Jack Delaney’s

[Jack Delaney’s Restaurant, 72 Grove Street, New York, New York, c. 1939–1941. Telephone: WAtkins 9-9215. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

According to this 1942 review of Jack Delaney’s Restaurant (now online with three picture-postcards), “the chief picture you’ll take away is one of horses, horses, everywhere horses.” Jack Delaney (d. 1966) was a horse breeder who opened his restaurant in 1927. Jack Teitelbaum, or “Jack Lane,” mentioned in the 1942 review, was the house pianist for thirty years, still the house pianist at the time of his death in 1964. One more Jack: in 1939, Jack Kerouac and his father celebrated a Horace Mann football win at Jack Delaney’s.

In 2008, The New York Times printed an excerpt from a novel that mentions Jack Delaney’s. The copyright restriction accompanying the excerpt is pretty scary, so I will paraphrase salient bits: Jack Delaney’s began as a speakeasy. A sulky cart hung from the ceiling. I can’t agree with the novel’s narrator that the cart was the oddest thing about this establishment: for me, the rooftop wins out. And yet another Jack: the actor Jack Warden once lived above the restaurant. But not when this photograph was taken: he would have been in the Navy or the Merchant Marine then.

This Grove Street address is now a Starbucks. The bank next door is now a Chase Bank. Here’s much, much more about 72 Grove Street, with cameo appearances by Kerouac, Edwin Denby, and Frank O’Hara.

*

September 19: A reader shared a 1940s menu from Jack Delaney’s. Among the offerings: “Imported Large Sardine Sandwich.”

September 20: A reader shared this ad:

[The Villager (November 10, 1960). Click for a much larger view.]

Tack : “stable gear,” “especially articles of harness (such as saddle and bridle) for use on a saddle horse.” The description of the Tack Room, as best as I can make out:

Settle down and relax before our log burning firestone. Watch the glowing embers dance before you, the sounds of crackling pine logs. Amble over to our open hearth and watch the steaks sizzle before your eyes. Listen to show tunes played for you nightly by your Host and Hostess Lee(?) and(?) Ben Rozet at the piano.

It’s new, it’s different.
It’s tops in leisure dining.

The advertisement may be found at NYS Historic Newspapers, a great free resource. A 1961 squib in Down Beat let me figure out at least one of the names:

Ben Rozet, pianist with Artie Shaw’s band in the 1930s, is featured at the piano bar in the Tack room upstairs at Jack Delaney’s in Greenwich Village.

Thanks, Brian.

Related reading
More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

[For completists only: you can see the cart hanging from the ceiling in the third picture-postcard: “Where to Put On the Feed Bag.”]

“Hyphen killer”

“As a legacy, ‘hyphen killer’ is not bad,” said Henry Furhmann (1957–2022), a Los Angeles Times editor who pushed to end -American constructions.

Here is an obituary from the Times. And here is the essay that persuaded the editors of the AP Stylebook to drop the hyphen in 2019: “Drop the Hyphen in Asian American.” An excerpt:

To many of us in the trade and, more to the point, many of the people we write about, those hyphens serve to divide even as they are meant to connect. Their use in racial and ethnic identifiers can connote an otherness, a sense that people of color are somehow not full citizens or fully American: part American, sure, but also something not American.

A related post
Hyphens in the news

“Reverse Freedom Rides”

Did you know about this? “Sixty years before migrants were sent to Martha’s Vineyard, there were the ‘Reverse Freedom Rides’” (NPR).

[Ron DeSantis is engaged in human trafficking, isn’t he?]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Steve Mossberg, whose Stumpers have sometimes given me fits. Today’s puzzle felt difficult, particularly in the southwest. But I did it.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, ten letters, “Film with the most AFI top 100 quotes (6).” I’d call it a gimme, for me maybe the only gimme in the puzzle. It didn’t hurt to have listened to a podcast episode about this film yesterday.

1-D, four letters, “Brown Derby owner who gave his name to a green course.” Are we golfing? A nice bit of dowdy trivia.

11-D, eleven letters, “Emeril makes them with yogurt and coconut.” No thanks.

12-D, ten letters, “Taste of philosophy.” A bit forced.

15-A, ten letters, “Set aside.” I’m surprised to see that that is what the word can mean.

19-A, three letters, “Frost line.” Hah.

20-A, five letters, “Frost lines.” Hah.

22-D, eleven letters, “One concerned with approach, take-off and landing.” Get the first and third letters and you’ll struggle to see the rest.

27-D, ten letters, “Brown sugar.” Tricky, but not tricky enough!

32-D, four letters, “Off-the-wall call.” A nice way to clue a familiar word.

34-A, five letters, “Pumps (up).” At least three plausible answers, all of which begin with the same letter. So sussing out 25-D, four letters, “Lift to greet” helped not a bit.

38-A, ten letters, “Words that add depth to a video game character.” Certainly a gimme for some. New to me. My video-game play has been limited to three arcade games — Cruis’n World, Ms. Pac-Man, Night Driver — and one computer game, Mario Kart. Do the words “I’m-a Luigi, number one” add depth?

55-A, ten letters, “Big Apple’s Pastrami Queen, e.g.” Also new to me. And speaking of “new,” can’t we just write “NYC’s”? I remember advising a great student who told me that she was moving to “the Big Apple”: “Never call it ‘the Big Apple.’ It’ll mark you as an outsider.” Good advice, no?

My favorite clue in this puzzle: 45-A, seven letters, “Case workers.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Coffey, comma, ay caramba

Who gives a darn about an Oxford comma, as The New York Times might ask? That would be Thérèse Coffey — Liz Truss ally, head of the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care, and punctuation peever. Coffey hates the Oxford comma, is unashamed to say so, and wants it removed from her department’s written communications.

I of course stand by the Oxford comma. I’ll quote myself:

Items in a series should be separated with commas. What do I mean by “items in a series”? Wine, women, and song. Life, love, and laughter. John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

There’s no consensus about using a comma before that final item — the so-called “Oxford comma” or “serial comma.” Keeping that comma seems to me the better choice, simplifying, in one small way, the problems of punctuation. If you always put the comma in, you avoid problems with ambiguous or tricky sentences in which the comma’s absence might blur the meaning of your words.

The real question, as asked by Vampire Weekend: “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?” It made for a hilarious moment (with bleeps) on The Colbert Report in 2010. Great for classroom use, at least for my classroom.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Threatening the dictionary Now with a guilty plea.

Abyssinia

I had a pleasantly disorienting moment while doing yesterday’s Newsday crossword. The puzzle was by Stan Newman; the theme, “Famous Last Words.” 28-A, nine letters, “Last word (1920s).” The answer: ABYSSINIA.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang cites a 1934 dictionary of slang: “[College slang] Abyssinia, I’ll be seeing you.” The Oxford English Dictionary has a 1932 citation from the Chicago Tribune: “ [High school and college slang] Abyssinia, I'll be seeing you.” Maybe the class of ’32 took the expression with them to college. Both sources cite Jessica Mitford (1960): “You’ll find people generally say, ‘I’ll be seeing you’ instead of ‘goodbye’ . . . You may be able to raise a laugh by saying, ‘Abyssinia.’”

Uh, probably not. The only place names I can think of that now lend themselves to puns: Alaska, Delaware, Europe. The Boy Scouts have many more.

[Wikipedia: “Afroasiatic-speaking communities make up the majority of the population. Among these, Semitic speakers often collectively refer to themselves as the Habesha people. The Arabic form of this term (al-Ḥabasha) is the etymological basis of ‘Abyssinia,’ the former name of Ethiopia in English and other European languages.”]

Turning what into what

A mathematician is a machine for turning what into what? A series of cartoons (Math with Bad Drawings).

Thanks, Murray.

A related post
Cows : food : milk :: mathematicians : coffee : theorems

[I wanted to wait until I had a least a slight understanding of the Taylor series before posting the link, but that might take forever.]

Dave Mustaine, stickler

Dave Mustaine of Megadeth, in an interview:

“The songs really never are done until they’re done. The lyric is a whole different subject because I am a stickler for grammar. And a lot of times I’ll go back and look at my lyrics and think, ’God, what are you? A fourth grader?’ Because some of the grammar and the punctuation and stuff will be off.”

Teachers, share with your students.

Related reading
All OCA grammar posts (Pinboard)

[I don’t have any previous Megadeth posts.]

Cursive at Harvard

In The Atlantic, Drew Gilpin Faust says that her students can’t read or write cursive writing:

It was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was teaching, and it included a number of excellent illustrations, such as photographs of relevant Civil War manuscripts. But, he continued, those weren’t very helpful to him, because of course he couldn’t read cursive.

Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more.

If the name rings a bell, Faust was the president of Harvard. The scene of instruction in these paragraphs: a Harvard classroom.

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)