Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

  Bill went off in 1871 to become an Albany alderman, street commissioner, and sheriff, but retained the partnership with his brother until 1886, when they split. Bill went over a block to Maiden Lane and Broadway and opened his own restaurant, which soon became Keeler’s European Hotel (for men only), and it was such a success that Sheriff Bill eventually bought half the square block and built a place that became a cynosure of the good life, the sporting life.

  In time the hotel included a bowling alley, pool and billiard rooms, a barbershop with four baths, private dining rooms upstairs where families might dine or where hanky-pankers might pank privately. A restaurant for ladies was added, but the ladies were not allowed to stay overnight. Bill built a lake to furnish ice for his guests, bought a poultry farm to keep his kitchen stocked, and bought an oyster bed in Lynnhaven, Virginia.

  The earliest menus I’ve turned up, one dated from March 12, 1897, and another from January 5, 1902, consist of four pages of dense, small-print listings (eighty-seven entries in 1902 on ways to eat clams and oysters: rockaways and rocky points, lynnhavens, bluepoints, littleneck clams). In 1838 on its pioneer menu, Delmonico’s offered only five oyster dishes plus oyster soup. The oysters were menu headline items at Keeler’s: LYNNHAVEN HALF SHELL 40–30 [cents], it read in 1897. OYSTERS NOW ON HAND was the 1902 banner, in type larger than the name of the hotel’s.

  The pattern continued at Keeler’s State Street after Bill Keeler’s hotel burned down. In 1932 and 1944 oysters were the main attraction: BLUE-POINTS, 45 CENTS, it read, the same price both years.

  Politicians and celebrities came in great flow to Keeler’s Hotel. (Jack couldn’t remember any of them. “I was never interested in that. I was in the kitchen.”) They consumed oysters by the barrel—five thousand oysters, three thousand clams signed for by Sheriff Bill in a three-day period in October 1914; that is, eight thousand mollusks in thirteen barrels, at a total cost of eighty dollars, or about one cent apiece wholesale.

  “Nobody else handled them like Keeler’s,” said Jack. Other places had insufficient turnover on oysters, and sophisticated Albany oyster eaters demanded they be served fresh, as they always were at Keeler’s—three oystermen working as fast as they could to answer the demand. A few years ago Jack estimated he could open fifteen clams in a minute, twelve oysters in two minutes. He works with a stabber, a long knife that was brought to Albany by the Crisfield oystermen. For anybody who has tried to open an oyster for the first time, six a minute seems like Olympic speed.

  Alas, it’s nothing of the sort. The oyster-opening record, according to Guinness, is held by Douglas Brown, who on April 29, 1975, at Christchurch, New Zealand, opened one hundred oysters in three minutes and one second. Guinness lists and knows no clam-opening record, which is almost shameful. But my guess is that it would be at least double the oyster figure. Clam eating, on the other hand, is laggardly. The record is 424 littlenecks, out of shell, in eight minutes, or fifty-three per minute, by Dave Barnes at Port Townsend Bay, Washington, on May 3, 1975. This compares with the oyster-eating record—held by Ron Hansen of Sydney, Australia—of 250 oysters, out of shell, in 2:52.33, or 87.0413 oysters per minute. My theory is that clams need a bit of a chew, but that the silky oyster slides swiftly and sleekly down the gullet.

  I have not a whit of doubt that Jack could have established the speed record in his youth had that been his goal. There are unplumbed depths to Albany people: the road not taken. But Jack had another ambition: he wanted to become a waiter. “Ah,” said Sheriff Bill, “so you want to rob the customers, too.” And so Jack went to work nights, a dollar a day plus the nickel and dime tips. By 1913 his fortune had climbed to $400, and with a fellow oysterman, Bill Evans, who knew oysters but had no money, he opened an oyster bar and wholesale delivery business to other restaurants, up the hill from Keeler’s Hotel, on Lodge Street. Jack and Evans didn’t get along; so Jack left and opened a hole-in-the-wall restaurant—four tables, a kitchen, and a marble oyster bar—back down the hill at Beaver and Grand streets.

  Jack married Jane Millerstein from Troy in 1916 and began to prosper. Jane was cashier, Jack counterman. When a customer came in, Jack would take the order, call it through a partition—“One oyster fry”—then run into the kitchen and cook it. He took over a piano store next door and broke through the walls to expand. He took over a coal company that closed, put in private dining rooms, expanded his menu, and by 1937 employed seven waiters, five cooks, two checkers in the kitchen, an oysterman, and was selling eight hundred to one thousand oysters every other day. That year, ’37, an Albany bank offered Jack the mortgage on a failed restaurant at 42 State Street, a block over from where Keeler’s Hotel used to be and a few doors down from John Keeler’s restaurant at 56 State. Jack moved in and has been there ever since, now seating 140 in the dining room, a bar adjacent where you wait for a table, banquet rooms upstairs; and during August, when transiency is at its peak, Jack’s Oyster House serves five hundred meals a day, not including banquets. Jack’s sons, Arnold and Marvin, run the place, and Jack’s grandson, Brad, is apprenticing.

  Photographic blowups of the town when Sheriff Bill was a presence adorn the walls. Jack was always a physical presence, working eight, ten hours a day until pneumonia and other ills hit him, and when we met he was sitting out front in his black suit and red tie, longing for last year’s pep and yearning to get back to the kitchen with his apron and stabber. “I’d love to get in there. It runs good, but it’d run a whole lot better if I was there.”

  Jack used to go on vacation to Miami Beach, stay a month. “But it got monotonous sitting around doing nothing.” So he quit vacations. “All I did was take care of my business. I always wanted to be here, never wanted to be away.”

  Jack’s life embodies the golden platitude that America is a republic of equals, the land of opportunity. But even during America’s incipient time Jefferson spoke of our “aristocracy of merit,” and that seems closer to the truth of what Jack reveals to us. Bill Keeler and Jack Rosenstein, like the Walrus and the Carpenter—Bill with his big mustache, Jack with his tools—led a parade of oysters out of the nineteenth century through most of our own century, and Jack’s sons are keeping the parade going toward the twenty-first.

  We know that some things changed along the parade route. Bill Keeler’s sons turned the hotel’s Broadway dining room into a cabaret, the first in Albany, and an orchestra and entertainers played to turn-away crowds. “The crowds, you’d have to see it to believe it,” said Jack. “But the old man didn’t like it. Didn’t care for that kind of business.”

  So Bill Keeler retired, and in 1918 he died in Virginia, nearer, my oyster, to thee. His hotel burned on the morning of June 17, 1919, and a fireman lost his life, but more than a hundred guests got out safely. The hotel had had a small fire in an earlier year, and an employee called Bill Keeler at home to tell him. “Why call me?” said Bill. “Why don’t you call the fire department?”

  I told Jack I was trying to personify the value he represented, and I asked him what he thought was the key element of his life’s work. “That it’s been done right,” he snapped back.

  I ate a dozen oysters while we talked, bluepoints, which Jack always loved best, except maybe for rocky points, which are larger, and there is therefore more of them to love. Did Jack love oysters the way I did?

  “No, I never ate them. I can eat a clam, but I don’t care for them much either. But I can’t eat an oyster. I tried to cultivate a taste for them, but I couldn’t.”

  “Yet you and the oyster,” I said to Jack. “You were partners all your life.”

  Jack laughed at that. “That’s right,” he said.

  “Did you ever think about what the oyster means? What it is?”

  “Nah. Never did.”

  Nevertheless, there goes Jack, there goes Bill, walking up from Maiden Lane and Broadway—up to Lodge Street, and then down to Beaver and Grand, and then over to State. A hundred million oysters are following their trail, or is it two
hundred million? Well, it’s a lot.

  “It seems a shame,” the Walrus said,

  “To play them such a trick.

  After we’ve brought them out so far,

  And made them trot so quick!”

  The Carpenter said nothing but,

  “The butter’s spread too thick!”

  “O Oysters,” said the Carpenter,

  “You’ve had a pleasant run!

  Shall we be trotting home again?”

  But answer came there none—

  And this was scarcely odd, because

  They’d eaten every one.

  “The question now with oysters is,” said Jack, “will you be able to get them? It’s hard to get oysters, but that’s the business. Will you get them?”

  1985

  The Capitol:

  A Quest for Grace and Glory*

  We were sitting on the steps that lead down into Capitol Park west, making notes on the hundreds of people who had been here during the lunch hour on this perfect summer day of 1985. The great office buildings on Capitol Hill, Albany’s acropolis, had disgorged their hungry, sun-seeking denizens, who quickly opened their lunch bags or lined up at the score of sidewalk pushcarts to buy fruit, and egg rolls, and hot dogs, and they lolled on these steps and on the park’s sweet greensward until time and the egg rolls ran out. Then they went away.

  Now the day was making long shadows, and all that remained of the lunchers was a bit of their spoor: grease spots on the steps. Three young boys rode up on bikes, and two of them rolled their trousers and waded into the park’s small pool, where minigeysers rise and fall in season. The boys were questing for coins that profligate dreamers sometimes toss into the water along with their secret wishes. The third boy approached the steps and asked if the man taking notes was a reporter.

  “Sort of,” he was told.

  “You look like one. What you writin’ about, the buildings?”

  “About this big one, the Capitol. It’s very famous and very old.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yep. They started to build it 122 years ago.”

  “Wow!” said the boy. “That’s almost a century.”

  Excess beyond comprehension: precisely.

  The Capitol is, in all respects, a presence beyond human scale. Inside it or outside it, the eye is gluttonous, the brain festive, the imagination overtaxed. It is the architectural snowball that became an avalanche, exceeding all expectations except those of the men who first conceived it, who wanted the symbols of America to inhere in it; and so they do. What also inheres is the monumentalism of one of the last load-bearing masonry buildings in America and a sprawl of superlatives that have become its historical baggage.

  There is, for instance, the cost of building it. Governor Lucius Robinson (1877–1879), a frugal man, called it “a public calamity … without parallel for extravagance and folly.” By 1899, after it had been a-building for thirty-six years, the legislature refused to spend any more money finishing it and declared it complete. Cost to that point: $25 million, the most ever expended on a building in North America. But it was hardly complete, and the new governor in 1899, Theodore Roosevelt, immediately undertook alterations that by 1902 proved to be not only unsatisfactory but dangerous. Alterations are still going on today, as is the effort to finish it.

  It will never be finished; is, indeed, unfinishable. But it demands eternal attention, deserves completion or restoration of certain splendid parts, and calls out indignantly for elimination of the abuses that have been perpetrated through the years on its glorious corpus. If all the words written in, about, and because of the existence of this corpus were suddenly turned into raindrops, the entire population of the world would be awash in a deluge of vowels and consonants. This book adds a few drops to that deluge, with reverence and beauty: the reverence in these words, the beauty in the photographs that follow them.

  The American Architect and Building News in 1881 called the Capitol “one of the greatest buildings of the century.” An early critic said of the. Senate Chamber (the work of the eminent architect H. H. Richardson and one of his upcoming associates, Stanford White) that it was “the most beautiful room in the United States.” Another critic wrote that the Chamber “surpasses in magnificence any legislative hall on this continent.”

  The Assembly Chamber, the madly bold design of Leopold Eidlitz, a major architect and theorist to his contemporaries, was described by a critic in Scribner’s Monthly in 1879 as “the most monumental and most honorable work of public architecture this country has to show for itself.” But it proved to be structurally unsound, stones fell onto the desks of fearful legislators, and after only nine years the great ceilings with their groined arches were reconstructed and lowered, their grandeur diminished.

  Richardson’s Great Western Staircase in the Capitol, also called the Million-Dollar Staircase (it cost more than a million), has been described by a present-day architectural historian as “possibly the most intricate one in the western world.” Also, the feud over styles of design among the Capitol’s architects (Thomas Fuller was the first, replaced by the triadic team of Richardson, Eidlitz, and Frederick Law Olmsted, they in turn replaced by Isaac Perry) was viewed, in its day, as “a controversy in architectural politics unprecedented in our history.”

  This sort of maximizing can go on, has gone on, and is well documented. But let us consider certain new and current elements of the Capitol’s history and turn our attention to a series of views of the building’s four exterior sides, the likes of which only birds have heretofore seen.

  These photos were made by Dan Weaks, who works with a truck that is outfitted to raise his camera to a height well above normal eye level. We seem to be looking at the Capitol’s eastern façade, for instance, from the perspective of a helicopter hovering over State and Eagle streets, our eye at the building’s dead center in the imaginary cross hairs of a telescope. Weaks takes multiple photos of his subject, then pieces them together like a jigsaw puzzle to create his pictures-that-never-were. The human scale is always there, those tiny, ambulating blurs in all his foregrounds; and while they are most aptly in scale against the great façades, they are also the presences without which there would be no such epic scope to photograph.

  Stephen Shore’s color photographs of the Capitol’s exterior give us a perspective of another sort: a sidewalk realism, but with natural light that is constantly recoloring the great building. Now it is a wan beige in the summer sun, now a bone gray, or a rich, shadowed tan, or a bright, sunlit white with greenish shadow, or a stark bluish-gray on a day when the matching gray trees have shed all their leaves, and yet the grass is still as green as when summer was here.

  Shore finds his blue skies reflected equally blue in the Capitol windows, and also in the windbreaker of a woman on a park bench. He finds the lion guarding the porte-cochere entrance beneath the eastern steps to be not one lion but three: twice reflected in the glass and the polish of a parked Le Baron. He will discover an upward angle that proves the Capitol’s façade is predominantly the work of stone carvers, from another angle that it is all Romanesque arches, and from yet another a nonesuch grid of parallel and perpendicular lines. A long look at the Shore photos is repaid by revelation. In one foliated corbel he finds a handsome hound with his tongue out. He has, perhaps, discovered a stone carver’s pet, but he has also discovered that the hound’s cranial fracture and bisected left ear are part of a line of mortar that has repaired, with great finesse, serious damage to the corbel caused by weather, or vandals.

  The abundance of such carvings, the extraordinary stonecutting, all done with tools passed on from medieval time, both crafts all but vanished from the world in this age of steel and poured concrete, give anyone randomly touring the Capitol’s interior a passport to a lost age, an age of belief in which a symbol carried ancestral weight: a log cabin in the wilderness, a broken chain beneath an emancipated slave.

  On the first floor by the Senate staircase a tour guide w
as instructing visitors about the carvings that adorn the balustrade. Darwin’s theory of evolution was new when the staircase was being built, said the guide, and the designers decided to begin at the bottom with the symbolic carving of a single cell, and then rise, with the ever-increasing complexity of living things, to the fourth floor, when the final carving would depict man at the summit of living ascendancy.

  But many of the carvers were Catholics who would have none of such heathen jabber, and they refused to carve man at the top. So evolution, said the guide, now ends with the elephant.

  We followed the carvings upward and near the fourth floor found the rhino, the hippo, the mammoth, and a penultimate elephant; but we interpret the last carved panel not as an ultimate elephant but as a recumbent camel. I think the carvers were having their way with life, just as they did with death in a carving on the Million-Dollar Staircase showing an antlered stag with a huge arrow in its back. The carving is captioned “Non Effugit.”

  The photos of Judith Turner provide another vision of Capitol abstractions: the geometry of pillars and pedestals, stairs and shadows. She turns her cubist eye on a precubist world and finds poetry in polished marble, combed sandstone. She is the minimalist any visitor to the Capitol must become or else lose sight of the delicacy of the basket woven into a corbel by a carver, or the backlighting that silhouettes an archway, or a tumultuous rush of lines and angles that overpower a corner until one sees the sinuous bobcat in the background, climbing the foliage of an adjacent arch: and vision is arrested, and delighted.