In some ways, buildings are like people. They have a birth and a prime of life. As they age, they either wear well or not. They\u2019re either cherished and well cared for, or neglected. The lives of some buildings are cut short way too soon. Others seem to thrive year upon year upon year. Still others hang on, despite neglect, for a long time. They have roles in our lives, and when some buildings are gone, we remember their specialness.<\/p>\n
I reflected on these thoughts while looking at a friend-recommended site called Hudson Valley Ruins<\/a>. In this site (and also a book<\/a> published in 2006), Tom Rinaldi and Rob Yasinsac chronicle historic and distinctive architecture \u201cthreatened by development, vandals, and time and the exposure to the elements,\u201d as the site notes.<\/p>\n Roaming through HudsonValleyRuins.org, though its ruins lost and ruins brought back, you can read a good deal of the Hudson Valley\u2019s history from Yonkers northward to Troy, looking at old and shuttered factories and mills, schools, train stations, houses, stores, and farms. The site has updates and a photo-illustrated \u201cdemo alert,\u201d which warns of impending demolitions and promotes actions to save the structures. On Nov. 17 of this year, the alert told of the soon-to-occur demolition of the 1950s steel-and-glass-enclosed Carvel ice cream stand in Hartsdale, N.Y., on the site where the Carvel retail business was born in 1934. (In 2007, the site first cited the threat to the Carvel stand.)<\/p>\n This all got me thinking about McHale\u2019s tavern on the west side of Midtown Manhattan. Three years ago right around this time, we found out that McHale\u2019s, at West 46th<\/sup> Street and Eighth Avenue, would close in early 2006 to \u2013<\/span> as Curbed<\/a> put it \u2013<\/span> \u201cmake way for 42 stories of you-can-probably-guess.\u201d Developers were razing the building containing McHale\u2019s and the Happy Deli in order to erect a sleek residential-condo building called The Platinum, <\/em>appropriately named since one needs to have a lot of it to afford a condo here. I just couldn\u2019t welcome a condo development with the name “The Platinum” replacing a legendary neighborhood pub.<\/p>\n Scenes and a Cast of Characters<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n After exploring the many buildings neglected, threatened, or demolished that Rinaldi and Yasinsac document on HudsonValleyRuins.org, I went looking online for anything about McHale\u2019s. When I found a photo showing its familiar red and green neon signs<\/a> and glass swing-door, I was surprised by the sadness that came up again. Three years later, the loss of McHale\u2019s still feels fresh.<\/p>\n Losing some buildings is noteworthy because of the buildings themselves, their history, or architectural distinctiveness, while for others, it\u2019s the lives within the building. McHale\u2019s was a case of the latter, a well-lived life for more than 50 years as a beloved establishment. It didn’t have some consumer market-aimed name meant to conjure up a quality or image. McHale\u2019s was named for a family \u2013 Jimmy McHale was the last owner of the place and his father, also named Jimmy, had bought the tavern in 1953.<\/p>\n The pub was gritty and earthy, not fancy. (Lost City<\/a>, a blog whose birth was inspired by the death of McHale’s, called the place “traditional, old-style, classy, unpretentious, urban, vintage New York<\/a>.”) It also felt timeless, as if my dad just as easily could have had a Koehler beer in a place looking like this in the 1950s as my having a Samuel Adams in 2004.<\/p>\n McHale\u2019s had many regulars and became known as a hangout for the backstage folks who worked on Broadway, and its waitresses might be doing acting gigs as well as delivering beers and steaks to tables. Inside were several booths and a long oak bar in a front room where the brown venetian blinds let in just a little light at dusk. As one of my McHale\u2019s companions once said, \u201cDid you ever notice that the darker it gets, the better McHale\u2019s looks?\u201d Crowds would jam both the bar and the tavern\u2019s back room \u2013 which for some reason felt to me like a Moose hall in upstate Pennsylvania \u2013 when the New York Yankees or the Rangers were in the playoffs.<\/p>\n Special memories live on this corner at West 46th<\/sup> and Eighth. I\u2019ll never forget the night I jumped out of a booth and hugged a stranger for one of the fabled home runs a Yankee hit in the late-1990s playoffs. The bar had Rangers’ and Yankees’ photos, signed baseballs, hockey equipment and the like on the walls \u2013<\/span> truly old stuff. <\/em>For years, a fuzzy-headed man clad in a Yankees jacket used to stand on the sidewalk outside of McHale\u2019s, hold a transistor radio to his ear, and listen to the Yankees broadcast while watching the game on one of McHale\u2019s TVs through the venetian blind slats. Where is he now, I wonder?<\/p>\n Next on the Menu?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n McHale\u2019s served hearty food and excellent beer for $4 a pint. Its thick and delicious burgers were on various best-of-New-York lists, and the book The 10 Best of Everything<\/em> named them one of the world\u2019s best. They were certainly the best in a lot of people\u2019s worlds, including mine.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to say what will end up in the street-level space of The Platinum building. Progress and the ever-changing, in New York and elsewhere, sometime bring a new great thing or place. But will it be a one-of-a-kind legendary watering hole that draws folks for generations? Hmmm, I wouldn\u2019t bet on it. I can\u2019t decry the process of new homes for people, so it\u2019s not about stopping \u201cprogress\u201d or all new construction. It\u2019s about the scale, the monotonous effect of a line of high-rises on a neighborhood full of character, and a price paid in the process.<\/p>\n Hats off to Rinaldi and Yasinsac for the way their site and work capture and advocate for the neglected, threatened, and torn-down buildings of note in the Hudson Valley, on a continual basis. Sometimes somber in a sea of new, often-bland high-rises on Eighth Avenue in the West 40s of Manhattan, I wish McHale\u2019s could have been saved. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In some ways, buildings are like people. They have a birth and a prime of life. As they age, they either wear well or not. They\u2019re either cherished and well cared for, or neglected. The lives of some buildings are cut short way too soon. Others seem to thrive year upon year upon year. 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