The Classic New York of Mame Dennis: A Coda, on Bank Street

At the time I set out on the recent Mame walk (see related posts following), I was trying to decide between Mame Dennis and Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, for the walk's theme. While exploring the places Auntie Mame worked following the stock market crash of 1929, I realized that both Mame and Lily share one thing in common, a crisis of social status. Mame's story of finding herself ill-equipped to fulfill the basic job requirements in the Depression echoes Bart's similar lack of preparedness at the turn of the century. But with her spirit of adventure, Mame knows how to play roles to survive and get along. Lily Bart, on the other hand, can not see her way out of the constrictions of social class and status. Doors opened for Lily, but she did not enter. Mame, as we know, opened all the new windows and doors.

In the late 1920s Patrick Dennis' aunt, Marion Tanner, the purported role model for the character, bought a handsome house on Bank Street in Greenwich Village and lived there until the 1960s. The "real" Mame did not inhabit Beekman Place, but the Village, an appropriate neighborhood for a woman with her taste in ideas and friends. According to several books and memoirs, among them, Richard Jordan's But Darling, I'm Your Auntie Mame and Eric Myers' Uncle Mame: The Life of Patrick Dennis, Marion Tanner was indeed an eccentric wealthy woman of keen intellect, but not quite the caricature that the nephew created.

Patrick Dennis lived his own colorful life, marrying and becoming a father of two children, all the while grappling with issues of bisexuality, and later launching a career as a butler, including a stint for McDonald's founder, Ray Kroc. According to one story, Patrick was once asked about the inspirational source of Mame, and he pointed to himself. At some point he and his aunt had a falling out, and the politics of the family grew complicated. Stricken with pancreatic cancer, Patrick died in 1976 at the age of 55.

While walking along Bank Street last week, I met a woman who knew Marion Tanner. She said Tanner was one of the most brilliant women she had ever known, but "with a giant screw loose." In the 1960s, Tanner turned her house at 72 Bank Street into several apartments for renters, but in time, she let artists, and later ill people, drug addicts, and other unfortunate souls stay there. She eventually lost the house through non-payment of taxes. "Mame" lived the remainder of her years at a retirement home on Hudson St. She died in 1985 at the age of 94.

The woman I met chastised me a bit for asking questions, saying that this was "an old story." But, sometimes the old stories are never told. In the end, what remains is the moral of the fictional story, and the one worth repeating -

"Live, live, live!"
"Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!"

Image: Bank Street, West Village, New York, New York. April 2008.

See related posts:
Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map
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

Coming next: The walk, and a map.

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: 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

The Liberation Theology of Mame Dennis

I can't remember the year I first saw the 1958 movie Auntie Mame, starring Rosalind Russell, but the persona of the wildly eccentric aunt made an enormous impression on me. Curled up on the floor in a Dallas suburban home and watching Mame open new doors for her orphan nephew, I graduated from the Dorothy Gale School of No Place Like Home to a budding sophisticate. I wanted Auntie Mame to take me, too, to new places and to teach me how to live life large.

A year or so ago here in New York, I attended a Sunday morning service at a large Episcopal church on Fifth Avenue, and the visiting priest (a woman, by the way) took as her sermon topic the Christ-like example of Mame Dennis. No kidding. The priest extolled the virtues of Auntie Mame's large spirit, anti-bigotry and generosity, and told us we would do well to follow in her righteous path. At the end of the sermon, I could have passed out from happiness.

My high school in Dallas put on a production of the musical version. I think I was in the chorus, not having aspirations to try out for the leads. I can't sing, at least at any kind of Broadway level. Nevertheless, the part of Vera Charles, an actress and Mame's bosom buddy, was typecast with a 17-year-old classmate who already seemed graduated beyond her years to a boozy, hard-talking sophisticate. She was none of these things, but she had the right husky voice. All of us knew she had to play Vera. Agnes Gooch, Mame's homely secretary, was played by a brilliant character actress who later enjoyed a career in New York experimental theater.

All grown up now, I'm reading Patrick Dennis' book, Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade, published in 1955, and enjoying the witty charm of the author. The book was republished in a new trade paperback edition on September 11, 2001 (Amazon). For obvious reasons, attentions of the city and world were elsewhere on that day.

I plan to walk us through the New York of Mame Dennis, layering an older vanishing Manhattan with the newer one taking its place. In the course of the walk I will pass on what I've learned about the "real" Mame, if indeed there was one. As a tease, I end with this intriguing item:

From Time Magazine Obit. November 11, 1985
DIED. Marion Tanner, ninetyish, quirky, colorful, real-life model for the heroine of the Broadway musical Mame, which was based on the 1955 novel Auntie Mame, written by her nephew Edward Everett Tanner III under the pen name Patrick Dennis; of pneumonia precipitated by a stroke; in a New York City nursing home. For more than three decades she ran a salon for struggling artists, writers, self-styled radicals and, later, drifters. In 1964, unable to meet mortgage payments, she was evicted from her house, prompting a deputy sheriff on the case to remark, "She is an amazing woman . . . In an earlier time, she might have been a saint."

Image: Beekman Place. Patrick and Norah, his Irish nanny, arrive in New York at Grand Central Terminal and then take a taxi to 3 Beekman Place, the residence of his Auntie Mame.

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
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis
A Walk in Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, the U.N., Tudor City, and E. 42nd St.
Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

After scouting new walks around Midtown East today, I made my way back to Grand Central Terminal to catch a downtown train home. When I entered the terminal I noticed that the light looked particularly theatrical. While I did see a cameraman setting up a tracking shot (that's his foot on the dolly to the right), a telltale sign that the terminal would make it into yet another motion picture, the light beaming down on the floor came not from artificial spots but from the spring sun beaming through the massive windows. Whoever stepped into that bright spot today, like the people above, cast themselves in their own drama.

In designing the next themed walk for this website, I wanted to focus on a literary character important to New York mythology. I couldn't decide whether to follow Lily Bart, the central character of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, or Mame Dennis, the fabulous eccentric of Patrick Dennis' Auntie Mame. Both books open their New York stories at Grand Central Terminal. The House of Mirth begins with Lawrence Selden catching a glimpse of Lily Bart. After their joyful exchange of flirtatious witticisms, the couple walk up Madison Avenue. In Auntie Mame, the orphan, Patrick, and his nanny, Norah, travel by train to New York and arrive at Grand Central. From there they catch a taxi to 3 Beekman Place to meet his new legal guardian. Patrick doesn't know much about his late father's sister, only that she is "a very peculiar woman."

Walking helps the decision-making process. In the end, I decided to leave Lawrence Selden and Lily Bart in the terminal spotlight and pick up their story another day. The story and walk I'm about the pursue, I also thought, promises to bring some subtle complexity, with its tension between autobiography and fiction. So, soon I will take Patrick Dennis to Beekman Place, and a new walk begins.

Photo by Walking Off the Big Apple. April 3, 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: 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

In Search of the Lower West Side: Before Tribeca

I've started to collect older guidebooks to New York so I can understand shifting perspectives on the city. Guides published in earlier decades provide an excellent window on how visitors understood New York as a place and also help me understand the psychogeography of the city's previous residents. When I wrote the extended posts on Greta Garbo's walks around her neighborhood near E. 52nd St., I read guidebooks published in the 1960s and 1970s to help me locate the places she would have likely visited.

No reference to Tribeca appears at all in the 1978 edition of the Michelin Green Guide for New York. The 1985 edition mentions the name "Tribeca " and explains the abbreviation. Michelin lists as its one attraction the Alternative Museum at 17 White Street, a downtown multimedia venue that now exists solely in cyberspace. The guide characterizes the area as a "neighborhood of old factories and warehouses which emerged as an artists' community in the 1970s." It was not until the mid-1980s that Tribeca started appearing on the marketable maps of the city. It was a dead zone in terms of a destination.

Not so in the Depression era. In the late 1930s, the area known as the Lower West Side was one the liveliest parts of the city. The fine WPA Guide to New York (Amazon, reprinted), published in 1939 as part of the Federal Writer's project, describes the neighborhood as pulsing with activity at all times of the day and night. Home to Washington Market, the largest fruit and market in the world, shippers, suppliers, and retailers crowded the Lower West Side to get the perishable goods quickly to their destination.

Beyond these activities, the WPA describes other businesses of the Lower West side, including fireworks dealers, a retail radio district, pet stores, ecclesiastical supply stores, and the enormous trading center for butter and eggs at the Mercantile Exchange at Hudson and Harrison. What particularly excited the imagination of the guide writers was the "Syrian Quarter" with its bakeries, pottery shops and restaurants. From the guide: "Although the fez has given way to the snap-brim, and the narghile* has been abandoned for cigarettes, the coffee houses and the tobacco and confectionary shops of the Levantines still remain."

Many of these older guide books inspire me to wander off in the city to see what remains in 2008. For my next foray into the Lower West Side I plan to take the 1939 WPA guide with me.

Image: New York Mercantile Exchange, 1886. Thomas R. Jackson, architect. 6 Harrison Street. Now condominiums.

*A hookah. Funny how things come back into fashion.

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
Walking Off Tribeca and Remembering Mostly Lunch
Walking Off Tribeca: The Lay of the Land
Walking Off Tribeca: Starting at Square One

Reflections on Reviewing Art and Culture in the Blogosphere

Google Alert! Here's a post with your name on it!

During the glamorous days of the New York theater on opening night, actors would head to a swell place like Sardi's after the performance to anxiously wait for the reviews. I imagine that during the wait, amidst a boozy haze of cigarette smoke and clinking glasses of scotch-on-the-rocks, one actor would breathlessly run in with the freshly printed early editions of the newspapers, and then someone at the table would start reading the reviews out loud to the assembled party.

Google Alert has now replaced the breathless actor as the delivery device. After posting an art review on this website, for example, I can then trace, thanks to common analytics programs, a "hit" from the location where the artist may live. I don't know for sure if it's the artist or his or her "people," but since I know that many art professionals have created Google Alerts for themselves, I think it's most likely the artist.

There have been occasions, after posting a review, when I can analytically deduce that only the artist has read the post. At these times, I regret not writing the review as a letter: "Dear Artist, I like your work, but I didn't care for the red thing in the corner."

Sorry. A good opening, but Clement Greenberg won't be seeing it.

While many artists protest that they don't pay attention to reviews, it's always good to have someone who takes notice. Many artists work hard all the time and particularly drive themselves hard to prepare for an opening. I walk around New York feeling frustrated that there are too many artists in search of one decent review.

I'm not talking about promotional puff pieces of two sentences with a picture. I'm talking a 500-word review with description, evaluation and interpretation, one that gives the reader a sense of the artist. Writing a real review is hard.

There's little method to my own madness. Sometimes, I will seek out a particular exhibit, but often it's one I've encountered by chance. Out of the zillions of exhibits, I select for review a handful that inspire me to write. That's how I felt with my recent reviews of Rosalind Solomon, Luc Tuymans, Macbeth, and Jasper Johns. And, in my case, I have other things on my blogging agenda. I have to keep walking.

While I've found some excellent examples of arts writing in new media, the blogosphere and the expansion of internet journalism has not yet produced a new golden age of art criticism, I'm afraid. It's very easy to write, "I ate pancakes this morning. Last night I went to the Whitney opening party. The tequila drinks were good. I just broke up with my boyfriend."

When blogging about art becomes as lucrative as blogging about blogging, this new golden age may come to pass. I can't wait.

Image: Man reading newspaper while waiting for streetcar. Streetcar station, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Russell Lee, photographer. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF33-012324-M3 DLC (b&w film nitrate neg.)

Pack Arts Journalism in the Age of Un-Art: Writing About the Whitney Biennial

Though I have yet to see the newly-opened Whitney Biennial, I enjoy my biennial hobby of reading all the reviews before I go. I'm always looking to test my thesis that something I call "pack arts criticism" is at work. I'll explain. "Pack journalism" is a term often used to characterize the tendency of political journalists to cover a story with a single mindset, and I think arts journalism works the same way. Within days of the opening of any Biennial, I start to see a consensus building among the critics, often lead by critics at the major news outlets. The critical reception of the 2008 Whitney Biennial, which opened yesterday, is shaping up in a similar way.

Holland Cotter, in today's review of the Whitney Biennial for The New York Times connects the exhibition with an economy in recession. He characterizes the Biennial, with its "uncharismatic surfaces, complicated back stories," as an "unglamorous, even prosaic affair." Later in the review, he describes the biennial as a "hermetic, uningratiating show." Now that Cotter has set this tone, I'm watching other critics who are less sure of their art critical skills to follow his un-lead.

David Cohen and Alexandra Peers joined Cotter in setting the tone for future critics, penning early reviews, for their respective media outlets. Cohen, in his review at the New York Sun, prefers "anti" over "un" for his evaluation. He writes of the Biennial, "Instead, it is simply the lack of formal cohesion that suffices as the deflationary, antiheroic, anti-Art-with-a-big-A statement for most of these artists." Peers, writing about the opening for New York Magazine, veers toward the word "unfinished." She writes of the less-than-enthusiastic response, "The dominant aesthetic was so tentative and half-done that one rival institution’s curator wondered if artists racing to make deadlines hadn’t finished."

The curators set the tone themselves. Shamim M. Momin and Henriette Huldisch pitched the themes of un-ness in their conceptualization for the exhibit. Time Magazine's Richard Lacayo asked them their thoughts while organizing the show, especially what Huldisch terms as "lessness," a theme on which she elaborates more in the catalogue. In a blog post for Time, Huldisch defined "lessness" for Lucayo as follows: "One is a tendency towards non-spectable, non-monumentalism. I talk about three different directions. One is failure as a key motif. Another is an inclination to use modest, humble materials. And lastly there's this notion of people making smaller, more localized gestures that have an 'in the moment' aspect."

Well. Talk about lowering expectations. And she sure knows how to make up words. "Lessness" is the title of a Samuel Beckett story, but that's about the extent of its use as a real word, as far as I know. "Non-spectable" is also a non-starter. If the curator is arguing, and she may be, that the Whitney Biennial is less than spectacular, without any "spectable" attraction and in which failure is certainly an option, then I'm not too surprised that critics seem to be searching for an artist here and there about whose work there would be something nice to say.

Following the high-profile opening of "Unmonumental" (not a real word either), the inaugural exhibit at the New Museum, the Whitney has ushered in The Age of "Whatever." These early reviews, all restrained and tentative and probably more polite than they wanted, will likely set the tone for others over the next few weeks. In summation: Here's the Whitney Biennial. Come see it or not. Whatever.

Image: Photo of a chair in a gutter in Tribeca, an un-art artifact by Walking Off the Big Apple. March 2008.

See related posts: Best Chance to Get Into the Whitney Biennial? Don't Turn 40 and More on the 2008 Whitney Biennial Selections: The Global M.F.A.

Call for Volunteer Contributors: Attention Far-Flung Flâneurs, Walkers, and Peripatetic Writers

If you have been reading Walking Off the Big Apple, you know that the site has started to receive serious attention. Manhattan User's Guide in October described the site as their favorite pastime, and The New York Times added WOTBA to their City Room Blogroll. Stanley Fish quoted WOTBA in his review of the New Museum. Fancy that!

I think Walking Off the Big Apple would be even ten times more fabulous if it included guest walks from around the globe. The readership has always been international and not just confined to the greater Big Apple area. Plus, I get tired of the sound of my own twangy voice.

I invite interested walkers and flâneurs (see the gift list post for the distinction) to author a guest walk for WOTBA (the silly abbreviation for Walking Off the Big Apple). Maybe you have a favorite street or neighborhood you would like to share with WOTBA's global audience. I will serve as the gentle editor for your post. Feel free to take pictures or make illustrations for your walk. You may use your own name in its entirety, if you wish, or an abbreviated one or a colorful pen name. I don't need more than 500 words. Previously published walks will not be considered. No money will exchange hands. I will sing your praises.

I operate on a whimsical schedule as it is, so I would not hold anyone to a strict deadline. I have previously sent out this call to a handful of global readers who have expressed enthusiasm for this site, but as true flâneurs, they are proudly slow.

Please write walkbigapple@yahoo.com if interested in sharing a walk from your neck of the woods with the worldwide WOTBA audience. Thank you!

Image: Inside the Daily News building. 42nd Street, New York, New York.

Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge and The Paterson Strike Pageant

From the walk, Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe and New York City. The walk explores the worlds of Dodge and O'Keeffe, their intertwined biographies, and their individual decisions to leave New York for New Mexico. Several stops along the way need to be imagined, as the buildings in which events took place do not exist any longer.

In the late spring and early summer of 1913, Margaret Sanger, Max Eastman, John Sloan and his wife Dolly, the Harvard-educated radical journalist John Reed (see Warren Beatty's Reds), I.W.W. leader Big Bill Haywood, and others worked tirelessly to organize the Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913. Over a thousand workers in the silk mill industry who had walked off their jobs earlier in the year took part in the elaborate staging of their plight.The venue was Madison Square Garden, when the Garden was located off Madison Square Park.

Dodge writes, "No one realized the fun of having placed the letters I.W.W. ten feet high on each of the four sides of the Madison Square Tower in bright red electric lights, so that they could be seen from one end of town to the other." (from Movers and Shakers)

In recounting the events of the pageant, Dodge acknowledges, "Everybody worked except me." Dodge's job, as she saw it, was to inspire her then-lover, John Reed, and raise money. Dodge, as a wealthy Fifth Avenue heiress, spent a lot of energy trying to convince the anarchists in her circle that she was a good capitalist. The most humorous parts of her autobiography, although I don't think she saw them as funny, involve her worries that her friend Emma Goldman might possibly kill her.

to be continued....See previous related posts.

Fifth Avenue & The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge Sees Art By "A Schoolteacher Out West"

A continuation of the walk, Fifth Avenue & The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O'Keeffe, and New York City. See related posts.

Flashback: In the Fall of 1915 Georgia O'Keeffe was teaching at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina where she started working on a series of charcoal drawings. She tried out new techniques she had learned from her NY teacher Arthur Wesley Dow, especially a new way to treat light and dark, and the resulting work was like nothing she had done before. She sent some of these drawings to her close art school friend, Anita Pollitzer, who in turn showed them to Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 Gallery on January 1, 1916.

Every artist could use an Anita Pollitzer. The daughter of a wealthy Charleston, South Carolina family, Pollitzer could turn on the Southern charm. A burgeoning artist in her youth, she later made a name for herself as a suffragette and activist for the National Women's Party. Showing charcoal drawings of an unknown artist friend to someone as established as Stieglitz takes a great deal of panache.

Stieglitz loved the drawings and exhibited them without O'Keeffe's knowledge. She was angered that he did not ask her consent, but after talking it over with him, she agreed to let him exhibit her work. In August of 1916 she moved to Canyon, Texas to teach at West Texas State Normal College.

Mabel Dodge didn't often leave her place at 23 Fifth Avenue, but the 291 Gallery, a mile or so up the avenue, was "one of the few places where I went." One day in 1916 she met painter Marsden Hartley at the gallery, and Stieglitz "showed us some curious black and white drawings by a schoolteacher out west. Presently he hung them on the walls...This was the first work we saw of Georgia O'Keeffe." (Movers and Shakers)

The moral of this story, for all artists in the audience, is to find a nice flirtatious Southern friend who will brazenly show your work to dealers.

Image: Georgia O'Keeffe, Drawing No. 13, 1915. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Alfred Stieglitz Collection.

Gertrude Stein, The Big Bear Buddha of Bryant Park

Part of the walk, Fifth Avenue & The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O'Keeffe, and New York City

"In a large studio in Paris, hung with paintings by Renoir, Matisse and Picasso, Gertrude Stein is doing with words what Picasso is doing with paint. She is impelling language to induce new states of consciousness, and in doing so language becomes with her a creative art rather than a mirror of history."

- from SPECULATIONS, OR POST-IMPRESSIONS IN PROSE by Mabel Dodge (Arts and Decoration, March, 1913). Dodge's essay on the modernist, experimental writing of Gertrude Stein helped popularize the author in the United States. The essay was published and distributed at the 1913 Armory Show, the landmark blockbuster exhibition that introduced European modernism to New York.

Gertrude Stein and Mabel Dodge had frequent misunderstandings and did not always get along. At one point Dodge asked Gertrude's brother, Leo, why Gertrude seemed so distant, and according to Dodge, "he laughed and said because there was a doubt in her mind about who was the bear and who was leading the bear!" (Mabel Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers. Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1936.)

Image: Sculpture of Gertrude Stein, Bryant Park. On the right, behind Stein's left shoulder, is the base of the Radiator Building, the subject of one of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings. The sculpture is a casting based on a 1923 model made in Paris by Jo Davidson (1883-1952).

Image by Walking Off the Big Apple, New York, New York. January 17, 2008. From this angle, Gertrude looks gigantic, but actually it's a modest life-size statue.

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....

"Opium-Eating is Not Congenial to Walking," Says Virginia Woolf's Father

Thumbing through my vintage walking books and reading descriptions of the routine perambulations of the most famous writers in literature, I hang my head in shame over how little I walk. Essays about walking published prior to our own era make note of standard daily walks in the twenty-to-thirty mile range, far longer than the 10,000 steps or five miles recommended these days.

Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf and a walking enthusiast, wrote an essay "In Praise of Walking" describing the relationship of walking to the development of English literature. He writes, "The literary movement at the end of the eighteenth century was obviously due in great part, if not mainly to the renewed practice of walking." He cites William Wordsworth's walks in the Lakes and the Alps and Thomas De Quincey's daily ten miles. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, though consumed by bad habits, could walk farther than most avid walkers today:

"Opium-eating is not congenial to walking, yet even Coleridge, after beginning the habit, speaks of walking forty miles a day in Scotland, and as well all know, the great manifesto of the new school of poetry, the "Lyrical Ballads," was suggested by the famous walk with Wordsworth, when the first stanzas of the 'Ancient Mariner' were composed."

Stephen argues that all the great writers, with some exception, were "enthusiastic walkers." The greater the distance the more capable the writer, Stephen asserts, comparing the accomplishments of the lame Sir Walter Scott, who walked twenty and thirty miles a day, to the morbid obsessions of Lord Byron, a couch potato.

Fifth Avenue & The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O'Keeffe, and New York City (A Walk)

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Introduction

Years ago, in the plaza of Taos, New Mexico, my mother and I struck up a conversation with a guy who ran a sandwich stand. He told us he was a New Yorker, a former business executive who decided on a whim one day to move out west. While stuck in traffic for hours on the Long Island Expressway, he decided to go home, collect the wife and children, and leave New York for good. He said he never regretted the decision, and he was happy selling sandwiches on the Taos plaza.

Mabel Dodge (1879-1962), the wealthy heiress at 23 Fifth Avenue, and Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), the famous artist whose first exhibit was held at 291 Fifth Avenue, could have lived out the rest of their lives in New York. In 1917 Dodge married painter Maurice Sterne and had her eye on a new apartment at 23 Washington Square North. In April of 1917 Alfred Stieglitz exhibited a series of O'Keeffe's watercolors at his 291 gallery, and soon the two would be living together. They married in 1924.

After a series of nervous ailments, Dodge decided her future was in the west. In December 1917 she moved to Taos, New Mexico with her husband and their friend, Elsie Clews Parsons. Twelve years later, in the summer of 1929, O'Keeffe traveled to New Mexico with her friend, Beck Strand. The two stayed at Mabel's ranch. Mabel had divorced Sterne and married Tony Luhan, a Native American. For O'Keeffe, the visit presented a new palette, not just for her art but for her life. Upon returning to New York her art career blossomed (so to speak), but in 1932 and 1933 she also suffered from bouts of psychoneurosis. In 1934, still recuperating, she returned to New Mexico and found her ranch.

New York can be beautiful, but not in the way that New Mexico can be beautiful. I think New Mexico will continue to hypnotize those of us who live back east. When I get sick of the city, I sit on my terrace and look west. I imagine the Sangre de Christo Mountains in the setting red-orange sun and cow's skulls with white calico roses descending over the azure sky. I think then, "How much longer can I take this? What Ghost Ranch waits for me?"

A walk up Fifth Avenue continues with Ladies of the Canyon

(top) Mabel Dodge Luhan. Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1934, and (bottom) Georgia O'Keeffe. Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1950.

The Violence of Walking, According to Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Walking, then, is a perpetual falling with a perpetual self-recovery. It is a most complex, violent, and perilous operation, which we divest of its extreme danger only by continual practice from a very early period in life. We find how complex it is when we attempt to analyze it, and we see that we never understood it thoroughly until the time of the instantaneous photograph. We learn how violent it is, when we walk against a post or a door in the dark. We discover how dangerous it is, when we slip or trip and come down, perhaps breaking or dislocating our limbs, or overlook the last flight of stairs, and discover with what headlong violence we have been hurling ourselves forward."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Physiology of Walking," from Pages From an Old Volume of Life: A Collection of Essays, 1857-1881. Seventh Edition. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1887

Washington Irving's Solitary Walk Through Christmas

"Stranger and sojourner as I am in the land,--though for me no social hearth may blaze, no hospitable roof throw open its doors, nor the warm grasp of friendship welcome me at the threshold,--yet I feel the influence of the season beaming into my soul from the happy looks of those around me." - Washington Irving

It's well known that New York native and storyteller Washington Irving made Christmas an important holiday in the United States, reworking Dutch folk tales of Saint Nicholas to invent the jolly, though obese, Santa Claus and publishing popular "sketches" of the time he spent Christmas in rural England with an aristocratic family .

A subtle and important aspect of Irving's writings about the holiday is how he approached a convivial family-oriented time of year as a homesick solitary man. The back story: The much loved and charming youngest child of a large New York merchant class family, Irving was pressed to study for the law though he loved literature and drawing. He and his brother Peter started writing the witty satirical history of New York, but he was left with finishing it when Peter was called away to England for the family business. During this time Washington fell in love with Matilda Hoffman, the 17-year-old daughter of a judge, and he put his literary career aside to join the judge's law practice to demonstrate his responsibility. Matilda soon took ill of consumption and died in April of 1809. Irving never married.

Irving left the United States in 1815 and remained overseas for the next seventeen years, with most of the time spent in England. There he wrote The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, the book that includes his most well-known stories, including the Christmas sketches.

In describing his experiences with the traditional English Christmas celebration, he admits to fighting what we would call seasonal affect disorder and the temptation to feel bitter about being all alone. He writes, "He who can turn churlishly away from contemplating the felicity of his fellow beings, and sit down darkling and repining in his loneliness when all around is joyful, may have his moments of strong excitement and selfish gratification, but he wants the genial and social sympathies which constitute the charm of a merry Christmas." You can tell he's been there.

So, in describing how he feels, he advocates letting the merry holiday contagion to reach those dark places inside. The important story is not that Washington Irving popularized the ideal of the family Christmas, but that he figured out also, as a single person, how to cope with it. We tend to forget that part in school.

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.