From top to bottom, 60 Warren once served New York City's restaurant industry. Every office, every square foot of this menu-worn building was occupied by restaurant employment agencies and their pirate-spirited proprietors. At its low-rent apex during the 1960's, 60 Warren Street represented nearly every food joint in Manhattan, and all the five boroughs, including that dumping ground in the distance, Staten Island.
*
The fat,
shirt-sleeved man stood inside the entrance of 60 Warren Street hoping someone
-anyone- would buy one of the two job tickets he was holding between his puffy
fingers. Just then a seeming youngster, neatly dressed in black and white
waiter's apparel, pushed through the coffee-stained, double doors. The fat man
hesitated for a sweaty second, but he's been fooled before. The kid looked too
young to know anything, much less how to work tables in the class joint
operated by the fat man's best client. But the fat man also needed to get a
waiter out to Junior’s in Brooklyn, or he’d lose that account too. "What
the hell," the fat man thought, "at least the kid’s dressed
right."
"Hey
Kid, ca’mere, you wanna work a big-money counter in Brooklyn?"
"Not
if I can help it, you have something here in the United States?"
"Yeah,
in midtown, but ya gotta know silver service."
"Don't
worry, I know, but I have to check upstairs first."
"Kid,
you'll make money and you ain't gonna get nothin’ better upstairs!"
"I
know, but I have to check."
The kid
continued on, past the building's tiny lunch counter, over scattered litter and
up the two steps onto 60 Warren Street's crowded main floor. It was 3:45 in the
afternoon and the place had the pre-dinner jitters. Agency men stood in every
one of the dozen or so office doorways waving small slips and yelling over each
other into the shifting crowd; "COOK, Wall Street! WAITRESS, uptown!
DISHWASHER, uptown! WAITER, BUSBOY, 34th Street! I NEED A COUNTERMAN, West
Village!" "Hey, Kid, you cook? I got somethin’ in the Battery!"
The
anxious men with the slips needed "extras." An extra worked one meal,
a kind of career limited to a few hours. The halls of New York City’s 60 Warren
Street were filled with individuals willing to accept this limitation, since
working extras was their career. Whether a need for short days or recurring
blackouts from one too many intimate meetings with Sir Bottle O’Scotch,
meal-to-meal employment was an extra’s waxing or waning way of life.
Countless
restaurants around the city were waiting for a “Warren Streeter” to walk
through their front doors and instantly fill in for an absent employee. A
missing waiter or waitress meant stretching a station into chaos. A missing
cook meant flushing money down the drain. New York City is not the place for
laid back restaurateurs, except those sprinting headfirst into bankruptcy. The
more solvent-minded preferred calling Warren Street, rather than a Chapter-7
lawyer.
This
particular Tuesday afternoon was no exception. As the Kid continued down the
hall past walls cluttered with cork boards pinned with hastily scribbled job
offerings, a man stepped from the crowd and grabbed his arm.
"Kid,
I have something for you!"
"Hey,
Al, how you doin’?" the Kid responded.
"Great,
but the Hawaiian needs two waiters."
"Up
in Times Square?"
"Yeah,
you'll clean up runnin' that tourist-teriyaki around for a few hours!"
"Jeez,
Al, I promised Marv I'd check in upstairs."
"Listen,
see if you can help me out on this one; I've had the account two days and I'll
sure-as-heck lose’em if I don't deliver."
"The
halls are crawling with waiters, Al."
"Yeah,
but I can't send just anyone, not after what happened last Friday."
"What
happened last Friday?" the Kid asked.
"Mundlin,
you know, down the hall, he had the account and sent them a waiter who nearly
burnt the bloody place down!"
"What?"
"Yeah,
the fool he sent up there is coming out of the kitchen holding up like ten
brochette swords drenched, I mean really d-r-e-n-c-h-e-d, with that flambé crap.
Well, he decides to light up just as he’s going into the dining room and, POOF,
the flames hit those Hong Kong curtains and took off to the moon! All bloody
hell broke loose! I'll tell ya, if the Chinese dishwasher hadn't grabbed the
fire extinguisher they wouldn't be anyone's account right now."
"Jeez!"
the Kid exclaimed.
"Yeah,
and get this; the owner called Mundlin the next day and told him he was going
to push him in front of the Grand Central Shuttle the next time he sees him!"
Al said, breaking smile.
"Al,
who the heck Mundlin send up there?"
"Iggy."
"Iggy?
Iggy-The-Torch!" laughed the kid, "What's he, crazy!"
"No,
dead!" they both laughed.
The
decibel level around them was increasing like an unanswered dinner bell...
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