• • A recently renovated, 19th-century tavern, P.J. Clarke's is on East 55th Street and Third Avenue (915 Third Avenue, at 55th Street — 212-759-1650) , where Frank Sinatra reigns on the juke box.
• • Joseph Doelger had a brewery across the street from Clarke's. (Doelger, a Bavarian immigrant, made a towering family contributions to New York — — he and his sons made one of the first, true New York lager beers, making the family extremely wealthy. Also he had a sister Matilda, whose wedding was covered in the society pages.)
• • Jacob Delker's daughter Matilda • •
• • Except this is definitely not the same Matilda Delker who married "Battling" Jack West and gave birth to Mae West in August 1893. Matilda Delker came from a family without wealth or prominence. Her father Jacob Delker was a Bavarian immigrant, however, he became a sugar and coffee broker, not a brewmaster. Jacob Delker's family was so poor when Matilda was growing up that they used to rent rooms located directly behind a Brooklyn oven.
• • P.J. Clarke's is a hold out: a squat, brick building that dates from 1868 now on a block of skyscrapers. Clarke's was a neighborhood staple in the days when Third Avenue was packed with tenements and elevated trains rumbled at interval overhead.
• • Louis Armstrong, who worked with Mae, once played the trumpet in Clarke's back room. Jackie O was a visitor. Johnny Mercer supposedly wrote the song "One for My Baby" on a napkin at Clarke's long, wooden bar. Sinatra also used to frequent Clarke's. Sinatra admired the massive men's room urinals (that still exist), proclaiming that you could stand New York City Mayor Abe Beame inside one of them.
• • If you visit Clarke's today you will benefit from a significantly quieted scene and some excellent decor, menu and service improvements that have come from a re-building of the area. Across the street, for instance, is the massive FDR Post Office, put up in 1967 during a surge of construction activity.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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