Virginia Bartlett, whose proud cleavage and
ageless figure embodies the classic glamour of a Latina Sophia Lauren, swears
incredible things happened at the Studio Coffee Shop in Hell’s Kitchen.
The 68-year-old blond Puerto Rican spent over a decade as the coffee shop’s sole waitress and when she walks down the street she’s still recognized by many. The place, which was no bigger and just as grimy as a doughnut cart, once stood on the ground floor of the Film Center Building on Ninth Avenue between West 44th and 45th streets and has since been transformed into Nizza, an Italian-French restaurant.
Bartlett talks with the comic abandon of a
bilingual Lucille Ball, and among her many stories about the shop, she insists
that a group of 9/11 conspirators met at a rear table the weekend before the
terrorist attacks. Four suited men came in one Saturday morning, chattering
with one another about planning “a big thing” in which “everything gonna be
taken care of.”
They ordered “ham and eggs over, with orange
juice, coffee,” she recalls, adding that one guy—the guy she would later
recognize on TV as one of the terrorists—asked for corned beef hash.
At a nearby booth, a woman dressed in a navy blue
suit ordered two poached eggs and an English muffin. When she got up to go to
the ladies room, the woman whispered to Bartlett, “See those guys over there,
you watch if they get out; you watch which way they go.”
Usually unfazed by the odd folks that passed
through, Bartlett was rattled when the woman told her she was from the FBI.
Bartlett says things got busy and, when she next looked, “The three guys—bam!—they walk right out. They went
across the street and they disappear like magic.”
Bartlett moved to New York in the late 1950s at
the age of 15. She lived with an aunt in Long Island, and She enrolled at a
business college on Madison Avenue. Eventually, she got married and then
divorced and raised two children. During that time, she worked as a waitress, a
bank clerk and as a model for an Upper East Side French clothing designer.
She didn’t start working at the coffee shop
until 1992, when she was already in her fifties, divorced for a second time and
desperate for cash. She spotted the job listing at a less-than-reputable
employment agency where she was then working. When she arrived for the
interview, Bartlett says the owner asked her, “Where are you from?”
“Will it make a difference?” she said. “I came
here for a job.”
He pressed, and she admitted that she was
Puerto Rican. According to her, he hired her on the condition that she not
speak Spanish to his customers.
For the next 13 years Bartlett endured him, his
jealous wife and a temperamental cook who was always quitting at a moment's
notice and running off to the nearby porn theaters in Times Square.
She was paid a total of $20 for eight hours of
work, six days a week, but she claims she made $400-$500 in tips. Though some
of her customers didn’t always have the money to pay for their meals.
Still, her regulars were like family, even the
cuckoos, the stalkers and cross-dressers. There was the woman who ate
everything with a spoon. The tall looker with salt-and-pepper hair, who after
proposing on bended knee and giving her a gold bracelet, ordered a cup of
coffee and never returned. And the guy who played with himself as he eyed the
porn actresses who came down in their sheer costumes, taking a break from a
shoot in one of the studios upstairs.
Over the years Bartlett witnessed the change in
the clientele—let’s not forget that Cuban cross-dresser who dropped in with his
lovers—and the transformation of the neighborhood into a hot property, bringing
bistros and brasseries that served expensive dishes requiring a sonnet’s worth
of description.
Though Bartlett was born in a Puerto Rican town
where the locals were known for their ability to see premonitions, she never
saw the closing of the shop coming.
The boss announced one day in mid-November
2005, “Y’know, Virginia, we’re not gonna be here too long.”
How long, she asked.
“About another week,” he said, ordering her to
come in the next day to help pack.
But she never went back.
Bartlett, who lives in Annadale, a neighborhood
in Staten Island, and who endured a four-hour commute each day she worked, has
only returned to Hell's Kitchen once—for the annual International Food
Festival.
While she never cared much for the actual coffee shop, she admitted that she missed her customers. “They was like part of my life,” she says.
