TASTE: Egg Cream with Ice Water Chaser

The secret behind the best-known New York City beverage—the egg cream—is so well known it’s almost not a secret at all: namely, that the drink contains neither eggs nor cream but rather seltzer, flavored syrup (Fox’s U-bet brand, no other), and milk. Yet there’s something in the persistence of its name that, I’ve always felt, lends the drink a richness that its low calorie content belies. Just saying the words egg cream, especially to a gristly, decidedly uncreamy Manhattan diner waitress, immediately cants my taste buds toward a creamy experience.


At the Lexington Candy Shop, on the Upper East Side, the egg cream lives on in true form. It’s served in a weighty glass with ridges up the sides, with a straw whose paper wrapper quickly wilts from the wet-cloth marks still swirling across the tabletop from the previous customers. The foamy head is thick enough to lift with the tip of a straw. When you press the straw into the foam, it leaves a puncture that immediately fills with egg-cream fizz. The sweetness of the first sip dissipates quickly on the tounge; it’s sharp, tingly. The coffee syrup swirls through the lightness of the seltzer, and the combination produces the illusion of “egg creaminess.” Slurp noisily until all that is left is a lacy filigree on the inside of the plastic glass.


But at the Lexington Candy Shop, there’s more: the water chaser: cold New York City tap water arrives in a wax-paper cone resting in a stainless-steel cup-holder, not unlike a hard-boiled-egg cup. The whole contraption has a pleasing weight, and the paper cone is cool and downy and giving, like a tiny bag of flour. Moreover, you can chew on the edge of the cone so bits of wax flake off in your mouth and mingle with the cool rush of the water, which “chases” down the coffee-milky-creamy-sparkly egg cream like nothing else. When the cups are empty, there’s the slap of a ripped-off bill on the table. Swirls of ballpoint pen—no smiley faces or heart doodles here—and like the straw wrapper the bill dissolves in the wet rings left by your drink cups. Settle up, move on into the glare of the sidewalk: what could be more New York City than that?

SMELL: Church Avenue, Brooklyn, in summer

According to nonofficial sources, the area around the 11218 zip code, in the Kensington/Ditmas Park section of Brooklyn, is one of the most ethnically diverse in the country. I’ve taken a couple of summertime strolls down Church Avenue, one of the neighborhood’s main thoroughfares, and each time I’ve been struck by the changing landscape of aromas.

Walking east from the corner of Westminster Road, the smell of hot oil seeps from beneath the door of No. 1 Restaurant, followed closely by spice and charred meat from a barbecue joint. Then comes the warm-scalp scent of hair relaxer from Paris Hair Design, balanced by cold gusts of linoleum, freezer burn, and wet mop from C-Town, with its tins of export soda crackers and Café Bustelo. The Rugby Road intersection offers a refreshing waft of mown grass, but this is quickly overwhelmed by gusts of diesel bus exhaust from the B35 outside the DNA Paternity Testing Center at Burlingham Road (sign outside: Does he really have his father’s eyes?).

The entrance of Bobby’s Department Store yawns open with the plastic smell of cheap rubber sandals spilling from cardboard crates, mingling with more grease from neighboring Chin Chin Wu restaurant. Kids race their tongues against melting ice pops from a jangling Good Humor truck, with its sugary cold breath. Next comes rancid fish from S&A Fish Market with its flashing fish logo, then one of my favorite urban smells: the warm floral gusts of Tide and Downy from the Super Li Laundromat. Near the corner of East 17th Street I detect the tang of ketchup from a mysterious source. On the next corner, bags of star anise, cinnamon, mangos, pineapples, and enormous foam-padded bras spill from the open panel door of a curbside van.

Men’s cologne and synthesized piano music drift through the iron door grate of the Brooklyn Gospel Assembly Church, with its rows of folding chairs beneath fluorescent lights. The laundry a few doors down offers no smells through its bulletproof windows, nor does the shuttered Brooklyn Islamic Center, near the roti shop with its banners advertising “ Recession Meals” in the form of the “Micro mini” and “Super mini” plates of Caribbean food. I turn around at the corner of St. Paul’s Place, with its confluence of fruit stands smelling like the cool inside of a just-cut squash. At J&S discount, across the street from Bobby’s, the air smells like human body odor, relieved a few doors down by syrupy cologne from La Chic Ladies Fashion.

As I am nearing the end of my journey, a woman in a high-Sunday suit passes me, carrying a box of roses. I wish I could say the fragrance lingered in her wake, but it quickly gave itself to the larger bouquet of these iconic few blocks of Brooklyn.

TASTE: Manhattan Special Espresso Coffee Soda

Shelved between the Frappuccinos and the Red Bull energy drinks, Manhattan Special Espresso Coffee Soda is an often-overlooked New York City deli staple. I’ve never seen anyone buy it, and the label is so mysterious it borders on sinister. A head-banded vixen dims her eyes and drapes her long-gloved arm around the neck of a pomaded, mustachioed man, who appears not only unmoved but annoyed. Perhaps it is because an espresso percolator and brimming cup await him, just out of reach, in the foreground of the fuzzy cameo-cloud in which this couple floats, a silhouette of the New York City skyline looming behind them. The words “Since 1895” arc above the cloud, though the couple looks more flapper than Victorian.


I picked up a bottle at my local deli, intent on unbottling the secret to more than a century of local shelf life. The clerk turned the bottle in his hand, as if he hadn’t noticed he stocked it. “Have you tried this?” he asked, peering at the label. “Looks like it’s made in Brooklyn. And it’s made with real sugar!” He rang me up for a dollar fifty, seemingly impressed and reassured.

At home, I pried off the metal top. Caramel bubbles rose to the lip with a soft fizz, forming a crest that slowly sank. The first sip had all the bitter graininess of espresso, with the unmistakable tongue tingling of real sugar and a prickling of carbonation. The glass bottle was a nice weight and fit comfortably between two fingertips--not unlike an espresso cup. But the drink quickly devolved into a too-sweet soda, lacking the creamy, lip thickening, pulse-quickening quality of real espresso.

Disappointed with my first experience, I decided to try Manhattan Special the way I drink my morning coffee: in a glass with ice and a liberal dousing of half and half. What a revelation! The cream mellowed out the cloying sweetness and acidity of the coffee, but the carbonation still adds an unexpected effervescent texture to each sip. The head poured out rich and foamy, like a nice stout, rather than dissolving into a vaguely chemical lace residue as it had when drunk plain.

On a recent trip to the Gravesend, Brooklyn, Italian diner Joe’s of Avenue U (which deserves an entry in its own right), I noticed that the beverage menu comprised soda, seltzer, mineral water, coffee, espresso, cappuccino, and Manhattan Special. Apparently the parts don’t add up to the whole, which puts this local beverage in a class of its own.

N.B.: Check out the company website for a slide-show history and “guestbook” rich with local reminiscences. I called the factory—on Manhattan Avenue, in Brooklyn, hence the soda’s name--for more information about the couple on the bottle, but they could not help me.

SIGHT: Staten Island’s Boat Graveyard

On a hazy day in early spring, I made my way down a shabby stretch of Arthur Kill Road on the western shore of Staten Island, past Big Nose Kate’s Saloon, Guy’s Tire Buys, and Crazy Goat Feeds pet-food store. From the gravel shoulder where I parked, a flight of stone steps led up to the Blazing Star Burial Ground, a hillside knoll where lilacs droop over gravestones dating back to the 1700s. Not half a mile in the distance lurked the bald green pate of Fresh Kills landfill. And just ahead, through a sweep of tall grass, was what I had come to visit: the rusted hulks of ancient ships that have, like Blazing Star’s occupants and the trash of the five boroughs, also come to Rossville for their final rest: at Staten Island’s boat graveyard, otherwise known as Donjon Marine Company salvage yard.

After donning tall rubber boots, I pushed my way through the grasses, teetering across landfill sludge—Santa hats, flyswatters, shampoo bottles—on ancient ship beams studded with nine-inch rusty nails. The air smelled like sulfur and stagnant mud. In the distance, spring birds twittered over the rush of the West Shore Expressway. In the rippling water, Canadian geese drifted between empty shells of ships sunk in the mud. Their hulls canted to port and starboard; portholes pointed toward the sky. Splintered wooden wheelhouses toppled onto decks, where crusty cleats held limp bowlines strewn with algae. In some places the hulls were paper thin, almost lacy, and the metal curled at the edges; one could imagine it rustling and tinkling in the wind. Gears, pulleys, and capstans clung to the decks of the ferryboats, tugboats, barges, and fishing boats like desperate sailors on a stormy sea, only the waters here were so stagnant that I spotted a few mussel colonies growing in the shallows.

For a different view, I drove a few yards down the road to the official entrance of the salvage yard and managed to snap a few pictures. As I was admiring close up the sunset patterns the rust made on the hulls, a pickup truck ground up beside me and two guys hopped out. “Hey Mike, see that? A brass valve, right on the front!” They stood beside me for a moment, assessing the wreckage, before we were both chased off by a firm if somewhat lackadaisical guard. Apparently that’s part of the reason the ships are here: so they can continue to serve the public, if not by ferrying goods and people, by offering a brass fitting or an old tiller wheel.

Just before I left, I saw a rubber raft with an outboard motor puttering among the ships, and then a shiny red tugboat streamed past, its fresh white wake splashing up against the rusted shells of its ancestors.