Delmonicos-the first restaurant in New York

There are about 18 thousands full service restaurants in NY  and this number is increasing. It is impossible to believe now that two hundred years ago there were NO restaurant in New York аt all!  In the beginning of the 18th century  the city offered a little more than a the basics to the New Yorker in search of meal .
The Stranger's guide to the city of New York published in 1817 listed no restaurants at all, just hotels and boarding houses. There were taverns and  oyster cellars in the city.  Coffee houses could be found relatively easily, but there were no proper sit down restaurants, no cafes. Local taste ran to beef oysters and bread. Dining was not a leisure activity- New Yorkers eat   fast  - they do not want to waste time.
 Paris at that time  was completely different story.  There were about thousand of the restaurants in Paris in 1815  according to the annual guide Almanach des gourmands.

The history of New York  restaurant started with Delmonico brothers. John(Giovanni)  first came to America  from his native  Mairengo, which was Switzerland's southernmost area, adjacent to Italy.    He set up a wine business in New York. in 1826 his brother Peter (Pietro), the confectioner, arrive.  Two brothers used $20,000 in gold coins they saved  and  established a coffee-and-pastry shop at  23 Williams street.  A small shop  was selling classically prepared pastries, fine coffee and chocolate, bonbons, wines and liquors as well as Havana cigars.

 The number of the European visitors in New York was rapidly increasing   and business was growing. In 1829 brothers  rented a room in the adjoining building, at 25 William Street and by 1830, they rented the entire building, which served as a restaurant next to the cafe.  Building had decorative iron balconies and a marble entrance portico with four columns that were reputed  to be from the doorway of a villa in Pompeii. The new  restaurant represented a cultural shift toward French dining. In 1831 the third brother Lorenzo  joined them.
In 1834 the Delmonicos bought a 220 acre farm in present day Williamsburg, Brooklyn  to grow produce for the restaurant.  The brothers raised many vegetables that were not otherwise available in America and  introduced them to their American restaurant guests.

At the time   at  inns and hotels   you just ate what was on offer that day, for a fixed price, at the fixed times set by the establishment. Delmonico's introduced to America the relatively-new French concept of a menu, with different things you could choose at different prices. The menus were in French with English translations.
In 1837  restaurant issues the first printed American menu and lists "hamburger steak" as one of the priciest items for 10 cents.
When their restaurant burned  in the Fire of 1835, the Delmonico brothers acquired the site at  the corner of Beaver and William streets  and  erected an elegant four-story building that quickly became a favorite gathering place for New York society and visiting dignitaries.
Celebrities that frequented Delmonico's over the years included Samuel Morse, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Astors, Grand Dukes of Russia, Napoleon III, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain.
The business was so successful that from 1865 to 1888 it expanded to four restaurants of the same name. At various times, there were Delmonico's at ten locations.
By 1890, the South William Street restaurant had served since 1837, some 53 years.  In 1890 the Delmonicos replaced that building with the current eight-story building, which provided additional restaurant space as well as several office stories.  It also kept several touches from the original structure , including the Pompeii pillars and cornice that framed the entrance. These columns  had come to be regarded as talismans which patrons touched in passing for good luck.
1914 brought the world to war in Europe, and it impacted Delmonico's Restaurant.  Eating habits were changing. The Restaurant closed in 1923, a victim of Prohibition and rising real estate values in the Grand Central  district.
Wikipedea wrote: Almost immediately after the closing of the last Delmonico's, a number of imitators opened "Delmonico's" restaurants. The Delmonico family attempted to retain exclusive rights to the name, but a court ruled that with the closing of the last restaurant the name had passed into the public domain.
In 1929 a restaurateur called Oscar Tucci opened a revived Delmonico’s at 2 South William Street, which stayed in business until 1977.  Tucci  adopted the original menus and recipes.
Other Delmonicos have operated in the space from 1981 to 1992 and since 1998.

Dishes invented at Delmonico's include Baked Alaska, Delmonico Potatoes, Delmonico Steak, Eggs Benedict and Lobster Newburg.

"Baked Alaska" desert was created by Charles Ranhofer, the French chef of the   restaurant   to celebrate the United States purchase of Alaska from the Russians in 1867.  
Baked Alaska is made of ice cream placed in a pie dish lined with slices of sponge cake  and topped with meringue.

 Today you can still test the famous  desert  in the same restaurant where it was cooked for the first time in the history  in the end of 19th century.
.

The Frying Pan, historical boat and a restaurant

This is one of those places in the city where you realize how amazing NYC really is.  The  floating restaurant on the Hudson with  amazing views from all angles of wherever you sit is locates at the very end of West 26 street in Chelsea.  My friend and I came here  for a short break on  a sunny Thursday afternoon  a week ago   after walking the High Line(elevated freight rail line transformed into a public park on Manhattan's West Side). I fall in love with  this place,  and we ended up  hanging here for almost three hours . I felt like I was on vacation - the wind, the faint scent of salt in the air... The view was incredible! And the history behind this place is really interesting.

In 1929 the lightship  name just " Lightship No. 115 " was built in Charleston, South Carolina   for Cape Fear,  North Carolina. 

Photograph courtesy
U.S. Coast Guard

Since the late 1800s lightships had been used to guide other ships around harbor entrances and dangerous  shallow sandbars.
The shallow waters there  have the name " Frying Pan Shoals" - so the ship was renamed “The Frying Pan”.  A crew of 15 men served aboard the ship for three months at a time followed by two months of shore leave. The lightship remained at its post until 1965 and then  a  new lighthouse was built on shore. Frying Pan Lighthouse was automated in 1976 and then deactivated in 2003. In 2010 the lighthouse was sold for   $85,000   

 The Frying Pan ship was moved  to  an old oyster cannery on the Wicomico River in the Chesapeake Bay  where she  spent next ten years.  She sank due to a broken pipe and  was underwater for three years before being raised by salvers.

John Krevey, an electrical contractor and businessman from New York City bought the ship for $8,000. Krevey installed a truck diesel engine and started and started  a  coastal sea voyage to the Hudson River in 1983.  By 1991, he had it docked temporarily at Pier 59 on the Hudson River at 18th Street. 
 Until the early 1970s, railroad cars used to float into Manhattan by barge, then link up with railroad tracks at the waterfront, and finally to warehouses located nearby.  In 1996, Krevey acquired an old railroad barge  that formerly carried railroad boxcars across the Hudson River, and tied it up on the north end of Pier 63, at W. 23rd St.

In 2000, Krevey and friends  bought  the John J. Harvey, a decommissioned fireboat.   Built in 1931, MV John J. Harvey,   is among the most powerful fireboats ever in service.   Her pumps are powerful -- enough so that when she and the George Washington Bridge were both brand new, she shot water over the bridge's roadway.   On Sept. 11, 2001, the  ship  helped evacuate Battery Park City residents  and after that    under radio direction from the Fire Department, trained its powerful water pumps on the blazing towers. In 2008 Krevey   rented a tugboat and moved the Frying Pan, the  barge and John J. Harvey  to Pier 66 (3 city blocks north).  Three years later in 2011 John Krevey died   at age 62 while on a vacation with his son in Santo Domingo. The cause appeared to be a heart attack. 

Today  Pier 66 is a part of  Hudson River Park  and  includes  a former Lackawanna railroad barge, the Pier 66 Maritime Bar & Grill, the Lightship Frying Pan, a historic rail float bridge, and an authentic 1900′s caboose.  While the outside of the Lightship Frying Pan    has been restored to her original appearance, the inside retains the barnacle-encrusted, sunken-ship motif that acknowledges her storied past.  
Pier 66 is open  7 days a week  from  May 1  to  October 1, and in October only when   weather is 65 F (18 C) degrees or over.

Society of Illustrators -a club, museum and a restaurant

For those of you who are looking for a hidden gem in New York City, the Society of Illustrators is certainly one of them.  It is located at 128 East 63rd Street in a graceful, five-story townhouse on a quiet residential block on the Upper East Side. 

The is a gift shop in the lobby and a small two-floor exhibition space. Admission is  free   for all visitors on Tuesdays from 5-8pm. Every Tuesday and Thursday there is a  Sketch  night  from 6:30 - 9:30pm, with nude , partially clothes or fully costumed models and live music.  The price   is $15 and $7 for students/seniors. There's an original Norman Rockwell above the bar on the second floor, and a dining room.   

If you are not the member of the society you can buy a Museum Experience Package with Lunch that includes the full buffet, coffee, dessert and a glass of wine. ($30 per person , not including admission). The dining room is open for lunch Tuesday-Friday from 12:00pm to 2:30pm. From spring to early fall, the  terrace provides a rare opportunity for dining al fresco in the heart of the city.

 The Permanent Collection has of nearly 2,000 works by many of the greatest names in American illustration.

 128 East 63rd  was originally  a carriage house built in 1875 for William P. Read, a personal secretary for financier J.P. Morgan.  In the beginning of 20th century  two brothers bought the house. They converted the   building into a residence and the stable area became a squash court.

The society of Illustrators was founded on   February 1, 1901 by  nine artists and one businessman with the following credo: “The object of the Society shall be to promote generally the art of illustration and to hold exhibitions from time to time.”
In August 1939, the Society   purchased the building for approximately $33,000, which is nearly $500,000 in today’s dollars.

'Club 21':Richard Nixon, Elizabeth Taylor and Ernest Hemingway dined there

'21' is one of America’s most famous speakeasies from the Prohibition Era.  Every President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt except for George W. Bush has dined at 21. JFK dined at '21' on the eve of his inauguration.
The most famous feature of 21 is the line of 33 painted cast iron lawn jockey statues which adorns the balcony above the entrance.

Club was once home to wealthy horse owners and breeders of New York City. They donated jockeys with the colors of their private horse stables. The most recent from Sackatoga Stables represents  the great NY horse, Funny Cide, winner of 2003 s Kentucky Derby and Preakness races.
The first version of the club opened in Greenwich Village in 1922. The club was opened by two cousins   Jack Kriendler and Charlie Berns to earn night school tuition.  In 1926 the location was moved  to  88 Washington Place  and in a year  it moved uptown to 42 West 49th Street.  The wrought-iron gate  that you can see now outside the club   dates back to that time – they were initially installed on  42 West 49th Street.

In 1929, to make way for the construction of Rockefeller Center, the club moved to its current location.   The bar  included a secret wine cellar, which was accessed through a hidden door in a brick wall which opened into the basement of the building next door (number 19).
The wine cellar housed 2,000 cases of wine, including the private collections of Presidents Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Mae West, Eva Gabor and Aristotle Onassis.
At the beginning of the  Prohibition era  the owners   hired architect Frank Buchanan to install a complex system to hide and destroy liquor in case of future raids. As soon as a raid began, a system of levers was used to tip the shelves of the bar, sweeping the liquor bottles through a chute and into the city's sewers.
During Prohibition, New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker had a private booth in a corner of the cellar, where he would go to have a cocktail in peace as the feds were raiding the premises above for contraband.  In 1997  the famous Wine Cellar was  remodeled and become  one of the most sought-after private dining rooms in the city. Patrons enter through the now famous brick wall "door" that the Feds never found.
Salvador Dali and Alfred Hitchcock were  the frequent visitors of the Bar. They  collaborated during the making of the psychological mystery thriller  “Spellbound”.   During the Wall street boom , in 1980s '21' spawns the power lunch.  Forbes says "more deals are done at '21' than on the stock market floor.
At Christmas time the patrons received silk scarves decorated with a motif of various unique club insignia. Each scarf is numbered and has the Jockey logo.

Silk scarf

You can use an interactive map on the restaurant’s web site to find out where our celebrity regulars like to sit.

In 1950, the famous '21' burger is $2.75. By 1987, it was the most famous burger in NYC and costs $21. Now it is $32. Men must wear a jacket, and no jeans or sneakers allowed.  From mid-August through Labor Day the restaurant is closed.

On the Winter Restaurant Week  February 17th through March 7th (Monday-Friday)  you can have three-course lunch for $25 or    three-course dinner  for $38.  Beverages, tax and gratuity are additional.

If you book a dinner reservation you can park  you car for  6 hours   for $10 at Central Parking Garage, located in the CBS Building on 31 West 52nd Street

Alwyn Court: clay and caviar

     Façade of the residential building Alwyn Court, built in the beginning of the XX century and located at 58th Street and Seventh Avenue, is considered the most ornate in the entire New York. The architects of this building were inspired by the style of Francois I, King of France in 16 century. The style  combines Renaissance and Gothic ornamental forms. Every inch of the building is covered with  shapes and figures such as urns, flowers and leaves, animals, grotesque human faces and cherubs, fabricated by the Atlantic Terracotta Company of Staten Island.

     Terra cotta, meaning “cooked earth” in Italian, is a “high-heat-fired”, porous natural clay that can be molded into anything from construction material to ornamental structures. Terra cotta was introduced in the United States by immigrant artisans from England in the mid-19th century. At the beginning of the XX century Atlantic Terracotta was the largest producer of architectural terra cotta in the world.

   Steel-framed skyscrapers needed decorative, inexpensive and lightweight fire-resistant materials for decoration and protection from the elements. There were two plants in Staten Island, New York. Atlantic Terra Cotta manufactured products for forty percent of the terra cotta buildings in New York City. The company was created in 1846 in Perth Amboy, Staten Island, due to rich supplies of clay.

   The architects took advantage of the economy of terra cotta, since a single mold could be used many times to create a shape. Terra cotta had become popular with architects at the turn of the century because of its versatility and affordability. 

     The building opened in 1909. There were  12 floors  with only two apartments on each floor and a square courtyard in the middle.   Every apartment had fourteen rooms and five baths. Each unit had its own living room, library and music rooms and wine cellar.

     Just a year after the building was built there was a fire that destroyed several apartments. The damage was quickly repaired and within a year the Alwyn Court was at full occupancy. But the prosperity did not last long. Great Depression hit hard and by 1937 the Alwyn Court sat empty. After the foreclosure apartments were reconstructed and became smaller, the number of apartments was tripled, but the remarkable terra cotta façade was left intact. In April 2013 two-bedroom apartment was sold for 1.5 million. And you have to be ready to pay $2000 per month for maintenance.

    The premier location and opulent decorations attracted upscale restaurant “Petrossian” that was open in  1984 on the first floor of the building. The restaurant sits the next door to food boutique, with caviar, smoked salmon, foie gras, tea, preserves, and pastries. 

     Armenian brothers, Melkoum and Mouchegh Petrossian, émigrés from Russia, had opened their Paris shop in the early 1920's to introduce the pleasures of caviar to a willing world.

   Hotel impresario César Ritz helped to popularize the delicacy. Champagne and caviar soon became inseparable from the idea of deluxe dining.

Petrossian now buys its caviar from the US and other farms in Israel, Europe, and China, and maintains its reputation for excellence. “If our American ossetra is put next to wild ossetra, I dare anyone to tell me the difference,” says Alexandre Petrossian,  the third generation of the Armenian family. 

Residents of the Alwyn Court were evacuated in March this year. Extell company had to restore the crane on the newly constructed One57 that crashed during the storm Sandy- I published a post about One57 several weeks ago. Michael Gross, chronicler of high-end real estate, author of 740 Park and resident of Alwyn Court said  to Observer:   “Frankly, I was not worried about the apartment so much as the corruption of the city and the unfairness of all this. Cranes go up and down in the city all the time and no one gets evacuated” 

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the author of "The Little Prince", in New York.

     This charming building with blue trim, and over-flowing window boxes sits on East 52 just less than a half-block from  5th Avenue. There is a plaque on the building that says that  several chapters of  “The Little Prince”  by Saint-Exupery  were written in a studio on the second floor.  On the ground floor of the building was “La Vie Parisienne” (The Parisian Life), a French restaurant.  

     Today restaurant “La Grenouille” occupies the first and the second floors – you can book upstairs lovely semi-private area. 

      Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (29 June 1900 – 31 July 1944), was a French aristocrat, writer, poet, and pioneering aviator. He had been working in Argentina as a director of the airmail Argentina airline- this period of his life is briefly explored   in the first 3-D IMAX fiction film “Wings of Courage".     

     Saint-Exupéry won the U.S. National Book Award for his book memoir “Wind, Sand and Stars”, that he was able to receive  a year later, in  1941 here in New York , in the hotel Astor. The hotel was on Times Square and was turned down in 1967. The French and English versions of this book were different. The author removed sections from the French and added new material specifically written for American readers.

     In 1940's the studio on the second floor was a place where Paris-born artist Bernard Lamotte lived. LaMotte attended the Art school at the Sorbonne, Paris  where he met   Antoine de Saint-Exupéry . In 1932 the artist moved to New York City.

     This studio, called ”Le Bocal” (“The Fishbowl”)  was one of the places where the famous  French writer Saint-Exupéry worked on  “Le petit prince” (The Little Prince”).

      Saint-Exupery sailed from Lisbon to New York on the last day of 1940. He planned to stay in New York for four weeks but remained for more than two years. He had travelled there on a personal mission to persuade its government to quickly enter the war against Nazi Germany.

     The writer was isolated by his inability to speak English and had little news of his family or friends. He survived a number of airplane crashes in the previous 20 years and  his health was  poor.

     Saint-Exupery wrote and drew "The Little Prince" during the second half of 1942. The writer had for years sketched the  little figure on letters, manuscript pages and restaurant tablecloths. This novel, beginning with a crash  of a plane in the Sahara desert  in 1935, in is based on his own experience.  On the fourth day after the crash,   Bedouin on a camel saved him from the dehydration.

   The novella is the most read and most translated book in the French language, and was voted the best book of the 20th century in France. It was translated into more than 250 languages with sales more than 140 million copies. “Le petit prince” is  one of the best-selling books ever published.

     The original autographed manuscript of The Little Prince are in The Morgan Library & Museum,  in Manhattan, New York City.

     Only weeks after his novella was first published in April 1943 the author-aviator joined the Free French Forces - the resistance organization founded by Charles de Gaulle in 1940 in London.  Some of   Saint-Exupéry philosophical writings were created during  his lonely flights – he often took a notebook with him.

     Saint-Exupéry took off in an unarmed P-38 on his last spy mission from an airbase on Corsica  and did not return. An unidentifiable body wearing French colors was found several days after his disappearance and buried in Carqueiranne in September.

     In September 1998 a French fisherman  found a silver identity bracelet with the names of Saint-Exupéry and of his wife Consuelo. In May 2000 diver found the partial remains of a plane near to where the bracelet was previously found. After a two-year delay imposed by the French government, the remnants of the aircraft were recovered in October 2003. In June 2004 the fragments were given to the Air and Space Museum in Paris, France.

     In April 2012 a Parisian auction house announced the discovery of two previously unknown draft manuscript pages of “The Little Prince” that had been found and which included new text. The little prince arrives on Earth and meets the first person on the planet, a completely new character, who’s described as an “ambassador of the human spirit.”

    This “ambassador” was almost too busy to speak to his inquisitive interlocutor, saying he’s looking, in vain, for a missing six-letter word. 

These two pages are the only pages from "The Little Prince" in the world apart from the manuscript in the New York "Morgan library.”

Visit Restaurant: "La Grenouille" , classic French cuisine

The Little Prince (Wordsworth Children's Classics) (Wordsworth Collection)