So, I went to the movies. Band of Outsiders, by Goddard, at the Film Forum. Beautiful, lush black and white, ceaselessly smoking, young people, bohemian and free. They dabble in crime and talk about love. Is it a real noir film or just a commentary on the art of cinema? The young woman and two men run through the Louvre, a famous scene. So brash, so fun, so filled with lust for life. I love the pants with narrow cuffs, the sunglasses, cigarettes, which pleasantly reminded me of my younger years, when fashions were similar and irresponsibility had lower costs.
And, I was in the village, which is always nice. America has become closer to what the Village always epitomized – we’re more tolerant of others, we’re more encouraging of diversity, experimentation, edginess. Even though the village has gotten way upper class, the trust funders outnumbering the misfits, the bohemia vibe more than lingers, it’s still palatable All the changes, well mostly positives ones, of the last half century or so, in our country, started here so walking around this ground zero always improves my mood.
I’ve been coming here since I was a teenager and it has never not inspired an uplifting reverie.
Boom! A once busy spot is dark and quite. Plywood covers the windows. I know what this is... was... t-the… no... it can’t be... no… NOOOO!!!
The Waverly Restaurant, one of the best NYC diners in NYC, a NYC diner that’s so good it could be in a NJ diner.
Gasp… Closed?
The only affordable place to eat in this neighborhood that is not a pizzeria or a hot dog stand. What a kick in the head, and another harsh reminder that the era I called my own is truly gone, fading so fast nothing is left to fade. I love diners. It’s not that I haven’t had enjoyable experiences in other eating establishments, but I’m just simply never as comfortable eating out as I am eating American comfort food, usually prepared by warm, gracious Greek immigrants.
Maybe it is a New Jersey thing too. New York attitude welcomes everybody but those from the Garden State. Places like the Waverly Diner provided much needed familiarity to me; you can get breakfast any time of the day, an affordable sanctuary outside the hip elitism and outright Anti-Jersey Bigotry so prevalent throughout Manhattan.
In the 90s, I was taking classes and working in the neighborhood, ate here often, three or more times a week.
I usually ordered a spinach or mushroom omelet, side of breakfast sausage. I ate at the counter. I drank tea, read, scribbled in the notebook, made small talk with the waiters. Shredded potato hash browns glistening aside the eggs like a slice of cake, except with a golden brown exteriors as crisp and crunchy as a potato chip. They served the eggs in a frying pan with an orange wedge.
I get into these grooves, some might say ruts, where I eat the same thing consecutively, some time for days. I had things on my mind, things to work out and think through, the imagination working overtime. I didn’t want to spend additional time pondering meal options. I know what I liked. It was a diner, after all.
That Village period faded into something else, my Waverly diner meals again became more infrequent. In 2005 a friend’s parent passed away. The funeral was in Queens, which required a long subway haul. I was going to the funeral with a mutual friend, who lived in Manhattan It was on a Sunday in the winter and I met the mutual friend early in the morning at the Waverly, where we would begin the subway journey after a hardy breakfast and a chance to reacquaint. Like all funerals, this was also a reunion. We were at the table looking out on 6th avenue. A light snow fell. The Christmas season had just started and I was attending a Jewish funeral. No escaping irony. The death was sudden, real sad and tragic, yet was also a reason for friends who haven’t seen each other in a while to get together again. Funerals tend to weave somewhat contradictory emotions together into that specific day’s fabric of grief and ritual. The Waverly waiter recognized me. We chatted. We were glad to see other. It’s not like we knew each other’s names, or talked about anything more significant than the weather or other generalities. I’m sure he had better customers than I, more regular regulars. I was a regular but only for a few years, maybe five and it had to be at least five, that had passed before the funeral reunion. The Waverly had been one of my Clean, Well Lighted Places and this gentlemen, with his white shirt and black pants, wide, friendly face and warm, easy smile was part of that experience. It was people like him who make a place be what a place like that is. Now that place is gone.
What used to be here? That’s the game you play as you get older. What used to be here? You walk around and see something new and wonder, what used to be here. Remember? It’s not that I am old, well I am but so are you. You’re getting older and if you are not you will soon be as old then you will become older. You already are seeing change and I bet you’ve noticed that it has been speeding up lately. Things that you knew what seemed like all your life, those apparently well established components of civilization or at least that little piece of society filling your personal bit of existence, that gives you your this and that, they too have been or will suddenly one day be gone.
One day Shea is destroyed and a stadium named after a bank is built and the cost of a game is half your paycheck. Or the routine of renting a movie from a local business person who knows your name is erased by progress. Sure, things like the Metropolitan Museum of Art will always be, but where is CBGBs, the Bottom Line? The Village Gate is a CVS, the Palladium a Trader Joes. Tower Records is a Chase Bank, or is that the Second Avenue Deli that’s the Chase and Tower something else? These may be extinct icons of my generation, but you’ll have yours. Life isn’t lived entirely online. In Jersey City, Arties seemed like a mainstay, that’s gone. Flamingos, a great diner at Exchange Place, went under renovation more than a year ago, but no construction has been done there in months.
Change is the only constant but good lord, it has gotten more constant in the current era, faster and more unyielding. I’ve been going to the Waverly since I was visiting Tony during his college days at NYU. I assumed it always would be there because it always was there. That’s what’s so jarring. The places that were part of your discovery of the city, a city of the various and assorted components that culminated into a life, into what you know, suddenly gone, taken away, piece by piece, stolen by forces beyond your control. Life was one way and now it’s another. What used to be here?
There used to a diner here.
What’s a diner, they’ll ask.
What’s a mushroom omelet with hash browns and sausage on a day you are feeling sad and tired with too much on your mind?
A quick google reveals that the Waverly is undergoing a renovation and expansion – they bought out the adjoining wine store. I’m not a big wine drinker, so you have to go to another blog for oenology devotees who are eulogizing the loss of one of his or her life’s mainstay and contemplating the impact of change of one less wine store on one’s existence. Waverly street is the only street that crosses itself, keep walking on it you’ll get to that time and space defying corner. The Village remains the Village. NYU can grow like a giant ameba absorbing blocks and erasing parts of the past. Hospitals close, record stores, book stores. You wake up one day and say how did what’s left of my hair get so gray? One hopes it is true, that it’s just the renovation (notice the classic neon sign is still there, hopeful evidence), but it will never be the same Waverly, because nothing truly is, especially you, the one doing the perceiving. I hope the Waverly will reopen, bigger (on weekends, there was always a line for tables), with a counter, and the best omelets in town. When it comes to change, that’s one of those more things stay the same parts.
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