“Boy the way Glenn Miller played…,” the man sang through his open Pontiac window. “I know what you’re doing!” He yelled, as he sailed past the graveyard and pastel-colored rowhouses.
I was standing in front of a tidy, light blue rowhouse with an American flag planted in the front yard and a year-round wreath on the door. Signs gave a personal greeting of welcome to visitors. This is one of the most famous houses in television history. Can you guess the show?
All in the Family was the background track to my formative years, running weekly right through the ’70s and taking me from childhood through puberty. It showed the turning of the times, and my family was following similar themes. I’m pretty sure my “Old Country” patriarchal father identified with Archie’s authoritarian approach to running a household, while my mother was younger and didn’t take to being called Dingbat. Which my dad did try to lay on my mother, more than once…
As ground-breaking as it was, I didn’t know that at the time. I did know that the consciousness-raising and changing awareness the show depicted seemed utterly natural. It informed my nascent world view, and has percolated through the years as a compass showing the way forward to equality. An interesting fact I just learned on Wikipedia is that Sally Struthers was dissatisfied with how static her character Gloria was, and sued to get out of her contract in 1974. As a result, her character began to grow in subsequent seasons. Life informing art!
So this show had an incalculable impact on me personally, but also of course on society as a whole. It expressed the Zeitgeist, and ranked number one in the Nielsen ratings from 1971 to 1976, becoming arguably one of the most influential comedic programs of all time, and certainly of that decade.
When I first came to New York, I wanted to see the iconic house in Queens shown in the opening credits. But it is quite a trek to 89-70 Cooper Avenue. So I didn’t get around to making the journey to Glendale via the M train until February 21 of this year. Covid was in the air, and I felt an internal pressure to see the things in New York I’d been meaning to see before it was too late. I felt that life as I knew it was drawing to a close. There was so much uncertainty politically and with this new virus. I was considering returning to Canada, so on a cool, sunny Friday, I took the M train to the end of the line.
This definitely feels like the burbs. Bushes, parking lots, drive-throughs… And a link to Canada (Toronto Dominion bank).
It felt great to break out of my routine and see a part of New York I’d never been to. Though the show was set in Astoria, the opening credit scene of the camera panning over a row of houses was filmed on Cooper Street in Glendale. Both are neighborhoods in Queens. That image had been burned in my brain and represented something powerful about a way of life and an era, but also of my girlhood and a more innocent time.
I didn’t know what to expect, but the neighborhood near the M train station was def the burbs. Small businesses, low buildings, a sense of space and openness. The route along Metropolitan Avenue led through a large graveyard, and I looked with interest at the names and dates on the stones…
At the far side of the graveyard I came to Cooper Avenue, cutting off at a bit of an angle. There was a business on the corner, which I scarcely noticed, and then a small lane, and then the famous row of duplex houses. 89-70 was the second row house. I began to cry as I stood in front of it. Though Google maps says it’s just a 27-minute drive from where I live in Manhattan, in my inner map it is both much closer and much further away.
It’s all bound up with countless family dinners in the house I grew up in on Portland Street, in Burnaby, BC, and our ’70s living room with black-velvet flocked wallpaper and orange and green velvet furniture. All the emotions of that time, and a father who is now deceased and forever out of reach. And a mother who is no longer a beautiful young blonde, but a woman in her 70s (still beautiful in a different way) with arthritis and cataracts, who just had a stroke.
Grimaldi’s – The New York Slice
It was quite a long trip, and it seemed silly to just turn around and go home again after a few minutes of singing and being sung to at the Bunker house. I walked back to the corner and noticed a pizza place. The sign said Open, though the place had a bit of a deserted, disarrayed air to it. I walked in and there were tables pulled out blocking the aisle, and I didn’t see a soul.
“Are you open?” I called out. A woman hurried to the door and said, yes, they were just cleaning the windows. The slice is a New York tradition, so I asked her if I could get a mushroom slice. I thought it would be like most pizza places, with some premade, precut pies.
But she yelled, “David!” and a young man came up to the kitchen from the basement. To my surprise, he started building a single-slice-sized pizza just for me. The place was called Victoria G’s Pizzeria, and I found out that this is the latest store opened by the famous New York pizza family Grimaldi’s. Wow, what a fortuitous day!
There is no such thing as a hole in the wall, in any corner of the five boroughs, it seems. Every inch of the city is connected to history. I hadn’t heard the story before, but the owner Patsy Grimaldi (Victoria G is his daughter) learned to make pizza at age ten at Patsy’s Pizzeriea, his uncle Patsy Lancieri’s restaurant in Italian Harlem in 1941.
Victoria, for it was she, the eponymous owner, told me tales of the family’s Pizza Wars tangles with other pizza empires while the pizza baked in the coal oven and I sipped on high-end organic specialty white tea. Victoria was a talkative sweetheart, and she gave me another teabag to take home.
Meanwhile, another guy came out and resumed work on cleaning the windows. This was none other than Frank Sinatra impersonator JJ Burton, who performs every Saturday night at Vicky G’s. He warmly invited me to come back the next night to hear his tribute to Sinatra and other classic rockers. Geez what a nice bunch of people.
And OMG, this was the best pizza I’ve ever tasted! Look at this shape. Completely unique. I’ve never seen anything like it. They use a judicious amount of a home-made mozzarella that’s divine—less chewy and more creamy than the usual. The herbs are heavenly. A smear of tomato sauce, just enough to add some zing. And then a handful of thin, fresh mushroom slices. I don’t eat pizza often so it is always a special treat, but this was something else. A glimpse into a better world!
It is especially poignant to recount this trip to you now, as this was one of the last carefree days in New York, about a week before our first recorded case of Covid-19 on March 1.
Boy the way Glenn Miller played. Songs that made the Hit Parade! Gee our old La Salle ran great. Those were the days…