Jimmy’s Corner
Theater District
140 W. 44th St.
New York, NY 10036
(212) 221-9510
It was my first time in New York City and I stayed at the Intercontinental on 48th St.. Only two hours into Times Square and I was already electronically hungover. Don’t get me wrong, at the start I had worn my tourist fanny pack with pride, sitting in Duffy Square with a skewer of Brazilian steak, listening to acoustic sets by a handicapped, chonie-clad patriot with a guitar. I even gave improper directions to a tourist! But as time went on I noticed I was no longer waiting for crosswalks and WHY THE HELL MUST YOU WALK THE ENTIRE WIDTH OF THE SIDEWALK? I had my bearings (apparently) and it was time to explore.
To a tourist drinker, the first eight hours in a city is crucial: spend too much time in one bar and you haven’t explored the city, spend too little time at many bars and the experience is, well, hazy to say the least.
But this was New York, right? Time to go overboard. I started my walkabout in Lansdowne Road at 43rd and 10th and eventually ended up at the Blind Tiger on Bleeker in the West Village, covering more than 40 blocks on foot. It was amazing. Simple conversations at even simpler locations, met up with friends, ate a Black Iron burger, hopping from bar to bar with Frogger-like precision, but by night’s end the beverages had taken their toll and I was no longer landing on the lily pads. It was time to head home.
After arriving at the hotel, I exited the cab and noticed a literal hole in the wall under a nondescript maroon awning, the entrance to Jimmy’s Corner. I could go for a nightcap. Hell, I can always go for a nightcap. But this drink would turn out to be so much more. Little did I know after ten stops in the city, I was home. 
The long, narrow bar was lined with quilted memories of boxing’s past, but it is by no means cut-and-paste memorabilia. Pictures are tagged and mounted like taxidermy and it’s poignant, a family album of sorts, like the difference between dining under rusty Radio Flyer at Bennigan’s and snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef; you look at this place with sincere interest. And there’s a historical smell in the air, one of wet dust and bleached pleather. It was obvious that the place was cleaned with elbow grease for elbow greasers, a bar for citizenry.
I sidled slyly up to the bar and took a seat next to a peppery older man with a genuine smile not knowing he was the owner, Jimmy Glenn. Jimmy has worked in boxing most of his life. He’s trained at-risk youth in Harlem and worked as a cut man for boxing greats Michael Spinks and Floyd Patterson (He even lost some teeth to Patterson as an amateur fighter). And the picture of Glenn shaking hands with Muhammed Ali should let you know he’s something serious, if only for shaking hands with greatness. But to the common patron off the street you would never know it’s his place as he sat there among friends, pleasant, buying the occasional drink for a familiar face or a twisted story, blending in to his surroundings like water.
Drinking’s a good sport but sometimes it’s good to get out, stretch the legs and enjoy a drink while doing something else.
Here are a few shiny things, some drinking related, some not, that caught our attention.
Underhill Lounge - In 2006, barman and son of an undertaker, Erik Ellestad began documenting his mission to faithfully re-create and photograph every cocktail in the Savoy Cocktail Book (1930). That’s 888 recipes… in alphabetical order… uphill, both ways. He averages around five cocktails a week—beginning with his first post, the Abbey— and he’s deep into the ’S’s now. Someone should make a movie about this.
Selected Works by Selected Jerks - pop culture super team Kelly Deal, Shane “weselec” Cyr and Scott “The Other Guy” McDowell setup an Internet party line and get looptid about music. Not in that “You SHOULD be listening to this” way but more in a slumber-parties-smell-like-candy-and-farts way. In other words, they remind you why you enjoy music. Fun, fingerbanging and jumpsuits. Right?
Shorpy, Geoplaced by Ryan Bateman - Ryan, who? Oh, you know, @secretsquirrel, Mr. Everythinginthesky, robot maker, software diddler and augmenter of reality. Well, he’s a South African that lives in Great Britain and made a sweet machine that places photos scanned from the American National Archive on a Google Map because “All in all, [he thinks] it’s pretty neat.” And I don’t even know what “refudiate” means.
48 notes