RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,269
(fish house road)
My wanderings - of a sort -
took me to all kinds of places.
'Manahattan' was mine, or at
least I felt that way, in a sort of
Whitmanesque and ambulatory
fashion. Unwittingly witty, I
waltzed. [There could be a few
interesting and interconnected
pun-items in that, but I'll let
them pass]. Suffice it to say
that, once in the 1860's, at
the corners of what are now
Bleecker and Broadway, was
once an underground saloon
called Pfaff's, to which Walt
Whitman and numerous others
made nearly nightly pilgrimages.
It was a writerly kind of place,
a few notables, names you might
recognize today - if you were of
that ilk and interest. The place
had its own, entire, roster of
characters - drunks, poets,
schemers, roustabouts, and those
curiously in between the otherwise
dark panels of mid-1800's NYC.
It was long gone, yes, of course,
by 1967, yet I, knowing precisely
where it had been, the location
still standing, and with it some
occasional old panels of entryway,
below the sidewalk glass, etc.,
would often just stand there, in
my own way haunting a place long
gone. What an interesting tale I
could weave, even then, and as
if out of my own thin air. I've
always been like that.
-
One of the more curious denizens
of that place was a female! An
actress of the day who slept
around some, pranced and
prattled too, with the best of
them. She bore a child out of
wedlock to the American pianist
(also famed) Louis Moreau Gottschalk,
whose music you're probably heard,
somewhere, and didn't even know it.
The actress called herself Ada Clare,
and it was meant to bring on the
punning aspect of saying 'I declare'
for all her scandal and licentiousness.
[Licentiousness and lasciviousness
have always been two amazing and
'American' words to me. Along with
the word 'profligate']. Ada died of
rabies, having been bitten by a dog
in her agent's office. So much for
canine incisors, I guess.
-
Anyway, I've gotten far afield.
The idea here was Fish House
Road. Yes, somehow I found
that just out of NYC, over in
the beginnings of the old Jersey
Meadows (it was than pig farms,
slop and slaughterhouses), and,
yes, fisheries or fish-rendering
plants - filthy and smelly and
dirty - which handled some of
the daily catch and distribution
orders and trucking to any of the
2,000 restaurants and eateries
dotting the metro area. The big
secret, of course, being that no
word of this was ever to be
mentioned to the customers or
diners of the many high-toned
establishments which partook.
Had the word ever filtered out
to places such as, say, an old
Delmonico's or some steak house
or fish-fry, about the 'Jersey' fish
and food originating in such
horrid quarters, the world there
would have quickly ended the
capital idea of 'dining out' with
all of fine propriety of snooty
decorum or, even, 'Gilded Age'
stupid pomp.
-
Somehow, I got to Fish House Road
once, maybe by accident, and then
always returned. Back then it was
an incredibly unlettered world and'
location : wooden shacks, trucks
leaning on bad springs, old ambulances
and rickety vans being used to store
supplies and non-perishables. The
freezing and the refrigerating of
the foodstuffs - I would imagine -
was kept all in good order. Ice House
Road, or Fish House Road, it would
have hardly mattered back in those
slower and more deliberate days.
When everything was still far-nearer
to origins.
-
It's all mostly gone now, though there
still remains a 'Fish House Road' -
maps and a few road signs still make
the mention. A preponderance of
newer highways, off and on ramps,
trestles and overpasses, have fairly
well destroyed the place and sundered
the heart and soul of whatever might
once have been there. Today's world
has been built for light and swift,
while all of this older Fish House
Road world, in the same manner as
Pfaff's, had been built for the slow
and more reflective patterning of an
older world. Where people talked
and exchanged goods and ideas, not
brand names, catch-phrase slogans,
and debates of the looming wrongs
all around us. Trite, Tedious, and
Moribund, by contrast, is today's
law firm of the moment.
-
I declare.
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