the old Metropole

The old Metropole is a New York restaurant that appears only in conversation, yet it carries the weight of a vanished world of gangland violence and sentimental memory. Meyer Wolfsheim, the gambler who fixed the 1919 World Series, invokes it during a lunch with Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby at a Forty-second Street cellar restaurant. When Nick asks what place Wolfsheim is referring to, Wolfsheim answers with a single, brooding word: "The old Metropole." The name triggers a reverie that reveals the emotional core of a man who otherwise presents himself as a shrewd, unsentimental operator.

Wolfsheim's Memory of the Rosenthal Murder

Wolfsheim describes the old Metropole as "filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever." He then recounts the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. According to Wolfsheim, six of them were at a table, and Rosenthal had eaten and drunk heavily all evening. Near dawn, a waiter approached with a strange look and said someone wanted to speak to him outside. Rosenthal agreed to go, but Wolfsheim pulled him back down into his chair, urging him to make the bastards come inside if they wanted him. Rosenthal went anyway, turning at the door only to say, "Don't let that waiter take away my coffee!" He walked onto the sidewalk, where he was shot three times in the belly; the killers drove away. Nick remembers that four of the shooters were electrocuted, and Wolfsheim corrects him: "Five, with Becker." The story is told with a mixture of gloom and proprietary pride, as if the old Metropole were a sacred site whose martyrs only he can properly commemorate.

The Restaurant as a Symbol of the Underworld

The old Metropole stands in contrast to the restaurant where the lunch takes place. Wolfsheim looks up at the Presbyterian nymphs painted on the ceiling and admits, "I like across the street better!" When Gatsby says it is too hot there, Wolfsheim concedes, "Hot and small—yes, but full of memories." The juxtaposition establishes the old Metropole as a place of authentic, if criminal, history, against the sterile decor of the newer establishment. Wolfsheim's sentimental attachment to the site reveals that for him, the gangster world is not merely a business but a community bound by shared violence and loss. His refusal to attend Gatsby's funeral later—"When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way"—is the inverse of this sentiment: he will memorialize the dead of his own era but will not risk entanglement in a new killing.

Narrative Function and Thematic Resonance

The old Metropole episode serves as Nick Carraway's first direct encounter with the violent underworld that shadows Gatsby's glamour. Until Wolfsheim's story, Nick had thought of the fixed World Series as something that "merely happened," the end of an inevitable chain. The old Metropole gives that abstraction a concrete, bloody location and a narrator who speaks of it with the reverence of a veteran. The restaurant also prefigures the novel's own pattern of violent death—Myrtle Wilson run down by Gatsby's car, Gatsby shot in his swimming pool—and the way those deaths will be remembered, or forgotten, by those who survive. Wolfsheim's elegy for the old Metropole is a minor key version of Nick's final meditation on Gatsby's dream: both are elegies for worlds that have passed, but Wolfsheim's is a world of gangsters and gamblers, while Nick's is a world of wonder and hope.