Fascinating NYT piece on the history of a NYC institution:
Mike Fanelli (bottom right), the owner from 1920 to 1980, in a flier for the artist Chris Wilmarth’s March 1971 show at the Paula Cooper Gallery, then located a few doors away. Wilmarth is top right and the cook is on the left. Credit: Courtesy of Fanelli’s
Fanelli’s, on the corner of Mercer and Prince Streets, is a bastion of old New York beloved by artists and tourists alike.
This excerpt is from a piece originally published By Reggie Nadelson for The New York Times | Oct. 14, 2019
In this series for T, the author Reggie Nadelson revisits New York institutions that have defined cool for decades, from time-honored restaurants to unsung dives.
Seven years ago this fall, when Superstorm Sandy hit New York and there was no power downtown, SoHo was deserted, dark and cold. At Fanelli’s, the neighborhood cafe, though, there were candles on the bar, plenty of booze and, for as long as it lasted, food. Most important, there was company and conversation. “I was here the whole time,” says Sasha Noe, Fanelli’s owner. “Where else could I be?”
At 52, Noe, who can often be found at 6 in the morning making repairs, is hanging on to the place with determination. Born a couple of blocks away, he lives with his wife and three children in the loft on LaGuardia Place where he grew up. His father, Hans Noe, an architect, bought the building where Fanelli’s occupies the ground floor in 1982. An artist and sculptor, Sasha bussed tables and tended bar during high school. After he graduated from Bard, he came home.
Bartender Colin LaBrie, and morning regulars drinking beer and orange juice. Credit: Nina Westervelt
“If we don’t keep something of New York the way it was, what will our kids have?” Noe asks as he eats an onion ring.
This is the second oldest watering hole in New York. The building was erected in 1847, and the ground floor space for a while was a grocery store (when groceries sold alcohol), then from 1863, a saloon. Fanelli’s is marinated in history and nostalgia, the kind that makes New Yorkers kvetch about change, as we’ve been doing for a few hundred years: “You shoulda seen it when ….”
“It is one of the last good barrooms left in the city,” says Clare Huntington, one of the regular bartenders. People blow in from every direction to meet here at the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets (some sitting in the same seats for decades) to participate in the lost art of conversation while drinking. In the mornings, Fanelli’s is almost empty.
Beside me at the bar, early one day, a retired social worker looks at his drink. “Before I moved away from the neighborhood, I came here a lot,” he says. “I kind of miss the place. I miss New York.”
The vintage neon sign over the brick building reads FANELLI CAFE. The old wooden front door is set with engraved frosted glass. Inside is the bar itself, a long stretch of mahogany that runs almost the length of the narrow room, with its tiled floors and old three-globe chandeliers.
The neon sign at the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets has helped make Fanelli’s a SoHo landmark. Credit: Nina Westervelt
The wall of fighting fame at Fanelli’s. Mike Fanelli had been a prize fighter and the pictures here show boxers including Jack Dempsey, in the bowler hat, and Rocky Marciano. Credit: Nina Westervelt
This is where I eat breakfast most mornings. A few other locals read the papers, sip an early cocktail or coffee, contemplate bacon and eggs or a plate of fries. One day, a regular whose garden went wild this past summer offered around bags of gorgeous ripe tomatoes and deep green cucumbers.
The huge wooden bar back is carved with a traditional rendering of the Green Man, the folkloric figure who has shown up in both secular and ecclesiastical buildings for millenniums. (You find him in a lot of English pubs, too. Kingsley Amis wrote a book in 1969 called “The Green Man” about a pagan monster.) The mirrors and bottles catch the early morning sunshine filtering in through old windows. I like being at the bar best when the TV has an old movie on and I can eat my bacon with Errol Flynn or Ronald Colman, the sound off.