Curiosity & Cocktails at Old Town's Paradiso

Paradiso in Old Town

Walking along King Street in Old Town, Alexandria, you might notice a fairly non-descript pizza place called Paradiso.  It's one of many restaurants and bars in Old Town. But inside you'll find much more than excellent pizza, a Zagat favorite.  Paradiso is not only a pizzeria, but if you look closely at the sign you'll see it's also a birreria, with an amazing selection of  hard-to-find brews.

How extensive is Paradiso's selection?  On the beer list you'll find over 200 bottles, a traditional British cask ale, and 14 always-changing options on tap.

During our recent visit we tried several options under the guidance of Paradiso's talented beer expert, Matt.   We were impressed to see Unibrou Éphémère on the list, too.

The good news is one need not venture to Old Town to enjoy Paradiso's delicious pizzas and incredible beer selection.   Paradiso has locations in both Dupont Circle and Georgetown, as well.

McNulty's Tea & Coffee Co.

McNulty's

Open since 1895, McNulty's Tea & Coffee Co. on Christopher Street has an amazing selection of eclectic teas and coffees from around the world.   Without a doubt, McNulty's is old school.  When you step inside you feel like you've stepped back in time. Much of what you see inside - bins, chests and scales - date back to the 19th century and the people who work at McNulty's actually know something about their product.  Over the years we've tried several of the teas and coffees and we've never been disappointed.

If you like your coffee super-strong but not bitter, don't miss the French Roast Java Mountain Supreme.  As my grandfather used to say, "It'll put hair on your chest."

If you are a coffee or tea fan, we definitely suggest a visit to McNulty’s, and it's a featured stop on Cocktails & Curiosities Tour No. 1 of Greenwich Village.

Milligan Place: A Unique Oasis in the Village

Milligan Place

Hidden behind an unassuming gate on6th Avenue just north of West 10th Street, Milligan Place is a unique little courtyard of residences and businesses. Built in 1852, the four row houses in this exquisite oasis replaced Samuel Milligan’s home, which he constructed in 1799.

Milligan_Place_Gate

Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature, once lived in Milligan Place, and in addition to residential apartments, today Milligan Place is the home of a mental health facility called the New York Person-Centered Resource Center.  Person-centered therapy is a branch of the humanistic school of psychology and philosophy.  Often referred to as the Third Force, humanistic psychology encompasses psychological, biological, philosophical, and sociological ideas that emerged in reaction to psychoanalysis and behaviorism.

Milligan Place is a featured stop on Cocktails & Curiosities Greenwich Village Tour No. 2.

City Swiggers: Beer Heaven on the UES

City_Swiggers

A new beer shop & tasting room has opened on Manhattan's Upper East Side, and it truly is a beer lover's paradise. Located on 320 East 86th Street between 2nd & 125 Avenues, City Swiggers sells over 500 craft beers in bottles (and a few cans) and has 14 rotating options on draft.

Growlers from City Swiggers

Owners Alan & Pamela Rice allow you tosample the draftbefore filling agrowleror mini-growler and heading on your way.

We stopped by last week before a barbeque and sampled a few amazing brews.  We left with a growler of  Greenport Harbor Supeh Freekeh and mini-growler of Magic Hat Elder Betty (pictured at right).

Both were major crowd-pleasers and we're certain City Swiggers will be a regular stop for us this summer,  particularly now that we own our own growlers!

Sheridan Square 2: "Goofy" Clubs

Pirate's Den Owner

In the 1910’s and 1920’s a unique type of watering hole opened in the Sheridan Square area.  Called “Goofy Clubs,” these restaurant-bars literally invented the over-the-top thematic ambiance we now take for granted in both theme parks and hundreds of restaurants and bars. Located at 10 Sheridan Square and opened in 1917 by Don Dickerman (at left), the Pirate’s Den was the most famous Goofy Club.  It was decorated like a pirate ship, including cannons bolted to the floor and theatrical waiters dressed as pirates brandishing real swords.  Live caged parrots and screaming monkeys completed the fantasy.  (Monkeys??  Try to get that past the NYC Health Department today!)

Indian_Girl_Costume

Not surprisingly, the Goofy Clubs flourished during Prohibition.  At the Toby Club it was Halloween everyday, much like at the Slaughtered Lamb, with fake cobwebs and spiders, mounted skulls and spooky candles.  At another club waiters dressed in prison stripes and served illicit booze to customers in private cells.  At the Wigwam, yes, you guessed it, servers dressed as Native Americans and wore skimpy outfits with tom-tom accompaniment.

Today crazy theme restaurants are a dime-a-dozen, from Ninja New Yorkto Nascar Sports Grill to Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.

For better or for worse, Greenwich Village's Goofy Clubs  got the thematic ball rolling about a hundred years ago.

Sheridan Square 1: The Village's "Mousetrap"

Sheridan_Square

Because of its confusing, maze-like streets and corners, guidebooks in the 1920’s called the area “the Mousetrap” where several streets come together -- West 4th, Washington Place, Grove Street and Barrow.

The little triangle in the midst of all this chaos is Sheridan Square, and the geometrical confusion is not its only odd incongruity.  The triangular square, only 4200 square feet, is named after New York native & Civil War hero General Philip Sheridan, whose statue you can find not here in his triangle, but nearby in Christopher Park.  Why would you look for a statue of Sheridan in a triangle named Sheridan Square?  This is New York City!  We do things our own way here.

Sheridan_Subway

Until 1982 the square/triangle was a paved traffic island.  Then the Sheridan Square Triangle Association convinced the city to turn the eyesore into the (hopefully) verdant garden you can visit today.  Twenty-first century New Yorkers know Sheridan Square primarily as a subway stop, but the area’s history is far more "goofy" and intoxicating.   More on that later . . . .

Unique in New York: The Northern Dispensary

Northern_Dispensary_1

Built in 1831 as a medical clinic for the poor, the triangular Northern Dispensary is unique in New York:  It has one side on two streets, Christopher & Grove, and it has two sides on only one street, Waverly Place. We know from public records that in 1829 the dispensary's bank balance was $11.17 and in 1832 it treated 3,296 patients.  In 1837 Edgar Allan Poe was treated for a nasty head cold and released.

Later, after full-service hospitals were opened around the city, the building housed a dental clinic.  Alas, the organization that ran the dental clinic refused to treat patients with AIDS, and in 1989 the clinic closed after the the city's Human Rights Commission slapped it with a $47,000 fine.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York purchased the property in '89 and hoped to open an SRO for AIDS patients, but local opposition spooked the diocese and it sold the dispensary to a real estate investor in 1998.

The Northern Dispensary has been vacant and unused ever since, perhaps because its deed requires it to be used "to serve the worthy poor."  If the building is not used to serve the poor, its ownership automatically reverts back to the City of New York, according to the deed.

You might think it was very progressive, way back in 1827 when the dispensary was chartered, for the city to require free health care services for the poor.  "Ah, the worthy poor!  How noble!  How generous!"

Northern_Dispensary_2

But don’t get to feeling all warm and fuzzy inside.   Keeping the poor healthy & productive was good for business and reduced the spread of disease to the not-so-poor, and the dispensary served as a place to separate them from general society.

How did the dispensary's powers-that-be feel about their "worthy poor"?  The original board of directors asked donors to pity the doctors who had to work at the clinic and deal with "the miserable and degraded of our species, loathsome from disease and disgusting morals.”

Today the three-sided Northern Dispensary just sits and waits to serve, slowly decaying.  Its owner, Gottlieb Real Estate, is notorious for its eccentric founder, the late Bill Gottlieb, "a rumpled, elusive fellow who would walk the streets carrying shopping bags stuffed with cash and documents."

If you peer inside the windows you'll see dust, debris, rusting dental equipment and jackknifed filing cabinets.  Fourteen years is a long time for a a beautiful old building to be abandoned.   We hope she gets some well-deserved love, and soon.

Picasso's Bust of Sylvette, by Carl Nesjär

Picasso_NYU_1

Just off Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, in a nondescript courtyard between tall NYU buildings, rises  a 60-ton concrete sculpture that many immediately recognize as a Picasso. Which is only partially correct.

In 1967 Norweigan sculptor Carl Nesjär created the 36 foot tall Bust of Sylvette, an enlargement of Picasso's sculpture of the same name from 1954.

I.M. Peicommissioned the work in 1966 as he designed the complex, which consists of three 32-story apartment buildings known today as Silver Towers.    Picasso assisted  Nesjär with the scaled enlargement, construction material, and its placement in the plaza.

But who, pray tell, was Sylvette?

Picasso_NYU_2

Born in Paris in 1934, by age 20 Sylvette David was living on the French Riviera with her English fiance, the sculptor and designer Tobias Jellinek, and her mother.  She met Picasso at an exhibition where he bought one of Mssr. Jellinek's chairs.  The couple delivered the chair to Picasso's studio the next day, and he asked her to pose.  Over the next 3 months she was the subject of more than 40 paintings, drawings and sculptures by the great Spanish master.

Today Sylvette is a painter and ceramicist.  She lives in the United Kingdom under the name Lydia Corbett.

Greenwich Village's Washington Square Hotel

Washington_Square_Hotel

Built in 1902 as the residential Hotel Earle, the perfectly-situated Washington Square Hotel has housed some famous residents over the years. Ernest Hemingway stayed at the hotel for a few weeks in 1914, just before he went off to World War I.  The ubiquitous Village denizen Bob Dylan chose the location because it was close to his favorite bar, Minetta Tavern.  Joan Baez lived with Bob in room 305 for a while.

Renamed in 1986 to reflect its proximity to Washington Square Park, the renovated Washington Square Hotelis now popular with NYU parents and other not-so-bohemian tourists.

Madame_X

We love the art deco lobby, complete with a copy of John Singer Sargent’s famous Madame X, which was painted fresco-style on tiles by the owner’s wife and perfectly sets the mood.

The hotel’s highly-regarded restaurant, North Square (also known as C3 for the hotel's address, 103 Waverly Place), offers a popular jazz brunch on Sundays.   (Don't miss the pumpkin pecan pancakes.)

And, finally, here's one of our favorite New York stories . . .

Several years ago, one of North Square's waitresses asked the owners if she could play a few of her songs during brunch.  She gave them a demo CD, they were impressed, and she had her first gig at the Washington Square Hotel’s brunch.  She went on the win five Grammy Awards.  The waitress was Norah Jones.

Washington Square Hotel is a featured curiosity on tour #2 of Cocktails & Curiosities Greenwich Village.

"The Heart and Soul of Old New York"

Did you know that the famous and oft-photographed St. Patrick’s Cathedral is not the original St. Patrick’s Cathedral?  For 70 years, from 1809-1879, another St. Patrick’s was the seat of the Archdiocese and the heart and soul of Old New York.

St_Patricks_Cathedral

St. Patrick’s Day is approaching and the eponymous New York parade passes by St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue.  The massive Gothic church, located across the avenue from Rockefeller Center and across 50th Street from another famous temple, Saks, is one of the most photographed tourist attractions in New York City.

But it is indeed the second St. Patrick’s.

Gangs_of_New_York

The original cathedral can be found in “The Heart of Old New York” on the corner of Prince Street and Mott Street.  Evoking a “Gangs of New York” feeling, St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, as it is now known, is open to visitors and offers Sunday mass in Chinese, Spanish and English, a reflection of the diverse neighborhood it serves.

If you visit the stately old cathedral, the Heart and Soul of Old New York, be sure to notice the wall on the corner of Mulberry and Prince Streets.  The wall was built in the 1830’s to protect the church from the anti-Irish “Nativists” who burned down nearby St. Mary’s Church.  In the 2002 film “Gangs of New York,” Daniel Day-Lewis played Nativist leader Bill “The Butcher” Cutting.