Dust of New York by Konrad Bercovici

Author:Konrad Bercovici
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620136003
Publisher: Duke Classics

When Stark's Café was Closed

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"Impossible, impossible, impossible," said everybody when the news passed around that Stark's Café was closed and that the house was being demolished.

Stark's Café on Houston Street was a celebrated landmark of New York. It was there that the playwrights, from the most pretentious to the humblest, closed contracts with managers. A special table at the upper end of the place was reserved for this purpose, and when a manager was sitting at that table with a playwright it meant business. "Charlie" the lawyer, would then loom up from somewhere and draw up the "funeral papers." Stark's Café! Why, Jewish actors in Alexandria, Egypt, made appointments with their London acquaintances to "meet at Stark's." It was not necessary to add "in New York."

Stark's was the stage mart of the world. The first tables near the door, just ordinary wooden tables, were apportioned for the ushers, ticket speculators and supers. Next to these tables were a few better ones, marble topped, at which were seated the provincial actors on visit in the metropolis. After those, there were a few which belonged to musicians and the writers of vaudeville jingles. But the round centre tables and those near the windows toward Houston Street were reserved for stars of both sexes, managers and successful playwrights. Stark's head waiter put it very clearly: "These tables are reserved for gentlemen who at least occasionally put on a silk hat."

And now, this place, this rendezvous of the two hemispheres was closed and being torn down.

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