Alas. I stopped going there years ago, when Fairway’s financial woes meant their inventory — especially their olive oil — went to hell. But even so. I remember loading bags of groceries on my old Dutch bike with white tires and toiling up that insane hill to Riverside Drive. And years and years of driving into the city at night from upstate, and stopping by Fairway for this or that, mostly because I could. But I also remember long before Fairway, when there was a bait-and-tackle place in a quonset hut in what’s now Fairway’s parking lot, and the old Harlem Meatpacking truck, whose logo was a calf carved up looking back at itself and licking its chops.

(West Side Rag)