Hic sunt medici! Here are doctors!
Doctors! The doctors are here!
One thing we have around here are doctors.
Craig was sitting outside Birch Coffee on E. 62nd Street, drinking the brew, enjoying the fine UES spring, when an older gentleman arrived with a long-haired German Shepherd. He asked Craig to keep an eye on the canine while he went in for his Joe. They (Craig and the pooch) were having a good time playing . When the man came out, they chit-chatted. Turned out the fellow lived upstate and preferred being there, but, he told Craig, “I keep a place here for the doctors.” He thus has a pied-à-terre someone near Sutton Place.
Hic sunt medici. Here are doctors.
The Romans wrote “Hic sunt leones,” here are lions, on maps of the empire’s primitive outskirts. These were places where they considered the natives fierce and not too clever. It is said that a map of today’s Britain was so labeled.
Did you see this recent piece in The Wall Street Journal?
It features a retired couple in Miami who simply couldn’t duplicate their relationships with first-rate Upper East Side doctors down in Florida. They needed their specialists at the Hospital for Special Surgery, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Mount Sinai Hospital and Lenox Hill Hospital. And so they bought a loft nearby.
Rebecca Cavallaro of Sotheby’s International Realty — East Side Manhattan Brokerage told the WSJ that such buyers are targeting so-called med-à-terres in the $2 million to $5 million range, sometimes well above that.
Meanwhile, some rich retirees are taking the direct route of not selling their UES apartments. Cavallaro adds, “People are keeping New York homes because New York is New York, and that includes their doctors.”
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If you spill coffee on your keyboard at 3 a.m.
The Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, between 58th and 59th, has become a major tourist destination, understandably so. It’s right across the street from the Plaza and near a main entrance to Central Park. You see lots of rolling luggage. You hear languages that, admittedly, could be heard elsewhere in the city but not necessarily in the same place.
We asked one of the salespeople, “Who comes here at 3 a.m., 4 a.m.?” That crowd is mostly New Yorkers, the Apple guy explains, night people who spilled coffee on their keyboards in the wee hours and need an emergency replacement.
According to Wikipedia, “The store is always open to customers, with no hours or days closed, an acknowledgement that after-hours New York is still going strong. It is the only Apple Store in the universe that is open 24/7.
Can we call a 34-year-old woman a ‘matron’?
The New York Times published a news item on December 9, 1946, about a “Park Avenue matron” who died suddenly. She was 34. Back in those days, “matron” was often paired with “Park Avenue.”
It connotes white glove, the right clubs, that sort of thing. And Mrs. Evelyn Morgan would seem to qualify.
Mrs. Morgan and her husband had apparently spent the evening at the Stork Club. Club goers back then tended not to hold back the drink, and it’s possible that a full night ending at 1:30 a.m., followed by sleeping pills to be not a healthy combination.
Starting as a speakeasy during Prohibition, the Stork Club was the place for celebrities, soignée socialites and other connected New Yorkers to be seen and talked about in the next day’s papers. It was there that Count Basie and Guy Lombardo performed with their orchestras.
“It was a shrine of sophistication in the minds of thousands who had never seen it, the fabric and pattern of legend,” wrote Lucius Beebe, a top-hatted bon-vivant who chronicled “high society” in mid-century Manhattan.
The Stork Club became victim of the go-go 60s. Dress codes had collapsed, and refinement had crumbled in an implosion of hippie slobdom. The swaying ballroom dancing of yore had morphed into couples free-form rocking on the clubs’ dance floor.
The original Stork Club closed in 1965 and the building was leveled. The site is now a Midtown pocket park, Paley Park.
As for the Morgans’ apartment at 277 Park Avenue, the building between 47th and 48th Streets was raised and is now an office tower.