Category — Mickie Cathers

With the official arrival of May Day, the crossroads of Spring and Summer, locals flock out to enjoy Sutter’s Hill. Located between two abandoned railway lines—reminders of the city’s competing railroad companies consolidated out of existence long ago—Sutter’s Hill is a steep man-made mount overlooking the beautiful vista of a small man-made “lake” (though, a more accurate term would be pond), a field of soft grass, and a lone pear tree that bears no fruit.

The history of Sutter’s Hill began in the early 1920s, when aluminum heiress Honey Sutter commissioned one of the country’s first multi-story underground homes. Decked out in the finest appointments on the inside, the exterior was hidden by a truck-fleet’s worth of soil, halfway up to the fifth floor. When, in her characteristically impulsive manner, she decided to abandon the city in 1943 to join an air circus, she left the house to the municipality, lock, stock and barrel.

In a rare episode of foresight, then-Mayor Dalton Worth elected to turn the whole thing into a park. To this day, the bottom four floors are closed and sealed, completely buried under what has ever since been called Sutter’s Hill. In the winter, it serves as one of the city’s best (and steepest) sledding/snowboarding hills, in warmer times as a wonderful lookout spot and place for romantic encounters.

The fifth floor of the house is kept in pristine condition by the collaborative efforts of the Preservation Society and the Historical Property Rights Commission. There are eight rooms in all, some furnished with teak four-poster beds or replica antique vases and faux-cubist paintings. The pseudo-museum also includes a small cafeteria and bakery, in the former upper ballroom and two guest bedrooms.

If you are not too sensitive, your feelings not too tender, the cafe’s sharp-tongued and all-business cooks offer fine delights, including the standard fare of cakes, cookies, kugel and one of the best rice puddings in the country, as declared by Rachel Ray on her traveling food program, $40 a Day (The pudding is $1.50/slab, and rated by the host as “Mmmmph, oh gawd!”).

An oil painting of Ms. Sutter (tragically killed in an airplane crash in 1943) hangs behind the cash register in the cafe. Honey gazes lovingly at the viewer in nothing but a white shirt, her shoulders bathed in her golden curls.
Sutter’s Hill Cafe hours: Mon-Sat 8-6, Sun 10-4
- M. Cathers

This city is full of people that you see just about every day, but about whom you know nothing.

:: Ms. Tina, the city’s favorite transvestite and headliner at Ed and Ellen’s Bar, on York Avenue. She is a common sight for sore eyes walking her caramel-colored Pomeranian and is never met, no matter the weather, without her pink patent leather pumps.

:: Jessica “Winter” Walters, sure to be found no matter the time nor day, sketching the factories around Baxter Park and selling tourists her signature “City Spirit” paintings. A friend of ours has even seen one of Winter’s warehouse studies- complete with her trademark city skyline background and ghost of fallen factory worker with an empty word bubble- hanging on the wall of a bookstore to the east of Central Station in Amsterdam.

:: Watch out for Zim, the puckish, midnight-clothed skateboarder working on going pro, as he skates inside the General Tallmer Memorial Fountain in winter, or plays his harmonica and homemade drum set of pots, pans, garbage cans, and paint buckets in summer. We have a feeling young Zim is really going to make it in the X-treme world, judging by his dedication and competitive fire.

:: “Mumbly Joe” Kestak, once a walk-on safety for the local professional football franchise, is now one of the city’s homeless vagabonds, often found walking around the city with his companion Bootsy, a large yellow boa constrictor. Mumbly Joe is a friendly fellow who, for a quarter, will let children pet Bootsy and for a dollar, will turn his radio down for five minutes.

:: Mr. and Mrs. Randall St. James, though physically two people, count as one here and you’ll know why the moment you meet them. This old couple, in love and happily married for 57 years, are never seen without their elbows hooked together, more often than not, on their favorite bench, sharing a bagel and lox washed down with heavily sugared coffee Sunday mornings. They’ll freely lecture you on your choice of clothing or the ways in which society has strayed from the straight and narrow, but if you’re lucky, they’ll invite you to sit with them and hear, again, the story of how they met in that dance hall so long ago. And then they will tell you again. And then again.
- M. Cathers