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

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)

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

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.”

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.

The post All in a Day’s Work: Archival Wanderings Around SoHo appeared first on New York Bound Books.

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!”

The post Mad Woman: Anne Tolstoi Wallach and the Mad Men appeared first on New York Bound Books.

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.

Mapping 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.

New 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 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

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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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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“St. George’s” by Gene Schermerhorn

In 1888, Gene Schermerhorn, a member of an old New York family, ended a series of letters to his young nephew in the finest spirit of personal recollections:

Now my dear Phil I have tried to tell you what this great city was like when I was a boy but little older than yourself, and I hope I have succeeded in interesting you somewhat. I have begun with my earliest recollections of New York and I will leave it now about 1856 when the population was only 629,810…It is estimated now at over 1,500,000.

I cannot help looking forward and wondering, if it can possibly be that you can tell of as great changes. It is my firm belief that you will be able to do so and that you will live to see the entire island as thickly built as it is now below 59^th St. and perhaps the district above the Harlem also. Or it may be that you will see changes that I don’t even dream of, although my faith in the future of New York is unbounded…I hope you will sometimes enjoy reading what has given me so much pleasure to write for you.

Your loving Uncle Gene

First hand accounts like these are sparks of New York life.  Many writers, including Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, E.B. White and Joseph Mitchell, have illuminated the city, but the words of New Yorkers outside of literary circles, people like Gene Schermerhorn, are often equally eloquent and distinctive. Unlike histories, contemporary diary entries, letters, and other eyewitness accounts offer a view of New York life that is umblemished by the sensibilities of a later time.

“Harlem Bridge at the End of Third Avenue’ by Gene Schermerhorn

One such example is the unusual and enlightening first-hand account from Adriaen van der Donck, a passionate citizen of New Amsterdam who challenged Governor Stuyesvant’s dictatorship and who unsuccessfully petitioned the Dutch government to take control of New Netherlands away from the Dutch West Indies Company, forseeing the threat of an English takeover.  Van der Donck, New York’s first lawyer, wrote in detail to the Dutch government about the land’s fabulous natural resources and, uncharacteristic for his time, admired and appreciated to some degree the island’s native inhabitants.

The sweet ruler that influences the wisdom, power, and appearance of man, of animals, and of plants, is the air.  Many name it the temperament or the climate.  The air in the New Netherlands is so dry, so sweet, and healthy that we need not wish that it were otherwise.  In purity, agreeableness, and fineness, it would be folly to seek for an example of it in any other country.

Other compelling first-hand accounts are that of two prolific and articulate nineteenth-century diarists, Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong. Hone and Strong were prominent citizens whose voluminous diaries overlapped to cover the years from 1828 to 1875, a time of New York’s tremendous growth. Hone was a successful businessman, mayor and popular social figure; Strong a patrician lawyer, erudite and cultured, who helped shape Columbia College and fledgling cultural and civic institutions.  Their diaries are among the best accounts of nineteenth century New York, and both have been skillfully edited into very accessible volumes by Alllan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas.

Hone, worrying about rising living costs in 1835 wrote, “Everything in New York is at an exorbitant price.  Rents have risen fifty per cent. for the next year. [sic] I have sold my house, it is true, for a large sum; but where to go I know not.”

George Templeton Strong reflects in 1851:

It’s quite terrific to see the strides extravagance and luxury are making in these days. Langdon’s arrangements for his ball tonight remind me of the fact. Though I thought a few years ago that I was or might be hereafter tolerably well off, I’m satisfied from the way the style of living grows and amplifies that I am to be always poor, relatively speaking, and perhaps some day an absolute pauper, unable to live in New York.

Strong also conveys the prevailing prejudices of the day throughout his diaries:

Womens’ rights women are uncommonly loud and offensive of late.  I loathe the lot.  The first effect of their success would be the introduction into society of a third sex; without the grace of woman or the vigor of man; and then, woman, being physically the weaker vessel and having thrown away the protection of her present honors and immunities, would become what the squaw is to the male of her species – a drudge and domestic animal.

A rare voice is that of Isaac Lyon, a lowly cartman who hauled furniture through New York’s streets while George Templeton Strong read Greek and Latin at Columbia College and Philip Hone frequented literary clubs and the theater:

New York is what might be most emphatically termed a fast city. Yes! the very fastest in all creation. Its men are fast, its women are fast, and so are its horses. Its merchants are fast, its brokers are fast, and so are its swindlers. Its steamships are fast, its railroads are fast, and so are its politicans. Its churches are fast its theatres are fast, and so are its saints and sinners. Everything goes with a rush – everybody is always in a hurry – and any man who is of the city-born, can always recognize a fellow New Yorker in any part of the world, by the fastness of his movements.

One of the many charming illustrations in LETTERS TO PHIL

Lyon’s irreverent words provide a more inclusive portrait of the city. His gritty reminiscences reflect the working class nativist distrust of lawyers, doctors and the clergy, hostility to the largely Irish immigrants who threatened the availability of jobs, and a powerful emotional bond to George Washington. Lyon’s path intersects that of Hone and Strong in a most unexpected manner: all three avidly bought rare books and recorded their triumphs and losses at the auction houses and in bookshops. Lyon’s accounts of besting men like Hone and Strong at book auctions are delightful reading.

As we enter the twentieth century, John Sloan’s New York Scene from the Diaries, Notes and Correspondence 1906-1913 is a glimpse of early bohemian Greenwich Village sunsets and street scenes through the eyes of a great artist of New York:

September 15. …. The leaves in Madison Square are commencing to show the touch of fall, very beautiful rich color and the brass trimmings of the automobiles dashing by Fifth Avenue suggest a picture to me.

We also share young Alfred Kazin’s enthrallment as he sees the New York beyond his 1930s Brooklyn ghetto in A Walker in the City, and the poignant voices of Anzia Yezierska , Piri Thomas, James Baldwin, Paule Marshall and others who recounted the struggles of young immigrant and ghetto children to find a place in a complex society.

There are various anthologies of New York’s rich diversity in first-hand observations, reflections, commentary and elegies. One outstanding work is historian Bayrd Still’s Mirror for Gotham: New York as Seen by Contemporaries from Dutch Days to the Present, which contains the thoughts of nearly six hundred anonymous visitors and well-known personalities.

And the list goes on and on.  People throughout our short history have had strong and often visceral reactions to New York.  They love it or they hate it.  They reach for the stars or they hit rock bottom.  We’ve heard these stories retold over and over again, but there’s nothing like hearing them, or at least reading them, as firsthand accounts.

Click here for a selected bibliography of titles related to this entry.

This post originally appeared on this blog on December 10, 2011.

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Memories of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies by Charles T. Harris

When I first picked up the book Memories of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies, I thought to myself, oh goody, a memoir about the New York of my childhood.  I opened the book, and to my surprise and delight, this catalog of memories, written by Charles Townsend Harris, is a look back not on the twentieth century, but on the 1860′s and 1870′s.  I perused the pages of Townsend’s recollections as I sat in the New York Bound Books office here in Greenwich Village and read about the neighborhood’s origins:

I was born in the erstwhile village which in its earliest days was separated from the main city by Lispenard Meadows.  People in the early part of the last century visiting Greenwich literally went into the country, as the village was truly a rural settlement.

By the 1860′s and 70′s, however, New York had become a newly bustling metropolis, as Barbara Cohen writes in her post on 1850′s New York:

As New York City left the 1850′s behind, the nation entered into the bloodiest war in its history.  Although the battlefields were in the south, the Civil War exacerbated class tensions, culminating in the infamous Draft Riots in 1863, and left a lasting impact on life in the city.  The seeds of transformation, from a seaport town to an international metropolis in the decades leading up to the war, however, could never be unsown, and New York continued its meteoric rise, despite domestic conflict, to become the epicenter of the Western world.

Grand Central Depot, from Memories of Manhattan

Despite the major transformation New York had undergone during the mid-nineteenth century, Townsend, writing in 1928, by which time the city had changed even more dramatically with the descent underground of public transport as well as the ascent of the hemline of flapper girls, looks back at the 60′s and 70′s of the prior century as a harsher, yet more innocent time:

Street cars were moved by horse power, engineered by husky drivers who had to stand all kinds of weather in the open.  The passengers in winter kept their feet warm in a deep bed of straw, assisted by a heavy shawl worn across the knees.  In these days of rapid transit, overhead and underground, the younger generation has no conception of what discomforts New Yorkers had to endure sixty and more years ago in transportation. (61)

Easter on Fifth Avenue, from Memories of Manhattan

And on fashion he writes:

The “flapper” of today is the very opposite of the modish young woman of the sixties and seventies.  Then the hair was long, made up in a “waterfall,” or confined in a net, the coiffure resembling a beaver’s tail, the whole covered by a bonnet much like that worn by the present-day Salvation lassie, and later by a round affair shaped like a pudding dish.  Long skirts distended by a hooped cage four to five feet in diameter concealed the feet.  No knee-length skirt was seen unless on a ballet dancer, and silk stockings were never worn unless on stage or in a ballroom. (116)

In an earlier chapter, he writes about his memories of the Village:

The street life of Greenwich Village in the sixties and seventies was different from that of any other part of the city, having more of the rural atmosphere.  Vendors with tin ovens sold hot corn in the summer and baked potatoes with butter and seasoning in the winter.  During the spring and early summer women bore trays of wild strawberries on their heads, furnishing the fruit in small splint baskets.  Chimney sweeps patroled [sic] the streets soliciting jobs with their musical cries, and fish peddlers made “the welkin ring” with blasts from their tin horns.  Pass down Morton, Barrow, Le Roy, and Grove Streets or Greenwich Avenue today and observe the home like houses that are left.  There was no “jerry” building in their time; the great fault was that they lacked bath rooms, a wash tub on Saturday night furnishing the means of the weekly ablution.  The frames and inside finish of the houses were of honest timber; the method of construction was substantial and artistic and meant to be lasting. (45)

Greenwich Village, from Memories of Manhattan

I daresay that Greenwich Village no longer has a “rural” atmosphere, but it does still retain a tranquility not found in the rest of Manhattan, save for Central Park.  This is in part due to the fact that the Manhattan grid that dictates most of its streets was not put in place by city planners until the winding streets in the Village had already been carved out and settled.  Thus, one can still take a meandering stroll down the narrow, tree-lined streets around our office and, at least in the early morning or late at night, leave the hubbub of Manhattan behind for a while and enjoy a little quiet time save for a barking dog or an occasional passing ambulance—it is so tranquil that one can almost hear the cry of the chimney sweep.

Harris, Charles T. Memories of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies. New York: Derrydale Press, 1928.

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Mister Dog at the Fridge

In today’s guest post, Benjamin Feldman  writes about Mister Dog, a favorite childhood story about “a funny dog named Crispin’s Crispian. He was named Crispin’s Crispian because he belonged to himself.”  As an adult, Feldman learned that the author of his bedtime favorite was Margaret Wise Brown, famed children’s book author and New Yorker.  His profile of Brown and how her life and work intersected with his own is a shining example of how all readers intersect with books and authors and the power they have to shape our perspective on life. Read more about Feldman and his work on his blog, The New York Wanderer.

Mister Dog

My father was a gentle, quiet, swarthy man, slow and decisive, both with logic and love. It was Summer-time, 1957. The day at a close, he’d read me a picture book. Sitting beside me on my trundle bed, Daddy was all mine. The four others could wait. My favorite story, for the umpteenth time.

Once upon a time there was a funny dog named Crispin’s Crispian. He was named Crispin’s Crispian because he belonged to himself. In the mornings, he woke himself up and he went to the icebox and gave himself some bread and milk. He was a funny old dog. He like strawberries.

There the dog stood on the facing page, a hairy fellow just like my father. My dad, at all of thirty-eight, seemed so old to me, a benevolent giant, telling a story that made me brave. I hung on every word, bathed myself in the colors and rhythms, headed at last for a happy ending in a five year old’s always tumultuous days. Night after night, my father’s deep voice carried me safely, softly, off to sleep.

The funny old house

Mister Dog’s home was a funny old house, two stories of ramshackle painted clapboard, gables akimbo, chimney perched precariously on top. Despite its obvious structural imperfections, I hadn’t a care when I stepped inside. It was me in that story, my spitting double, out in the woods behind our house. There, a hound named Crispian’s Crispian ran into a boy at the fishing pond. Five-year-old me with my new best friend.

“Who are you and who do you belong to?” asked the little boy. “I am Crispin’s Crispian and I belong to myself,” said Crispian. “Who and what are you?” “I am a boy,” said the little boy, “and I belong to myself.” “I am so glad,” said Crispin’s Crispian. “Come and live with me.”

My childhood copy of Mister Dog lacks its cover. I never knew the author’s name. But the book was precious to me for what it meant, the feeling of being special and loved so deeply by my father when I was young.

Years went by, and I lost track of many things. Then my father died suddenly and unexpectedly when I, too, reached thirty-eight. A piece of me also passed away, leaving me bereft, and my two little daughters without their bed-time story man for months on end. Tattered and stained, my childhood treasure lay on a shelf in my widowed mother’s home where I found it after Daddy died.

One year later, still treading water in a river of grief, I wandered one evening in the West Village, and stopped at the corner of Charles and Greenwich. I peeked over a wall at a very strange sight and chills ran up and down my spine. I looked behind me. No one was watching, and I was alone. There I found the start of healing, a way back to a place once known. In the little clapboard farmhouse that sits downtown, the real Crispin’s Crispian kept his mistress company while Margaret Wise Brown wrote what turned out to be her very last book. The name of it was Mister Dog.

********

Out in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint, just off Manhattan Avenue, a two family house still stands on Milton Street. The house at # 118, probably built before the turn of the twentieth century, was a genteel, brick-clad residence with a slate mansard roof and elegant ironwork surrounding its yards. Today it’s somewhat the worse for wear, having been cheaply re-clad, its noble crown masked behind asphalt shingles. The original iron gates have somehow survived.

The gates at 118 Milton Street

The block looks much the same as it did in 1915. Across the street, immaculate houses from the late 19th century still shine. At the head of the block up by Manhattan Avenue, in what has been for decades a Polish neighborhood, a giant and still well-attended red-brick Catholic church rules the hill-top. Five-year-old Margaret could swing on the gates along 118’s perimeter, listening to the freighters’ horns as they docked nearby. Wharves with magic names end nearby streets. India, Java, spices and silks. Milton was a “city street with high iron gates, a red brick church at the end of the street and the sound of boats on the river,” she later recalled. The ironwork at her home perhaps seemed tall to a five year-old. Perhaps there were other gates, truly tall. It doesn’t matter. When I discovered this house and its connection to her, again my heart thrilled with a bit of repair. I can go there any time, where she was born, this woman who cast such magic on my five-year old soul.

118 Milton in 1939/40

Here on Milton Street Margaret took her exercise in what she later called the “painful shy animal dignity with which a child stretches to conform …” And here in Greenpoint she spent the first five years of her emotional life, building, brick by brick that “ ‘wild and private place,” a place to which we return truly only by accident.”

*********

The Brown family moved away from Milton Street when success at the American Manufacturing Company allowed Margaret’s father to build a house in then bucolic Beechhurst, Queens. They moved again to Great Neck, and Margaret finished her schooling at Virginia’s Hollins College after graduating from Dana Hall and studying in Lausanne at Chateau Brillantmont. Suffering through a failed romance, she then chose a different path from that of most of her classmates. Margaret moved into her own flat at 21 West 10th Street while studying at the Bank Street College of Education. There she became an adherent of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, working in the avant-garde of enlightened children’s literature, and soon her own work took shape. With the appearance of The Noisy Book in 1939, Margaret Wise Brown established herself in the forefront of American picture-book authors. Known today chiefly as the author of The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon, Margaret developed long-term relationships with several publishers and illustrators, and produced more than 100 works for children during the next thirteen years.

Her tumultuous affair with Michael Strange, a wealthy socialite and ex-wife of John Barrymore, lasted many years. The two co-habited in Strange’s apartment at 10 Gracie Square during Michael’s divorce from her second husband, Harrison Tweed, and then occupied adjacent apartments at 186 East End Avenue. After spending her first royalty check buying a flower vendor’s entire cartful of blossoms for her home, Margaret devoted some of her income to renting a separate writing studio, an unheated wooden cottage that sat in a back lot behind a tenement on the west side of York Avenue between 71st and 72nd Streets. There she spent the days writing, and many evenings held dinner parties in a living room with walls Margaret covered with animal fur. Crispin’s Crispian, a Kerry blue terrier given to the author by her lover, had the run of the place. The two-story cottage, nick-named Cobble Court, had been part of a farm family’s dairy operation in the previous century, and more recently was used as a neighborhood dining room.

Margaret Wise Brown with Crispins Crispian

Margaret Wise Brown writing

7 Cobble Court

121 Charles

By the time I was born in 1952, Margaret Wise Brown was long-accustomed to the company of elegant, well-educated New Yorkers, and lionized by many. Her eccentric personality and extravagant life-style are hardly what one might imagine for the author of tender children’s books. On a whim she’d make extravagant purchases: exquisite china, a shiny Chrysler touring car. During an April vacation in the Georgia Sea Islands that year, Margaret met a dashing man at an evening cocktail party. A decade and a half her junior, James Stillman Rockefeller, Jr. was a “gentle-spirited romantic and sailing enthusiast,” about to embark with two buddies on a three-year, around-the-world voyage in his sloop Mandalay.

“Pebble” Rockefeller’s boyish manner and lack of pretense (despite both Carnegie and Rockefeller lineage), charmed the ever self-effacing Margaret. During an early morning walk on the beach the day after they met, James inquired if Margaret had ever been married. Her suitor was as much younger than she as Michael Strange was her elder. Along with her answer, and with uncharacteristic immodesty, Margaret told James of her more than seventy published children’s books, and the one kept by Queen Mary by the royal bedside. Margaret let down her guard, confessing that one day she’d write “something serious.” Suddenly, she felt again a rare event in her troubled life. The “fidget wheels of time,” as she was fond of saying, slowed mercifully, and love crept in.

James kept his plans for his sailing trip, but first they were betrothed. Margaret’s new lover saw her off at dockside for her solo vacation trip to the Cote D’Azur on September 23rd. After visiting, Cannes, Eze and St. Paul de Vence, a side trip to Florence was cancelled when she developed acute abdominal pain, diagnosed in a French hospital as an ovarian cyst. Its removal was accompanied by a prophylactic appendectomy. Despite predictions of a full recovery, Margaret lay in Nice’s Clinique des Augustins in a somber mood. On October 30th, she penned a note on Cobble Court stationery, a codicil to her will she rewrote the past August:

I wish my ashes to be given to James Stillman Rockefeller, Jr. and thrown into the Atlantic. They can put a stone up … according to the Will if my family wishes…For Walter Varney, [an old friend of Michael Strange's] thanking him for his generous help to me and my friend Michael Strange, I give this check dated October 20th for $2,000 and the care of my dog if he wants him. Otherwise he goes as in the Will…I ask [that] James S. Rockefeller, Jr. have anything of mine he wants since he is the closest to me, and that he is to have the use of Cobble Court and 186 East End Ave. until all is settled. He has the keys and I consider these places to he his home as well as my own.

Despite her deathbed preparations, by November 13th, the patient was ready for discharge. When her nurse arrived in mid-morning, Margaret was in a jaunty mood. She did an imitation of a one-leg high kick, but suddenly, without warning, she fell unconscious and passed away. An undetected embolism had formed in her leg and suddenly traveled to her brain.

Mister Dog was the last of her works published during Margaret Wise Brown’s life, around the time that I was born. I’ve always felt that the book were written just for me. Over five decades, it’s given me confidence, strength and finally, hope. My father died in the very same way. Though no can-can artist, he, too, was felled by a stroke, passing instantly from my life. As a child I never knew Margaret, but when I stood on Charles Street I knew that we’d crossed paths. It’s possible to miss someone you never met, who died before you could hold a spoon. I do, the child who didn’t know her name. Because of Margaret’s understanding of what makes little children tick, what repairs their hurts and pains, what can make them whole and well, I feel I knew her while she was alive.

Her work has born fruit that she of the giant imagination would never know, she who told whimsy what to do. Goodnight Moon sold 6000 copies in 1947, the year of publication. Sales leveled off to 1,500 copies a year for many years thereafter and then began to rise. By 1970, almost 20,000 copies a year were sold. Then an explosion: during the next two decades, almost four million copies of the book were sold. Heaven knows what the total is today.

Though creator of magic for uncountable souls, Margaret had no children of her own. In an act that failed to surprise many of her friends, she willed the royalties from most of her works published up to the time of her death to Albert Clarke, a little boy who lived in the tenement through which she passed on her way to her back yard writing cottage. And though Margaret didn’t know my name, I feel like I was mentioned in her will. Stroll down Charles Street, stop and gaze. The clapboard house is #121. There on a lot on a northeast corner, behind a stucco wall, sits Cobble Court, trucked down in 1967 after threatened with demolition when the 1335 York Avenue and its neighbors were assembled for a new nursing home.

*****

My father’s long gone, but I can still stand there, under the moon, hearing his smooth voice reading the story one more time: You can be the boy who belongs to himself. A few steps away stands a woman with taffy-colored hair in a poodle cut with a funny black dog, softly reminding me how the words go:

Crispin’s Crispian was a conservative. He liked everything at the right time –dinner at dinner time, lunch at lunch time, breakfast in time for breakfast, and sunrise at sunrise, and sunset at sunset. And at bedtime –
At bedtime, he liked everything in its own place— the cup in the saucer, the chair under the table, the stars in the heavens, the moon in the sky, and himself in his own little bed.

Notes:

The 1940 Tax Lot photos taken as a WPA make-work project show every tax lot in the city. 118 Milton Street is gorgeous and still well-kept in its pre-war photo.

The quoted material in M.W. Brown’s own words is taken from Leonard S. Marcus, Margaret Wise Brown – Awakened by the Moon, Beacon Press, Boston: 1992, Chapter 1. Brown’s own words cited here from Marcus’s book appeared in articles written by her for the 1951 and 1952 Grolier book of Knowledge annuals, cited in Marcus’ work.

The events concerning Brown’s relationship with Rockefeller are for the most part paraphrased from Marcus, op. cit. and his interviews with J.S. Rockefeller, Jr.

From Mister Dog, by Margaret Wise Brown, illustr. by Garth Williams, copyright 1952, renewed 1980 by Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Golden Books, Inc., an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc. For on line information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see http://www.randomhouse.com

Benjamin Feldman is the author of two New York books, Butchery on Bond Street – Sexual Politics and the Burdell-Cunningham Case in Ante-bellum New York and Call Me Daddy – Babes and Bathos in Edward West Browning’s Jazz-Age New York.  His essays and book reviews about New York City, American history, and Yiddish culture have appeared online and in print in CUNY’s Gotham History Blotter, The New Partisan Review, Columbia County History and Heritage, and Ducts literary magazine.  Read more about Feldman and his work on his blog, The New York Wanderer, where this post originally appeared on February 10, 2007.

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I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp: An Autobiography
By Richard Hell, 293 pages, HarperCollins Publishers, $25.99

George Bellows: Painter with a Punch!
By Robert Burleigh, 48 pages, Abrams Books for Young Readers, $18.95

The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor

372 pages, W.W. Norton & Co., $26.95

From the book’s website:

John Randel Jr. (1787-1865) was an eccentric and flamboyant surveyor. A nineteenth century genius renowned for his inventiveness as well as his bombast and irascibility, Randel plotted Manhattan’s famous city grid but died in financial ruin. Telling Randel’s engrossing and dramatic life story for the first time, this eye-opening biography introduces an unheralded pioneer of American engineering and mapmaking.

I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp: An Autobiography

293 pages, HarperCollins Publishers, $25.99

From USA Today review:

Richard Hell brings to his new autobiography, …more literary experience than your typical rock memoirist. Before gaining attention for his work in such seminal punk-era bands as Television, the Heartbreakers and Richard Hell and the Voidoids, he wrote verse and even published a poetry magazine (albeit a “fetal” one, he admits in these pages); and writing has been Hell’s main vocation — essays, reportage, fiction — since he retired from music back in 1984.

George Bellows: Painter with a Punch!

48 pages, Abrams Books for Young Readers, $18.95

From the Politics and Prose website:

No punches are pulled in this fascinating biography that covers the life and work of the prolific artist George Bellows. Having spent most of his adult life in New York City, Bellows left behind an extraordinary body of work that captures life in this dynamic city: bustling street scenes, ringside views of boxing matches, and boys diving and swimming in the East River. Art reproductions and photographs from his youth round out the book.

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