Essential
New York City used to be a mecca for odd little shops. These dark, dusty emporia would be up or down flights of stairs, creaking wooden floorboards stretching back into promising shadows, low tin ceilings shedding lead paint flakes onto barrels of merchandise below.
The real estate boom swept most of these relics out of their rickety tenements, and then, wherever the landmarks commission didn’t dig in, swept away the buildings as well, in favor of bland blue glass condoliths with bright plastic bank branches on the ground floor.
Water Street, which formerly offered all the rope merchants, boarding houses and brothels an able-bodied seaman could desire, is now a canyon of office buildings. A few relics remain; one non-marine but redolently New York concern lasted from 1895 until just a few months ago:
Essential Products Co., 90 Water Street.
In the window, a pyramid of Essential Products bleached undisturbed since the seventies. That was Essential Products’ heyday, when they were recommended in all the New York City guidebooks. Even Ralph Nader offered this grudging concession to non-ascetics :
“Fortunately for those who cannot resist perfumes, alternatives do exist to spending a fortune on name brand products. Essential Products in NY offers perfumes similar in scent but not price to the expensive name brands”.
Mr. Polly and I found Essential Products open for business, if the hand-lettered sign was to be believed, less than a year ago. We clambered up the two crumbling steps and tried the door, which opened grudgingly into mushroomy dankness, papered with Brooklyn Dodgers clippings, adorned with balding tinsel garlands held up with packing tape.
“Open for Business” was a relative term.
A man emerged from the back to tell us that Barry Striem would come in shortly. We moved into the showroom, dominated by a large wooden case containing large apothecary jars with ground-glass stoppers. These jars had varying levels of brownish, viscous fluids, but none of them more than a third full. Presently Mr. Striem showed, coming in wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers cap. He explained that there had been a fire in the upper stories of the Essential Products building, but they were still doing mail-order. He wasn’t sure what the city was going to do. His son was urging him to retire. His son was a location manager, he said.“You know Steve Buscemi? You know that movie ‘Trees Lounge’? That was shot in my house,” he told us.
He handed me a sheet listing the fifty or so perfumes Essential Products carried, and the famous cousins they resembled. The house brands, all numbered, were labeled, “Parfum de Naudet.” The list ran from 1920s flappers like Shalimar through all the grand dames, concluding with shoulder-padded eighties designer numbers, and there it stopped.
The apothecary jars were all labelled, and just entering the store had made it a foregone conclusion that we would be purchasing something. I wasn’t ready to try the P de N version of Opium, but I hadn’t been ready for the original. Mr. Striem pointed out a few lighter fragrances for me, and began trying to pry off stoppers. The jars might have contained reclusive djinns, for many of them refused to open. But Mr. Striem persisted, and held out a glass wand tipped with Essential Product. “Hold out your wrist,” he said.
He and Mr. Polly talked Dodgers while he daubed my wrist with the dregs of Parfums. Yeah, he knew Duke Snider and Pee Wee Reese. There they were with him, scotch-taped to the wall alongside effusions of gratitude from customers. He regarded these with pride but also a certain wry detachment. “What do you think of this?” he said of one that could only be described as a mash note. “So I’m more important than her husband?”
The scent on my wrist was not obtrusive, and had a pleasing and surprising complexity. I decided to take it, envisioning Mr. Striem performing a decanting operation, mad scientist style, with glass pipettes. However, he opened a case containing small boxes already wrapped in flowered paper, I put down my eleven fifty, and soon Mr. Polly and I headed into the sunlight with Parfum de Naudet #36, their version of Estee Lauder’s “Pleasures.”
“Essential Products” was just below Wall Street, a short walk from where I live, but I missed its closing. One day last week, I saw that graffiti covered the upper floors, the upper windows were either boarded up or stove in, and the bird had flown.
“Vacate” notices were taped to the door, looking very much at home with the tinsel and customer photos (Japanese admirers with 70s afros). “The Department of Buildings has determined that conditions in this premises are imminently perilous to life.” was right above “Best Wishes for A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”
Behind the Buildings Department notices, the empty showroom made me wonder who moved out the apothecary jars. Perhaps the location manager son helped pack his father up, and the jars are now in a props storeroom. There is no Essential Products presence on the web, except for a single archived Webpage with that tantalizing list of Parfums de Naudet, all gone now, except for my little bottle of #36. It’s a pretty, green scent, spritely when first applied, but despite its concentrated form, it really doesn’t linger.
Posted by Mrs. Polly on 04/27/09 at 10:25 AM • Permalink
Categories: I Don't Know Much About Art, But I Know What I Like • Messylaneous • New York City •
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