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Drinking In The Kitchen
The night started out inauspiciously enough. I meandered into McSorley's in the late afternoon, but by 1 am I was propositioned by a hooker at Queensboro Plaza. To begin: I carried in my shoulder bag one copy of Joseph Mitchell's UP IN THE OLD HOTEL, one pack of cigarettes, a half dozen matchbooks, and DAREDEVIL #26-37 and #41-44, by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev. My goal was simple enough. I intended to profile the art of Alex Maleev by visiting some of the backgrounds he used as references. This was purely a fact-finding mission, but it just so happened that of the two backgrounds I could readily identify, one of them was a bar. So I started there. As you know, DAREDEVIL is set in the Hell's Kitchen neighbourhood of New York City. After the Civil War, Hell's Kitchen was considered to be located between 14th and 52nd Streets along 8th Avenue. It was named Hell's Kitchen because of the sleaze and gang warfare. As Bendis says in DAREDEVIL #44, Hell's Kitchen received it's name from Dutch Fred the Cop: "He had this rookie partner, and they were watching this insane riot that broke out. Just a blood and fire bath right in the middle of the street. Supposedly, the rookie watches this horror and says something like, 'This place is Hell.' And Dutch Fred hits back with: 'Hell's a mild climate. This is Hell's Kitchen.'"
Bendis points out that gang warfare was an entirely different system in the days of Dutch Fred than it is today. Gangs "would protect their neighborhood. They were volunteer fire departments and neighborhood militia." Today the gangs are gone, relegated to the boroughs. The neighbourhood of Hell's Kitchen is now commonly known as Clinton, which sounds much nicer to real estate agents, and is considered to occupy 34th to 59th Street and 8th Avenue to the Hudson. And today, Hell's Kitchen is known for the fine dining along Eighth Avenue rather than for superheroics or gang warfare. So Matt Murdock and his new friend Milla are walking through Hell's Kitchen discussing the neighbourhood's history. As they walk, the background fades into a flashback and there, as plain as day on pages 4 and 5, is McSorley's Ale House, a fixture of the lower east side that is about as far from Hell's Kitchen as you can get. In the words of New Yorker writer and editor Joseph Mitchell, who profiled McSorley's in an article entitled 'The Old House At Home'; "McSorley's occupies the ground floor of a red-brick tenement at 15 Seventh Street, just off Cooper square, where the Bowery ends". McSorley's has been at the same location since 1854, and is arguably the oldest bar in New York City. Upon reading DAREDEVIL #44, the fanboy and the New Yorker in me came running at each other from opposite ends of an alley and smacked their foreheads together. It's an inconsistency I can respect, though. Most of Alex Maleev's backgrounds are lifted directly from the New York City landscape. Some are readily identifiable, such as on page 2 of DAREDEVIL #28, which is a shot from the 7 train in Queens. The Silver Cup Studio sign is there in the left corner of the panel. This is a shot as familiar to any Astorian or resident of Long Island City as their own kitchen. It's a confusing page, though, as the shot goes from a view from the el immediately to the offices of Nelson & Murdock, but it's easily forgivable because: a) It looks great; and b) Silver Cup is where many of the interior sequences from THE SOPRANOS are shot, and anyone who doesn't think that Bendis has at least a passing familiarity with THE SOPRANOS probably isn't paying enough attention. From the water towers on top of tenement buildings to the fire escapes and blind alleyways and the claustrophobic diners and apartments next to the elevated trains, Maleev has rendered New York City in all of its comic book glory. This in a time when the grit of the real New York has been brushed aside to make way for a Times Square safe for tourists; when a citywide restaurant smoking ban lies just around the corner; when most office buildings require two forms of ID and a keycard to enter. Since September of 2001, the rest of the country has developed a certain affection for the city, and the days when Manhattan was seen as a dangerous place are long gone.
McSorley's is one of the last few reminders of what New York used to be, and it just so happens that it's not in Hell's Kitchen. But that's okay, because Hell's Kitchen is safe now. You're never more than a block away from a Starbucks. Fucking Starbucks. You'll hopefully never see one in an issue of Bendis and Maleev's DAREDEVIL. Instead you'll see bodegas and delis with terrible yellow awnings, where you can get a 'regular' cup of coffee made with 50% milk and two heaving spoonfuls of sugar plus one solid splash of the darkest coffee ever to stain a pot. No one will ever order a personal pan pizza in Maleev's DAREDEVIL. They'll say: "Give me a slice and a Coke. Nah, don't put it in the oven - if it's warm I'll take it." The New York of Alex Maleev's DAREDEVIL is much like McSorley's, in that it's "dark and gloomy, and repose comes easy in a gloomy place." The best time to get to know a bar is in the late afternoon. The bartender will most likely be puttering around wishing he had someone to talk to. And the bartender that afternoon was in a conversational mood. It turns out he's lived in a railroad apartment in Hell's Kitchen for the past twenty years. There was a guy down at the end of the bar who had lived in Hell's Kitchen for a few years in the late-seventies and early-eighties. He used to drive a cab. "It was the worst fucking job I ever had." We sat there and bullshitted for a few hours and I waited for my buddy to show up. When he did we each had a pint of McSorley's own and tossed around the idea of catching the DAREDEVIL movie. We retired to the West Village and the grungy living room couches of Kettle Of Fish where we drank pints of Bass, told each other huge, wonderful lies and smoked all of our cigarettes. Sometime around ten o'clock we were ready to unpack the momentum to head up to the Union Square cinema. The DAREDEVIL movie is a well-choreographed music video set on a Hollywood soundstage, with only a passing resemblance to New York City. It's a DAREDEVIL where no one takes the el train and Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson hang out in a Starbucks knock-off. The movie's rendition of Daredevil's radar attacked my drunken senses like a cat in a clothes dryer. Like Ben Affleck, I wanted to sleep in a sensory deprivation tank. I screamed with laughter during the Elektra/Daredevil flirtatious fight scene in the playground and wished for the film to end there. When it did, my friend and I parted company with the lingering sense of guilt you get after hanging out in a titty bar and then having to go home to your girlfriend. Just like how you never tell your girlfriend about getting a lapdance from a pair of breast implants and stretchmarks, the DAREDEVIL movie is best left unmentioned. I should've taken the L train home, but I still had one more place to see. I wanted to catch the Silver Cup sign from DAREDEVIL #28. So I grabbed the N train to 42nd Street and connected to the 7 into Queens. I woke up somewhere in Flushing, having missed the view. So I connected to a Queensboro Plaza bound 7 train and gave it another try. Long Island City is very much a part of Maleev's vision of DAREDEVIL. He grabs the oppressive existence of life underneath the el and the old men who stand outside of delis drinking Greek coffee and spitting on the sidewalk. I saw the sign how I intended and got out at Queensboro Plaza and wandered down to the street to grab a cup of coffee. The bus from Ryker's Island lets off at Queensboro Plaza. The hookers are always in business down there. I stood out front of a deli and took a sip of my coffee. This six foot tall hooker who looked like something from a Frank Miller comic came striding down the street. She wore pink leather hotpants and her afro was dyed blonde. She looked unbelievably fabulous. The pro said to me: "Hey, honey, I'll suck your dick for fifty bucks." Now I know that's a bargain, but still I declined. She said: "Whatever," and kept on moving down the street. I finished my coffee and took the train home. Frank Smith is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Ninth Art endorses the principle of Ideological Freeware. The author permits distribution of this article by private individuals, on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice. Back. |
