Gay Talese is a legendary writer who works in a singular way. While tucked into his office—which is known to all as “the bunker,” and reached through a separate entrance below his family’s townhouse, on East 61st Street—Talese mixes journalism with arts and crafts. He initially composes his articles and books on long strips of paper that he strings above his desk, making a constellation of words.
Talese’s Talk of the Town piece in this week’s magazine is about a building near his townhouse that has been home to one failed restaurant after another. And his notebook, which it would seem he has been working on for the past thirty-four years, looks more like work of an outsider artist. It’s one of many such scrapbooks he has produced over the years, using countless interviews, dogged research, a pair of scissors, and a lot of Scotch tape. Talese told me more than a few times while I was fact-checking his piece, “Andy, it’s all there. Jesus, it’s all in the notebook!”
Below, see some pages from the notebook with excerpts from Talese’s piece.
On the cover, Talese constructs an overview of the saga of 206 East Sixty-third Street, which “has long been identified as the most unpromising address in New York City for aspiring restaurant owners and chefs.”
“Since 1977, a dozen restaurants have rented the lower two floors and basement of this building, and, without exception, the various investors failed to fulfill the expectations that existed the day they signed the lease.”
The building was originally built in 1907 for twenty-thousand dollars to house Schillinger’s storage and stable building.
“The first restaurant at 206 East Sixty-third was an elegant French establishment overseen by a Grenoble-born chef who named his place Le Premier…. After the Times’ food critic Mimi Sheraton found the fish pâté ‘rubbery and bland’ and the murals ‘whimsically pornographic,’ Le Premier closed, fifteen months after it had opened, costing its investors $1.5 million.”
“The second restaurant, Bistro Pascal, opened in 1979, financed by a specialist in tax shelters, and though it lowered the prices, it continued to lose money.”
“In 1984 came Gnolo, headed by an ex-waiter from Elaine’s named Nicola Spagnolo…. His wife begged him not to do it, claiming that the building exuded ‘bad karma.’”
“In 1986, the fourth restaurant, Moon’s, was opened by the son of a wealthy bath-robe manufacturer who had an office in the Empire State Building. He lost two million dollars in two years.”
At Lolabelle, Yvonne Bell, “featured Caribbean cuisine and hired jazz combos and reggae musicians to perform, and on weekends she brought in a choir for Gospel Brunch. None of this worked.”
Another failure: “Peaches (1998-1999), part-owned by Donald Trump’s Georgia-born second wife, Marla Maples.”
On the heels of “a kosher Italian restaurant” and a “kosher Japanese steak house” came “a nonkosher barbecue place,” which also closed.
“This spring, a seventy-year-old Zen Buddhist monk named Samu Sunim spent $5.6 million to purchase the building, with the intention of converting it into a monastery…. All remnants of restaurant life have been sold or thrown out.”
