© Nathan Tweti
David W. Dunlap writes the following about Bickford’s:
If you lived in New York anytime from the 1930’s through the 1960’s, chances are you knew Bickford’s. They were up and down Broadway, on Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, Nostrand Avenue and Fulton Street in Brooklyn, Main Street and Jamaica Avenue in Queens.
“Breakfast at Bickford’s is an old New York custom,” a 1964 guidebook said. “In these centrally located, speedy-service, modestly-priced restaurants a torrent of traffic is sustained for a generous span of hours with patrons who live so many different lives on so many different shifts.”
To say the least. The best minds of Allen Ginsberg’s generation “sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s,” he wrote in “Howl.” The Beat Generation muse, Herbert Huncke, practically inhabited the Bickford’s on West 42nd Street. Walker Evans photographed Bickford’s customers, and Andy Warhol rhapsodized about Bickford’s waitresses. Bickford’s make its way into the work of writers as diverse as Woody Allen and William Styron.[i]
“Death (being edged to the doorway): Where’s a good hotel? What am I talking about hotel, I got no money. I’ll go sit in Bickford’s. (He picks up the News).”
—Getting Even, Woody Allen
“How vividly there still lingers on my palate the suety aftertaste of the Salisbury steak at Bickford’s, or Riker’s western omelette, in which one night, nearly swooning, I found a greenish, almost incorporeal feather and a tiny embryonic beak.”
—Sophie’s Choice, William Styron
[i] Dunlap, “Old York,” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2000/12/10/nyregion/old-york-look-close-this-ever-new-town-you-will-see-traces-past-peeking-through.html.
