Open My Heart and You Will Find Michio’s Pizza
By Eric S. Margolis
Once upon a time very long ago there was a magical place in New York City called Greenwich Village. It was unfashionably far downtown and supposedly filled by lurking Italians with big mustaches and pistols. Polite people stayed away.
My mother, a daring foreign affairs correspondent wise to the ways of the Mideast and Balkans, loved the Village and recounted stories of its street vendors and mobsters to slightly horrified uptowners.
Though it sounds a fable, in those very distant days of the 1950s, old Italians actually used to stroll down the streets of the Central Village, singing Neapolitan folk songs, playing on their mandolins. The air was rich with the aroma of crusty, fresh breads from the glorious Vesuvio Bakery on Prince Street.
The Village was quiet and remote from busy midtown. Real artists lived there in walk-ups girded by iron fire-escapes, which for many New Yorkers became their sole retreat from the city’s torrid summer days. A few jazz clubs drew hip avant-gardists from the Upper West Side.
For my cosmopolitan family, a confusing farrago of Lower East Side New York and wild Albanians, our central gathering spot was a rather dingy little shop on MacDougal Street named ‘La Masquera,’ or the ‘Mask,’ in old-fashioned Neapolitan – Italy used to have 11 languages or dialects. Thick, colorful Neapolitan dominated in New York as well as Southern Italy. When I first got to Italy in the very early 50s, I didn’t understand a word that people were speaking and asked if it really was ‘Italian.’
My first job on this planet was running the cash register at the venerable Peacock Coffee House on MacDougal, the local watering hole for the neighborhood’s Italian community. I struggled to make change and operate the ancient cash register. There were artists, poets, musicians, day-laborers and well-dressed gentlemen with splendid mustaches who were treated with great deference by everyone and hailed as ‘don’ and ‘cavaliere.’
Then there was a scary old flophouse, the Greenwich Hotel, that occupied an entire block of Bleecker Street in the heart of the Village. They would rent you a room for a few hours and a large bottle of Muscatel wine.
The owner of the Greenwich Hotel was an early venture capitalist. He recruited rummies as his work force. Each wino was assigned a specific route heading uptown from the Village to around 42nd Street. They were to panhandle up their designated route.
At the end of this route, they would return to the Greenwich Hotel and hand the money they had gleaned to its owner. Then they were given a bottle of wine. Lest they be tempted to pocket some of the money they were given, hotel accomplices were stationed along the assigned route to give the mendicants marked coins. If any were missing at the journey’s end, the returning clochard would be given a thrashing and expelled from the hotel for good. Charles Dickens would have appreciated this early Industrial Revolution behavior.
At the eastern corner of the Greenwich Hotel was a verminous-looking pharmacy. I innocently asked the louche-looking owner if he had any illegal speed capsules for sale. It was impossible to get through economics exams without these efficient Benzedrine capsules to make one study economics, utter gibberish that at the time was considered the word of God.
‘How many do you want, kid?’ asked the evil-looking patron. ‘The biggest bottle you have.’ I got a 1,000-size bottle and scampered off with my treasure under my arm.
But of all the memories of the long-vanished Village that I hold dear, the most poignant was of the old pizzeria on MacDougal Street, La Masquera.
This literal hole in the wall was run by a single person, a titan of Italian gastronomy known to all as ‘Michio.’ He had wisps of white, eyes dancing with humor, and a stentorian voice. He was usually wrapped in white restaurant aprons. Out of his ancient pizza ovens came the best pizza I have ever tasted. Even in Rome I heard about Michio’s sublime pizza.
Michio was a loveable man who loved the opera almost as much as life. We were always assured of an especially magnificent pizza when one of the earth-shaking Italian operas was playing on his radio. He held his beautiful pizzas as if they were Tosca or Mimi, and cried into the pie as it emerged from the oven. Since Michio had no liquor license – refusing to pay the usual bribes to the city liquor inspectors – wine was served to us in coffee cups in case the inspectors raided La Masquera.
It’s all gone now, like a summer dream. Honkey-tonk joints and bad restaurants flooded in. Real estate became impossibly expensive. Many Village residents moved across the river to Jersey and out to remotest Long Island. La Masquera closed after dear Michio died in his kitchen. A few of the old joints still cling to life but the heart and soul of the Village are long gone.
Still, as a New Yorker I expect a new Village to be reborn, maybe in Queens. But it won’t be like the original one.
Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. He appears as foreign affairs expert on CNN, BBC, France 2, France 24, Fox News, CTV and CBC.
