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Tribeca's First Fine Dining
They would be wrong, and then some—by more than a century and a quarter. The first grand eatery in these parts, it turns out, was Taylor’s Restaurant, a glorious institution that flourished way back in the 1850s and 1860s at the northwest corner of Franklin Street and Broadway. One of the city’s most prominent newspapers, the New York Herald, called it “the restaurant of the age.” It had started in the 1840s as a mere ice cream parlor and confectionary, but its location and superior service produced so many customers that it soon had to expand. Most of its patrons, at the start at least, were women enjoying a newfound (though limited) independence from male dominance by getting together with their friends to go shopping. In particular, they were attracted by A.T. Stewart’s Store, the grand new emporium (actually the nation’s first department store) that had opened in 1846 at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street. The shopping opportunities hereabouts seemed endless: all the way up through today’s Soho, Broadway was lined with elegant stores featuring the latest fashions. Indeed the editor of the Illustrated London News admitted in the late 1850s that “there is no street in London that can be declared superior, or even equal, all things considered, to Broadway.” And after a leisurely stroll along this mecca, what could be better than some ice cream, an omelette or a fancy pastry at Taylor’s? The building itself was handsome, seven stories high and faced with richly decorated brown freestone. But the true glory was the interior: seeing it for the first time caused many people to cry out with delight. (Unfortunately there seem to be no pictures of it.) The 50-by-100-foot grand salon, wrote the Daily Tribune, was “a perfect blaze of decoration...a complete maze of frescoes, mirrors, carving, gilding, and marble.” Corinthian columns, painted crimson with gilt trim, rose 22 feet to a frescoed and gilt ceiling. The back (or western) wall of this space boasted a large stained-glass window at either side of which was a fountain surrounded by flowers. The windows along the Franklin Street wall were kept partially curtained during the day to yield the subdued light preferred by the ladies as they dined at the more than a hundred black walnut tables. Dramatic by day, Taylor’s was even more splendiferous at night. Said the New York Journal, the “imagination could scarcely conceive anything to go beyond it.” Innumerable gas lights blazed forth in the chandeliers, wall sconces, and torches held aloft by classical bronze statues scattered around the room. The evening crowd was different from the daytime one, consisting not of shoppers but of well-to-do folk out for dinner or for a late snack after the theater. Men dined at Taylor’s, too. The restaurant had two floors, the main one principally for ladies and the lower level for gentlemen, who were served a somewhat heartier fare. Indeed one might say the men actually got the better of it as they had the best view of Taylor’s real triumph, its immense crystal fountain. As Charles Lockwood described it in “Manhattan Moves Uptown”: “Rising from a marble basin nine feet wide, the sparkling structure of silver-colored pipes, crystal basins and splashing water rose twenty-one feet in the stairwell, the top portion being visible in the dining room on the main floor. A stream of water fed from a pipe into the topmost crystal basin and from there fell by gravity from basin to basin, lower and lower, forming a gently splashing twenty-one-foot ‘pyramid of water,’ which sparkled at a hundred different spots in the glare of the gas lights. After this shimmering descent, the water finally emptied into the marble basin, where six glass dolphins, each two and a half feet long, spouted streams of water from their snouts.” It’s a wonder, you might say, that the clientele could ever manage to take their eyes off the decor to concentrate on their food. But perhaps that was just as well, for as a matter of fact the food often failed to measure up. One grumpy critic wrote that the meals “rank between a fifth-rate Palais Royal restaurant and a second-rate Vienna cream shop.” To find truly excellent dining, epicurean New Yorkers would have to go to Delmonico’s Restaurant downtown in the Wall Street area or to its new branch on Chambers Street across from the Stewart store. But almost everyone else could hardly have cared less. No matter what was served, Taylor’s was the place to be. On busy days people cheerfully waited in line for an hour or more to be seated. It did not last, of course. As the city continued to grow northward the neighborhood went into a decline, Taylor’s closed and its great crystal fountain splashed for the last time. Tribecans would have to wait a century and a quarter to experience such exuberance again.
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