Le Steak de Paris

[From Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964).]

One more from Maeve Brennan’s Manhattan: Le Steak de Paris. Brennan writes about this restaurant several times in The Long-Winded Lady, more than about any other. In a 1967 piece, she stops in for dinner and learns that the building has been slated for demolition and that the owner, unable to find a new location in the city, is planning to move Le Steak to Long Island. Brennan then describes the restaurant:

Inside, Le Steak has hardly changed in all the years I have been going there. The walls were once covered with printed-paper murals of rustic eighteenth-century scenes. Later there was red-brick-patterned wallpaper. Now the paper imitates polished wooden planks — vertical planks — and there is a cigarette machine where the jukebox that played French records used to be. But nothing has really changed there. The menu is much the same as always — Crème Jeannette, Poulet Rôti, Shrimps Cocktail, Artichaut Froid, and so on. Even the atmosphere is the same, as though finality had stayed where it belongs — out of sight and far away.

Le Steak de Paris must have lived a very quiet life in Manhattan: if the New York Times historical index (1851–2007) can be trusted, the paper has not one reference to the restaurant — which would mean no reviews and no advertisements. The 49th Street address, now part of a skyscraper, still houses a restaurant, City Lobster and Steak.

As for the telephone exchange, CI can mean only one thing: CIrcle.

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May 8, 2017: Bobby Cole, a New Jersey historian, found a photograph of Le Steak de Paris. He’s active in the Facebook group Old Images of New York. Thank you, Bobby, for allowing me to share your find here:


[Click for a larger view.]

This photograph prompted me to take another look at the New York Times Historical Index, which now returns one article mentioning Le Steak de Paris. Here is a photograph of Guy l’Heureux, the restaurant’s owner, from a 1967 article about the many restaurants that were soon to be demolished to make way for another skyscraper. Said L’Heureux, “What can you do? C’est la vie.”


[“If Your Favorite Restaurant Is Near Sixth Avenue and 49th Street, Go to It Now or You May Be Too Late,” The New York Times, September 12, 1967.]

And here is a small ad that ran many times in the Times:


[October 10, 1966.]

“Dinner from $3.50”: I’m there.

Eighth Street Bookshop

The Eighth Street Bookshop, run by brothers Eli and Ted Wilentz, is one of the now-defunct businesses that make an appearance in Maeve Brennan’s The Long-Winded Lady. The store closed in 1979.The above advertisement appeared in the Evergreen Review 19 (July–August 1961). My copy is a used-book store find.

RealityStudio, a site devoted to the work of William Burroughs, has excellent evocations of the Eighth Street Bookshop by Jed Birmingham and Bill Reed. An excerpt from Reed:

Eighth Street’s regular clientele included Edward Albee, Uta Hagen, Herbert Berghof, Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, the curmudgeonly Joseph Campbell, essayist-novelist Albert Murray (every day), author-activist Michael Harrington, cartoonist William Steig, New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, poet-translator (later, MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient) Richard Howard, and Alger Hiss, also the store’s station[e]ry supplier. . . .

Nearly every time you turned around at Eighth Street found you rubbing literary stardust out of your eyes.

A related post
From the Evergreen Review

Pete Seeger on The Colbert Report

If you missed it last night: Pete Seeger with Stephen Colbert. The Seeger segment begins at 10:15. My favorite exchange:

“You’re ninety-three, yes, sir?”

“That’s what they tell me.”

If you turn up the volume, you’ll hear that at least some audience members are singing on the choruses.

Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady

Maeve Brennan. The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2009. 268 pages. $15.95 (paper).

Except in our minds, there is no connection between the little American farmhouse and the Hungarian cats and the Hungarian pigeon, but in our minds these stories remind us of what we are waiting for — a respite, a touch of grace, something simple that starts us wondering. I am reminded of Oliver Goldsmith, who said, two hundred years ago, “Innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom.”

From “The Farmhouse That Moved Downtown,” first published in the March 18, 1967 issue of The New Yorker.

Imagine a solitary figure in an Edward Hopper painting who turns from the usual window, moves to a desk, and begins to write of what she has seen: that would be Maeve Brennan. From 1954 to 1981, Brennan (1917–1993) contributed unsigned items to the “Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker, each item introduced as the work of “the long-winded lady.” That name must have been a matter of a self hard at work deprecating: the fifty-six items gathered in this volume are nothing like long-winded. Almost all are just a few pages long, the work of a writer in search of something that will start her wondering, a writer given to noticing and thinking about her fellow strangers. Brennan is an observer, not a reporter: even when the people she studies seem available for questions, she asks none. She seems to speak only to tobacconists and waiters, and even then her words are implied, not stated.

“There is a great deal of virtue in feeling unseen,” Brennan writes in 1969. Feeling unseen, she looks down to the street from a high hotel-room window (she lives in a series of hotels); feeling unseen, she looks out to the street from a table in a nearly deserted restaurant (she likes restaurants with windows). Or she follows events at another table as she drinks a martini or eats a dish of coffee ice cream. Her Manhattan is a lonely town: quiet, somber blocks without the glare and hum of, say, Frank O’Hara’s city. In Brennan’s Manhattan, there is always just one thing happening, and the writer’s responsibility is to attend to it.

Brennan attends to the most modest details: an ailanthus tree, a plate of broccoli, a coffeeshop at 5:00 a.m., a Californian waiting for a Fifth Avenue bus, some boors in a bookstore, a newspaper story about cats and a pigeon. The content is sometimes slight, and reading too many of these pieces at a sitting might leave a reader too aware of their sameness. But Brennan is a maker of beautiful descriptive sentences, and that is what most draws me to her work:

Washington Square Park was being very satisfactory the other morning at six o’clock. It was a dripping green morning after a night of rain. The air was mild and fresh, and shone with a faint unsteadiness that was exactly like the unsteadiness of color inside a seashell.

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The few people who were about wore light-colored summer clothes, and they sauntered and strolled and paused to look around like the extras in an operetta just before the principals walk on and take the center of the stage.

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The rain that had fallen all day today had stopped, leaving the air damp and the streets wet and shiny, tinted with city lights.

I began writing with the intention to comment on these sentences and then thought to let them speak for themselves. I must though point out the adverb exactly in the first passage. Remove it and what remains is merely a strained comparison. The slightly defiant exactly commands the suspension of disbelief and is, here, exactly right. Exactly right too is the word dripping, which seems to me one specific trace of the general influence of James Joyce’s Dubliners on Brennan’s prose, the word recalling the “dark dripping gardens” of “Araby” and the “dripping tree” of “The Dead.”

To read The Long-Winded Lady in 2012 is to read about a lost Manhattan. But in this book the city is already disappearing, its three- and four-story buildings giving way to the empire of “Office Space.” The names of now-defunct restaurants and stores appear here like the names of the dead, remembered now by fewer and fewer of the living: the Adano Restaurant, Bickford’s, the Eighth Street Bookshop, International Book & Art Shop, Le Steak de Paris, Longchamps, Marta’s Restaurant, The Old Place, Schrafft’s, Zucca’s. In Maeve Brennan’s writing, these places and their city still live.


[“Maeve Brennan of HARPER’S BAZAAR looking through store window.” Photograph by Nina Leen. United States, 1945. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

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March 8, 2017: More about that farmhouse in this post.

Too early again

About two weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Aurora, Colorado, shootings, various voices in media and politics said that it was inappropriate to be discussing gun-ownership rights — not the right time, too early. In the aftermath of today’s shootings in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, it seems that once again it will be too early for such a discussion.

Stuyvesant principal resigns retires

The New York Times reports that Stanley Teitel, the principal of New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, has resigned has announced his retirement. In July the Times reported on widespread cheating at Stuyvesant, one of the city’s top high schools.

The school’s website still shows no school-wide policy concerning academic integrity, or at least none that I can find.

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September 8, 2012: The New York Times reports the school’s new principal is thinking about creating an “academic honesty policy.”

A related post
Cheating at Stuyvesant High School

[I’ve crossed out my mistakes in this post: given the situation at Stuyvesant, it’s difficult for me not to read retire as a euphemism for resign.]

Library of Congress (1945)

There’s so much to like in this Academy Award-nominated film, which celebrates reading and scholarship and humankind. The shots of patrons looking through the card catalogue speak — well, volumes. Watch too for other forms of beautiful technology and several musical surprises.

Alexander Hammid directed. The narrator is Ralph Bellamy. The book that the boy is reading at the beginning and end is Lucy Salamanca’s Fortress of Freedom: The Story of the Library of Congress (1942), available from the Internet Archive. The film is at the Archive too, but the print at YouTube is better.

Thanks to Sean at Contrapuntalism for sharing this great find.

[Correction: The film is from 1945.]

The lifespan of my interest in The Lifespan of a Fact

John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact has called to me from bookstore shelves on several occasions. The book purports to be the record of seven years of back-and-forth between a writer (D’Agata) and a fact-checker (Fingal). Publisher W. W. Norton calls the book “a brilliant and eye-opening meditation on the relationship between ‘truth’ and ‘accuracy.’” Notice the quotation marks.

Now that I have the book from the library, I am glad that I resisted the call. What to make of a writer who claims to have changed a seemingly factual “thirty-one” to “thirty-four” because “the rhythm of ‘thirty-four’ works better in that sentence”? Nothing, because that detail alone (on page 16, the second page of the text) made it easy for me to suspect that this book is not worth my time. Some further dipping clinched it.

But wait: there’s more. A piece by Craig Silverman of The Poynter Institute makes clear that the book is not even what it purports to be, a record of a seven-year fact-checking process.

Me, I believe in truth and accuracy in nonfiction, no need for quotation marks around either word. Oh, and no need for made-up quotations from Bob Dylan either.

A related post
George Orwell on historical truth

Gilbert Highet on relevance

On how to make a subject relevant:

The best way to do it is for the teacher to make himself relevant. Nine thousand times more pupils have learnt a difficult subject well because they felt the teacher’s vitality and energy proved its value than because they chose the subject for its own sake. If a youth, sizing up the professor of medieval history, decides that he is a tremendous expert in the history of the Middle Ages and a deadly bore in everything else, he is apt to conclude that medieval history makes a man a deadly bore. If on the other hand he finds that the man is filled with lively interest in the contemporary world, that he actually knows more about it because, through his training, he understands it better, that the practice of intellectual life, so far from making him vague or remote, has made him wise and competent, the youth will conclude without further evidence that medieval history is a valuable asset.

The good teacher is an interesting man or woman.

Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching (New York: Knopf, 1951).

I’d add: being interesting need not be a matter of attempting to prove to “the kids” that one is “hep” or “with it.”

[Thank goodness Highet added “or woman” to the last sentence. The language of he and man makes me grind my teeth.]

Nabokov on working in the library

Vladimir Nabokov, in his 1967 Paris Review interview:

A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young. I remember how once, between terms, not at Cornell, a student brought a transistor set with him into the reading room. He managed to state that one, he was playing “classical” music; that two, he was doing it “softly”; and that three, “there were not many readers around in summer.” I was there, a one-man multitude.