December | 2020 | casaCARA

I scan the list with my heart in my throat, occasionally whispering “oh no!”, remembering places I’ve been and loved, meant to go back to, never did and now never will.

The list, of some of the hundreds of mom-and-pop-type businesses closed in New York City since this cursed pandemic began, is in New York Magazine’s annual “Reasons We Love New York” issue, out this week. The magazine, partnered now with Curbed, the behemoth real estate site, put the story’s title this year in the past tense. It’s “Reasons We’ve Loved New York,” a farewell to the many places that have closed permanently in 2020, listed in order of the year they opened, from oldest to most recent.

Some are truly historic, like the Paris Cafe in South Street seaport (how is it I never went there, or even heard of it, since it opened in 1873?) and Gem Spa (1921), where I used to buy egg creams and Bambù rolling papers as a college student in the late ’60s.

Also tragically lost is Monkey Bar (1936) on East 54th at the Hotel Elysée, below, a swanky spot with retro murals, where we memorably celebrated my aunt’s milestone birthday, my sibs and cousins and I all decked out spiffily, having gotten babysitters for our young children.

It grieves me that Jules Bistro (1993) on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village, is no more. It was a semi-subterranean place for salad Niçoise and steak frites in the afternoon, live jazz later, with a sliver of sunny street view reflected in wraparound mirrors. Jules seemed decades older than it really was and possibly located in Paris. It was a go-to for meeting friends since my cousin Pamela introduced me to it, and I considered it a real treasure.

And so many more that spark heavy-duty nostalgia. Frank’s Cocktail Lounge on Dekalb Avenue in Fort Greene, Brooklyn (1972), dark even at noontime, where I went exactly once during a break from studies at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture, and always meant to return. The Cupping Room in Soho (1977), below, with both a casual front counter, a sky-light, art-filled dining space and heavenly whipped eggs, is gone. Even Cranberry’s (1977) on Henry Street in north Brooklyn Heights, which could be counted on for a very good sandwich to bring down to the promenade. What will come in their places? Chains or independent businesses? Or will the spaces be vacant for years?

Was Chinatown bakery Lung Moon (1968) the place we used to get char su bao, sweet bean-filled rolls, warm from the oven, for small change? And how could Lucky Strike on Grand Street be gone? Another clone of old Paris, a less glitzy, more neighborhood-y version of Balthazar and Pastis, with the same owners, it was reliably there for 31 years, and I expected it to remain for decades more.

The demise of some tried and true Booklyn spots of more recent vintage also pains me. On Van Brunt Street in Red Hook, both The Good Fork (2006, Korean home cooking) and Fort Defiance (2009, cocktails in the afternoon), below, which survived Hurricane Sandy but couldn’t come back from this, have gone out. (Fort Defiance has been reinvented as a grocery store.) Goodbye, too, to Soda Bar (2002) on Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights, dark and atmospheric, with great neon signage. And my ever-reliable Building on Bond (2008), with its leafy corner location, outdoor tables even before they became a necessity, local beers on draft and terrific Cobb salad.

Odessa, the Ukrainian diner on Avenue A, was not one of “my” places. I am partial to the still-extant (but for how long?) Veselka on Second Avenue (same idea — cabbage soup, pierogies), but a recent article by Christopher Bonanos perfectly describes how I would feel if Veselka were to suddenly disappear. Odessa, he writes, was a place that could be counted on to be open and accessible and cheap, easy in a city where easy don’t come easy. The kind of place you didn’t have to think about. No lines, no reservations, “It was just there,” Bonanos writes, “and then it wasn’t.”

Recently, I perused cartoonist Ben Katchor’s new book about now-defunct Jewish dairy restaurants, the kind that still existed all over the city when I was a young adult, the sort of places Isaac Bashevis Singer would go for lunch and story ideas. I remember eating at the Garden Cafeteria on the Lower East Side, Famous Dairy on West 72nd, the Art Deco Dubrow’s in the Garment District, and of course, Ratner’s on Delancey Street and on Second Avenue, and Rappoport’s, also on Second Avenue in the East Village.

As both a budding vegetarian and a Jew, I was familiar with the food, which was very like my grandmother’s concoctions of bow-tie noodles with kasha or cottage cheese; vegetarian chopped liver made of hard-boiled eggs, string beans, onions and walnuts; a simple bowl of slice banana with sour cream; steaming red borscht with bits of dill floating in it on a cold winter’s day. All these places disappeared one by one over the decades, as did the elderly Jews who used to sit on benches in the median strip of Broadway on the Upper West Side, chatting away in Yiddish.

One of my first stops when this is over will be to the East Village, to make sure B&H Dairy, above left, has survived. It’s a hole in the wall with only a narrow counter for seating, on which to perch on a round stool and order a bowl of mushroom barley soup, and one of the very last of its breed. Just a few days ago, a devastating fire on Second Avenue at 7th Street destroyed a very beautiful Gothic Revival church. I’m sorry about the church, but I’m glad the fire was across the street from B&H.

A city must mutate; it can’t remain the way it was forever. I understand that. But this sudden and rapid rending of the city’s fabric is unprecedented, even for New York City, and therefore frightening. Will all these atmospheric, memory-filled places be replaced, and by what? And when?

A contemporary London sitting room with chairs by the 20th century decorator Renzo Mongiardino, often credited with popularizing rattan furniture for indoor use

I love vintage rattan furniture so much that I once toyed with the idea of opening a store in lower Manhattan, back when stores were a good idea, and calling it Bamboozled. That would have been a misnomer, since bamboo is a different plant, rigid and dense, that grows in divided sections, whereas rattan — from the Malay word rotan and native to Malasia and the Phillippines — is a plant fiber that is hollow and bendable and lends itself much more easily to furniture construction. Rattan is not entirely synonymous with wicker either, wicker being a broader term for craft of woven furniture, often but not always made of fibers from the pliable rattan plant.

Bamboozled was still a great name for a store. File that one away in great ideas that never came to pass. But I was serious about the concept. Round about 1976, my wasband and I drove to Florida and spent a couple of weeks going up and down the secondhand furniture stores and thrift shops of Dixie Highway, which was a rich trove of rattan furniture. Rattan was always a popular choice for subtropical locales, from the days of the British raj in India to the open verandahs of the Caribbean.

Much of what we were drawn to in Florida was Art Deco-style, like the then-unrenovated hotels along Miami’s South Beach, where we also spent time among elderly folk in aluminum folding chairs who didn’t seem to notice the peach-colored mirrors etched with flamingos in the lobbies of the hotels in which they lived (and which are now, of course, boutique hotels thankfully saved from destruction and populated by a whole different group of people).

We filled up a U-Haul and drove back to New York, where we may have gone straight to a store on Hudson Street called Secondhand Rose. The proprietor, Suzanne Lipschitz, took one look at the contents of our trailer and bought most of our haul for what we thought was a very good price (laughable now, of course). We had enough to furnish our Tribeca loft with rattan sectional pieces, including a “pretzel” sofa and chair, which might well have been by the designer Paul Frankl (or might not).

At any rate, with this history, I was very pleased to recently get a review copy of the first comprehensive book about vintage rattan furniture in decades, below.

Rattan: A World of Elegance and Charm, just published by Rizzoli, was written by Lulu Lytle, a woman after my own heart, who took her fascination with rattan furniture all the way to the top of the British furniture industry, founding a company called Soane Britain that manufactures rattan using traditional hand techniques. Lytle even purchased the last remaining rattan workshop in Leicestershire, England and employs 15 people there, some of them older people engaged in passing down the craft through an apprenticeship program.

The book, as I wrote in my review for Introspective, the online magazine of 1stDibs.com, is a triumph of photo research, showing the evolution of rattan’s use from Victorian times through the modernist era and into the glamorous 1960s and ’70s, when it caught on with decorators and movie stars from Hollywood to Milan. Lots more great photos in the review and, of course, in the book itself.

This is one coffee table book that will remain on my coffee table for a long time.