Old Original Bookbinder’s was founded as a tavern in 1893, gradually expanding into a 54,000-square-foot restaurant swallowing a good chunk of Walnut Street. But it was produce merchant John M. Taxin who turned Bookbinder’s into a mecca for both the city’s elite and for gossip-column-worthy visitors, attracting a glittering roster that over the years included Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Gregory Peck and John F. Kennedy. Taxin, and later his son, Albert, became the city’s Toots Shors, table-hopping nightly to bestow compliments, bawdy jokes, brushed-cheek kisses and the occasional gratis martini. The Taxins’ Bookbinder’s gave Philly a cosmopolitan cachet it was desperately missing, and set the table for the special-treatment luxe dining establishments that Stephen Starr and his ilk would usher in more than 50 years later.