Pipe From Keens Steakhouse Is Claimed, and Smoked, Decades After Storage

(NYTimes) IN 1976, my membership certificate for Keen’s English Chop House’s Pipe Club arrived in my parents’ mailbox, a gift from my godfather, James Elkins McIlvain. I hadn’t yet turned 2. I never did ask Uncle Jim whether the gesture was a hope that I, too, would one day puff away at his favorite hangout, or if he merely giggled at the image of an infant inhaling from such an instrument — it looked as if it should be filled with opium rather than aged tobacco — like some sort of diaper-clad burgher. Starting in 1885, when Albert Keen opened his restaurant and saloon, now known as Keens Steakhouse, the destination has provided post-dinner pipes to the likes of Babe Ruth, Theodore Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill Cody. Keen, who managed the acting and literary society called the Lamb’s Club, on West 36th Street, in what was then the theater district, opened up his self-named restaurant next door. Continued