murray hill is legend

What's No Longer on the Menu in Historic Manhattan Neighborhood

Murray Hill mainstay Duke’s couldn’t survive the pandemic (photo by twi-my/mdr)

More than a thousand New York City restaurants have closed since the pandemic lockdown started in March 2020. Too many of them seem to be in my neighborhood, Murray Hill in Manhattan.

Named after Irish-born eighteenth-century merchant Robert Murray, Murray Hill was a close-knit community when my wife and I first moved here in the mid-1990s. The owner of the homey Tivoli restaurant knew how you liked your steak. Red, the bartender at Kavanagh’s, started pouring my pint of Guinness as soon as he saw me walking through the door to join my friends at the bar to watch Sunday football. A voice artist named Stuart would buy a round whenever one of his commercials aired during the games.

No young people came to Murray Hill for the nightlife; no foodies came to Murray Hill for the restaurants. It was a place where people lived, with the shoe repair guy, several dry cleaners, an indie pharmacy, old people and toddlers.

But over the next twenty years, Murray Hill, like much of the city, went from being a neighborhood to a destination at night and a way station in life, an area where one age group arrived, lived for a few years, and left.

Tivoli and Kavanagh’s closed, and more upscale eateries and bars began attracting a different clientele, one that came and went on Friday and Saturday evenings, never becoming part of the fabric of what made the area what it had been. And don’t get me started on SantaCon.

The much-loved Pizza & Pita is now no more than a memory (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Then the pandemic hit, and the neighborhood changed yet again. For most of the next two years, the streets were empty. No one was coming to Murray Hill to eat or drink or for their jobs — nearly everyone was working from home. The restaurants were losing not only workday lunch customers but the locals as well. My wife and I, both fortunate to keep our full-time jobs by working remotely, would still order food from nearby favorites, but we were not eating in, instead getting takeout or delivery, which decreases profit.

Royal Pizza, which in our estimation made the best Sicilian pie in the city: closed. Sons of Thunder, one of the first poke places in Murray Hill: closed. Popular barbecue hangout Duke’s: closed. Noodles 28, which had a mixed dumpling platter to die for: closed. The resurrected Under the Volcano: closed. Xi’an Famous Foods, a respite for spicy hand-pulled noodles and soothing Asian fruit drinks: closed.

Just a few weeks ago, Fresco Tortillas, our ever-reliable weekly spot for soft corn tacos, quesadillas, and chips and guac: suddenly shuttered. A chicken and ribs joint on Third Ave. that previously had long lunch lines from area workers: closed. For two years, the only lines were at Covid-19 testing sites.

Another great Murray Hill restaurant is gone (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

One day, the manager of Pho 5, which served the tasty Vietnamese noodle soup dish, was telling us how hard it was to stay open; a few days later: closed. Our go-to late-night favorite, Pizza & Pita, which made a sensational shrimp parm hero and excellent falafel: closed. Although not a tragedy, the famous Sarge’s delicatessen, which had always been twenty-four hours, now locks up at 10:00 pm.

We’d find it hard to go on without Daniel’s Bagels, but fortunately it has survived, fending off the predatory attack of Dunkin’ Donuts, which had moved in next door; Daniel’s has cut down its hours significantly, while Dunkin’ is no more.

Each of these closures means that employees lost their jobs, and owners lost their dreams. It’s sad to walk through Murray Hill and see so many empty storefronts — it’s not like there has been a parade of restaurateurs to take over these spaces. Instead of menus in the window, there is real estate information, some with the same realtors’ names and phone numbers dating back more than two years.

As fewer and fewer people wear face coverings — Murray Hill was extremely mask-compliant, going hand in hand with high vaccination rates and low Covid numbers — the closed restaurants are a constant reminder of better times, when a potential apocalypse was not waiting around every corner.

Will Smith is determined to make it through a global pandemic — and Murray Hill — in I Am Legend (photo courtesy Warner Bros.)

It also recalls one of Murray Hill’s great movie shoots, when Will Smith was filming I Am Legend about fifteen years ago here. For those scenes, Park Ave. between Thirty-Fourth and Fortieth Sts. was transformed into a ghost town filled with broken-down cars, tumbleweeds, and abandoned stores, apartments, and eateries, with eerie posters about mass infection pasted on phone booths and bus shelters.

The movie was based on Richard Matheson’s classic novel about a deadly pandemic that turned its victims into vampire zombies; the Twilight Zone scribe wrote it in 1954 and set the tale in 1976, as if that were a faraway future. “Before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything,” Matheson explains early on.

Vampire zombies can’t be next . . . can they?