Old New York: Discover It All in "Discovering Vintage New York"

By Mitch Broder

Walk by the Streit’s matzo factory and get handed a hot piece of matzo as you pass the open window of the matzo-cooling room.

Sit down at Marchi’s Restaurant and get served the one and only meal they’ve been serving there every night for the past 70 years.

Marchi's.

Slip into Marie’s Crisis Café and get amused by people singing show tunes around a piano before you break down and start singing along.

I can’t live around such opportunities and not tell people about them. That’s why I’ve written a book called “Discovering Vintage New York.”

About two years ago, I started writing Vintage New York the Blog. But long before that, I dreamed of writing Vintage New York the Book. And that’s just what I did — dream. But as vintage spots kept disappearing, I knew I’d better get to work while the dream could still come true.

The result is the first and only book to collect all the Manhattan restaurants, shops, cafés, and nightspots that take you back in time. It covers more than 75, and it spotlights 50 with profiles that tell you what each place is like now and how it got that way.

Katz's.

My blog, as its subhead notes, allows for “justifiable detours.” But the book travels exclusively on Vintage Road. All the spots are at least 50 years old (or very close to it). And all the spots, in some genuine way, evoke a bygone era.

The subjects range from the Café Carlyle to Katz’s Delicatessen, and from The Four Seasons to The Donut Pub. I spent hours at every one of them and interviewed people at every one of them. I wanted to get each spot’s history straight and to convey each spot’s unique charm.

A friend who once worked in publicity has called the book an “adventure map,” and though I have to leave terms like that to publicists, I secretly think she’s right. No one I’ve met along the way has known about all of these places, let alone been to all of them. Or even to a lot of them.

I add this in the book’s introduction:

I chose places that some of us see as the heart of New York — the ones that created the city that’s squeezing the likes of them out. When places like these close, people who always meant to visit them start grieving. I wrote this book to save you some grief.

More than that, I wrote it to tempt you to visit these spots for fun. They are precious places, and they almost always leave you with precious memories. I don’t want to say how many vintage places have disappeared since I started dreaming. I’ll just say that no matter what you think, nothing lasts forever.

I tell more about the book in the introduction, and I thank the many people who helped to make it possible in the acknowledgments. Still, I’m compelled to shamelessly steal my own words again, and repeat the first paragraph of those acknowledgments:

The people who most directly made this book possible are the people who own, manage, and otherwise tend to the places featured in it. Thanks to everyone who invited me in, showed me around, told me stories, and kept the places going long enough for me to show up.

And now I also thank The New York Post for introducing the book to New York City with a big splash, in last week’s Sunday paper. It was appropriate, since The Post is the oldest newspaper in the city, and yet it was nimble enough to scoop me on a story about myself.

Find what's really cool in “Discovering Vintage New York,” published today by the Globe Pequot Press. It makes a great gift. I’m not just saying that.

The Donut Pub: Come See What It Takes to Make Dunkin' Run

By Mitch Broder

In the new year, The Donut Pub will surely get new neighbors, but they won’t be Munchkins.

The Munchkins are gone till 2020.

Those would be the Munchkins of Dunkin’ Donuts, the chain that has 9,700 more stores than The Donut Pub, which has one. A Dunkin’ store moved in near The Donut Pub in 2007. It moved out months ago. All that’s left are Dunkin’ Doorknobs.

Dunkin’ technically had seniority. The chain began in 1950; The Donut Pub didn’t open till 1964. But by 2007, The Donut Pub had already knocked off one Dunkin’ Donuts. The neighborhood had cast its vote for a place that calls Munchkins “Donut Holes.”

That was in the late nineties. Yet Dunkin’ tried again a decade later, at 215 West 14^th Street, just a few doors away. So it should be returning in about nine years, and gone again in four. America may run on Dunkin’, but New York stops at The Pub.

It stops there because The Pub has better doughnuts and better service, not to mention a better sign. But better isn’t always enough. I think The Pub wins because Dunkin’ Donuts feels like a place to get out of, while The Donut Pub feels like a place to come into.

It has a counter where people nestle with a newspaper and two pastries, since they usually have two favorites and get both rather than choose. And it has counter people who want to please you, like Sam, who’s been there for twenty-six years, and Gus Markatos, who’s the manager but doesn’t let that stop him.

“I like interacting with people,” he told me. “When someone’s not in, I cover for them. I drink coffee, I eat doughnuts, I do everything.” Still, it’s the pastries that keep The Pub popular, he said. “We have the best black-and-white in the city,” he added. I still don’t know how he knew I would care.

But he knew or guessed, and he brought me one. It seemed free at the time. But Gus is a businessman. He knew what he was doing. I’ve been back twice. The second time the cookies were just out of the oven and Sam had one frosted for me in all chocolate. That doesn’t happen at Dunkin’ Donuts.

But The Pub has always had doughnut competitors, at least till they’ve run out of dough. In the sixties doughnuts were everywhere, since back then they were good for you. There were shops all over the neighborhood, Gus said, including across the street. They were good for The Donut Pub. They provided target practice.

Decades later, the exalted Krispy Kreme arrived in the city. It opened its first store nine blocks away, in 1996. The company called itself “the biggest thing to hit New York since Nathan’s sold its first hot dog at Times Square.” The Pub would cream Krispy just the way it had sunk Dunkin’.

The Pub’s just plain inspirational, especially when you learn that one of its founders was a man named Buzzy Geduld. Buzzy went on to become a Wall Street trader who managed Herzog Heine Geduld until Merrill Lynch bought it in 2000 for about a billion dollars.

In short, you don’t mess with The Pub, even if you do have 9,700 stores. Sure, nearby stores display doughnuts — but only a couple of doughnuts.

As a Pub counter man said to me one night: “Why would you try to compete with a place that’s been here since ’64? Have some respect for the place.”

Have some respect for The Donut Pub at 203 West 14th Street, near Seventh Avenue, in New York City.