...or Lucklessly Looking for One Loyola Loser’s Lost Lunch Counter
As I’ve invariably mentioned on many posts prior to this, I was kind of an awkward high schooler. Upon my arrival at Loyola School in 1981, I was pretty much a shy, self-conscious, nervous, argumentative and needlessly sensitive kid. Certain other factors didn’t help. I was also a slump-shouldered nerd. I hated sports, collected comic books, played “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” and listened to a steady diet of Devo, screechy metal, pugnacious punk rock and other music entirely predicated on hostility toward all things popular and mainstream. I was jittery and barely approachable, a lot of the time.
Mercifully, I did manage to accrue a small coterie of very patient and understanding friends who tolerated my thorniness, but I had what I considered a lot on my plate, at the time – my parents’ impending divorce, my at-the-time middling grades, various strenuously unrequited, heroically improbable and forever unmentioned crushes and regular run-ins with various bullies both in and out of school. At Loyola, I was an easy target for some likely lads in my class, given my inability, at the time, to laugh anything off. I didn’t make things easy on myself. Out on the mean streets of the Upper East Side (don’t be fooled, you could get into trouble there, too -– as floridly documented here), my failure to project any semblance of confident toughness made me an all-too-likely victim.
But recently, I’ve been thinking about it, and I now suspect that a major reason I was so tightly wound and on-edge in school, most of the time, was that I was basically perpetually HANGRY.
I first mentioned the roots of this condition in this unlikely post. As an ancillary anecdote to explain the significance of a certain old, since-vanished neighborhood landmark I’d become preoccupied with finding visual evidence of (that being the white, grinning, plaster whale that used to sit atop the awning of a seafood joint on Madison Avenue called Moby Dick), I mentioned my rigidly observed high-school lunch routine, which essentially consisted solely of a worrying paucity of French fries. But let me back that up with some extra context.
At the time, upperclassmen were permitted to step off the school premises for forty-minute free periods. Freshmen were, for whatever reason, not let out, and -- if they didn't bring their own homemade lunch (something I never did) -- had to make do with the very slim array of offerings in the basement-level Student Commons, the heartiest of which being probably the “pizza,” which were frozen rectangles that a genuinely well-meaning lady named Alice blithely chucked in a toaster oven for unevenly inconsistent amounts of time. The end results were invariably mouth-scaldingly hot on the outside, but still frozen on the inside. This entrée was generally accompanied by a can of soda from the battered White Rock soda machine (presumably a gift from a benefactor alumnus) and a Drake’s Cakes selection like Ring Dings or Funny Bones,… vile confectionary products which, in retrospect, were terrible things to put anywhere near your mouth.
But from sophomore year on up, you were allowed to go out. Now, forty minutes isn’t a whole helluva lot of time, but it more or less sufficed for popping over to nearby Madison Avenue to procure one’s lunch at a small selection of concerns. A lot of – if not most – of my schoolmates went to a nearby Greek deli called Neofytos, which sold your basic fare of bagels, egg concoctions and sandwiches. For whatever reason, I wasn’t a big Neofytos fan, as it was usually too crowded and/or filled with individuals I didn’t want to see or talk to. Instead, after I’d swiftly soured on a full school year of one-too-many mouth-scarring slabs of Alice’s “pizza,” I started very regularly repairing to a venture just two or three storefronts up from Neofytos
called -– if my own dimming memory is to be trusted -– Jackson Hole Burgers.
Now, look, I don’t claim to be infallible. Ironically, the location of Moby Dick’s, for example, that, in that first post, I placed directly across the street from the establishment I’m now discussing, was actually a block up between 84th and 85th. I am entirely capable of obscuring facts or flatlly misremembering things, and take pains to correct myself, here, when I do. But as I remember it, and this from loyally giving them my patronage for three solid school years from 1982 until 1985 (although I’d imagine it well pre-dated that era), I remember Jackson Hole Burgers, which I’ll describe in greater detail below, as being basically in the middle of the block on the west side of Madison Avenue between East 83rd and East 84th Streets. If you know better and can prove it, now’s your time so speak on up.
While the name Jackson Hole may conjure images for any longtime New Yorkers reading of various other outlets of that same chain around town (there used to be one in nearby Carnegie Hill on 91st Street and Madison, another on Second Avenue, just south of East 86th and a third, across town, on Columbus Avenue just south of West 86th), this was nothing quite so expansive. More of a “lunch counter” than a proper diner or lunceonette, this joint was the quintessential greasy spoon. Imagine, if you will, a cramped, tiny space divided by a lunch counter wide enough, from south wall to north, to accommodate about six patrons, sitting elbow-to-elbow. Behind them there was a narrow space, with another small table for two in the front window. It was not a big place.
Behind the counter, meanwhile, was a tightly confined (but deceptively efficient) kitchen set-up manned by at least four sullen-but-talkative Greek gentlemen who helmed proceedings as if from inside the claustrophobic iron bowels of a German U-boat. Lined up behind the counter – in their matching short-sleeved, white-collared shirts in various states of needing to be laundered -– they relentlessly toiled and talked continuously in an odd patois best described as Greeklish while manning an incalculably busy grill, a bubbling deep-fryer, a food-prep area and a small sink. From that tight, maddeningly restricted and probably not entirely spic’n’span space, they managed to crank out a truly miraculous amount of (admittedly very greasy) food.
On the far left, against the southern wall, was a register operated by a stout, mustachioed gent who’d ostensibly take your order, if you managed to catch his attention while sharing the inevitably crowded, narrow space behind the folks seated at the counter. It was always hot in there, as was amply evident by the appearance of the kitchen staff. At any point, it seemed likely that this venture’s incredibly busy, productive system might throw a greasy spoke and messily implode, but somehow it all worked. As I recall, true to the concept of “the lunch counter,” they closed up shop by the mid-afternoon. They were predominantly there for your hasty lunch needs, although I suppose they might have served ill-considered breakfast, as well.
If you’re having a hard time conceiving of such a venture, all you really need to do is go to YouTube and search the “Olympia Restaurant” sketches from vintage “Saturday Night Live.” While John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd composed that series of sketches based on a beloved Chicago diner, the same, basic kitchen dynamic was at play at Jackson Hole Burgers and completely spot-on.
Anyway, during my alloted midday lunch periods for five days a week, for 36 weeks of every school year from about 1982 to 1985, I would enter this tiny, smokey closet on the otherwise well-heeled expanse of Madison Avenue, brave the restless rugby scrum of fellow patrons and request an order of French fries to go. That’s it. Just French fries.
I have no recollection of ever eating in-house at the counter – where there was never any space, anyway -- or at the tiny table in the front window. They’d put a batch of fries fresh out of the aforementioned deep-fryer (though Lord knows how infrequently they bothered to change the oil therein) into a cardboard tray with the red-checkered pattern and wrap it up in foil. I’d pay them -- probably no more than a dollar and a half, this being the mid-`80s – and back to school I’d go. Once back in the dank, wood-panelled confines of the Student Commons, I'd dependably pair my starchy spoils with a can of tepid White Rock cola. I’d spend the next several minutes swatting away classmates trying to prize one of my fries. My response was always “no” and/or, more likely, “Fuck OFF,” as, truthfully, when all you’re having for lunch is a side-order of French fries, EVERY FRY COUNTS!
The photo below, from my junior-year yearbook, was clearly staged for arguably comedic effect, but it was a disarmingly accurate portrayal of my daily struggle. That's my friend Gianni posing as a marauding fry-poacher.
So, as you can probalby surmise from my needlessly verbose portrayal of the eatery above, the place left a pretty indelible impression in my memory. It was verily a huge part of my high school experience
But, … in the same way it probably doesn’t occur to you to take a picture of your favorite lunch spot today, I never took a picture of it. I mean, honestly, why would I? Why would anyone? I should point out, here, that the building that formerly housed this lunch counter was razed, at some point, after I went off to college in 1985.
But after I posted the follow-up entry last week about Moby Dick’s, I was suddenly struck by an impulse that has driven so much content on this stupid blog. Periodically, I become preoccupied with finding visual evidence of the existence of any number of former concerns around my native Manhattan, usually of a fairly banal and/or super-niche variety. Prime examples of this, beyond the aforementioned Moby Dick posts, include posts about the nearby Trans-Luxe theater on Madison Avenue, the original site of Forbidden Planet on the west side of Broadway at East 12th Street, the Disc-O-Mat on East 58th and Lexington Avenue, Second Coming Records down on Sullivan Street, Freebeing Records on Second Avenue, SoHoZat on West Broadway, Rocks in Your Head on Prince Street in SoHo, Supersnipe Comics on the corner of East 84th and Second Avenue, the New York Comic Arts Gallery on East 58th Street, King Karol Records and Musical Maze on Third Avenue and, of course, the super-elusive Plasmatics mural at the Graffiti Hall of Fame on Upper Park Avenue. There are some that have continued to elude me, of course, like any pics of The Madison Pub on Madison Avenue just north of East 79th Street, any exterior shots of the toy store Rappaport’s on Second Avenue and any evidence at all about a great record store on Madison Avenue near both Grand Central and the former flagship outlet of Brooks Brothers. It’s like they never existed, according to the internet.
In that same way, when it comes to the Jackson Hole Burger place on Madison Avenue between East 83rd and East 84th, I cotinue to come up empty. In my extensive Googling, I haven’t come across a shred of any mention of even the slightest possible existence of such a business. I then thought I might have a shot of finding it on 80s.NYC, a somewhat comprehensive collection of building phototgraphs from the 1980’s, but didn’t realy hit paydirt. There is the VERY slight chance this picture below captures its exterior …
I mean, it’s exceptionally hard to discern, but it might be that storefront with the white signage on the left.
Anyway, my frustration building, I then took my query to the Facebook group, Yorkville East Side of Manhattan in New York City. Now, this was probably destined to fail from the get-go because the greasy spoon in question wasn’t actually in Yorkville, but I figured some folks from Yorkville might’ve been familiar with it. But no real dice. They made several suggestions, but I assure you, I am NOT referring to The Viand or the New Amity (which recently closed) or Soup Burg or Nectar, the place at 1090 Madison where Meryl Streep stalks her little boy in “Kramer Vs. Kramer.” Those were all nice ideas, but they’re all comparatively proper roomy diners, not a cramped little hole in the wall like this place.
What I did learn, during these travels, however, is that just like Carnegie Hill to its north and Yorkville to its east, this particular patch of real estate between East 86th and East 77th between Fifth and Third Avenues has its own neighborhood identity – Metropolitan Hill – thus named, one presumes, for its proximity to the statelly Metropolitan Museum. Who knew? I don’t know why I’d never heard that before, but there ya go.
Anyway, that’s kinda where I am in my stupid quest. I have no proof, as yet, that Jackson Hole Burgers (or whatever else it actually might have been named or informally called) was actually ever there, but I’d swear on my cherished stack of Killing Joke CDs that it completely existed.
And, as asserted in the second graf of this Old-Testament-sized post, I also indirectly blame this establishment for my fraught emotional state during much of my tenure at Loyola School given that, indirectly, they enabled my very worst dietary inclinations and helped me subsist on a dubiously steady regimen of solely starch, salt and sugar, leaving me doubtlessly bleary-eyed and ornery on the best of afternoons.
Regardless, if there is indeed evidence that this spot existed, trust me … I’ll find it. Treat yourself to an order of fries and watch this space.
Meanwhile, Neofytos Deli closed in 2018. Loyola kids (of whom my son Oliver is one) -- to say nothing of Regis boys and Marymount girls -- have precious little in the way of lunch options, these days.
ADDENDUM: For the benefit of regular reader G (that's it ... just G), herewith the White Rock machine (at left) in question, next to suitably malnourished-looking me:
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