Imbibe! (6 page)

In 1872, faced with the kind of massive rent increases that are an eternal characteristic of the New York real estate market, the Thomas brothers moved their operation uptown to 1239 Broadway, near West Thirtieth Street. This was in the heart of the rip-roaring Tenderloin, where New York came to unwind (either within the bounds of the law or without). Apparently, it was business as usual: Thomas was surrounded by his pictures, and the place was, as one history of the New York stage notes, “popular with Wall Street men and members of the theatrical profession”—key constituencies for building a clientele. Finance and celebrities.

In fact, Thomas’s bar was popular enough to become proverbial, the name you would reach for when you were looking for an example of a New York saloon. It appears as such, anyway, in two of the popular dialect humor books by “Eli Perkins” (alias New York journalist Melville D. Landon), and in 1875, it even made it into poetry, when George Augustus Baker, Jr. included a stanza in his “Les Enfants Perdus,” a bittersweet ode to New York’s gilded youth, wherein the “juvenile Comuses” all drink champagne and are “known at Jerry Thomas’s.” But suddenly, thronged as his place was, Thomas was done, broke, and had to sell his store to John Morrissey. That was in 1876, when he was pulling in at least $200 a day, at a time when a bar could turn a profit on $50 a week. (Alas, not even his artistic skills could help him: the patent he was awarded on February 1, 1876, for a kind of signboard “intended to represent a book suspended by the head-band or upper end as is very commonly done with directories or other books for public reference” failed to pull him out of the hole.) His obituaries blamed the closing on financial problems caused by buying stocks on margin. Knowing the Professor’s clientele, and knowing his sporting proclivities, I have little reason to doubt them. Thus ended Jerry Thomas’s run as a star.

With the closing of this, his last high-profile bar, Jerry Thomas was relegated to keeping establishments in out-of-the way corners of the city, first at 3 Barclay Street, across the street from the faded glory that was the old Astor House hotel, and then—after a last, Hail-Mary fling at easy money in Denver and Leadville, where gold fever was again running high—on Sixth Avenue and West Tenth Street, under the Elevated tracks across from the Jefferson Market Police Court. In both of these, apparently, he was without his
brother, George, who wisely retired from the saloon trade sometime around then and went into banking, although he still appeared as a member of Thomas’s enigmatic Gourd Club.
²

In March 1882, the Professor had to sell out for good. This time the pictures had to go, too—auctioned off to various fellow-bartenders and Sarony, the famous portrait photographer. The highest price paid at his auction was a paltry $26, for a caricature of the editor of one of New York’s second-tier newspapers. All the Hogarths together brought a mere $49.50.

Although the reporter from the
Sun
had found the Professor full of big plans for reopening on Broadway, he never owned a saloon again. For a time after this, by one account he briefly tended bar in New Rochelle (his wife and children lived in nearby Mamaroneck; I don’t know if he lived with them), and then for a good stretch at the quaint old Central Park Hotel, a wooden structure at the corner of Seventh Avenue and West Fifty-ninth Street (while there, he gave a testimonial to the makers of St. Jacobs Oil, a patent medicine, who used it in their advertising; ostensibly it had cured him of his neuralgia). This is where Alan Dale of the
Dramatic Mirror
found him, tending bar one Sunday afternoon in blatant disregard of the city’s blue laws. “He was a stout, thick, good-tempered-looking, greasy little man, of about fifty-five years of age,” he recalled. While that “greasy little man” hurts (I must confess), it’s true that the Professor was sick and broke, and that never presents you at your best. Nonetheless, “his forehead was bulging, as became a master-mind” and “his aspect was severely respectable” and when he introduced himself, giving Dale the full “Jeremiah P. Thomas,” he expected to be recognized—as well he should have.

He was still full of plans. This time, he was going to go over to London to set up a bar that would straighten out their garbled notions of American drinks:

 

Instead of London, he went to Brighton. The Hotel Brighton, that is—a rather seedy, gambler-infested joint at Broadway and Forty-second Street, whose “café” (for which read “bar”) he began managing at the end of 1884, supposedly with the intention of turning it into a real attraction. But on December 14, 1885, he left work right after noon, went back to his house at Ninth Avenue and West Sixty-third Street, and dropped dead. His death certificate lists “Vascular Disease of the Heart” as the cause. He was fifty-five years old. His grave, near the northeast corner of the “Poplar” plot in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, is marked by a stone that reads simply “J P. Thomas”—punctuated exactly like that.

The
New York Times
, the
New York World
, the
New York Post
, and a bevy of other papers, from one end of the country to the other, all printed substantial obituaries of Jerry Thomas, all of them chockablock with inaccuracies, all of them crediting him with drinks he didn’t invent. His real epitaph, though, came a few months before he died, in an editorial from the
Brooklyn Eagle
:

 

When the
Sun
interviewed Jerry Thomas in 1882, the reporter couldn’t help but note that, “two white rats that were pretty enough to be guinea pigs, and that would be taken for such except for their long and unmistakable tails, cut capers upon his shoulders, caressed him at the corners of his moustache, and mounted occasionally to the top of his Derby hat, whence he removed them with a patient persistency that had no effect upon them whatsoever.” Yeah.

Jerry Thomas would have laughed at the very idea that you could learn how to mix drinks from a book. Sure, you could pick up a few recipes, a few proportions in which to combine the standard ingredients, but turning them into a liquid work of art and making a bar full of skeptical, sporty gents give props as you do it? That’s like learning to box, or play Hamlet, from a book. The only way to master such things is to glue your eyes on the people who know how to do it and then practice, practice, practice. Accordingly, his recipes are essentially devoid of the helpful hints that one finds in modern essays in the genre. Indeed, not until the 1880s, when the profession was losing its ties to the sporting fraternity and started admitting miscellaneous clerks, waiters, and immigrants, did you find mixographers giving tips on technique, and even then they rarely tackled anything so basic as how to hold a shaker or what kind of strainer to use.

I can see their point. Thirty seconds spent watching Dale DeGroff effortlessly waltz the ice around in his mixing glass as he stirs a Martini will teach you more about the proper use of the barspoon than thirty pages of dense prose on the topic. In other words, this book can’t teach you how to mix drinks like Jerry Thomas; no book can. The Professor’s art came from constant practice and the knowledge that what he was doing was important to his customers and they’d think badly of him, who was as good a man as any of ’em, if he screwed it up. All I can do is explain how they used to do it, supply modern equivalents for things that no longer exist, and pass along a few hard-earned pointers from my experience with making these drinks. Fortunately, while that might not have you tossing drinks over your head in liquid rainbows as white rats frolic on your shoulders, it’ll at least have you turning out some pretty damn tasty drinks.

If literature and painting can have their ages and eras, so then can mixology. In fact, considered from the perspective of the man behind the bar, the 140-odd years between the end of the Revolution and the imposition of Prohibition can be carved up into three Ages: the Archaic, the Baroque, and the Classic (in most arts, of course, the Classic precedes the Baroque; but what do you want from history that happens in a bar?). Fittingly enough, Jerry Thomas was born on the cusp of the second and died on the cusp of the third.

 

In the formative years of American mixology, the tools were few, the recipes simple, the ingredients robust, and the mixology rough and ready. Sure, the more sophisticated towns maintained a handful of establishments where a tavern-keeper might have to invest in a few silver Punch ladles and lemon-strainers, a set of good china Punch bowls, and a barrel or two
of imported arrack to fill them with (the best kind came all the way from Indonesia and fetched four or five times the price good Jamaica rum did). But all the average barkeeper needed was a knife with which to cut lemons and what-have-you, perhaps a reamer to help juice them and a strainer to catch the seeds, a nutmeg grater, and one or two pieces of equipment peculiar to the craft.

The most important of these was the toddy-stick, a five- to ten-inch hardwood or silver (or whatever a sharp Yankee peddler could pass as silver) pestle with a rounded handle on one end and a flattened knob on the other. This, a somewhat more graceful version of the modern muddler, was the general mixing tool of the age, used to crush lumps of sugar and mix them into the drink. Since ice—in whose presence sugar dissolves poorly—was rare in drinks and boiling water common, this was entirely adequate, and its characteristic raps and taps against the side of the glass aroused much the same Pavlovian response in the topers of the day that the rattle of ice in the shaker does now.

Beyond that he might need a “loggerhead” or “flip-dog” for hot drinks (this was nothing more than an iron poker that would be heated and plunged into drinks, making them hiss and steam) and perhaps an Egg Nog stirrer, made by passing a splint of wood sideways through the end of a stick, which would then be twirled between the palms, thus whipping up the eggs. Some basic glassware—large tumblers, small tumblers, stemmed wineglasses and mugs for hot drinks—and a cruet for bitters, with a goose-quill forced through the
cork as a dasher-spout (this actually worked quite well, but before long it was replaced by the purpose-made metal-and-cork “dasher top”), and the bar was equipped, at least in terms of dry goods.