The New York Game Rooms

1960s Hustlers Refine the Game

Alfred Butts, an unemployed architect, developed Scrabble while living in Jackson Heights, New York, in the 1930s, but it wasn't marketed under its present name, board configuration, and tile distribution until 1948. The game sold with little fanfare and in small numbers for close to five years. Then, in 1953, Scrabble exploded into the public consciousness as sales went through the roof. It isn't totally clear why. Some say it was due to its sale through Macy's department store in New York and the associated publicity that this engendered. Others felt the boom resulted from the steady, but limited, sales of the game producing a critical mass of players. Whatever the reasons, it remained just a game for the next fifteen years. It wasn't until the 1960s that the modern strategy and tactics of serious Scrabble slowly emerged.

When Selchow & Righter (S&R) instituted organizedScrabble with clubs and tournaments in the early 1970s, even though there were good players in San Francisco, Chicago, and Toronto, it was generally recognized that the top tile pushers were in New York City. There was a reason for that. They developed in the public game rooms, places like the Fleahouse and the Chess House in the 1960s, and Chess City, the Game Room, and to a lesser extent the Bar Point Club and the Olive Tree, a Greenwich Village coffee house, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was a phenomenon unique to New York.

The New York game rooms were places where the public could play chess, checkers, backgammon, poker, gin rummy, and sometimes bridge, depending on the time and place. The equipment was rented and the players paid by the hour, says Les Schonbrun, of Oakland, California, who cut his Scrabble teeth at the Fleahouse in the mid 1960s and is the only competitor from that era still active in tournament play. Located on 42nd Street near Broadway, the Fleahouse, also known as the New York Chess and Checkers Club, was where serious Scrabble, not unlike what exists at the tournament level today, was born. A few men, and fewer women, gathered to match wits for a penny or two a point and refine the rules of what for most Americans was a family game.

Except for the nights when Fran Goldfarb played, there wasn't much to look at at the Fleahouse, according to Jeff Kastner, an Arizona marketing executive, who began playing there in 1969. The Fleahouse was owned by John Fursa, a gruff and scruffy looking fellow, who usually locked the doors after midnight and wouldn't let you in unless he knew you, says Schonbrun. And for good reason. The area was also home to numerous porn theaters, sex shops, and various unsavory characters.

You had to walk up a long set of creaky stairs, says Kastner. The place always smelled. "It's hard to describe, but somewhere between a men's locker room and a cheap bar," he says. It was not uncommon for the occasional derelict to wander in. "The tables, chairs, and walls had the look of a rundown school cafeteria," says Kastner, but there were large windows that offered a view of 42nd Street, such as it was. The chess, checkers, backgammon, and Scrabble sets were old and in need of replacement. Fist fights and cursing in various languages were acceptable behavior. "The bathrooms stank of urine and semen," says Kastner. "Need I say more?" Schonbrun remembers it was mostly frequented by hustlers and Eastern European emigrés. Two or three players were explosively violent and you had to be careful around them, he says. "There was a guy named Sal, with a Neanderthal jaw and brow, who was brutishly strong, not a bad chess and Scrabble player, but who shook people down when he was low on funds."

Charles Goldstein, who now lives in Berkeley, California, has similar recollections. Goldstein first went there to play chess when he was still a high school student in the 1960s. Later, while at Brooklyn College, he would drop in to play Scrabble. He didn't play the top people, who he remembers as "old guys who were not very friendly and smoked a lot," although Richie Gilston, an editor at Funk & Wagnalls, did clobber him once. His most vivid memory, though, is of literally being clobbered. "I beat this guy pretty badly," says Goldstein, who would go on to finish fifth in the 1978 North American Invitational, "so he flipped over the board and then punched me in the eye."

Still, this was the place where it started. Schonbrun first went to the Fleahouse with some physics graduate students who liked to play chess. It wasn't long before he discovered his gift for Scrabble. While he was recovering from his first marriage, a friend, Al Tesoro, was avoiding his physics dissertation. They got into sessions that lasted for days. "We didn't take breaks," says Schonbrun, "just had soup and sandwiches over the board, watched the day players come in and leave, come in and leave again."

People like Charlie Hendricks, Paul Brandts, Asa Hoffman, Shelby Lyman, and Richie Gilston played too. And, of course, there was Bernie Wishengrad, who would later win the New York City Championship twice, and Mike Senkiewicz, whomS&R would tap in 1972 to set up tournament Scrabble pretty much as it is today. They played with chess clocks (eighteen minutes for the score-keeper, fifteen for his opponent), the double challenge rule (gain a turn if you're right, lose one if you're wrong) and the Funk & Wagnalls College Dictionary.

They also played for money. Against one another it was mostly for practice, bragging rights, and to make things interesting, says Kastner. But when they "hustled fish," people from off the street, they gave handicaps such as money, time odds, free challenges, or spotted points (instead of starting from zero the opponent was given some arbitrary number of points, say 100, before the game began). The idea was to fleece the unsuspecting. Some of these guys were Runyonesque characters, according to Kastner. Hoffman was a chess master who could hustle almost any board or card game, including Scrabble. A good part of the time he slept on chairs in the backroom and spent his days at the track. "He was so notorious," says Kastner, "he was featured in the chess film Searching for Bobby Fischer."

Shelby Lyman was another chess whiz, who hosted the TVcoverage of the 1972 Fischer-Spassky World Championship. Bernie Wishengrad was a great handicapper who made his living at the track, while Richie Gilston was a writer/editor, who never had the nerves for tournament Scrabble but was a fine player in his own right. Brandts was also a chess master who often played Scrabble against Schonbrun and Mike Senkiewicz, considered the top two players in New York City. "I learned a lot from kibbitzing those sessions," says Kastner.

There were also a few women players, but they were scarce at the Fleahouse, where the price of admission was an obsession with the game and a willingness to negotiate the neighborhood. Kastner recalls Shazzi Felstein, who placed ninth at the 1978 North American Invitational, Fran Goldfarb, and a "Scrabble Rosie." The sleaziness was a big deterrent to women, says Schonbrun. "Everyone was smoking and sallow-faced," he says. "There was nothing to attract anyone who wasn't totally absorbed with chess, Scrabble, or bridge."

Kastner remembers his first visit to the Fleahouse well. He was a student at NYU at the time and captain of the chess team. It...