Memories belly up to bar: [CITY Edition]

Abstract

Last week I made a sentimental journey home - to Costello's, a saloon that has catered to generations of New York City reporters.

In the dim room, the long darkwood bar was only one-deep with customers. I didn't know any of them, although there was a familiar face behind the bar.

Costello's has a dining room with wall murals painted (to pay off his bar bill) back in the early '30s by James Thurber. The great cartoonist was part of the group that formed New Yorker magazine, a few doors away from the saloon.

Last week I made a sentimental journey home - to Costello's, a saloon that has catered to generations of New York City reporters.

In the dim room, the long darkwood bar was only one-deep with customers. I didn't know any of them, although there was a familiar face behind the bar.

``Haven't seen you for a while,`` said the bartender, a thick, gloomy man. Then he thought a minute and called off my last name.

For a few moments that was gratifying. Then I got uneasy. When a bartender remembers your name after eight years, it means only one thing: You got out of town and off to St. Petersburg just in time.

Everybody knows you can't go home again. If you're a journalist, you can't even go back to your favorite neighborhood bar again. Chances are it's no longer a haven for reporters but for clear-eyed people who work out in health clubs.

Costello's has a dining room with wall murals painted (to pay off his bar bill) back in the early '30s by James Thurber. The great cartoonist was part of the group that formed New Yorker magazine, a few doors away from the saloon.

The murals are in black and white and much like the work Thurber was doing for the magazine at that time. They are full of large, angry women, small, cowed men and regretful dogs.

Gone (only into retirement, fortunately) is Herbie, the World's Worst Waiter. His memory still hovers over Costello's in a framed story from the New York Daily News' Sunday magazine saluting this stocky, genial incompetent.

Generations of reporters watched over Herbie and learned not to mind his mixing-up their orders, his spilling their drinks, his rather clean thumb in their mashed potatoes. Herbie himself took pride in being immortalized in the newspaper he loved.

The other diminished Daily News landmark is the saloon known as Louie's East. There was never a Louie's West.

Now there is no Louie's at all. A couple of years ago, the grungy little bar in the two-story building behind the newspaper's skyscraper disappeared. It was replaced by a business endeavor that calls itself ``Gourmet Deli.``

Louie's East was like an old-fashioned neighborhood bar - in a very tough neighborhood. To wear a necktie into the place was to risk having somebody want to start a fistfight with you.

It was less a reporter's bar than a pressman's, a printer's, a paper handler's or a deliverer's. Reporters, a necktie-wearing breed, were safe enough and accepted if they unbuttoned the top buttons of their shirts and slipped their ties down a few inches. This showed they only wore ties as a job uniform, like the pressman's coveralls.

It was at Louie's I first heard the term ``a-belly-up-to-the-bar-with-the-boys-girl.`` This meant the kind of woman reporter (few New York blue collar unions, then or now, accept female workers) who bought her own drinks, cussed effortlessly and wasn't looking for romance, at least not from these guys.

Now the belly-up-to-the-bar women reporters have gone the way of their male counterparts - and it's not toward the old saloons. For reporters, like so many other Americans, don't hang out in bars like they used to. Neither do I, and it's probably just as well.

Still, I will always think fondly of Louie and Herbie the terrible waiter and the New Weston Bar farther uptown, across the street from Newsweek. In those days, we used to have a routine we called the ``progressive lunch.``

A progressive lunch began with two or three drinks at the standup bar at the New Weston. Then we went to a little diner called Hamburger Heaven, ordered cheeseburgers and cups of coffee and took them back to the office to be devoured at our desks while writing stories for the magazine.

I couldn't do that now. Maybe nobody could. They bred real men and real belly-up-to-the-bar women in those days.