Elsie’s

Elsie’s Lunch, alas, is no longer with us. I should have written her up as part of my early MIT experience, inasmuch as she provided some of my earliest and strongest secular motivations for visiting this neighborhood. Elsie and Henry Bauman, as I understand it, came to escape Hitler and created one of the great commercial successes of Cambridge. Their “schpecial” was a rather monstrous roast-beef sandwich with onion, mustard, and Russian dressing, on a deli roll (unless you asked for something different, like cissel or pumpernickel). For fifty cents. If you asked for a “regular”, they’d hold the onion, and the dressing. As I sit here, drooling with nostalgia, I’m tempted to dredge up their whole menu, but that would be cruel. As well as difficult. I must mention the Landsman: hot Rumanian pastrami, “cut extra thick with a heavy hand.” And the “Fresser’s Dream,” stacking up four different deli meats—‘way too thick to get your mouth around.

At meal-times, Elsie’s was always crowded. She had a door on Mount Auburn Street and another around the corner on Linden, but you often couldn’t get in either one. But you could tell the guy in front of you, “two schpecials and a chocolate Western, please,” and he’d probably pass your order in. After a while, a bag would come out, if you hadn’t made it through the door, and you could repeat the bucket-brigade process with your money and your change. Never lost a cent that way.

And if I was broke, I could yell, “Catch you the first of the month, Elsie,” and she’d smile and wave. She never let us raggedy students starve. We’d never let her down, either. By the time I was here as a married grad student, still watching my pennies, one of my favorite lunches was Elsie’s sandwich of cream cheese (about four ounces, so help me!) on pumpernickel, for 35¢ and a rather wonderful chocolate-frosted spice-bread square for a quarter. Mighty satisfying, for sixty cents… The enterprise lasted long enough for our older kids to become properly fond of it. Then Elsie had a heart attack and moved to the Cape. The new owners were smart enough to keep some of its features alive, but it finally succumbed in the 1990s, as rents in the neighborhood became unreasonable.

Back a Page (Da Squayah)

Such a Life Contents

Harvard 66-68: section start

Harvard 66-68: page index

Next Page (Ed.D)

Welcome

Stories

Sections

Such a Life

People

Places

Site Search

Do You Know?

Updated Aug 2014

[7Harv09.htm]

Page 36-016