Well, we’ve dropped the manuscript for our Cambridge Companion to the Literatures of New York City — the size of a ream of paper — in the mail to our editor. [Insert huge sigh of relief.] We were only a couple weeks late, and that owing to a few slow permissions and illustration requests. We’re happy to say how very pleased we are with the volume, which should be out early next year.
Here’s what the final table of contents looks like; it differs in minor details from the earlier one, and we’ve added one contributor since then:
Cyrus R. K. PatellINTRODUCTION
1Robert Lawson-PeeblesFROM
BRITISH OUTPOST TO AMERICAN METROPOLIS
2Elizabeth L. BradleyINVENTED ANCESTORS: DUTCH NEW YORK FROM IRVING
TO WHARTON
3Bryan WatermanTHE
CITY ON STAGE
4Thomas AugstMELVILLE,
AT SEA IN THE CITY
5Lytle ShawWHITMAN’S
URBANISM
6Caleb CrainHIGH
LIFE, WITH A GLANCE AT THE LOW: THE EARLY LITERATURE OF NEW YORK’S MONEYED
CLASS
7Martha NadellWRITING BROOKLYN
8Sarah Wilson
“BEAUFORT’S BASTARDS”: NEW YORK NOVELS OF MANNERS
9Eric Homberger CITY
OF IMMIGRANTS:
POLITICS AND THE POPULAR CULTURES OF TOLERANCE
10Melissa BradshawPERFORMING GREENWICH VILLAGE BOHEMIANISM
11Thulani
DavisBLACK MECCA TO BLACK FIRE:
AFRICAN AMERICAN MOVEMENTS
12Trysh TravisNEW
YORK’S CULTURES OF PRINT
13Daniel KaneFROM
POETRY TO PUNK IN THE EAST VILLAGE
14Robin BernsteinSTAGING
LESBIAN AND GAY NEW YORK
15Cyrus R. K. PatellEMERGENT
ETHNIC LITERATURES
Bryan WatermanEPILOGUE:
“THE MAGIC OF THIS BROKEN WORLD”: NOSTALGIA AND COUNTER-NOSTALGIA IN NEW YORK CITY WRITING
Over the last few months I’ve been reading, a few chapters at a time with a group of students, Timothy Gilfoyle’s A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York. The book uses the life–and a rude manuscript autobiography–of a famous nineteenth-century career criminal, George Appo, as a window onto crime and punishment in the nineteenth-century metropolis.
Though I’m finding many aspects of the book fascinating–its detailed discussions of routine torture for prisoners at Sing-Sing and overcrowding on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island); its discussion of Appo’s mixed Chinese and Irish heritage (his Chinese father was well-known, first as a model minority and then as a murderer); its anatomy of underworld cons and categories of persons (especially the importance of being a “good fellow”)–I’m a little let down overall that the book spends so much time making Appo representative of a larger class of criminals and leaves a lot to be said about his celebrity status, or what made him extraordinary.
Still, lots of enticing details that make me look at my neighborhood in new ways. I’ve often thought of the old crime-ridden Mulberry Bend and the Five Points or Bartleby in the Tombs when I bike my daughter to school through Chinatown each morning, but today I caught myself looking out for number 4 Mott Street, which is where one of Appo’s favorite opium dens was located. (Today it’s a large glass Citibank building just off Chatham Square numbered 2-4 Mott.) Gilfoyle writes:
The den at 4 Mott Street was one of the best known, but not the first opium den in New York City, as Appo believed. More accurately, it was the first well-known opium joint that allowed Euro-American visitors to indulge in opium smoking. In 1882, an Evening Post reporter described a visit to 4 Mott Street as “an extraordinary experience.” The den was situated in a four-story tenement just off the Bowery, only a few steps from several prominent concert saloons. Inside, smokers reclined on low platforms extending the length of the small, dimly lit room, their heads supported by small wooden stools. The Chinese proprietor, Poppy, weighed and served opium in little seashells. Fumes from the pipes filled the room with such a thick, bluish cloud that one visitor claimed it was impossible to see his hands held at his waist. When the smoke cleared, he observed a dozen small peanut-oil lamps glowing “like the fire flies in a fog,” and a room packed with smokers, all of whom were Euro-Americans. Poppy busily moved from patron to patron supplying opium, many crying out, “Poppy, gimme a quarter’s worth.”
Who were these Euro-American opium smokers? The habit wasn’t cheap. Appo could afford it because his crime paid fairly well (when we wasn’t locked up). Plus he had an in with some big-shot Chinese gangsters. Appo writes of the scene in his manuscript life story: “Mott Street was being deserted by the good American people on account of the Chinese tenants drifting into the neighborhood rapidly.” (Appo never identified as Chinese himself, apparently.) “With the Chinamen came many American opium habitues from the West, most of them from San Francisco, and all crooks in every line of stealing brought on to the East by the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia. … [Poppy's] was crowded day and night by opium habitues from all stations in life, both men and women, some of good social and financial standing. Most of the rest were crooks in every line of dishonest business, from the bank burglar down to the petty thief.” Slummers and the criminal poor, smoking up in cosmopolitan fellowship. Simpler times.
If the days of cross-class opium dens are safely behind for most New Yorkers, some monuments of Appo’s world remain: One of the most interesting details in the book, I thought, was Gilfoyle’s note that “Convict labor” (provided by Sing-Sing’s “quarry slaves”) helped to “transform New York City into a ‘vast expanse of marble palaces,’” including Federal Hall on Wall Street (built as a Customs House in the 1830s) and Grace Church at Broadway and 10th. The idea of the stones for those buildings being hewn by captive labor reminds me of a comment from Marshall Berman’s introduction to New York Calling: he recalls something his father used to say when he was a kid admiring the city’s grand structures: “And don’t forget who built this.” When Marshall would ask “Who?” his dad would respond: “People we never heard of, who worked themselves to death.”
I wrote a while back about attempts in the 1820s to gentrify the Bowery. More recently, a couple blogs I follow have charted current efforts to remake the street’s image as a luxury shopping district with a little bit of urban edge. (That shitty Hamptons store “Blue & Cream” in the shitty Avalon building even went as far as tagging their own store with “graffiti” directing passers-by to their recession sales inside.) Most recently we’ve seen attempts to move away from the idea of “the” Bowery toward a “Bowery district” (spreading the faux-seedy influence and reputation?) or slips from newcomers calling it “Bowery Street” (as if to contain its once-unruly energy and long reputation as the dark twin to Broadway?).
EV Grieve directs us to another NY history blog, Inside the Apple, which has this to say about previous attempts to rename the Bowery:
The most famous Dutch bouwerij
was owned by Peter Stuyvesant, who lies buried in the churchyard of St. Mark’s in the Bowery on 10th Street and Second Avenue. For years, this church was known as St. Mark’s in the Bouwerie, its archaic spelling not only hearkened back to the days of the Dutch, but also helped distinguished it from the nearby thoroughfare. By the
late 19th century, the Bowery had become synonymous with skid row.
A lot of the Bowery’s reputation was deserved, but at least part of the blame for its near-universal name recognition was the musical A Trip to Chinatown, which featured the song “The Bowery.” Its chorus boasts:
The Bow’ry, the Bow’ry They say such things and they do strange things, On the Bow’ry! The Bow’ry! I’ll never go there any more.
By 1916, the street’s reputation had gotten so bad that civic groups
battled to come up with a new name for the thoroughfare. One suggestion
was “Cooper Avenue” in honor of Cooper Union founder (and Jell-O
pioneer) Peter Cooper. A rival proposition recommended “Central Broadway.” It’s hard to imagine the chaos this name change might have brought about in a city that
already featured Broadway, West Broadway, and East Broadway.
Neither of these suggestions had any real traction, perhaps because there was still nostalgia for the old Bouwerie of Peter Stuyvesant. Indeed, that nostalgia was so strong that in 1956 a group of merchants suggested that Third Avenue be renamed “The Bouwerie,” to invoke the charm and refinement of a bygone age. (That this would have given the city a Bowery and a Bouwerie a block apart seems not to have figured into their calculations.) Plans were underway at the time to remove the last vestiges of the Third Avenue “El,” and it seemed logical to local boosters to get rid of the name Third Avenue–which they saw as intimately connected to the failure of the “El”–and replace it with Bouwerie, which would increase the street’s cachet and, presumably, retail rents.
While preparing for this morning’s lecture on Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (1868), I noticed for the first time just how much the novel hates on the Bowery. In its opening sequence the otherwise industrious street urchin Dick realizes he’s overslept and probably missed a few shines because he’d spent the prior evening at the Old Bowery theater. Even though the theater is one of the spots that keeps Dick in town, the novel remains pretty equivocal about the entertainment provided there: clearly Dick enjoys it, but later in the novel he reforms and promises not to waste his money there in the future. The book’s less equivocal about Bowery fashions: one pair of pants is frowned on by the narrator as “very loose in the legs, and presenting a cheap Bowery look.”
And Dick is fine with this dis. He’s more than happy to scrub up for an imagined life as a clerk (no Bartleby is Dick!) and he continually fantasizes about having a “manshun” on the “Avenoo.” At the novel’s close, he and his pal Fosdick resolve to leave their little pad on Mott Street and move to “a nicer quarter of the city.”
If Alger were still writing today (or if some team of underpaid ghost writers continued to churn out sequels the way someone keeps turning out new titles in the Boxcar Children series) I’m sure we’d see Ragged Dick — ragged no longer — ready to move back down to the Bowery now that the Whole Foods had arrived. Slumming’s the new Old New York luxury craze, after all!
(h/t to Grieve for the last illustration, as well as a bunch of the links above; topmost image: Reginald Marsh, “The Bowery,” 1928)
We’ve been thinking about entertainment cultures in the 19c city lately. I mentioned in lecture last week what a significant role P. T. Barnum played in popularizing the theater among middle-class families by staging “moral” plays such as dramatic adaptations of H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, even earlier, extraordinarily popular temperance (anti-alcohol) plays such as W. H. Smith’s The Drunkard — which often featured an actual reformed drunk in the lead role, adding to the realism of the famous delirium tremens scene (when the drunk falls into a delusional fit on stage).
The Drunkard was, like Royall Tyler’s The Contrast before it, a Boston
play with a New York
setting. The New York
scenes contrast rural simplicity and come only when the protagonist, Edward Middleton, is at the
lowest point of his alcoholism. The city is a symbol of vice, a lack of
self-control. The municipal government’s inability to govern its inhabitants
(particularly in the notorious Five Points slum) mirrored the individual lack
of self-control that could lead to alcoholism, or “dipsomania,” at it was termed
then. The play was orignally staged in a museum in Boston; museums in the
nineteenth-century were a mixture of pop science and sheer sensationalism. They
might offer natural history specimens, but they could just as easily offer
freakish “curiosities” with spurious claims to authenticity. They also offered
popular readings, or “lectures”–sometimes even scenes from Shakespeare’s
plays–to audiences that perhaps would not attend the theater.
The Drunkard aimed both for those morally high-minded
audiences and for folks who were attracted to freakish displays. The
combination must have worked: It played for an unprecedented 101 nights in Boston in 1844.
Following its extraordinary success in Boston, Barnum, the owner of New
York‘s famous American Museum, decided to expand
his own “lecture room” not once, but twice, eventually accommodating 3,000
people. These renovations were undertaken largely to accommodate The Drunkard‘s
extraordinary success. He hadn’t taken such steps before because his museum
neighbored the Park Theatre (on Park Row, just across the street from the southern tip of City Hall Park). But once the Park burned down (again) in 1849 and wasn’t rebuilt,
Barnum decided to venture into the theatrical business.
Barnum wasn’t
the inventor of the museum by any means, but he transformed the institution in significant
ways and became one of the most successful and famous showmen in America as a
result. In the early 1840s he bought an already existing museum and the stock
of another and launched his own enterprise. Older museums had attempted to
combine education, moral uplift, and amusement in order to refine their
audiences and, of course, to make money. Barnum understood better than earlier
museum owners that above all the public wanted novelty. He brought in trained
dogs, performing fleas, jugglers, ventriloquists, fat people, giants, dwarfs,
wax figures, scale models of the wonders of the world, Indians, and even the
“Feejee Mermaid.” Barnum also understood the
power of print: his advertisements literally papered the town; his illustrated museum guide a bestseller; and he
pioneered the celebrity autobiography.
Barnum also opened special hours for black patrons, which means two
things: his audiences were still carefully managed in important ways (in this case, segregated by race), but he also recognized blacks as a potential paying audience.
Reform melodramas were the primary theatrical genre
on stage at museums like Barnum’s. This made their spaces safe for some
Protestants who would not attend the more established theaters. These plays
drew on sentimental and gothic elements in a way that bridged the gap between
traditional theater and the freak shows on display in museums. In this way you
can think of the delirium tremens scene in The Drunkard–reportedly one of its biggest draws–as something like a freak show. People
would pay good money to see someone insane with liquor, just like they would
pay to see the Quaker Giantess. One of the motivations would have been to make
themselves feel normal.
Reform
plays had been popular at least since the 18th century, but became much more
common with the explosion of reform movements and the rise of melodrama in the nineteenth century.
William Dunlap, the original manager at the Park, had a play called Thirty Years, or The Gambler’s Fate.
Another such play had the enticing title, Wine, Women, Gambling, Theft,
Murder, and the Scaffold. Just in case you got hooked by the first part of
the title, it wanted to let you know where that would lead you. A number of
other temperance plays were produced in The Drunkard‘s wake. These include The
Bottle, Another Glass, Life, or Scenes of Early Vice, The Curate’s Daughter,
Aunt Dinah’s Pledge, The Drunkard’s Warning, The fruits of the wine cup, and Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, an adaptation of the era’s most famous
temperance novel.
Following a fire in the mid-1860s, Barnum gave up his
famous museum enterprise and turned his energies to the traveling circus–a form
that still bears his name. But he’s important to us not only because he stands,
in New York and American history, at the crossroads between popular
entertainment and dramatic literature, but because he illustrates a conception
of celebrity he shared with the stars of the stage: As one theater critic of
the day put it, “Barnum himself is one of the curiosities [on display in his
museum] and we scarcely know which people would go further to see–Barnum, the
sea serpent, or a real mermaid.”
Today in our Writing New York class, we’re talking about Melville’s great short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). Its subtitle is “A Tale of Wall Street,” and we take that subtitle seriously. In fact, we emphasize the fact that Herman Melville, born in New York City in 1819, is a writer who embodies the tension between New York and New England, with ties to Boston on his father’s Melvill side and ties to the patrons of Dutch New York on his mother’s Gansevoort side. [The family surname was in fact "Melvill"; Herman's mother added the extra "E" after her husband's death.]
If we recontextualize Melville as a New York writer (rather than a part of the New England story so often told in American Literature I classes), then “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street” takes on a new importance in Melville’s career. As Dennis Berthold and Barbara Foley have shown, we have read the story ahistorically for too long. Although its richness as a text is evident in its ability to support intricate psychoanalytic and deconstructive readings, a New York focus asks us to historicize the text, to read it, first, as a tale of New York’s Wall Street culture and, second, as a response to the infamous Astor Place Riots, which took place just blocks from Melville’s home on Fourth Avenue and to which he was connected by virtue of his signature on a petition that catalyzed the riots.
Riot at the Astor-Place Opera-House, New York. Wood engraving, 1849. Shelfmark File N567.7 no.2. Folger Shakespeare Library.
To provide an additional bit of context, we ask the students to read the “Loomings” chapter with which Ishmael begins his narratve in Moby-Dick. Although it makes a nice story to see Melville’s meeting with Hawthorne as the spark that lit the flame of genius within Moby-Dick, it is useful also to remember that the novel’s opening chapter is set in Manhattan. Why begin there, unless to suggest that there is something crucial about the city’s cosmopolitanism for an understanding of Ishmael’s experience at sea?
Emphasizing the subtitle has an additional benefit: it gives us license (in thinking about how “Wall Street” came to symbolize what it does today) to show Michael Douglas’s wonderful “greed is good speech” from Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street (1987):
How sad that the critique of Wall Street dramatized by Stone’s film is even more trenchant today, twenty-two years later.
In my seminar on New York and modernism last fall, we used New York Modern: The Arts and the City by William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff as our point of departure. In their introduction, Scott and Rutkoff make a distinction between the terms modern and modernism:
We use the term modern to denote the broad range of art produced by artists who defined themselves as modern. We use modernism, or modernist, in reference to the much narrower, but still broad, rangeof European art that consciously rejected realism and historicism. European “modernists” insisted that art should not be mimetic, should not correspond to sensory experience, but rather should express artists’ inner consciousness, their subjective perception of sensory experience.
The argument of their book is that New York modern is a continuing style that predates and outlasts formalistic modernism and grows out of the realism of Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, and Thomas Eakins.
Scott and Rutkoff argue that the Museum of Modern Art adopted “an essentialized definition of modern art” based on the formalistic modernism of “nonmimetic European or European-inspired art.” In contrast, the original Whitney Museum in the Village adopted a collecting style that reflected the openness of “New York Modern.”
We spent one of our classes at the Whitney Museum, now on Madison Avenue, and I asked the students to find and discuss two works, one that seemed to them to embody “New York Modern,” the other “modernism.”
Today, I present two responses to a work identified with New York Modern, Paul Cadmus’s 1938 painting, Sailors and Floozies.
Paul Cadmus was 94 at the time of his death. A native New Yorker, he was discovered in the depression era when he was commissioned to paint for the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), for which he completed his first piece The Fleet’s In! in 1934. He painted in a style that is referred to as magic realism.
The painting Sailors and Floozies is a picture that depicts sailors in Riverside Park, near a monument called the sailors and soldiers memorial. Three sailors are meeting their lovers (the floozies) and there is garbage and litter all around them. Interestingly, Cadmus paints the frame with graffiti as well, so that the artwork extends out of the picture onto the actual frame.
According to New York Modern: The Arts and the City by William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff the painters that had their art on exhibition in the Whitney “offered sober, critical, and satirical images of contemporary life.” What Cadmus achieved with his painting was very “modern” because he displayed something that many people might not even have thought of as art, and he painted it in an interesting way. The painting was very controversial; many critics thought that it was “tawdry, repulsive, and unpatriotic” because it depicted drunk sailors during the dawn of the Second World War. This wasn’t Cadmus’s intention though; his image is more about homoeroticism than patriotism.
– Akeelya McKenzie
Paul Cadmus was a Manhattan-based painter who was one of a group of artists favored by the Whitney Museum due to their proximity to the Village and past study in the Arts Students League. Cadmus’s subject matter was often erotic and socially critical, or at least socially provocative. For instance, Sailors and Floozies, an oil and tempera rendition of one Marine and two Navy sailors on leave with their female companions brought about so many objections when first put on display, it was into the lives of removed from the Golden Gate International Exhibition in San Francisco in 1940. However, it eventually became part of the permanent Whitney collection, alongside many other works that were not considered to be acceptable examples of modern art.
The Whitney’s acceptance of all styles of modern American art allow it to have a much broader range of works with a much more eclectic offering. Sailors and Floozies doesn’t follow exact standards of other modernist formats, but displays Cadmus’s vivid and expressive “magic realist” style, as it is often called. Cadmus’s pieces of this style have also been called cartoons due to their somewhat exaggerated and “caricaturistic” appearance.
Unlike the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum welcomed undefined styles and the relatively unknown artists who heralded them, such as Paul Cadmus and his magic realism. Whereas MoMA aimed to leave out politics and society from the works in its collection, art such as Sailors and Floozies at the Whitney aimed to provide a window Americans across the country.
– Ian Rahman
Akeelya McKenzie and Ian Rahman are both first-year students at New York University.
Nothing throws a neighborhood into relief like death, and nothing organizes a neighborhood like a good bar, preferably one that can sort the locals from the tourists or barhoppers.
Reading others’ meditations on the death of Holiday Cocktail Lounge’s owner, Stefan Lutak — along with ruminations on the passing of Joe Ades, the peeler man, who’d sold his wares at the northwest corner of the Union Square farmer’s market as long as I’ve been shopping there — reminds me of the death of a good friend and patron saint of the old seaport, Don Taube, a couple summers ago. Don wasn’t the owner of our local bar but he was one of the regulars, even though he had given up drinking years before when he wife died. (The picture above was taken the night I gave a book reading at the Seaport Museum; it meant the world to me that Don made it out that night.)
Losing a neighborhood figure like that leaves a hole, but a productive one in which the loved one lives on and continues to shape lives; I can’t sit at the bar without thinking about Don and I know plenty of other people who can’t either. Most of us wouldn’t even need the brass plate we screwed to the rail with his name on it. I imagine the same will be the same for dozens of Holiday patrons — God willing the place survives its owner’s death.
The folks at the fabulous foundation City Lore, in their not-four-tourists guidebook Hidden New York, reprint a poem by the Brooklyn writer Robert Hershon:
The Driver Said boerum hill? it used to be gowanus this ain’t no neighborhood if ya butcher comes to ya funeral that’s a neighborhood
Not that many of us can still say we have a butcher, unfortunately, but lots of folks have a bartender, or a fellow who regularly occupies the stool next to you. These are the people who, no matter their demeanor, stitch lives together to make communities.
So here’s to all the Dons and Stefans and Peeler Men out there, living, dead, or living on in people’s memories and daily interactions.
According to the article, the pleasure garden — named after the famous London entertainment spot — was originally opened by Samuel Fraunces, proprietor of Fraunces Tavern, a version of which remains on lower Pearl Street in the financial district. His Vauxhall existed in present-day TriBeCa, at the intersection of Greenwich and Chambers, where my daughters’ old elementary school, P.S. 234, now stands. It later moved to Broome Street, between Broadway and Bowery (which is where I happen to live), and then relocated to Lafayette between 4th and 8th (pictured above in 1803), where it remained until 1859. Until the middle of the 1850s its facilities included an outdoor theater and restaurants. It would have been this location represented in Glance‘s final scene.
Several things strike me as interesting about the gardens’ final location. First, it would have been adjacent the Astor Place Opera House, scene of New York’s most infamous theater riots in 1849, only a year after Glance premiered. (The land the gardens were on also belonged to Astor.) Second, its location — with Broadway on one side and Bowery on the other — placed it smack in between the centers of upper-class fashion and working-class life. Vauxhall also would have separated the Bowery culture from the Olympic Theater, on Broadway (though a little lower, between Howard and Grand), where Glance opened. (See my prior post for a contemporary protest against the impact the play had on the theater’s audience makeup.)
According to the Wikipedia article, again citing Henderson and Caldwell, the gardens drew patrons from both elite and working-class neighborhoods until around 1850, when the Bowery folks won out for the park’s remaining decade. This would make Benjamin Baker’s choice of the spot for the conclusion of his play a rather interesting symbolic geography: a place where classes mingled, but one increasingly coming under working-class influence. And it does seem as if Mose and Lize are more at home at Vauxhall than are the play’s upper-class characters. Harry, one of the wealthier characters, acknowledges to his new girlfriend Jane that she has “condescen[ded]” to “honoring this place with [her] presence.” By contrast, Mose, with his “outré” manners, sits and delivers his famous order to the waiter: “Bring me a large plate of pork and beans. Say, a large piece of pork, and don’t stop to count de beans!”
Bonus: check out the Bowery Boys’ podcast on the “original bowery b’hoys,” along with a group of kid actors known as the “Bowery Boys” in the 1930s and 40s.
In case you missed them in the Times the other day, you can find several NY-inspired lego creations by the Berlin-based illustrator — and former NYer — Christoph Niemann by clicking here.
This morning in lecture I mentioned — while showing this familiar image of the Five Points — that the little fellow up front to the left, the one with the top hat, always reminds me of Eustace Tilley, The New Yorker‘s monacled mascot.
Turns out this week’s magazine includes the results of the 2008 Eustace Tilley contest, in which readers were invited to redesign Tilley for the contemporary city. Lots of people submitted Obamafied versions; lots of representations of a homeless Tilley too (which, along with Tilley the suicidal investment banker, seemed to speak to our current economic crisis).
Here are a couple of my favorites; the rest of the entries can be found here.
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