End of an Era

[arisbe]

All State Days

When my daughter came in some time before dawn I knew that the All State Cafe, part of her life since before she was born, and part of mine for more than half my tenure on this planet, was gone forever.

I don't remember how the year started. I think I must have raised a glass of domestic bubbly with my aged parents in their house in Lake Worth when the clock struck 1973. I know I was amused to be served it the next morning flying student standby on Delta to New York, having been seated in first class. I made my way to my fifth floor walk-up a block north of Dyckman Street, and reported to work at Teachers College on the morning of the second. Perhaps the parade of boats on trailers was going down Amsterdam Avenue as it did that time every year, when the Boat Show was at the old Colosseum on Columbus Circle.

Roseann Quinn, teacher of the deaf in her native Bronx, didn't make it to work that day. When she failed to report again on the third, her worried headmaster sent a teacher to her building on West 72nd Street. The superintendent opened her studio to discover her naked body, head bashed in, multiple stab wounds, a red candle thrust into her vagina.

New Year's Day Quinn had gone across the street to a seedy bar called W.M. Tweed's, where she was a regular, picked up a man, and brought him home. The newspapers were covered with sensational headlines, but I was oblivious in my ivory tower. The police published a sketch of the man she was last seen with at the bar; he turned himself in, and his boyfriend, a small time burglar and Times Square hustler, was captured in Indianapolis, and hanged himself downtown in a jail called the Tombs.

On Easter Sunday I moved down to Morningside Heights, riding in the cab of the van with the chief mover. He said he was pleased that I had opted for the flat rate so he and his men would be done quickly and get some rest; the would be running through the Sixth Brandenburg Concerto in the afternoon, and it is a demanding work. I made it to an early mass at Notre Dame church around the corner, Columbia's president Bill McGill wheezing asthmatically next to me at the communion rail.

A little downtown, the gentrificaiton of the Upper West Side was proceeding apace, and the police harassment of Tweed's, at which blacks and whites mingled freely and notoriously, proceeded to the point of extortion. Steve, then as now the owner, acceded to their demands, but went to the meeting wearing a microphone, and the miscreants were convicted. Still, he closed the place down, and when he reopened as the All State Cafe, it was the yuppie venue depicted in Looking for Mister Goodbar, loosely based on the Quinn murder, and Cheers, loosely based on some folks I know. Knew. Where did all the black people go? That was the question asked by a fellow who came back during the Reagan years after a decade and a half in Hawaii, now a blogger. Gentrification, he was told. Not Steve's fault. I saw him this morning packing memorabilia into a Budget rental van. Give my regards to Inwood, I said.

Toward the end of the year -- I am still speaking of '73 -- the woman I was becoming involved with was suddenly faced with the necessity of making a home for her parents, then living in her native India. She found a place on West End opposite the palatial offices of Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, rumored to have been Mae West's townhouse, and now Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis' Hineni center. O tempora, o mores! (She was teaching for a branch of the City University located over the Woolworths on Amsterdam where I last saw Isaac Asimov, and in the former Pythian temple on 70th with the Assyro-Babylonian bas reliefs and the seated Pharaohs on the roof, their double crowns painted the wrong colors. The All State was the place in her neighborhood we could meet away from her parents.

Maya and I were married around the corner at Blessed Sacrament with the magnificent rose window, the parish, I am sorry to say, of General Sherman in his later years. Her father wanted to hire an elephant for us to ride to the church, but that didn't seem like such a good idea. In those days I was still Roman Catholic, before Rear Admiral Archbishop Cardinal O'Connor signed my transfer papers into the Russian Church sui juris. But that's another story. The upshot is, I moved into the neighborhood; my father-in-law moved out, to Teheran, to Auroville, to San Antonio where he died shortly before John Lennon. The other upshot is Srsti, with dots under the “r,” under the “s,” and under the “t.” Srsti Bridget Sharma Purcell, to be precise.

When Srsti was six we were told not to expect her to live to twelve, but what do doctors know? She celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday Saturday night. At the All State. Calling out for pizza, for the kitchen exhaust caught on fire Thursday afternoon, sending flames shooting out the top of the building. This event accelerated the demise of the place, which the expiration of the 35 year lease had made inevitable. That night the bar, opened without food, went into lockdown when an old lady I call the Ratdog Woman went violently apeshit. She did it again Saturday with the same result, forcing the party to adjourn to Ashford and Simpson's Sugar Bar next door. (No, that's not where all the black people went. The ones who used to hang out at Tweed's couldn't afford it, any more than I can. They couldn't afford the All State either, and toward the end, neither could I.)

© 2007 FP Purcell

(First Installment)