When I was in college, New Haven was pretty much a dump. There's no way to hide it; the place was devastated. And I know that I often thought how nice the city could be (it was once considered one of the best places in America to live).
As they say, be careful what you wish for. Soon after I graduated, the city and the campus began to improve considerably. This, of course, meant rising rents. Demery's, the site of so many delightful Friday night fights, was turned into an Au Bon Pain. The pizza place near my residential college where they sold crack out of the kitchen closed and was replaced by nicer shops.
Obviously, it is nicer, on the whole, to have a cleaner, more pleasant campus. The downside of these changes is that awesome institutions like the Yankee Doodle get squeezed out.
In my Senior year, I lived off campus on Park Street and I think I must have eaten at the Doodle 3-4 days a week. Two eggs, coffee and toast cost $0.80. A hamburger and coke was something like $1.50. The place only had a few stools in a mini-diner format and it closed at 2 PM. I quickly learned that the owner did not want to be friends with the students (or most of the customers) and I would often chuckle into my eggs as some newbie would come in and try to befriend Rick or his daughter. Although the Doodle was sparse, it was never downtrodden or dirty. It was a total timewarp from the 1950s, when, it seemed, they also froze the prices.
A group of alums have banded together to try to save the Doodle and I intend to contribute. At the very least, I owe Rick the real value of all those meals I got there for next to nothing. There is no doubt that the real estate value (given its location in the middle of 7 of the 12 residential colleges) is too high now to make it work on its own. But there is nothing wrong with devotees banding together to try to preserve something that made the lives of so many undergraduates just that much better for decades.
P.S. - When I was there, the record for the hamburger eating contest was 12. I am still certain I could have held the title briefly in that period. The record is now in the mid-twenties, which is deeply disturbing.
1 comment:
We had a place like this at the University of Maryland and they were called Lil' Tavern and the little green "A" frame walk ups sold shitty little White Castle type hamburgers to late night drunken revlers for the change left in one's packet at the end of a long night in Georgetown. They used to be on every corner. I think their all gone now.
Post a Comment