By Robin Hirsch
From the collection, The Whole World Passes Through: Cafè Stories from the Cornelia Street Cafè (installment from February 2001)
In England, when I was growing up, there was a vaudeville theatre in London, in the heart of Soho, called the Windmill. Scantily clad women supposedly appeared on stage there every night—an almost unbearably thrilling notion for boys coming of age amid the rain and rationing of postwar England. But what made the Windmill special was that for the six years of the war, even during the Blitz, it had remained open. Scantily clad women had appeared there every single night, bombs or no bombs. This claim to fame was immortalized after VE Day with a large neon sign, proclaiming, in letters equal in size to the letters spelling out the name of the theatre, “WE NEVER CLOSED.”
This is a refrain that has echoed for me during the more than twenty-three years that the Cornelia Street Café has been in existence. For a very brief period at the beginning we closed on Mondays. But beginning in December of our first year, with the arrival of the Songwriters Exchange, which foregathered in our one room every Monday night, we were open seven days (and nights) a week.
Now, an ever increasing number of songwriters foregathering in one room suggests pretty quickly that you need another room. So, three years later, when the storefront next door, became available, we leaped at the opportunity. Preparing the space was no problem: that could go on on the other side of the wall while we went about our business in the café proper, serving an ever-increasing number of patrons with the aid of our trusty toaster oven. However, inevitably the day arrived when we had to break through and join the two spaces together.
Without revealing certain trade secrets which some of us (given New York City codes of every description) will doubtless take to our graves, we decided to carry out the necessary work on New Year’s Day 1981. We figured that, since it was a holiday, we could set about creating the arch that to this day connects the bar room with the side room, free from the snooping of Inspectors.We operated with the example of Rome and its viaducts very much our guide. Those arches had lasted for hundreds of years; surely an arch would hold up this building with its twenty-eight apartments, at least until our lease expired. We covered the windows, we assembled our friends and cohorts and equipped them with sledgehammers. Before building comes demolition. It was a huge job, it made an enormous mess, but by the next morning we had our arch and the building was still standing. Our Rome had been built in a day.
As it happens, that day twenty years ago, was the last day we closed. All the construction we have done since—from putting in a kitchen (and expanding it twice) to dropping a staircase down into the basement, from taking over the room that is now our back dining-room to moving the bathrooms from upstairs to downstairs, we have done without closing. It is above all a tribute to our customers, who have sometimes gazed in awe or trepidation as some monstrous piece of equipment, handled by equally monstrous ballet dancers, maneuvered itself past, over, or around their sesame-crusted salmon. “It’s just the cabaret,” we would say, as jauntily as we knew how.
Well, twenty years is a pretty good record. On Monday, January the 29th 2001, it fell.
We had intended to redo the floors for a long time. In our traditional fashion, we had figured out that if we sanded them at night, we could get a couple of coats of sealer on and they would dry enough for us to open sometime the next day. The following night we could add the final three coats of polyurethane and we’d be back in business. Ah, well.
We had alerted the building. The Christian Brothers (who will doubtless be redoing the floors in Heaven when they are called upon) arrived at midnight on Sunday with three huge sanding machines and half a dozen guys. Our friends from the 6th Precinct arrived shortly afterwards, having been summoned by various friendly neighbors, and cheerfully closed us down. The great and good Santiago stood guard for the balance of Sunday night over all our worldly possessions lined up forlornly on the sidewalk. On Monday the Christian Brothers returned, sanded for eight hours, and sealed and polyurethaned for another eight. Rain threatened, so we moved all our worldly possessions—tables, chairs, ice chests—from the sidewalk to the basement. The next morning we brought all our worldly possessions up from the basement, redistributed the furniture, washed every knife and fork, every glass and dish, every saucepan, every spatula, and, admiring our handiwork and our reflection in the gleaming floors, opened the doors again, exhausted, a day late, but all in all, mightily pleased with the results.
We realize you might prefer scantily clad women, but they’re busy at the Windmill.
