The Right Places (22 page)

The success and survival of P. J. Clarke's make, as the Irish say, a tale to tell, and from the beginning involved an uncommon combination of fiscal wizardry and Old World witchcraft. Patrick Joseph Clarke was a dead ringer for Admiral Bull Halsey, and his conversation consisted mostly of grunts. Apprenticed in the old country, he was a strict saloonkeeper and when he opened his place in 1892 there was no nonsense allowed. Woe betided the waiter who failed to put his tips in the kitty, or the bartender who tippled from Paddy Clarke's stock. It was he who established the anti-intellectual cast of P. J. Clarke's. Some said this was simply because his chief rival, Tim Costello, courted the writers and artists—Hemingway, Thurber, Steinbeck, Robert Ruark, and John McNulty. “Pansies and willie-boys!” Paddy Clarke called them, and that was that. A bachelor, he was pious and churchgoing, and also strongly superstitious. During Prohibition (“It's like a bad cold, it will go away,” he used to say) he was once badly beaten by thugs, and his relatives began urging him to write a will. But Paddy Clarke was convinced that if he wrote a will he would surely die the next day. And so, with his fingers still crossed against the morrow, he died intestate in 1948.

It was this single fact, ironically enough, that set the course of Clarke's saloon toward becoming an unofficial city landmark. (A spokesman for the Landmarks Commission has said that Clarke's architecture is not sufficiently distinguished to warrant making it an
official
landmark, as though Clarke's customers could possibly care.) Because when Paddy Clarke died with neither direct heirs nor a will, all his relatives—brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, both here and abroad—fell to wrangling over who should receive which share of Paddy Clarke's estate, the most important part of which was the building with the bar downstairs and three floors of cold-water flats above. Visions of wealth and the easy life danced in the eyes of all the relatives, particularly those back home in County Longford where
exaggerated reports of Paddy's wealth had filtered. But when the relatives could not agree—and there is bad feeling between a number of Clarkes today over the matter—the court ordered that the building be sold. Thus it was acquired in 1949 for thirty-three thousand dollars by a young man named Daniel H. Lavezzo who, with his father, had been running a business importing Italian antiques, but who had also made a profitable sideline out of dabbling in real estate properties, particularly those in somewhat rundown neighborhoods.

From the beginning, Dan Lavezzo admits that he had no consuming interest in being a saloonkeeper. But he was interested in making money and so, since he was now running a saloon, he decided to run a profitable one. Clarke's had already acquired a reputation as a popular spot for society and show folk, in a day when debutantes and Park Avenue blades considered it fun to go “slumming” in the slightly dangerous shadows of the old Third Avenue El. Two movies—
The Lost Weekend
and
Portrait of Jennie
—had used Clarke's, or a reproduction of it, as settings. And it had become increasingly a place where out-of-towners headed when they wanted the feeling of rubbing shoulders with the greats of Manhattan, even though, in most cases, the out-of-towners just rubbed shoulders with one another. Because it was also a popular bar with the police force, Clarke's customers also enjoyed the feeling that they were rubbing shoulders with men whose exciting task it was to deal with crime. The occasional presence of a lady no better than she should be was merely titillating, particularly when she was balanced with a diamond-encrusted Hope Hampton or a Barbara Hutton. Lavezzo determined to change as little of this ambiance and clientele as possible, and went about the task of preserving Clarke's special Irish flavor with a fine Italian hand.

He installed Charlie Clarke—P.J.'s favorite nephew—as his general manager. Charlie, who had been born in one of the flats upstairs, and who had been a popular waiter and bartender for his uncle, gave the place a valuable aura of family continuity that kept the old trade from straying elsewhere. When Glennon's Bar & Grill, competition from across the street, was forced to close by a landlord who wanted to sell the building, Dan Lavezzo hired Jimmy Glennon, the popular bartender, and brought him—and his customers—over.
(For years, Glennon has been writing a book:
How to Be an Irish Mother
.)

By the mid-1950s the El was down, and Third Avenue had begun its renaissance as a street of glittery skyscrapers. Advertising agencies and publishers and film companies abandoned Madison and moved to Third, bringing with them new customers for P. J. Clarke's. In 1955, Dan Lavezzo bought three small two-story rooming houses behind Clarke's on Fifty-fifth Street, broke through into them, and added the back dining room, which, because it was darker, cozier, and slightly less noisy than up front in the bar, quickly became the most “exclusive” dining area.

Lavezzo had been living in Greenwich, but when the State of Connecticut gobbled up his property to make way for the New England Thruway he needed, for tax reasons, to spend the money realized from the sale of the Greenwich house on another residence. At the time, the flats in the two top floors above Clarke's had been condemned, and so Lavezzo decided to throw these tiny flats together into two large apartments, one to a floor. The third floor thus became bachelor quarters for Dan Lavezzo, who is divorced, and the top floor became an elegant pad for Michael Butler, the millionaire sportsman and producer (
Hair
and
Lenny
). The second floor, meanwhile, housed the Lavezzo antique business, which was taking increasingly less time than the real estate and restaurant business. This was the state of affairs when the Tishman Realty and Construction Company, which has been responsible for some of the city's more monolithic structures, announced plans to build 919 Third Avenue, which was to occupy the entire east side blockfront between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth streets, including P. J. Clarke's. The interests of the Tishman brothers and Daniel H. Lavezzo were about to collide.

Robert Tishman, who heads the construction company, has a reputation of driving a hard bargain. “He is one tough cookie to deal with,” says Lavezzo, with more than a touch of respect in his voice. So, though on a smaller scale, is Danny Lavezzo. “He is a very sophisticated trader,” say the Tishmans. Lavezzo, a compact, wary-eyed man in his early fifties, has the air of a man not easily persuaded to do anything he doesn't want to do. Though he has been known to consume as many as fifty beers a night at P.J.'s—“I never drink the hard
stuff on the job”—Dan Lavezzo is known as a hard man to catch off guard. He was not at all anxious to sell his building to the Tishmans, nor to lose the one-to-two-million-dollar-a-year business which his building was then providing. “There's a lot of superstition in this business,” Lavezzo says, “and most guys who run a successful joint believe that it's bad luck to move. If things are going good, you don't even fire a busboy—much less go to a new address.” Clarke's to be Clarke's,
had
to be at the northwest corner of Fifty-fifth and Third.

Dan Lavezzo also owned a building in the middle of the block that the Tishmans wanted and which, because of its central position, was even more pivotal to their plan. This gave Lavezzo the upper hand. And so, after a battle of nearly two years' duration, during which negotiations broke down several times, Lavezzo and the Tishmans reached an agreement. Lavezzo would sell both Clarke's and the second building to the Tishmans. The mid-block building would be razed to make room for the tower, but Clarke's would be permitted to stand untouched and, as a guarantee, Dan Lavezzo was given a ninety-nine-year lease on the property as part of his price. In the deal, a figure of somewhere in the neighborhood of one million dollars went to Lavezzo for the air rights above his store—or not a bad appreciation on his original thirty-three-thousand-dollar investment. Other restaurateurs in the city turn positively glassy-eyed with jealous admiration of Lavezzo and his feat. “The monumental
chutzpah
of the man!” cries Vincent Sardi. Lavezzo, typically, just shrugs it off. “Air rights? Air rights?” he asks innocently. “I don't remember anybody talking to me about air rights.” “He's putting you on!” snorts Jerry Speyer, a Tishman vice president and Robert Tishman's son-in-law. “He knows goddamn well what he got for the air rights.” Also as part of the deal, because of a complicated zoning conflict between commercial and residential properties, the top two floors of Clarke's had to be lopped off, forcing both Messrs. Lavezzo and Butler to find new apartments elsewhere.

It was not the first time that an old-shoe neighborhood bar had had a modern tower built around it. Hurley's, for example, has been contained within the Rockefeller Center complex, and just down the street on Third Avenue, Joe & Rose's Restaurant is presently being encased in a huge new office building. But, because the architects at
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill felt that Clarke's was something of a special place, they designed a handsome courtyard around it, to set it off a bit, and then placed 919 Third Avenue several yards behind the regular building line to even
further
set it off. The Tishmans offered to lease part of this new plaza to Lavezzo for an outdoor café, but Lavezzo turned them down. The Tishmans are still somewhat disgruntled about that. After all, what realtor likes to see some of his property untenanted? But Dan Lavezzo thinks little of outdoor cafés in New York. “You get dust and soot in your potatoes,” he says, “and some bum can spit at you or try to panhandle you, or make a remark. Listen, if I was up on Fifth Avenue with a view of the Park, that would be something else. But I'm on Third with a view of the back door of the Post Office.” Michael's Pub—in a new location in the Tishmans' building—has set out umbrellas and tables and chairs in front of its share of the new plaza. Lavezzo doesn't think they add much. “Clarke's has always been an indoor sort of place,” he says. “People come here to get away from the streets and the traffic and the crummy people.” Lavezzo is prouder of the hospitable new bike rack that he has set up behind his saloon, and of the handsome new row of globe lights along his outside wall. The other night, while customers stood in line for tables at P.J.'s, Michael's Pub next door was achingly empty, its bartender engrossed in the
Racing Form
.

In Paddy Clarke's day, Irish bars like his along Third Avenue served free meals, usually a thick soup or a stew, with their drinks, but Dan Lavezzo brought in a simple but reasonably varied menu of dishes for which the best adjective would be honest. What was formerly the free lunch counter next to the bar is now set up to serve what Clarke's regulars agree are some of the best hamburgers and chili in town, and the food in the dining room is—considering the tiny kitchen from which it emerges—very good indeed. Chalked on a blackboard, the bill of fare includes such items as steak Diane, meatballs with chili, and zucchini Benedict, which means with hollandaise sauce. Not long ago, Dan Lavezzo was tickled to receive, from a friend returning from France, a menu from a fashionable Paris restaurant which listed “spinach salad à la P. J. Clarke's”—a salad of tossed spinach greens and fresh white mushrooms—and he is still proud of the fact that in 1966 Craig Claiborne of the New York
Times
gave his restaurant a rating of three stars. (“Not bad for a corner saloon,” he says.) There is also an extensive and reasonably priced wine list. Dinner for two, with drinks, can be had for under ten dollars.

There are other Lavezzo touches—such as the fact that virtually the only advertising he has ever done has been to print the name of the place on matchbooks and sugar cubes. (As a favor to his friend George Plimpton, Lavezzo runs an ad in the
Paris Review
consisting only of P.J.'s telephone number.) Also, his is one of the few remaining bars in New York that still serve real ice cubes in the drinks, and not the slivered machine-made wafers that have melted almost before the drink reaches the table. Then there are the huge, old-fashioned porcelain stanchions in what is the town's most public men's room—nicknamed “the Cathedral” because it is surmounted by a vaulted Tiffany glass ceiling—into each of which is placed, each evening, a block of icehouse ice. One customer, apparently unused to such amenities, emerged from the Cathedral not long ago carrying one of these blocks of ice and asked the bartender for “some Scotch for this rock.” Then there is Dan Lavezzo's standard of service, which he likes to be prompt, polite, but informal and unfussy. To help achieve this he pays his waiters, who work in white shirtsleeves and aprons, on the scale of bartenders.

Dan Lavezzo is distrustful of publicity, and such as P. J. Clarke's has had has been self-generated, with no assistance from its proprietor. He reacted “with resignation” to the printed reports from the Knapp Commission hearing about Clarke's being a police payoff station. “What the hell can you do?” he asks wearily. “Everything goes on at a bar.” And why, he wonders, did the D.A.'s office wait until the two men it wanted had wandered into P. J. Clarke's for a drink before making their arrests? The officers, it turned out, had been following the pair for weeks. Was there a touch of press-agentry in the federal agents' decision to make their big move in a famous and conspicuous place? And Lavezzo is cynical about the press itself. “If something bad happens here, the papers are always sure to spell your name right,” he says. But if the
Daily News
runs a picture of Ari and Jackie Onassis coming out of here, the caption will say they're leaving ‘a Third Avenue saloon.'”

Too much publicity of any kind, Lavezzo feels, can be bad for a place like his, particularly in a city like New York where things go out of fashion almost before they're in. “Look at the places that were big a few years back,” he says, “the places that were all over the papers like the Peppermint Lounge, Arthur, Le Club, Hippopotamus—they're all dead or half dead now. Look at Elaine's. Nobody gets more publicity than she does these days. She's got friends feeding items about her into the columns every night. But the trouble is she's attracting all the sorts of people she didn't want to have. And I've heard reports of rude treatment and bad service. There used to be a place up the street called Stella's. Stella's was the
in
place for a while, and Stella used to insult the women and grope the men. She got away with it for a while because people thought it was cute. But she closed up and moved to Florida a long time ago. If I were Elaine, I'd be
very careful
.”