There once was a Greenwich Village restaurant called Joe’s, which a couple of times upon a time flowed through several lives. Here is its tale:
During all the years of Joe’s existence, I lived a couple of blocks away so feel confident about taking you to the corner of West 10th and West 4th Streets, a typical Village corner where two streets, which should not in this grid city ever encounter each other, defy propriety and crisscross.
Back in my Village days, what you saw on this corner, aside from disoriented strangers turning maps around and around, were some architecturally eccentric buildings and a cram of restaurants elbowing each other for space.
Once though, back when I first moved to the Village, there was only one restaurant — Joe’s.
Joe’s was Italian, with outside walls of gloomy brick and forever dusty windows on either side of the front door. Actually, everything about Joe’s was sort of dusty, even the red neon sign saying “Joe’s,” which I remember as always lit, even at 5 in the morning. Joe’s always looked a little seedy.
The endlessly evolving sociology of Villagers and Village eating establishments was — and possibly still is — complex and emotional. Our apartments were small, so the coffee house was our eat-in kitchen, the restaurant our dining room table.
This is why Villagers remembered their restaurants. It wasn’t nostalgia — we recalled plenty of lousy meals. It had something to do with the embrace of friendship, with whom we ate and what happened over those meals. Village streets were for us a palimpsest of found and lost restaurants, ghosts layered over ghosts.
Why did we go to Joe’s? Its menu was the same stained menu of all Italian restaurants then, before an intrepid New World explorer discovered Tuscany. But this was also a time before ubiquitous pizza joints. So we went to Joe’s for pizza, which had not then become a fast slice you gobbled on the way to an uptown concert. Pizza was a meal you sat down for.
Joe’s pizza was pretty good. Not as good as John’s on Bleecker, of course, but John’s always had lines down the block. Joe’s you could get into, you could sit down, you could eat, like grown-ups.
That, in fact, was the really odd thing about Joe’s. The place was always empty. To the left of the front door were a number of tables, the restaurant section. A partition separated Eating Joe’s from Drinking Joe’s, which was a bar on the right. You’d walk in and there would be maybe one table occupied. Or none. Never more than one, usually none.
I remember an elderly thin man in waiter togs and a woman sitting at the bar. Mr. and Mrs. Joe? Possible. They would look at you blankly, as if slightly startled that you had wandered in. Then one would rise and amble toward your group and after some sort of signal that, yes, you were there to eat, would gesture toward the tables. You would sit and commence the timeless discussion over what to put on the pizza, who didn’t eat anchovies, et cetera.
There must have been someone in the kitchen because food would emerge and you would eat. During your meal, the proprietors/waitstaff would resume their positions at the bar. Their services would not be required again that evening.
Now at some point even I, naive as I was, began to think this was weird. My friends were older and ultra-sophisticated — part of the ‘60s folk-blues-political scene that was fermenting in the Village. They had lived here for years, knew cool stuff. One night over pizza they laid it on me, sotto voce: Joe’s was known to be a money-laundering spot for the mob. I was hugely thrilled. And felt, with that one imparted confidence, that I had been inducted into a secret society of hip adults. (I even asked details about the process of washing money, and it was explained to me then and many times since and I still don’t get it.)
Eventually — but eventuality can be a sort of eternity — Joe’s did close. I found myself sad and simultaneously relieved of an exasperating tension. But it was also sweet that no hand-scribbled sign announcing “RENOVATING WILL RE-OPEN SOON” appeared on Joe’s door. Nobody was in denial. Joe’s was just…closed.
Joe’s sat there closed for a very long time. (Which was, in this hot restaurant neighborhood, also peculiar.) Joe’s ancient dust accumulated history of its own. And Joe’s faded as an entity so completely that in my regular dashes down West 4th Street, I never even noticed it anymore.
Then one day, maybe in the late ‘80s, Joe’s stopped me in my fast track. There was paper over the windows. Renovation was clearly afoot. I began once again to pay attention to Joe’s.
Soon thereafter, Joe’s re-lit its red neon sign and re-opened as — “Formerly Joe’s.” I laughed in pleasure at the homage.
I ate at Formerly Joe’s a couple of times. It was OK, had a raw bar where the old drinking bar used to be. I don’t remember the menu; it was that kind of menu; the Zeitgeist menu of that demi-decade.
After a couple of years Formerly Joe’s closed. And sat closed for a pretty long time.
Then one day in the late ‘90s, there was paper over the windows again. Et cetera. And Joe’s re-opened. Place had new lights, banquettes, but (almost) the same red neon sign.
I went to eat. Good food, comfort food prepared on a high level. I said to the waitress, “I used to come here when Joe’s reputedly laundered money.” Her eyes grew big in a secret thrill I well remembered and she nodded. “That’s what we were told,” she whispered. Then she pointed down. “When they renovated,” she said, “they kept the old floor.” I looked down and, yes, that old tile floor, the unusual size of the tiles, the oddball color combinations, and surprisingly I experienced a wash of tender emotion. Ghosts layered over ghosts.
Oh, and Joe’s was now called — up there in that red neon sign — “Joe’s…again.”
Are you surprised that after a short time Joe’s…again closed? For a couple of months, a group of film trucks and people surrounded and occupied it, using it as a location for, I think, Sex in the City. Then Joe’s just sank back into its long night’s sleep.
Until it re-opened, owned by two guys, Bob and Peter, who re-did the insides, new bar, new paint, new lights. Chinese calligraphy up near the ceiling. They presented an intriguing and tasty pan-Asian cuisine. They were affable and enthusiastic. The windows were the same windows, floor the same floor.
Except. They had a banner covering the old Joe’s neon sign. Upon that banner was written: Chow’s Bar.
Was it just me? Was I too cynical to be thinking, bad karma? So okay maybe if they had called it “Joe’s Forever!!” it would still be doomed, but couldn’t they have placated the ghosts on that particular corner and called it…”(Joe’s) Chow?”
Works for me.
