For 78 years, the Schaller & Weber deli – standing among brick tenements and postwar high-rises on a heavily trafficked, unprepossessing corner of the Upper East Side – has sold fatty kielbasa smoked sausage and Black Forest ham to the remnants of the neighbourhood’s German population.
Like many businesses here in Yorkville – an Upper East Side micro-neighbourhood on the eastern, less fashionable side of Manhattan – Schaller & Weber knew its audience: would-be grandes dames in rent-controlled apartments along York Avenue, young families attracted by Yorkville’s low rents who are willing to put up with its poor transport links, and the odd bachelor banker trying to stay close to the Upper East Side proper.
Until now. In August, the founder’s grandchildren opened Stube, a new street-facing counter selling sausage sandwiches on brioche-style rolls from Balthazar, one of the city’s most famous bakery-restaurants. Traditional kielbasa is available, but other options include bacon cheddar bratwurst, and bauernwurst with daikon-carrot slaw and Sriracha chilli sauce. Most cost around $5.
Stube is just one of many newcomers to Yorkville: a neighbour-hood long regarded as hopelessly staid. But the low rents – it’s the cheapest in Manhattan south of Harlem – are attracting young people priced out of Brooklyn, as well as property investors keen to capitalise on the arrival of the Second Avenue subway line (scheduled for December 2016).
Yorkville’s classic businesses are still there: 100-year-old Glaser’s Bake Shop is still cash-only and, depending on the baker’s conversational mood, a two-person queue can take 20 minutes or more to get through. But new bars – cheaper, if no less ambitious, than their downtown counterparts – have opened to cater for Yorkville’s younger set.
In 2013, DTUT set up shop on Second Avenue, serving coffees by day and fondue and hot mulled cider at night, with live music and quiz nights in the mismatched seating area. Earlier this year, Seamstress – whose creative director, Pam Wiznitzer, made her name at the Dead Rabbit bar in the financial district – brought the speakeasy craze to the Upper East Side. The vaguely gothic bar is behind curtains at the back of what appears to be a Victorian leather-goods shop. Last month, one of Second Avenue’s classic sports dives, Molly Pitcher’s Ale House at no 1641, was replaced by The Daisy, a craft cocktail bar from the owners of the West Village’s popular Agave restaurant and tequila bar. And Yorkville is also about to get its most “downtown” outlet yet: a branch of vaguely literary mini-chain Irving Farm Coffee Roasters.
Yet Yorkville’s charm lies mostly in the co-existence between lifers and new residents. On a brownstone-studded street off Second Avenue, The Auction House, unmarked, candlelit and reminiscent of a Victorian bordello, has served smoky mezcal since long before passwords for parties became de rigueur. Some nights the bartender will put on the football for a raucous college crowd. Other nights, when it’s almost empty and the candles have all but died, he’ll put on some scratchy 1920s jazz, and the midnight remnant will dance the Charleston until closing time.
Here in Yorkville, you never know.
