Note: I've missed a few days of this repartee due to a really nasty stomach flu. Truly grotty.
So I'm in bed last night, tossing and turning. Thinking about that time in my life when I was living in Yonkers, NY. Not quite The City, but if you stood at a certain place on Riverdale Avenue, right near the Convent of Mt. Saint Vincent, where the NYC bus stopped, you could be both in The City and Westchester at the same time. I used to place my feet astraddle this imaginary line on the sidewalk, right in front of the cooler shade of the convent's stone fence.
I always felt I had this dual citizenship, this ability to span being a Yonkers girl and a New York City girl. Truth be told, lots of folks believe that Yonkers is really just another town in the borough system. So I guess I was always a city girl by default.
Besides these thoughts plus a massive craving for Carvel (across from the convent, and still there...and also indicating that perhaps my appetite was returning!), I took an astral walk down Riverdale Avenue. Of course, this was 1968. Everything's a bit different in 1968. Finely manicured apartment buildings, including the mysterious "co-op," which was an apartment neighbourhood which was supposed to be private and don't take the short cut through it or some guy in grey will come out and yell at you...The Associated grocery store, where they carried those tiny little green glass bottles of coke and the guys were named Murray, Meyer (the butcher) and some other guy with a grey buzzcut and Fassbinder glasses who manned the register. The only things we ever shopped for there were snacks, like cokes or ...mmmmm.... Wise Cheeze Waffies...or the occasional candy bar. Too expensive, my mom would say. My family did their shopping up on South Broadway or across the city line in Riverdale at the Daitch.
For the real sugar rush, though, there was nothing like Lane's Luncheonette. This place runs throught my blood memory like
nothing else. I could draw the place in finite detail...from its jaunty diagonal placement at the corner of Riverdale Avenue and Valentine Lane...to its sign above the door in black lettering on white...to the glass door that proclaimed "It's KOOL Inside!"...and when you entered: to the right, display racks of grown-up books and then lots more of Archie Comics and the forbidden "love" comics. Beyond that, there were wooden racks containing newspapers (Yonkers Herald Tribune, Daily News) and then magazines above that (Playboy right out there, all the way to the left so maybe you don't see it, but there). Toward the back were more wooden shelves holding toys and paper and just stuff, and then THE BELL SYSTEM phone booths. Wooden, private, with ights that went on when you closed the door to dial your mom and ask if you could buy the "love" comic because you were 8 now.
But to the left when you entered...ah, to the left...first, the candy, the candy. Hersheys and red hots and licorice, oh my! Sylvia, the register lady, always tried to pawn off pieces of Bazooka from a plastic box on the counter in lieu of change owed. There was a Murray there, and a Mary, and I can't remember the fourth guy who was part of this family but they were somehow all related.
And then there was the lunch counter. Malteds and milkshakes in the silver containers, poured into the hourglass-shaped glasses, with a paper straw and a pretzel rod from the glass container on the counter. And the tuna fish, the tuna fish sandwiches! What the hell was in the tuna fish that made it taste like pure heaven on a piece of triangular toast? My brother and I have been attempting to replicate this memory for a thousand years now. I haven't even eaten tuna in about 10 years because of suspected contaminants, but the memory of the tuna fish haunts me. Some delicate balance of tuna, mayo, celery and perhaps pickle relish, I don't know, whipped into this impossibly ethereal concoction, filling the white toast slices with some sort of mousse-like perfection. George, not related to the rest of the gang, was the cook and I wish we'd pumped him all those years ago so our moms could replicate our favourite sandwich...but then again, it never would have tasted as good at home at the kitchen table as it did on a lunch trip to Lane's.
3 comments:
Amazingly enough, it was just last night that I lay in bed, imagining the progress of the sunlight as it moved from East to West, arcing across Riverdale Ave. and the changes it made to shadows on the red brick buildings and the long slope up the hill to Fay Park.
There, it illuminated the giant anchor fences that surrounded the basketball courts, with a luminous yellow glow, glinting sharply off of the 1950s style windows of P.S. 27 before it disappeared into the treetops above the Palisades across the river.
The grey-haired buzzcut man from the Associated market was named "Benny" (I know this because he would always ask me with his Yiddish/lecherous accent; "Could Benny kiss your Mommy"?...
Sensing even then his sliminess (I must've been 5 or 6 years old), I would recoil and offer a definitive "No!" (not that my Mother would've needed me to protect her, as she was tough as well as pretty).
I hate to dispel the Murray myth, as indeed Murray would certainly have been a suitable moniker for Benny's partner, but it was Meyer.
Benny, Meyer and Joe the butcher.
I remember Joe fondly as he would reward my visits there with a large free slice of Kosher salami (probably to shut me up so that he could try and chat up my mom!)
The Murray roster takes another hit as we head North across the intersection to Lane's Luncheonette
I too could reproduce a fairly accurate architectural rendering of that place, especially emphasizing the "Toy" section, just past the greeting cards on the right (I used to constantly ogle the aurora brand plastic models of cars, airplanes and movie monsters).
The Murray there was actually named Morris. He most definitely could've or should've been a Murray.
Morris was the very cranky male partner, who somewhat resembled Moe from "The 3 Stooges" in both appearance and temperament. Ironically (or so i always thought), he was married to Mary, who was the nicer of the 2 women proprietors.
Lou, the nice partner, was married (also ironically) to Sylvia, who was the large bleach-blond dragon lady who yelled a lot (Lou just kinda looked away, although you couldn't really tell as he had a wandering eye).
George Jackson, who was the short- order cook there, made the most incredible fried chicken (or so my mother thought). She would have them deliver buckets of it up to the Hebrew Home for The Aged where she worked (just up the road a piece from Mount St. Vincent) for their lunch every Thursday, as that was the day it was the lunch special at Lanes.
I believe that the spot where Lanes was is now or was a local bodega, which is certainly a more apt resource for the current neighborhood demographic (long gone is the demand for pretzels and chocolate egg creams).
I went back to the old neighborhood a few years ago when I was drunk and depressed (I probably shouldn't have been driving in the first place) and did a few laps around the circle on Abeel street below the Fay park steps.
I parked in the circle (illegally of course) and wandered or stumbled around the park and the co-op complex grounds where i grew up and lived for so many years, so long ago.
After communing with my ancestors, demons and many many memories of all variety, I hopped back into my fancy-shmancy convertible and drove off back into what was then "the fucking present".
They say you can't go back and they're right (whoever THEY are).
But I still enjoy a really good cheeseburger with a cherry-coke from the fountain now and then (and "No! you can't kiss my daughter!")
Thanks for the memories!!!!
dan
Hi Dan: thanks for your incredibly wonderful, lyrical additions to the 10705 saga! Your response brought back even more memories, as well as refining some of my more misty ones. I guess I must've had Murray on the brain...and that Benny... :-) I lived in Riverdale during most of the 1990s before I moved to SC and used to run along Palisade Avenue right past the Hebrew Home. I'd walk down Riverdale Avenue and reminisce; I remember the bodega, chock-a-block full of shelving that took up the whole space of the store. All that possibly remained of Lane's was the paying counter, which was full of NY Lottery stuff and all the other accoutrements one finds in a deli and such, so I couldn't really tell. But I could hope. ;-)
George's fried chicken sounds real good right about now. Thank you again for your beautifully related response. Take care!
I grew up in Riverdale on Ellsworth Ave (where my 83 year old mom still resides) and spent my child and teen years in Fay Park knew every nook and cranny in it along with the "older guys" like my brother and his friends and us about 2-4 years younger than them yet we all coexisted in Fay for so many years. Most of us played for Lud-Dale little league (me on Parkview Lincoln Mercury), played football and Babe Ruth baseball on the "big field", shoveled the basketball courts in the winter and took over the tennis courts to play hockey while battling with Mrs. Walker the local tennis guru who eventually gave birth to tennis pro James Blake (still remember him in the baby carriage) for those courts. We played stick ball behind Elizabeth Seton and PS 27, played ringolivio in those co-ops where many of our friends and classmates at PS 27 and Hawthorne JHS grew up. No matter what Fay was the place to be and meet especially all the years we spent under and on top of the shelter. I cannot tell you how many egg creams and burgers I had at Lanes along with buying dozens and dozens of balsa wood, rubber band propelled airplanes that either ended up in pieces, down a sewer or stuck in a tree waiting for a windy night to find it on the ground the next day. Those two sets of couples where married and related and lived in the building right across the street...480 Riverdale Ave along with many of my best friends as a child. We also lived at Carvel by Benders Animal Hospital with the dogs barking in the cages in the back. We invaded the original Mt. Saint Vincent Campus regularly and got chased off the pond with our skates and hockey sticks by the security guards. We felt like we owned the area from Radford Street to Skyview in Riverdale. As for myself I actually worked in the Associated with those gentleman you previously spoke of. I was there at the tail end of their tenure around 1971-1974 delivering groceries to the surrounding buildings on Riverdale Ave and then almost running the place when the various different owners sold to each other. There was another cherished gentleman who was a fixture there and lived above the store and spent much time at a bar on South Broadway near Valentine Lane next to Napoli's pizza which all eventually burnt down and his name was "Whitey". This story can go on and on but I will end it on a very sad note...I just returned home this afternoon (4-22-14) from the funeral of my childhood friend from across the street on Ellsworth Ave....William (Billy) Flanagan who fought hard for years with illnesses and finally lost the battle way too soon at the age of 60. One positive note was I got to see his remaining siblings and friends I have not seen for decades. That Riverdale Ave / Lanes crew are going to try to meet up going forward. R.I.P. W.D.F.!
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