I think maybe I was the only one who watched the TV show
Keen Eddie, which aired briefly on Fox in the summer of 2003. Keen Eddie was a fish-out-of-water cop show about titular New York policeman Eddie Arlette (played by
Mark Valley, currently starring in the TV comic book adaptation
Human Target), who has been assigned to work for a police precinct in London. The show also starred
Julian Rhind-Tutt (perhaps best known as Angelina Jolie's sidekick in the first Tomb Raider movie) as Eddie's uptight English partner,
Colin Salmon (of, among other things, three of the Pierce Brosnan-era Bond movies) as their no-nonsense superintendent, and
Sienna Miller as Eddie's will-they-or-won't-they landlady.
One of the show's plot devices was this: In the pilot, which told the story of how Eddie bungled a case and was sent to London to clean up his mess, we see a few scenes in Eddie's apartment. On his wall, we see a map of New York (referred to, and maybe also labeled, "Eddie's New York"), with matchbooks from various establishments tacked up at (presumably) their locations in the city. During the pilot, there's a fire in the apartment, and the matchbooks and lots of other things burn to ashes, perhaps symbolizing the destruction of Eddie's career in New York. Once he's posted to London, he starts a new map, adding a new matchbook each episode corresponding to an establishment that was related to the episode's plot. (This was a plot device, at least, for the five or six episodes that aired before Fox pulled the plug. I haven't yet bought the DVDs to see whether they kept it up for the whole season, but I assume so.)
Well, I thought, that looked really cool, and I decided to emulate it. I picked up a wall-sized map of Manhattan (where I lived at the time, since supplemented by a Brooklyn map), tacked it up on my wall, and started taking matchbooks at restaurants and adding them to the map. (Over the past few years, due to the much-appreciated smoking ban, some restaurants have offered cards rather than matchbooks, but those work just as well, although they're sometimes larger.) Here's what the map looks like this evening, November 2, 2010, as I'm writing this:
Writing out a full list would be a tedious process and would just result in boring you, so I'll just include some of the highlights:
Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, from the Harlem location of the Upstate NY institution:
Vintage New York Wine Bar (which sadly closed a couple of years ago), a wine bar/restaurant focusing on New York State-produced wines; they stood out by offering, instead of matchbooks or cards, a cork imprinted with their business information:
Delhi Brasserie, an Indian restaurant in Southwest London that I visited during my first trip over there back in the summer of 2006, shown at the eastern edge of Long Island because if I were to locate it precisely to scale it'd probably have to be two buildings over:
Florent, a Meatpacking District institution since the mid-'80s that closed a couple of years ago after being priced out by the blandification of the neighborhood:
I'll add new entries here for new matchbooks as I add them to the map, and perhaps also add pictures for some older ones if I'm stuck for things to write about here.
