The Carnegie Deli has been closed since April, and rumors swirl that it will never reopen. If this truly is the end, will the city lose some of its luster — or, perhaps even more worrisome, its schmaltz?
Since 1937, the Carnegie’s skyscraper sandwiches and obnoxious waiters encapsulated the very ethos of excess that characterized New York as a whole. With its walls plastered with pictures of presidents, athletes and movie stars and its gargantuan sandwiches named after luminaries, the landmark restaurant — arguably the most famous deli in the country — has long held out the tantalizing prospect of vicarious celebrity to all who ate there.
And yet, there is something profoundly democratic about the place as well, with its policy of seating strangers next to one another — a practice that is so New York that when the Carnegie opened an outpost in swank Beverly Hills in 1990, its Manhattan-trained general manager, Robert Trager, eliminated the custom because he doubted that “Aaron Spelling would want to sit next to some tourist from Kokomo, Indiana.”
In New York, by contrast, politicians and comedians sit cheek by jowl with tourists from Germany and Japan.
The Carnegie Deli’s greatest achievement, though, was to take essentially Eastern European Jewish foodstuffs — kasha, knishes and kreplach — and to transform them into edible icons of the entire city.
Over time, even pastrami slipped its Jewish moorings; when I once went around to various tables and asked the assembly of Carnegie diners what kind of food they were eating, not one used the word “Jewish.” They said simply that they were eating “in a deli.” As Jews joined the mainstream of American society in the decades following World War II, their dishes did so too, especially in New York, where bagels and matzoh ball soup became as ubiquitous as egg rolls and pizza.
Then again, the Carnegie Deli thrived in an era when Jewish culture was still coterminous with New York culture itself. It became a magnet for Sid Caesar, Henny Youngman, Woody Allen — for whom it named a sandwich — and other Jewish comedians who, along with the stereotypically arrogant and contemptuous waiters, helped sustain the deli’s air of shticky, self-satirizing humor.
But disaster has increasingly lurked behind the levity.
In 2002, the deli made headlines when three people were shot to death in an apartment in the same six-story building that houses the deli.
More recently, the restaurant’s owner, Marian Harper Levine, has been going through a contentious divorce with her husband, Sandy. Sandy Levine was caught having a long-term affair with a former waitress whom he set up in an apartment above the restaurant. Even worse: He’s accused of giving her recipes and food so that she could open up her own Carnegie knockoff in her native Thailand.
Last April, in the wake of the lethal gas explosion in lower Manhattan, Con Ed began investigating buildings for similar illegal gas hookups, and the Carnegie was found to have diverted their gas pipes to bypass the building’s meter.
Unemployment benefits are about to expire for the deli’s 70 workers, and the upstairs tenants remain without cooking gas, heat or hot water. And last year, two dozen of the deli’s current and former workers settled for almost $2.65 million dollars for back wages; the court found that they had been systematically underpaid for more than a decade.
It seems unlikely that the restaurant will ever reopen, although there remain outposts of the famed deli at a handful of casinos and amusement parks in Nevada, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
The loss of the Carnegie would be an outsized one for New York, where there are few remaining vestiges of the Jewish deli and none with the resplendently festive vibe that makes the Carnegie so appealing. Katz’s, on the Lower East Side, is a grungy, if still well-lighted and lively, cafeteria. The Second Avenue Deli has moved uptown, away from its trademark Walk of Fame with the Yiddish stars’ fading footprints on the sidewalk. And Ben’s Kosher Deli, near Penn Station, despite its Art Deco aesthetic, seems more upscale suburban than showbiz.
When the Second Avenue Deli closed in 2006, comedian Jackie Mason called it a loss of epic proportions, noting that “It’s almost like wiping out Carnegie Hall.” What will Mason say if the Carnegie Deli, one of his favorite hangouts, goes under?
Ted Merwin is the author of “Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli.” He teaches religion at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., where he also is director of the Milton B. Asbell Center for Jewish Life.