June 28, 1952 Issue
The Cave
How Louis Morino, the wise man of seafood, runs
his restaurant.
By Joseph Mitchell
June 20, 1952
Every now and then, seeking to rid my mind of
thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to Fulton Fish Market. I
usually arrive around five-thirty, and take a walk through the two huge
open-fronted market sheds, the Old Market and the New Market, whose fronts rest
on South Street and whose backs rest on piles in the East River. At that time,
a little while before the trading begins, the stands in the sheds are heaped
high and spilling over with forty to sixty kinds of finfish and shellfish from
the East Coast, the West Coast, the Gulf Coast, and half a dozen foreign
countries. The smoky riverbank dawn, the racket the fishmongers make, the
seaweedy smell, and the sight of this plentifulness always give me a feeling of
well-being, and sometimes they elate me. I wander among the stands for an hour
or so. Then I go into a cheerful market restaurant named Sloppy Louie’s and eat
a big, inexpensive, invigorating breakfast—a kippered herring and scrambled
eggs, or a shad-roe omelet, or split sea scallops and bacon, or some other
breakfast specialty of the place.
Sloppy Louie’s occupies
the ground floor of an old building at 92 South Street, diagonally across the
street from the sheds. This building faces the river and looks out on the slip
between the Fulton Street fish pier and the old Porto Rico Line dock. It is six
floors high, and it has two windows to the floor. Like the majority of the
older buildings in the market district, it is made of hand-molded Hudson River
brick, a rosy-pink and relatively narrow kind that used to be turned out in
Haverstraw and other kiln towns on the Hudson and sent down to the city in
barges. It has an ornamented tin cornice and a slate-covered mansard roof. It
is one of those handsome, symmetrical old East River waterfront buildings that
have been allowed to dilapidate. The windows of its four upper floors have been
boarded over for many years, a rain pipe that runs down the front of it is
riddled with rust holes and there are gaps here and there on its mansard where
slates have slipped off. In the afternoons, after two or three, when the
trading is over and the stands begin to close, the slimy, overfed gulls that
scavenge in the market roost by the hundreds along its cornice, hunched up and
gazing downward.
I have been going to
Sloppy Louie’s for nine or ten years, and the proprietor and I are old friends.
His name is Louis Morino, and he is a contemplative and generous and
worldly-wise man in his middle sixties. Louie is a North Italian. He was born
in Recco, a fishing and bathing-beach village thirteen miles southeast of
Genoa, on the Eastern Riviera. Recco is ancient; it dates back to the third
century. Families in Genoa and Milan and Turin own villas in and around it, and
go there in the summer. Some seasons, a few English and Americans show up.
According to a row of colored-postcard views of it Scotch-taped to a mirror on
the wall in back of Louie’s cash register, it is a village of steep streets and
tall, square, whitewashed stone houses. The fronts of the houses are decorated
with stencilled designs—madonnas, angels, flowers, fruit, and fish. The fish
design is believed to protect against the evil eye and appears most often over
doors and windows. Big, lush fig bushes grow in almost every yard. In the
center of the village is an open-air market where fishermen and farmers sell
their produce off plank-and-sawhorse counters. Louie’s father was a fisherman.
His name was Giuseppe Morino, and he was called, in Genoese dialect, Beppe du
Russu, or Joe the Redhead. “My family was one of the old fishing families in
Recco that the priest used to tell us had been fishing along that coast since
Roman times,” Louie says. “We lived on a street named the Vico Saporito that
was paved with broken-up sea shells and wound in and out and led down to the
water. My father did a kind of fishing that’s called haul-seining over here,
and he set lobster traps and jigged for squid and bobbed for octopuses. When
the weather was right, he used to row out to an underwater cave he knew about
and anchor over it and take a bob consisting of some scraps of raw beef tied to
a line with a stone on the end of it and drop it in the mouth of the cave, and
the octopuses would shoot up out of the dark down there and swallow the beef
scraps and that would hold them on the line, and then my father would draw the
bob up slow and steady and pull the octopuses loose from the beef scraps one by
one and toss them in a tub in the boat. He’d bob up enough octopuses in a
couple of hours to glut the market in Recco. This cave was full of octopuses;
it was choked with them. He had found it, and he had the rights to it. The
other fishermen didn’t go near it; they called it Beppe du Russu’s cave. In
addition to fishing, he kept a rickety old bathhouse on the beach for the
summer people. It stood on stilts, and I judge it had fifty to sixty rooms. We
called it the Bagni Margherita. My mother ran a little buffet in connection
with it.” Louie left Recco in 1905, when he was close to eighteen. “I loved my
family,” he says, “and it tore me in two to leave, but I had five brothers and
two sisters, and all my brothers were younger than me, and there were already
too many fishermen in Recco, and the bathhouse brought in just so much, and I
had a fear kept persisting there might not be enough at home to go around in
time to come, so I got passage from Genoa to New York scrubbing pots in the
galley of a steamship and went straight from the dock to a chophouse on East
138th Street in the Bronx that was operated by a man named Capurro who came from
Recco. Capurro knew my father when they both were boys.” Capurro gave Louie a
job washing dishes and taught him how to wait on tables. He stayed there two
years. For the next twenty-three years, he worked as a waiter in restaurants
all over Manhattan and Brooklyn. He has forgotten how many he worked in; he can
recall the names of thirteen. Most of them were medium-size restaurants of the
Steak-&-Chops, We-Specialize-in-Seafood type. In the winter of 1930, he
decided to risk his savings and become his own boss. “At that time,” he says,
“the stock-market crash had shook everything up and the depression was setting
in, and I knew of several restaurants in midtown that could be bought at a
bargain—lease, furnishings, and good will. All were up-to-date places. Then I
ran into a waiter I used to work with and he told me about this old rundown
restaurant in an old run-down building in the fish market that was for sale,
and I went and saw it, and I took it. The reason I did, Fulton Fish Market
reminds me of Recco. There’s a world of difference between them. At the same
time, they’re very much alike—the fish smell, the general gone-to-pot look, the
trading that goes on in the streets, the roofs over the sidewalks, the cats in
corners gnawing on fish heads, the gulls in the gutters, the way everybody’s on
to everybody else, the quarrelling and the arguing. There’s a boss fishmonger
down here, a spry old hard-headed Italian man who’s got a million dollars in
the bank and dresses like he’s on relief and walks up and down the fish pier
snatching fish out of barrels by their tails and weighing them in his hands and
figuring out in his mind to a fraction of a fraction how much they’re worth and
shouting and singing and enjoying life, and the face on him, the way he conducts
himself, he reminds me so much of my father that sometimes, when I see him, it
puts me in a good humor, and sometimes it breaks my heart.”
Louie is five feet six,
and stocky. He has an owl-like face—his nose is hooked, his eyebrows are
tufted, and his eyes are large and brown and observant. He is white-haired. His
complexion is reddish, and his face and the backs of his hands are speckled
with freckles and liver spots. He wears glasses with flesh-colored frames. He
is bandy-legged, and he carries his left shoulder lower than his right and
walks with a shuffling, head-up, old-waiter’s walk. He dresses neatly. He has
his suits made by a high-priced tailor in the insurance district, which adjoins
the fish-market district. Starting work in the morning, he always puts on a
fresh apron and a fresh brown linen jacket. He keeps a napkin folded over his
left arm even when he is standing behind the cash register. He is a proud man,
and somewhat stiff and formal by nature, but he unbends easily and he has great
curiosity and he knows how to get along with people. During rush hours, he
jokes and laughs with his customers and recommends his daily specials in
extravagant terms and listens to fish-market gossip and passes it on;
afterward, in repose, having a cup of coffee by himself at a table in the rear,
he is grave. Louie is a widower. His wife, Mrs. Victoria Piazza Morino, came
from a village named Ruta that is only two and a half miles from Recco, but he
first became acquainted with her in Brooklyn. They were married in 1928, and he
was deeply devoted to her. She died in 1949. He has two daughters—Jacqueline,
who is twenty-two and was recently graduated from the Mills College of
Education, a school for nursery, kindergarten, and primary teachers on lower
Fifth Avenue, and Lois, who is seventeen and was recently graduated from
Fontbonne Hall, a high school on Shore Road in Brooklyn that is operated by the
Sisters of St. Joseph. They are smart, bright, slim, vivid, dark-eyed girls.
Louie has to be on hand in his restaurant in the early morning, and he usually
gets up between four and five, but before leaving home he always squeezes
orange juice and puts coffee on the stove for his daughters. Most days, he gets
home before they do and cooks dinner. Louie owns his home, a two-story brick
house on a maple-bordered street in the predominantly Norwegian part of the Bay
Ridge neighborhood in Brooklyn. There is a saying in Recco that people and fig
bushes do best close to salt water; Louie’s home is only a few blocks from the
Narrows, and fifteen years ago he ordered three tiny fig bushes from a nursery
in Virginia and set them out in his back yard, and they have flourished. In the
late fall, he wraps an accumulation of worn-out suits and dresses and sweaters
and sheets and blankets around their trunks and limbs. “All winter,” he says,
“when I look out the back window, it looks like I got three mummies stood up
out there.” At the first sign of spring, he takes the wrappings off. The bushes
begin to bear the middle of July and bear abundantly during August. One bush
bears small white figs, and the others bear plump black figs that split their
skins down one side as they ripen and gape open and show their pink and violet
flesh. Louie likes to gather the figs around dusk, when they are still warm
from the heat of the day. Sometimes, bending beside a bush, he plunges his face
into the leaves and breathes in the musky smell of the ripening figs, a smell
that fills his mind with memories of Recco in midsummer.
Louie doesn’t think much
of the name of his restaurant. It is an old restaurant with old furnishings
that has had a succession of proprietors and a succession of names. Under the
proprietor preceding Louie, John Barbagelata, it was named the Fulton
Restaurant, and was sometimes called Sloppy John’s. When Louie took it over, he
changed the name to Louie’s Restaurant. One of the fishmongers promptly started
calling it Sloppy Louie’s, and Louie made a mistake and remonstrated with him.
He remonstrated with him on several occasions. As soon as the people in the
market caught on to the fact that the name offended Louie, naturally most of
them began using it. They got in the habit of using it. Louie brooded about the
matter off and on for over three years, and then had a new swinging signboard erected
above his door with sloppy louie’s restaurant on it in big red
letters. He even changed his listing in the telephone book. “I couldn’t beat
them,” he says, “so I joined them.”
Sloppy Louie’s is small
and busy. It can seat eighty, and it crowds up and thins out six or seven times
a day. It opens at five in the morning and closes at eight-thirty in the
evening. It has a double door in front with a show window on each side. In one
window are three sailing-ship models in whiskey bottles, a giant lobster claw
with eyes and a mouth painted on it, a bulky oyster shell, and a small skull.
Beside the shell is a card on which Louie has neatly written, “Shell of an
Oyster dredged from the bottom of Great South Bay. Weighed two and a quarter
pounds. Estimated to be fifteen years old. Said to be largest ever dredged in
G. S. B.” Beside the skull is a similar card, which says, “This is the skull of
a Porpoise taken by a dragger off Long Beach, Long Island.” In the other window
is an old pie cupboard with glass sides. To the left, as you enter, is a
combined cigar showcase and cashier’s desk, and an iron safe with a cash
register on top of it. There are mirrors all around the walls. Four lamps and
three electric fans with wooden blades that resemble propellers hang from the
stamped-tin ceiling. The tables in Louie’s are communal, and there are exactly
one dozen; six jut out from the wall on one side of the room and six jut out
from the wall on the other side, and a broad aisle divides them. They are long
tables, and solid and old and plain and built to last. They are made of black
walnut; Louie once repaired a leg on one, and said it was like driving a nail
in iron. Their tops have been seasoned by drippings and spillings from
thousands upon thousands of platters of broiled fish, and their edges have been
scratched and scarred by the hatchets and bale hooks that hang from frogs on
fishmongers’ belts. They are identical in size; some seat six, and some have a
chair on the aisle end and seat seven. At the back of the room, hiding the door
to the kitchen, is a huge floor mirror on which, each morning, using a piece of
moistened chalk, Louie writes the menu for the day. It is sometimes a lengthy
menu. A good many dishes are served in Louie’s that are rarely served in other
restaurants. One day, interspersed among the staple seafood-restaurant dishes,
Louie listed cod cheeks, salmon cheeks, cod tongues, sturgeon liver, blue-shark
steak, tuna steak, squid stew, and seven kinds of roe—shad roe, cod roe,
sturgeon roe, lemon-sole roe, mackerel roe, herring roe, and yellow-pike roe.
Cheeks are delectable morsels of flesh found along the jaws of some fishes.
They come into the market in small shipments, and the fishmongers, thinking of
their own gullets, let Louie buy almost every shipment. Recently, a large
shipment of salmon cheeks—two hundred and seventy pounds—came in from the West
Coast, and Louie bought it and put it in his deep freeze. The fishmongers use
Louie’s as a testing kitchen. When anything unusual is shipped to the market,
it is taken to Louie’s and tried out. In the course of a year, Louie’s
undoubtedly serves a wider variety of seafood than any other restaurant in the
country.
When I go to Sloppy Louie’s for breakfast, I
always try to get a chair at one of the tables up front, and Louie generally
comes out from behind the cash register and tells me what is best to order.
Some mornings, if there is a lull in the breakfast rush, he draws himself a cup
of coffee and sits down with me. One morning a while back, he sat down, and I
asked him how things were going, and he said he couldn’t complain, he had about
as much business as he could handle. “My breakfast trade still consists almost
entirely of fishmongers and fish buyers,” he said, “but my lunch trade has
undergone a change. The last few years, a good many people in the districts up
above the market have taken to walking down here occasionally for lunch—people
from the insurance district, the financial district, and the coffee-roasting
district. Some days, from noon to three, they outnumber the fishmongers. I
hadn’t realized myself how great a change had took place until just the other
day I happened to notice the mixed-up nature of a group of people sitting
around one table. They were talking back and forth, the way people do in here
that never even saw each other before, and passing the ketchup, and I’ll tell
you who they were. Sitting on one side was an insurance broker from Maiden
Lane, and next to him was a fishmonger named Mr. Frank Wilkisson who’s a member
of a family that’s had a stand in the Old Market three generations, and next to
him was a young Southerner that you’re doing good if you understand half what
he says who drives one of those tremendous big refrigerator trucks that they
call reefers and hits the market every four or five days with a load of shrimp
from little shrimp ports in Florida and Georgia. Sitting on the other side was
a lady who holds a responsible position in Continental Casualty up on William
Street and comes in here for bouillabaisse, only we call it ciuppin di
pesce and cook it the way it’s cooked fishing-family style back in
Recco, and next to her was an old gentleman who works in J. P. Morgan &
Company’s banking house and you’d think he’d order something expensive like
pompano but he always orders cod cheeks and if we’re out of that he orders cod
roe and if we’re out of that he orders broiled cod and God knows we’re never
out of that, and next to him was one of the bosses in Mooney’s coffee-roasting
plant at Fulton and Front. And sitting at the aisle end of the table was a man
known all over as Cowhide Charlie who goes to slaughter-houses and buys green
cowhides and sells them to fishing-boat captains to rig to the undersides of
their drag nets to keep them from getting bottom-chafed and rock-cut and he’s
always bragging that right this very minute his hides are rubbing the bottom of
every fishing bank from Nantucket Shoals to the Virginia Capes.”
Louie said that some
days, particularly Fridays, the place is jammed around one o’clock and latecomers
crowd together just inside the door and stand and wait and stare, and he said
that this gets on his nerves. He said he had come to the conclusion that he
would have to go ahead and put in some tables on the second floor.
“I would’ve done it long
ago,” he said, “except I need the second floor for other things. This building
doesn’t have a cellar. South Street is old filled-in river swamp, and the
cellars along here, what few there are, the East River leaks into them every
high tide. The second floor is my cellar. I store supplies up there, and I keep
my deep freeze up there, and the waiters change their clothes up there. I don’t
know what I’ll do without it, only I got to make room someway.”
“That ought to be easy,”
I said. “You’ve got four empty floors up above.”
“You mean those
boarded-up floors,” Louie said. He hesitated a moment. “Didn’t I ever tell you
about the upstairs in here?” he asked. “Didn’t I ever tell you about those
boarded-up floors?”
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“No,” I said.
“They aren’t empty,” he
said.
“What’s in them?” I
asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I’ve heard this and I’ve heard that, but I don’t know. I wish to God I did
know. I’ve wondered about it enough. I’ve rented this building twenty-two
years, and I’ve never been above the second floor. The reason being, that’s as
far as the stairs go. After that, you have to get in a queer old elevator and
pull yourself up. It’s an old-fashioned hand-power elevator, what they used to
call a rope-pull. I wouldn’t be surprised it’s the last of its kind in the
city. I don’t understand the machinery of it, the balancing weights and the
cables and all that, but the way it’s operated, there’s a big iron wheel up at
the top of the shaft and the wheel’s got a groove in it, and there’s a rope
that rides in this groove, and you pull on the part of the rope that hangs down
one side of the cage to go up, and you pull on the part that hangs down the
other side to go down. Like a dumbwaiter. It used to run from the ground floor
to the top, but a long time ago some tenant must’ve decided he didn’t have any
further use for it and wanted it out of the way, so he had the shaft removed
from the ground floor and the second floor. He had it cut off at the
second-floor ceiling. In other words, the way it is now, the bottom of the
shaft is level with the second-floor ceiling—the floor of the elevator cage
acts as part of the ceiling. To get in the elevator, you have to climb a ladder
that leads to a trapdoor that’s cut in the floor of the cage. It’s a big, roomy
cage, bigger than the ones nowadays, but it doesn’t have a roof on it—just this
wooden floor and some iron-framework sides. I go up the ladder sometimes and
push up the trapdoor and put my head and shoulder inside the cage and shine a
flashlight up the shaft, but that’s as far as I go. Oh, Jesus, it’s dark and
dusty in there. The cage is all furry with dust and there’s mold and mildew on
the walls of the shaft and the air is dead.
“The first day I came here, I wanted to get
right in the elevator and go up to the upper floors and rummage around up
there, see what I could see, but the man who rented the building ahead of me
was with me, showing me over the place, and he warned me not to. He didn’t
trust the elevator. He said you couldn’t pay him to get in it. ‘Don’t meddle
with that thing,’ he said. ‘It’s a rattlesnake. The rope might break, or that
big iron wheel up at the top of the shaft that’s eaten up with rust and hasn’t
been oiled for a generation might work loose and drop on your head.’
Consequently, I’ve never even given the rope a pull. To pull the rope, you got
to get inside the cage and stand up. You can’t reach it otherwise. I’ve been
tempted to many a time. It’s a thick hemp rope. It’s as thick as a hawser. It
might be rotten, but it certainly looks strong. The way the cage is sitting
now, I figure it’d only take a couple of pulls, a couple of turns of the wheel,
and you’d be far enough up to where you could swing the cage door open and step
out on the third floor. You can’t open the cage door now; you got to draw the
cage up just a little. A matter of inches. I reached into the cage once and
tried to poke the door open with a boat hook I borrowed off one of the fishing
boats, but it wouldn’t budge. It’s a highly irritating situation to me. I’d
just like to know for certain what’s up there. A year goes by sometimes and I
hardly think about it, and then I get to wondering, and it has a tendency to
prey on my mind. An old-timer in the market once told me that many years ago a
fishmonger down here got a bug in his head and invented a patented returnable
zinc-lined fish box for shipping fish on ice and had hundreds of them built,
sunk everything he had in them, and they didn’t catch on, and finally he got
permission to store them up on the third and fourth floors of this building
until he could come to some conclusion what to do with them. This was back
before they tinkered with the elevator. Only he never came to any conclusion,
and by and by he died. The old-timer said it was his belief the fish boxes are
still up there. The man who rented the building ahead of me, he had a different
story. He was never above the second floor either, but he told me that the man
who rented it ahead of him told him it was his understanding
there was a lot of miscellaneous old hotel junk stored up there—beds and
bureaus, pitchers and bowls, chamber pots, mirrors, brass spittoons, odds and
ends, old hotel registers that the rats chew on to get paper to line their
nests with, God knows what all. That’s what he said. I don’t know. I’ve made
quite a study of this building for one reason and another, and I’ve took all
kinds of pains tracking things down, but there’s a lot about it I still don’t
know. I do know there was a hotel in here years back. I know that beyond all
doubt. It was one of those old steamship hotels that used to face the docks all
along South Street.”
“Why don’t you get a
mechanic to inspect the elevator?” I asked. “It might be perfectly safe.”
“That would cost money,”
Louie said. “I’m curious but I’m not that curious. To tell you the truth, I
just don’t want to get in that cage by myself. I got a feeling about it, and
that’s the fact of the matter. It makes me uneasy—all closed in, and all that furry
dust. It makes me think of a coffin, the inside of a coffin. Either that or a
cave, the mouth of a cave. If I could get somebody to go along with me,
somebody to talk to, just so I wouldn’t be all alone in there, I’d go; I’d
crawl right in. A couple of times, it almost happened I did. The first time was
back in 1938. The hurricane we had that fall damaged the roofs on a good many
of the old South Street buildings, and the real-estate management company I
rented this building from sent a man down here to see if my roof was all right.
I asked the man why didn’t he take the elevator up to the attic floor, there
might be a door leading out on the roof. I told him I’d go along. He took one
look inside the cage and said it would be more trouble than it was worth. What
he did, he went up on the roof of the building next door and crossed over.
Didn’t find anything wrong. Six or seven months ago, I had another
disappointment. I was talking with a customer of mine eats a fish lunch in here
Fridays who’s a contractor, and it happened I got on the subject of the upper
floors, and he remarked he understood how I felt, my curiosity. He said he
seldom passes an old boarded-up building without he wonders about it, wonders
what it’s like in there—all empty and hollow and dark and still, not a sound,
only some rats maybe, racing around in the dark, or maybe some English sparrows
flying around in there in the empty rooms that always get in if there’s a crack
in one of the boards over a broken windowpane, a crack or a knothole, and
sometimes they can’t find their way out and they keep on hopping and flying and
hopping and flying until they starve to death. He said he had been in many such
buildings in the course of his work, and had seen some peculiar things. The
next time he came in for lunch, he brought along a couple of those helmets that
they wear around construction work, those orange-colored helmets, and he said
to me, ‘Come on, Louie. Put on one of these, and let’s go up and try out that
elevator. If the rope breaks, which I don’t think it will—what the hell, a
little shaking up is good for the liver. If the wheel drops, maybe these
helmets will save us.’ But he’s a big heavy man, and he’s not as active as he
used to be. He went up the ladder first, and when he got to the top he backed
right down. He put it on the basis he had a business appointment that afternoon
and didn’t want to get all dusty and dirty. I kept the helmets. He wanted them
back, but I held on to them. I don’t intend to let that elevator stand in my way
much longer. One of these days, I’m going to sit down awhile with a bottle of
Strega, and then I’m going to stick one of those helmets on my head and climb
in that cage and put that damned elevator back in commission. The very least,
I’ll pull the rope and see what happens. I do wish I could find somebody had
enough curiosity to go along with me. I’ve asked my waiters, and I’ve tried to
interest some of the people in the market, but they all had the same answer.
‘Hell, no,’ they said.”
Louie suddenly leaned forward. “What about you?”
he asked. “Maybe I could persuade you.” I thought it over a few moments, and
was about to suggest that we go upstairs at any rate and climb in the cage and
look at the elevator, but just then a fishmonger who had finished his breakfast
and wanted to pay his check rapped a dictatorial rat-a-tat on the glass top of
the cigar showcase with a coin. Louie frowned and clenched his teeth. “I wish
they wouldn’t do that,” he said, getting up. “It goes right through me.”
Louie went over and took
the man’s money and gave him his change. Two waiters were standing at a service
table in the rear, filling salt shakers, and Louie gestured to one of them to
come up front and take charge of the cash register. Then he got himself another
cup of coffee and sat back down and started talking again. “When I bought this
restaurant,” he said, “I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the building. I had it
in mind to build up the restaurant and find me a location somewhere else in the
market and move, the trade would follow. Instead of which, after a while I got
very closely attached to the building. Why I did is one of those matters, it
really doesn’t make much sense. It’s all mixed up with the name of a street in
Brooklyn, and it goes back to the last place I worked in before I came here.
That was Joe’s in Brooklyn, the old Nevins Street Joe’s, Nevins just off
Flatbush Avenue Extension. I was a waiter there seven years, and it was the
best place I ever worked in. Joe’s is part of a chain now, the Brass Rail chain.
In my time, it was run by a very high-type Italian restaurant man named Joe
Sartori, and it was the biggest chophouse in Brooklyn—fifty waiters, a main
floor, a balcony, a ladies’ dining room, and a Roman Garden. Joe’s was a
hangout for Brooklyn political bosses and officeholders, and it got a class of
trade we called the old Brooklyn family trade, the rich old intermarried
families that made their money out of Brooklyn real estate and Brooklyn docks
and Brooklyn streetcar lines and Brooklyn gasworks. They had their money sunk
way down deep in Brooklyn. I don’t know how it is now, they’ve probably all
moved into apartment houses, but in those days a good many of them lived in
steep-stoop, stain-glass mansions sitting up as solid as banks on Brooklyn
Heights and Park Slope and over around Fort Greene Park. They were a big-eating
class of people, and they believed in patronizing the good old Brooklyn
restaurants. You’d see them in Joe’s, and you’d see them in Gage &
Tollner’s and Lundy’s and Tappen’s and Villepigue’s. There was a high
percentage of rich old independent women among them, widows and divorced ladies
and maiden ladies. They were a class within a class. They wore clothes that
hadn’t been the style for years, and they wore the biggest hats I ever saw, and
the ugliest. They all seemed to know each other since their childhood days, and
they all had some peculiarity, and they all had one foot in the grave, and they
all had big appetites. They had travelled widely, and they were good judges of
food, and they knew how to order a meal. Some were poison, to say the least,
and some were just as nice as they could be. On the whole, I liked them; they
broke the monotony. Some always came to my station; if my tables were full,
they’d sit in some leather chairs Mr. Sartori had up front and wait. One was a
widow named Mrs. Frelinghuysen. She was very old and tiny and delicate, and she
ate like a horse. She ate like she thought any meal might be her last meal. She
was a little lame from rheumatism, and she used a walking stick that had a
snake’s head for a knob, a snake’s head carved out of ivory. She had a pleasant
voice, a beautiful voice, and she made the most surprising funny remarks. They
were coarse remarks, the humor in them. She made some remarks on occasion that
had me wondering did I hear right. Everybody liked her, the way she hung on to
life, and everybody tried to do things for her. I remember Mr. Sartori one
night went out in the rain and got her a cab. ‘She’s such a thin little thing,’
he said when he came back in. ‘There’s nothing to her,’ he said, ‘but six bones
and one gut and a set of teeth and a big hat with a bird on it.’ Her
peculiarity was she always brought her own silver. It was old family silver.
She’d have it wrapped up in a linen napkin in her handbag, and she’d get it out
and set her own place. After she finished eating, I’d take it to the kitchen
and wash it, and she’d stuff it back in her handbag. She’d always start off
with one dozen oysters in winter or one dozen clams in summer, and she’d gobble
them down and go on from there. She could get more out of a lobster than
anybody I ever saw. You’d think she’d got everything she possibly could, and
then she’d pull the little legs off that most people don’t even bother with,
and suck the juice out of them. Sometimes, if it was a slow night and I was
just standing around, she’d call me over and talk to me while she ate. She’d
talk about people and past times, and she knew a lot; she had kept her eyes
open while she was going through life.
“My hours in Joe’s were
ten in the morning to nine at night. In the afternoons, I’d take a break from
three to four-thirty. I saw so much rich food I usually didn’t want any lunch,
the way old waiters get—just a crust of bread, or some fruit. If it was a nice
day, I’d step over to Albee Square and go into an old fancy-fruit store named
Ecklebe & Guyer’s and pick me out a piece of fruit—an orange or two, or a
bunch of grapes, or one of those big red pomegranates that split open when
they’re ripe the same as figs and their juice is so strong and red it purifies
the blood. Then I’d go over to Schermerhorn Street. Schermerhorn was a block
and a half west of Joe’s. There were some trees along Schermerhorn, and some
benches under the trees. Young women would sit along there with their babies,
and old men would sit along there the whole day through and read papers and
play checkers and discuss matters. And I’d sit there the little time I had and
rest my feet and eat my fruit and read the New York Times, my
purpose reading the New York Times I was trying to improve my
English. Schermerhorn Street was a peaceful old backwater street, so nice and
quiet, and I liked it. It did me good to sit down there and rest. One afternoon
the thought occurred to me, ‘Who the hell was Schermerhorn?’ So that night it
happened Mrs. Frelinghuysen was in, and I asked her who was Schermerhorn that
the street’s named for. She knew, all right. Oh, Jesus, she more than knew. She
saw I was interested, and from then on that was one of the main subjects she
talked to me about—Old New York street names and neighborhood names; Old New
York this, Old New York that. She knew a great many facts and figures and
skeletons in the closet that her mother and her grandmother and her aunts had
passed on down to her relating to the old New York Dutch families that they
call the Knickerbockers—those that dissipated too much and dissipated all their
property away and died out and disappeared, and those that are still around.
Holland Dutch, not German Dutch, the way I used to think it meant. The
Schermerhorns are one of the oldest of the old Dutch families, according to
her, and one of the best. They were big landowners in Dutch days, and they
still are, and they go back so deep in Old New York that if you went any deeper
you wouldn’t find anything but Indians and bones and bears. Mrs. Frelinghuysen
was well acquainted with the Schermerhorn family. She had been to Schermerhorn
weddings and Schermerhorn funerals. I remember she told about a Schermerhorn
girl she went to school with who belonged to the eighth generation I think it
was in direct descent from old Jacob Schermerhorn who came here from
Schermerhorn, Holland, in the sixteen-thirties, and this girl died and was
buried in the Schermerhorn plot in Trinity Church cemetery up in Washington
Heights, and one day many years later driving down from Connecticut Mrs.
Frelinghuysen got to thinking about her and stopped off at the cemetery and
looked around in there and located her grave and put some jonquils on it.”
At this moment a
fishmonger opened the door of the restaurant and put his head in and
interrupted Louie. “Hey, Louie,” he called out, “has Little Joe been in?”
“Little Joe that’s a
lumper on the pier,” asked Louie, “or Little Joe that works for Chesebro,
Robbins?”
“The lumper,” said the
fishmonger.
“He was in and out an
hour ago,” said Louie. “He snook in and got a cup of coffee and was out and
gone the moment he finished it.”
“If you see him,” the
fishmonger said, “tell him they want him on the pier. A couple of draggers just
came in—the Felicia from New Bedford and the Positive from Gloucester.”
Louie nodded, and the
fishmonger went away. “To continue about Mrs. Frelinghuysen,” Louie said, “she
died in 1927. The next year, I got married. The next year was the year the
stock market crashed. The next year, I quit Joe’s and came over here and bought
this restaurant and rented this building. I rented it from a real-estate
company, the Charles F. Noyes Company, and I paid my rent to them, and I took
it for granted they owned it. One afternoon four years later, the early part of
1934, around in March, I was standing at the cash register in here and a long
black limousine drove up out front and parked, and a uniform chauffeur got out
and came in and said Mrs. Schermerhorn wanted to speak to me, and I looked at
him and said, ‘What do you mean—Mrs. Schermerhorn?’ And he said, ‘Mrs.
Schermerhorn that owns this building.’ So I went out on the sidewalk, and there
was a lady sitting in the limousine, her appearance was quite beautiful, and
she said she was Mrs. Arthur F. Schermerhorn and her husband had died in
September the year before and she was taking a look at some of the buildings
the estate owned and the Noyes company was the agent for. So she asked me some
questions concerning what shape the building was in, and the like of that.
Which I answered to the best of my ability. Then I told her I was certainly
surprised for various reasons to hear this was Schermerhorn property. I told
her, ‘Frankly,’ I said, ‘I’m amazed to hear it.’ I asked her did she know
anything about the history of the building, how old it was, and she said she
didn’t, she hadn’t ever even seen it before, it was just one of a number of
properties that had come down to her husband from his father. Even her husband,
she said, she doubted if he had known much about the building. I had a lot of
questions I wanted to ask, and I asked her to get out and come in and have some
coffee and take a look around, but I guess she figured the signboard sloppy louie’s restaurant meant what it said. She thanked me and
said she had to be getting on, and she gave the chauffeur an address, and they
drove off and I never saw her again.
“I went back inside and
stood there and thought t over, and the effect it had on me, the simple fact my
building was an old Schermerhorn building, it may sound foolish, but it pleased
me very much. The feeling I had, it connected me with the past. It connected me
with Old New York. It connected Sloppy Louie’s Restaurant with Old New York. It
made the building look much better to me. Instead of just an old run-down
building in the fish market, the way it looked to me before, it had a history
to it, connections going back, and I liked that it stirred up my curiosity to
know more. A day or so later, I went over and asked the people at the Noyes
company would they mind telling me something about the history of the building,
but they didn’t know anything about it. They had only took over the management
of it in 1929, the year before I rented it, and the company that had been the
previous agent had gone out of business. They said to go to the City Department
of Buildings in the Municipal Building. Which I did, but the man in there, he
looked up my building and couldn’t find any file on it, and he said it’s hard to
date a good many old buildings down in my part of town because a fire in the
Building Department around 1890 destroyed some cases of papers relating to
them—permits and specifications and all that. He advised me to go to the Hall
of Records on Chambers Street, where deeds are recorded. I went over there, and
they showed me the deed, but it wasn’t any help. It described the lot, but all
it said about the building, it said ‘the building thereon,’ and didn’t give any
date on it. So I gave up. Well, there’s a nice old gentleman eats in here
sometimes who works for the Title Guarantee & Trust Company, an old Yankee
fish-eater, and we were talking one day, and it happened he told me that Title
Guarantee has tons and tons of records on New York City property stored away in
their vaults that they refer to when they’re deciding whether or not the title
to a piece of property is clear. ‘Do me a favor,’ I said, ‘and look up the
records on 92 South Street—nothing private or financial; just the history—and
I’ll treat you to the best broiled lobster you ever had. I’ll treat you to
broiled lobster six Fridays in a row,’ I said, ‘and I’ll broil the lobsters
myself.’
“The next time he came
in, he said he had took a look in the Title Guarantee vaults for me, and had
talked to a title searcher over there who is an expert on South Street
property, and he read me off some notes he had made. It seems all this end of
South Street used to be under water. The East River flowed over it. Then the
city filled it in and divided it into lots. In February, 1804, a merchant by
the name Peter Schermerhorn, a descendant of Jacob Schermerhorn, was given
grants to the lot my building now stands on—92 South—and the lot next to it—93
South, a corner lot, the corner of South and Fulton. Schermerhorn put up a
four-story brick-and-frame building on each of these lots—stores on the street
floors and flats above. In 1872,1873, or 1874—my friend from Title Guarantee
wasn’t able to determine the exact year—the heirs and assigns of Peter
Schermerhorn ripped these buildings down and put up two six-story brick
buildings exactly alike side by side on 92 and 93. Those buildings are this one
here and the one next door. The Schermerhorns put them up for hotel purposes,
and they were designed so they could be used as one building—there’s a party
wall between them, and in those days there were sets of doors on each floor
leading from one building to the other. This building had that old hand-pull
elevator in it from bottom to top, and the other building had a wide staircase
in it from bottom to top. The Schermerhorns didn’t skimp on materials; they
used heart pine for beams and they used hand-molded, air-dried, kiln-burned
Hudson River brick. The Schermerhorns leased the buildings to two hotel men
named Frederick and Henry Lemmermann, and the first lease on record is 1874.
The name of the hotel was the Fulton Ferry Hotel. The hotel saloon occupied the
whole bottom floor of the building next door, and the hotel restaurant was
right in here, and they had a combined lobby and billiard room that occupied
the second floor of both buildings, and they had a reading room in the front
half of the third floor of this building and rooms in the rear half, and all
the rest of the space in both buildings was single rooms and double rooms and
suites. At that time, there were passenger-line steamship docks all along South
Street, lines that went to every part of the world, and out-of-town people
waiting for passage on the various steamers would stay at the Fulton Ferry
Hotel. Also, the Brooklyn Bridge hadn’t yet been built, and the Fulton Ferry
was the principal ferry to Brooklyn, and the ferry-house stood directly in
front of the hotel. On account of the ferry, Fulton Street was like a funnel;
damned near everything headed for Brooklyn went through it. It was full of foot
traffic and horse-drawn traffic day and night, and South and Fulton was one of
the most ideal saloon corners in the city.
“The Fulton Ferry Hotel
lasted forty-five years, but it only had about twenty good years; the rest was
downhill. The first bad blow was the bridges over the East River beginning with
the Brooklyn Bridge that gradually drained off the heavy traffic on the Fulton
Ferry that the hotel saloon got most of its trade from. And then, the worst
blow of all, the passenger lines began leaving South Street and moving around
to bigger, longer docks on the Hudson. Little by little, the Fulton Ferry Hotel
got to be one of those waterfront hotels that rummies hole up in, and old men
on pensions, and old nuts, and sailors on the beach. Steps going down. Around
1910, somewhere in there, the Lemmermanns gave up the part of the hotel that
was in this building, and the Schermerhorn interests boarded up the windows on
the four upper floors and bricked up the doors in the party wall connecting the
two buildings. And the hotel restaurant, what they did with that, they rented
it to a man named MacDonald who turned it into a quick lunch for the people in
the fish market. MacDonald ran it awhile. Then a son of his took it over, according
to some lease notations in the Title Guarantee records. Then two brothers named
Fortunato and Louie Barbagelata took it over. Then John Barbagelata took it
over, a nephew of the other Barbagelatas, and eventually I came along and
bought the lease and furnishings off of him. After the party wall was bricked
up, the Lemmermanns held on to the building next door a few years more, and
kept on calling it the Fulton Ferry Hotel, but all it amounted to, it was just
a waterfront saloon with rooms for rent up above. They operated it until 1919,
when the final blow hit them—prohibition. Those are the bare bones of the
matter. If I could get upstairs just once in that damned old elevator and
scratch around in those hotel registers up there and whatever to hell else is
stored up there, it might be possible I’d find out a whole lot more.”
“Look, Louie,” I said,
“I’ll go up in the elevator with you.”
“You think you would,”
Louie said, “but you’d just take a look at it, and then you’d back out.”
“I’d like to see inside
the cage, at least,” I said.
Louie looked at me
inquisitively. “You really want to go up there?” he asked
“Yes,” I said.
“The next time you come
down here, put on the oldest clothes you got, so the dust don’t make any
difference,” Louie said, “and we’ll go up and try out the elevator.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Now
or never. If I think it over, I’ll change my mind.”
“It’s your own risk,” he
said. “Of course,” I said.
Louie abruptly stood up.
“Let me speak to the waiter at the cash register,” he said, “and I’ll be with
you.” He went over and spoke to the waiter. Then he opened the door of a
cupboard in back of the cash register and took out two flashlights and the two
construction-work helmets that his customer, the contractor, had brought in. He
handed me one of the flashlights and one of the helmets. I put the helmet on
and started over to a mirror to see how I looked. “Come on,” Louie said,
somewhat impatiently. We went up the stairs to the second floor. Along one
wall, on this floor, were shelves stacked with restaurant supplies—canned goods
and nests of bowls and plates and boxes of soap powder and boxes of paper
napkins. Headed up against the wainscoting were half a dozen burlap bags of
potatoes. A narrow, round-runged, wooden ladder stood at a slant in a corner up
front, and Louie went directly to it. One end of the ladder was fixed to the
floor, and the other end was fixed to the ceiling. At the top of the ladder,
flush with the ceiling, was the bottom of the elevator cage with the trapdoor
cut in it. The trapdoor was shut. Louie unbuttoned a shirt button and stuck his
flashlight in the front of his shirt, and immediately started up the ladder. At
the top, he paused and looked down at me for an instant. His face was set. Then
he gave the trapdoor a shove, and it fell back, and a cloud of black dust burst
out. Louie ducked his head and shook it and blew the dust out of his nose. He
stood at the top of the ladder for about a minute, waiting for the dust to
settle. Then, all of a sudden, he scrambled into the cage. “Oh, God in Heaven,”
he called out, “the dust in here! It’s like somebody dumped out a
vacuum-cleaner bag in here.” I climbed the ladder and entered the cage and
closed the trapdoor. Louie pointed his flashlight up the shaft. “I thought
there was only one wheel up there,” he said, peering upward. “I see two.” The
dust had risen to the top of the shaft, and we couldn’t see the wheels clearly.
There was an iron strut over the top of the cage, and a cable extended from it
to one of the wheels. Two thick hemp ropes hung down into the cage from the
other wheel. “I’m going to risk it,” Louie said. “I’m going to pull the rope.
Take both flashlights, and shine one on me and shine the other up the shaft. If
I can get the cage up about a foot, it’ll be level with the third floor, and we
can open the door.”
Louie grasped one of the
ropes and pulled on it, and dust sprang off it all the way to the top. The
wheel screeched as the rope turned it, but the cage didn’t move. “The rope
feels loose,” Louie said. “I don’t think it has any grip on the wheel.” He
pulled again, and nothing happened. “Maybe you’ve got the wrong rope,” I said.
He disregarded me, and pulled again, and the cage shook from side to side Louie
let go of the rope, and looked up the shaft. “That wheel acts all right,” he
said. He pulled the rope again, and this time the cage rose an inch or two. He
pulled five or six times, and the cage rose an inch or two each time. Then we
looked down and saw that the floor of the cage was almost even with the third floor.
Louie pulled the rope once more. Then he stepped over and pushed on the grilled
door of the cage and shook it, trying to swing it open; it rattled, and long,
lacy flakes of rust fell off it, but it wouldn’t open. I gave Louie the lights
of both flashlights, and he examined the door. There were sets of hinges down
it in two paces. “I see,” Louie said. “You’re supposed to fold it back in.” The
hinges were stiff, and he got in a frenzy struggling with the door before he
succeeded in folding it back far enough for us to get through. On the landing
there was a kind of storm-door-like affair, a three-sided cubbyhole with a
plain wooden door in the center side. “I guess they had that there to keep
people from falling in the shaft,” Louie said. “It’ll be just our luck the
door’s locked on the other side. If it is, I’m not going to monkey around; I’m
going to kick it in.” He tried the knob, and it turned, and he opened the door,
and we walked out and entered the front half of the third floor, the old
reading room of the Fulton Ferry Hotel.
It was pitch-dark in the
room. We stood still and played the lights of our flashlights across the floor
and up and down the walls. Everything we saw was covered with dust. There was a
thick, black mat of fleecy dust on the floor—dust and soot and grit and lint
and slut’s wool. Louie scuffed his shoes in it. “A-a-ah!” he said, and spat.
His light fell on a roll-top desk, and he hurried over to it and rolled the top
up. I stayed where I was, and continued to look around. The room was
rectangular, and it had a stamped-tin ceiling, and tongue-and-groove
wainscoting, and plaster walls the color of putty. The plaster had crumbled
down to the laths in many places. There was a gas fixture on each wall. High up
on one wall was a round hole that had once held a stovepipe. Screwed to the
door leading to the rear half of the floor were two framed signs. One said, “this reading room will be closed at 1 a.m. fulton
ferry hotel.” The other said, “all
gambling in this reading room strictly prohibited. by order of the proprietors. fulton ferry hotel. f. & h. lemmermann, proprietors.” Some bedsprings and some
ugly white knobby iron bedsteads were stacked crisscross in one corner. The
stack was breast-high. Between the boarded-up windows, against the front wall,
stood a marble-top table. On it were three seltzer bottles with corroded spouts,
a tin water cooler painted to resemble brown marble, a cracked glass bell of
the kind used to cover clocks and stuffed birds, and four sugar bowls whose
metal flap lids had been eaten away from their hinges by rust. On the floor,
beside the table, were an umbrella stand, two brass spittoons, and a wire
basket filled to the brim with whiskey bottles of the flask type. I took the
bottles out one by one. Dampness had destroyed the labels; pulpy scraps of
paper with nothing legible on them were sticking to a few on the bottom. Lined
up back to back in the middle of the room were six bureaus with mirrors on
their tops. Still curious to see how I looked in the construction-work helmet,
I went and peered in one of the mirrors. Louie, who had been yanking drawers
out of the roll-top desk, suddenly said, “God damn it! I thought I’d find those
hotel registers in here. There’s nothing in here, only rusty paper clips.” He
went over to the whiskey bottles I had strewn about and examined a few, and
then he walked up behind me and looked in the mirror. His face was strained. He
had rubbed one cheek with his dusty fingers, and it was streaked with dust.
“We’re the first faces to look in that mirror in years and years,” he said. He
held his flashlight with one hand and jerked open the top drawer of the bureau
with the other. There were a few hairpins in the drawer, and some buttons, and
a comb with several teeth missing, and a needle with a bit of black thread in
its eye, and a scattering of worn playing cards; the design on the backs of the
cards was a stag at bay. He opened the middle drawer, and it was empty. He
opened the bottom drawer, and it was empty. He started in on the next bureau.
In the top drawer of it, he found a square, clear-glass medicine bottle that contained
two inches of colorless liquid and half an inch of black sediment. He wrenched
the stopper out, and put the bottle to his nose and smelled the liquid. “It’s
gone dead,” he said. “It doesn’t smell like anything at all.” He poured the
liquid on the floor, and handed the bottle to me. Blown in one side of it was
“Perry’s Pharmacy. Open All Night. Popular Prices. World Building, New York.”
All at once, while looking at the old bottle, I became conscious of the noises
of the market seemingly far below, and I stepped over to one of the boarded-up
windows and tried to peep down at South Street through a split in a board, but
it wasn’t possible. Louie continued to go through the bureau drawers. “Here’s
something,” he said. “Look at this.” He handed me a foxed and yellowed
photograph of a dark young woman with upswept hair who wore a lace shirtwaist
and a long black skirt and sat in a fanciful fan-backed wicker chair. After a
while, Louie reached the last drawer in the last bureau, and looked in it and
snorted and slammed it shut. “Let’s go in the rear part of the floor,” he said.
Louie opened the door, and we entered a hall,
along which was a row of single rooms. There were six rooms, and on their doors
were little oval enamelled number plates running from 12 to 17. We looked in
Room 12. Two wooden coat hangers were lying on the floor of it. Room 13 was
absolutely empty. Room 14 had evidently last been occupied by someone with a
religious turn of mind. There was an old iron bedstead still standing in it,
but without springs, and tacked on the wall above the head of the bed was a
placard of the kind distributed by some evangelistic religious groups. It said,
“The Wages of Sin is Death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus
Christ our Lord.” Tacked on the wall beside the bed was another religious
placard: “Christ is the Head of this House, the Unseen Host at Every Meal, the
Silent Listener to Every Conversation.” We stared at the placards a few
moments, and then Louie turned and started back up the hall.
“Louie,” I called,
following him, “where are you going?”
“Let’s go on back
downstairs,” he said.
“I thought we were going
on up to the floors above,” I said. “Let’s go up to the fourth floor, at least.
We’ll take turns pulling the rope.”
“There’s nothing up
here,” he said. “I don’t want to start up here another minute. Come on, let’s
go.
I followed him into the
elevator cage. “I’ll pull the rope going down,” I said.
Louie said nothing, and
I glanced at him. He was leaning against the side of the cage, and his
shoulders were slumped and his eyes were tired. “I didn’t learn much I didn’t
know before,” he said.
“You learned that the
wages of sin is death,” I said, trying to say something cheerful.
“I knew that before,”
Louie said. A look of revulsion came on his face. “The wages of sin!” he said.
“Sin, death, dust, old empty rooms, old empty whiskey bottles, old empty bureau
drawers. Come on, pull the rope faster! Pull it faster! Let’s get out of
this.” 
Published in the print edition of the June
28, 1952, issue.
Joseph Mitchell, who died in 1996, began writing
for the magazine in 1933.
