Articles by Yukie Ohta

Sunwise Turn: A Modern Bookshop

June 15, 2013 in Furthermore by Yukie Ohta | No comments

A publicity pamphlet for The Sunwise Turn Bookshop (image: Make It New: The Rise of Modernism)

In her September 1, 2011 New York Times essay, “A Portal to 1920s Greenwich Village,” Jennifer Schuessler discusses the new online exhibition from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin entitled, “The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920-1925.”  At the center of the exhibition is a door from Frank Shay’s 1920’s Greenwich Village bookshop that is covered with 244 signatures of the shop’s visitors.  It includes those of famous writers such as Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Sinclair Lewis, as well as neighborhood eccentrics and unidentified book enthusiasts and reflects the lively literary world of 1920’s New York.  Shay “not only sold and published books, but ran a circulating library, lectured on bookselling, edited volumes of plays for other publishing houses, and even won a prize for his window displays. Most importantly, he cultivated a community: publishers, writers, artists, book collectors, magazine editors, cartoonists, academics, book designers, theater directors and more.”

Also at the Ransom Center, though not part of this exhibition, are the records of The Sunwise Turn Bookshop, purchased by the Ransom Center in 1977.  Sunwise Turn, founded and operated by Mary Mowbray-Clarke and Madge Jenison, was located in midtown Manhattan from 1916 until it closed in 1927 was concurrent with Shay’s shop.  One of the first bookstores in the U.S. to be owned by women, Sunwise Turn sponsored lectures by Robert Frost, Theodore Dreiser, and Amy Lowell among others.  It was the first “gallery” to exhibit the work of the painter Charles Burchfield among other new artists of the time, which perhaps influenced the artistic tastes of their young intern named Peggy Guggenheim.

Of the store’s interiors, Madge Jenison writes in her memoir Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling that they “intended the room to look like a place in which you could read a book.  We were to conduct it like life, and it was to look like life.”  In the catalog for a past Ransom Center exhibition entitled “Make it New: The Rise of Modernism,” Edward Bishop explains that by lavishly decorating the interior of their store, the proprietors of Sunwise Turn were “creating a space for reading, not just buying books,” and that they “saw themselves as cultural missionaries in the capitalist jungle of Manhattan.”  Like Frank Shay, they also published books and worked hard to cultivate a literary community, but, in the end, the store was bought out by Doubleday and became part of the “jungle” it was fighting against.  Christopher Morley’s description of Shay’s store in his essay “Wine that Was Spilt in Haste” (1931) applies equally to its contemporary, Sunwise Turn:  It was too personal, too enchanting, too Bohemian a bookshop to survive indefinitely, but for five or six years it played a very real part in the creative life of New York.

Bishop, Ted. “The Sunwise Turn: The Modern Bookshop.” Make It New: The Rise of Modernism. Edited by Kurt Heinzelman. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004.

Harry Ransom Center.  “The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920-1925.”  Accessed October 11, 2011.  http://research.hrc.utexas.edu/bookshopdoor/theshop.cfm#1

Jenison, Madge. Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1923.

Schuessler, Jennifer. “A Portal to 1920s Greenwich Village.”  The New York Times. September 1, 2011.

This post originally appeared on 10/3/11.

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New York Bound Bookshop: The Closing Chapter

June 8, 2013 in News by Yukie Ohta | 1 comment

New York Bound Books at 50 Rockefeller Plaza

New York Bound Bookshop at 50 Rockefeller Plaza

There’s no turning back the clock, but one way I always tried was by visiting New York Bound…with its passing goes one bookstore in which we could find, if only for an hour, what we have lost since bookstores lined Fifth Avenue.  The city, no less than its customers, is left with a hole in its heart.                                 

—Frank Rich, The New York Times, June 29, 1997

Stoddard Corner Bookshop in Hudson, New York is honored to offer the stock of New York Bound Bookshop and selected volumes from Barbara Cohen’s private collection to a discerning public– large holdings of New York material, as well as books on books, art, European history, and a significant amount of ephemera.

The story of Ms. Cohen’s distinguished, forty-year career as a respected bookseller began and fittingly, concludes, in Columbia County, New York. In the early 1970s, her late husband, Myron, converted a toolshed on their Gallatin property where Ms. Cohen specialized in old, rare, and out-of-print books, maps, prints, and ephemera about New York. In 1976, New York Bound Bookshop moved to South Street Seaport’s Fulton Market, then to West 54 Street, and finally, with business partner Judith Stonehill, to the Associated Press Building lobby at 50 Rockefeller Plaza.

BG-Letters to PhilDuring the early years, the New York Bound Bookshop played a vital role in the completion of the popular Anderson Isometric Map of Midtown New York and published four books about New York—from a rare 19th century manuscript to the reprint of a fascinating 1932 book about New York—including Letters to Phil: Memories of a New York Boyhood 1848-1856 by Gene Schermerhorn with a foreword by Brendan Gill.  She also co-edited Trylon and Perisphere, a book about the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and a compilation of literature and art of New York entitled New York Observed, published by Abrams. After New York Bound Bookshop closed, Ms. Cohen and Ms. Stonehill worked together to bring about reprints of E.B. White’s Here is New York, Tony Sarg’s 1927 portrait of the city renamed New York Up and Down, Charles Lockwood’s seminal Bricks and Brownstones, and the Milos Sasek’s beloved classic Here is New York.  Over the years, Ms. Cohen has served on the jury for the New York Society Library’s awards that honor the best books about New York as well as the Small Press Center, a non-profit organization to benefit small press publishers.

Stoddard Corner in Hudson, NY

Stoddard Corner in Hudson, NY

After the bookstore closed in 1997, Ms. Cohen began assembling a bibliography of books on New York using the knowledge she gathered over her forty years devoted to acquiring antiquarian books and printed matter about New York and advising authors on little-known works.  This research resulted in the launch of a website, NewYorkBoundBooks.com, that offers obscure and invaluable bibliographic data on New York City, with editor Yukie Ohta at the helm.  Ms. Cohen’s interests have also recently evolved from bookselling to showcasing “Biblioarte,” works that celebrate books as art and art as books.

Join us as Barbara Cohen and New York Bound Books close the final chapter where it all began—in upstate New York.

 

INVENTORY VERNISSAGE
June 22 – 23 & June 29 – 30, 2013

11 AM – 5 PM
Ms. Cohen will be present.

Stoddard Corner Bookshop
757 Columbia Street
Hudson, New York 518.478.3660
stoddardcorner@yahoo.com
about.me/stoddardcorner

Catalogue at newyorkboundbooks.com/vernissage

 

 

Angry Young Man: Richard J. Whalen’s Angry View of New York

June 1, 2013 in Furthermore by Yukie Ohta | No comments

whalen 1The saying goes, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”  This expression came to mind the other day as I was browsing in Housing Works Bookstore and came upon a book by Richard J. Whalen entitled A City Destroying Itself: An Angry View of New York.  Whalen, a native New Yorker, originally wrote a shorter piece on the same theme for Fortune Magazine that was so popular, he expanded the article to a book-length diatribe about all the myriad things he feels are destroying New York.  Written in 1965, it is noteworthy that the complaints he had then are the complaints we still hear today in 2013.

The opening of chapter 3 reads:

New York shows alarming signs of spiritual malnutrition and death-by-inches. It is frowning, tight-lipped, short-tempered, the most nervous city in America.  It is a city without grace.  It is humorless, able to mock and taunt, but too tense to gain the release of laughter.  It is a city that cried “Jump” to a would-be suicide perched on a window ledge.

Richard J. Whalen

Richard J. Whalen

I, too, am a native New Yorker, and I happen to disagree with Whalen here, but I have heard this sentiment expressed by countless others, although usually from those who were born and raised in other, more peaceful and bucolic, places where people are polite, even if they don’t mean it.

Whalen opens the book with:

All but a few years of my life have been spent in and around New York City, but I cannot claim an intense feeling of identification with the city.  In a sense, one is cheated by being born here.  The newcomer never entirely recovers from his stunning first impression, while the native becomes aware of the city gradually and without a thrill of wonder.

whalenPoint well taken.  I do find newcomers to New York have a strong reaction to it, whether negative or positive.  The excitement in the eyes of those whose lifelong dream it was to move to “The Big Apple” is almost blinding, whereas this is all I ever knew, I thought everyone grew up riding graffiti covered-subways and having year-round access to the world’s greatest museums.

Here is another refrain, oft heard, especially from old-time natives:

New York exists only in he present tense.  Just as there is no sense of obligation to the future, so there is no feeling of pride in the past.  Although Manhattan is quite old—it was first settled in 1615—is, as Alexander Woollcott once remarked, “a town without any attics.”  The city seems to regard the past with contempt and hastens to obliterate its heritage.

In 1965, the Landmarks Preservation Commission New York was a newly established institution, and was born too late to save the old Penn Station:

Symbolic of New York’s self-destructive frenzy is the demolition of Pennsylvania Station. Now being razed to make way of a $120 million complex including a new Madison Square Garden arena, an exhibition hall, bowling alleys, and a thirty-three-story office tower.  This will be the fourth Madison Square Garden in eighty-five years.  There will never be another Penn Station.

I wonder what Whalen would have to say about our city’s current plans for Moynihan Station, an attempt to harken back to a time when trains arrived in terminals both grand and central.

What fun I had perusing this volume of complaints and criticisms that also contains thirteen illustrations by Feliks Topolski.  The jacket copy declares, “Here is a city of endless human discomfort, inconvenience, harassment and fear…one which strives and dehumanizes its inhabitants…a city destroying itself.”  Though obviously rather one-sided, Whalen’s prose is very readable and his arguments astute.  Had he been writing today, he would have made a first-rate blogger!

Whalen, Richard J. A City Destroying Itself: An Angry View of New York. New York: Morrow, 1965.

 

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Book Match: McNally Jackson

May 25, 2013 in Profiles by Yukie Ohta | 2 comments

McNally Jackson Books at 52 Prince Street in Manhattan

McNally Jackson Books at 52 Prince Street in Manhattan

Sarah McNally is a matchmaker. But please
 do not go to her for dating advice. McNally matches readers with books the old-fashioned way, by placing them in your hands. She carefully and thoughtfully curates the books sold in her independent bookstore, McNally Jackson, at 52 Prince Street just east of Lafayette.

Brimming with enthusiasm, McNally reigns over her modest bookselling empire with an almost maternal concern for her patrons. She has made it her goal to make sure their curiosity and intellect are nourished and comforted by making available an array of hand-picked titles in a pleasant, airy environment conducive to both contemplation and interaction. What is the secret to McNally Jackson’s success at a time when bookstores, and even books, are falling by the wayside
in the electronic age? McNally cannot put her finger on it, but she credits it to alchemy—the interaction of people and place and books, something that you cannot duplicate online.

McNally is not only a bookseller, she is an avid reader. She leads the bookstore’s international fiction reading group and is a member of a Proust reading group. She is also often present
at the bookstore’s numerous book talks and signings that have made McNally Jackson the cultural hub of the neighborhood. Their roster is a who’s who list of writers, editors, and critics that more often than not attracts a standing-room-only crowd. These events, along with the reading groups, storytimes for children, and even puppet shows, make it so much more than just a bookstore. It verges on being what Ray Oldenburg termed a “third place,” where one goes to spend time as a bridge between home and work life, a place that facilitates creative interaction among people.

McNally is thus truly a matchmaker. Through her bookstore, she not only unites reader and book, she brings people together to discuss literature, ideas, and fairy tales. She clearly does this all from the heart and not with an eye on some bottom line, though she is undeniably an astute businesswoman. Sincerity and business acumen—now there’s a perfect match!

 

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All in a Day’s Work: Archival Wanderings Around SoHo

May 18, 2013 in Furthermore by Yukie Ohta | 2 comments

The Stone Bridge, from The Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York (1865)

The Stone Bridge, from The Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York (1865)

One of the many perks of working at New York Bound Books is that I get to pore through lots of rare books about New York, for research and just for fun.  I recently photographed a few for our catalog that included several image of old SoHo, and when I say old, I do not mean when Dean and Deluca on Prince Street old, I mean when Canal Street was a canal old.

Title Page of the Valentine Manual 1865

Title Page of the Valentine Manual 1865

The first image, of the Stone Bridge (see above) in 1800, is from the 1865 edition of the Valentine Manuals.  Officially titled The Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York, this series of books was commonly called the “Valentine’s Manuals” for David T. Valentine, the clerk of the Common Council who compiled the volumes that included the city’s annual reports and directories. (read more about Valentine Manuals here at New York Bound Books).

A little research produced an article entitled “The Old Stone Bridge at Canal-street and Broadway” by Capt. Walker Bicker in The New York Times about his memories of  the bridge and its environs in the early 19th century, published April 9, 1886:

Broadway was not paved beyond “the stone bridge” which stood where Canal-street now crosses Broadway.  This was a famous resort for us schoolboys.  It was considered “out of town”—all north beyond as well as the immediate vicinity was country, post and rail fences dividing the land into different sized parcels.  This bridge spanned a small stream which conveyed water from the Collect on the east side of Broadway (where now stands the Tombs) to the west side, where was an extensive meadow covering most of the ground from Broadway to the north River and from Lispenard-street to Spring-street.

Here’s another image of Broadway, just one block to the north, in 1824.

Corner of Broadway and Grand Street, 1824 from The Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York (1865)

Corner of Broadway and Grand Street, 1824 from The Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York (1865)

Perhaps even more enlightening than the Valentine Manuals is Edward W. Browning’s New York Real Estate Brochure that lists buildings, apartments, apartment hotels, tenements, and stores to be sold at public auction on June 17, 1929.

Edward W. Browning’s New York Real Estate Brochure

Edward W. Browning’s New York Real Estate Brochure

 

513-519 Broadway through to 84 to 94 Mercer Street from Edward W. Browning’s New York Real Estate Brochure

513-519 Broadway through to 84 to 94 Mercer Street from Edward W. Browning’s New York Real Estate Brochure

 

This brochure contains a lot for sale at “513-519 Broadway through to 84 to 94 Mercer Street,” a plot that contains three buildings on Broadway, two of which go all the way through to Mercer Street, that would bring in an estimated whopping $80,700.00 in rent when fully occupied, presumably annually.  I found a recent article on Curbed about a unit in this lot for rent today:

Hank Azaria, best known for doing his voices on “The Simpsons” (Moe, Apu, Chief Wiggum among others), told the Wall Street Journal that he’s renting out his loft at 84 Mercer Street for a cool $16,000 per month. For that moolah you get a 4,000 square foot loft with 3 bedrooms. He picked the place up from photographer and director Cindy Sherman for $4.25M back in 2005, but he plans to spend a lot more time on the West Coast.

If a renter will pay $16K per month for a loft, imagine how much one of those retail spaces fetches!  I pride myself on being pretty good at math, but I’m not even going to attempt to figure out the percentage of appreciation between 1929 and 2011.  (And I don’t know if Azaria is BEST known for his Simpsons voices, fantastic though they are.)

Last, but not at all least, here is a newspaper clipping from February 9, 1907 of a picture of The Hall of Science, “where the freethinkers foregathered seventy-five years ago.”

hall-of-sciencebway-central-hotel

This building on Broome Street (probably between Mott and Elizabeth)  was purchased for $7,000 by educational reformer Frances Wright in 1829. According to the Encyclopedia.com entry on Wright:

Commencing a career as a lecturer, she bought a Baptist church and renamed it the Hall of Science, housing a lecture hall, a secular Sunday school, and a bookstore for free-thinkers. Wright’s lectures challenged evolving concepts of domestic ideology when she explained the experience and ideals of Nashoba, criticized evangelical revivals, and advocated education and equal rights for women. Her favorite topic was educational reform. She proposed a “guardianship system” through which state government would establish district boarding schools, where Americans could be raised for social equality through a curriculum that instructed all children in free inquiry and the physical sciences. Wright found admirers in New York among the reformers and artisans who comprised the city’s Workingmen’s Party and who also advocated enlightened public education and such issues as the ten-hour workday, abolition of imprisonment for debt, and attacks on the privileges of banks and capitalists.

Three random items.  Three SoHo locales.  Three interesting stories.  All in a day’s work.

 

This post originally appeared on The SoHo Memory Project on December 12, 2012.

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Mad Woman: Anne Tolstoi Wallach and the Mad Men

May 11, 2013 in Profiles by Yukie Ohta | 3 comments

WOMEN'S WORK by Anne Tolstoi Wallach

WOMEN’S WORK by Anne Tolstoi Wallach

The name Anne Tolstoi Wallach may not immediately ring a bell today, but her story will be familiar to anyone who watches Mad Men, AMC’s popular drama series set in in the ruthlessly competitive world of New York advertising in the 1960′s.  Wallach (no relation to Leo)  was a real life ad woman in the age of ad men.  She is also the author of the best-selling 1981 Women’s Work, a semi-autobiographical novel about a woman clawing her way to the top of the male-dominated Madison Avenue advertising business that she wrote at the age of 52.  She received an $850,000.00 advance for Women’s Work, the equivalent of anywhere from $2-$4 million today, the highest advance for a first novel ever paid to a woman at that time.

The back cover of the 1982 Signet paperback edition of Women’s Work summarizes:

Domina Drexler’s scintillating ads fill the slick pages of America’s choicest magazines and the walls of her magnificent corner office are graced with the advertising industry’s most prestigious awards.  But after more than a decade of dedication and creative triumphs, she’s still not a senior top-management executive.  She aims to become one—with or without the help of the man she loves…

Women’s Work offers a fascinating view of the grit behind the glamour in the high-pressured world of advertising.  It is a novel for every woman who wonders what success costs and what success is worth, and for every man who wonders what today’s women really want.

Wallach, a native New Yorker, attended Radcliffe and wrote for the Harvard Crimson.  As a working mother, she had her children using vacation days, taking two weeks for her first son and three weeks for her second.  It took Wallach 14 months of writing all day on weekends to write Women’s Work while she held down a full-time job as an advertising executive.  According to a September 7, 1981 article in People Magazine:

Though she has long since skirted the barriers to women in her business, she admits her novel’s impetus “comes from my own battle to become a vice-president at an ad agency where I was head of a creative group. All the guys with the same job were VPs, and I wasn’t. When I started to fuss about it, somebody said, Tell her she is one. She won’t know the difference.’ “

For sure, the position of women in advertising and the workplace in general has improved some since the publication of Women’s Work, but if you consider the fact that women still make and average of 9 percent less than men, even when studies consider education level, job experience and years in the workforce, this advance is not quite large enough to declare, a la the famous 1968 Virginia Slims slogan,   “You’ve come a long way, baby!”

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NEW New York Books

May 4, 2013 in News by Yukie Ohta | No comments

9780814771549_FullHabitats: Private Lives in the Big City
By Constance Rosenblum

New York University Press
256 pages
$19.95

From the NYU Press website:

There may be eight million stories in the Naked City, but there are also nearly three million dwelling places, ranging from Park Avenue palaces to Dickensian garrets and encompassing much in between. The doorways to these residences are tantalizing portals opening onto largely invisible lives.  Habitats offers 40 vivid and intimate stories about how New Yorkers really live in their brownstones, their apartments, their mansions, their lofts, and as a whole presents a rich, multi-textured portrait of what it means to make a home in the world’s most varied and powerful city.

 

9781419706721Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers
By Becky Cooper
Foreword by Adam Gopnik

Abrams Image
120 pages
$19.95

From the Abrams website:

Armed with hundreds of blank maps she had painstakingly printed by hand, Becky Cooper walked Manhattan from end to end. Along her journey she met police officers, homeless people, fashion models, and senior citizens who had lived in Manhattan all their lives. She asked the strangers to “map their Manhattan” and to mail the personalized maps back to her. Soon, her P.O. box was filled with a cartography of intimate narratives: past loves, lost homes, childhood memories, comical moments, and surprising confessions. A beautifully illustrated, PostSecret-style tribute to New York, Mapping Manhattan includes 75 maps from both anonymous mapmakers and notable New Yorkers, including Man on Wire aerialist Philippe Petit, New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov, Tony award-winning actor Harvey Fierstein, and many more.

 

9781593720520_sq-a7241315f316a663409b50259cc79fd04e1173a3-s2New York City of Trees
By Benjamin Swett

QuantuckLane Press
160 Pages
$29.95

From Benjamin Swett’s website:

It is common to talk about how trees improve living conditions in cities by filtering and cooling the air, absorbing excess rainwater, and making neighborhoods more attractive, but little has been said about the equally important role of trees as storehouses of a city’s past. Just as trees remove carbon from the atmosphere and hold it for many years in their woody tissue, so do they sequester the shared experiences of the people who live alongside them. The growth rings of trees contain, in organized fashion, physical manifestations of the world and of the human presence in it at different times in a tree’s history. Trees also store memories through the associations they carry for the people who live alongside them and see them every day. By looking at a group of trees I have known over many years, scattered around the five boroughs of New York City, I have tried to show how much of the life of New York is contained in its trees.

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Mogen Dovid: A Delicate(ssen) Matter

April 27, 2013 in Profiles by Yukie Ohta | No comments

Rebecca Federman writes one of my favorite blogs, Cooked Books, about all things food and books.  She is the Culinary Collections Librarian at the New York Public Library and co-curator, with Laura Shapiro, of the exhibition “Lunch Hour NYC.”

Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine

by Rebecca Federman

Working in a research library has its advantages. I’ve met lots of interesting people, encountered fascinating objects serendipitously, and wandered around the deep crevices of a landmark building.

But an unusual condition can occur when you’ve worked in a library for a long time. You run the risk of becoming jaded.

First Folio of Shakespeare? Been there, done that.

Gutenberg Bible? Please. I walk by it every day.

But when you do stumble upon something new — something exciting and revelatory and unexpected — you have a tendency to appreciate it all the more.

Such as delicatessen trade journals.

I was introduced to these periodicals by Roberta Saltzman, the librarian in the Dorot Jewish Division, who has cultivated a world-class collection of Jewish cookery materials. Among the fascinating items in her collection is the Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine, published in New York from 1930 until 1939.

Firmly union (“Live and Let Live” and “In Union there is Strength” are prominently featured on each issue), and printed in both English and Yiddish, Mogen Dovid covers the world of New York delicatessen culture and features articles related to racketeering, Brooklyn elections, trade overhead and union matters.

One of the most interesting parts of each issue is their Fair Price List which lists “at which the following food should be sold in all delicatessen stores.” The March, 1931 issue, for example, proposes that roast chicken (depending on its size) should cost between $1.50 and $2.50; the Temptation Sandwich (tongue, sliced tomato, and India relish) should cost 30 cents; cream cheese and olive sandwich, 20 cents, and a sardine sandwich, 15 cents.

And needless to say the ads are priceless. From Dr. Dick’s True Fruit Drinks to Dr. Brown’s Celery Tonic (when did it start being called Cel-ray?), these periodicals document local purveyors, distributors, and restaurants that have all but disappeared from view. With the exception of old business directories, these publications are some of the only reminders we have left of these institutions.

So while David Sax writes about the demise of the physical deli in his book Save the Deli, at least he can be reassured that we’ve saved the deli periodicals.

Visit Cooked Books at http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/

The following is a post that originally appeared on Sunday, February 14, 2010 in Cooked Books.

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Marking Spaces at the Queens Museum of Art

April 20, 2013 in News by Yukie Ohta | No comments

Marking Spaces at the Queens Museum

Marking Spaces at the Queens Museum

The Queens Museum of Art‘s new exhibition, “Marking Spaces: New York City’s Landmark Historic Districts on the Panorama of the City of New York,” commemorates fifty years of the New York City Landmarks Law founded on April 19, 1965.  This exhibition kicks off a two-year anniversary celebration by placing yellow flags on the museum’s Panorama of the City of New York indicating the 109 historic districts throughout the City.

Mayor Robert Wagner enacted the city’s landmarks preservation law a year and a half after the Beaux-Arts Pennsylvania Station, designed by McKim, Mead & White was razed.  The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission was formed to protect New York City’s architectural and cultural landmarks.

According to the Queens Museum website:

The designated historic districts of New York City represent some of the oldest and most distinctive areas in the city. Designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, these neighborhoods have been singled out for their unique “sense of place”. Each one is rich with history and architectural character, and together they help tell the story of New York City and its development into the world capital it is today.

Brooklyn Heights was the first historic district designated in November 1965, followed the next year by districts in Greenwich Village, Gramercy Park and the Upper East Side. Today, there are 109 historic districts with 18 historic district extensions numbering more than 30,000 buildings across all five boroughs.

Robert Moses originally had the Panorama, 9,335-square-foot architectural model of every building in the five boroughs, built for the 1964 World’s Fair. By placing the flags on the Panorama to designate historic landmarks, the museum will highlight the work of the Landmarks Preservation Commission over the past fifty years, and, one hopes, will allow the visitor to imagine what the city would look like had the commission not existed.

This exhibition will be on view through June 02, 2013.

Read more about The Queens Panorama of the City of New York, as well as Otis Bullard’s Moving Panorama of New York in my post Struck By Wonder: The Queens Panorama of the City of New York and Otis Bullard’s Moving Panorama of New York

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Poem in Your Pocket

April 13, 2013 in News by Yukie Ohta | No comments

April 18 is National Poem in Your Pocket Day

April 18 is National Poem in Your Pocket Day

April is National Poetry Month, and this Thursday, April 18, is national Poem in Your Pocket Day, which, according to NYC.gov, originated in New York City:

The Office of the Mayor, in partnership with the New York City Departments of Cultural Affairs and Education, initiated the annual City-wide PIYP day celebration in 2003. The goals of PIYP day are to showcase talented faculty and student poets in our schools, and encourage New Yorkers to embrace literacy and poetry.

In 2008, the Academy of American Poets took Poem in Your Pocket day national, allowing individuals around the country to join in and channel their inner bards.

The idea is powerful yet simple: write a poem or choose one by your favorite poet and carry it in your pocket to share with friends and family.  To facilitate this, the Academy of American Poets has compiled two small books of collected poems Poem in Your Pocket: 200 Poems to Read and Carry and Poem in Your Pocket for Young Poets: 100 Poems to Rip Out & Read.  Bruno Navasky, editor of the latter volume writes:

Teaching poetry often feels like one of those impossible tasks, like trying to tickly yourself, or keeping a secret.  A secret needs to be secret, but it wants to be shared.  A poem is like that.  The first time you hear a poem—really hear it—you’re always in the quiet of your own mind.  Even when listening to a poem in a crowded classroom or copying the words from a book, this is how it’s heard.  The poem is mere sounds or letters on a page until they get inside, tracing that mysterious path inside of you. (from the introduction to Poem in Your Pocket for Young Poets: 100 Poems to Rip Out & Read)

Moved by the spirit of Poem in Your Pocket day, Mayor Bloomberg began writing poems inspired by New York City:

Hey there, fella! Lady, hey!
Didja hear? It’s “Poem in Your Pocket Day!”
Tenth anniversary – the bubbly’s flowing
People are cheering… yelling… Tebowing

Where best to celebrate this whole affair?
The Crossroads of the World – Times Square
Historic site of many a saga
And on New Year’s Eve… one Gaga

From across the globe, they visit here
50.5 million last year
Wanting to see all they’ve anticipated
Just follow directions – it’s not complicated

Bronx Zoo? (Take the 5 or the 2)
Rockefeller Center? (Walk 6 blocks, then enter)
Empire State? (Bus to Fifth, then go straight)
Ferry to Staten? (At the tip of Manhattan) ]
Unisphere in Queens? (Get there via several means)
NY Aquarium? (Too far for kids to walk. Just carry ‘em)
“Mamma Mia”? (Right behind you. See ya.)

So on this big birthday of PIYP
Have a fantastic day in NYC
Take in the town – there is so much here to do!
(Just have a Poem in Your Pocket when you do)

If Mayor Bloomberg, with his grueling schedule, has the time to pen a poem, we do too.  And if not, well, there are plenty out there already to borrow for the day.

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