Western Beef Is Dead . . . Long Live Western Beef!

Patricia Fieldsteel eulogizes the 14th Street Western Beef in The Villager:

When I read The Villager online in my home here in the foothills of the Alps, I groaned aloud, “Oh, no, not Western Beef!!” But there it was, plain as day, the store on W. 14th St. with its signature orange-and-blue awning and the smiling green cowboy cactus will shortly close to give way to a high-end office building.

. . .

When I lived in New York, I loved Western Beef: the feeling of community and camaraderie among the shoppers, ranging from homeless people to wealthy West Villagers, transvestite prostitutes, truck drivers, Chelsea guppies, welfare families, firemen (always a good sign of a food store’s worth) and elderly Spanish-speaking people left from the days when far W. 14th St. was called “Little Spain.”

Then again, memory is a funny thing, and absence seems to make the heart grow fonder:

There were open white-plastic barrels of pig ears and snouts in brine; 10- and 20-gallon jugs of pork bellies and carpet-sized rolls of tripe. You needed a strong constitution to shop at Western Beef, which originally was a warehouse where one walked into a glacial auditorium-sized freezer with entire cow, hog and sheep carcasses hanging from hooks in the ceiling. I went once back then, had nightmares for a week and didn’t return until the early ’90s when the warehouse began to upgrade to more of a store. My friend and neighbor on Jane St. and now here in Provence, the cookbook author and cooking school teacher Lydie Marshall says, “I could not breathe in the place, especially the meat department; anyone who wanted to become a vegetarian only needed to go in their meat department and they would be cured forever of eating meat.” [Emph. added]

And:

At times, I admit, especially in the heat of summer, Western Beef was heavy on grunge and fetid odors, from the customers as well as the meat. I rarely shopped there in July and August. However, if there was one time of year when the store became magical, it was at Christmas. Christmastime was always a three-dimensional, live and in-living-color New York experience.

. . .

The checkout lines were long and took forever. Western Beef was noted for its narrow aisles, its Brobdingnagian logjams at the checkout. Most of the checkers were hirsute Spanish-speaking young women. A major portion of the customers paid with food stamps. They’d discover they’d bought too much and couldn’t pay, scrounging in their pockets, pulling out every last penny, nickel and dime. The checkers would yell, “Shameeka, KEY!! Rosita, KEY!!!! REGISTER!!” Another long wait, another delay until someone arrived with the master key to unlock the cash register. No one complained. [Emph. added]

You know, I don’t know if it helps any, but there are still quite a few Western Beefs around town: five in Queens, five in Brooklyn, two in Staten Island and five in the Bronx. You could always visit them . . . personally, I think they’re kind of gross.