When novelist Saul Bellow wrote about “fellows whose hearts ache at the destruction of the past” he might’ve been predicting my own suffering even for losses inflicted before my time: I never fully recovered from the razing of Ebbets Field, the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, never mind that The Boys of Summer played their last game at that ballpark before I was born.
Compassionate New Yorkers don’t just pine for their own good ‘ol days. They embrace their neighbor’s nostalgic yearnings for another place, from another time, in another part of town.
In the post I sent you a week ago – Eisenberg’s, a door to the past, reopens at S & P, – I shared my fears about the classic New York lunch counter formerly known as Eisenberg’s. I worried that the food and the personal warmth wouldn’t measure up to my memories.
I took comfort from the sympathetic words of lawyer-turned-baker Larry Finkelstein, the father of S & P co-owner Eric Finkelstein. Here is Larry’s philosophical response to any old regular’s certainty that things will never as good as as they used to be at 174 Fifth Ave.:
People have their memories of what they think it was, and that’s what it was for them. And whether or not it’s better or it’s not better, it’s what it is today. And that’s what it is.
Like Larry I have no objection to anyone romantisizing the Eisenberg’s experience from way back when. But the sandwiches I tried in late October at the New York institution renamed S & P might just be good as they’ve ever been for the 90-plus years honest lunches have been served at this address. Admittedly I am a little too young to say so with any conviction.
Lunch-counter intelligence at 174 Fifth Avenue from Larry Finkelstein