Archie
The Space That Fed Us
I had a whole other newsletter planned for today, but I went back to the city on Tuesday and walked by Archestratus, which is in the throes of the degradations of the dying, and I want to write about space instead.
Archestratus, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a cookbook store in Greenpoint that nurtured those who love food. It served very very good food for one part of its life (the arancini; the rainbow cookies; the Boy Giuseppe sandwich). Later, when it became smaller, there was less food you could buy, but the spirit of hospitality that a place with good food has lingered in the walls and shelves and persuaded you to sit down and at least have a cup of tea. There were so many books to leaf through while you were there: not just the bold-colored hardcover top 10 cookbooks that are in every bookstore, but the weird herbalist handbooks and spiral-bound community cookbooks of the 1960s and fiction about food and poetry about food and books that were about Arthur Russell because Paige liked him.
When Archestratus held a cookbook club or a bake sale, everyone brought good food. People who love to make food love nothing more than to bring it to a place where they can share it with other people who love to make food. We would carry our hot casserole dishes wrapped in towels on our laps on the subway, or unpack a bag with five little Tupperwares full of garnish to plate our dishes on the long table. Cookbook club was a free open-to-everyone potluck in NYC, which is kind of a crazy idea if you think about it, but it worked. A surprising number of people came by themselves to cookbook club, at least at the beginning, but soon we knew each other. By the time Covid lockdown started and everyone was reaching out for community, there was enough of it at Archestratus that we formed a weekly Zoom call in which we talked about what we were cooking or wanted to cook, which is to say that we shared some of our most intimate domestic details and desires with each other while we thought the world might be ending.
I worked at Archestratus while I was pregnant with Miro, and it will close its doors this April the day before Miro’s fourth birthday — over ten years after it opened. I like to say that my first baby was built out of Paige’s focaccia and broccoli rabe, because I ate one sandwich (Nunzia the Nun but with provolone instead of ricotta salata) almost every day from my fourth to my ninth trimester. As my belly grew rounder, I switched from prep shifts to quieter days at the bookstore. I would walk around pressing all the spines of the books into even walls. I sorted through the piles of donations and picked out old bookmarks and shopping lists. I listened endlessly to Paige’s playlists, which even now make me think I can feel a kick in my belly.
Archestratus is Paige, though Paige is not Archestratus. Something so weird and warm could only come straight out of the heart of a weird and warm person. It’s hard to square it all with capitalism. The shop exists to make money, but the money is only for keeping the shop open. What was Paige doing all these years, where did all that work go, if there’s no pile of cash or even a book or a painting at the end of it? Every last crumb was eaten.
The Secret Ingredient: Paige Lipari on Eggplant
Sometimes I think I want too much. I worry that I can’t simultaneously work in food and continue to find joy and creativity in cooking. Or that having big dreams is incompatible with a sustainable lifestyle. And then I think about Paige, who pours herself and everything she loves into
“Archestratus goes belly up and leaves behind a fertile ruin” is the post with which Paige announced the closure. Immediately the love and gratitude and stories began pouring in. People tried to express something ineffable, about community and joy, which are words overused but never actually abundant enough. I tried too, and am trying even here, to, I suppose, honor the space with a kind of obituary. Because a space can be a being and its life not reducible to its accomplishments or direct material effects. Memories bring us a little closer to what it was all about, but even they can’t fully encapsulate a space. A space is where things happen but it’s also a world unto itself: the of smell books and fresh bread, the knocking in the pipes in the winter, the glow of the sign, the tingly feeling you have as you pass by Headrush on the corner. It cannot be franchised, it can’t be online. I worry about a city with fewer spaces left.
I’m glad Archestratus is having an honorable death. Though the circumstances of this death are frustrating (looking at you late-stage capitalism), it is good, generally, that things die. My tree crops friends say that “When a tree dies, its life is half over,” because their decomposition and nourishment of ecosystem is part of their lifecycle too. May the mycelium deep beneath Huron street spread and erupt for years to come. May our desire to cook for each other and touch each other find new expression. May Archestratus rest in something more lively than peace, and may it resurface in small details, from a bookmark to a recipe to a particular turn of phrase, long into who we are each becoming.
A lovely obituary.