With the holidays approaching, we asked Tim Zagat, the creator of the slim, ubiquitous oxblood guidebooks that have colonized America’s dining-out habits, to choose his favorite historic restaurants. Herewith a baker’s dozen, along with excerpts from their write-ups in Zagat’s surveys.
GRAZE AMONG, THE STALLS AT PHILADELPHIA’S OLD READING Terminal Market, just as the Victorians did before hoarding their trains. Savor Oysters Rockefeller at that grande dame Antoine’s, the dish’s New Orleans originator. Cross the sawdust floor for a French-dip sandwich at Philippe the Original, one of I..A.’s oldest restaurants. Conjure up Prohibition in the hidden wine cellar (the feds never found it) at New York’s swank “21” Club. When you dine in the restaurants listed below, you will both eat well and be steeped in the history of their cities. These places have survived not just on reputation but also on the overall superiority of their cuisine, service, and ambience. Home to locals and travelers alike, they invite you to savor both the flavors and the history of their towns.
—Tim Zagat
ATLANTA 1840 Dante’s Down the Hatch • 3380 Peachtree Rd., NE, 404-266-1600 • “Decorated to look like an ancient pirate ship,” this “unique” jazz nightclub in Buckhead is one of “the coolest restaurants in Atlanta.”
BOSTON 1875 Locke-Ober • 3 Winter PL, 617-542-1340 • From the onion soup gratinée to the Lobster Savannah, plenty of old standbys remain at this Boston institution.
CHICAGO 1898 The Berghoff • 17 W. Adams St., 312-427-3170 • “Wiener schnitzel heaven” for more than a century, this “dependable” Loop German-American is a “bastion” of “oldworld” “Gemütlichkeit.”
LOS ANGELES 1908 Philippe the Original • 1001 N. Alameda St., 213-628-3781 • This venerable Dodger Stadium-adjacent “lunch counter with heart” is a “generational dining” experience where the French dip allegedly was “invented.” 1919 Musso & Frank Grill • 6667 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, 323-467-7788 • The very essence of “old Hollywood,” this “time portal” is “a classic” Traditional American “institution.”
MIAMI 1913 Joe’s Stone Crab • 11 Washington Ave., Miami Beach, 305-673-0365 • “Celebs, tourists, and those spending other people’s money” get their “annual fix” of “melt-in-yourtnouth stone crabs” and “world-class sides” at South Beach’s No. 1 popular “granddaddy.”
NEW ORLEANS 1840 Antoine’s • 713 St. Louis St., 504-5814422 • Nostalgists never stray from this “old-fashioned” 1840 French Quarter Creole-Classic French “landmark” where “half the fun is the history of it all.” 1880 Commander’s Palace • 1403 Washington Ave., 504-899-8221 • The “unrivaled” “queen of local cuisine” still rules with an “elegant” Haute Creole hand.
NEW YORK 1885 Keens Steakhouse • 72 W. 36th St., 212-947-3636 • This wonderful 1885 Garment District chop shop exudes so much history you’ll “feel like you’re in a Caleb Carr novel.” 1929 “21 ” Club • 21 W. 52d St., 212-582-7200 • “A timeless NY classic that’s still going strong,” this town-house “landmark” has “improved with age,” offering seamless black-tie service.
PHILADELPHIA 1892 Reading Terminal Market • 51 N. 12th St., 215-922-2317 • This “fantastic” farmers’ market next to the Convention Center is a “must-see for any visitor.”
SAN FRANCISCO 1908 John ‘s Grill • 63 Ellis St., 415-986-0069 • Maltese Falcon buffs migrate to this 1908 downtown chophouse that was a favorite hangout of Dashiell Hammett.
WASHINGTON, D.C. 1851 Willard Room • Willard Inter-Continental Hotel, 1401 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, 202-637-7440 • Since 1851 this “drop-dead” gorgeous downtown hotel institution has “defined elegance” and privilege.
WHY DO WE SAY THAT?
“TALKING TURKEY”
Eating crow and talking turkey are venerable American metaphors for different forms of speech, in the first case to consume that most unpleasant of all dishes, one’s own words, and in the second to speak plainly. Both appear to come from nineteenthcentury jokes.
Eating crow was popularized in the presidential election of 1872, when Horace Greeley split from the Republican party, which he had helped found on a national level 16 years before, to run against the incumbent President, Ulysses S. Grant. True Republicans regarded Greeley as a traitor, and diehard Democrats, who had long opposed Greeley’s liberal principles, refused to support him despite their party’s endorsement. Both disparaged Greeley as an unappetizing crow or boiled crow, and the metaphor soon was carried one step further. As reported in the San Diego Daily Union on September 13, 1872, “The chief leader of the Democratic Party of Rhode Island, Hon. Thomas Steever … cannot and will not ‘Eat Crow.’ He prefers Grant to Greeley, and made a speech at Providence recently to that effect.”
The underlying joke has been dated to 1851 but probably was around awhile before that. The earliest example in A Dictionary of Americanisms comes from the San Francisco Picayune of December 1 of that year: “The bet was made, the crow was caught and nicely roasted, but before serving it up, they contrived a reason to season it with a good dose of Scotch snuff. Isaac sat down to the crow, he took a good bit and began to chew away. ‘Yes, I kin eat a crow!… I kin eat a crow, but I ‘ll be darned if I hanker after it!’”
Talking turkey, meanwhile, apparently stems from a joke about a white hunter who tries to outsmart a Native American companion. After spending the day shooting turkeys and crows (or buzzards, in another version), the two hunters meet to divvy up the game. As told in the New York Mirror on July 8, 1830, the white hunter says to the Indian, “You may have your choice, you take the crow and I’ll take the turkey, or if you’d rather, I’ll take the turkey and you take the crow.” The Native American sees through the double-talk, however. “Ugh!” he replies. “You no talk turkey to me a bit.” The phrase became generic for plain speaking within a decade. Thomas C. Haliburton’s Traits of American Humor, published around 1840, includes the line “I was apt to talk turky always when I got sociable, if it was only out of politeness.”
Some old jokes, it seems, are like old soldiers. They never die, they just fade away—until only the punch lines remain.
—Hugh Rawson
EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF
In the introduction to her Rodeo Queens and the American Dream (Perseus, 320 pages, $26.00), Joan Burbick writes: “Telling the stories of rodeo queens necessarily raises the history of settlement and conquest, ethnic conflict, racism, blindness and greed.” So does telling the story of anything else if you’re a professor of American studies, which Burbick is at Washington State University. As she describes her experiences traveling the rodeo circuit and interviewing queens past and present, the author makes many incisive observations about Western history and myth. And during breaks in the how-I-wrote-this-book format, she gives some of the queens a welcome chance to speak for themselves.
A fellow editor’s note attached to our copy of Liberty for All (Miller Publishing, 240 pages, $60.00), a generously illustrated book about the Statue of Liberty, reads: “Would we be interested in this for ‘History Now’? It has really good pictures.” Indeed it has, including a set of models for alternative designs by the sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, a World War I artillery shell with an image of the statue carved into it, and an eerie 1946 souvenir postcard that pairs Lady Liberty with a picture of the liberated Dachau concentration camp. The book also contains hundreds of shots of the statue taken by the photographer Peter B. Kaplan before, during, and after its 1980s reconstruction, all accompanied by a text from Lee lacocca.
A left-wing friend of ours recently asserted that the September 11 attacks had “taken back the flag from the conservalives.” Astute analysis, or a lame excuse for being embarrassed to admit that you love your country? Either way, it shows the emotion that can attach to a simple piece of cloth. As Robert E. Bonner shows in Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (Princeton University Press, 223 pages, $29.95), such matters achieved near-mystical status during the Civil War, when many seceding states adopted singlestar flags to symbolize their departure from the Union (and inspired Harry Macarthy to write his anthem “The Bonnie Blue Flag"). Even after the war, in 1867, when the Confederate naval hero Raphael Semmes was given an American flag, he embraced it but vowed to remove all its associations with Republicanism, not long after a black clergyman had rejoiced that “the nation’s great emblem is no longer against us.”
LAVISH LEGACY
A HUGE NEW LINCOLN MUSEUM DIVIDES HIS HOMETOWN
NEARLY HALF A CENTURY AGO Illinois schoolchildren donated pennies—$45,000 worth in all—to help purchase a handwritten copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address for the state’s official history collection in Springfield. At last Lincoln’s towering call for “a new birth of freedom” would be on view in his old hometown.
But the now-priceless relic—along with thousands of other important artifacts, manuscripts, prints, and sculptures —has never enjoyed a permanent home. Now another “pennies for Lincoln” campaign, this one generating $54,000 from today’s Illinois students, will be applied to the $115 million public-private budget for a vast new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield’s downtown. The library will open to the public on November 18; the museum, in 2004.
In Springfield the Lincoln home, which sits in a beautifully restored 14-house district and is managed by the National Park Service, welcomes 400,000 visitors annually. At the same time, the state of Illinois owns a giant collection of materials: 1,500 original Lincoln manuscripts, including poll books in his own hand, the Lincoln marriage license, the deed to his house, photographs and oil portraits from life, Mary Lincoln’s wedding skirt, the diamond-studded watch key Lincoln carried, his traveling shaving mirror, and his personal lap robe.
The state’s historical library contains 12,000 books and pamphlets, along with relics and documents from every local, state, and national political campaign in which Lincoln participated. The collection has long needed a visitors’ center capacious enough to accommodate growing hordes of tourists, as well as a library worthy of its heavy traffic in scholars. The planned 198,000-square-foot Presidential Library and Museum is designed to provide both.
Yet the project is not without its critics. Some Springfieldians have assailed a $20 million plan to demolish a block of downtown buildings, including three historic structures, to make way for a park that would provide the proper “vista” for the library and museum. But the most intense debate of all has swirled around the state’s plan to devote much of the new museum space to a series of dioramas featuring life-sized latex figures. Entitled “The Journey,” this “immersive visit” through the sixteenth President’s career will show, among other scenes, young Abe reading by firelight in his log cabin, the kind of slave auction he might have witnessed on his first trip to New Orleans, a reproduction of his New Salem store, and presidential events ranging from a typical cabinet meeting to his assassination and funeral. As a result, only a small section of the huge new center will be devoted to the display of the museum’s bulging collection of original relics.
Advocates hail the new plan as a model for attracting museum-weary children and families to the new complex. But critics—notably the respected Civil War scholar John Y. Simon—regard it as inauthentic and a colossal waste of space: “Abraham Lincoln doesn’t have to be sold the same way as the Pillsbury Doughboy.”
Susan Morgerman, director of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, which is overseeing construction, insists that the reproduction Lincolns, to be crafted by a company called BRC Imagination Arts of California, will be tasteful, “engaging and entertaining, and I don’t think that’s bad.” But Simon replies that even Lincoln himself regarded “wax figgers,” as he once referred to them, “as a kind of vulgar sideshow.”
What should surprise no one is that Lincoln still ignites controversy in his hometown. He always did. He won the city by only 69 votes in the election that made him President, and four years later, when he carried the nation in a nearlandslide, he squeaked by here with a plurality of only 10. While serving in the White House, Lincoln even declined an invitation to return home for a proUnion rally, instead sending a scolding message questioning his neighbors’ willingness to fight for Emancipation.
The house remains divided. But well before the 2009 bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, regardless of what displays ultimately find their way inside its newest, grandest tourist attraction, Springfield will become home to one of the most ambitious—and hotly debated—history centers in the nation.
—Harold Holzer
The German Plan to Invade America
NEWLY REVEALED: HOW KAISER WILHELM PLANNED TO KEEP AMERICA FROM BECOMING A GLOBAL POWER
THE ANNOUNCEMENT EARLIER THIS year that military archivists had found nineteenth-century plans for a German invasion of America attracted curiously little attention in this country. There are several possible explanations: The idea of Germany’s being a warmonger is hardly news; any date starting with 18 might as well be in biblical times for the average American; and, most likely of all, the announcement coincided with the NBA Finals.
The goal of the planned invasion would not have been to conquer and hold the United States under the German flag. Instead Kaiser Wilhelm wanted to “put America in its place” and exact concessions in return for withdrawing. Of particular concern were Germany’s hopes to expand its empire into the Pacific. With America preparing to annex Hawaii and build a canal through Panama, the Germans feared being crowded out of that region.
The kaiser gave the job of drafting a strategy to Eberhard von Mantey, a 28-year-old naval lieutenant. His first plan, devised in 1897, envisioned a naval assault on American shipyards at Norfolk, Hampton Roads, and Newport News, Virginia, similar in concept to the Pearl Harbor raid of World War II. Before Germany could take any action, however, the Spanish-American War broke out. In that brief affair the United States greatly increased its Pacific presence and gained effective control of Cuba, where Germany had hoped to build a naval base. In response, Mantey came up with a revised plan that concentrated on northern population centers. German troops would land on Cape Cod and march to Boston as a flotilla shelled New York City, causing panic and making the city easy prey for a landing force.
Nothing came of Mantey’s second plan either. The German chief of staff, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, balked at committing the 100,000 troops it would have required, and the idea was finally dropped in 1906. A little more than a decade later, during World War I, Germany (being otherwise engaged itself) encouraged Mexico to invade the United States across the Rio Grande. When the United States learned of this proposal by means of the intercepted Zimmermann Telegram, it drew closer to entering the European conflict.
The outcome of that war shows why the Kaiser would have been foolhardy to go through with any invasion. Even if America’s martial spirit had not been aroused by the war with Spain, and even if the pugnacious Teddy Roosevelt had not later become President, America would never have responded supinely to an enemy invasion. For a precedent, one need only look back to the last time America was invaded, nearly a century before the German threat.
The nation was sharply divided over the War of 1812, with most of New England considering it pointless and suicidal; the island of Nantucket even declared itself neutral. But when British troops devastated Maryland and Washington, D.C., in 1814, the nation was united at last. As is happening again today, the attackers learned to their peril that the United States of America is not to be trifled with.
ON EXHIBIT
Besides being an enormous human tragedy, the sinking of the Titanic is a fascinating scientific and technological study. Visitors to Titanic Science, on display at the Science Museum of Virginia, in Richmond (800-659-1727; www.smv.org), from October 5 through January 4, can try to steer a simulation of the liner out of harm’s way, feel how cold an iceberg is, pilot a model of one of the robot vehicles that are used to salvage artifacts from the wreck, and see an IMAX film about the sinking. For stay-at-homes, www.titanicscience.com has a wealth of technical information about the Titanic and its brief life, with an activity guide for students and teachers.
