The iconic Club 21 restaurant in New York closes its doors, one of its representatives reported a couple of weeks ago. For now, its 148 employees are advised that their jobs will end at the beginning of next March and although the company that owns the historic New York Midtown location claims “to be exploring opportunities for it to remain viable in the long term,” they also say that At the moment they do not know how or when it will return to “continue being an important social and cultural center of the city.”
The pandemic has swept away another symbol of a golden age and with it are shielded the secrets of so many celebrities who have passed through its halls since it opened its doors on January 1, 1930. It quickly became one of the most clandestine bars celebrities in the United States since the Prohibition Era and later on the scene of meetings of presidents, writers, singers and artists, who in some cases even had their favorite tables reserved there.
Legend has it that all the presidents of the United States have dined there, except Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The last, Donald Trump, who chose him to celebrate his electoral victory in 2016 with his four oldest children and some of his closest associates. A designated date that according to the newspaper has published New York Post It was accompanied by a $ 36 burger, fries, and a red wine.
It is not the only secret that its announced closure has returned to memory. The American media define the place as a “true magnet for the rich, handsome and powerful.” The restaurant on West 52nd Street is said to still have special bottles of wine left in custody by Presidents Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton. And one of his former public relations revealed a few years ago that Ernest Hemingway himself used it as a place for his sexual encounters with a girlfriend of the gangster Jack Legs Diamond. Passion led them to try the dubious comfort of the kitchen staircase – very steep, according to the employees – and how lucky it was to Legs was shot and killed before he could get revenge on the writer.
Another novelist, Jay Mclnerney, married heiress and philanthropist Anne Randolph Hearst there in 2006. For him it was his fourth marriage, for her the third and for now last, and who officiated the marriage ceremony was another well-known name: the former mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani, the same one who recently sweated dye literally trying to defend the indefensible after the defeat at the polls of his client Donald Trump. Mclnerney has maintained the tradition of having a Christmas lunch there with his friends for the past 30 years and has called its closure a “tragedy.” “It is a loss for New York. There is so much history installed in that place ”, he has told everyone who has asked him about the imminent closure.
The place has witnessed other illustrious visits, brawls, pacts and love affairs. Actors and Authors Representative Irving Paul Swifty Lazar crossed the line in one of his dining rooms, when he smashed a glass on his head by film director Otto Preminger during a lunch that ended in a fight for the rights of the film Cold-blooded. Preminger required points and Lazar ended up being arrested in his office.
No less surprising it must have been to see to the eccentric painter Salvador Dalí accompanied by his ocelot and by a man who went by the name of Captain Moore and who was in charge of caring for wild animals. He leopardus pardalis Dalí responded to the name of Babou and luckily for the rest of the diners, the address of the place forced him to remain tied.
As a good high-end restaurant worth its salt, Club 21 has upheld a sacred maxim: “It was a safe haven. When you ate there, no one would come up to you or ask for your autographs ”, explained Bruce Snyder, who directed it from 1969 to 2005. That’s why Frank Sinatra to Robert de Niro, director Alfred Hitchcock, Jacqueline Kennedy, his son John-John, tennis player John McEnroe or Marilyn Monroe who celebrated the premiere of her film there in 1954 Temptation lives above. But it has also served as a set for movie scenes such as On the rocks by Sofía Coppola O Wall Street starring Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen. Any of them, if they wanted to, could go off the menu or have their favorite bites, strange as they were, prepared in their fridges. On the 21st, he did not leave so much for his food as for the fact of seeing and being seen, the first of all by the iron horsemen who stand guard on its facade and receive its visitors.
Now its closure suspends whether their public or private rooms will return renovated or if the memories that hang from their ceiling with the names of the celebrities who donated them must find a new destination and take with them the secrets of the characters they found in the Club 21 a private moment in what began as a speakeasy and ended up being part of the unmissable events in the city of skyscrapers.
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