Word: bleeck
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...place they meant when they said they were "going downstairs." To Boulevardier Lucius Beebe, it was "an arena fragrant with the souvenirs of mighty contests with bottles, wits and fists." Its formal name was the Artist & Writers' Club, but to its habitues it was simply Bleeck's. Last week Longtime Owner John Bleeck. the ruddy, white-maned Dutchman who for three decades made the place on Manhattan's West 40th Street a haven for newspapermen and magazine writers, pressagents and Broadway actors, died at 83 in his Long Island home...
Latter-Day Mermaid. Born in St. Louis in 1880, Bleeck (he insisted on the German pronunciation, as in Blake) traveled east by boxcar at 20, began tending bar, and by the time Prohibition arrived, had saved enough to open a speakeasy opposite the Metropolitan Opera House. A drugstore was his front, but the number of customers who reeled out onto Seventh Avenue after stopping in to fill "prescriptions" invited too many raids. In 1925 Bleeck opened less conspicuously situated quarters behind a Greek coffee stand in a shabby building alongside the Trib...
...Many an issue of the Trib was put out right over there at that table," Bleeck once said with pride, and with a sort of reverse snobbery he would keep celebrities waiting for tables while he tended to his journalistic charges. On any night, the late City Editor Stanley Walker could assemble a staff just by phoning downstairs-when he was not there himself...
...only relished his work as a recorder of such legends, but he set out to become a legend himself. He did not so much fill the role of city editor as play it. With favored Trib hands, he spent idle hours playing the match game next door at Bleeck's, which in those days was noted for its good Dutch food and Gemütlichkeit. When his reporters came back to report failure on an assignment, he wordlessly drew from his desk drawer a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker cap, bulldog pipe and magnifying glass, and snooped around the floor...