Chain of Custody
There’s an ashtray at the end of the bar at Fresh Kills Bar in Williamsburg. The first time I saw it I stopped mid-sip. Is this legit?
It was. Whoopi Goldberg gave it to them when they opened.
I asked Lauren McLaughlin, who has been behind the bar there since the beginning. She told me part of the story. I figured out the rest this morning, a decade or more after I first walked in.
I’m in my early forties. I probably shouldn’t know what the Stork Club is, right?
I graduated college in 2005, spent two years in LA, and moved back to New York still figuring out what kind of New Yorker I wanted to be. I grew up on Long Island, so “the city,” as we bridge and tunnel folk call it, wasn’t foreign to me, but living there was different. You had to decide what version of it you wanted.
Part of my answer involved a blazer and a tie I rarely had occasions to wear. Thankfully, there was Restaurant Week at the 21 Club once a year, which was the only way I could afford it. It offered me an occasion to wear that blazer, still a requirement for entry at the time. It felt like cosplay, but I came to understand it wasn’t.
The 21 Club was a museum of itself by then, a relic, and I loved it for exactly that reason. The Pegu Club and Flatiron Lounge were constants for me. Mad Men was everywhere. A Continuous Lean, Michael Williams’s menswear blog about heritage and considered things, was a bible of sorts. Rittenhouse rye was getting hard to find, though I couldn’t have told you why. I just knew bartenders wanted it and that when you could get it the Old Fashioned tasted different.
For many of us, there was a sensibility in the air at that moment. A return to things that were made carefully, worn deliberately, drunk properly. I was too young to articulate any of it. I just knew I was drawn to places and objects that felt like they had been somewhere before I got there. Places that seemed, perhaps, anachronistic and were better for it.
I absorbed the Stork Club somewhere in all of that. Osmosis, mostly. Then I read Ralph Blumenthal’s book about it in 2009 and the osmosis became something more like understanding.
Which is why, a few years later, I stopped mid-sip when I saw the ashtray.
Why did Whoopi Goldberg have a Stork Club ashtray to give anyone? She had finished narrating a documentary about Walter Winchell, the radio gossip columnist who ran American celebrity culture from the 1930s through the 1950s. He had fifty million listeners at his peak. Publicists lined up outside trying to get their clients into his column. The kind of man who could end a career before you finished your drink. His office was Table 50 at the Stork Club. The ashtray came from that room. Whoopi spent months living inside that world and when Fresh Kills opened she gave them the thing she had.
Winchell to Whoopi to Williamsburg. The object traveled.
My grandfather was a Toots Shor’s man. He knew Bernard “Toots” Shor personally, which sounds like old man mythology until you understood who he actually knew.
There’s a family story. Maybe lore is more appropriate. Late 1950s, sometime before 1961. My grandfather, my father, and Art Modell are in what passed for a luxury box at the Polo Grounds, watching the Giants play the Cleveland Browns. My father was maybe twelve. At some point Modell turns to my Dad and says, “Larry, I think I’m going to buy that team.”
Bullshit, right?
Art Modell bought the Cleveland Browns in 1961. He moved them to Baltimore in 1996, renamed them the Ravens, and won the Super Bowl five years later. My grandfather received a personal fax thanking him for his support. The kid who heard that comment at the Polo Grounds was in his fifties by then. We still have the fax. Real enough.
My grandfather wasn’t much of a drinker, more of a cigar guy, but he was in those rooms. The Stork Club came up when I asked him about his spots. Different crowd than Toots Shor’s, he said. Toots was athletes and sportswriters and guys who knew guys. My grandfather knew guys. The Stork Club was the Hollywood people, the gossip column set, Winchell’s table.
My grandfather died in 2016. The Stork Club closed in 1965. Winchell is gone. Toots Shor’s is a midtown office building. But the ashtray was at Fresh Kills Bar, and Lauren knew exactly where it came from, and I know because I sat down one night and asked.
Lauren doesn’t remember that conversation. Why would she? I never forgot it. I’ve been back plenty of times since, different nights, different occasions, different people across the bar. The ashtray was always there at the end. Until it wasn’t.
I reached out to Lauren before I published this. The ashtray isn’t there anymore. Richie, the owner, took it home. People kept trying to steal it.
Which tells you something. Enough people sat at that bar, saw that object, felt whatever I felt, and wanted to take it with them. Or maybe they were just drunk.
The photo of the original owner. The house rules placard. And sometimes, if you're lucky, a vintage Stork Club ashtray.
Go to the bar. Be whatever version of yourself you want to be, but go to the bar.