As La Rosita Goes, So Goes Morningside Heights

I arrived on Manhattan's Morningside Heights 27 years ago, a Baltimore suburbanite with little experience of urban living. I immediately fell in love with the place, embracing its grunginess with much enthusiasm. And it was grungy. My apartment on 109th and Amsterdam got hot water maybe 2 hours a day; sometimes there was no running water at all. I was mugged three times in my first five years in the city. A drug deal on the corner a few yards from my front door culminated in one fellow shooting another in the face. Reports that yet another landlord had torched a building in order to rid himself of pesky rent-control tenants and rebuild as a condo were met with a shrug more appropriate to a 'dog bites man' news story. I have several friends who lost their apartments in just that way, in fact.

27 years later, the grunge is gone. There are now two Starbucks between 110th and 116th Street on Broadway. Fancy grocery stores and drug emporiums are ubiquitous, as are surprisingly upscale restaurants. Gone is the Mill Luncheonette, where Rene served up breakfast 24/7 and threatened to charge you extra for 'crunchy eggs' if you complained about the bits of shell in your food; Ta-Kome, home of the soggiest hero in creation and sole vendors of Canadian Ace, a beer that came in a gallon jug, cost under $1, and gave you a headache the minute you opened the bottle; the Marlin Bar, where a local alcoholic cleared bottles from tables for an occasional drink and where I first heard the immortal dictum "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here"; Ben and Ralph's Tobacco and Newsstand, domain of two of the grumpiest old farts who ever lived and the place where I first heard the immortal dictum "Hey! This ain't a library! Buy it or get out!!!"; and the Blue Rose, a firetrap at which my band played every other Thursday (after it closed, we discovered that the entire bar was running off a single extension cord that ran out the back window, up the airshaft, and into the owner's apartment).

So it seemed fitting that my favorite Morningside Heights restaurant shut down during the week I was visiting New York. La Rosita was a Cuban restaurant that started as a hole in the wall, two parallel counters with barely enough space between to wedge yourself into your seat; it later moved a block south and expanded to include tables. It was here I first discovered the delights of café con leche, chicharrones de pollo (bits of chicken deep fried, then rolled in garlic), yellow rice and black beans, sweet plantains, Cubano sandwiches, and salads that consisted of nothing more than shredded lettuce, a slice of tomato, and a wedge of lemon. It was cheap, it was filling, it was damn good, and it was nothing like anything I'd ever eaten growing up in Pikesville, MD.

La Rosita's lease came up at the end of 2006 and the building owner told them the new rent would be $18,000 per month. You have to sell a lot of rice and beans to pay a bill like that. And so La Rosita is no more. La Rosita closed with a series of parties featuring live music; my good buddy Mark Ettinger, his daughter Kate, and I performed a set on the restaurant's penultimate night, several hours after I enjoyed my last La Rosita Cubano Especial with fried plantains and a mango batido. I composed a song especially for the show:

The La Rosita Song

Perdon, senor, no hablo Espanol
Pero quiero una plata de frijol-es
Y arroz amarillo y tostones
Y pollo frito; si, los chicharrones!

Par tres chuletas cantare el heptacordo
Now you know why my friends call me Gordo
And also why they call my wife Gordita
Because we take our meals at La Rosita!

The missus and I finished the night at Le Monde, a spiffy and lovely French restaurant on Broadway and 112th Street. We split a bottle of wine and had some late-night snacks and reminisced about what we miss about NYC, and what we don't, and I looked out the window and tried to remember what Morningside Heights looked like when I was a college kid. I couldn't remember what the Le Monde space used to be--a laundromat? a hardware store?--but it sure didn't look like this place, with its gorgeous wood columns and restored hammered tin ceiling and ultra-thin waiters and waitresses. I felt vaguely uneasy without knowing exactly why. This Morningside Heights certainly fits my current lifestyle better than the one on which I first arrived. I should welcome these changes, right?

When I got back home to Durham, NC, a new issue of the New Yorker was waiting for me. The first Talk of the Town piece nicely articulated the uneasiness I was feeling:

[There's a growing sense that] the city’s recovery has come at the cost of a part of its identity: that New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a face-lift and come out looking like no one in particular. The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face. This transformation is one you see on every street corner in Manhattan, and now in Brooklyn, too, where another local toy store or smoked-fish emporium disappears and another bank branch or mall store opens. For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier. Another bookstore closes, another theatre becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence. These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to.

Another soulful NYC venue has done bit the dust. RIP La Rosita. You guys decide to relocate, we sure could use you here in Durham.
photo shamelessly borrowed from Hugh Siegel