Café La Fortuna

When I first moved to New York, I had a college friend who grew up on the Upper West Side. She and her family were wonderful to me, and I loved them- still do. They fed me many holiday dinners. When they were out of town, I’d dog sit. We’d sunbathe in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park on Saturday afternoons. Or run errands in the neighborhood. But the one place we’d come back to, over and over again, was Café La Fortuna.

We’d sit there for hours, drinking coffee, eating tiramisu and listening to the music. Café La Fortuna only played opera, and had playbills from the old, pre-Lincoln Center Met and old records on the walls. It was timeless- it could have been 1976 (the year it opened), or 30 years earlier, or 30 years later. No way to tell, and it didn’t matter. In the winter, you were confined to the red-walled interior, with big red velvet curtains to keep the drafts out. But in the summer, you could sit in the garden for hours with an iced coffee and a sandwich.

I later learned that it was a great favorite of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, when they lived in the neighborhood. Which was nice to know I guess. But I had the feeling from the first time I was there, Café La Fortuna was mine. It would always be there. It would always serve as my timeless, relaxed living room in a neighborhood little air and light west of Central Park. I sat there, and dreamed about being associated with Juilliard- which happened five years ago.

In the Times yesterday, I read that Mrs. Urwand had died, the rent went up two-and-a-half times, and Mr. Urwand couldn’t pay. He’s closing down the café tomorrow.

It’s ultimately not that important, right? It’s not like a friend of mine died, or a dog I knew. Or some curse had been put on the world where we’d all gone deaf and you couldn’t hear music anymore. So why do my eyes keep welling up?

Au Revoir, Grande Dames

The Dramahound hesitates to turn this into an elegy festival, and “Tennis, Anyone?” was on the verge of elegy, I’m afraid. But when Mrs. Astor died yesterday, I couldn’t help thinking that death, of famous people or not famous people, comes in threes.

In a fairly short time span, three ladies responsible for not a little of New York City’s cultural life have died. So it would seem neglectful not to pay some small Dramahound tribute to them. I didn’t know any of them personally. I had a very pleasant dim sum lunch with one of their children last year; that’s as close as I got.

Beverly Sills was a force of nature in the opera world in New York City. When she retired from performing, she took on responsibility for getting City Opera on solid financial ground, which made the kind of work they produced in recent memory possible. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike the Met. I can’t afford it but once in a blue moon, and their programming is extremely conservative (though that seems to be changing under Peter Gelb). But I’ve seen I believe the only New York production of Tippett’s “Midsummer Marriage,” and that was at City Opera. We need both of them, City and the Met. Beverly Sills knew that, too. She went over to the Met when her work was done at City, and when her work was done at the Met, even as she was dying, she was navigating the treacherous waters and egos of Lincoln Center. She didn’t have to, she chose to, and opera in New York is all the better for it.

Kitty Carlisle Hart was a force of nature in the arts in the state of New York. She traveled all over, saw work and talked to people about their work, into her 90s. Mrs. Hart is difficult to write about because she ran the New York State Council on the Arts for so long and did so much for so many. She did not retreat into widowhood when her husband died (when Kennedy was President- a long, long time ago). She raised her two kids, and jumped back into life. Mrs. Hart’s work made a difference to nearly everyone who was in an audience or worked in the arts in New York for decades. I can’t imagine a better epitaph than that.

And finally, Mrs. Astor. It was her husband’s money, but, boy, she enjoyed giving it away. And she gave away a lot of it, particularly to the Public Library. I have spent many hours in the Research Library, reading and waiting for books to come up from the stacks in the basement. I always think of her when I’m there.

Ms. Sills, Mrs. Hart and Mrs. Astor. They all fought the good fight for years. And we are all the better for their efforts.