Reading the City 48: The Oyster Bar
My friend sent me a package last week. One of the items is a map called Writing Manhattan: A Literary Guide to the Usual and Unusual. After almost seven months in quarantine, I put on a mask and start walking to the locations to see what I could learn about the past, the present, and hopefully, the future of NYC.
I started falling in love with the city all over again.
Welcome to READING THE CITY.
I began with location 48. The Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station, a strange subterranean restaurant I already love. Cavernous by Manhattan standards, you don’t feel like you’re in the city at all when you’re in there.
At this location, the map tells me, Joseph Mitchell “honed a style of elegant and seemingly effortless Talk of the Town profiles at The New Yorker beginning in 1938. His love of the waterfront, its people and all things seafood are frequent subjects that make for satisfying reading. Mitchell typically had lunch at the Grand Central Oyster Bar.”
Writing Manhattan was published in 2013, the year Erin Overbey wrote this excellent profile of Joseph Mitchell. I love this detail:
Mitchell was New York’s first true biographer; he paired a reporter’s precision with a novelist’s sense of narrative to create a series of intricate and revelatory profiles of the city in The New Yorker. An excavator of lost souls and eccentric visionaries, his genius lay partly in a natural ability to connect with those living on the margins of society. (A 1943 Times review of his work was wryly titled “Nostalgic Portraits of the Lunatic Fringe.”) He was a staff writer for the magazine for nearly thirty years and then spent another thirty coming into the office each day but failing to publish a single word. The mystery behind this blockage has nearly eclipsed Mitchell’s astounding literary legacy.
Wait. Mitchell was a staff writer for nearly thirty years and then SPENT ANOTHER THIRTY COMING INTO THE OFFICE WITHOUT WRITING A WORD?
I wish Joseph Mitchell could take me with him on his wanderings today. Right now. I love a New Yorker who isn’t pretentious at all and who focuses on the reality of the human condition, the little moments that make up people’s lives.
Before you reach the entrance of the Oyster Bar, you walk through a Whispering Gallery. Two people can stand on either side of the tile dome facing the wall and whisper a message to each other. Somehow, it remains audible even when throngs of people are around. When James and I went yesterday, the Whispering Gallery was completely empty. Grand Central Station was practically abandoned. At least it was when we showed up. When we left, four women without masks were standing in the corners of the Whispering Gallery, facing inward instead of toward the walls, screaming at each other, “You’re stupid!” “NO, YOU’RE STUPID!”
But before they showed up to destroy the peace, it was so poignant to turn and see James whispering to me in the tiled gallery. For seven months we have been working together and meeting with clients remotely after years of constant business travel. Ironically, perhaps, our main business at Science House is helping people and organizations have better meetings and focus on what really matters. Now that people are meeting remotely, the problem is even worse than it was before.
Take a cue from Joseph Mitchell, who paid attention to the little details and spent thirty years coming to work without writing a word.
