Another memoir with the restaurant industry at it's center. A millennial account of moving to New York from a small town upstate, the allure of the city streets, and walking into a first job in the city.
by Liz Richards
The wind that echoed through the city streets that year was shrill and piercing, like a person lost in years gone by. As it swept through the thin, impossibly tall buildings of Midtown, it imposed a chill that was at once alive and sallow. It was the kind of wind that froze a body in time and marrow. It was everything. The Midtown wind that year was hope and courage and strength, not as I envisioned them in childhood, but as they came to me in the city streets. Pale and distant, ever shrill, ever moving.
New York isn’t a calling as much as it is a voice on the wind. It is a story handed down and passed around so that by the time we’re young, we already know the potential of Midtown. The wretched don’t just wash up on its shores and the streets aren’t lined with gold. New Yorkers are collective in their need for action and our search of the illusive motion along the concrete streets because the chill and the chase are part of us. The grid can’t contain us. We have constructed a city without limitations, with bodegas that never close, with businesses and oases for every possible desire. Our hearts’ content is that we recognize the beauty of the discontent, of constant motion within the grid. We are universal in our pursuit of the wind.
When I was accepted into my graduate program at the New School I had already chosen New York, even though I waited patiently for the other letters to trickle in from Portland, San Francisco State, and a school in Los Angeles. Why New York? was the question on everyone’s lips, and I had my list of carefully constructed responses about the integrity of the school, the creative legacy of the city, it’s relative proximity to home – six hours by car, eight by train or bus, or a one-hour flight – and some other practical motives. I envisioned myself an academic, lost in the city’s vast libraries and socializing in late-night study sessions with high-quality coffee drinks discussing literary principles and philosophy and whatnot.
New York itself never occurred to me, not the glamor or the grit of it. I never imagined that the world I found would be random or that my biggest moments would transpire in a world so separate from academia. From my position in a small Western New York township halfway between Buffalo and Rochester, as a twenty-one-year-old graduate of a SUNY school close to home, I thought only of getting out. Sure, there was the allure of the urban, that restless dream of a place where there was always action, always excitement. The notion of the tallest of city’s standing on an island where stars never came out seemed mystical, poetic. I wanted to stand under a blank night sky, to feel the rush of cars and water all around me. But also it was practical. The rest of the state, the New York that I knew, was dead or dying, and I was raised to chase my dreams. So I followed the wind downstate, and wound up in Midtown, in a famous Times Square restaurant.
Like everything in Times Square, Junior’s was a copy. The most central of four locations, its lights were the brightest and its food the priciest, but it was inspired by a fixture in Brooklyn’s history. The original location on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn was still the largest and the most beloved, and even in Times Square the menu boasted egg creams and hot pastrami on rye – along with that ever legendary cheesecake – but the transposition of Junior’s to 45th Street between Broadway and Eighth, on the bottom floor of the Viacom skyscraper that housed MTV, solidified the establishment as a multi-million dollar business. Owner Alan Rosen, whose grandfather opened the Junior’s on Flatbush as a humble nightclub in the 1950s and later a family eatery, was a celebrity and the cheesecake was so popular that by the 2010s, Junior’s was the number one buyer of Philadelphia Cream Cheese in the world.
I walked into Junior’s Times Square with no real knowledge of the legacy or the surrounding area. I had been in the city about a week, had just started classes, and was spending the day wandering aimlessly around the city in search of a job, and I wasn’t qualified for much. An email from a man named James popped up on my phone from a retail/service industry-based job site I had been using to submit online applications, asking if I could interview within the hour. The Google Maps App on my phone told me that I was nearby and so I went without hesitation. I recognized Junior’s as the place my roommate had taken me with my family the week before when they’d brought me to the city and moved me into my first Brooklyn apartment. My mother needed a real, New York-style cheesecake for a party and my roommate said this was the best. Beyond that I knew nothing about the place, and when James offered me a job in the take-out department I said yes without hesitation.
The job was at least forty hours a week (and generally several more) and hourly pay but it didn’t interfere with classes and seemed similar to the retail job I’d had upstate for five years in my hometown’s candy store, and I thought it would be the easiest phase of my life. I’d heard horror stories about people who never found jobs in New York, who spent months and years being turned away. To walk in the front door of the first place I interviewed and walk out with a job had to be a good omen. It felt temporary and automatic, but it was also a relief. Since I had a brand new Bachelor’s degree and was now a graduate student, I assumed that I would keep interviewing for jobs in my field and be on my way as a young professional soon enough. And I did keep interviewing. I was scammed and rejected and offered less money than I could survive on, like most millennials. In the meantime, I settled into the restaurant and let it shape me without even knowing it most of the time.
I spent so much time there, and for a while I couldn’t have left if I’d wanted to. By the time I did want to leave it was a big part of my world. I laughed more there, cried more, had been simultaneously angrier and more content than I had ever imagined possible in a temporary job. I knew that Junior’s was going to be my first stepping stone in New York, but I never thought it would be a milestone, a major moment in my life that shaped me as a woman as much as a New Yorker. For more than a year it was all I knew. My relationships, my energies, and myself were completely wrapped up in a place – in the windiest place in the city because the skyscrapers created a tunnel, and the most popular restaurant in Times Square.
Junior’s was a waiting place for most of the people who worked there. Some made a career out of it, but most viewed it as a means to an end. Junior’s was where we went to pay our rent, and our lives were supposed to happen outside. People came and went in Junior’s, like in any restaurant. But there was a core group who came and stayed for at least a few years. They were my first family in New York, and with them I did a lot of first things. My first job in New York was at Junior’s but it’s also where I made my first friends, tried my first pastrami, had my first real heartbreak (plus one or two more), had my first waitressing gig, and my first breakdown. I completely lost myself there, and that’s how I started to find my way.
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