Brooklyn’s Fulton Street Mall is a treasure trove for the urban explorer. At first glance, the shopping precinct of some two hundred stores in downtown Brooklyn looks like it has seen better days. Low rent retail, cheap costume jewellery, mobile phone accessories, knock off perfume and factory outlets crowd sidewalks filled with street vendors. Many windows are boarded up, and ‘going out of business’ signs are common. Indeed, tell someone that you’re off to visit the Fulton Street Mall and you may get a raised eyebrow or two. But peak behind the modern veneers, and glance above street level and the tattered awnings and you’ll find beautiful remnants of an earlier, more elegant age.
For this stretch of Fulton Street was once one of Brooklyn’s most luxurious destinations, a grand boulevard filled with trees, gas lamps and trolley cars, lined with prestigious cast iron department stores, fine oyster and chop houses and upscale saloons.
At the height of the Gilded Age, Fulton Street rivalled anything to be found in Manhattan, Paris or London. And the jewel in the crown was the restaurant Gage and Tollner.
This is the story of Brooklyn’s most famous restaurant that opened in 1879, but would suffer the same fate as much of Fulton Street by the late 20th century, becoming a fast food chain, then a cut price jewellery shop, until it was recently saved and beautifully restored to become the shining light of one of Brooklyn’s most fascinating streets, and a sumptuous restoration of a Gilded Age wonder.
Our first glimpse of Gage and Tollner was over a decade ago, when it was occupied by a knock off costume jewellery shop. Rows of plastic bangles and gold painted necklaces were on sale for “$2.99 and up!”, whilst “Store Closing” signs hung from the ceiling. But like most urban exploring discoveries, the key to finding treasure is keeping one’s eyes open.
The first clue that something special was lying forgotten here was the front door: grand columns flanking an old wooden door with vertical frosted glass, and the name ‘Gage and Tollner’ etched into the dusty panes in an elegant font from a bygone era. Venturing inside, quite incredibly the original interior of one of America’s most beautiful restaurants was still there, covered up behind the temporary shelves of costume trinkets.
Your dining experience at Gage and Tollner a century ago was elegant from the moment you stepped past the same frosted glass doorway. Inside was a blaze of thirty six ornate gas lamps with the glowing light reflected from the floor length cherry wood framed mirrored walls, sumptuously decorated with fashionable Lincrusta, a deeply embossed linseed oil based wall covering that had been invented in 1877, and would go on to be found in six state rooms on the Titanic, the White House, and here at Gage and Tollner.
Waiters in gold striped uniforms served well dressed patrons with such luxuries as she-crab soup, broiled Baltimore clams, mutton chops and kidneys en brochette. The finest restaurant in Brooklyn, if not America, it rivalled famed Delmonico’s in Manhattan as a glittering jewel of the Gilded Age. No wonder that Gage & Tollner would become New York’s first landmarked dining room, and only its third ever landmarked interior. To give a sense of its grandeur, the first two were the main branch of the New York Public Library and Grant’s Tomb.
During the Gilded Age, Gage & Tollner kept fine company on Fulton Street. A few doors down was the flagship department store of Abraham & Straus, a breath taking Second Empire designed cast iron gem that matched in luxury anything to be found on Ladies Mile in Manhattan. Occupying twenty eight acres of downtown Brooklyn, you would pull into the store itself by horse and carriage through a porte cohere entrance, as the interior courtyard soared up to the sky lights above. At one point, Abraham & Straus even employed local Brooklyn girls as live mannequins behind their plate glass windows.
Stroll down the wide tree lined boulevard Fulton Street in the Gilded Age and you would pass other luxury department and dry goods stores like A.I.. Namm & Son, Loeser’s, and the beautiful terra cotta facade of the Romanesque Revival ‘Offerman Building’, home to Weschler & Brothers department store.
Theatres such as the Brooklyn Paramount and Loew’s Metropolitan thronged a street that ended with the marble grandeur of the Dime Saving’s Bank, one of Brooklyn’s most monumental buildings, built to resemble a classical temple with a vast rotunda that was supported by red marble columns made from stone imported from Greece and winged bronzes of Mercury standing over the Brooklyn Bridge.
But by the 1970s and 80s, the elegance of Fulton Street had all but disappeared as the area fell into urban decline. The golden age of Abraham & Straus had ended when Isidor Straus and his wife Ida died on the Titanic. The grand company was swallowed up by Macy’s, and the branch on Fulton Street became a run-down cog and part in their giant chain, with many of the elegant fixtures lost.
The temple-like Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn closed down after the bank failed, and the long stretch of Fulton Street between Adams and Flatbush was redesigned in the 1980s as the urban ‘Fulton Street Mall’, which swiftly became grey and bleak. The New York Times visited in the early 1990s, reporting, “Spending a day at the Fulton Street Mall is like getting a crash course in urban trends and high-pressure sales tactics. On street corners, barkers tout free cell phone deals. Along the sidewalks, the Nation of Islam competes for the attention of shoppers with cheap dental insurance. And then there are the shop windows – crammed with sneakers, stiletto heels, team jerseys, electronics and enough gold chains to sink a pirate ship.”
Gage & Tollner would similarly fall on hard times, closing in 2004. It became a TGI Fridays, then falling down the fast food chain to become a branch of Arby’s; the menus which once boasted fine porterhouse steaks, green turtle soup and and blue point oysters turned to hamburgers, until it became a costume jewellery shop, which is how we found it in 2014. But thanks to the interior’s designation as a New York City Historic Landmark, the restaurant was still there, the beautiful Lincrusta walls and cherry wood mirrors were hiding behind dry wall and temporary shelves of gaudy trinkets, and the closing down sale signs hanging from the gas lamps. In short, the most perfectly intact 19th century restaurant was lying there, like a nugget of purest gold on Fulton Street, Brooklyn.
The rebirth of Gage and Tollner began in 2018 when three friends and local restauranteurs discovered the hidden gem and took over the lease. Partners Sohui Kim and Ben Schneider, the team behind Brooklyn favourites Insa and the Good Fork, and St. John Frizell, the man behind Red Hook’s delightful Fort Defiance began restoring Gage and Tollner to its Gilded Age glamour.
“I was always fascinated with the restaurant because of its history,” explains Frizell, award winning writer and eminently dapper cocktail expert. “It just seemed like such a symbol of the degeneration of beautiful old things in our culture…it was obviously always meant to be this grand old restaurant.” Our next visit to the venerable chop house was in 2019 with archival research and pain staking restoration well under way. “Of all the listed interiors in New York, there’s only a handful,” the equally dapper Ben Schneider explained. “We had such a positive experience with the Landmarks Commission, as most people are trying to get rid or change a landmark. We were doing what they’d dreamed about.”
As the decades of fast food and low rent retail fixtures were removed, the hidden beauty of Gage and Tollner was unveiled, restored and brought back to life. “Because of the landmark status all the new stuff was just put in front of the walls, rather than the original decor and fittings taken down or screwed into, thank goodness for that!” says Schneider.
With the gas lamps polished and cherry wood mirrors gleaming, the Gilded Age restaurant was steadily brought back to life, albeit with modern restaurant sensibilities. “There’s a lot of design choices we made to keep in mind the landmark status,” explains Schneider, “whilst thinking about what we can make our own and what we can bring back. The fabrics, the furniture, we made some choices that have our own mark on the room. We even worked with a graphic designer, studying the century year old menus to create something similar to the old look.”
“For us, all the value of Gage and Tollner is in that room,” beams St. Frizell, “Being able to go there and disappear into it for a second and sort of feel your place in history. Knowing that for years Brooklynites have gone there to mark special occasions, to gather with friends, and you’re doing the same thing they did. The food is going to be great, but it just needs to match the room. The room is really the star.”
After an enforced delay due to the pandemic, Gage and Tollner finally reopened its glorious doors in April, 2021. Step inside and the restoration is immediately staggering, the restaurant imbued with an amber glow, and for anyone in love with novels such as The Alienist or A Gentleman in Moscow, it is a sumptuous time machine back to the Gilded Age. Modern twists on nineteenth century fine dining see a menu filled with such mouth watering delicacies such as beef steaks, chops, dry-age heritage pork ribs, caviar chilled Maine lobsters, she-crab soup, Parker house rolls, oysters Rockefeller and crispy Hen-of-the-Woods mushrooms, whilst the cocktail list modernly evokes the decadence and sophistication of bygone days, with treats like the Sazerac, Gin Gibson, gimlets, the Sidecar and traditional three ingredient daiquiris.
Renovations were carried on to the upper floors with period looking private rooms, and the addition of a spectacular speakeasy styled bar, the Sunken Harbor Club. Redolent of far flung adventures to exotic parts of the globe, and inspired by vintage tales of adventure and mysteries of the deep, the Sunken Harbor Club looks like a submerged captain’s cabin from a 19th century tall ship.
Part gentleman explorer’s club, part vintage cocktail bar, the Sunken Harbor Club features an enjoyable back story: “We discovered the leather-bound volumes of the Club’s journal of record—the Compendium Bibendium—in the abandoned ruins of the club’s New York City chapter. The Compendium is filled with notes written in a secret code that, once deciphered, revealed colourful scenes from the Club’s history: glimpses of forgotten worlds, tales of wild adventure, and recipes for some of the most delicious drinks ever created.”
The return of Gage and Tollner will hopefully mark a change in fortune for Fulton Street. “Its bustling but still kind of wild out there, “ explains Ben Schneider. “But still in transition, and much more developed further up towards DeKalb market. Its alive and fun, just a bit crazy!’
Its a refreshing change to see a once beautiful place restored rather than lost. A visit to Gage and Tollner harkens back to a time when oysters, chops and exquisitely made cocktails were enjoyed under the glow of the gas lamps. Throw in a vintage explorer’s speakeasy upstairs, and you’ve encountered Brooklyn’s most enchanting treasure.
