The Nicest Man in New York!
Plus! Items of Interest!! Meet the new Intern!!!
Hello everyone,
Welcome to Issue #206 of CAFÉ ANNE!
Huge news! CAFÉ ANNE has a new intern! Some of you may remember Substack the Cockroach Intern, who served on the staff for two years starting in 2023. However, as time wore on, he refused to do anything but the bookkeeping, and then I discovered he was embezzling, etc. So of course I was very pleased, recently, to get an email out of the blue with the delightful subject line, “Free labor?” Inside, the person wrote:
“My name is Kevin Gonzalez. I’m a longtime reader and fan of the newsletter. I’m writing to you with what is likely a strange question: do you need an assistant, an unofficial Cafe Anne correspondent, researcher or an intern (possibly all three?) I will work for free, obviously.”
I met Kevin, who lives in Williamsburg, for coffee shortly thereafter. He was extremely fun and charming, of course, and repeated his offer to help with anything. So I told him my idea: “Let’s have the readers assign you a story! Whatever they say, you have to do it!”
He readily agreed. So everyone, please give Kevin a warm welcome in the comments and suggest a (quick!) NYC story for him to cover.
Meanwhile, he did most of the interview transcribing for this issue’s feature—a horrible, horrible task. Thank you Kevin!
In other news:
• I visited my dad in my hometown of East Aurora, NY and as usual, the annual Independence Day parade did not disappoint. The village proudly trotted out its entire fleet of municipal vehicles including a backhoe, many firetrucks, the new super-size red dump truck and the Zamboni. When the Zamboni stalled in the middle of the street, a heroic team of volunteers (including my nephew Ryan) pushed it to the curb. My Aunt Carol, upon witnessing the proceedings, made the following pronouncement: “This country’s going to be okay.”
• Though I miss working on the newsletter, I continue to enjoy my temp gig as a staff writer for the Curbed section of New York Magazine. You can see what I’ve been up to here. Just four weeks to go! After that, I’m going to take a little summer vacay, and then in September I’ll resume publishing on a regular schedule.
• I saw The Odyssey. My review: I have never seen so many ridiculously attractive people all mooshed into one movie!
• When I went to dinner at PJ Clarke’s, a restaurant in Battery Park City frequented by office workers, the waiter introduced himself. shook my hand, and shook my friend Dyan’s hand. When he left, Dyan and I exchanged bewildered looks. “I washed my hands before sitting down, and now I’ve shaken hands with everyone in the restaurant,” said Dyan. Is this a new trend?
Finally, huge shoutouts to new paid subscribers Ana G., Brigette, Dyan M., Sharon G., Chris D., Vegas J., Chloe G., and Charles G. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there is something very special about a reader who is willing to pay for a free newsletter that barely exists!
I am very excited, of course, about this month’s issue. We’ve got a profile of Chuck Norris—the Manhattan hotel doorman, not the actor. He may not have starred in any action flicks, but I think his story is even more entertaining! Please enjoy.
Regards!
Anne
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ITEMS OF INTEREST
Port Authority Selling Lincoln Tunnel Bricks at $2.25 a Pop
BONKERS PROFILE
The Nicest Man in New York!
Earlier this year I got an email from a reader, Lucie Taylor in Manhattan, suggesting I interview a fellow named Chuck Norris (not the actor!) who works as the doorman at the Park South Hotel on East 28th Street.
Lucie explained that her parents live in San Antonio and whenever they came to visit her in New York, they’d stay at the hotel and chat with Chuck while waiting for a cab. This past February, however, Lucie’s dad had to make the trip alone because his wife had cancer. When he told Chuck that she’d stayed home because she was sick, the doorman asked for their address.
“My dad gave it, thinking he planned to send a card,” Lucie wrote. “One week later, the doorbell rang, and there was Chuck on my parents’ doorstep in San Antonio! He had flown down for the weekend to visit and was one of the last visitors to make it there before my mom died.”
“I don’t know much about Chuck, but I think only a remarkable person would travel across the country to visit a dying person they barely know,” Lucie’s email continued. “I would love for you to interview him about this decision and his general life philosophy. I think my mom was awesome, and I guess so did he! But that doesn’t fully explain his decision for me.”
When I met Chuck a few weeks ago at the hotel, I was expecting an old man in a bellhop uniform. Nope! He was tall, fit and youthful looking—dressed in jeans, a spiffy polo and a newsboy cap. “Anything I put on, I look good,” he said, when I complimented his style.
While Chuck manned the door, greeting guests streaming in and out of the lobby, I told him I’d been reading reviews of the Park South Hotel online. “A lot of people mention Chuck the doorman,” I told him.
“Absolutely,” said Chuck, smiling his huge smile. “Because I’m famous, you know. Without me, there is no hotel!”
The mid-priced boutique hotel has 130 rooms, and Chuck said he makes it his business to know every guest—where they’re from, their family life, why they’re visiting. “The guest that came through just now, with the white hair—he came from Canada, but he was born in Libya,” said Chuck, who has a thick Caribbean accent. “His daughter came here to go to grad school—she’s a dentist.”
Chuck follows the news—national and global—so he knows what’s happening in every guest’s country. He keeps the names of hundreds of hotel regulars on his phone and calls to check up on them if they go too long between visits. “Every guest walking in is my family,” he said. “None is a stranger.”
When his shift ended, Chuck took me on a little tour of the hotel, including the cramped basement locker room where he meditates for an hour before starting his shift at 7 am. He has quite the routine, it turns out. He wakes up every day at 3:30 am to pray and eat breakfast—typically a fruit smoothie. “I don’t eat meat, I never smoke in my life,” he said. When his shift ends at 2:30 pm, he enjoys a two-hour workout: “I love the gym!” Then he heads home to Brooklyn to hang with his wife and two grown daughters. Before turning in early, he’ll watch the news, lay out his clothes and prepare his meals for the next day.
“So your life is very simple,” I observed.
“Simple in a way that I don’t make nothing a problem,” he agreed. “I just like being me.”
He told me he is 55 and has been working for the same hotel for 27 years, so I asked if he was content being a doorman. He gave me a look. “I’m not a doorman!” he said. “I am the ambassador for this company.”
After the hotel tour, we decided to check out a cafe around the corner. By now, I was determined to find some flaws in this fellow, so on the walk over, I demanded to know his pet peeves. The only thing that bothers him, Chuck replied, are coworkers who don’t take their jobs seriously—who call out sick or come in late. He hasn’t missed a day of work in 27 years.
“Alright,” I said. “I’m going to name some things that bother other people. How about when the train is late? Does that bother you?”
“I’m never late,” he said.
“Is there any weather you don’t like?”
“Winter,” he said, “but it doesn’t annoy me because I have very good winter clothes.”
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
Chuck said that he wasn’t there to say goodbye when his father died suddenly of a brain aneurysm: “That is my biggest regret.”
But this was hardly his fault. “Are you a perfect person?” I wondered.
“No, I’m not a perfect person,” he said. “But I am a good person, I’m a genuine, honest, loving person. I have no malice in my heart.”
At the cafe, Chuck sipped an iced coffee and filled me in on his background. Growing up in Trinidad, his mom was a nurse, and his dad owned a liquor store. Chuck loved the sea and spent a decade sailing the globe, working as a cook on commercial fishing boats. “But even though I go to all these places, I never lose focus,” he said. Some of his crew-mates had a family in every port: “I never choose that.”
He was on the docks one day in Newport, Rhode Island when he met the man who would change his life. Don Glassie was a sailor and entrepreneur. The two got to chatting and Don hired Chuck on the spot to help build his yacht. He next asked Chuck to help renovate the hotel he’d bought in Manhattan. When the hotel opened, Don asked Chuck to stay on as the doorman.
“He was one of the greatest,” said Chuck. “If your head hurt, he knew before you know. He helped everyone. Don is the one who encouraged me, because of his vision.” Chuck still works at the hotel out of loyalty to Don, who died in 2011.
Now I was wondering if perhaps Chuck was so positive because he’d had an easy life. “I tell you something,” he said, as if reading my mind. “I lose my son the age of four. My daughter died the age of 14. I don’t tell much people. Yes. Janelle and Stephen.”
We talked about how he dealt with losing two children to illness. “I never lose my mind,” he said. “I continue to stay strong. I meet a lot of good people. I talk to people all the time. I feel that’s what takes you through.”
I had yet to bring up Chuck’s surprise visit to Lucie’s parents in San Antonio, but this seemed like a good time. I asked him to recall how he got to know the couple—Jim Taylor and Cary Marriott—as hotel guests.
“When she come, she was my darling,” said Chuck. “Every time she come, I say, ‘Welcome home. How you doing?’ She say, ‘Chuck, I’m fine.’ They come and we talk.’”
“What did you talk about?”
“You talk about life, you talk about everything,” said Chuck. “How is politics? How is work? How the daughter doing? She was a good baker, a cook, so we talk about cooking. And I always call Jim the professor. Always say he was a smart professor.”
He has a vivid recollection of Jim’s visit in February without Cary: “I say, ‘Where is the beautiful young lady?’ And he say he come to bring me some news. He told me, ‘She is sick.’ I said, ‘She will get better, but give me the address, so I could send good will.’”
“Like a card,” I said.
“Yes,” said Chuck. “But later I think, ‘You know what? I’m not sending no card. I just say, ‘Book a flight,’ and I decide to check into a hotel, and that was it.’”
“I don’t understand why you decided to go visit,” I said. “What was going on in your head?”
“I just want to see her,” said Chuck. “I want to surprise her. Something just said, I need to go and visit her, because Jim usually don’t come by himself, and he tell me she not feeling too well.’”
“How soon after did you book the flight?”
“The next day,” Chuck told me. “I just want to make sure that she’s okay, because usually she will be there with him.”
“So you didn’t know she had terminal cancer?”
“No,” said Chuck. “I didn’t know.”
“Did you worry they would feel uncomfortable with your visit?” I asked.
“No,” said Chuck. “This is not the first time I do things like this. I knock on the door. They say, ‘Chuck, how you find me?’ I say ‘Yes! I find you, I miss you!’”
Chuck told me about several surprise trips he’d made to see guests in other states. But my favorite story was one about a recent trip to his native Trinidad. At the car rental counter, he met a lady whose hands were calloused. When he asked why, she told him she worked a second job in a poultry shop, plucking and butchering chickens by hand. When Chuck returned to New York, he couldn’t stop thinking about her rough life. So he ordered a chicken plucker and slicer, had the equipment shipped to Trinidad, flew back down to receive the shipment at the wharf, cleared it through customs and hired a driver to help him deliver the slicer and plucker to the poultry shop. It was a complete surprise to the lady. “She cried,” said Chuck. “She don’t believe that someone could ever do something like that.”
A few weeks after I met Chuck, I arranged a Zoom call with Jim Taylor in San Antonio to get his side of the story. The architect, who is 72, told me he is still muddling through his days in a fog. Cary died five months ago, on February 24. She was 67. “The smallest thing can remind me of her,” said Jim.
Jim and Cary met in the summer of 1981, in New York City, at a friend’s backyard barbecue. He was a banker, she worked for Condé Nast. They started talking about books, and that was it. “We both loved New York and we were there a long time,” said Jim.
They later quit their jobs and moved to Provence, then to architecture school for Jim, followed by a stay in Pittsburgh and finally to San Antonio where Cary, a writer, served as the marketing head for the San Antonio Museum of Art. “She was very kind and considerate, very much interested in the other person,” said Jim. “It was always—sorry if I got emotional there—it was never about her. It was always about you.” He shared a few stories about how Cary brought people together—gathering fellow young moms for tea, hosting Saturday morning coffees on her back patio so friends could meet each other, and hosting a cooking club.
Cary was the first to stay at the Park South Hotel and meet Chuck. “And then I started to go,” said Jim. “We would talk while we were standing around waiting for a taxi, or going in and out of the hotel. I would comment on his hat, or he would comment on my hat, and we’d kind of smart talk back-and-forth. And so, over the years, he got to know us. We weren’t going to have a drink after his shift or any of that kind of thing, but he got to know us as guests.”
Jim remembers when he stayed at the hotel in February and told Chuck that Cary was sick: “I might not have gone into the details of the diagnosis, but he was quite concerned. He asked for our address. I thought he’d send a card or something. You know, a nice gesture.”
Back in San Antonio, Jim was out running errands when Chuck showed up at the front door and rang the bell. Cary was bedridden, so her aide answered. Everyone in the family knows what happened next—the aide mistook Chuck for a delivery guy.
“Say it’s Chuck from New York!” the doorman insisted.
“If Cary could have fallen out of bed, she probably would have,” said Jim. “It was a complete surprise, no warning, not a text, not a phone call, nothing.”
Cary called Jim to tell him about their visitor. “I was incredulous,” he recalled. “I said, ‘You’re kidding me!’”
Jim sped home to find Chuck at Cary’s bedside. The two were laughing and chatting. The doorman was intent on getting her well, and he had a plan. “We had to get in the car and look for a tropical fruit,” said Jim. “Soursop. Have you heard of that? It’s an anti-inflammatory, and so absolutely good for you. He didn’t realize just how ill or sick Cary was—that it was not going to help at this point.”
Nevertheless, Jim and Chuck drove all over San Antonio looking for soursop, which they finally found at a small Caribbean grocery. Chuck stayed in town for three days and made soursop smoothies for Cary every morning. Cary loved the smoothies and drank them until she died. “We stocked up on enough to fill the freezer,” said Jim. “I still have one of those containers of the frozen fruit.”
“If it were me,” I said, “My reaction would have been, ‘This is incredible!’ But also I think I would have felt like it was a bit of burden to have to entertain this guy all weekend.”
“Well, I mean, yes,” said Jim. “I had to think, ‘Well, Cary can’t see him eight hours of the day, so how am I going to be hospitable and have some fun with him?’ We figured it out.”
Jim took Chuck sightseeing and out to dinner: “In the big scheme of things I didn’t lose anything, right?”
“All told, was it a good thing for you and Cary that he came to visit?” I asked.
“Of course!” said Jim. “Because it just showed the goodness of people. So unexpected, not required, not a duty, not part of his job. His job is to be nice to the guests. It’s not to get on a plane at his own expense and come visit a guest who’s struggling. So it was uplifting. It was unbelievable, frankly.” He wiped his eyes.
“What did Cary have to say after he left?”
“She cried thinking about it and talking about it,” said Jim. “We were all incredulous, but very honored and touched. Because we’d lived in New York, and we have two children who live in New York, so we sort of know New York—and I think Chuck represents the good of that city.”
Jim did not know that after his trip to San Antonio, Chuck went to Trinidad to buy a special variety of soursop that he thought might save Cary’s life. By the time he returned to the states, Cary had died.
“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” Jim said, after I told him. “But it’s so redemptive that we can live in this nasty world today, and yet there can be this light of kindness to change things, just for a moment. That makes a difference.”
So then I told Jim my favorite part of my chat with Chuck. It was when we were at the cafe, wrapping up the interview. “Chuck,” I said, “How could I be more like you?”
“You could be better than me!” he laughed. “You could be better than me!”
“You have a lot of good people in this world,” he added. “And the only way you will know is by interacting. If you don’t interact, you never know.”
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“I listen so hard I can’t hear.”
—Walker Percy
What a beautiful interview with Chuck! I’m so grateful that we live in a world with people like him in it. Congrats to the new intern, I look forward to his first assignment!
I’ve always wanted to see a living Saint. I will stop by the Park South Hotel when I visit NY just to gaze upon one. Great story. Remarkable!!!