NEW YORK – The first sign came in December, when the statues of thirty-five metal jockeys, all with their left arms raised to hold an imaginary bridle, were removed from the terrace overlooking the entrance. Now the confirmation has arrived: the “21” club at 21 West of 52nd Street, Manhattan, closes after almost a century of life among US presidents, plutocrats and Hollywood stars. The 148 employees of the iconic restaurant have been sent home.
The news, contained in a document presented to the New York Department of Labor, came like a whip because the Big Apple is starting again: the sidewalks, the urban parks of Washington Square and Union Square, restaurants, cinemas and arenas have returned to populate themselves. sports, even if with limited capacity. The “21” Club, inaugurated on January 1, 1930 in its new headquarters after eight years of activity in Greenwich Village, had resisted the Great Depression, prohibition and the crisis after September 11, but not the pandemic, even if the decision it came at the moment of the possible final parable of the emergency. A spokesperson for French luxury group LVMH, which had taken over the restaurant in 2018, included in a $ 2.6 billion acquisition package, explained to the New York Times that the club will not die definitively, it will do so only in its “current form” and then become something new, capable of occupying a “different role in the exciting future of the city”.
What this role will be is not clear at the moment. The only certainty is that another New York light goes out, after those of “La Caridad 78” in the Upper West Side, “Colandrea New Corner” in Brooklyn, and Monkey Bar in Midtown. Club “21”, with its unchanged 1920s décor, the obligation to wear a jacket, the prohibition of jeans, has been one of the favorite restaurants of almost all the presidents of the United States, starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt , to move on to John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. George W. Bush and Barack Obama, however, no. And then Frank Sinatra, Groucho Marx, Sophia Loren, Mae West, Aristotle Onassis, Gene Kelly, Gloria Swanson, Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe. Everyone passed by here, enchanted by the ceilings furnished over the years with the objects donated by the guests, saddles, hats and jockey jackets, from the Air Force One model of President Clinton to the tennis rackets of Chris Evert and John McEnroe, to the Jack Nicklaus golf. And then the corridors adorned with works by Frederick Remington, original drawings by Walt Disney and Peter Arno.
Ernest Hemingway linked his presence to “21” with the famous phrase pronounced upon arrival, “since I don’t drink, I’ll make myself a tequila”. But there is another story about him. At a party the writer spent the whole evening with a woman, with whom he stayed to talk and eat until late. When the closing time came, Hemingway asked Jack Kriendler, one of the two historic owners, to be allowed to stay a little longer. It was granted to him. An hour later they found him having sex in the kitchen with that woman. The next day, Hemingway returned for dinner, looking slightly troubled. “Jack – he asked – I have a problem: what was his name?”.
This is where in the sixth season of “Sex and the City”, Mr Big confesses to Carrie Bradshaw that he needs to undergo a minor angioplasty. Wine bottles also made history here, hidden by fake stairways in the 1930s to avoid seizure during the years of prohibition. When Jay-Z visited the club, a friend of his asked for a $ 10,000 bottle. No one remembers what kind of wine it was and whether guests enjoyed it. But in the history of “21” it is only a negligible detail.
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