Daniel H. Lavezzo Jr., 83, Owner of Famed Saloon, Dies
By Douglas Martin, courtesy of The New York Times
Daniel H. Lavezzo Jr., who for more than half a century as an owner of P. J. Clarke's saloon offered patrons from ironworkers to movie stars the comforts of cold beer, a dark refuge and juicy hamburgers, died of heart failure Tuesday at his Manhattan home. He was 83.
Clarke's, on Third Avenue at 55th Street, was the setting for the movie classic The Lost Weekend, with Ray Milland, although that was filmed in 1945, four years before Mr. Lavezzo's family bought the bar. Charles R. Jackson, who wrote the novel on which the film was based, stopped by for years afterward.
He was one of many celebrities who came to Clarke's while Mr. Lavezzo owned it. Buddy Holly proposed marriage at Clarke's, and Aristotle Onassis took Lee Radziwill there years before he married Jacqueline Kennedy. Gov. Hugh L. Carey swore that he did not visit with the frequency newspapers suggested. Nat King Cole named the bacon cheeseburger "the Cadillac of burgers," a moniker that stuck. Table 23 was Frank Sinatra's any time he wanted it.
Joe Allen, who started working at Clarke's as a bartender in the early 1950's and now owns eight restaurants around the world, remembers the evening in the late 1950's when three people entered and sat at separate tables waiting for company. They were the mobster Frank Costello, Senator Hubert H. Humphrey and Marilyn Monroe.
"I thought, hmmm, this isn't bad," Mr. Allen said in a telephone interview from his home in Tuscany, Italy.
On Friday, a little after noon, a visitor found the place crowded and the jukebox playing the music of Louis Armstrong, who used to drop by with his trumpets early in the morning. Glasses clinked as people made merry in dark rooms said to have escaped a paintbrush since at least the First World War.
Jessie, a terrier who once darted across Third Avenue to pick up newspapers, sat frozen in her permanent and now dusty perch above the ladies' room. Customers had chipped in long ago to have her stuffed.
But Mr. Lavezzo was not in his usual position between the front and back room greeting customers, a task he preferred to the office chores, which his brother handles. Monday was his last day.
"He was the champ of all time," said Martin Finn, 70, a retired Off- Track Betting employee who has been coming to Clarke's for four decades. "He was Mr. New York - a magical, magical man."
He also became known as a David who prevailed over Goliath when he resisted offers to sell the property to developers who were putting up a skyscraper around it. Instead, he negotiated a 99-year lease with the developers, the Tishman Realty and Construction Company.
He received payments totaling $1.5 million in a deal that involved the family's chopping off the building's two top floors - which were never used by Clarke's - so they could be traded as air rights to allow the adjacent skyscraper to be built higher.
"The result was what you see today: like Dudley Moore posing with the New York Knicks, here is a little bit of a thing dwarfed by giant structures, but very chipper and strong," an article in GQ magazine said in 1986.
Daniel Henry Lavezzo Jr. was born in Manhattan on July 20, 1917. He grew up in Greenwich, Conn., and attended several prep schools, including Choate, where he played football with John F. Kennedy, according to his son, Daniel Henry Lavezzo III. He then entered the Navy instead of college, and after World War II pursued a variety of jobs, including selling Zenith radios in the Midwest.
He decided to join his father in his antiques business in New York. His father owned seven lots along Third Avenue, including the site of Clarke's. In 1949, Mr. Lavezzo, his father and a brother, John, bought the business.
The goal was the same as with antiques: to preserve a piece of the past. The business would combine the old bar crowd, which included late-night revelers in black tie and carpenters in overalls, with Ivy League professionals eager to relax in comfortable surroundings.
Food became more important around 1950, when city health authorities began to encourage dining in bars. In 1956, a large dining room was added in the back.
Its large oval table became the headquarters of a group of regulars who called themselves the Science Club and met every Friday for lunch. Dorothy Kilgallen, a panelist on the television show What's My Line? started the practice of bringing a mystery guest. One of the guests was Harry Belafonte, who won immediate approval by asking, "What are we meeting to overthrow?"
Mr. Allen said he began stopping at Clarke's after returning from World War II and facing an "invisible," if clearly not thirsty, future. Mr. Lavezzo suggested that he start working at the bar, in part to stem his rising bar tab. Mr. Allen began studying his boss's style.
He noticed that Mr. Lavezzo refused to use ice machines, apparently because he enjoyed the old-fashioned ritual of the iceman coming. He gave Earl Wilson and other gossip columnists free drinks, like all the other bars, but begged them not to mention Clarke's, mainly so celebrities might feel protected there. He marveled that all New York Giants football players and coaches drank without charge, only because Mr. Lavezzo was such an unabashed fan.
When Mr. Allen opened a restaurant he copied the checked tablecloths, the bare brick and other features. But he said those were not the important lessons.
"What I got from him was his point of view," Mr. Allen said.
Mr. Lavezzo dressed nattily, favoring madras sport jackets when they were in fashion, and sometimes when they were not.
Mr. Lavezzo is survived by his son and brother, one grandson and one great-grandson.
His passion was racing, breeding and betting on horses. His thoroughbred Chas Conerly, named for the Giants football player, ran well in the early 1980's.
Mr. Lavezzo's affection for betting on the horses came into play in his split-second decision to allow unaccompanied women to stand at the bar, a practice he had previously feared would encourage prostitutes. About 10 women gathered at the bar at lunchtime and demanded to be served, according to GQ.
Mr. Lavezzo was just leaving to bet the daily double. As he rushed past, the bartender asked what he should do. "Serve 'em before I miss the double!" he shouted.
Seymour Hacker, New York City Book Dealer, Dies at 83
By Roberta Smith, courtesy of The New York Times
December 24, 2000 - Seymour Hacker, whose 57th Street bookstore, Hacker Art Books, was a well-known fixture of both the art and book worlds for more than 50 years, died on Tuesday in New York. He was 83.
A small, bright-eyed man fluent in four languages, Mr. Hacker was one of the last booksellers to learn his trade from the bookmen whose stores and stands once lined Fourth Avenue between Astor Place and 14th Street. Born on the Lower East Side in 1917, he grew up in the Bronx and began haunting Fourth Avenue when he was 12. Initially he sold the booksellers expensive magazines discarded by tenants of his Bronx apartment building.
In 1937, at age 19, Mr. Hacker opened the Abbey Bookshop, a general bookstore on East Ninth Street. Two years later he joined Albert Saifer to open a book auction house at Ninth Street and Fourth Avenue. In 1941, he enlisted in the merchant marine, and spent five years buying books in any European port he visited and reselling them in New York.
Noting that fine art books were in especially great demand, he opened Hacker Art Books at 381 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village in 1946, moving uptown in 1948. Customers included Delmore Schwartz, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mr. Hacker's friend Zero Mostel.
When he first moved uptown, he added an art gallery, showing lesser- known Abstract Expressionists. In 1950, he founded a publishing line and specialized in reprints of out-of-print books. One of its few original publications was "Paul CŽzanne: Letters," edited by John Rewald, which Mr. Hacker translated.
Mr. Hacker considered himself one of "the last of the dinosaurs." He lamented the rise of megabookstores and what he saw as the degeneration of education, which he thought prevented young people with a natural inclination from acquiring the "mental apparatus" to pursue bookselling.
Despite his other ventures, he remained most attracted to the antiquarian trade. "I grew up with old books," he said, "and it sticks."
Mr. Hacker's first marriage, to Ruth Lorley, ended in divorce in 1974. He is survived by his wife, Linda; two daughters from his first marriage, Melissa Hacker and Emily Hacker, both of Manhattan; and a granddaughter.
Onofrio Ottomanelli, Who Ran a Venerated Meat Market, Dies at 83
By Daine Cardwell, courtesy of The New York Times
December 20, 2000 - Onofrio Ottomanelli,,/b> who opened a Greenwich Village butcher shop half a century ago that grew into a New York institution, died Friday at St. Vincents Hospital and Medical Center in Manhattan. He was 83.
Mr. Ottomanelli, whose motto was "live, work and trade in the Village," distinguished himself from other local butchers and won a citywide clientele by offering fresh game in addition to prime meats and poultry.
That specialty helped the store grow into a retail and wholesale business supplying homes and restaurants. It remains a feature at the original store, which has moved several times but is still on Bleecker Street.
Mr. Ottomanelli was born in Upper Manhattan in 1917 but moved back with his family to their hometown of Bari, Italy, before he was 3. There, on his grandparents' farm, he learned the butchering trade from his grandmother.
In 1937, he returned to New York and was drafted into the Army during World War II. After he was wounded and discharged, he began working with his brother Joe at their uncle's Yorkville butcher shop, later called Joe's Quality Meat Market. A few years later, he opened O. Ottomanelli & Sons on Bleecker Street.
(Ottomanelli Brothers, which includes several markets in Manhattan as well as cafes, bakeries and a mail order service, is a separate business that grew out of Joe's Quality Meat Market and is run by nephews of Mr. Ottomanelli's.)
For decades, Mr. Ottomanelli awakened before sunrise to get to the wholesale meat market by 5 a.m. to make his selections, cultivating his relationship with his suppliers.
"A lot of the suppliers would say, `Make us your first stop,' " his son Frank said, meaning that Mr. Ottomanelli would be guaranteed first pick of their meats and they would be guaranteed his business.
As O. Ottomanelli expanded, Mr. Ottomanelli encouraged his sons, Gerry, Nick, Frank, Peter, Michael and Joseph, to work in the store, teaching them to butcher by practicing trimming bones.
"He always used to say, 'Every time you cut a piece of meat, it's money,' " Frank said. "So we learned on the cheap stuff."
Mr. Ottomanelli's sons Michael and Nick have left Bleecker Street to work elsewhere in the meat industry, but the other four remain. He is also survived by a daughter, Rosemarie.
His wife, Anna, died in the mid- 1970's.
Many of his children moved away as they married and started families, but Mr. Ottomanelli remained in the Village, moving several times but staying within walking distance of the shop. His last address was 287 Bleecker Street, next to his store between Jones Street and Seventh Avenue South.
Until he was admitted to the hospital two months ago, Mr. Ottomanelli was a regular sight in the neighborhood, at the store overseeing his sons, on the street chatting with other merchants or at a restaurant drinking a beer.
Three years ago, Frank persuaded his father to let him and his brothers pay for a monthlong 80th-birthday trip to Italy, where Mr. Ottomanelli had not been for at least 20 years. Frank and his wife spent the last week of the trip with him.
"I think that was the first time in my life he ever told me I was right," Frank said.
Frank's son Matthew Ottomanelli remembered his grandfather's approach to work. "Everything had to be done the right way," he said.
The only one of Mr. Ottomanelli's 17 grandchildren to go into the meat business, Matthew was at work at the store the day of his grandfather's burial, to make sure the wholesale orders were filled properly.
"I missed his funeral to take care of my family," Matthew Ottomanelli said. "It's how he would have wanted it."
And here's the next set of more groovy obits...
There are several obit enthusiast sites out there, and each has its own unique take on obituary journalism. Here are some recommended sites you may enjoy as well.
