Who’d have thought that one of this city’s most enduring landmarks would prove to be a former Greenwich Village speakeasy opened in 1928 by a left-wing subversive Chicago stagecoach driver and labor organizer who counted Edna St. Vincent Millay and Somerset Maugham among his drinking buddies?
For those of you familiar with the life and times of Millay, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Ring Lardner, Willa Cather, Eugene O’Neill and Djuna Barnes — not to speak of John Cheever, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, A. J. Leibling, Anais Nin, James Thurber and, yes, the great Calvin Trillin — I need only say one word for you to understand:
Chumley’s.
Change, of course, is as endemic to this town as grime, street vendors, traffic, hookers and trophy wives. Gigantic new buildings spring up as swiftly as weeds after a rainstorm. New restaurants and clubs open and become so hot they’re mobbed for weeks, then abruptly shutter their doors and vanish.
Yet, miraculously, so much stays the same. There is still a Little Italy. There still is a Chrysler Building. The Planet Hollywoods, the Gaps and other chains and franchises have muscled their way into the city on the backs of millions of hayhead tourists, but there still is a Bergdorf’s, a Bendel’s, a Bolo and a Da Antonio. And, despite decades of manic and depressive patronage by legions of alcoholic writers, highly educated good-time girls and characters so strange they are categories unto themselves (Humphrey Bogart was a customer), there is still a Chumley’s.
It sits in an obscure, three-story building just up from the corner of Bedford and Barrow Streets in Greenwich Village. There is not and never has been a sign identifying the place or a window that reveals its interior. Just a number on the antique wooden front door known only to the knowing. (No, I won’t give it to you.)
You still enter, as you did in Prohibition days, by passing into a small, dark foyer, climbing a small flight of stairs to the left, and then descending another set into a hazily lit Old English interior, decorated with the book jackets of works by now mostly deceased patrons. Some are notable; most are not.
Chumley’s was opened in 1928 by this oddball from Chicago named Leland Stanford Chumley, whose resume also included laborer, tramp, waiter, newspaper cartoonist, editorial writer and painter.
Lee Chumley also was an organizer for the extremely left-wing International Workers of the World (the Wobblies), which led to raids on his literary joint by the Bomb and Alien Squad, panting after anarchists.
Prohibition ended in 1933. Chumley died two years later of a heart attack. A mysterious woman who called herself Henrietta Chumley and claimed to be his widow turned up and ran the place until her death in 1961. I can recall her sitting, sometimes asleep, by the cheery hearth, undisturbed by some of the most impassioned intellectual conversation and bohemian deportment in the Village.
I was first introduced to Chumley’s in 1957, when I asked a friend and mentor — Beat Generation writer and furniture mover Jules Klebenoff (to whom I still owe 20 bucks) — where I might take a “nice girl” instead of the rat traps I usually patronized. Without further thought, he simply said: “Chumley’s.”
One of the things about Chumley’s that has never changed is that it has continued to attract mostly “nice girls,” i.e.: sisters Edna and Cora Millay. You almost never find Courtney Love or Madonna wannabes. I do not believe Barbra Streisand ever darkened the darkened doorway.
In the years since Momma Chumley’s death, her dozen or more cats disappeared. Subsequent owners installed, gasp, a jukebox (though I don’t think the selections changed much). The graffiti in the men’s room (hailed as the most literary in the nation; yet none of it printable here) became a bit more stridently political. Someone installed a red plastic lobster as bar decor. Some of the wooden tables, which had several generations of initials carved into them as deep as archeological digs, were replaced by others whose carvings are as yet only a quarter inch deep.
A couple of years ago, I was shocked to find Chumley’s closed and scaffolding up over the door. I feared calamity — that it was being turned into yet another pizza franchise, or worse, a “sports bar,” or that it was being torn down altogether.
Instead, it was merely being renovated by the new owner, Steve Shlopak, who seems to worship Chumley’s as he might a shrine.
He’s made some changes. There’s a new back room, which would have been handy for those Wobblies meetings (not to speak of interesting evenings with Djuna Barnes). He seems to have moved the men’s room, apparently transporting the wall graffiti like some ancient precious frieze. And he’s put some wooden booths in the middle of the very small room, creating considerable intimacy.
But, alas, he didn’t stop there. Above the row of ancient book covers, he has plastered every available inch of the walls with framed period photographs of all the notables who once drank there: Millay, Thurber, Edmund Wilson and hordes more. The establishment looks less like a saloon than a museum, a sort of Planet Hollywood for dead writers.
I am, of course, appalled, as I was when they turned the famous meeting place under the clock of the Biltmore lobby into a cocktail lounge called “Under the Clock.”
But then, it probably is time for Chumley’s to become a museum. Cheever is dead. Joseph Heller just died. John Updike, Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow are old men. After them, what great writers have we?
Better a picture of Edna St. Vincent Millay, I suppose, than another red lobster.
