Famous Oyster Bar

There's not much to say about the self-proclaimed Famous Oyster Bar of midtown, except that its signs had been among my very favorite things to see in this neighborhood for a long, long time.  No more: the place closed two Sundays ago after 55 years in business.

(T. Rinaldi) 

The Famous Oyster Bar's fascia signs boasted particularly evocative midcentury letterforms; the swing sign was curious in that it seemed to have been re-lettered from a previous incarnation (its stylized silhouette didn't quite jive stylistically with the lettering, and abandoned electrode housings in the arced space above suggested that some tubing had been removed). 

(T. Rinaldi) 

In a sterile part of town that seems especially hostile to anything the least bit ephemeral, the very sight of these signs made me feel that I still lived in the city as I once imagined it, the New York of Jack Lemmon movies and Checker cabs, stale sandwiches at the Automat and graffiti-covered Redbirds flying underground by night.

(T. Rinaldi) 
  
Much as I always admired its signage, I had never actually patronized the Famous Oyster Bar of West 54th Street.  The owners had so heavily reworked its interior that I figured I might just as well enjoy this place for what I liked best about it, from outside.  But when Jeremiah Moss broke the news that the Oyster Bar would breathe its last, with about 24 hours' notice, I decided I'd better get the hell up there.  

(T. Rinaldi) 

I don't much care for coming around such places in their final hours.  I prefer to experience them on a normal day - just another guy in just another restaurant, as though there were a whole world of such places out beyond the threshold.  For the Oyster Bar, I decided to come anyway - it was that or nothing.  The staff there had been so friendly when I rang them up to ask about their signs for the neon book, I felt I obliged to check-in at least once.  


(T. Rinaldi) 

So Sunday night I went over and sidled up to the bar.  I ordered a cocktail, then one more.  I watched the Grammy awards get started on TV.  The kitchen closed as I finished my drink.  Closed for good, after 55 years.  A little more of that old city of my imagination dissipated back into the spirit world from whence it came, away out there with Jack Lemmon and the Redbirds ... the banjo-strumming bohemians of Greenwich Village.

"Neon in daylight is a great pleasure" - Frank O'Hara.  (T. Rinaldi)