The Hill Rag. September 20014
It's
hot enough to grill a burger on the sidewalk this mid-week, mid-afternoon in
August.
By
moonrise the sidewalk cafe at Mr. Henry's will fill with burgers and fries and
nachos, beers and margaritas. Right now the patio is abandoned, but inside the
restaurant is as it always is, cool and dark, denying the hour. Any hour. Any
year.
A
spiffily-suited quartet appears to be negotiating Something Very Important at a
center table. A few regulars inhabit the bar, but the curmudgeonly cloud that
normally hovers, always ready with a sarcastic remark and a
hemorrhoidally-fueled smile, is missing. Alvin
Ross, the mug of Mr. Henry's for over four decades, has retired.
Alvin has been at the pub since 1971,
when local property baron, Larry Quillian, won the place in a poker game from
Henry Yaffe, the pint-sized, peripatetic entrepreneur who ensconced
songstress Roberta Flack in a room of her own on the second floor.
At
the time, Yaffe owned six bars around town, operating under different names,
but with the same stylistic formula of red-checked tablecloths and hodge-podge
of Victoriana hung over flaking plaster walls.
