Entries tagged with “Whitman” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

We've just heard about what promises to be an eye-opening stage adaptation of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. It's playing at the cell, a theater space located at 338 West 23rd Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues.

You can find out more at http://www.leavesunbound.com, which describes the show as "chamber theater meets dance theater meets congregation meets celebration -- without irony or clothing." Yep, that's right: the chorus performs in the nude. According to the director, Jeremy Bloom, the production "celebrates the bare human form as an intersection of nature and industry."

Leaves of Grass continues through August 29, with performances Thursday through Monday at 8:00 p.m. and additional performances at 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Running time is about an hour. 

The video below will give you a sense of what the show is like.

Sunday some friends and I donned sensible shoes, grabbed flashlights, and headed to the Trader Joe's at Atlantic and Court in Brooklyn, where we stood in line in the rain waiting to climb down a manhole and enter the world's oldest subway tunnel, which remained hidden from New Yorkers for over a century.



Down we go!





The half-mile long tunnel was built by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1844 as part of the Long Island Railroad. The idea was to get the train off the downtown streets, where accidents were apparently too common as locomotives chugged to and from the waterfront. The tunnel remained in operation until 1861, when developers had the bright idea that sealing it off and removing train traffic from the area would raise property values, a plan that backfired when commerce shriveled up along with the thoroughfare.

Among the old timers who complained about the travesty being wrought by this would-be wave of gentrification was, believe it or not, Walt Whitman, who wrote about the tunnel in his "Brooklyniana" column for the Brooklyn Standard. Like most Brooklynites, he believed incorrectly that the tunnel had actually been filled in; he lamented the passing of the polyglot culture that had sprung up around the train tracks as engines plunged into the tunnel:

We were along there a few days since, and could not help stopping, and giving the reins for a few moments to an imagination of the period when the daily eastern train, with a long string of cars, filled with summer passengers, was about starting for Greenport, after touching at all the intermediate villages and depots. We are (or fancy will have it so) in that train of cars, ready to start. The bell rings, and winds off with that sort of a twirl or gulp (if you can imagine a bell gulping) which expresses the last call, and no more afterwards; then off we go. Every person attached to the road jumps on from the ground or some of the various platforms, after the train starts -- which (so imitative an animal is man) sets a fine example for greenhorns or careless people at some future time to fix themselves off with broken legs or perhaps mangled bodies. The orange women, the newsboys, and the limping young man with long-lived cakes, look in at the windows with an expression that says very plainly, "We'll run along-side, and risk all danger, while you find the change." The smoke with a greasy smell comes drifting along, and you whisk into the tunnel.

Our tour was led by Bob Diamond, the president of the Brooklyn Historic Rail Association, who discovered the tunnel's location around 1980, when he was not quite 20 years old. Between the 1860s and 1980, the tunnel had been a thing of legend: The Times printed a "romance" about pirates living in the tunnel in the 1890s; H.P. Lovecraft wrote about "Persian vampires" roosting there in his story "The Horrors of Red Hook"; German saboteurs were feared to be plotting enormous explosions there during WWI; bootleggers were supposed to be distilling there; and an old-fashioned engine was supposed to be sealed in somewhere, possibly containing the missing pages of John Wilkes Booth's diary. Authorities believed the tunnel no longer existed, but Diamond persisted, scouring maps in the public library and hounding city officials and local historians until he located a small crawl space under the Atlantic Ave manhole cover and convinced the gas company to help him check it out. The gas folks, seeing that the hole appeared to be filled, were ready to bag the effort, but Bob climbed inside and crawled on his stomach below the street for several feet until he hit a dead end. He removed enough dirt with his bare hands to realize he'd found a brick wall, which he eventually knocked a hole through big enough to poke his head inside and see that he'd finally found the tunnel. Here he is describing the tunnel's construction:



And here's another quick video produced, apparently, by tunnel enthusiasts:



Diamond gives tours a couple times a year; judging from the turnout Sunday they're fairly popular. According to his website, the next one's scheduled for June 28. He has a lively style, a pocket full of entertaining anecdotes, a thorough-going knowledge of the area's geology and history, and a sense of adventure that doesn't appear to have diminished in the last 30 years. Highly recommended for folks who like a taste of the underground now and again.

The tunnel's been thoroughly blogged elsewhere, including Forgotten NY. For a bunch of better photos than mine, check out these sites.

Most of lecture today was devoted to the idea of Greenwich Village in the early twentieth century -- and to the group of people the historian Christine Stansell has termed "American Moderns."

I did mention during lecture some earlier stirrings of New York's bohemian subculture, strong enough that they received commentary from outsiders. W.D. Howells pokes fun at middle-class slumming -- young writers and artists who want to make a romantic escape from their parents' stifling genteel culture -- in The Coast of Bohemia (1893). In the 1870s the journalist James D. McCabe, in Lights and Shadows of New York Life, has this portrait of "Bleecker Street":

In many respects Bleecker Street is more characteristic of Paris than of New York. It reminds one strongly of the Latin Quarter. ... It is one of the headquarters of Bohemianism, and Mrs. Grundy [a code word for the epitome of genteel propriety] now shivers with holy horror when she thinks it was once her home. The street has not entirely lost its reputation. No one is prepared to say it is a vile neighborhood; no one would care to class it with Houston, Mercer, Greene, or Water Streets; but people shake their heads, look mysterious, and sigh ominously when you ask them about it. It is a suspicious neighborhood, to say the least, and he who frequents it must be prepared for the gossip and surmises of his friends. ... Walk down it at almost any hour of the day or night, and you will see many things that are new to you. Strange characters meet you at every step; even the shops have a Bohemian aspect, for trade is nowhere so much the victim of chance as here.

Who are these strange characters? He goes on to say they're quite a different crowd than you'll find walking on Broadway, so close by:

That long-haired, queerly dressed young man, with a parcel under his arm, who passed you just then, is an artist, and his home is in the attic of that tall house from which you saw him pass out.  ... If you look up to the second floor, you may see a pretty, but not over fresh looking young woman [an actress], gazing down into the street. ... She is used to looking at men, and to having them look at her, and she is not averse to their admiration. On the floor above her dwells Betty Mulligan, a pretty little butterfly well known to the lovers of the ballet as Mademoiselle Alexandrine. No one pretends to know her history. In the same house is a fine-looking woman, not young, but not old. Her 'husband' has taken lodgings here for her, but he comes to see her only at intervals. ... Women come here to meet other men besides their husbands, and men bring women here who are not their wives. Bleecker Street asks no questions, but it has come to suspect the men and women who are seen in it. [Excerpted in Sawyers, ed., The Greenwich Village Reader]

The intersection of Broadway and Bleecker had, even earlier, been home to a bohemian literary scene that met at a cellar pub called Pfaff's. The characters affiliated with the Pfaff's scene fit some of McCabe's character types: artists, actresses, dancers, writers, the most famous of whom was Walt Whitman. (He took a visiting Emerson to Pfaff's for dinner.) A terrific website hosted by Lehigh University and created by Ed Whitley and Rob Weidman offers biographies of over 150 key figures who made their way through Pfaff's, including Howells, Horatio Alger, the famous actress Adah Isaacs Menken, and the actor Joseph Jefferson. The site, The Vault at Pfaff's, also contains searchable digital reproductions of The Saturday Press, the short-lived newspaper edited by Henry Clapp, Jr., a key publication for the Pfaff's crowd. There's enough there to lose yourself in for several hours, to be sure.

[Whitman at Pfaff's, image taken from The Vault at Pfaff's]

This year I'm teaching a "Freshman Honors Seminar" on the subject of "Modernist New York." The class is held in the residence hall where we live, and it is linked to an "Explorations" community. The students live together, intermingled with another seminar/community called "New York's Writing Women," which deals with Greenwich Village Bohemia and the Harlem Renaissance. The Explorations program enables us to create programming related to the class: so, for example, we took students in both classes to visit the Tenement Museum last month. In-between our readings of Hart Crane's poem The Bridge (1930) and John Dos Passos' novel Manhattan Transfer (1925), I took my students on a walking tour of Brooklyn Bridge and City Hall Park.

Our "textbook" for the class is the very readable cultural history New York Modern: The Arts and the City by William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff. The book works well for my purposes in part because it concentrates on arts other than literature and also because it makes an argument about  "New York modern" as a set of styles and perspectives that is both distinct from modernism (because it is rooted in the realism of such writers and artists as Whitman, Wharton, and Eakins) and outlasts it.

The subject of tomorrow's class is music, and our reading comes not from New York Modern but from Alex Ross's history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest Is Noise (2007), in particular its fourth chapter, "Invisible Men," which treats U.S. composers during the ragtime and jazz eras. Our listening assignment is drawn from some of the composers whom Ross mentions:

Antonin Dvorak, Symphony "From the New World"
Scott Joplin, "Maple Leaf Rag"
Original Dixieland Jazz Band, "Livery Stable Blues"
Will Marion Cook, Overture to In Dahomey and "On Emancipation Day"
Jerome Kern, Show Boat (Act One, Scene One: "Niggers all work on de Mississippi"; Act Two, Scene One: "Dyunga doe! Dyunga doe!"
Charles Ives, Three Places in New England, "1. The 'St. Gaudens' in Boston Common"
Edgard Varèse, "Amériques"
George Gershwin, "Rhapsody in Blue" and Porgy and Bess, Introduction and "Summertime"
Duke Ellington, "Black" (First Movement of Black, Brown And Beige)

I've paired the students up and assigned a piece or set of pieces to each group. I'm looking forward to seeing what they make of the music, particularly the Ives, Varèse, and Ellington. And we're capping this week off with an outing to the New York Philharmonic on Friday, for a special program called "Inside the Music: Dvorak's New World Symphony," which features a performance of the symphony preceded by a multimedia presentation about its genesis, narrated by Alec Baldwin.

Or, if anyone wants to take this back to '94, maybe that should be the Wackness of the Whale?

Caleb Crain had the great idea to cut and paste the entire text of Moby-Dick into the online  tag-cloud widget Worldle, which he asked to search for the top 365 words. Here's what resulted:

As we begin work on our cultural history of New York City, Bryan and I are starting with the premise that one of the things that will make our distinctive is its organization around different "scenes" that have existed during the city's history. This principle was inspired by the account of the "downtown scene" that Bryan gives during our Writing New York lecture course at NYU. Where possible we want to locate these scenes in particular geographic locations such as neighborhoods, parks, buildings, or even street corners. And we're looking for "tour guides" to help us make our way through these different scenes, polymathic individuals whose encounters with the city and its denizens will suggest the networks of cultural affiliation that will help us give shape to our history.

So I've been working on Walt Whitman's New York. I'm working for the moment on Whitman's early career and my "scene" is centered on the ferry between Brooklyn and New York. I'm expecting Walt to lead me around Brooklyn, to the Lower East Side, to the opera, to the lecture hall to hear Emerson lecturing about the duties of the poet.

Today, however, I've been thinking about another encounter: between Whitman and William Cullen Bryant, the author as a young man of "Thantopsis" and editor-in-chief, from 1829 to 1878, of the New York Evening Post. I started by thinking about whether "Thanatposis," with its blank verse and trisyllabic second line, can be seen as a precursor for Whitman's free verse experiments, but a little rummaging around the stacks led me back to this piece from Whitman's Specimen Days: