On my way to pay tribute to an icon on his last day of service I had to pass through the obliterated history of Times Square. Years before I had spent an evening at the old Howard Johnson's, then the last of a dying breed - a human-scaled diner amid the encroaching corporate tide of M & M stores and Gordon Ramsay franchises. Ever since I got to New York it feels as if I've been chasing the image that had been embedded in my mind of the automat-era Manhattan I grew up watching that existed in old Naked City episodes and The Sweet Smell of Success. The Times Square of newspaper gossip columnists that wielded enormous power and theatre openings that made headlines. When I read the article in the NY Times about a bartender who was retiring I was surprised to see that Sardi's still existed. I had just assumed that those old Broadway haunts had faded away. Joe Petrsoric has been tending bar there since 1968 and is a link to that era. Along the way I passed the now-shuttered Satrlite Deli and it felt like I was passing through a graveyard. The block it's on is quieter than the rest of the neighborhood thankfully and as you approach the door, the tourist din gives way to a comfortable buzz of well-heeled old locals I  climbed the red-carpeted stairs and walked past the "Happy Retirement" balloon and like magic he looked up from the packed bar, smiled and took my order. In a flash he made me a perfect old-fashioned and I sipped it basking in the atmosphere that felt like a movie set. 

On his last day it seemed like the right time for me to stop my quest too. To find that New York of my dreams. Because surely there will come a day when I try to take a sip and find the glass empty.