The Bottom of the Harbor Read online

  “My hours in Joe’s were ten in the morning to nine at night. In the afternoons, I’d take a break from three to four-thirty. I saw so much rich food I usually didn’t want any lunch, the way old waiters get—just a crust of bread, or some fruit. If it was a nice day, I’d step over to Albee Square and go into an old fancy-fruit store named Ecklebe & Guyer’s and pick me out a piece of fruit—an orange or two, or a bunch of grapes, or one of those big red pomegranates that split open when they’re ripe the same as figs and their juice is so strong and red it purifies the blood. Then I’d go over to Schermerhorn Street. Schermerhorn was a block and a half west of Joe’s. There were some trees along Schermerhorn, and some benches under the trees. Young women would sit along there with their babies, and old men would sit along there the whole day through and read papers and play checkers and discuss matters. And I’d sit there the little time I had and rest my feet and eat my fruit and read the New York Times—my purpose reading the New York Times, I was trying to improve my English. Schermerhorn Street was a peaceful old backwater street, so nice and quiet, and I liked it. It did me good to sit down there and rest. One afternoon the thought occurred to me, ‘Who the hell was Schermerhorn?’ So that night it happened Mrs. Frelinghuysen was in, and I asked her who was Schermerhorn that the street’s named for. She knew, all right. Oh, Jesus, she more than knew. She saw I was interested, and from then on that was one of the main subjects she talked to me about—Old New York street names and neighborhood names; Old New York this, Old New York that. She knew a great many facts and figures and skeletons in the closet that her mother and her grandmother and her aunts had passed on down to her relating to the old New York Dutch families that they call the Knickerbockers—those that dissipated too much and dissipated all their property away and died out and disappeared, and those that are still around. Holland Dutch, not German Dutch, the way I used to think it meant. The Schermerhorns are one of the oldest of the old Dutch families, according to her, and one of the best. They were big landowners in Dutch days, and they still are, and they go back so deep in Old New York that if you went any deeper you wouldn’t find anything but Indians and bones and bears. Mrs. Frelinghuysen was well acquainted with the Schermerhorn family. She had been to Schermerhorn weddings and Schermerhorn funerals. I remember she told about a Schermerhorn girl she went to school with who belonged to the eighth generation, I think it was, in direct descent from old Jacob Schermerhorn who came here from Schermerhorn, Holland, in the sixteen-thirties, and this girl died and was buried in the Schermerhorn plot in Trinity Church cemetery up in Washington Heights, and one day many years later driving down from Connecticut Mrs. Frelinghuysen got to thinking about her and stopped off at the cemetery and looked around in there and located her grave and put some jonquils on it.”

  At this moment a fishmonger opened the door of the restaurant and put his head in and interrupted Louie. “Hey, Louie,” he called out, “has Little Joe been in?”

  “Little Joe that’s a lumper on the pier,” asked Louie, “or Little Joe that works for Chesebro, Robbins?”

  “The lumper,” said the fishmonger.

  “He was in and out an hour ago,” said Louie. “He snook in and got a cup of coffee and was out and gone the moment he finished it.”

  “If you see him,” the fishmonger said, “tell him they want him on the pier. A couple of draggers just came in—the Felicia from New Bedford and the Positive from Gloucester—and the Ann Elizabeth Kristin from Stonington is out in the river, on her way in.”

  Louie nodded, and the fishmonger went away. “To continue about Mrs. Frelinghuysen,” Louie said, “she died in 1927. The next year, I got married. The next year was the year the stock market crashed. The next year, I quit Joe’s and came over here and bought this restaurant and rented this building. I rented it from a real-estate company, the Charles F. Noyes Company, and I paid my rent to them, and I took it for granted they owned it. One afternoon four years later, the early part of 1934, around in March, I was standing at the cash register in here and a long black limousine drove up out front and parked, and a uniform chauffeur got out and came in and said Mrs. Schermerhorn wanted to speak to me, and I looked at him and said, ‘What do you mean—Mrs. Schermerhorn?’ And he said, ‘Mrs. Schermerhorn that owns this building.’ So I went out on the sidewalk, and there was a lady sitting in the limousine, her appearance was quite beautiful, and she said she was Mrs. Arthur F. Schermerhorn and her husband had died in September the year before and she was taking a look at some of the buildings the estate owned and the Noyes company was the agent for. So she asked me some questions concerning what shape the building was in, and the like of that. Which I answered to the best of my ability. Then I told her I was certainly surprised for various reasons to hear this was Schermerhorn property. I told her, ‘Frankly,’ I said, ‘I’m amazed to hear it.’ I asked her did she know anything about the history of the building, how old it was, and she said she didn’t, she hadn’t ever even seen it before, it was just one of a number of properties that had come down to her husband from his father. Even her husband, she said, she doubted if he had known much about the building. I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask, and I asked her to get out and come in and have some coffee and take a look around, but I guess she figured the signboard SLOPPY LOUIE’S RESTAURANT meant what it said. She thanked me and said she had to be getting on, and she gave the chauffeur an address, and they drove off and I never saw her again.

  “I went back inside and stood there and thought it over, and the effect it had on me, the simple fact my building was an old Schermerhorn building, it may sound foolish, but it pleased me very much. The feeling I had, it connected me with the past. It connected me with Old New York. It connected Sloppy Louie’s Restaurant with Old New York. It made the building look much better to me. Instead of just an old run-down building in the fish market, the way it looked to me before, it had a history to it, connections going back, and I liked that. It stirred up my curiosity to know more. A day or so later, I went over and asked the people at the Noyes company would they mind telling me something about the history of the building, but they didn’t know anything about it. They had only took over the management of it in 1929, the year before I rented it, and the company that had been the previous agent had gone out of business. They said to go to the City Department of Buildings in the Municipal Building. Which I did, but the man in there, he looked up my building and couldn’t find any file on it, and he said it’s hard to date a good many old buildings down in my part of town because a fire in the Building Department around 1890 destroyed some cases of papers relating to them—permits and specifications and all that. He advised me to go to the Hall of Records on Chambers Street, where deeds are recorded. I went over there, and they showed me the deed, but it wasn’t any help. It described the lot, but all it said about the building, it said ‘the building thereon,’ and didn’t give any date on it. So I gave up. Well, there’s a nice old gentleman eats in here sometimes who works for the Title Guarantee & Trust Company, an old Yankee fisheater, and we were talking one day, and it happened he told me that Title Guarantee has tons and tons of records on New York City property stored away in their vaults that they refer to when they’re deciding whether or not the title to a piece of property is clear. ‘Do me a favor,’ I said, ‘and look up the records on 92 South Street—nothing private or financial; just the history—and I’ll treat you to the best broiled lobster you ever had. I’ll treat you to broiled lobster six Fridays in a row,’ I said, ‘and I’ll broil the lobsters myself.’

  “The next time he came in, he said he had took a look in the Title Guarantee vaults for me, and had talked to a title searcher over there who’s an expert on South Street property, and he read me off some notes he had made. It seems all this end of South Street used to be under water. The East River flowed over it. Then the city filled it in and divided it into lots. In February, 1804, a merchant by the name of Peter Schermerhorn, a descendant of Jacob Schermerhorn, was given grants
to the lot my building now stands on—92 South—and the lot next to it—93 South, a corner lot, the corner of South and Fulton. Schermerhorn put up a four-story brick-and-frame building on each of these lots—stores on the street floors and flats above. In 1872, 1873, or 1874—my friend from Title Guarantee wasn’t able to determine the exact year—the heirs and assigns of Peter Schermerhorn ripped these buildings down and put up two six-story brick buildings exactly alike side by side on 92 and 93. Those buildings are this one here and the one next door. The Schermerhorns put them up for hotel purposes, and they were designed so they could be used as one building—there’s a party wall between them, and in those days there were sets of doors on each floor leading from one building to the other. This building had that old hand-pull elevator in it from bottom to top, and the other building had a wide staircase in it from bottom to top. The Schermerhorns didn’t skimp on materials; they used heart pine for beams and they used hand-molded, air-dried, kiln-burned Hudson River brick. The Schermerhorns leased the buildings to two hotel men named Frederick and Henry Lemmermann, and the first lease on record is 1874. The name of the hotel was the Fulton Ferry Hotel. The hotel saloon occupied the whole bottom floor of the building next door, and the hotel restaurant was right in here, and they had a combined lobby and billiard room that occupied the second floor of both buildings, and they had a reading room in the front half of the third floor of this building and rooms in the rear half, and all the rest of the space in both buildings was single rooms and double rooms and suites. At that time, there were passenger-line steamship docks all along South Street, lines that went to every part of the world, and out-of-town people waiting for passage on the various steamers would stay at the Fulton Ferry Hotel. Also, the Brooklyn Bridge hadn’t yet been built, and the Fulton Ferry was the principal ferry to Brooklyn, and the ferryhouse stood directly in front of the hotel. On account of the ferry, Fulton Street was like a funnel; damned near everything headed for Brooklyn went through it. It was full of foot traffic and horse-drawn traffic day and night, and South and Fulton was one of the most ideal saloon corners in the city.

  “The Fulton Ferry Hotel lasted forty-five years, but it only had about twenty good years; the rest was downhill. The first bad blow was the bridges over the East River, beginning with the Brooklyn Bridge, that gradually drained off the heavy traffic on the Fulton Ferry that the hotel saloon got most of its trade from. And then, the worst blow of all, the passenger lines began leaving South Street and moving around to bigger, longer docks on the Hudson. Little by little, the Fulton Ferry Hotel got to be one of those waterfront hotels that rummies hole up in, and old men on pensions, and old nuts, and sailors on the beach. Steps going down. Around 1910, somewhere in there, the Lemmermanns gave up the part of the hotel that was in this building, and the Schermerhorn interests boarded up the windows on the four upper floors and bricked up the doors in the party wall connecting the two buildings. And the hotel restaurant, what they did with that, they rented it to a man named MacDonald who turned it into a quick lunch for the people in the fish market. MacDonald ran it awhile. Then a son of his took it over, according to some lease notations in the Title Guarantee records. Then a man named Jimmy Something-or-Other took it over. It was called Jimmy’s while he had it. Then two Greek fellows took it over. Then a German fellow and his wife and sister and brother-in-law had it awhile. Then two brothers named Fortunato and Louie Barbagelata took it over. Then John Barbagelata took it over, a nephew of the other Barbagelatas, and eventually I came along and bought the lease and furnishings off of him. After the party wall was bricked up, the Lemmermanns held on to the building next door a few years more, and kept on calling it the Fulton Ferry Hotel, but all it amounted to, it was just a waterfront saloon with rooms for rent up above. They operated it until 1919, when the final blow hit them—prohibition. Those are the bare bones of the matter. If I could get upstairs just once in that damned old elevator and scratch around in those hotel registers up there and whatever to hell else is stored up there, it might be possible I’d find out a whole lot more.”

  “Look, Louie,” I said, “I’ll go up in the elevator with you.”

  “You think you would,” Louie said, “but you’d just take a look at it, and then you’d back out.”

  “I’d like to see inside the cage, at least,” I said.

  Louie looked at me inquisitively. “You really want to go up there?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The next time you come down here, put on the oldest clothes you got, so the dust don’t make any difference,” Louie said, “and we’ll go up and try out the elevator.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Now or never. If I think it over, I’ll change my mind.”

  “It’s your own risk,” he said.

  “Of course,” I said.

  Louie abruptly stood up. “Let me speak to the waiter at the cash register,” he said, “and I’ll be with you.”

  He went over and spoke to the waiter. Then he opened the door of a cupboard in back of the cash register and took out two flashlights and the two construction-work helmets that his customer, the contractor, had brought in. He handed me one of the flashlights and one of the helmets. I put the helmet on and started over to a mirror to see how I looked. “Come on,” Louie said, somewhat impatiently. We went up the stairs to the second floor. Along one wall, on this floor, were shelves stacked with restaurant supplies—canned goods and nests of bowls and plates and boxes of soap powder and boxes of paper napkins. Headed up against the wainscoting were half a dozen burlap bags of potatoes. A narrow, round-runged, wooden ladder stood at a slant in a corner up front, and Louie went directly to it. One end of the ladder was fixed to the floor, and the other end was fixed to the ceiling. At the top of the ladder, flush with the ceiling, was the bottom of the elevator cage with the trap door cut in it. The trap door was shut. Louie unbuttoned a shirt button and stuck his flashlight in the front of his shirt, and immediately started up the ladder. At the top, he paused and looked down at me for an instant. His face was set. Then he gave the trap door a shove, and it fell back, and a cloud of black dust burst out. Louie ducked his head and shook it and blew the dust out of his nose. He stood at the top of the ladder for about a minute, waiting for the dust to settle. Then, all of a sudden, he scrambled into the cage. “Oh, God in Heaven,” he called out, “the dust in here! It’s like somebody emptied a vacuum-cleaner bag in here.” I climbed the ladder and entered the cage and closed the trap door. Louie pointed his flashlight up the shaft. “I thought there was only one wheel up there,” he said, peering upward. “I see two.” The dust had risen to the top of the shaft, and we couldn’t see the wheels clearly. There was an iron strut over the top of the cage, and a cable extended from it to one of the wheels. Two thick hemp ropes hung down into the cage from the other wheel. “I’m going to risk it,” Louie said. “I’m going to pull the rope. Take both flashlights, and shine one on me and shine the other up the shaft. If I can get the cage up about a foot, it’ll be level with the third floor, and we can open the door.”

  Louie grasped one of the ropes and pulled on it, and dust sprang off it all the way to the top. The wheel screeched as the rope turned it, but the cage didn’t move. “The rope feels loose,” Louie said. “I don’t think it has any grip on the wheel.” He pulled again, and nothing happened.

  “Maybe you’ve got the wrong rope,” I said.

  He disregarded me and pulled again, and the cage shook from side to side. Louie let go of the rope, and looked up the shaft. “That wheel acts all right,” he said. He pulled the rope again, and this time the cage rose an inch or two. He pulled five or six times, and the cage rose an inch or two each time. Then we looked down and saw that the floor of the cage was almost even with the third floor. Louie pulled the rope once more. Then he stepped over and pushed on the grilled door of the cage and shook it, trying to swing it open; it rattled, and long, lacy flakes of rust fell off it, but it wouldn’t open. I gave Louie the lights of both flas
hlights, and he examined the door. There were sets of hinges down it in two places. “I see,” Louie said. “You’re supposed to fold it back in.” The hinges were stiff, and he got in a frenzy struggling with the door before he succeeded in folding it back far enough for us to get through. On the landing there was a kind of storm-door-like affair, a three-sided cubbyhole with a plain wooden door in the center side. “I guess they had that there to keep people from falling in the shaft,” Louie said. “It’ll be just our luck the door’s locked on the other side. If it is, I’m not going to monkey around; I’m going to kick it in.” He tried the knob, and it turned, and he opened the door, and we walked out and entered the front half of the third floor, the old reading room of the Fulton Ferry Hotel.