“Be warned! Crank skanks wander here!” So wrote some wit — black ink on a white wall of the entryway to an apartment building with a missing front door upstate in Bath.
I’d recently watched an episode of the second season of “Breaking Bad” in which a meth addict crushes her druggie old man’s skull beneath a stolen A.T.M. because she takes exception to his nagging her with that most unbecoming of words, skank.
Thus it was on my mind, but thus it does not reflect the true nature of Bath, one of those ragged-glory burgs smack dab in the middle of the gift that keeps on giving, the Southern Tier.
It’s hard get a handle on the draw of these downtowns, and there are a lot of them — the limestone and red-brick Main Streets, the Queen Anne, Italianate, and Greek Revival beauties on the broad side streets, the way American history gamely hangs on in this corner of a country that is determined to wipe it out.
Some particulars: Two doors down from that doorless entryway was Stephanie’s Family Restaurant, a fine luncheonette that on Sunday saw a collection of gray heads fresh from church, which could cause you to ponder an aging local population, outnumbered only by a group of Steuben County cops in blue and state troopers in gray at three tables run together for a morning powwow, which might lead you to reflect on hierarchies, jurisdictions, and community relations.
A block and a half in the other direction rose the Old National Hotel, our base of operations for a weekend track meet and senior athlete recognition up in Geneseo. About “old”: This iteration of the hotel dates to 1915, managed and I would wager unchanged since 1982 by a sharp elderly gent and former Bath mayor and his wife.
They’re tired, however. They’re selling the place, which comes with an adjoining restaurant shuttered since the pandemic. If there’s an establishment more deserving of preservation, I haven’t seen it.
Now, with brown carpets redolent of cigarette smoke in the second-floor hallways, there are those who would say the place needs a serious upgrade. I would not be one of them. Not with the perfectly operational elevator, which the owner pointed out with pride, not with the phone booth with the bump-out curve of a seat and the light that still comes on when the door accordions shut, not with the 1983 Bally Budweiser Tapper video arcade game still standing tall by the bar’s street exit, a classic in which the player is a bartender fending off angry drinkers.
The Old National’s bar, naturally, is the heart of the matter. You can belly up to dark wood, take in the warm glow of illuminated liquor bottles, nod to the Stephen King character three stools down, and sip your Genesee.
After seven hours on the road? A can of cream ale never tasted so good.
