Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map

The walk described here is based on a series of posts relating to the New York of Auntie Mame (see related posts following). I took the walk myself over several days, rather than all at once. I consider the walk as a series of experiences. Trying to enjoy Macy's, Times Square, the Algonquin, stores along Fifth Avenue, the Plaza Hotel and the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis in the same day would be too daunting and exhausting. And expensive.

I'm already thinking about returning to the St. Regis.

This walk serves as a companion to the Walk in Turtle Bay that includes 3 Beekman Place, the fictional home of Mame Dennis. The walk also intersects with other themed walks such as the New York of Raymond Hood, Architect and Fifth Avenue and the High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe, and New York City.



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The walk is approximately 1.6 miles. What I consider Classic New York is more vast than this walk. It would include Tiffany's, for example, but I'm saving a visit there for when I write about You Know Who. Also, MY Classic New York includes free things and cheap things and just the sheer joy of strolling.

See related posts:
Classic New York: 59th and Fifth: A Slideshow
Classic New York: The Algonquin
Classic New York: Times Square
Classic New York: A Visit to Macy's, in April
Classic New York: Henri Bendel
Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis
A Walk in Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, the U.N., Tudor City, and E. 42nd St.
The Liberation Theology of Mame Dennis
Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

Image: at 59th and Fifth Ave. Walking Off the Big Apple. April 2008.

Classic New York: 59th & Fifth (with Slideshow)

I spent the late morning in the vicinity of 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, the epicenter of Classic New York. After visiting with the carriage horses parked at Grand Army Plaza, I walked into the restored Plaza Hotel where I drank a cup of coffee, looked around at the new furniture and floor coverings and then gazed out a front window.

It was my first time back in the Plaza Hotel since the soft reopening, and I was disappointed that the place didn't smell like its older self - that mix of irises, spilled champagne, musty drapes, lingering cigar smoke, coffee, chocolate, and Joy perfume that I so strongly associate with my memory of the hotel. This morning, I smelled more fresh paint and sawdust than anything, and my attempt to enjoy a cup of coffee was interrupted by sounds of electric saws and shrill experiments with the hotel's PA system. I knew I was going to be a hard customer for the reopened Plaza, but many like myself associate great moments of our lives with this once-charmed place.

Leaving The Plaza, I wandered into surrounding stores, including Bergdorf Goodman (still very much like its older self, and in a good way) and FAO Schwarz, the legendary toy store. The Apple Store, with its clear cube above-ground entrance, seems well-settled in this location.

Yesterday, I passed by a Bond No. 9 perfume store, and posted in the window was Andy Warhol's quote, "My favorite smell is the first smell of spring in New York." Andy may have been pulling our leg, but leaning over the fence at 59th Street this morning to look at the first verdant signs of spring in Central Park, I thought, maybe, it could also be my favorite smell, too.

Images by Walking Off the Big Apple from Friday, April 11, 2008.

See related posts:
Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map
Classic New York: A Coda, on Bank Street
Classic New York: The Algonquin
Classic New York: Times Square
Classic New York: A Visit to Macy's, in April
Classic New York: Henri Bendel
Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis
A Walk in Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, the U.N., Tudor City, and E. 42nd St.
The Liberation Theology of Mame Dennis
Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

For more about Fifth Avenue, see the separate WOTBA walk, Fifth Avenue and the High Road to Taos.

UPDATE: WOTBA outtakes and additional photos NOW ON FLICKR.

Classic New York: The Algonquin

From Times Square, making my way east along 44th Street, the crowds dispersed as I crossed 6th Avenue. It was a noticeable break between Frantic and Serene. The block along 44th, between 6th and 5th Avenues, regains the polished luster of Classic New York. Of course it does. It's the block, among other things, of the Algonquin Hotel, at 59 W. 44th.

Mame Dennis once worked as a personal shopper at the Algonquin, but, according to Patrick Dennis, the hotel didn't fare well enough in the poor days of 1931 to keep around a woman with expensive taste. He writes, "So she passed most of that spring chatting with old friends in the lounge."

The doorman opened the door for me, and I had to adjust my eyes to the dark surroundings. At around 5 o'clock yesterday afternoon, the lobby was in full swing, with couples and larger groups chatting around cocktails, giving the impression they had been there since breakfast. The first creature I noticed was Matilda, the Algonquin Cat, perched at the reception desk. Now 13, she could care less who walks through the front door. I asked directions to the Blue Bar, and the host escorted me through the lobby to an adjacent room. "Welcome to the Blue Bar," he said, and he said it like he meant it.

I took my place at the far end of the bar. I started up a conversation with the bartender, ordering a "Matilda," a lemony orange vodka concoction finished with a touch of good champagne. The drink is named, of course, for the Cat Who Could Care Less. Finding whatever I said Dorothy Parkerish, the couple next to me struck up a conversation, asked me where I was from ("Greenwich Village, by way of Texas," as part of a lengthier monologue), and said that I just missed a posse of Texans from San Antonio. I'm sorry I missed them, but the bar was clear enough at that point for me to look around at the Al Hirschfeld theater drawings, the subdued blue backlights along the ceiling, and what was on the three television sets.

The presence of TVs in the bar (which would have been impossible in the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis) - tuned yesterday, by the way, to the General Petraeus hearings, the Par 3 round at the Masters, and on the largest, Animal Planet, keep the Algonquin not only a comfortable and friendly place with a rich history but also a living entity in contemporary life. Don't you know there's a war on? How about that Tiger Woods? And, what about that tiger? Sitting at the bar in the Algonquin, I realized that Classic New York is still accessible to the living, not something long gone and in the past, and given political progress since the days of Mame in matters of civil rights and justice, more accessible to more people than at any time before. The matter now, I'm afraid, concerns how many people can afford these kinds of drinks in a contracting economy, an issue Mame faced in 1931.

The hotel and the bar, while beautifully restored, doesn't come across as a set piece, with its best days far behind, but a place where I would like to bring friends to have a drink and to write our own fresh dialogue for 21st-century New York.

Website for The Algonquin Hotel.

Image: by Walking Off the Big Apple. April 9, 2008.

See related posts:
Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis: A Coda, on Bank Street
Classic New York: 59th and Fifth: A Slideshow
Classic New York: Times Square
Classic New York: A Visit to Macy's, in April
Classic New York: Henri Bendel
Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis
A Walk in Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, the U.N., Tudor City, and E. 42nd St.
The Liberation Theology of Mame Dennis
Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

Classic New York: Times Square

The Times Square area, famously cleaned up from its XXX days, to some people's chagrin, still attracts visitors like lemmings. I don't have many occasions to walk through this dizzying streetscape, but when I happen upon Times Square, my stress level hits at least the orange zone.

It's hard for my brain to handle all the multiple moving images projected onto jumbo screens, the crawling ticker of news items, the flashing colors, and the onrush of pedestrians. One day I will spin into a vortex, collapse upon the pavement, and succumb to massive trampling by high heels, boots and sneakers. If I survive, I will move to Iowa.

Leaving Macy's, I headed up Broadway at 34th St. and then through Times Square to 44th Street. I wandered around the Theatre District for awhile, fighting for a bit of the pavement with those leaving the theaters after matineés. I encountered many tour guides attempting to keep their groups together, confusing when everyone seems to be a part of some tour. It would be easy to get lost and switch tours accidentally, winding back up at the wrong hotel with a different group of strangers.

Images: Daytime nightmares at Times Square. Walking Off the Big Apple, April 9, 2008. I hope this picture is big enough for everyone to see.

See related posts:
Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis: A Coda, on Bank Street
Classic New York: 59th and Fifth: A Slideshow
Classic New York: The Algonquin
Classic New York: A Visit to Macy's, in April
Classic New York: Henri Bendel
Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis
A Walk in Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, the U.N., Tudor City, and E. 42nd St.
The Liberation Theology of Mame Dennis
Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis

A 20-dollar bill doesn't go far in Manhattan, but it's enough to cover the price of the signature Red Snapper at the King Cole Bar inside the St. Regis Hotel at 2 E. 55th St. and over which you can see not only Maxfield Parrish's sublime and recently restored Old King Cole Mural above the elegantly paneled bar but also the means by which you can experience New York through rose-colored glasses.

The "Red Snapper" is the name for the St. Regis Hotel's "Blood Mary," the now-ubiquitous concoction the hotel introduced to the United States. When I visited the bar yesterday afternoon, I already knew I wanted to try one, rationalizing mid-day vodka consumption with the conviction that tomato juice and pepper would help me get over the final stages of a cold. Amply served in a tall curvy glass and with just the right amount of peppery spice, the drink, accompanied by bar snacks of wasabi crunches, pretzels, and mixed nuts, along with the visual wonder of the Old King Cole narrative playing above, helped propel me to a higher state of consciousness.

I visited the bar and the St. Regis as part of this week's exploration of the Classic New York of Mame Dennis. Before I set out on my midtown trip, knowing my destination in advance, I dressed myself in Classic Fashion, ransacking the closet for tailored black clothes and appropriate accessories. I let the spirit of Mame transform my appearance from the scholarly spectacled Agnes Gooch of my morning attire into a dame that seemed at home in the St. Regis. It's not the clothes that open doors to Classic New York, I know, but rather qualities of confidence and posture. Still, it's best to dress up. I also wore dark sunglasses, a powerful fashion addition for reporting from the field.

When I walked through the lobby of the hotel and past the dining area toward the King Cole Bar, at that point shifting the sunglasses to the top of my head, I couldn't count the number of well-groomed service staff members waiting to help the hotel guests. Classic New York, I learned, involves a high ratio of well-trained and polite experts to the willing, and preferably monied, customer. When Mame becomes Mrs. Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, she moved to ten rooms at the St. Regis Hotel, lifting her out of the impoverished embarrassment of a carriage house in Murray Hill. Lucky her. In the timeline of Patrick Dennis' memoir, she would have arrived at the hotel at just about the time (give or take a couple of years, who's counting?), in 1934, when bartender Fernand Petiot took a job at the bar and invented the "Red Snapper."

Website for the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis Hotel

Next up: After the King Cole Bar, negotiating the conga line of Henri Bendel makeup experts.

Image: Arriving at the St. Regis Hotel. April 8, 2008.

See related posts:
Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis: A Coda, on Bank Street
Classic New York: 59th and Fifth: A Slideshow
Classic New York: The Algonquin
Classic New York: A Visit to Macy's, in April
Classic New York: Henri Bendel
Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis
A Walk in Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, the U.N., Tudor City, and E. 42nd St.
The Liberation Theology of Mame Dennis
Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

The Classic New York of Mame Dennis

Patrick Dennis, a pseudonym for writer Edward Everett Tanner, gives the straight and narrow an alternative role model with his witty 1955 bestseller, Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade. When young Patrick arrives at Beekman Place, the door opens to his aunt's unconventional bohemian life in the glitzy New York of the Jazz Age, and, by example, to a different way of being. A party is in progress: "They all used funny words, like 'batik' and 'Freud' and 'inferiority complex' and 'abstraction.'"

Patrick soon grows accustomed to his aunt's nocturnal habits (where 9 a.m. is "the middle of the night"), her glamorous theater friends, her preference for Bauhaus decor, and the experimental schools, psychotherapy, and all matter of fads and crazes (all of which Mame tries). Beekman Place is no place to be square.

Busted for placing Patrick in an experimental school (where all children were stripped of their clothes and expected to make their own fun), Mame loses her grip over her nephew when his furious trustee places him in a boarding school. Worse, she loses her wealth in the crash of 1929. Forced to leave her posh apartment for a carriage house in undesirable Murray Hill, she tries to support herself through jobs for which she is intellectually but not practically equipped. She runs through brief "careers" in literary publishing (loses a valuable manuscript), interior decoration (defies the client's orders for French Louis XV and delivers instead "Bolshevik barbarism"), entrepreneurship (her own moderne store on E. 54th is a hit, but she forgets to mail in insurance forms after it burns down), a saleswoman at Henri Bendel (10 west 57th, but since 1990, at 712 Fifth Ave.) a speakeasy operator, a personal shopper at the Algonquin (59 W. 44th St.), and then, in a hilarious ill-fated turn, an actress in one of Vera Charles' plays.

Finally, Mame takes a Christmas retail position in the toy department at Macy's, selling roller skates. Not easily trainable, she remembers only how to write up sales slips as C.O.D.'s. Those who know the story will recall that she's fired when she lets a customer help her make out the necessary cash sales slip. The customer, happily, is her future wealthy Southern husband, one Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, of Georgia.

Sweeping her off her feet, Burnside moves Mame to ten rooms at the St. Regis Hotel (2 E. 55th St.) and encourages her to resume her old spending ways. On their first anniversary, he buys her "a big old mansion" on Washington Square (for me, a noticeable and impossible slip in an otherwise good make-believe). In the movie version, the two travel to Europe where Burnside dies after falling off a mountain in the Alps. In the original book, though, the day of their housewarming party on Washington Square, Burnside dies after being kicked in the head by a horse in Central Park. Alas. Mame becomes a very wealthy widow.

Mame's New York is the classic New York of Depression-era fantasy – the room service, hatboxes, dressing gowns, perfume, after-theater dinners, gloved doormen and bellhops, glamorous show-biz friends, witty repartee and liquor. The fantasy regenerates in postwar 1950s New York, the time of the book's publication (think, too, of Capote's Holly Golightly).

Visiting the places of Auntie Mame – the classic hotels (Algonquin, St. Regis, the Plaza), the legendary department stores (Macy's, Henri Bendel, etc.), and the nightlife (21 Club at 21 W. 52nd St., etc.) would make a fine walk, don't you think? I think so. Over the next few days I plan to seek out this classic New York fantasy and report back on my findings.

Auntie Mame would never take such a walk herself, by the way. Mame owns a Rolls-Royce.

Image: New York, New York, Macy's department store at Herald Square. September 1942. Marjory Collins, photographer. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USW3-007681-D DLC (b&w film neg.).

See related posts:
Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis: A Coda, on Bank Street
Classic New York: 59th and Fifth: A Slideshow
Classic New York: The Algonquin
Classic New York: Times Square
Classic New York: A Visit to Macy's, in April
Classic New York: Henri Bendel
Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis
A Walk in Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, the U.N., Tudor City, and E. 42nd St.
The Liberation Theology of Mame Dennis
Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

Walking Off Tribeca and Remembering Mostly Lunch

When I returned from my long walk and lunch in Tribeca today, I felt over-stimulated but more tired than usual. Traveling can be both stimulating and exhausting at the same time. Beyond the physical demands of exploration, an encounter with new sources of stimuli can induce mental fatigue. Walking around unfamiliar streets takes more work than the ones you already know.

Some of my haphazard impressions of the day in Tribeca:

enjoying the facades of the buildings along White Street;
the glimpses of the Hudson River and all that blue;
Duane Street and its gentle and elegant restraint;
the jarring presence of neo-Brutalist towers juxtaposed with more human scale nineteenth-century buildings;
a painter putting the finishing touches on a propped-open door of Robert De Niro's not-yet-open Greenwich Hotel and catching a look at some of the fine detailing;
the eight-foot crater on Church Street where a water main blew this morning, and hundreds of city workers trying to fix it;
a flower market with seasonal tulips and hyacinths;
a wide and busy Church Street;
cell phone conversations, 90% of which were about Eliot Spitzer.

Mostly, I remember lunch. I didn't have a particular spot picked out in advance, and I walked around until I was hungry. The Cosmopolitan Cafe at 95 W. Broadway looked good. The cafe was intimate and well-decorated with tables close together and a selection of books lined against the wall. I chose a table in the back. I enjoyed the quiche of the day - spinach and gruyere, and it came with a nice salad with lemony dressing and a selection of fruit. Afterwards, the proprietor surprised me by placing a cup of hot chocolate and a plate with a ginger cookie on the table and saying it was their "treat."

After that gesture, I enjoyed the walk home, even if I'm too tired to remember anything now. I may live in Greenwich Village, but Tribeca seems far away.

Here's a find! A blog about food in Tribeca: Taste of Tribeca.
Website for the Cosmopolitan Hotel.

See related posts:
The Woolworth Building
Establishing Shots: The Tribeca Film Festival
The Tribeca of Duane: Duane Street and Duane Park
Tribeca's Most Tripped-Out Vista
Tribeca Living: A Building for Chocolate, and One for the Wool Trade
In Search of the Lower West Side: Before Tribeca
Walking Off Tribeca: The Lay of the Land
Walking Off Tribeca: Starting at Square One

Roundup: The Plaza Hotel, Sondheim's Seurat, the Texas Primary, and the Upcoming Gelato Showdown in the Village

As I gather my thoughts about the Chichester Festival Theatre's entertaining production of Macbeth that I saw last night at BAM, I would like to pass on a few updates and news items:

• I've now assembled all the posts from The New York of Raymond Hood, Architect self-guided walk onto new pages and placed them under the list of walks on the site's sidebar. I've added a small slideshow of more images of the buildings.

• The Plaza Hotel reopens Saturday, March 1, and I look forward to visiting. I've been meaning to comment on the story, "It's Lonely at the Plaza Hotel," by Christine Haughney from the February 17, 2008 edition of The New York Times. Apparently, the new condo owners are lonesome, as not everyone can afford a place in their legendary hotel. The story quotes one woman who told the reporter that she "wouldn’t mind meeting someone other than the decorators, real estate brokers and other service workers fussing over the apartments." I know exactly how she feels. All I can say is that I'm available. I would love to hang out in The Plaza. Anyone living at The Plaza who might be reading this and who would enjoy some company, please write walkbigapple@yahoo.com.

• Mapping Texas for the Primary. As a native Texan, I have many opinions about the upcoming Texas presidential primary. I recommend reading Randy Kennedy's NYT article, "Pieces of Texas Turn Primary Into a Puzzle," that explains the diversity of the vast Texas political landscape. My mother, a proper East Texan who wore skirts, hose, and high heels her entire life, thought I would become uncivilized if I spent any time with West Texans. Of course, I rebelled. No further evidence is necessary beyond looking in my closet and seeing what is not there.

• Art lovers suffering from a Seurat withdrawal after the closing of the exhibit at MoMA should make note that a new production of Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, now playing at Studio 54 (254 West 54th Street), has received good reviews and extended its run through June 15, 2008.

• (Image) Yesterday, I spotted the sign for the new gelato place coming to Bleecker Street later this spring. GROM's first NY location is up on Broadway on the Upper West Side. The Village location, an excellent site on Father Demo Square, will set up a showdown between this Turin-based upstart and L'Arte del Gelato on Seventh Ave. It will be like a spaghetti western but with gelato. As I posted earlier, I am observing a strict gelato diet for Lent. It's not going well.

Schnabel, WOTBA, and Venetian Masks: Most Popular Search Terms

I like to know the means by which new readers come to this website, and perusing the list of most popular search terms from time to time, I begin to ascertain patterns. I am also curious how well I help new readers find the information they need and how I can better meet the needs of the global audience.

Here is the list of the five most popular search terms from the past month that have directed people to Walking Off the Big Apple. I will follow the list with a brief analysis of these findings:

1. "Julian Schnabel"
2. "Julian Schnabel building"
3. "Walking Off the Big Apple"
4. "Venetian masks"
5. "How to make Venetian masks"

Julian Schnabel: recent Academy Award nominee, major contemporary visual artist, friend of Jean-Michel Basquiat, raised in Brownsville, Texas, interior designer for the Gramercy Park Hotel, mover and shaker. I don't know Julian personally. What else do you need?

Oh. His building in the West Village. I wrote about his "Tower of Pink Power" lo, these many months ago, when WOTBA was just a wee thing, but for each new week this particular post continues to rank high on the visitor's list. Indeed, you MUST come walk the neighborhood and see his building with your own eyes. I have come to love it in every way – its whatever pink-rose-red mottled facade, its brazen Italianate trimmings, its soaring height on the western edges of the Village.

Walking Off the Big Apple: I have high confidence that people have come to the right place when they type in this search term. I imagine it's the result of a conversation involving my far-flung friends. Since 1990, the colonel (the title I give my Kentucky-born spouse on this website) and I have lived in Austin, Texas, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Columbia, South Carolina, and now Greenwich Village, USA. In that order. Beat that with a stick! So, I think the conversation goes like this:

"You hear anything from Teri lately?"
"Naw. Living in New York! Heard she had a popular blog." (Note: I tell people I have a "popular" blog as a PR technique.)
"What's it called?"
"I think it's called..."

Venetian masks: Time for the masked ball, or as a South Carolina friend commented when he saw some Venetian masks in a flower shop, "They must be having an Eyes Wide Shut party!" As I explained in one of the Weekend Frivolities, I visited the shop in Venice that made the masks for the Kubrick film. I stumbled upon the place while strolling the small streets near the Guggenheim Venice. From time to time, I make masks based on molds I made of our two dogs and deceased cat. I'm going to make more this year and will try to sell them to you.

In conclusion, Julian, raised on the Texas-Mexican border, and me, raised in Big D, and both in love with Art, sometimes dream in Italian. Prego, y'all. Welcome to the West Village. Welcome to Walking Off the Big Apple.

The 6th most popular search term is "cupcakes."

Image: Julian Schnabel's Palazzo Chupi, W. 11th Street, with cupcake and coffee from the nearby Magnolia Bakery. Photo from the morning of February 26, 2008. Walking Off the Big Apple –"Giving readers what they want since 2007."

Epilogue: Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos

When Mabel Dodge first saw the Taos Pueblo, she felt an intense surge of longing. In Edge of Taos Desert she writes:

"It was as though the Pueblo had an invisible wall around it, separating the Indians from the world we knew–a wall that kept their life safe within it, like a fire that cannot spread. "How self-contained it seems! I thought, and how contented it feels!" I mused to myself. "I wish I belonged in there!"

For many years after my father died, my mother and I traveled almost every summer from our home in Dallas to Santa Fe, staying at the old La Fonda Hotel. Sometimes we drove there, a seemingly endless and boring drive through the Texas Panhandle but an increasingly fascinating journey toward the end. It took us a few days to adjust to the altitude difference, so we would spend the first days keeping close to the main plaza.

On one trip we joined a group traveling to Taos, via the High Road. Toward the end of the day we stopped outside the Taos Pueblo. We got out and walked around for an hour, keeping a respectful distance between our tourist selves and the residents of the pueblo.

When it was time to board the van for the return trip, we could not find my mother anywhere. We waited thirty minutes. Finally, I spotted her walking out of a door in the Pueblo. I remember that she was wearing her typical smart Dallas fashion designer suit, with hose, high heels, and all the appropriate accessories, and I thought how comical she looked in that context.

When she sat down next to me in the van, I asked what she was doing in there. She said that she had struck up a conversation with a nice couple about their children and that they invited her to sit down. She had a great time. When the van pulled away from the Taos Pueblo, she told me she didn't feel like leaving. "I want to go back there," she said. "It's where I belong."

I love New York City, and I plan to stay for a long time. I feel, though, that there's a part of me I'm saving for later, the one that trades in urban canyons for longer memories and a much bigger sky.

See additional related posts for Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe, and New York City.

Images: New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, House on Canyon Road, Santa Fe, and Lexington Avenue near 49th., NY, NY, 2008. You get the picture. Photos by Walking Off the Big Green Chili Pepper.

Fifth Avenue & The High Road to Taos: Georgia O'Keeffe's Long Road Home

See the complete walk on new pages.

When Mabel Dodge invited Georgia O'Keeffe to spend the summer with her in Taos in 1929, O'Keeffe accepted the invitation without first consulting her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, a dominating spouse. She spent the summer there without him anyway, awakening to the possibility she had found a new place that seemed like home.

"She wrote to Henry McBride from Taos in 1929, 'You know I never feel at home in the East like I do out here-and finally feeling in the right place again-I feel like myself-and I like it- . . . Out the very large window to rich green alfalfa fields-then the sage brush and beyond-a most perfect mountain-it makes me feel like flying-and I don't care what becomes of art.' - Georgia O'Keeffe: Art and Letters by Jack Cowart and Juan Hamilton

Stieglitz was an aging New Yorker, embedded in the cultural life of the city, and far-away New Mexico was a place best left to his wife. In February of 1930 he exhibited her New Mexico-inspired paintings at An American Place at 509 Madison Avenue, his third and final gallery in New York. The gallery presented O'Keeffe's New Mexico paintings every year until the gallery's closing in 1950.

Any artist would have relished O'Keeffe's life - time alone in New Mexico to paint a serious body of work as well as a successful artist-gallerist spouse back in New York to exhibit them on Madison Avenue every year. In addition, the two often enjoyed time at the expansive Stieglitz estate up on Lake George. But...

Enter Radio City Music Hall (1260 Avenue of the Americas), an odd tangent on our Fifth Avenue & The High Road to Taos walk. In the spring of 1932 O'Keeffe accepted a $1500 commission to paint a mural on the walls of the Ladies Powder Room. Wanting to paint something big, she accepted the challenge over her husband's objections. By October, after spending the summer in Canada, she grew frustrated with some technical difficulties with the mural and abandoned the project. In early 1933 she became ill and was admitted to Doctor's Hospital for psychoneurosis, a condition often brought on by acute stress.

Meanwhile, Stieglitz, who was 23 years older than O'Keeffe, had started a relationship with a young married woman, Dorothy Norman, his gallery manager, an artist, arts patron and a proponent of the photographic arts. He started taking photos of her, the same sort of sensational erotic images he made of O'Keeffe early in their marriage. The two spent a lot of time in the darkroom together. All this while his wife is sick. O'Keeffe knew what was going on.

O'Keeffe returned to New Mexico in the summer of 1934, first staying at Ghost Ranch seventy miles west of Taos, and until Stieglitz's death she returned there most every summer. In 1936 she and Stieglitz moved from the Shelton Hotel to a penthouse apartment at 405 East 54th St., a place nearer Stieglitz's gallery. In 1942 they moved to a small apartment at 59 East 54th St., even closer. During the summer of 1945 she bought an adobe house on three acres in Abiquiu. In 1946, Stieglitz, after a massive stroke, died in New York at the age of 82.

After spending a couple of years in New York, consumed with settling the Stieglitz estate, O'Keeffe permanently moved to New Mexico in 1949, dividing her time between Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu. She had spent thirty years going back and forth from her home in the west to an apartment in midtown Manhattan, and she didn't have to do that anymore. She died March 6, 1986 in Santa Fe at the age of 98.

I've learned from this story that finding your own ranch buys you an extra 17 years.

Image: interior, New York Marriott Hotel East Side (formerly the Shelton Hotel), 525 Lexington Avenue at 49th St.

The Building that Would Glow at Night: Raymond Hood, Georgia O'Keeffe, and the American Radiator Building

From the walk, Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe and New York City.

Whenever I come upon the Radiator Building on 40th Street on the south side of Bryant Park I am immediately struck by its drama. It's unusual to see a building made of black brick, much less one with gold trim. Designed by Raymond Hood, the American Radiator Building of 1924 fit the bill of the clients - it was massive, solid, and it would glow at night. While Hood wanted the building to look like a cathedral, he knew that the many window openings would overly lighten the heaviness. He solved the problem by making the facade black. He didn't want lights turned on in the building after dark but directed the upper floors to be illuminated with floodlights.

O'Keeffe not only painted the Radiator Building at night but with all the windows illuminated. The painting is one of several O'Keeffe made in the mid 1920s in response to the changing New York skyline. At the time she and Alfred Stieglitz lived on the thirtieth floor of the Shelton Hotel at 49th and Lexington, and O'Keeffe frequently walked near the new building.

Her painting of the Radiator from 1927 (the same year as Fritz Lang's Metropolis, tellingly) is remarkable for its color and for the depiction of the artificial light of the city night - the purple/blue tints of floodlights and the fluorescent whites of the office towers. There's a touch of warm incandescent in windows here and there. The stylized smoky steam arising from the building at the right echoes the flipped curved cornices of the Radiator's top floors. It's pure theater.

After Stieglitz died in 1946, his personal art collection of some 1,000 works was divided up among six museums. One benefactor was Fisk University in Nashville, a university Carl Van Vechten suggested to O'Keeffe. Among the artworks in the bequest was O'Keeffe's painting, Radiator Building–Night, New York. For a couple of years, the cash-strapped university has tried to sell the painting, now valued around $20 million, and at one point worked out a co-ownership deal with a new Walton-backed museum in Arkansas. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico is attempting to legally block the agreement, and the matter is scheduled to go to court next month.

See Fisk university struggles to make cash from an art collection donated by Georgia O'Keeffe (Albuquerque Tribune)

The Radiator Building now houses the Bryant Park Hotel. The hotel's website makes my head hurt.

See related posts about Raymond Hood on this website.

Images: (l) photo by Walking Off the Big Apple, January 2008. and Georgia O'Keeffe. Radiator Building–Night, New York. 1927.

UPDATED APRIL 2008: Fisk appealing judge ruling to display collection. See AP Story here.

Ladies of the Canyon: Mabel Dodge and Georgia O'Keeffe

See the complete walk on a new page.

"Trina wears her wampum beads
She fillls her drawing book with line
Sewing lace on widows' weeds
And filigree on leaf and vine"
-Joni Mitchell, "Ladies of the Canyon"

See the post Fifth Avenue & The High Road to Taos for the beginning of this walk

Mabel
Mabel Dodge, for four years during the 1910s, occupied an elegant apartment at 23 Fifth Avenue on the corner of 9th Street, a space she enveloped in white. She painted the woodwork white, papered the walls white, and she covered the windows and floors with white curtains and white rugs. She served white wine at lunch, and she often wore white dresses. She created a place where her identity could take shape, and she filled the space with other people who had already defined themselves - socialists, painters, Bolsheviks, newspaper columnists, poets and anarchists, who could give her a new sense of self against all that white.

After repainting her apartment, she suffered an apparent nervous collapse, if not a clinical breakdown. She heard ghosts in the telephone receiver, and she saw the word "EVIL" appear to her in the form of a giant blue-grey smile. She could be original - the Paterson Strike Pageant at Madison Square Garden was her idea, or she could be petty and petulant, strung out on a guy like John Reed. She wouldn't be happy until the 1920s, when she had moved to New Mexico and where all the adobe houses were painted white.

Georgia
"One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt."
" Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, how ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead? But then I realize that to someone else it may not seem so ordinary."

In 1925, Georgia O'Keeffe and her husband Alfred Stieglitz moved into the Shelton Hotel at Lexington and 49th Street (now the New York Marriott East Side) and lived there for 12 years. Their apartment afforded excellent views of Midtown and a window onto the dazzling skyscraper race of the 1920s. O'Keefe had already started painting her signature flowers, but she started sketching, drawing, and painting the buildings out her window, ones with interesting shapes. She made approximately 40 works of buildings in the New York sky, including City Night, 1926, Shelton Hotel, N.Y. No.1, 1926, Shelton with Sunspots, 1926, Radiator Building-Night, New York, 1927, and New York Night, 1928-1929.

By 1929 O'Keeffe grew disillusioned with her marriage and with New York. She welcomed the invitation to spend the summer at Mabel Dodge Luhan's home in Taos.

By the early 1910s, the proliferation of tall New York buildings along Fifth Avenue and other thoroughfares cast the streets in darkness, and it grew common to refer to these places as "canyons." By 1920, during the early days of the building boom, new landowners tore down Mabel Dodge's house at 23 Fifth Avenue and the 291 Fifth Avenue building that housed Stieglitz's gallery and replaced them with larger buildings in the modern style.

Image: Looking north on Fifth Avenue.

to be continued....

Dining Near Washington Square Park

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Visitors to Greenwich Village may enjoy some of these food options around Washington Square Park. The list of places is particularly suited for visiting NYU. In 2008 the park underwent major renovations, and so dining near the park may be more enjoyable than staring at a construction site. I still cherish small eastern sections of the park that are set aside for later renovation.

As someone who lives near Washington Square Park, I've enjoyed many of the nearby cafés, tiny eateries, bakeries and restaurants. This map points to places that range from very expensive to everyday fare. While finances don't allow me to frequent the high end places like Blue Hill, Il Mulino, Cru, or Babbo, they come highly recommended. I'm trying to keep this list confined to a few blocks from the park. Still, I am tempted to add a couple of places just a block or two farther away - Jane's on Houston and Bellavitae on Minetta, for example, my two reliable favorites for special dining.

I regularly visit Marumi for excellent sushi, La Lanterna for pizza and desserts, Think Coffee and Joe for coffee, Leela Lounge for Indian, and Sam's Falafel. For brunch, I always enjoy North Star, the restaurant associated with the Washington Square Hotel. Order the "sampler," with eggs, chicken apple sausages, potatoes and pancakes. Their bread basket is beautiful. Try to make reservations for jazz brunch.

NYC Hotel Availability For "Orphanistas" (Moving Image Archivists, Cinephiles, Film Scholars, Film Restorers, Etc.)

The following information is especially for the archivist-scholar-preservationist friends planning to attend the 6th Orphan Film Symposium at NYU March 26-29, 2008. I can't vouch for availability and accuracy. I do know these affordable hotels by reputation or experience, so these would be fine places to stay.

Hotel rooms under $200 a night:

SOHOTEL (SoHo area, on the Bowery)
341 BROOME ST. NEW YORK, NY 10013
1-800-737-0701
$179-$189

HOTEL 31 (Midtown East)
120 EAST 31ST. NEW YORK, NY 10016
(212) 685 3060
double, shared bath $94
other type rooms available

HOTEL 17 (Gramercy)
225 EAST 17 ST. NEW YORK, NY 10003
(212) 475 2845
double, shared bath $119
other type rooms available

THE POD (formerly Pickwick Arms) Upper midtown East
230 EAST 51 ST. NEW YORK, NY 10022
800-742-5945
single, shared bath $116

GERSHWIN HOTEL (Midtown East)
7 EAST 27 ST. NEW YORK, NY 10016
212-545-8000
Superior Room $180-$194 (one double or two singles)

By the way, I recommend these hotels for people who are not film scholars or moving image archivists and would like to find NY hotel rooms within a budget.

the 6th Orphan Film Symposium blog

Letter to the Editor Inquiring About Orphan Hotels (on this website)

List of Walking Off the Big Apple's Printable Maps

What follows is a list of links to Google maps I've created for Walking Off the Big Apple. These are all self-guided walking tours built around a theme and designed for visitors and residents alike. These interactive walking maps are meant to supplement many of the walks listed in the sidebar.

These are the routes that I've traveled and would recommend to others. I don't conduct walking tours myself, preferring to veer off chartered courses, but I like to think that people using these maps might bump into others at some point.

That reminds me. Once upon a time in graduate school, I took a course on Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe. I wrote a research paper comparing the two authors' use of urban imagery, and I argued that Hawthorne explores the street to comment on the individual's responsibility to society while Poe conceptualizes the city as a mental labyrinth. I'm looking at the paper now, as I've just fished it out of a trunk. I begin the paper with a speculation that the central character of Hawthorne's "Wakefield" brushed up against the voyeuristic figure of Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" in the streets of London of the 1820s.

While I find it a little daffy that I imagined a chance meeting between two fictional characters walking along the same street, I'm nevertheless pleased to discover that my interest in fictional urban geography started not this year in New York but years and years ago along "the Drag" in Austin.

As Cy Coleman sings, "Why try to change me now?"

Gramercy/Flatiron Stroll
The Bowery 2007
Garbo Walks
Chelsea & Far West Village Walk
Diane Arbus & Chelsea Hotel Walk
Art Supplies Walk
40 Bond to 40 Mercer

UPDATED: Many more walks since this posting. See sidebar of website or visit Walking Off the Big Apple's Google Map page.

The Specter of Holiday Attributions, and The Nick and Nora Walk

I was all set to design a Christmas walk involving the wealthy Chelsea scholar and poet Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863) when research led me to arguments that Moore did not write A Visit From St. Nicholas but had appropriated a poem authored by Major Henry Livingston, Jr. (1748-1828). My, my, my. This revelation upset me, because I was already bent out of shape after reading the NYT story of artist Richard Prince's appropriation of Jim Krantz's photography for the Marlboro ads. People should do their own work.

Now that I'm mad, WOTBA readers are saved from a Gramercy-to-Chelsea holiday walk, one that would have started at Pete's Tavern where O. Henry wrote The Gift of the Magi to the house where Clement Moore maybe didn't write A Visit from St. Nicholas.

Instead, I've quickly designed an uptown walk based on Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man (1934), a sophisticated hardboiled tale set during Christmas in New York. This Nick and Nora Charles homage should possess just the right amount of tartness for an appropriate (but not appropriated) Walking Off the Big Apple walk. I pray that Hammett wrote it himself.

First, a quote from the woman who inspired the character of Nora Charles:

"When we were very broke, those first years in New York, Hammett got a modest advance from Knopf and began to write The Thin Man. He moved to what was jokingly called the Diplomat's Suite in a hotel run by our friend Nathanael West. It was a new hotel but Pep West and the depression had managed to run it down immediately and certainly Hammett's suite had never seen a diplomat because even the smallest Oriental could not have functioned well in the space."
- Lillian Hellman, from "Dashiell Hammett: A Memoir,"
The New York Review of Books, November 25, 1965 (link)

(Oh, well. Too late to give Hellman any sensitivity training.)

Walking Directions for the Nick and Nora Walk: Find your way to 330 East 56th Street, formerly The Sutton Hotel, managed by Nathaniel West in the early 1930s and where Hammett wrote The Thin Man. From there walk to the Upper East Side apartment building at 630 Park Ave. (the southwest corner at 66th St.). Lillian Hellman lived on the tenth floor from 1969 to 1984. Follow the walk with a dry martini at Bemelmans Bar at The Carlyle (35 E. 76th St.). If you don't want to go home yet, take a cab to Pete's Tavern where Ludwig Bemelmans wrote Madeline and O. Henry wrote The Gift of the Magi.

Link: The Upper East Side Book: Park Avenue, 630 Park Avenue. (The City Review) The essay at this site includes an upsetting rumor about another resident of the building, Dorothy Kilgallen, the gossip journalist and a frequent player on 'What's My Line?"
Link: Website maintained by a family member devoted to Henry Livingston, Jr.

Image: Holiday fun at the WOTBA residence.

Weekend Frivolities DIY Edition: Venetian Masks

The previous post on taking black-and-white photos in New York in the snow could be filed under Weekend Frivolities, in that it's about making holiday gifts, but I didn't think it crossed the Bridge of Idiocy enough to qualify for this feature.

I've been promising to demonstrate how to make Venetian masks, but I think they're too hard for me to explain. First of all, you need to make a clay sculpture that looks like something, maybe a terrier or a cat, mix up some plaster in batches and then pour it over the sculpture, wait till it hardens, pull the clay out of the mold, and then start cutting up pieces of paper for papier-maché. That's just for starters. It's a big mess. I've cried any times.

The best way to learn how to make beautiful masks in the authentic tradition is to fly into Marco Polo Airport, find a hotel in Venice for a few days and then walk the mysterious streets of the Dorsoduro until you accidentally find the Ca' Macana shop.

The former architecture students who founded Ca' Macana in the early 1980s played a role in the revival of the Carnival, an event that had nearly disappeared for a couple of centuries. The shop made the masks for Stanley Kubrick's sexy Eyes Wide Shut (1999). I bought the fox mask (at left) from them as well as their book that includes step-by-step instructions.

To understand the creative process of these well-crafted masks, the section of Ca' Macana's website about mask-making classes features an informative video.

I have a mask I want to make, one that will be a perfect accompaniment to the southern funeral fan that I demonstrated last weekend. I'm going to call it Artist's Mutt. I'll post a photo if it turns out OK.

Image at top: A Venice "street," with the Bridge of Sighs in the background. When I took the photo, I was fascinated by the fellow standing on the bridge in the foreground, because I thought for sure it was the ghost of Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini's 8 1/2.

To see examples of my unusual Venetian masks -all with some sort of twist, look for the illustration accompanying the following posts:
Museums in New York Open on Mondays
Then We Take Berlin: Berlin in Lights Festival

The Bowery 2007 Walk: Chinatown

You may remember that scene in the infamous final episode of The Sopranos when one of the guys walks out of a Little Italy restaurant and then the camera pulls back with a wide shot of the street to show Chinese businesses closing in on the old neighborhood. If you didn't see it, never mind.

When I walk south along the tenuous and uncertain blocks of the northern Bowery these days, I get a feeling that everything is up in the air, unsettled. No one building, either built or under construction, makes a definitive statement. It IS like the current state of the New York Yankees, one that has finished the season but will try to be different next year. That was the point I was trying to make in a post the other day. Anxiety and uncertainty, along with too many choices, leads to a depressing state of affairs.

When I reach the transition of the northern Bowery to the owned and operated Chinese blocks to the south, I immediately feel better. First of all, we have colors - reds, greens, pinks, merlots, and what have you, vivid background awning colors advertising with clear and large signs, in English and Chinese, the lighting shops, hotels, bakeries, social associations, and more. No more subtlety, no more understated lack of assurance. The individual businesses are filled in, for the most part, providing a sense of unity.

Note: The Bowery 2007 Walk, now complete, will appear in a few days, along with a map, on the sidebar of this website. A pedestrian interpretation of Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) will follow in due course.

See the complete walk here.

The Bowery 2007 Walk: Upscaling the Flophouse

The Bowery's northern blocks, from Cooper Square south toward the Kenmare-Delancey intersection, embrace the majority of the area's new construction. The most controversial new building, the Cooper Square Hotel, looms out of scale on 3rd Avenue, just yards before the Bowery technically begins.

I've passed through the area many times, and I often see people standing across the street from the hotel looking like they want to tear it down with their bare hands. I talked to one guy the other day who wanted some affirmation