A Room with a View
With appreciation to Muhammad Ali, Christmas to me has a habit of floating around like a butterfly for a few months. It makes itself known in October. Sometime around Halloween I start to notice the Christmas stuff in the places like the local pharmacies and discount stores. So then it resides in my conscience with an appreciation that it’s coming. It continues to float through Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Christmas music starts making an appearance. The Christmas tree and menorah make their appearance in the lobby at work. Even seeing Penn Station overrun with drunk Santa Claus’s and sexy Santa Chicks for Santacon still doesn’t make Christmas something present to me.
And then ZAP, Christmas stings like a bee. It hits me that it really is here, not coming, but it is truly the season. That happened to me a couple of weeks ago. My friend Jan was too kind and invited me to crash her outing with her college friend Laura and join them for drinks at the Campbell Apartment. It’s a bar in Grand Central Terminal. As Jan, Laura and I discovered while reading the wikipedia page, the Campbell Apartment has a long and varied history.
The 3,500-square-foot space was first leased in 1923 by John Campbell from William Kissam Vanderbilt II, grandson of the original owner of the New York Central Railroad. The family built Grand Central Terminal. The space was a single room 60 feet (18 m) long by 30 feet (9.1 m) wide with a 25-foot (7.6 m) ceiling and an enormous faux fireplace in which Campbell kept a steel safe. At that time, it was the largest ground floor space in Manhattan, Campbell commissioned Augustus N. Allen, an architect known for designing estates on Long Island and town houses in Manhattan, to build an opulent office, transforming the room into a 13th-century Florentine palace with a hand-painted plaster of paris ceiling and leaded windows. It also featured a quatre-foil designed mahogany balcony, that still exists today. After Campbell’s death in 1957, the rug and other furnishings disappeared from his office and the space eventually became a signalman’s office and later a closet at Grand Central, where the transit police stored guns and other equipment. It also became a small jail, in the area of the present-day bar. After falling into disrepair, the space was restored and renovated in 1999 as the Campbell Apartment. The name misleads some into thinking the space was used as a residence, rather than as an office, but “apartment” is used in the more traditional or British sense as a room set aside for an individual’s private use. The walls and ceiling were brought back to their former glory and the original steel safe, once hidden behind a wall, now sits in the massive fireplace as a reminder of Campbell’s wealth.
So what was the sting? I made my way to the bar to order a drink and I noticed the Christmas decorations. They didn’t seem commercial like at CVS or obligatory like at work. It was simply and wholly festive. And then it hit me that Christmas was on its way. It was a nice comfortable feeling.
Jan, Laura and I had the good fortune to get a table in the balcony. Our server could only have been more attentive if she had sat at our table and relayed our drinks to the bar by semaphore. Looking down over the crowd at the bar I could feel what it must have been like decades earlier.
The Campbell Apartment
One of the drinks I ordered was the commodore. It was on the Campbell Apartment’s classic cocktail menu. It was a pleasant cocktail. Not a drink I would go out of my way to find, but it had a nice balance of tart and sweet. And the reality is that an evening shouldn’t be just about the cocktails, it should be about the conversation had over those drinks.
The Commodore
- 1.5 oz Elijah Craig 12 yr. bourbon
- 1 oz creme de cacao
- 1 oz lemon juice
- dash of Scrappy’s grenadine
- shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass
Merry Christmas!
