A Writer's Life (17 page)

In 1980, as Nicola Spagnolo celebrated his fifty-third birthday and sixth year as the proprietor of Nicola's, his hair was almost entirely gray and his lean figure an inch thicker in the middle, but he retained his youthful appearance and energy and the conviction that he did not have a worry in the world. His unrelenting optimism and devil-may-care attitude worried Linda at times, although during their courtship these were the very qualities that had attracted her to him, since she believed that recklessness and Pollyannaism were a positive part of his nature. How else could he have jumped ship and landed on his feet? But what had seemed boldly romantic in the past was less appealing now that she had given up her job to devote herself exclusively to their marital life and to maintaining an expensive lifestyle entirely dependent on her husband's sizable but uncertain income. That his restaurant was doing well was a comforting thought, but it was not something that could be taken for granted. She had noticed while walking around town that a few restaurants that had been hugely successful in the past, so popular that every night crowds of people used to stand patiently for a half hour or more waiting for tables, were suddenly and inexplicably out of business. She often reminded her
husband of this whenever he returned home complaining—as he regularly did during his eighth and ninth year of running Nicola's—that he was becoming bored with the nightly routine and needed a new and greater challenge. He also admitted to her with a certain reluctance that he was having disagreements with a few of the men who were his partners. The issues were relatively minor, he reassured Linda, and no one was entirely at fault. He attributed it to the middle-aged crankiness of the men involved, including himself, although he remembered that he had felt similarly as a young man when he had been at sea too long working on cruise ships. Being confined for prolonged periods had often unnerved him and everyone around him, he recalled, bringing an edginess and impatience into conversations that otherwise would have been casual and friendly exchanges of ideas. Now these irritable feelings existed in his restaurant, he said, making his relationship with his partners thorny and stressful, and he was ready to leave. The financial rewards could not compensate for the fact that he had been doing basically the same thing in the same place in front of the same crowd almost every night for nearly ten years. The solution was not in working fewer hours, or taking longer vacations, both of which Linda had suggested as a solution; what he needed now, he insisted, was a permanent change. Ten years was his limit in any one place. He had been at Elaine's for ten years. And now he was approaching his tenth year at Nicola's. And furthermore, as he confided to Linda before informing his partners at Nicola's, he had recently found a vacated place in which he thought he could revive his spirit and enthusiasm by starting a
new
restaurant, with fewer partners this time, and with the ultimate goal of succeeding at this particular location, where
two
restaurants had already failed.

This rentable space consisted of the lower two floors and the basement of an old five-story commercial brick building situated within a residential side street in the East Sixties, about twenty blocks downtown from Nicola's. Since the partnership he was abandoning would still own the name Nicola's—and would continue to run the restaurant under that name at 146 East 84th Street into the twenty-first century—Nicola Spagnolo decided that he would call his place Gnolo, inspired by the last five letters of his surname. His new restaurant would be larger than Nicola's. In addition to Gnolo's main dining room on the street level, and the spacious basement that the departed restaurant owners had used for their freezers, wine cellar, and preparatory kitchen, there was a staircase leading up to the second floor, which the two earlier restaurants—Le Premier had been a tenant from September 1977 until December 1978, and the
Bistro Pascal from February 1979 until July 1983—had reserved for private parties, corporate social functions, and as a second public dining room on those rare occasions when the floor below had been overbooked.

While Nicola did not anticipate altering this arrangement, he was confident that the two floors and the basement he was renting would be put to more profitable use than anything imagined by the restaurateurs who had been there before. He had known only success for twenty years, having contributed heavily to it at Elaine's from 1964 to 1974, and at Nicola's from 1974 to 1984; and at Gnolo he would not be shackled with four partners, as he had been at Nicola's. At Gnolo he would have only two—one being his attorney, and the other a gentleman he had first met while waiting on his table at Elaine's, the scion of Harry Winston's jewelry establishment on Fifth Avenue.

After Nicola had signed the lease and made plans to have the place repainted and redecorated in time for Gnolo's opening in the fall of 1984, he telephoned to invite me and my wife to be among his first-night guests in the middle of October. I was glad to accept and looked forward to seeing him again after a lapse of many months. From 1982 through the summer of 1984, I had been living mainly in Italy, researching what would become, seven years hence,
Unto the Sons
. During this period, my visits to New York had been frequent but brief, and I can recall dining at Nicola's place on East Eighty-fourth Street no more than three or four times, which had been sufficient for me to assume that his days there were numbered. He candidly told me that he was restless, displeased with most of his partners, and depressed. I also found him depressing to be around, as he lacked the sprightly spirit I had always associated with him. And therefore I was relieved as well as pleased to hear the ebullience back in his voice when he telephoned me to announce the launching of Gnolo.

“What's the address?” I asked.

“It's on Sixty-third between Second and Third avenues,” he said. “It's closer to Third Avenue. The address is Two oh six East Sixty-third.”

I was astonished.

“I've been keeping a file on
that
building for twenty-five years!” I exclaimed. “I've often thought of writing about it.”

“Well, now's the time,” Nicola said.

“It went up as a warehouse about eighty years ago,” I went on. “It used to be filled with old bureaus, pianos, and family heirlooms, and there was a stable below for the horses that pulled the moving carts. Later there was a garage for trucks. Then the place was gutted and converted into a five-story commercial building, and the upper floors were rented out as office space to a travel agent, and a studio photographer, and, I think, a shoe
importer—and there's also a Gypsy fortune-telling parlor on one of the floors there now. There used to be restaurants on the ground floor that I went to, but they're both out of business now.…”

I was boring him, or so I assumed from his interruption at this point.

“Look, I don't care a lot about the horses and other stuff,” he said. “All I know is, I'm moving in next month, and it's going to be great.”

After he hung up, I reached into my filing cabinet and retrieved what I had been collecting about the building since I had first noticed it during the late 1950s, which was when I drove a sports car around New York (a 1957 Triumph TR-3) and was garaging it directly across the street from 206 East 63rd. I was then researching and writing what would become
New York—A Serendipiter's Journey
, in which I called attention to many of New York's old buildings and obscure people whom I thought characterized survival and perseverance in an ever-changing city. I would have asked the photographer Marvin Lichtner, who was taking pictures for
Serendipiter's Journey
, to take one of the ex-warehouse at 206 East 63rd, but unfortuntely the publisher's deadline in 1961 closed in on me before I could gather enough historical data about it to include it in the book.

Still, it continued to occupy my thoughts as I saw it every day while coming and going from my garage. So in 1964, after I had finished
The Bridge
—which included photos by Bruce Davidson showing the ironworkers in action—I proposed in a memo to my publisher that we do a follow-up book entitled
The Building
, which would present in words and pictures the history of this edifice on Sixty-third Street that had captured my fancy and that (as I suggested in my sales pitch) stood as a monument to American durability and adaptability, having existed from the horse-and-buggy era into the period of motorcars and then into the high-tech time of microchips without a single brick being chipped from its fortress-like facade! There was nothing flimsy about this structure, I emphasized in my memo; it had been solidly constructed during the golden age of brick masonry in America, and the early-twentieth-century artisans who had begun laboring on it in 1906 had obviously taken great pride in their craft even while aware that what they were constructing would be occupied at night only by a dozen ungrateful dray horses. It was my appreciation of the workers' dedication to detail that had initially attracted me to this building, which was designed in the Renaissance style and was fronted with light brown iron-dotted brickwork that was corbeled and frieze-lined and had window arches crowned with keystones and other touches of entablature testifying to many extra hours of early-century effort.

On the inside of the building was a freight elevator that ran along the
interior western wall between the top floor and the ground level, the latter being where, until the late 1940s, the loading and unloading of the customers' cargo had been done with the aid of horse-powered winches. The upper four floors were sectioned off into cubicles, each containing the individual customers' belongings. I was once permitted to tour the interior after introducing myself as a prospective client, and what I saw as I ventured from floor to floor were objects that I assumed were expendable items of sufficient sentimental value, if not actual value, to preserve them from the junk heap. There were many grandfather clocks, sideboards, armoires, and sofas. There was also a suit of armor, a spinet, an oil painting of a white-haired, black-robed magistrate, and a stately large-wheeled perambulator bearing a croquet set. There were many rolled-up rugs, stone and marble statuary, candelabra, and a couple of finely crafted oak wood sleds (Rosebuds?) and some steamer trunks bearing the stickers of ocean liners no longer afloat.

It also occurred to me that the warehouse served, at least in part, as a repository for what had been willed and was unwanted. It was where a younger generation had stowed away the evidence of their rejection of the inherited tastes and values of their elders. The floors here were the final resting place for the reupholstered love seats that had once known familiar contact, care, and affection. This place was now an orphanage for antique dolls. It was an art gallery for the portraits of departed patriarchs no longer deemed worthy of family wall space. It was a memory bank filled with reminders of good and bad times, a vault packed with redeemable inventory that was traceable to people with stories to tell—stories that
I
could tell if my reluctant publisher would eventually endorse my proposal for
The Building
.

In my memo I conceded that though this place lacked the imprimatur of landmark status and was overshadowed by modern skyscrapers reflecting a soaring modern economy, it nonethless stood tall in the annals of antediluvian stubbornness; it simply refused to erode and disintegrate, and I was confident that within its cubicles I would find the inspirational essence of human drama and pathos that would be worthy of public attention. I recalled a line from Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman
, in which the wife of Willy Loman—a man whose best days are behind him and is disrespected by his sons—excoriates these sons, reminding them that their father is a worthy human being, one to whom “attention must be paid.” And she insisted further: “He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.…”

I saw this old warehouse on Sixty-third Street as the Willy Loman of buildings in New York.

T
HE FIRST OWNER OF THE BUILDING WAS A STOUT AND AUTOCRATIC
man named Frederick J. Schillinger, a German-born furniture mover who died in New York at seventy-two in 1927 and whom I tried to revive whenever I sat thinking about him and trying to write about him at my desk.

Sometimes I looked up to study several fading sepia photographs of him that were pinned to my bulletin board. In the clearest and most detailed of these, Schillinger was shown standing on the sidewalk with apparent satisfaction in front of his then newly opened five-story warehouse at 206 East 63rd Street. The photo was taken on a wintry day in 1907, and except for the absence of the advertising signs that were then affixed to the brick-walled exterior—signs reading
SCHILLINGER'S STORAGE
:
Furniture Packed and Shipped … Pianos and Safes Moved and Hoisted
—the building today is unchanged in its outward appearance.

When he posed for the picture in 1907, Frederick J. Schillinger was fifty-two, gray-haired, square-jawed, mustachioed, and quite distinguished in attire. A black bowler rested on his broad head, a dark tie fronted his white shirt and was knotted triangularly under his chin, and covering his thick chest and his muscular furniture-lifting arms and shoulders and extending below the knees of his dark trousers was a velvet-collared gray chesterfield overcoat. While it might be supposed that this man in the moving business who carried a scent of horses was dressed as he was in order to appear fashionable in the photograph, I was told by some of his elderly grandchildren and other relatives who had given me the pictures that he was always clothes-conscious and also somewhat vain and pompous. He was a man who emulated the stodgy manners of the butlers who too often kept him waiting in the vestibules of the large East Side homes to which he and his workmen were summoned to carry away furniture that could not be accommodated in the more modest living quarters that his no-longer-rich clientele would soon be compelled to occupy.