Neary’s, the great pub that Jimmy Neary opened in 1967 at 348 E. 57th St., closed its doors for the final time on Friday, and it’s no wonder people say it’s the end of an era — we’re sad to see Neary’s legendary Irish coffee and lamb chops go, but we’re not at all worried about the era.
Every day in New York City, some “era” ends, and the sooner we stop whining about an irretrievable, inaccurately recalled past, the better for eight million of us.
An era supposedly ended when the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to LA, when the electronics store was replaced by the World Trade Center, when Studio 54 closed, when the Trans-Bronx Expressway destroyed the southern half of the Bronx, when the music store disappeared from West 48th Street, and when Lord & Taylor was replaced by WeWork.
Now, lamenting sentimental landmarks long gone is entirely appropriate as a matter of the heart, and as a sentimental slacker, I miss Nedick’s every time I pass the corner of Broadway and West 34th Street.
What is not appropriate is to use any incidental losses to fuel a broader, false nostalgia: the idea that the city was once more human, more colorful, more civilized than it is today.
Ah, I miss the days of playing stickball in the streets, or the truly bohemian Greenwich Village! Or the netherworld of downtown clubs in the 1970s and 1980s!
An essay by Roger Friedman for his website Showbiz 411 represents the entire socio-cultural perspective: “Time flies in New York,” Friedman wrote about Neary’s closure. “All the great places are gone or on the verge of closing. The real heyday is pretty much over.”
He’s not wrong that many beloved buildings and businesses have disappeared, but what is “real” to some is to others an old, tired business that has run out of steam, like almost all businesses eventually do.
To sentimentalize New York’s past is to romanticize its real past, which was never as wholesome or pure as the late Pete Hamill would have us believe, even in his beloved 20th-century Brooklyn, with its hard-working Irish, Italians and second-generation Jews.
The real Gotham of the 1930s, for example, was different from the white-tie-and-tailcoat fantasy depicted in a film made 3,000 miles away in California, and the disconnect wasn’t just economic.
My grandfather recalled with embarrassment that a few blocks from my childhood home in Brooklyn, my compatriots would jeer at their few black neighbors by praising Mussolini’s mechanized conquest of Ethiopia’s ragtag army.
When Jimmy Neary poured his first pint in 1967, New York City was on the brink of a “doom loop,” not the vicious cycle we imagine today, but an all-too-real one: Middle-class residents were fleeing, race riots were bringing about “long, hot summers,” and Times Square, for those ready to acknowledge it, was degenerating into decadent anarchy.
Everyone fondly remembers the opulence of the 1960s, with its charming, mostly black-music-filled watering holes and jazz clubs like Neary’s, but New York City was much more segregated then than it is today, and not just in Sutton Place, the affluent neighborhood where Neary’s drew its large clientele.
Popular Pinterest page “35 Stunning Color Photographs of Daily Life in 1960s New York“Black Face” is incredible in a way that the title never intended: In crowded photographs of Fifth Avenue, Grand Central, and Times Square, there is only one black face to be found.
I miss Neary’s as much as anyone else and I cherished the Irish comfort that came through to me from Jimmy and from the faces on the walls of Hugh Carey, Bill Clinton and other powerful people who actually passed through many times.
It was a mecca for well-dressed diners wanting to enjoy burgers and fish and chips, and I never went there without wearing a suit or at least a navy blazer.
It’s where I had my first date 44 years ago with the woman who is now my wife. During the 1978 newspaper union strike, I went to Neary’s at 10pm and drank alone in the red leather corner booth (which was still there last week) before my midnight-to-dawn picketing shift.
I too miss my old neighborhood in Neary. I lived there for 13 years and watched Greta Garbo stroll the sidewalk from my apartment on East 52nd Street.
But historians, bloggers, and everyone who laments the dire state of New York needs to take a life reevaluation.
Long live Nearys! But when it comes to confronting modern challenges like street disorder, housing shortages and government dysfunction, false memories don’t help.
To win, you must forget the past and believe that the best is yet to come.
