Dante’s Pullman

New York City, ca. 1935

Dating back to the late 1860s, the three-story townhouse at 59 Charles Street in Greenwich Village is considered notable because so much of the building is original. When the historic residence was sold in 1967, the New York Times reported that Miss Emma Gerdes had lived in the house for eighty-two years.1 Having moved there with her family in 1884 when she was eight years old, she never left, staying long after her brothers moved away and her parents died. During all those years, she kept the house almost exactly the same, slowly turning it into a time capsule, until she had died the previous year. The Times dutifully informed its readers that there had been a few small changes—the large metal chandelier hanging from the hand-painted ceiling in the parlor was converted from gas to electricity, and new wallpaper was hung in the stairwell in 1923. In more recent years, subsequent owners have meticulously maintained the original details, confining most of the improvements to systems hidden inside the walls like plumbing, electrical systems, and air conditioning. Given its well-documented pedigree, it was surprising to discover something about this building that had been long forgotten—it had once housed an Italian restaurant.

This came to light when the enigmatic menu below was found in a group of menus dating to the mid-1930s. As shown, a restaurant named “Dante’s Pullman” opened at that location in 1923, the same year that the wallpaper was reportedly changed. Perhaps to help make ends meet, Emma Gerdes rented the ground floor of her home to an Italian chef named Dante, or at least one who admired Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet of the Middles Ages whose likeness appears on the cover. The word “pullman” is also a mystery, perhaps referring to the small, narrow architectural space in which the restaurant operated, reminiscent of a railroad lounge car.

A small restaurant on the ground floor would not have disturbed the living quarters above. Featuring a typical iron-railed stoop with a street-level entrance leading directly into the dining room, the house only has one other room on the ground floor, the big, square kitchen situated directly in the back. There were other eating places in the city that operated in residential spaces, such as the “parlor restaurants” that could be found in the tenement buildings in the Jewish neighborhoods of the Lower East Side.2 However, these miniscule eateries served home-cooked meals in the style of a particular city or small region in Europe for homesick immigrants. The wide selection of dishes on Dante's menu shows that it was designed to attract a broad base of customers by appealing to the tastes of the American middle-class.

The house at 59 Charles Street is situated between West Fourth and Bleecker Streets, a quiet section without any through traffic. There were a number of people living on the block over the years who later became famous. Novelist Sinclair Lewis resided at No. 69 from 1910 to 1913 and poet Hart Crane lived at No. 79 in 1920. Folksinger Woody Guthrie lived across the street at No. 74 in 1943, where he and blues musician Lead Belly would often stay up late singing with friends, although the restaurant may have been closed by then.

Nothing remains to suggest that there once was a restaurant on the premises. Despite its modernization, the kitchen retains some of the original details from the mid-nineteenth century, like the system of bells that were once used to summon servants, and the old iron cook stove with a handsomely carved front that still stands in its walk-in niche. If Emma Gerdes had been alive when the house was sold in 1967, the story of the restaurant might have been passed along. Nevertheless, the history of restaurants is often lost, even though they are an integral part of urban life. Sometimes all that survives is a menu, providing the only evidence that the restaurant existed.

Notes
1. New York Times, 23 April 1967.
2. Jane Ziegelman, 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement, New York, 2010.