Every morning, Willie Degel, the proprietor of Uncle Jack’s Steakhouse, on West Fifty-sixth Street, less than an avenue away from Trump Tower, has a blunt conversation with his mirror. A couple of days before Christmas, he sat with a visitor at a slightly wobbly table upstairs at Uncle Jack’s and described his routine. “I look at myself and I say, ‘I’m the man,’ ” said Degel, a round-faced, crewcut fellow in his late forties, with a sturdy build that was testing the seams of his three-piece suit. “I say, ‘Who’s the man? I’m the fucking man. Today, I’m going to work, I’m taking on this world, I’m making it the way I want it to be.’ And I’m uplifted, I’m inspired. You gotta say it three times. The third time, you gotta really be looking yourself dead in your eyes and tell yourself who you are and what your mission is.”
That particular day, Degel had told himself that his mission was to get vehicular traffic moving on his block, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. For more than six weeks—ever since the Presidential-election result had imposed gridlock on the neighborhood—barricades at both ends had been business killers. Volume at Uncle Jack’s was down more than twenty per cent, and that was an improvement over the first two weeks. “Completely shut down,” Degel recalled. “Pedestrian traffic, commercial traffic, cars, everything. It was, like, ‘Red alert!’ The city wasn’t prepared for it. You mention Fifty-sixth Street, people were like, ‘Ohmigod, you must be dead. Are you going out of business?’ ” Now, at least, the police were allowing selective breaching of the Sixth Avenue barricade: venders could make deliveries and garbage was being picked up, but to get out you had to make a U-turn.
None of this had diminished Degel’s esteem for a certain President-elect. “Trump’s been here,” he said. “He orders steak. He loves the New York strip steak. I just renamed it the Trump Strip. It makes me laugh when people, to ridicule him, talk about how his father maybe left him a few million dollars. And you turn it into five hundred or seven hundred million? You know how hard it is to make money? He’s not an idiot. He’s a smart man, he’s a businessman, he’s a developer. I’m pro-Trump.”
Degel, who grew up in Flushing and owns six restaurants, including the original Uncle Jack’s, in Bayside, declined to identify his party affiliation. “I don’t call myself anything,” he said. “I’m an entrepreneur. I make my own decisions. I’m a smart guy in the sense that I’m not highly educated, but I break things down and simplify. I’m a really good problem solver.”
Another parallel: As he made plain in an interview several years ago, he’s not inclined to curl up with, say, “Mrs. Dalloway.” (“I don’t read books. I read people.”) Also, like POTUS 45, he’s been the star of a reality-television show—“Restaurant Stakeout”—in which he untactfully told people how they were doing their jobs wrong. It’s pure coincidence, probably, that in the early nineties, when Trump was stiffing his bankers for hundreds of millions, Degel did six months in federal prison for conspiracy to commit credit-card fraud.
Though all evidence pointed to the Secret Service and the N.Y.P.D., Degel preferred to blame Bill de Blasio for the street closing. “I want the Mayor to do a better job,” he said. “I paid for this location, I pay taxes, I pay rent. We reached out to the Mayor. We invited him to a breakfast. Nobody’s knocked on this door once.”
What if the situation persisted?
“Let’s make this whole block into a café-type block. You don’t want car traffic? No problem. But let’s put tables and picnic things, and put little coffee trucks and make it really cool. And make this the best destination to walk to and go eat and drink. It’s, like, Vegas does it, but it’s in a mall. So let’s do it right here.”
Three days into the new year, the Sixth Avenue barricade had been removed and cars were moving, sort of; the block between Fifth and Madison remained closed. A reporter’s request for an explanation from Secret Service personnel inside Trump Tower proved as fruitful as a visit to the Tomb of the Unknown Complainer. Degel, meanwhile, had a new headache.
“The week after New Year’s, you become a ghost town anyway,” he said. “Everybody’s got resolutions and is going to the gym. Supposedly, there was a rift between the Mayor and the Secret Service. I don’t really know what went down. The Mayor was grandstanding—this was what people were saying. What people? You know, just people in general. I don’t know. No one tells you what’s going on. It was just politics. Everything’s politics.” ♦