It Must've Been Something I Ate by Jeffrey Steingarten

Author:Jeffrey Steingarten [Steingarten, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48644-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2002-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

DOWNTOWN AND FAR AWAY

If my immigrant grandfather had met Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on the Lower East Side of New York City, it would have been in 1901, when my grandfather ran a little grocery there and Butch was staying at a boardinghouse on East 12th Street between Second and Third, planning an escape to South America, as the Pinkerton detectives closed in.

I feel sure their paths must have crossed. Maybe they sweated together in the dim inferno of the Tenth Street Turkish and Russian Baths, which had opened for business nine years earlier. I see them, shoulder to shoulder, waiting patiently for a salami or a piece of pickled herring at the counter at Katz's Delicatessen, established in 1888 on East Houston Street at the corner of Ludlow. Except that before his sojourn on the Lower East Side, Butch had spent most of his life rustling horses and robbing trains in Wyoming and Utah, where such delicacies were doubtless unknown, and still may be, and except that my grandfather was probably a foot shorter than Butch and Sundance, which would have made rubbing shoulders a feat.

Maybe their paths crossed one bright Sunday at Tenth Street and Second, as Butch and Sundance headed into St. Mark's-inthe-Bowery, a stately church already a hundred years old, and my grandfather, not much of an Episcopalian, walked south, past the dozen Yiddish-language theaters lining the avenue, giving a neighborly smile to the Gershwin boys, then only three and five years old. The remains of Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant, whose farm stretched south from East 17th Street and covered half the Lower East Side, lay in a vault somewhere beneath that church. He died in 1672, two centuries too soon to meet my grandfather and his new friends from Utah.

Such are my deepest meditations as I stand patiently at the counter at Katz's, waiting for my pastrami on rye, the only still point in a turning world. Outside, everything is undergoing tumultuous and ceaseless rearrangement. Change has always been the essence of the Lower East Side, and each new wave can barely cover up the last before the next wave crashes into it.

Some things stay the same. Only here at Katz's is the succulent pastrami still cut by hand. So what if the place has become a bit of a dump? You should look so good at 110. Peter Stuyvesant still presides over two square miles of nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century houses and tenements built to catch a nearly endless flow of immigrants, first the Irish and the Germans (Kleindeutschland, it was called), then the Jews and Italians, and finally Hispanics and Chinese, though on the Lower East Side nothing is final for more than a year at a time. Of the numberless Irish saloons, only McSorley's on East Seventh Street is left. Of the Jewish population from Eastern Europe, which reached 400,000 in 1920, only a few of its 500 synagogues and religious schools remain, only one of its dozens of public

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