I learned about it from my dad as a teenager, undoubtedly as an optimistic aside to one of his rants about how “everything sucks now.” The first time I went, one late afternoon just before the after-work crowd arrived, I felt immediately at ease. I loved the Campbell Apartment before I was even old enough to be allowed inside. This embodies all that I really want my place to be.’ It has a history to it that gives it some personality, and all the rest.” Flickr/mooshinier “I saw it, and it spoke to me,” he recalls. ![]() Under Grossich’s conscientious touch, the Gatsby-era space came to personify a certain ghost of New York’s past. We spent a lot of time in historical societies, and looking back at that period, and getting the right stuff together, then hiring a bunch of Sistine Chapel-like craftsmen to lie on their backs and repaint the whole ceiling from scratch.” “We invested to completely restore it, which in and of itself was a delightful exercise. ![]() Grossich sought to restore the Campbell Apartment to its days of old New York glamour and antique novelty. It was a completely destroyed room… everything was damaged. ![]() We were then approached by the MTA about an interest in space… apparently there was no one interested in the space at all. “Back years ago, I started a group of places called Bar and Books, and they were lofty library-like environments back when you could still smoke cigars and all the rest, and they had library backdrops. "The Campbell Apartment kind of acquired me,” Grossich told me. Seventeen years ago, Mark Grossich of Hospitality Holdings (who has owned the Campbell Apartment: New York Bar and Institution until now), renovated the space for about $3 million and opened it to the public. Over the following decades, it had stints as a signalman’s office, a closet for the guns of transit cops, and a jail. When he died in 1957, the office fell into disrepair. He kept an enormous steel safe in the faux fireplace on the back wall, both of which also remained fixtures throughout the space’s future transformations. Rumor has it that the room-size Persian carpet that lay throughout Campbell’s tenure cost $300,000 - $3.5 million today, according to the Times. Allen to design his office, with plaster-of-Paris ceilings and the mahogany balcony that has survived the years. According to a 2007 New York Times article, he hated socks, even with shoes, and liked his pants so thoroughly unwrinkled that he would work pantsless at his desk while his pants hung in a humidor.Ĭampbell commissioned Augustus N. He was born in 1880 in what is now Fort Greene, one of three children of John Campbell, treasurer of the Credit Clearing House. Not much is known about Campbell himself. Campbell originally leased the Campbell Apartment space in 1923 from his friend William Kissam Vanderbilt II, whose family built the Grand Central Terminal where the office was situated. But the Campbell Apartment was, in some form or another, a part of my New York and all the New Yorks of the past 93 years. I’ll never know Scribner’s Bookstore or the Gaslight Cafe or even really what dating meant before all the Bumbles and the Tinders and the Hinges. In the words of Whitehead, “Never listen to what people tell you about old New York, because if you didn't witness it, it is not a part of your New York and might as well be Jersey.” Still, like most of us, I hold tight to my individual truth about what the city is and should be (and most importantly, what it should never be), scrambling to keep the precise skyline I saw from the Uptown 1 the first time I drank a beer, the coffee cart guy who fed me through my first job, the restaurant I’m positive Warhol frequented. I hear the pretension in my voice when I threaten a move to LA, or begrudge another bank, Duane Reade, or Starbucks their new lease. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.”Īs a native New Yorker and self-professed Most Nostalgic Person in the Room (any room), I am in a constant battle between myself and my changing city. ![]() In my favorite ode to New York, Colson Whitehead writes for the Times, “No matter how long you’ve been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say ‘That used to be Munsey’s’ or ‘That used to be the Tic-Toc Lounge.’. Campbell - would close its doors forever come August to begin a new life as a sibling of the Lower East Side lounge Mr. When I learned last month that the Campbell Apartment - Grand Central’s not-so-secret “secret” bar located in the former office of New York railroad mogul John W.
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