Sunday, November 8, 2009

Site Of Maruffi's Bar, 1937


an excerpt from a nytimes article from 1996 that mentions Maruffi's Bar on the corner of Baxter and Bayard

LIVES;Bar, None, By Madison Smartt Bell, Published: Sunday, March 3, 1996
The Spring Lounge, one of the last two neighborhood bars in Little Italy (aside from private social clubs), is up for sale, which makes me scared. For years I've used the place as a rendezvous-resting place and portable office; it was also a virtual residence for a character in my first novel. The Spring Lounge isn't the only neighborhood bar I've used to shelter both myself and people who populate my books, but lately it seems as if they've all been going down like birds shot off a wire.
For sure, there is no shortage of bars in Manhattan, but the new ones are too bright, have too much glass. The bartenders are so brisk they ought to be serving double lattes instead of the waters of Lethe. In fact, you don't have to go thirsty half so long if what you want is chichi coffee -- soon enough there'll be a Starbucks on every corner, but how much enlightenment is all this caffeine producing? Coffee or booze, there's almost no one left to drink it but the gentry, and the trouble with those sorts of clients is they're too much like oneself.
The first bar I ever entered in Manhattan was at the corner of Houston Street and the Bowery. There was a blizzard; I was 20 years old, shuffling down from Chelsea in leaky cowboy boots in search of a Greenwich Village that had long ceased to exist outside of my imagination. Nothing was open and no one was on the street, no one interested in wading through knee-deep snow except for me and of course the homeless, then known as winos. When Bleecker Street ran out, I turned right and followed the winos to where they were going. Like most of the Bowery bars I later patronized, this one didn't seem to require a name. The tables and chairs were legless, which didn't matter, as the customers were sleeping in stacks on the floor, the bottommost snuffling in pools of filthy water from melted snow. There was also a bathtub-size pool table, where I was able to earn some money. I was the youngest person there by at least 20 years, but no one objected to my presence. I felt oddly at home; it was not exactly a welcoming place, but entirely uncritical. You could stay there as long as you liked. There are no bars left on the Bowery now. The last one closed at the end of 1993, foreshadowing within several weeks the death of Charles Bukowski. A nice coincidence.
Because I lived in Brooklyn, I used Manhattan bars as staging areas, and Maruffi's, on Baxter Street at the corner of Columbus Park, was a good one for sorties into either SoHo or TriBeCa. Because of its proximity to the Tombs, Maruffi's was a place where many cops unwound, and the first time I went there, they were relaxing by means of a large general fistfight. One officer (out of uniform) came over to the only table left standing, where I and my young lady companion demurely sat behind small, stout glasses of bourbon, to apologize; his friends, he said, were "a little excited." One of his friends clubbed him over the head with a shoe, and our officer roared like a bear, knocked him down, then jumped on the bar and lowered his pants to moon the entire assembly. When he had rebuttoned, he came over and apologized to us again with even more formal courtesy. But Maruffi's has been closed for years; its space is now a second-floor dining room for the restaurant next door.
Besides the cop bars, there were others in Chinatown that I will not name because they were almost exclusively the resorts of criminals -- Chinese criminals, but the occasional white guy might be tolerated. These venues were in basements and tended to be more or less unmarked. You could drink Tsing Tao beer and Chinese vodka there and count on meeting no one that you knew. Occasionally these places would be swept clean by opposing gangsters with Kalishnikovs, but such celebrations were acceptably rare. The phones were good: a good bar phone must be adequately secluded from the noisemakers, yet near enough to the counter that you can watch your coat. No more bars like these in Chinatown. Since the last of them was boarded up for tax evasion, I wonder how the cops and criminals know how to find one another.

from Joe Bruno
I used to "live" in Maruffi's, when I lived across the street on White Street, and after. At least 2, 3 nights a week. Forlini's was more of a restaurant. Maruffi's was a man's bar. Very few women ventured in. I played on their bar softball team in the mid 60's.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

LOL ! omg maruffi's-and over on Bayard St Jeannies,and what a place for wayward asians-cannot divulge the how and whys of either one but was thinking about a few misspent mornings over at Maruffi's and bangin into Jeannies a couple of times as well.
Guess they're gone the same as we are.

Unknown said...

That was my grandfather's bar I would love to hear more about it!!!

Unknown said...

That was my grandfather's bar I would love to hear more about it!!!

Anonymous said...

Kevin Hall
I worked for the old phone company in the neighborhood out of a KV storefront in the 70s and 80s and we stopped here occasionally for lunch.It was a fun place, but Patrick Henry's on Monroe was a lot closer and we only stopped here when we had work nearby. We had large tie wraps before they were commercially available and during one lunch hour a cop knowing that we carried them asked us for a few. He was out of a precinct nearby Central Park and was telling one of his bear sized fellow cop's that when he had to run down multiple perps he liked to use the tie wraps so he didn't have to be just down to his handcuffs and would tie wrap perps to anything that was stationary. His fellow cop buddy didn't believe they would hold him and allowed himself to be be wrapped to the brass bar rail. He tried every move that houdini ever used to get out of a straight jacket after brute force failed repeatedly and still couldn't get free. At that point he asked to be cut loose because he had to be in court at 100 Center in a matter of minutes. He pleaded and cried,but his fellow cuts didn't cut him loose until about 3 minutes before the top of the hour, leaving him to do his best overweight Carl Lewis imitation to get back before the judge was seated. Entertaining place, too bad most of them are gone

Unknown said...

That is my uncle's bar