Inside a rathskeller in New York’s Little Germany

In 1936, a man named Joe King opened a restaurant serving “moderately priced German dishes and imported beers”  in a German Renaissance Revival building on Third Avenue and 17th Street.

This was once the outskirts of New York’s enormous German immigrant enclave, Kleindeutschland. By the 1930s, Little Germany had mostly decamped to Yorkville (Luchow’s remained as well on 14th Street until the 1980s.)

But it would have been worth it to come down to this place in the old neighborhood. The beer steins, the lights, the tin ceiling, the piano installed for communal singalongs. . . . It closed in the 1960s, but I wish it were still around.

[Postcard: digitalcommonwealth.org]

“The most unusual cafeteria in New York”

I wish I knew why Longleys, on Sixth Avenue and 50th Street, billed itself with this title. But I can’t figure it out.

The decor looks perfectly normal for a 1950s-era cafeteria: spotless floors, fake plants, salt and pepper shakers on every table.

Longleys boasts of its “unbelievably fine food.” But they don’t specify any menu items—probably because the food wasn’t much different from what was served at the city’s other popular cafeteria chains at the time, like the President Cafeteria.

Jack Kerouac memorialized Hector’s Cafe, near Times Square, in On the Road. Who memorialized Longleys? The only mention I found was in Jerry Stiller’s autobiography.

When he first met his future comedy partner and wife Anne Meara, they slipped into Longleys for coffee and cake . . . and then lifted some silverware because Ann’s roommates in the Village kept losing theirs.

When it shut down, I have no idea. But it must have been not long after the postcard came out. 1265 Sixth Avenue no longer exists; 1261 and 1271 are office towers built in 1961.