Requiem for a Coney Island Bar
Dec. 14, 2010—
Maybe some of you have been to Ruby’s Bar & Grill on the Coney Island boardwalk in Brooklyn, N.Y. Maybe not.
But everyone has the desire for an endless summer.
Ruby’s closed last month. It opened in 1934 and was the oldest bar on Coney Island. You could sit outside, stare at the Atlantic Ocean and understand just how small you are in this world. Life is not meant to be taken so seriously. They knew that at Ruby’s.
I remember dancing to Tito Puente and Ronnie Hawkins’ “Who Do You Love?” near Ruby’s jukebox. One time I saw a middle-aged African-American woman in breathless hip-huggers and chesty halter top. She was sucking on a pacifier.
Another time, near closing time, Puerto Rican women were slow dancing with scarred, stubble faced men to Jimmy Rosselli’s “When Your Old Wedding Ring Was New.” When I had my first pay-as-you go cell phone, I called a girl friend from Ruby’s.
I wished she was there.
Coney Island is my favorite place in New York. The tilt-a-whirl democracy is blatant. When the subway system came to Coney Island in the 1920s, its popularity took off. Coney Island became known as “The Nickel Empire” because of the 5-cent subway fare.
“It is blatant, it is cheap,” wrote author Reginald Wright Kaufman. “It is the apotheosis of the ridiculous. But it is something more; it is like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone Park. To not have seen it is not to have seen you own country.”
Ruby’s fell victim to re-development from Zamperla USA, which has a ten-year lease to operate amusements the city bought for $95.6 million from Thor Equities. Thor closed down the Trader Vic’s at the Palmer House in Chicago. Ruby’s will be replaced by entertainment and/or retail stores you will find anywhere else in America.
There was only one Ruby’s.
Every once in a while I make a list of my favorite bars in America: The Green Parrot in Key West, Fla., the Lamplighter in Memphis, Tn. the Matchbox in Chicago and Vesuvio’s in San Francisco. All of these joints are small, they embrace diversity and there’s great music. You see weathered truth in the eyes of regulars. No one dyes their hair. The bartender always buys the third drink. Ruby’s was on that list.
Certainly the new developers will get more real estate bang for their buck. [Shoot the Freak and Cha Cha’s Italian Ice and Ice Cream are also going down.] Ruby’s was a linear, one-level boardwalk roadhouse with red frontage and a color portrait of a fat burger and fries. The new building may stand taller, but its soul won’t be as deep.
In 2001—a month before September 11— I wandered into Ruby’s after a Brooklyn Cyclones minor league baseball game down the 12th Street Boardwalk. Owner Ruby Jacobs had died in April at the age of 74. He started the bar with his brother Phil, who died in November, 2000 at 84. They are buried together at a cemetery near the Belmont racetrack. Ruby grew up on the boardwalk selling knishes. Ruby’s tombstone reads:
“Coney Island the Elixir of Life.”
We take pictures of summer, we think of things to say on tombstones, dusted by snow in a New York winter. My final visit to Ruby’s turned out to be in the fall of 2007. I paid
closer attention because Thor had already announced plans to redevelop Coney Island.
I saw a faded photograph of Bob Hope and Jackie Gleason in blond wigs and drag. Their get-up was a suprise birthday present to Rudy, who was a big Marilyn Monroe fan. For the second time I heard the story about the tiny Cessna plane that crashed into the beach snd near Ruby’s front door. One of the regulars got up, left his drink at the bar, pulled the pilot out of the plane, and later returned to finish his cocktail.
Bartender Willie Hinds had worked at Ruby’s for 27 years. A mid-September sun softly glistened over the ocean. Hinds told me, “They took away the World’s Fair, they took away the World Trade Center, they took away Rockaway Park, they’re going to take away Coney Island, too.” She never smiled.
Then she told me about Bacardi and Cokes. I ordered a beer and talked to an attractive woman working the New York Times crossword puzzle. I generally don’t speak to strangers, but I like someone with a newspaper in front of them.
She was looking for a word for a period of existence.
And I looked around the empty bar.
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