illustration for a web recipe
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"We got / Cool and hot / Just for you / The pleasures of the soul
Come on / Come in / And check it out / Soul food to go"
- — "Soul Food To Go (Sina)" by Djawan;
- performed by Manhattan Transfer on the album "Brasil" (1987)
( ISBN-10: B000002ILX )
Many of my stories have a moral; not this one. It's just a strange but true tale. It begins by way of background with a discussion of the former World Trade Center in Manhattan, then tells of a quest to find soul food on business trips, and ends up connecting the two through a pointless coincidence. And yet this tale haunts me, so I keep telling it.
When I lived in Massachusetts in the late 1970s, my wife and I took occasional visits to New York City to sightsee, usually on a tight budget. One gloomy Saturday afternoon we ended up down at Battery Park looking across the harbor at the Statue of Liberty. We then proceeded to wander the lower west side until it became so cold and windy we decided to catch a subway back to the Port Authority to take a Greyhound back home. The problem was we had a low-quality map and no familiarity with the terrain, and we ended up on the wrong side of a complex of skyscrapers. After several false starts trying to cut through the complex we finally went around it, which cost us several blocks. On the east side was a sign at ground level that said, "World Trade Center." I asked my wife, "What's a World Trade Center?" She didn't know.
About a year later we'd wised up to the fact that if you want to see New York, you need a New Yorker to guide you. (This principle is, of course, true many places.) We went back on a weekend visit with a coworker of mine who was born and raised in Brooklyn. He took us to see and do a number of wondrous things, from Times Square after midnight, to a neighborhood Jewish deli, to the Museum of Holography (now absorbed by M.I.T.'s museum in Cambridge, MA) and the Transit Museum (still in NY). He also took us for about a mile walk on the old West Side Highway, abandoned at the time and covered with political graffiti from a protest there, and we ended up at the twin towers of the World Trade Center. He took us to the top to enjoy the view, though he stayed in the cafeteria because he was afraid of heights. It was quite a great way to see Manhattan. Down be low us we spotted brightly colored geometric shapes on the sandy land next to the Hudson River. When we descended we walked over to discover they were painted grape stake fences — an art project designed to be appreciated from the skyscrapers above.
Well, that was delightful, but the buildings themselves were unimpressive to me aside from their record-breaking height. About five years later I read "From Bauhaus to Our House" (1981) by Tom Wolfe.
- ( ISBN-10: 0312429142 )
an old cover of "From Bauhas to Our House"
From this I learned how "Modern" architecture, begun in the 1910s and '20s, had managed to paint itself into a corner by the 1970s and was tyrannized by a long list of "don'ts" — don't use curves, don't use color, don't use decoration, etc. These skyscrapers were merely symptoms of the creative bankruptcy architecture had stumbled into after declaring that "ornament is crime." (This was "fixed" by the Post-Modern movement, which is a whole 'nother story entirely.)
And now for something completely different. Though both my parents were born and raised in Memphis, TN, I was unaware of Memphis' claim as a birthplace of the blues until about the year 1999. That year I began to learn about the history of the blues — its origins in the cane flutes of slaves (who could be killed for possessing any musical instrument), used to play the three note melodies of their native Africa, the three chord guitar music that evolved out of those early melodies, and the electric guitar riffs of rock 'n' roll pioneers who incorporated blues chords into their work.
Along with this new interest in old music, I also began to appreciate more the southern cooking of my youth. My grandmother, who we called "Grann," used to make my parents, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles and me food like country ham, string beans, biscuits with sorghum molasses, and all kinds of pies: lemon meringue, banana cream, chocolate cream, and my favorite, Karo pecan.
In 1976, on visit to the town of my birth (Gainesville, FL), I was directed to a soul food restaurant on the edge of town called Mama Lo's. Literally on "the other side of the tracks" in a railroad shack, this old black woman had an antique iron stove on which pots of food were bubbling: ham hocks, collard greens, black-eyed peas, grits, etc., and cornbread keeping warm in the oven. As I recall everything was twenty-five cents per serving, and we tried everything.
In my business travels in the '90s and oughts, I began a search for authentic soul food. I'd eaten at places like the Blue Chalk Cafe in Palo Alto, CA, which offered a California Nouvelle cuisine reinterpretation of southern cooking, but that wasn't going to cut it. At the other extreme there was a chain of restaurants in the southeast called Black Eyed Peas, which was sort of the Denny's of soul food. It might do in a pinch.
In the year 2000 I found myself working a trade show at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL. We were staying at the upscale Omni Rosen Hotel next door, and so I asked the concierge where I could find soul food. She was perplexed; I guess nobody ever asked that question before. Next I tried the Yellow Pages (this was of course before smart phones or Yelp) but all I found was Black Eyed Peas. Upon calling several locations I found all of their numbers were disconnected. Since they were still listed in the phone book, I assumed they had closed down within the last year. I finally ended up at the House of Blues in Downtown Disney, which was more California Nouvelle cuisine. Don't get me wrong, the pan seared gulf shrimp with chipotle blue corn mayonnaisse drizzle (or whatever it was) tasted great; it just wasn't Mama Lo's.
About a month later I was working a trade show at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. For some reason we were staying at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square. I remember the Marquis Theater was on the ground floor; there was a huge poster advertising Bernadette Peters in "Annie Get Your Gun." Our hotel lobby was on the fifth floor up an elevator. (I guess this was to discourage homeless people from using the restrooms.) And in that lobby, in the gift shop, I found a little book called something like "101 Places to Eat Southern and Soul Food in Manhattan." Of course! (Slaps forehead.) What was I thinking, looking for soul food in the south? I should've been in New York City! I pulled out my pencil and notebook and noted a few possibilities. That night I took a cab to Greenwich Village and found a little restaurant called the Dew Drop Inn. The decor was amazingly retro. The owner was a fanatic for American regional cooking, and had traveled down Route 66 searching for recipes. I had the Dr. Pepper chicken, which was very good; the sugar in the Dr. Pepper was caramelized into a glaze.
Afterwards I went off in search of another southern food restaurant for dessert; I no longer remember the name. I think I was looking for an address on Greenwich street. The blocks seemed to be a lot longer than I expected. I remember passing a UPS warehouse where brown trucks were busily loading up for the next morning's deliveries. Soon I was out of the village, and somehow ended up on Broadway. Except for the fact that I was pretty sure I was still walking south, I was lost. Fog rolled in. On I trudged. Finally I saw the twin towers of the World Trade Center looming ahead, shrouded in grey, looking like a scene out of "Escape from New York" (1981). I figured I could catch a cab there back to Times Square. But first I ducked into the lobby of one of the towers to warm up.
marble tiles in a lobby of the World Trade Center
The lobby was "decorated" with marble tiles, one of the few nods to aesthetics permitted by the Modernist canon. I remembered reading in Wolfe's book how often the grain of the marble was ignored in placing tiles, so as to not seem too eager to create something visually pleasing. As I stood and looked at that marble, I thought to myself, "These really are hideous buildings; they should never have been built."
About a year later they were gone. I feel a little guilty about this. I know I'm not responsible for 9/11 attacks, and I never would have wanted them to happen, but I still feel like I should've been more careful what I wished for.
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