Past and Present: 122 Montague Street

A Look at Brooklyn, then and now.

Cultural archetypes, some would call them stereotypes, are hard to let go of when we’ve got them in our collective heads, especially when they’ve been drummed into our cultural consciousness by generations of advertising. Today we’ve become much more sensitive to the kinds of images we use in advertising, and most people now try very hard to avoid being politically incorrect, and insensitive to ethnic, religious and racial groups. Nowhere do cultural images resonate more than when you are talking about food and cooking. For many people in the 1940’s, nothing said good Southern cooking more than the figure of an ample, dark, smiling black woman in a bandana carrying a big ol’ platter of food. So if a Brooklyn restaurant was named after this icon of Dixie deliciousness, it would be seen as a complement, now wouldn’t it? Welcome to Mammy’s Pantry!

Mammy’s kitchen of Southern goodness was dispensed from a restaurant on Montague Street, near the corner of Henry. 122 Montague is now home to the Housing Works Thrift Shop, but in the 1940’s, it was home to Mammy’s Pantry and the Old Dominion Bar. Southern style favorites such as Maryland crab cakes, fried chicken, shrimps Creole and Chesapeake Bay oysters could be downed with juleps, swizzlers, wine, and cocktails, followed by some cobbler for dessert. They also made jams and jellies, and homemade cakes and pies.

Gourmet Magazine had a columnist in the 1940’s with the delightful name of Clementine Paddleford. She wrote about NYC restaurants and food events, and her columns have been reprinted on line. She mentions Mammy’s on two different occasions, once in 1943, and then a year later in ’44, where she calls it “Brooklyn’s beloved of the home style restaurant.” The restaurant is also mentioned in another publication in 1947.

It would take some serious searching through phone and business directories, and other non-digital sources to find out who owned Mammy’s, and how long it was in business, and it would certainly be interesting to see who was back there in the kitchen, actually frying up the chicken. Even in the 1940’s, restaurants in this town open, last a few years, and then close, sometimes at the height of popularity. Isn’t the average life of a restaurant in New York City a year? Mammy’s lasted at least four, which we have a record of.

The postcard which gave us these images also had a lot of incidental information that we lovers of Brooklyn find interesting. Note the map of the area. This was before Cadman Plaza, and the old streets and buildings are present. The cultural highlights are also a hoot. Tallyrand? in 1943? I guess the mention of famous Henry Ward Beecher and his “selling” of the slave girl had some relevance to a place named Mammy’s? Also note the announcement that the restaurant had Musak. Believe it or not, it was very posh then. Did you know it was developed in 1934? That’s a long time to be driven insane.

So, did Mammy’s outlive its popularity? Did the name and the beloved icon of Mammy, used in the advertising, finally get dated and a bit distasteful? Or was there another new flavor of the month down the street that caused its doom? It would be interesting to find out. GMAP