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Nice si.com column by the always-entertaining Steve Rushin on NY sports landmarks that have all become chain drug stores and the like. His jumping off point is the site of the old Dodger offices, where Jackie Robinson signed his contract, and how it's now a TD Bank.
It isn't true that every other business in New York has become a Duane Reade drugstore. But there was, last I checked, a Duane Reade drugstore at 51 West 51st Street in Manhattan, the former address of Toot Shor's famous saloon, where Joe DiMaggio and Jack Dempsey ate, where Shor literally drank Jackie Gleason under a table, and Yogi Berra allegedly said upon meeting the writer Ernest Hemingway: "What paper are you with, Ernie?"
Seated one night at the circular bar, Frank Sinatra watched Dempsey, then Bing Crosby, then Babe Ruth walk through the front door. "When Babe Ruth walked in," Sinatra recalled in a film clip in the 2009 documentary Toots, "I damn near wet my pants."
Today you can purchase Depends on the former site of Shor's, but have very little reason to wet your pants there, which is an irony evident in many of these ghostly shrines.
Ruth himself used to sign his contracts at 1639 Third Avenue in Manhattan, in the offices of Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert, whose Ruppert Brewery sprawled over four blocks of the Upper East Side. That brewery's front door was near the corner of East 91st Street, where the portal to a kind of anti-brewery stands today: It's a health club -- a branch of the New York Sports Club -- so that this former shrine to Knickerbocker Beer and Ruthian excess is now a temple to physical fitness and self denial.
This seems to be a theme connecting these ghost buildings of New York. Upon his arrival in the city, after signing with the Jets, Joe Namath was introduced to Toots Shor, who in turn introduced him to the New York press at a cocktail party-slash-press conference on January 23, 1965. Eventually, the pair had a falling out -- specifically a throwing out, when Toots tossed Namath after an argument -- and Broadway Joe opened his own swinging joint, Bachelors III.
That place is still there, still a pickup spot, still full of fur coats and heavy breathers, but now 798 Lexington Avenue, on the corner of 62nd Street, is a pet shop, American Kennels, and the only pedigree the customers care about is the pooch's, not the building's. |
Decent book on the same subject: Babe Ruth Slept Here: The Baseball Landmarks of New York.
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