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

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]

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."

(Photo of Grace Church from bridgeandtunnelclub.com)