A menu from the Mayflower Coffee Shop, which features prominently in Frank O’Hara “Music,” written in 1953 and later published in Lunch Poems (1964):
If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the Mayflower Shoppe, that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf’s and I am naked as a table cloth, my nerves humming. Close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared. I have in my hands only 35c, it’s so meaningless to eat! and gusts of water spray over the basins of leaves like the hammers of a glass pianoforte. If I seem to you to have lavender lips under the leaves of the world, I must tighten my belt. It’s like a locomotive on the march, the season of distress and clarity and my door is open to the evenings of midwinter’s lightly falling snow over the newspapers. Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet of early afternoon! in the foggy autumn. As they’re putting up the Christmas trees on Park Avenue I shall see my daydreams walking by with dogs in blankets, put to some use before all those coloured lights come on! But no more fountains and no more rain, and the stores stay open terribly late.
The Mayflower was located at 777 Fifth Avenue, an address that no longer exists. It was close to what’s now the gleaming Apple Store Cube. The liver sausage and lettuce sandwich was exactly 35c.