All week, thousands of United Nations officials and delegates strode up and down 46th Street between Second and Third Avenue and most were likely unaware that they were walking right past the spot where one of the more notorious episodes in New York mafia lore took place.
On December 16th, 1985, Paul Castellano, the head of the Gambino crime family, was driven to Sparks Steak House for a meeting arranged to ease myriad internal tensions. It was a complicated winter for the 70-year-old, who was standing trial for his role in a car-theft ring. Even from the distance of 40 years, it’s easy to summon up the feel of the street that evening – the perishing breeze chasing up from the East River, the Christmas twinkle of the shops and the Monday commuters hurrying in the dusk; this happened at 5.26pm: rush hour.
The New York Times reported that just after Castellano stepped out of his limousine along with an associate, Thomas Bilotti, they were approached by three men and shot with semi-automatic weapons.
“After the shooting, witnesses said, the gunmen fled on foot east to the corner of the Second Avenue, where they jumped into a waiting dark car that sped south on the avenue and disappeared, leaving behind a grisly tableau of underworld murder.”
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That tableau was intact when the photographers arrived and, over the following days, black-and-white photographs of Castellano lying dead on the pavement, in his suit and heavy coat and slip-on shoes and obligatory dainty socks, were published across the world. They are terrible and dramatic and look to all the world like a film still.
“Everyone should be outraged at something like this,” said a young district attorney for the southern district of New York, Rudolph Giuliani.
“A murder like this makes the world a little bit less safe for everybody – no matter who is murdered.”
Giuliani’s office put in place the Rico (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act and set about targeting and prosecuting key Mafia members in the city for the remainder of the decade.
In 1992, John Gotti stood trial and was found guilty of Castellano’s murder. A year later, Giuliani was elected mayor of New York and was largely credited with transforming Manhattan – in particular the midtown stretch through which 46th Street cuts a ribbon, from the gaunt UN building by the East River through Times Square and along “Restaurant Row” past Ninth and Tenth avenues to what was Hell’s Kitchen.
(Less than two years after Castellano was killed, Jimmy Coonan, the leader of the New York-Irish “Westies” petty crime and ultra-violent organisation, was arrested under the Rico Act and tried. He was sentenced to 75 years and remains incarcerated in Schuylkill, Pennsylvania).
The months and years after the killing of Paul Castellano did nothing to hurt the bookings at Sparks Steak House. After emigrating from the Campania region of Italy in the 1930s, the Cetta brothers had flipped their butchering skills into the transformation of a former English pub – also Sparks – into a classic steakhouse. It’s been there since, largely unchanged, impervious to the metamorphosis of the city outside its doors and indifferent to the restaurant fads that have come and gone over the years. Its windows are filled with newspaper clippings and awards. The interior is as you’d imagine: mahogany, starched linen and low lighting.
Sparks is still the brattish upstart to the enduring, magisterial steakhouses which have somehow operated continuously since the late 1800s. Keens, on Herald Square, with its clay smoking pipes used by former patrons such as Babe Ruth and Teddy Roosevelt, has been a constant since 1885. The Old Homestead, on lower Ninth Avenue, started life two years after the Civil War. Gallagher’s, on 52nd Street, will celebrate its 100th birthday next year.
Each of these places, in chintzy decor and atmosphere, behave as though it is still 1959, or 1972, or 1985: you step in, time slows down and nothing ever changes. You are likely to hear Frank Sinatra singing In the Wee Small Hours.
The same is true of places like PJ Clarke’s – a regular filming location for Mad Men – and McSorley’s Old Ale House in the East Village.
Not all survive: eagle-eyed flaneurs on 51st, near Radio City Hall, might notice a small bronze plaque marking the location of the original Toots Shor’s restaurant. Its inscription – “Where the ‘crumb bums’ who played sports and the ‘crumb bums’ who wrote about them got together with those who rooted for them and read them. Especially Toots”- is odd and awkward and contains within a phenomenal story of mid-century American glamour and power.
Toots vanished in the 1970s and Gino’s, Marilyn Monroe’s favourite restaurant, closed its doors in 2010.
But others, like Sparks, continue to weather fads in drink culture and the city’s restless and ruthless restaurant culture by ignoring it. There is the sense that despite the hyperinflated rent and living costs, the spirit of New York can never quite bring itself to quit the 20th century. And it is the stubborn, unchanging holdouts like Sparks that help preserve that.
Customers can sense the real stuff as soon as they step through the same doors to receive the same welcome as those long gone – the hoodlums, the gods, the stars, the crumb bums, the ghosts.
