The hottest tables of yesteryear

ICE CREAM SALOONS
…in Tribeca
The stretch of Broadway between Franklin and Leonard Streets has neither the bustle of neighboring Chinatown nor the grandeur of the avenues farther west in Tribeca. But in the 1800s, this block was a destination for ice cream saloons—restaurants that specialized in frozen treats, yet also flaunted expansive menus and majestic interiors. The saloons, Grimes reports in his chronicle of New York’s dining past, gained popularity among young couples and “mercenary types” getting busy at the small semi-private tables.

The first—and most innocent—of these parlors was John Contoit’s New York Garden, opened in 1810. “It was really nothing more than a single plot along the street,” says Grimes of this oasis nestled between two buildings. “But you could go in through the garden entrance and suddenly you were in a very small, bucolic world.” The Garden was not out of place in the Tribeca of the early 19th century. “[The area] was really at the fringe of populated New York, almost into the countryside,” Grimes says. The pastoral vibe was underscored by the offerings: strawberry and vanilla ice cream, and lemon ices (spiked with cognac if you tipped the right server).

The place laid the groundwork for two more ice cream parlors that opened along the same thoroughfare in the 1850s, when it became a popular shopping district: Taylor’s at 365 Broadway and Thompson’s at 359 Broadway. “The two big rival ice cream saloons,” says Grimes. “One of the big attractions if you were female is that you could go in, which was very hard to find in New York where the segregation by sex was very strict.”

Further down Broadway at the corner of Reade Street is the onetime location of another celebrated café, this one owned by an Italian immigrant named Ferdinand Palmo. His restaurant, Palmo’s Garden, sold ices and liquor—the latter consumed by the “chic literary types” who, Grimes says, made the place their clubhouse. Palmo eventually went bankrupt pursuing his other ambition: bringing Italian opera to New York. The economic turmoil brought on by the Civil War felled the rest of the ice cream saloons.

FRENCH AND ITALIAN BISTROS
…in the Village and Soho
Though today you can find plenty of bistros along the crooked avenues of the Village and Soho, none of them have much in common with the charcuterie shops, restaurants and patisseries that proliferated in the area—between Grand Street and Washington Square, west of Broadway—when it served as New York’s French quarter. “Back in the 1870s this was an intensely French neighborhood with a lot of political refugees,” says Grimes. “The restaurants were lower-end—French restaurants for the French.”

Beginning in the 1880s, the area was overtaken by Italians, who opened boardinghouses with ground-floor eateries. Among these was Mori at 144 Bleecker Street between Sullivan and Thompson Streets. “Word started to spread that if you went to the Village, you could find wonderful Italian food, where a six- or seven-course meal could be had for 50¢,” says Grimes of Mori and its ilk. “[The Italians] thought they were serving their countrymen, but [the patrons were] bohemians with high cultural aspirations but low means.”

Gonfarone’s, located at 30 West 8th Street at MacDougal Street, was another destination for a half-dollar dinner of antipasti, minestrone, pasta, meat, fish, cheeses, coffee and biscotti, says Grimes. Before its Italian incarnation, the building was owned by a Frenchwoman named Marie Griffou, who also operated the Hotel Griffou at 21 West 9th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. We’d bet more than a pair of quarters she’d cluck her tongue at the blue bloods who reopened the place under the same name last June.

FINE DINING PALACES
…in Times Square
Today, the intersection of 42nd Street and Broadway is an orgy of commerce. A century ago, it was, too. At a time when the area’s theater industry was just gaining momentum, this junction was a restaurant acropolis—a gateway to a grandiose dining culture unmatched in New York before or since. “[Times Square had] some of the most expensive, most glamorous, most thrilling restaurants a city had ever seen,” says Grimes.

According to Grimes, just before the turn of the 20th century, Times Square developed from a center of the horse-and-carriage trade into a stretch of “lobster palaces”—massive, ornate dining halls packed with the nouveau riche and chorus girls. Rector’s, the first and best of these eateries, stood at 1508 Broadway at 44th Street from 1899 until shortly after the start of Prohibition. “It got a reputation for being a place you didn’t want your husband to go,” says Grimes. The menu was extravagant, with dishes like foie gras and squab bound in jelly, most costing less than $2.

Just up the block from Rector’s was the Hotel Astor’s sweeping rooftop garden, another product of the leisure culture still robust at the tail end of the Gilded Age. “Theaters closed in the summer because it was so hot,” says Grimes. “[During the off-season], one theater owner put a garden on the roof to host vaudeville acts and sell food and drink.” The Astor, built at the height of the rooftop rage in 1904, stood at 1515 Broadway between 44th and 45th Streets (now an office building). The skyscraping green space stretched an entire city block and featured what Grimes calls an “ornate landscape, with babbling brooks, formal gardens and a restaurant—the Belvedere.”

Back on 42nd Street was Murray’s Roman Gardens, the apex of the era’s excess. The restaurant, opened in 1908, offered a hodgepodge of architectural and decorative wonders. “Murray’s was really an ancient themed restaurant. It had a little Rome, a little Egypt—there was a full-size Cleopatra barge on the main dining room floor,” says Grimes. “There was the Dragon Room that had a facsimile of the Imperial Gardens in Peking.”

Booze sales helped keep these louche fortresses afloat, and the arrival of Prohibition in 1920 abruptly halted the area’s development (“The 9/11 of dining,” says Grimes). The dining halls folded and were eventually seized by Chinese restaurateurs offering meals at a price—55–65 cents a pop—that would have had the Midtown Lunch set in delirium.

CANTEENS AND CHEAP LUNCHES
…in Lower Manhattan
Just south of Police Plaza’s concrete expanse and abutting the archways of the Brooklyn Bridge lies Frankfort Street, or Pie Alley, as it was known in the 19th century. The concourse, says Grimes, was once jammed with ambling street vendors wearing trays heavy with fruit pastries. “It’s amazing how many meals were made of a piece of pie and a cup of coffee,” he says of the hungry workers who visited the Alley for a 1¢ wedge of huckleberry, blueberry or apple.

At lunch, journalists, newsboys and other printing-house laborers came streaming out of Park Row, which merges into Frankfort Street near City Hall. This stretch was dubbed Newspaper Row in the 1830s, thanks to its glut of dailies, such as the Herald and the Sun. Just as Pie Alley popped up to meet the needs of the noontime crowds, so too did the many “beef and” joints (meat plus a side) and chophouses that operated in the basements of most of the area’s newspaper buildings. One such example—called Buttercake Dick’s—was located in the bottom floor of the Tribune building on the corner of Park Row and Spruce Street, where over 1¢ biscuits, “the guy who publishes the newspaper could be rubbing elbows with a newsboy,” says Grimes.

Farther south at 141 Fulton Street between Broadway and Nassau is a remnant of Mouquin’s, which opened in 1857 and was one of lower Manhattan’s more fashionable eateries until it closed just before 1900. “Mouquin’s was the first real bistro in New York, and the gateway to French food for generations of journalists,” says Grimes. The building still stands (you can see its chaletlike facade), and is now a Popeyes chicken.

WILLIAM GRIMES AUDIO TOUR
Listen in as TONY hits the streets with culinary historian and author of Appetite City, William Grimes.

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