The lovely Jon Vie Pastries, in Greenwich Village, had an exquisite business card. It proudly proclaimed that they were “bakers of distinction.”
A pen and ink drawing of the arch and fountain in Washington Square, it contained a birthday cake with candles. The smoke floated up into the sky, resembling clouds at the height of the fountain’s American flag.
When I was a child, Jon Vie was a Friday evening stop on the way to visit a friend of my parents, one Luis Mendietta, who lived on the corner of Waverly and West 10th. When I was old enough to wander the Village on my own, Jon Vie was always a stop for an éclair and a cup of coffee, while sitting at one of their spacious tables and watching the world on Sixth Avenue walk by.
Recently I came across Jon Vie’s business card while attempting to reconnect with my dusty Rolodex, and while doing so realized that the entries in this now archaic information-gathering system were a perfect snapshot of New York in the ‘90s. As I flipped through the various businesses, people and organizations, I realized that many of them are no longer with us.
There was Airline Stationers, on the corner of Madison and 40th where I used to drop in as a high school student doing research at Mid-Manhattan Library, scouring the aisles looking for the perfect notebook and pen.
Then there was the card for Dr. Morris Shorofsky, our general practitioner whose office was located on East 61st Street, between Third and Lex. My husband and I loved Dr. Shorofsky, who was sweet and funny and seemingly ageless.
“Dr. S,” my husband once asked him, “aren’t you ever going to retire?”
“You see that courtyard out there?” Dr. Shorofsky pointed at the window. “They’re going to bury me in it.”
Around the corner, on Lexington and 62nd, was the Classique Shoe Salon, where my mother bought her Italian-made fine leather shoes. I found their card, while perusing the collection, and remembered how I always knew I would be all grown-up when I had purchased a pair of spectator slingbacks from Classique.
Then there was Ricky Bunting, who was a Brand Ambassador for Brooks Brothers, at their iconic flagship store on Madison Avenue and 46th Street. I would have never thought about Ricky if I hadn’t come across his card, which reminded me of the conversation he and I had in Men’s Wear about the etiquette classes he was teaching with a colleague for seniors at NYU.
“Do you still use your Rolodex?” I recently asked my husband, whose business cards from various folks in the entertainment industry have been found lying on his desk for decades.
“No, I use Google,” he said, “and proceeded to explain his current method for electronic contact list keeping. I understand, for I certainly use a similar one to track my writing resources. There is something about the business card, though, a certain sense of personality, an artfulness, that is missing from the electronic contact. Perhaps I have held on to these business cards to keep them alive.
“Shops that reflect an individual's idiosyncratic tastes are slowly disappearing in the Village, a trend repeated elsewhere in Manhattan,” The New York Times said about small businesses like Jon Vie.
“Even the neighborhood's dogs know the shop, because Jon Vie saves broken cookies for them. One dog that ran away from its owner a year ago was soon found inside the shop, drooling over the cookie case.”
Sydney Kryska, the bakery’s manager “recalls a time when the machine that spits out numbers to keep the line of customers honest was in use every afternoon between 4 and 5. We had that many people buying cake on their way home," he said. "Now we don't use that machine except for Thanksgiving or other big holidays. People do not come in on their way home to pick up pastries or desserts. They're health-conscious.”
This may have been true but if there is one thing I have discovered about New York from a lifetime of observation, it is its sense of renewal. Yes, my Rolodex is a testament to loss, to a New York that is no longer there.
And yet, there is a beautiful new pastry shop around the corner from my house. In the middle of winter, in the midst of the economic devastation of a global pandemic, I watched a man paint the word Boulangerie on the sign above the window. It was artistic and wreaked of personality.
Just like my beautiful business card from Jon Vie Pastries, Bakers of Distinction.