Late in the semester when we teach Writing New York, I give a lecture on Ginsberg’s Howl that situates it — especially the long attack on the burst of midtown skyscrapers as the heathen god Moloch — within the history of mid-century “urban renewal.”

To get the point across, I show some clips from Ric Burns’ New York that deal with the protracted antagonism between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs in the 1960s. At some point over the past several years, I became convinced that Dr. Seuss’s book Yertle the Turtle (1958) perfectly parallels this confict — though the timing’s off by a few years — with Moses cast as Yertle (separated at birth?) and Jacobs as the little turtle Mack, whose burp upends Yertle’s scopocracy. (Is that even a word? He’s the king of all he surveys.) It’s been more commonly suggested that Seuss had Hitler in mind for Yertle’s prototype, but I think the reptilian monarch looks more like Moses, and so I’m happy with my anachronistic reading.

In his pre-election post today, Jeremiah draws the connection between Bloomberg and Moses, a comparison I find apt. I want to draw a similar connection between Bloomie and Yertle. And so, dear readers, we encourage you to get out the burp tomorrow. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a bunch of ordinary little voters could prevent the billionaire from buying a third term?

Thanks to Dana for my subtitle.

Remembering Roy DeCarava, 1919-2009 [Harlem Bespoke; NYTimes]

Historic wood windows on Staten Island [HDC Newsstand]

Celebrate the Poe bicentennial for Halloween with Queens Players [h/t liQcity]

Parrot Safari coming up in Brooklyn, Nov. 7 [Brooklyn Parrots]

Saturday is the last day to catch The Provenance of Beauty, a bus tour/theater outing through the South Bronx. The show is sold out, but stand-bys apparently do get in. [review @ Urban Omnibus]

We’ve written here before about the Lower East Side Ecology Center‘s electronics recycling events. Their benefit event takes place this Saturday from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. at the East River Park Amphitheater. The event features live music by pianist Ray Santiago, whose latest album is called Afro-Cuba A La New York City. There will also be activities for kids and local food from the Greenmarket.

Tickets: $50 Supporter, $100 Friend, $200 Patron. Click here for more information and to purchase tickets. Click here for directions to the Amphitheater.

Over the course of the last month as I wrapped up my own contribution to our Cambridge Companion — a chapter on nineteenth-century theater, with a special focus on plays set in the contemporary city — I had the occasion to revisit the essay that remains the definitive scholarly account of Mose the Bowery B’hoy: Richard M. Dorson’s “Mose the Far-Famed and World-Renowned,” published in the journal American Literature in 1943. (Click here to access the article via JSTOR; institutional subscription required.) A revised version of the piece appeared in Dorson’s 1973 book America in Legend: Folklore from the Colonial Period to the Present.

From first page to last, one rich footnote after another, Dorson’s article on Mose delights. One of the first professionally trained folklorists in the United States, and a major force behind Indiana University’s renowned program in folklore for several decades, Dorson was a meticulous collector of stories about American characters. Mose was just one of those, although Dorson was forceful in his belief that folklore emerged in cities as easily as it did anywhere else, and Mose — butcher, fireman, benevolent protector of the Bowery — is probably the most uniquely urban folk hero America has produced. (Students in Writing New York may be interested to know that Dorson’s first article, published in 1940, was on the character type pioneered by Royall Tyler’s Jonathan, the “stage Yankee,” almost always portrayed as a bumpkin bewildered by the city, the very opposite of Mose.)

Dorson had obviously spent hours and hours in the theater history collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library, which makes his notes on Mose as rich as the essay itself. For example, his opening note on the definition and use of the term “b’hoy” includes the following authoritative description:

The term applied to a type of loafer-dandy familiar on Chatham Street [now Park Row] and Centre Market Square in the forties, distinguished by his rolling gait, surly manner, slangy talk, and extravagant costume; the last is frequently catalogued as a shiny stovepipe hat tipped over the forehead, soap-locks plastered flat against the temple, a “long nine” cigar uptilted at an angle of forty-five degrees, bright red shirt, heavy pearl-buttoned pea-jacket, and rolled-up trousers tucked into the boots.

Just in case you need some ideas for next Halloween. And Dorson leaves tantalizing little hints of things he can’t fully describe in polite company, such as Mose’s cameo in a “lurid work” titled Asmodeus! or, The Iniquities of New York. (Actually, I looked it up on Google Books and it seems pretty tame.)

Dorson is clearly attracted to Mose’s popularity — what made the character such a hit, from his first appearance in Benjamin Baker’s 1848 farce A Glance at New York to his many incarnations and spin-offs, national theater tours (played by Frank Chanfrau, who defined the role, and many others), and adventures in sequels that took him to China, California, and even the moon. At the same time, he’s sensitive to the cultural tension Mose caused, citing, among other accounts, William Knight Northall’s Before and Behind the Curtain (1851):

For four months did this unmitigated conglomeration of vulgarity and illiteracy keep the stage–a compliment entirely due to Mr. Chanfrau. Except the acting of this gentleman, there was not a redeeming feature in the whole affair. It was low in design, vulgar in language, and improbable in plot. … The theatre was crowded from pit to dome nightly, and the hi-hi’s of the pit testified how happy they were to see a congenial vulgarity thrust under the nostrils of a better class of people. It would be scarcely fair to judge of a person’s taste, simply because they spent an evening in witnessing the rowdyism of Mose. The piece was the town talk, and few could reisit the inclination to go and see for themselves what had produced such an extraordinary excitement all around them. The house was filled with a constant succession of strangers, for we venture to assert that no man with any pretension to good taste, with any love for the stage, or any desire to see it fulfil its proper uses, would ever go there twice, and sit through the abomination the second time. When the public curiosity had been somewhat satisfied … the boxes no longer shone with the elite of the city; the character of the audiences was entirely changed, and Mose, instead of appearing on stage, was in the pit, the boxes, and the gallery. It was all Mose, and the respectability of the house mosed too.

When the play closed at the Olympic, it moved to the Chatham, which Northall felt was a more appropriate venue.

Dorson writes of Mose’s afterlife in folklore, once the plays about him had fallen out of popularity in the 1860s:

Underworld stories sprang up around a fabled Bowery giant, twelve feet tall, with hands as big as hams reaching down almost to the ground; he wore a red shirt and a red helmet as big as a tent. When Big Mose charged into battle against the New York gangs, he carried an uprooted lamppost in one hand and a butcher’s cleaver in the other; wrathfully he hurled paving blocks ripped from the streets at the Plug Uglies and the Dead Rabbits. For sport he drank drayloads of beer at a sitting, or jumped from Manhattan to Brooklyn, or blew ships back down the East River with the fumes of a two-foot cigar, or unhitched a horse car and ran with it pell-mell the length of the Bowery. When his girl turned him down, Big Mose fled the Bowery for the South Seas, where he married an island princess, became the king of the Sandwich Islands, and raised forty half-breed children. But even today when a bum picks up a cigarette stub he says, “Big Mose must of dropped it.”

In some ways it seems a crime — but then again it may be your and my good fortune — that Dorson’s America in Legend can be found used on Amazon for under a dollar.

Last night I caught a production of four early O’Neill one-acts or sketches, followed by a late monologue. The whole thing took place at Metropolitan Playhouse, a downtown treasure chest for anyone interested in early American theater.

O’Neill, in fact, is a little late for these guys, whose previous productions include nineteenth-century works such as Mowatt’s Fashion, Dunlap’s Andre, Boucicault’s The Octoroon, Stone’s Metamora, Herne’s Margaret Fleming, or turn-of-the-century plays like Zangwill’s The Melting Pot and Fitch’s The City. The Metropolitan folks have long prided themselves on showcasing American theater before O’Neill. Last night what we saw was a bit like O’Neill before O’Neill.

The pieces we saw were “Before Breakfast” (1916), a one-woman monologue set in the margins of Greenwich Village bohemia; a Melvillean/Conradian sea-piece called “Ile” (1917), in which a monomaniacal whaleship captain pushes his men — and his wife, who’s along for the voyage — to the edge in his mad dash for 400 barrels; “The Movie Man” (1914), a satire on Hollywood’s investment in foreign war — in this case the Mexican revolution — in which a couple American filmmakers head south as embedded journalists of sorts in search of the perfect war footage (and a little sex on the side); “The Web” (1913), a tragicomic prostitute/gangster sketch set, presumably, on the Lower East Side, not far from where Stephen Crane’s Maggie would have lived; and “The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O’Neill” (1940), a humorous and moving monologue on mortality spoken posthumously by O’Neill’s dog.

The texts for all of these and more are available online from the O’Neill eText Archive. Alex Roe, the Metropolitan’s Artistic Director (who pulled off a fantastic performance as “Blemie,” the dog, in the final monologue), wonders whether some of this material belonged to the trunk of plays O’Neill supposedly had with him when he first showed up in Provincetown.

The promotional material for the show had pegged “The Web” as the most “New York” of these plays, and it was easily the most energetic and rewarding. (Keri Serato, who played female roles in two of the other pieces as well, only fully came to life here, and delivered fantastically as the consumptive dame, and David Patrick Ford as a gangster on the run helped her push the role to its potential.) But I was pleasantly surprised by all the sideways glances at Village bohemia in “Before Breakfast.” As “Mrs. Rowland,” Sidney Forter gave a riveting performance — over half an hour spent talking to her husband, who’s supposedly shaving off stage, while she prepares his breakfast. He never answers, in spite of the fact that she moves from idle early morning chit-chat (between sneaking sips from a flask she keeps hidden) to a withering tongue-lashing for his failure to hold a job (a Harvard grad who’s knocked up the daughter of an Irish grocer, he’s slumming in the Village as a poet) and for his affair with a rich-girl fellow slummer who’s been duped by his poetic talk. In this sketch and in “The Web,” O’Neill takes potshots at wealthy New Yorkers with benevolent intentions, reformers who depend on vice for a sense of their own morality. Here the noble Harvard grad who’s heroically married the lower-class girl he impregnated lives a bohemian dream that begins to crumble on itself long before the action’s through.

I’ve seen half a dozen or so plays at the Metropolitan and always feel rewarded for having made it out. No one else does this kind of work. But last night was unique in at least one way: Usually I’m aware that the plays I’m watching — Stone’s Metamora, for instance — were designed for enormous nineteenth-century theater spaces, not the intimate 60-or-so seater you find at the Metropolitan. Last night’s material, though, was clearly written for  the “little” theaters of the early twentieth century downtown scene. They seemed perfectly suited to the space, which in several of the pieces came to feel as claustrophobic as a captain’s quarters in an ice-bound whaler or an LES tenement filled with TB, crying babies, and shouting neighbors. It’s unusual to feel transported to another age’s production plan — the sort of space where you set up a few tables and chairs, gather some like-minded folks together, and put on a play you’ve written for all your smartest friends.

I’ve been dipping in and out of Dreiser’s 1923 book The Color of a Great City, a collection of local-color newspaper sketches he had written between 1900 and 1915. He frames himself as a city walker, a young explorer, an observer in the vein of Stephen Crane or Dreiser’s contemporary Djuna Barnes — precursors, all, of someone like Joseph Mitchell, who would push such sketches into longer, sustained essays.

Just as he framed Sister Carrie (1900) as something of a period novel — though set just a decade earlier — Dreiser frames the sketches collected in Color of a Great City
as memorials to the “phases” of the city that “most arrested and appealed” to him as a young man, but were “fast vanishing or are no more”:

For, to begin with, the city, as I see it, was more varied and arresting and, after its fashion, poetic and even idealistic than than it is now. It offered, if I may venture the opinion, greater social and financial contrasts than it does now: the splendor of the purely social Fifth Avenue of the last decade of the last century and the first decade of this, for instance, as opposed to the purely commercial area that now bears that name; the sparkling, personality-dotted Wall Street of 1890-1910 as contrasted with the commonplace and almost bread and butter world that it is to-day. (There were argonauts then.) The astounding areas of poverty and of beggary even,–I refer to the east side and the Bowery of that period–unrelieved as they were by civic betterment and social service ventures of all kinds, as contrasted with the beschooled and beserviced east side of to-day.

I’m struck by a couple things, reading a passage like this one from his Foreword. Certainly the Lower East Side of the early twenty-first century would seem downright genteel when compared to the post-Five Points world he had encountered a hundred years ago. But this type of lamentation remains a familiar one. (Has Manhattan Lost Its Soul? a recent cover of Time Out NY asked, as if for the first time.) Is it simply that we’re at the tail end of a long gentrification process that spanned the entire 20th century? Or, acknowledging that economic disparities still abound in New York, even in Manhattan, is there something about the persistence of poverty — not to mention the durability of ethnic enclaves and even some old architecture –  that should cause us to question the tone of resignation in Dreiser’s Foreward and the certainty with which so many observers from his time to the present declare that Manhattan just isn’t as vital as it once was, say, ten or twenty years ago?

I find suprising things downtown every day.

UPDATE (later that day …): A very recent example of the lamentation for a more interesting, gritty, vital, and affordable New York can be found in the publicity for the new Berman and Berger edited collection, New York Calling, just out from Chicago:

New York City in the 1970s was the setting for Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, and Saturday Night Fever, the nightmare playground for Son of Sam and The Warriors,
the proving grounds for graffiti, punk, hip-hop, and all manner of
other public spectacle. Musicians, artists, and writers could subsist
even in Manhattan, while immigrants from the world over were
reinventing the city in their own image. Others, fed up with crime,
filth and frustration, simply split.

Fast-forward three decades and today New York can appear a glamorous
metropolis, with real estate prices soaring higher than its
skyscrapers. But is this fresh-scrubbed, affluent city really an
improvement on its grittier––and more affordable––predecessor? Taking
us back to the streets where eccentricity and anomie were pervasive, New York Calling unlocks life in the unpolished Apple, where, it seemed, anything could happen.

I wonder, is this lamentation constant through the last century (and perhaps even longer)? Or is it cyclical?

(Thanks to Sukhdev Sandhu for bringing New York Calling to my attention.)