My family from the west of Ireland was in the booze business. We had Gaffney’s Bar and Grill on Columbus and 72. Still have the Emerald Isle on 72 and Broadway. We owned liquor stores in 5 different locations in Manhattan. The story goes that my father and his sisters use to bathe in the neighbors apartment because my Grandfather made actual bathtub gin during prohibition. Luckily it was my great aunts digs who owned the local beauty parlor where you could get you hair done and get a taste.
When I was growing up they drank highballs, rye and ginger for their evening cocktails. Only one before dinner and the only drink of the day.
Later on in the 50’s the WW2 gen, my father and uncles were beer drinkers. Cocktails disappeared completely.
The best Manhattan: The bar at Radio City Music Hall where it was said to have been invented. Love the maraschino cherries that suck up the booze.
Call me old-fashioned for remembering simpler days: The times where you didn’t have to spend two hours reading the manual about your new automobile in order to drive it properly. Many things we have today don’t get better, they just get different. Take Substack, for example. Used to be when I had a paid subscription, all I had to do was open an email and I could read the article and comment on it if I liked. Now I have to log in and if I go somewhere else and return, I have to log in again. The Substack app is supposed to avoid all of this but it creates a different set of problems and starts sending me un-asked-for columns “based upon my current subscriptions.” I now believe that the cause of all this, whether it is drinks, automobiles, or Substacks , is that all the important jobs can be conducted by less than a third of the people we now have and that the rest are simply “make work” activities of no real long-term importance. Before I depart I have a question: have you seen yet the new solar powered pepper grinder?
My family from the west of Ireland was in the booze business. We had Gaffney’s Bar and Grill on Columbus and 72. Still have the Emerald Isle on 72 and Broadway. We owned liquor stores in 5 different locations in Manhattan. The story goes that my father and his sisters use to bathe in the neighbors apartment because my Grandfather made actual bathtub gin during prohibition. Luckily it was my great aunts digs who owned the local beauty parlor where you could get you hair done and get a taste.
When I was growing up they drank highballs, rye and ginger for their evening cocktails. Only one before dinner and the only drink of the day.
Later on in the 50’s the WW2 gen, my father and uncles were beer drinkers. Cocktails disappeared completely.
The best Manhattan: The bar at Radio City Music Hall where it was said to have been invented. Love the maraschino cherries that suck up the booze.
Mike Gaffney
Great story, Michael. Thanks for sharing the details.
Call me old-fashioned for remembering simpler days: The times where you didn’t have to spend two hours reading the manual about your new automobile in order to drive it properly. Many things we have today don’t get better, they just get different. Take Substack, for example. Used to be when I had a paid subscription, all I had to do was open an email and I could read the article and comment on it if I liked. Now I have to log in and if I go somewhere else and return, I have to log in again. The Substack app is supposed to avoid all of this but it creates a different set of problems and starts sending me un-asked-for columns “based upon my current subscriptions.” I now believe that the cause of all this, whether it is drinks, automobiles, or Substacks , is that all the important jobs can be conducted by less than a third of the people we now have and that the rest are simply “make work” activities of no real long-term importance. Before I depart I have a question: have you seen yet the new solar powered pepper grinder?