Everyone Went to Nick's

Abstract

This was New York in the elegant eighties and these were the Giants, fashioned in elegance, playing on the Polo Grounds, then at 110th Street and Fifth Avenue. It was the New York of the brownstone house and the gaslit streets, of the top hat and the hansom cab, of oysters and champagne and perfecto cigars, of Ada Rehan and Oscar Wilde and the young John L. Sullivan. It also was the New York of the Tenderloin and the Bowery, of the slums and the sweat shops, of goats grazing among the shanties perched on the rocky terrain of Harlem.1Toots Shor ran New York City's best-known watering hole of the 1940s and '50s, where Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason were regulars and Joe DiMaggio ate two or three meals per week. When they were not at Shor's, Mickey Mantle and his Yankee buddies hung out at the Stork Club, the Plantation Room, Mama Leone's, or Jack Dempsey's joint, with the old champ often decorating the window by sitting at a nearby booth.2 In 1894 Michael T. Nuf Ced McGreevey, a devoted baseball fan, named his new Boston saloon Third Base because it was the last place one stopped before going home. By the turn of the century his establishment was a favorite of diehard fans known as the Royal Rooters. Its walls were covered with baseball pictures from McGreevey's own collection and memorabilia from friends like Cy Young.3 McGreevey's claim today to being America's First Sport Bar, however, ignores the real holder of that honor: Uncle Nick Engel's Home Plate, in New York City, just off Broadway near Madison Square. For a decade beginning in the mid-1880s, boxers, billiard players, racing men, actors, writers, playboys, and aristocrats staggered and swaggered through Nick's place, where one might bump into Mark Twain or Maurice Barrymore at the bar, or a member of the visiting Chicago White Stockings feasting on one of Nick's steak dinners upstairs. During the baseball season, managers and magnates made a point of visiting Nick's and many deals originated within its walls. Above all, Nick's Home Plate was the hangout of the New York Giants during the club's glittering first era of greatness. Team owner John B. Day and manager James Mutrie were regulars. Pictures of Giants players adorned the cafe's walls-Johnny Ward, Mickey Welch, Buck Ewing-as well as photos of out-of-town favorites such as Michael King Kelly (with a telegram from the great player to Nick tucked in the corner announcing victory in an important game) and Engel's pals from the New York stage. Nick's son Freddie, the team's batboy, was not only supposed to retrieve errant balls and bring good luck to the team on the diamond. He also delivered love notes from Giants players to adoring female fans.4Working His Way UpNick was a perambulating trade mark for the damp brand of joy that that fluxes in his Gotham glassware emporium, wrote the Washington Post.5 He was born on October 31, 1844, in New York City, the son of Adam Engel, a carpenter. The senior Engel apprenticed Nicholas and his elder brother Adam to a woodcarver, but at the beginning of the Civil War the brothers left the trade and began opening oysters at the Philadelphia Hotel at Battery Place and Greenwich Street in lower Manhattan. They worked there for seven years before moving on to North Moore and Greenwich Street as bartenders. Nick married the former Teresa Rieger in 1868.6In 1872 the brothers went into business for themselves, opening an oyster and chop house on Sixth Avenue between 28th and 29th Streets in the heart of the infamous Tenderloin district. Nearby on 27th were houses of vice such as the Heart of Maryland, the Tuxedo, the Cairo Dance Hall, and Buckingham Palace, a single room two stories high that had crammed into its confines a shooting gallery, a full-scale restaurant, and, behind curtained booths, a brothel.7 Soon the reputation of the Engel brothers' place grew as a place of good food and convivial atmosphere. The brothers parted ways in 1877, with Adam moving to the Clifton, at 35th Street and Fifth Avenue. …