Sixth Avenue, On the Greasy Side

On the first day, I had three fried wontons, a marinated shish-kebab sandwich, a taco, and a cantaloupe Italian ice.

On the second day, I had an egg-roll, a felafel, another shish-kebab, and an egg cream with a pretzel.

On the third day, I had a bowl of Fu Manchu stew, a plate of vegetable tempura, another taco, and a tall cup of fruit salad.

On the fourth day, I had a cheese-steak, a knish, a bag of peanuts, a glass of fresh orange juice, and a chipwich.

On the fifth day, I had a roast pork and onions hero, a bag of apricots, two eggrolls, a papaya shake, and a soft ice cream cone.

And over the weekend, I dreamt of Sixth Avenue, where the pushcarts are bumper to bumper for 10 long blocks--both sides of the street--and I smelled beef charbroiling and batter deep-frying and fruit squirting and ice-cream melting, and I saw that it was really, really good.

When anyone asks me what I did last summer, I am compelled to describe the job I had writing reading comprehension tests for a research company in midtown Manhattan. But that is a lie. What I did last summer--what I thought about and planned out on paper and lived for--was lunch.

For a few weeks, I had my lunch indoors, in a sawdusty bar and grill on Eighth Avenue called the Blarney Stone. I patronized the Blarney Stone's grill, but the bar was never short for business. Each day, a cluster of grizzled old guys huddled around one corner of the counter, nurturing their pints and carrying on what appeared to be an endlessly repeating discussion of welter weight boxing. And at a table in the back, two small mailmen sat down everyday, without fail, and quietly drained a pair of enormous pitchers of ale.

My order at the Blarney Stone was brisket on an onion roll--a huge sandwich that came with a plate of home fries and a bowl of thick homemade soup. I ate it at the back of the restaurant, where I could watch the mailmen.

One day, I brought along a beautiful Adams House sophomore who was working as an intern at the local public television station. "What an interesting restaurant," she said as we walked in, picking up the tail end of the morning's boxing seminar. I smiled and bid the counterman to throw the brisket on the slicer.

My intern-friend scanned the menu--a decaying chalk-board with a few scrawlings on it--and finally asked for a Tab and a tuna-fish sandwich. The counterman produced an old can of tuna from the back of a shelf under the grill and spilled some Pepsi into a highball glass.

I was ready to sit down, but my friend walked over to the bar. So I walked over with her and asked the bartender if I could have a glass of water. My friend smiled and then sweetly asked for a gin and tonic, while he was at it. "It's for my headache," she explained to me.

That was my last meal at the Blarney Stone. For the rest of the summer, I pounded the pavement for my lunch. It is now a full half-year since I ate my way down South Avenue from 55th St, to 49th St, but the landscape is still fresh in my memory, and I can--and often do--recite the litany of pushcarts that fed me last June, July, and August. In order, walking downtown.

The Chipwich cart. Chipwiches were the marketing phenomenon of Summer 1981. All around the city, hundreds of identical little brown carts sprang up and sold a single remarkable item; a scoop of ice cream between two chocolate-chip cookies, I only began to pass up the chipwich vendor when I realized that at a dollar a shot, I could buy two david's cookies and a small scoop of Haagen Dazs.

Larry's Ices. Larry's, another chain, sold Italian ices with the same flavors as a tropical fruit pack of Life Savers. Larry (and his franchisers) made a mean ice, but they were a little expensive to make a habit of.

The felafel cart. I ate here whenever I had lunch with a vegetarian.

The dried fruit and nuts cart. There were several of these around the city, all leased out by the Moorues. The vendors were not cult members themselves, but as soon as i found out that Chairman Sun was getting all the profits, I divested myself of all financial ties with the carts. I broke my policy only once, when the vendor appeared with her six-year-old violinist brother and the best sign I saw all summer: "if you like my brother Stevie's music, please buy my dried fruit and nuts."

The Chinese specialties cart. This vendor sold limp, soggy, overfried wontons, eggrolls and vegetable tempura I loved it.

The egg cream and pretzel cart. This vendor gave out a free pretzel with every 75-cent egg cream he sold. At the deli around the corner, you could get an egg cream for 40 cents and a pretzel for a quarter.

The soft ice cream cart. Also known as the milkshake cart, soft ice cream being a tricky thing to keep in your cone in 90-degree weather. I stopped in front of the cart every day to watch a street-mime who had staked out this part of the avenue. His schtick, which attracted a large crowd every day, was to follow unsuspecting pedestrians about a step behind them, imitating the way they walked Every so often, he would run ahead of one of his subjects and dive onto the sidewalk to look up her skirt. One day, an elderly woman he was following whipped around and sprayed him in the face with a can of mace.

The Fu Manchu Stew stand. This item was genuinely wretched--the recipe, as far as I could tell, was rice, soy sauce, grains of hamburger meat, and canned celery. A few blocks further downtown, a vendor was selling the same dish as a Wok-a-Doo Stew.

The fruit salad cart. A stunning Indian woman in a sari dispensed a first-rate cup of fruit here, with watermelon, orange, grapes, grapefruit, pineapple and cantaloupe. It was at this stand, right in front of the Exxon building, that I generally saw a scene that took me all summer to get used to. It went something like this:

Two men in dark suits (never the same two; I saw this again and again with a different cast each time) are standing at the corner, waiting for the light.

Dark Suit I: "Well, Phil, that merger sounds just great. We'll hammer out the details after our squash game, whaddaya say."

Dark Suit II: "Swell, R. J., I'll have my girl get in touch with your girl."

Dark Suit I: "Right, Phil, I'll get back to you with those figures before we meet with marketing."

Dark Suit II: "Appreciate it, R. J."

They shake hands: The light changes, and they each whip out a joint and get wasted.

The shish-kebab cart. The Greek couple that presided over this cart took about a minute and a half to pull some marinated beef off their grill and onto a hero roll, cover it with lettuce and tomatoes, sauteed onions and peppers and paint a little extra marinade on the inside of the roll. I had roast pheasant with truffles once, at a famous French restaurant, and it was almost as good as that hero.

The cheese-steak stand. This stand was right down the street from the Museum of Modern Art and got away with charging $3.50 for a small sandwich. I used to linger in front of it every so often to hear a brass quintet called the Waldo Park Players. "Where is Waldo Park?" someone once asked the tuba player. "This is Waldo Park!" he said, gesturing to the northeast corner of 53rd and Sixth. Later that summer, I ran into the Players on Bleecker St., in Greenwich Village. Someone in the crowd asked the same question. "This is Waldo Park," came the answer.

The taco and lemonade stand. The tacos here were cheap and tasty, but I have never been able to buy lemonade on the street since I saw Harpo Marx (in Duck Soup) hop into a vendor's tank of lemonade and jog in place until the police came to get him.

The roast pork and onions stand. Mimi Sheraton, the New York Times's food critic, singled out this stand as a trichinosis hazard. But it was so good