Nickel beer at Sam's

Jeremiah's awful news yesterday on the possible demise of the Holiday on St. Mark's inspired to me look into some other old haunts on the street from year's past...I came across this article in the Time magazine archives on Sam's Bar & Grill.

The Nickel In St. Mark's Place
Monday, Apr. 4, 1949

Pale and shaken, 51-year-old Sam Atkins backed away from himself with a feeling somewhere between disbelief and awe. By a single, splendid cerebration he had been lifted out of the ruck into the status of a television curiosity. In his humble Manhattan saloon, Sam had decided to cut the price of beer (the 7-oz. glass) from a dime to a nickel.

Up to that moment Sam was just a pensioned pumper driver from the Bayonne (N.J.) fire department, and Sam's bar & grill was like any neighborhood joint around St. Mark's Place on the Lower East Side. Its only distinctive touch was Sam's cousin, "Bottle Sam" Hock, who amused the trade by whacking tunes out of whisky bottles with a suds-scraper. But the customers got a joyful jolt when Sam opened up one morning last week.

All around the walls, even over the bar mirror, tasteful, powder-blue signs proclaimed in red letters: "Spring is here and so is the 5¢ beer." The early birds drank and took their change in mild disbelief. The nickel wasn't obsolescent after all. The word spread. Sam's bar & grill started to bulge like Madison Square Garden on fight night. People drank, shook hands with strangers and sang.

Then something went sour. The two breweries that supplied Sam cut him off, and an electrician came around and took the neon beer sign out of the flyspecked windows. Somehow, it seemed, Sam had betrayed free enterprise. An organization of restaurant owners muttered that Sam might not be cutting his beer, but he was cutting his throat. The Bartenders Union threw a picket line in front of the place because it was nonunion.

But Sam hung on. He signed up with the union, managed to get his beer through a couple of distributors and a Brooklyn brewery, announced that he was going to have the windows washed, and keep at it. Said he solemnly: "The people want it." By this week Sam's idea had spread to other saloons in Washington, D.C. and New Jersey, and Sam was getting more trade in a day than he had drawn before in a week. The nickel beer was here to stay, Sam announced.

Photos via the Time archive.

Downtown Beirut, around 1990, about 3 a.m.

I can't remember when it closed, 1994? On First Avenue.

Speaking of Downtown Beirut, I came across an article on menright.com about Carolyn, a downtown fixture and bartender at Downtown Beirut and member of Killer Instinct, X.K.I. and Bad Tuna Experiment.



According to the article:

Carolyn was new in town, working for an answering service and as an occassional punk extra in clueless Hollywood versions of the Lower East Side. She spent the nights she wasn't working on the benches in Tompkins Square, or on the stoops around Stromboli's Pizza on St. Mark's Place. She didn't have enough cash to get into the clubs very often. Drink of choice: a forty-ounce Bud.

The article talks about her bands and early years in the neighborhood. And whatever happened to her?

Carolyn resumed her long-interrupted college career and graduated summa cum laude from Hunter College. She got married. She studied for a PhD in English (specializing in Medieval Germanic Languages), wrote grammar exercises for college textbooks, and appeared on Jeopardy. (She won the trip — not the money.)

Carolyn is now the mother of a daughter by the name of Harriet, has a house in the woods, and is a Senior Editor for a major textbook publisher in New York City. Unlike many of her contemporaries on the Lower East Side, she survived. This is her hidden past.

And here's BTE with "Beer Picnic."

Window-washing day at the Empire State Building

This gives me the creeps. I hate heights.

A sign that I like

On 14th Street between Avenue A and Avenue B. Check out the old telephone exchange -- OR 3-4786.

Three other signs that I've always liked

Yes, all obvious ones...But I wanted to start the new year with an appreciation of some classic-looking signs.

The Parkside, Houston and Attorney.



Veniero's, First Avenue at 11th Street.



Smith's, 44th Street and Eighth Avenue.

Two signs that I like on Essex Street

Next door to each other. I'm curious if the Dembitzer Bros. are still shipping all over the world...

My Kinda Town

Bobby Steele and the Undead. Tompkins Square Park, July 2006. For everyone, like me, who's out of town at the moment.

Smokes and smiles

No secret how expensive cigarettes are...funny why the brass at the Mobil station on Avenue C and Houston thinks advertising the not-a-bargain price might lure in some motorists...



Meanwhile, remember to smile.

Save the M8

Scoopy has the following item in this week's issue of The Villager:

East Village native Quinn Raymond reports that COBATA (Coalition of Block and Tenant Associations) has started a new Web site to save the M8, the bus line linking the West Village and the East Village. The MTA wants to curtail the route as part of their plan to close a moronic $790 billion* budget gap.

* an EV Grieve estimation

Squats vs. the city

Also in The Villager this week: An interesting piece by Lincoln Anderson titled "Former squats are worth lots, but residents can’t cash in."

[Photo of 209 E. Seventh St. from the mid-1980s by Fly via The Villager]

Things to do if you're really bored

Measure this distance! On First Avenue between 10th Street and 11th Street.



Seems like more than 75 feet to me.

Here's to your New Year's resolutions!