The short building in the middle of the block on the avenue was empty for several years. A padlock the size of a shoe hung on the front door; the ground floor windows, backed by plywood, were covered with pasted ads, which were covered with graffiti. Ill use and inattention jarred with the building itself, which had a curved gable on the top story and stone scrollwork here and there as if laid on by a pastry chef.
Its first life, born in the century before last, was as a beer hall for the German Americans who once lived in the neighborhood. H. L. Mencken, fellow ethnic, described the hours-long conversations he would have when he came up from Baltimore, there or at Luchow’s, with James G. Huneker, a critic of an older generation. “What a stew, indeed! Berlioz and the question of the clang-tint of the viola, the psycho-pathological causes of the suicide of Tschaikowsky . . . the precise topography of the warts of Liszt, George Bernard Shaw’s heroic but vain struggles to throw off Presbyterianism . . . what to drink when playing Chopin, what Cézanne thought of his disciples . . . the varying talents and idiosyncrasies of Lillian Russell’s earlier husbands, whether a girl educated at Vassar could ever really learn to love.” (I suspend the convention of omitting proper names; cut them from that passage and space-time collapses.)
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