Lost New York

Fales Library New York University New York City Fall 2009 An Exhibition Sponsored by Fales Library, the Department of English, and the Humanities Initiative at New York University LOST NEW YORK b LOST NEW YORK 16 0 9–20 09 An Exhibition Sponsored by Fales Libr ary, the Department of English, and the Humanities Initiative at New York University Fales Library New York University New York City Fall 2009 LOST NEW YORK d Contributors Jane Greenway Carr is a doctoral student in the Department of English at New York University, where she co-organizes the Colloquium in American Literature and Culture. She is currently interning at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her dissertation will examine relationships between reading and occasions of citizenship. John Easterbrook is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at New York University, where he studies the literatures of the colonial Americas. His dissertation will explore theories of transnationalism and the production of citizenship in colonial travel narratives. Kristen Doyle Highland is a doctoral student in the English department at New York University specializing in early American and antebellum literature. Her research interests include the print culture of early national America, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular culture, and the Atlantic world. John Melillo is a Ph.D. candidate in British and American literature at New York University. His dissertation, “Outside In: The Sound of Noise from Dada to Punk,” examines the influence of noise on poetics and poetry through the twentieth century. John writes music criticism in a variety of online publications and plays in the New York City–based band Jodienda. Cyrus R. K. Patell is associate professor of English at New York University and the author of U.S. Multicultural Literatures: An Introduction to Emergent Writing After 1940 (forthcoming from NYU Press). Together with Deborah Lindsay Williams, he is coediting the eighth volume of the forthcoming Oxford History of the Novel in English, which treats American fiction after 1940. Marvin J. Taylor is director of the Fales Library and Special Collections at NYU, where he founded the Downtown New York Collection. He is also the editor of The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984 (Princeton, 2006). Bryan Waterman is associate professor of English at New York University and the author of Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature (Johns Hopkins, 2007). With Cyrus Patell, he is coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York City (forthcoming in 2010); they also maintain a weblog about New York cultural history at http:// ahistoryofnewyork.com. LOST NEW YORK e Contents Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Cyrus R. K. Patell and Bryan Waterman “we can use those folk and turn them into Hollanders”: Cosmopolitan Citizenship and Adriaen van der Donck’s A Description of New Netherland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 John Easterbrook Gotham: The Other New York. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Kristen Doyle Highland Diving in the “Dumps”: Myth and Performance in the Ultimate American City. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Jane Greenway Carr Secret Locations in the Lower East Side: Downtown Poetics 1960–1980. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 John Melillo LOST NEW YORK f F. W. Beers. Atlas of New York and Vicinity. New York: F. W. Beers, A. D. Ellis, and G. G. Soule, 1867. Plan of New York and Brooklyn. This engraved map from F. W. Beers’s Atlas of New York and Vicinity includes routes downtown (via the avenues and Broadway), the area of Central Park (then under construction), and the visual configuration of the city’s boroughs prior to the 1898 consolidation. Beers lived in Brooklyn, where he was employed as head of the map division in the Brooklyn Office of Public Records for thirty-five years. LOST NEW YORK g Introduction Cyrus R. K. Patell and Bryan Waterman he essays in this volume are part of New York University’s celebration of both the four-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s exploration of New York Bay and the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of A History of New York by Washington Irving. Accompanied by a conference, sponsored by the Department of English and the Humanities Initiative, and an exhibition at the Fales Library, this volume explores the dynamics of creativity and destruction, nostalgia and invention, that have marked efforts to “do New York” (the advice that Henry James once offered to Edith Wharton). The essays collected here investigate the relationships between literary imagination and the archives, between loss and remembrance, and between preservation and development in the long and storied history of one of the world’s great cities. In the opening chapter of Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, famously invites us to walk with him down the eastern shoreline and through the bustling streets of lower Manhattan: LOST NEW YORK 1 Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. Ishmael’s “insular city of the Manhattoes” is a port of call, a gateway to the ocean, and a cosmopolitan magnet for all the peoples of the world. No longer. The city is still cosmopolitan, to be sure, but most of the people and goods it draws arrive by air, road, and rail. Ishmael’s seafaring city is now almost entirely lost to us: the island today is girded by motorways; the few tall ships docked on its piers are museum pieces, some seaworthy, some not; the Queen Mary 2 now berths in Brooklyn; and the Fulton Fish Market has relocated to the Bronx. Yet the moment in the city’s history captured in the “Loomings” chapter of Moby-Dick is itself made possible only through the erasure of a previous New York. Even as he acknowledged the excitement of New York in an 1847 letter to his sister, Washington Irving—Melville’s senior by thirty-six years—remembered an earlier version of the city with a tinge of nostalgia: New York, as you knew it, was a mere corner of the present huge city, and that corner is all changed, pulled to pieces, burnt down and rebuilt—all but our little native nest in William Street, which still retains some of its old features; though those are daily altering. I can hardly realize that within my term of life, this great crowded metropolis, so full of life[,] bustle, noise, shew and splendour, was a quiet little City of some fifty or sixty thousand inhabitants. It is really now one of the most rucketing cities in the world and reminds me of one of the great European cities (Frankfort for instance) in the time of an annual fair—Here it is a Fair almost all year round. (Qtd. in Homberger 70) Irving knew better than most about the ways in which the past becomes lost to us even as it continues to influence and inflect our present. His bestselling History of New York, first published in 1809, was a response to the New-York Historical Society’s call for materials pertaining to the city’s Dutch past and to 2 lo s tNEW n YORK ew york LOST Samuel Latham Mitchill’s guidebook Picture of New York (1807), which gave that past short shrift. Drawing on a mixture of local lore and his own imaginative faculties, Irving recreated that Dutch past in vivid, comic prose that still confounds today’s historians: the question of how much of the History is Irving’s own invention remains an open question. One thing that hasn’t changed in the two hundred years since Irving published his History is the relative paucity of generally available primary materials related to New Amsterdam. Most of the archival materials that have been preserved are written in archaic forms of Dutch and have not been translated. Since 1974, the New Netherland Project, directed by Charles Gehring and based in Albany, has been translating and publishing documents held by the New York State Library and the New York State Archives, with approximately 24 volumes anticipated when the project is complete. Literary texts, however, are another story. The intrepid reader who wishes to investigate New Amsterdam’s literary writing must venture to the library to find Narratives of New Netherland, 1609–1664, published in 1909, and Anthology of New Netherland, or Translations from the Early Dutch Poets of New York, with Memoirs of Their Lives, originally published in 1865 and reprinted in 1969. For the most part, literary New Amsterdam has been all but lost to American literary history. In his essay “‘we can use those folk and turn them into Hollanders’: Cosmopolitan Citizenship and Adriaen van der Donck’s A Description of New Netherland,” John Easterbrook explores an important text recently published in a reliable scholarly edition. Van der Donck composed the Description after the outbreak of the first Anglo-Dutch War in 1650, which had dashed his hopes of leading a reform of the government of New Amsterdam. What emerges in the Description, according to Easterbrook, “is an invocation of the colony as it existed in Van der Donck’s mind”—a city of imagination, if you will, already rooted in nostalgia for a lost past—“encompassing the vast knowledge and experience accumulated since his first arrival in New Netherland in 1641.” Easterbrook’s analysis supports the contention of historians such as Thomas Bender, Kenneth Jackson, and Russell Shorto that from its Dutch colonial origins, New York has offered a cosmopolitan alternative to the xenophobia that was prevalent in other colonies and that has come to play such a large role in the American national imaginary. Bender has argued that “the outlook associated with New York’s cosmopolitan experience has been unable to establish itself as an American standard” because of the dominance of two “influential myths of America,” one based on New England Puritanism, the other on Jeffersonian agrarianism. Evoking “the virtues of the small town and the agricultural frontier,” these two myths “have come to be associated with the essential America.” Bender notes i n t r LOST odu ion NEWc tYORK 3 that despite their differences, Puritanism and Jeffersonianism share one crucial characteristic: “both reject the idea of difference. Neither can give positive cultural or political value to heterogeneity or conflict. Each in its own way is xenophobic, and that distances both of them from the conditions of modern life, especially as represented by the historic cosmopolitanism of New York and, increasingly, other cities in the United States” (185–86). Reading Van der Donck’s Description in the light of recent theories that reconceive cosmopolitanism less as an alternative to nationalism than as a way of embracing cultural difference, Easterbrook stresses the importance of Van der Donck’s emphasis on residence rather than birth as the basis for citizenship. The Description helps us understand how New Amsterdam evolved into what Easterbrook describes as “a rooted, cosmopolitan space whose porous borders allowed for cultural centers everywhere and circumferences nowhere”—in short, “a global city.” Perhaps another reason that Van der Donck’s contribution to literary history has been nearly lost lies in the fact that Van der Donck does not appear in the first edition of Washington Irving’s celebrated History of New York and is relegated to a mere footnote in the second. Irving’s New Amsterdam is cosmopolitan in its appreciation for religious tolerance and its hospitality to all sorts of commerce, but Irving believed that it was only in his lifetime that New York became a “global city.” It was Irving, of course, who gave New York the nickname “Gotham,” forty years before writing about the “rucketing” city to his sister, and his use of the term anticipates his subsequent description of New York as “a Fair almost all year round.” Even in 1807, there is something slightly mad about the burg as far as Irving is concerned. In her essay “Gotham: The Other New York,” Kristen Doyle Highland traces the evolution of the name Gotham back to its appearance in a collection of medieval folk tales published in 1526. Highland shows how Irving appropriated a type that signified foolishness and used it to poke fun at New Yorkers in his satirical collection Salmagundi (coauthored during 1807–1808 with his brother William and their friend James Kirke Paulding). Irving’s literary reinvention of the city as Gotham relied on the displacement of one New York by another. “Vanished,” writes Highland, “is a New York founded on earnestness, hard work, and simple pleasures, replaced by an ‘other’ New York, a Gotham of grasping materialism. Not the silly fools of old, this new generation of Gothamites allows itself to be fooled by pretension and social artifice.” Highland recovers the irony behind the name “Gotham,” an irony generally lost to the cultural memory of New Yorkers and even disavowed by some of the city’s most eminent current historians. “Gotham,” Highland shows us, has signified many things during the 4 lo s tNEW n YORK ew york LOST past two centuries, but it has always denoted an alternative New York: at times a utopian space of cosmopolitan possibility that would have pleased Adriaen van der Donck, at other times a phantasmagorical space of almost radical dystopia that would have dismayed him. Recovering a set of lost cultural mythologies is the goal of Jane Greenway Carr’s essay “Diving in the ‘Dumps’: Myth and Performance in the Ultimate American City,” which investigates three little-known stage pieces by writers who were drawn to Greenwich Village in the early twentieth century: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dawn Powell, and E. E. Cummings. Carr shows how playwriting provokes these authors to explore New York mythologies that express nostalgia while trying to avoid its pitfalls. Millay’s libretto for Deems Taylor’s opera The King’s Henchmen draws on Anglo-Saxon culture but serves as a way of reimagining New York as a city of fashions and dreams. Powell’s play Walking Down Broadway reconceives the familiar motif of the Broadway promenade as a way of charting the city’s shifting physical and moral geographies. E. E. Cummings’s ballet scenario Tom becomes not only a vehicle for an exploration of the dynamics of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin but also a way of memorializing a moment in the city’s theatre history in which “Tom shows” and dramatic adaptations of Stowe’s novel were all the rage. Considering these texts together allows Carr to evoke subtleties in the texture of the heyday of Village Bohemia that are often lost in accounts that focus on works that are more canonical and more overtly centered in New York. For the downtown artists discussed by John Melillo in his essay “Secret Locations in the Lower East Side: Downtown Poetics 1960-1980,” lost New York is also a provocation for the creation of new forms. But where Millay, Powell, and Cummings sought to evoke lost moments, these downtown artists make use of lost or forgotten spaces to create fugitive aesthetic productions in a variety of forms, from mimeographed little magazines to performances that blended music and poetry. Nonetheless, these downtown artists share with the writers whom Carr discusses a profound understanding of the power of performance. As Melillo puts it, for downtown artists, poets, and performers, “making art had a theatrical, incantatory, and celebratory element,” one that encouraged the formation of new communities around the work of local artists. Changes in the city’s demographics and real estate markets, combined with changes in media and technology, have rendered such communities yet another part of lost New York, but, as Melillo suggests, even “lost” they continue to affect the city’s cultural present. The essays in this collection share an appreciation for the ways in which the different lost New Yorks they evoke continue to have afterlives as New York i n t r LOST odu ion NEWc tYORK 5 begins the twenty-first century. Indeed, it may well be that one of the hallmarks of New York writing is a particular preoccupation with the past, a piquant sense that New York’s modernity is always haunted by the ghosts of previous modernities, born of what the architectural historian Max Page has called “the creative destruction of Manhattan.” You can’t imagine the things that I have seen, the city seems to say to us: from New Amsterdam to “Gotham” to the “rucketing” city of the 1840s; from Ishmael’s “Manhattoes” to Greenwich Village Bohemia to the downtown scene of the late twentieth century. But if you try, you may create something beautiful yourself. E. B. White wrote that the truest New Yorkers are not those who were born here, or those who commute to it to work every day, but rather those who have come to the city to pursue a particular vision of urban existence—the “settlers” who give the city its “passion” (18). They arrive in the city to find that what drew them here is already lost to them—and that the city offers them something else instead. So these new New Yorkers embrace what they find, often eager to preserve more than they displace, and cling to it even when it, too, has receded into the past. Like Adriaen van der Donck, the novelist Colson Whitehead puts a premium on residence in the city: you become a New Yorker, he believes, “the first time you say, That used to be Munsey’s, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet café plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now” (3-4). The essays that follow evoke a variety of lost New Yorks, but above all they suggest that no New York is ever really lost to those willing to look hard as they do a little digging. Cyrus R. K. Patell and Bryan Waterman New York City summer 2009 6 lo s tNEW n YORK ew york LOST Works Cited Bender, Thomas. The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea. New York: New Press, 2002. Homberger, Eric. The Historical Atlas of New York City. 2nd ed. New York: Holt, 2005. Page, Max. The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. White, E. B. Here Is New York. New York: Little Bookroom, 2000. Whitehead, Colson. The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts. New York: Doubleday, 2003. i n t r LOST odu ion NEWc tYORK 7 Peter Stuyvesant. Land grant to Jacob Bacher and Isaacq Bedlo. New Amsterdam: August 19, 1664. Autograph document, signed. 1 page. Richard Maass Collection, Fales Library, New York Unversity. This land grant, from the Richard Maass Collection, was written in a mixture of Dutch and Latin. Here, Stuyvesant grants a parcel of land on Staten Island to Bacher and Bedlo just weeks before the English navy seized control of Fort Amsterdam. 8 lo s tNEW n YORK ew york LOST “we can use those folk and turn them into Hollanders”: Cosmopolitan Citizenship and Adriaen van der Donck’s A Description of New Netherland John Easterbrook n 1649, Adriaen van der Donck left the harbor of New Amsterdam and sailed across the Atlantic for the second time in his life. Returning to the United Provinces of the Netherlands, Van der Donck left behind his wife and adopted homeland and faced the three-month voyage back to the land of his birth in order to attempt a daring task: convince the States General in The Hague that the Dutch colony of New Netherland was withering under the autocratic rule of Director-General Peter Stuyvesant and the mismanagement of the West India Company (WIC).1 He intended to petition that the WIC be divested of its property in the colony and ask that the colony be placed under the control of the government (Shorto 217–18). In many respects, Van der Donck’s mission went exactly according to plan. In 1650, after months of hearings, the States General sided with the colonists, ordering that a municipal government LOST NEW YORK 9 be established in the city of New Amsterdam and demanding that Stuyvesant return to the Netherlands to account for his administration (229–30). Van der Donck quickly began preparations for a new government in the city, all the while preparing to return to New Amsterdam and lead the reorganization himself. As Russell Shorto notes, what happened next would dramatically alter the fate of New Amsterdam and would relegate Van der Donck’s important role in the city’s development to a forgotten page in the history books (245). As Van der Donck prepared to return to the colony, ships from the Dutch and English fleets engaged one another in the straits of Dover; hostilities that had been escalating for decades now led to a brutal confrontation between the rival fleets. The fear of war with England reinvigorated the WIC and led the States General to overturn its original ruling. To make matters worse, Van der Donck was now seen as a threat. His “activism, which only weeks before had been lauded as the full flowering of Dutch legal progressivism being applied, in a test case, to the nation’s overseas province, suddenly looked positively dangerous” (249). Van der Donck was apprehended, and his requests to return to New Amsterdam were denied: the man who earlier was hailed as a hero now found himself an outsider, feared in the country of his birth and forbidden to return to his adopted homeland. As the First Anglo-Dutch War raged and Van der Donck found himself without a home, he busied himself by writing a book about the fledgling colony on the other side of the Atlantic—a book whose eventual omission from the early American canon would mirror the fate of its author and his own forgotten legacy. First published in Dutch in 1655, A Description of New Netherland was quickly reprinted a year later but was not published in English until 1841 in a translation by Jeremiah Johnson. In 1968, the Johnson translation was published in a separate edition by historian Thomas F. O’Donnell. The inaccuracies of Johnson’s translation have been well publicized. Dutch scholar Ada van Gastel points out that “Johnson deleted words, phrases, clauses, sentences—indeed, five whole chapters. He occasionally so misrepresented van der Donck’s text as to reverse its meaning” (“Van der Donck’s Description” 411–12). Despite these inaccuracies, historians and literary critics alike have long recognized the importance of the Description.2 Louis B. Wright calls it “the colony’s most impressive piece of literature” (189). O’Donnell, in his introduction to the 1968 edition, characterizes the Description as “one of America’s oldest literary treasures. Had he written in English rather than Dutch,” O’Donnell writes, the Description “would certainly have won from posterity the same kind, if not the same amount, of veneration that has been bestowed on Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation” (x). O’Donnell succinctly narrates the reception history of the Description when he 10 “ wLOST e cNEW a nYORK u s e t h o s e f o l k . . .” writes that “Van der Donck’s book was written, published, widely read, put aside, and, alas, almost forgotten long before Bradford’s book was published at all” (x). Indeed, the lack of an adequate translation has left the Description absent from most college syllabi. Only now, with the 2008 publication of Diederik Willem Goedhuys’s translation of the Description, do we finally have a complete and accurate text with which to work. What will concern me in this essay is the way in which Van der Donck’s Description worked alongside increasingly tolerant labor and migration policies to develop a cosmopolitan model of citizenship in New Amsterdam—a model that laid the foundation for the global city of New York that we know today.3 Cosmopolitanism is not a singular or rigidly defined program. Wary of the dangers of conflating cosmopolitanism with Americanism, or replacing one form of cultural nationalism with any number of other ethnocentrisms, the cosmopolitan embraces the multiplicity of cultural practices.4 Cosmopolitanism is not the desire for a false universal, but rather a recognition of the interrelations between cultures that are crucial to the practice of cosmopolitanism, not just as an idea but as “infinite ways of being” (Pollock et al. 12).5 While critics often look with suspicion on the desire to embrace infinite ways of being, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, the arbitrary nature of national boundaries suggests “the possibility of a world in which everyone is a rooted cosmopolitan, attached to a home of his or her own, with its own cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different, places that are home to other, different, people” (“Patriots” 91). In this regard, cosmopolitanism is a decentralizing effort that demonstrates how there is not “a circle created by culture diffused from a center, but instead, that centers are everywhere and circumferences nowhere” (Pollock et al. 12). A cosmopolitan model of citizenship is thus defined not by birth, but rather by residence.6 An emphasis on residence rather than birth is central to the Description and its role in the production of citizenship within the colony, situating the text as a crucial player in the development of New Amsterdam and its cosmopolitan dynamics. In many ways, the Description is an invocation of the colony as it existed in Van der Donck’s mind, encompassing the vast knowledge and experience accumulated since his first arrival in New Netherland in 1641. Divided into sections that catalog the country in all of its wonder—including its flora, fauna, seasons, inhabitants, and an extended meditation on the nature and ways of the native beaver—the Description is an attempt to share the beauty and majesty of the colony with those in the United Provinces, despite Van der Donck’s admission that he is “unable to depict it or show it in writing, since in my view the eye alone, more so than the ear, is capable of comprehending it” (19). The e a sLOST t e NEW rbr ook YORK 11 opening section, “The Country,” is separated into chapters whose subjects range from a history of the Dutch arrival on the continent to catalogs of local vegetables, trees, and berries to descriptions of rivers and waterfalls where “the water rushes foaming, frisking, and whirling over the stony ground for about the distance of a gunshot and a half” (13). The second section, “Of the Manners and Extraordinary Qualities of the Original Natives of New Netherland,” offers a remarkably sophisticated portrait of the Indians of the Hudson Valley, complete with observations on their methods of hunting and fishing, marital rites, and the administration of law and justice. Of the five chapters missing from the Johnson translation, one is titled “Of the Universal Law of Nations.”7 Its inclusion in the Goedhuys translation offers an insight not only into Van der Donck’s description of the Native Americans but also into the political and social order advocated by Van der Donck before the States General and throughout his text. “Of all the rights, laws, and maxims observed anywhere in the world,” Van der Donck writes in the chapter, “none in particular is in force among these people other than the law of nature or of nations” (103). He goes on to state that “wind, stream, bush, field, sea, beach, and riverside are open and free to everyone of every nation with which the Indians are not embroiled in open conflict” (103). With this reference to natural law, Van der Donck invokes the work of Dutch jurist Hugo de Groot, known as Hugo Grotius and widely considered “the father of international law” (Shorto 99). As a graduate of the University of Leiden— where he studied law under the influence of Grotius—Van der Donck would have been familiar with the law of nations, which is reflected in his description of the Native Americans when he writes that “[a]ll those are free to enjoy and move about such places as though they were born there” (103).8 Throughout this chapter and the Description as a whole, Van der Donck frames the colony as a borderlands—an open and porous community of overlapping and convergence where boundaries are blurred and peoples move freely. He also suggests a privileging of residence rather than birth in the Native American community—a cosmopolitan principle advanced by the seventeenth-century Dutch and similarly promoted by Van der Donck in the city of New Amsterdam. International law in the seventeenth century bore the imprint of Grotius’s cosmopolitanism; the idea of a “united humanity” based on the movements of peoples across borders portrayed in the Description was an ideal thoroughly embraced by the Dutch.9 As “traders and sailors, whose focus was always out there: on other lands, other peoples, and their products,” the Dutch were the most tolerant country in Europe, accepting any people who were willing to work hard and build a future for themselves (Shorto 26–27). Van der Donck suggests this cosmopolitan approach to migration in the Description when he writes that 12 “ wLOST e c a nYORK u s e t h o s e f o l k . . .” NEW Claes Florisz. Port clearance for the ship Star from Amsterdam to New Amsterdam. Amsterdam: June 26, 1663. Printed document, signed. 1 page. Richard Maass Collection, Fales Library, New York University. This clearance document, from the Richard Maass Collection, shows the Star “ready with the first good wind to sail to Nieuw Amsterdam” and deliver two bales of Osnabruck linen, one chest of writing materials, and shoes, “all dry and in good condition.” Maass’s translation and notes also indicate that at least two settlers traveled on board the Star. “the Dutch have compassionate natures and regard foreigners virtually as native citizens, which is an attraction, the more so when, in addition, everyone of whatever trade he may be and who is prepared to adapt, can always get off to a good start here” (130). This tolerant approach to migration, he writes, “has become the customary practice” (130). While making explicit the colony’s open borders, Van der Donck’s statement also suggests the cultural work being performed by the Description in the seventeenth century—namely, its role in attracting new settlers to the colony. The Description was written to excite and entice a Dutch audience that, in the seventeenth century, was enjoying a period of tremendous growth and prosperity. Convincing potential settlers to leave a nation in its Golden Age was a difficult job for recruiters throughout the life of the Dutch colony; few Dutch citizens were willing to face the dangers and hardships of the voyage in order to risk the uncertainty of a transatlantic settlement project.10 Early on, the “monopoly on trade” held by the WIC, in addition to “its strict regulations of land transactions,” made the colony an unappealing destination for settlers (Foote 35). In 1628, the colony’s population was struggling and numbered only 500 settlers. In an effort to bolster settlement, historian Thelma Wills Foote writes, the WIC revised its policies to offer “‘freedoms and exempts’” normally withheld e a sLOST t e NEW r b YORK rook 13 for larger landowners “to Netherlanders who were willing to migrate to Dutch North America” (35). When even this measure failed to spark migration, the WIC extended this preferred treatment to settlers from all of Europe (35). “[A]s a further enticement,” Foote writes, the WIC “provided free ocean passage, making migration to New Netherland one of the cheapest travel packages to the New World” (35). Van der Donck’s book was written as a remedy to this population problem. In fact, population is one of the driving forces behind the entire text, as becomes apparent early on when Van der Donck describes the abundance of minerals and natural resources available in the colony. “Because the country is not yet full of people,” he writes, “these things are little regarded, but they could become important as the population grows and splendor and luxury increase” (41). Reinforcing the opportunity for work and prosperity, Van der Donck goes on to describe a disease plaguing the horses of the colony. The cause of the disease remains undiscovered because of the scarcity of qualified veterinarians in the colony, despite their being “so plentiful in some places here [in the Netherlands] that they have little to do” (44). The same population problem is reiterated when he describes the “plentiful” cod, haddock, herring, mackerel, and flounder in the waters of the colony (59). “If people were to go in for it on the basis of the experience that has been gained,” he writes, “shiploads could easily and cheaply be had nearby” (59). Van der Donck also points out the presence of seals, tuna, and whales: “These are not being caught, yet if ships were fitted out [for whaling] the catch in nearby waters could be quite adequate. The stage has not yet been reached in the country, however, for such matters to be properly taken in hand” (59). The cataloging of natural resources in the Description is supplemented throughout with diversions that drive home the main theme of the book: there is opportunity here for those who will take advantage of it. Van der Donck’s effort to promote migration was just one of the factors working to produce a cosmopolitan society in the city. During the first phases of colonization, Foote notes, Calvinists were welcome, but the WIC forbade “Lutherans, Quakers, and other religious outsiders” (41). Most Calvinists, however, were reluctant to settle the outposts that stretched north along the Hudson River. “Faced with this unforeseen contingency,” Foote writes, “the WIC rescinded its exclusionary immigration policy,” paving the way for other religious groups to populate the Dutch colony (41). Through this strengthening of religious tolerance, the connection between the Dutch desire for trade and a tolerant approach to migration begins to emerge. Realizing that a steady flow of migration was necessary to make the colony profitable, in 1640 the States General ordered the WIC to do whatever was necessary to increase settlement 14 “ wLOST e c a nYORK u s e t h o s e f o l k . . .” NEW (Middleton 18). The assembly soon “relinquished its trade monopoly” and agreed to govern the colony “‘according to the style and order of the province of Holland and the cities and manors thereof . . . [and] as far as possible, the ordinances received here in Amsterdam’” (18). The easing of trade restrictions and the “promise of local rights,” Middleton writes, soon turned New Amsterdam into “a bustling seaport” and the center of the fur trade (19). By the 1640s, eighteen different languages were spoken in the city. In the 1650s, New Netherland’s population reached thirty-five hundred people. It would soon measure fifteen hundred in New Amsterdam—the city Van der Donck describes as “the heart, head, and center of New Netherland” (65).11 As was the case throughout the life of the Dutch colony, New Netherland’s status as a haven for exiles combined with the colony’s desire for trade and a working population to create a multicultural and multivocal community. In fact, New Amsterdam saw a steady stream of settlers from neighboring colonies, including Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. With the goal of portraying New Netherland as a haven and dispelling any doubts about the potential for prosperity in the colony, Van der Donck ends his Description with a conversation between a Dutch “Patriot” and a “New Netherlander” (127). It is here, in the closing pages of his masterpiece, having spent the bulk of the book praising the colony for its natural resources, that Van der Donck (in the guise of the New Netherlander) reassures potential settlers that “many will ever find a free and untroubled refuge there and conduct free and profitable trade” (128). The conversation serves as a coda to the book as the Patriot, having already read the preceding chapters, admits at the outset that he is “satisfied that, then as now, a citizen, farmer, or other private person of whatever condition can do well for himself there” (127). With the city’s status as haven established, the conversation quickly turns to the trade opportunities available to those looking to settle in New Netherland. As has been the case throughout the rest of the book, Van der Donck admits that “[t]rade is the object and on trade we must depend” (137). Trade in the colony, however, depends on population. Pointing out that the colony already trades with Canada and New England, Van der Donck looks ahead to a time when, “with a growing population, trade can expand still more” (140). He asks, “[W]hat would prevent the New Netherlanders from trading with France, Spain, Portugal, and the entire Mediterranean equally well as from this country, given the men and the means?” The answer: “A growing population will infallibly supply those two requisites” (141). Reinforcing the notion that a person “of whatever condition” can do well in the colony, Van der Donck slides into hyperbole when he states that a growing population would benefit the colony “even if, in a manner of speaking, no e a sLOST t e NEW r b YORK rook 15 other people went there than those who had merely their bare limbs to see them through; the country would soon yield them clothing and a living” (141). That this person can be of whatever “condition” is characteristic of the tolerant labor and migration policies that evolved out of the colony’s demand for population and trade. Sociologist Gerard Delanty writes that while cosmopolitanism is often considered to be a luxury of the elite for whom travel is easy and temporary, “the cosmopolitan is not the émigré intellectual or the free-floating expatriate, but one of the millions of uprooted people who have had to leave their homeland not out of choice but out of economic or political necessity” (63). The uprooted are those people for whom Van der Donck is writing; indeed, he is one of them himself. It is New Amsterdam’s status as a haven and a refuge that situates the city as a cosmopolitan community where identities overlap and become more negotiable (64). Residence is the primary concern here, not birth. The establishment of citizenship rights based on residence in the city of New Amsterdam emerged as a direct result of Van der Donck and his work on behalf of the commonality. In 1653, Stuyvesant established a municipal government in New Amsterdam that instituted a popular government and paved the way for the city of New York. A few years later, the city instituted a “two-tier ‘Great or Small Burgher Right’ modeled on the practice introduced in Amsterdam” (Middleton 38). Providing a form of citizenship to the city’s inhabitants, the small burgher status was offered to “[a]ll native-born residents and anybody who had lived in the town for a year and six weeks, married ‘native born daughters of Burghers,’ or paid twenty guilders” (38). If a resident couldn’t afford the dues, then an installment plan was provided (Shorto 271). In effect, the privilege was available to anyone, regardless of birthplace. The great burgher right was reserved for residents “who were or ever had been ‘in the High or Supreme government of the Country,’ former and present burgomasters and schepens, ministers of the gospel, military officers, and persons of high status who paid fifty guilders” (Middleton 38). While scholars tend to understand the burgher system as upholding rigid social distinctions, Middleton writes, “social status in New Amsterdam remained fluid, and the clear-cut distinction in the two-tier civic status was more aspired to than real” (41). Indeed, most residents of New Amsterdam applied for the privilege, and “it gave even the humblest— shoemakers, chimney sweeps, tailors, blacksmiths, hatters, coopers, millers, masons—a stake in the community, a kind of minority shareholder status” (Shorto 268). The diverse city that had developed by this time was now a rooted cosmopolitan space whose porous borders allowed for cultural centers everywhere and circumferences nowhere. New Amsterdam, like its namesake in the Netherlands, was now a global city. 16 “ wLOST e cNEW a nYORK u s e t h o s e f o l k . . .” While instituting restrictions on those who could apply, the burgher system offered a remarkably accessible claim to the city for those who wanted it. The cosmopolitan citizenship of New Amsterdam was unique in that, rather than focusing the institution of citizenship on the practice of exclusion as it is conventionally conceived,12 the emphasis both here and in the Description is on inclusion. In his conversation with the Patriot, Van der Donck argues that the Netherlands is unique among other European countries because it does not run the risk of depleting its population in the United Provinces by sending settlers to Dutch North America. Rather, the Netherlands “should actually gain people, because those living in New Netherland or similar colonies turn into Hollanders as effectively as those from abroad who become citizens here and always remain loyal to us” (130). Thus, Van der Donck suggests that the acts of being a “Patriot” and a “New Netherlander” are not mutually exclusive; one can be both at the same time. This overlapping identity is possible because the Netherlands is accustomed to accepting migrants “from Europe, Germany, Westphalia, Scandinavia, Wallonia, etc.” (129–30). Rather than excluding these migrants, Van der Donck assigns them citizenship through their residence in the United Provinces and its colonies, regardless of their place of birth. “In short,” he writes, “we can use those folk and turn them into Hollanders,” effectively solving the population problem (130). Van der Donck’s statement is ironic, however, because what the Description and the evolving labor and citizenship policies of the colony produced was not a city of Hollanders, but rather a city of New Amsterdammers. Adriaen van der Donck’s participation in this growing city would be brief. In 1653, the same year in which a municipal charter for the city of New Amsterdam was signed and four years after his return to the Netherlands, Van der Donck was finally granted permission to return to his adopted homeland (Shorto 252). Still perceived as a threat, he was “forbidden from engaging in public life and forbidden to practice law in the colony” (253). In 1655, Van der Donck was killed in one of a series of attacks by an alliance of Indian tribes (280–81). In the same year of his death, however, the Description was published for the first time. The book proved to be a best seller, attracting throngs of settlers to the city before beginning its journey into obscurity (282). With the Goedhuys translation, however, we can reconsider O’Donnell’s situating of Van der Donck’s Description as one of the touchstones of early American literature—a work whose legacy is important for understanding not only the development of New Amsterdam, but also the city that emerged after the English took Fort Amsterdam on September 8, 1664, when New Amsterdam became known as New York. e a sLOST t e NEW r b YORK rook 17 notes 1. Biographical and historical details throughout draw on Shorto. 2. See Van Gastel, “Rhetorical Ambivalence.” 3. For discussions of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan citizenship, see Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, and Hutchings and Dannreuther, ed., Cosmopolitan Citizenship. 4. See Said, “The Politics of Knowledge,” 26, as well as Pease, “National Narratives.” 5. On the dangers of a “false universalism,” see Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms.” 6. See Delanty, Citizenship in a Global Age, 52–53. 7. This chapter was first published in 1990 in a translation by Ada van Gastel in The William and Mary Quarterly, but it has not been included in editions of the Description until now. 8. In his discussion of Description, Shorto helpfully points to Grotius’s influence on this chapter (136–37). 9. See Carter, The Political Theory of Global Citizenship, 19–29. 10. See Foote, Black and White Manhattan, 35–45. 11. See Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 31, 50. 12. See O’Byrne, The Dimensions of Global Citizenship, 6, 37–44. Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 91–114. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. ——–—. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton, 2006. Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Carter, April. The Political Theory of Global Citizenship. New York: Routledge, 2001. Delanty, Gerard. Citizenship in a Global Age: Society, Culture, Politics. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000. 18 “ wLOST e cNEW a nYORK u s e t h o s e f o l k . . .” Foote, Thelma Wills. Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Hutchings, Kimberly, and Roland Dannreuther, eds. Cosmopolitan Citizenship. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Middleton, Simon. From Rights to Privileges: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. O’Byrne, Darren J. The Dimensions of Global Citizenship: Political Identity Beyond the Nation-State. London: Frank Cass, 2003. O’Donnell, Thomas F. Introduction to A Description of the New Netherlands, by Adriaen van der Donck, ix–xl. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1968. Pease, Donald E. “National Narratives, Postnational Narration.” Modern Fiction 43, no. 1 (1997): 1–23. Pollock, Sheldon, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. “Cosmopolitanisms.” In Cosmopolitanism, edited by Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, 1–14. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Robbins, Bruce. “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 246–64. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Said, Edward. “The Politics of Knowledge.” Raritan 11, no. 1 (1991): 17–31. Shorto, Russell. The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America. New York: Vintage, 2004. Van der Donck, Adriaen. A Description of New Netherland. Edited by Charles T. Gehring and William A. Starna. Translated by Diederik Willem Goedhuys. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Van Gastel, Ada. “Rhetorical Ambivalence in the New Netherland Author Adriaen van der Donck.” MELUS 17, no. 2 (1991): 11. —–—–—. “Van der Donck’s Description of the Indians: Additions and Corrections.” The William and Mary Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1990): 411–21. Wright, Louis B. The Atlantic Frontier: Colonial American Civilization, 1607–1763. New York: Knopf, 1947. e a sLOST t eNEW r b YORK rook 19 GOTHAM CITY and all BATMAN-related elements © and ® DC Comics. Used with Permission. Scott Beatty. Batman Begins: The Visual Guide. London, New York: DK, 2005. Map of Gotham City. 20 LOST NEW YORK Gotham: The Other New York Kristen Doyle Highland n 2007, the Gotham Book Mart closed its doors after nearly ninety years as a literary hub of New York City. With this closing, the store passed into an ever-expanding Lost New York, a nostalgic version of New York City as dynamic and real to many New Yorkers as its living, breathing parallel. Journalists and bloggers lamented the store’s demise and cataloged the literary luminaries who once trolled the shelves and toasted accomplishments amidst the book towers of this literary New York landscape. But that was a different Gotham, an ideal ostensibly displaced by the skyrocketing rents and callous, bottom-line mentality of a modern-day commercial New York City. The Gotham Book Mart, it turns out, had a most appropriate name. From Washington Irving’s original designation of New York as Gotham in 1807, through reappropriations of the label in late-nineteenth-century sensational and reform literature, to twentieth-century architectural and imaginative representations, Gotham has always figured as that “other” New York in various stages of being lost. A cultural LOST NEW YORK 21 gem lost to unregulated development, a small-town past lost in historical apathy, or a grasping modern city lost in a moral wilderness, Gotham is a lost New York. Ironically, the Gotham Book Mart visually reproduced the wide arc of the lost-and-found characterizing the history of the name “Gotham.” When Gotham Book & Art changed its name in 1923 to Gotham Book Mart, founder Frances Steloff asked artist John Held, Jr., to design a new sign for the store (Rogers 69). The wrought-iron result became iconic: three men fishing in a small boat with the motto, “Wise Men Fish Here,” below. Gesturing to the popular folktales of the foolish “Wise Men of Gotham,” the sign plays with the satiric connotations of “wise,” much as Washington Irving did over one hundred years before. The process in which a medieval folktale collection comes to signify New York City is a story of lost associations and found meanings, a centuries-old tale of “Gotham” still being written. In 1526, J. Rastell of London published A, C, mery talys, a jestbook that opens with an anecdote of two men crossing Nottingham Bridge—one on the way to the market, one just returning. These denizens of the town of Gotham are soon embroiled in an argument concerning who has the right to bring his market sheep over the bridge when they are joined by a third Gothamite. Noticing that the combatants argue over sheep that neither of the two actually possesses, the inventive neighbor takes his own sack of meal, asks the two men for assistance in lifting it to his shoulder, and empties his sack into the river rushing below. Turning to his belligerent and now much astonished companions, he admonishes, “Now by my faythe sayd he euen as muche witte is in youre twoo headdes, to stryue for that thing which ye haue not.” A moralizing narrator concludes the tale with an assertion of collective wisdom in the behavior of individual fools: “Thys tale shewyth you that som man talkyth [to other] men wysdome when is but a fole hym selfe.” Later publications of this story, which introduce Andrew Boorde’s 1565 publication of a collection of twenty-one Gotham tales, The Merie tales of the made men of Gotam, and subsequent editions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries revise this final proverbial assertion to a question: “Which was the wisest of al these three persons? Judge you.” Through these printed tales and others over the following centuries, Gotham was associated with the actions of fools.1 Subsequent publications of the Gotham tales are surprisingly consistent. The twenty-one tales in the 1565 edition are reduced to twenty by combining the final two into one in the 1690, 1750, 1785 (London), and 1795 editions. All of the tales discuss the absurdities of daily social life, from market-going to churchgoing, marital relationships to male fraternity. Some are purely ridiculous, such as the man who sets his cheese wheels rolling down the hill expecting each to 22 g oLOST t h NEW a mYORK : the other new york The Merry Tales of the Wise Men of Gotham. Glasgow: Printed for the Booksellers, no date. Fales Library, New York University. h iNEW g hYORK land LOST 23 find its way to market, while others, like the opening tale, assert a proverbial import. The most popular story, evident in later American references and a modern-day spatial tribute, is the story of the cuckoo fence, in which the Gotham residents attempt to hedge in a cuckoo to guarantee access to its singing all year long. Predictably, the cuckoo flies away. Yet perhaps the Gothamites were on to something, as the cuckoo and his hedge have remained preserved together for centuries in the form of narrative.2 Though the tales themselves remained remarkably consistent through numerous editions, the referent “Gotham” spun outward from the tales as a term Washington Irving. Salmagundi; or, the Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. and Others. New York: D. Longworth, 1808. Fales Library, New York University. 24 g oLOST t h NEW a mYORK : the other new york eminently adaptable to contemporary social and cultural concerns. The 1750 London edition of the tales gestures toward this adaptability with a final warning: “And thus the breed of Gothamites has been perpetuated even unto this day.” Ushering the characters of the tales into real-life, contemporary counterparts, this move marks “Gotham” as a type. Gotham is thus understood less as a geographic place in a rural English past than as a social condition. This dynamic between Gotham-as-place and Gotham-as-type, and its oscillation between the two, is the very interpretive dynamic that allows its transfer from the geographic space of the town of Nottingham to a type of foolish people everywhere to the foolish people of New York City and finally to the geographic space of Manhattan. Understood as a type—as shorthand for fools—Gotham had a remarkable ability to adapt itself to the presentist quality of satire. Numerous eighteenth-century political satires reference Gotham-as-type in their titles or as self-evident referents within the text. Well-known satirist Charles Churchill went so far as to relocate Gotham to an imaginary utopian alternative to British imperialism in his 1764 verse satire, Gotham: In Three Volumes. His poem opens with this imaginary relocation: Far off (no matter whether East or West, A real Country, or one made in jest) Not yet by modern MANDEVILLES disgrac’d, Nor by Map-jobbers wretchedly misplac’d, There lies an Island, neither great nor small, Which, for distinction sake, I GOTHAM call. (1) Churchill not only displaces Gotham from its geographic coordinates, he also revises its cultural import. In his scathing verse satire of the colonial project and the hypocrisy of the religious justifications that undergird conquest, Gotham is a utopic ideal, one ruled justly and prudently. Gotham is that “other”—an ideal, other England unstained by the blood of colonization. However, inverting Gotham-as-absurdity to Gotham-as-ideal retains both meanings, gesturing toward the impossibility of attaining this nirvana. Nevertheless, Churchill’s invocation and revision of “Gotham” reveals the term’s growing adaptability and increasing flexibility of meaning. Considered together, the myriad references to Gotham in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts offer insight into the process of freeing a term from its spatial and temporal anchors. Loosed from its medieval origins and opened to new meanings, “Gotham” was primed for its transmission and translation across the Atlantic. h iNEW g hYORK land LOST 25 As in Britain, Gotham was often employed in early American texts to denote foolish actions or actors. In his 1791 treatise on the Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution, Thomas Paine argues against the wisdom of a government that dictates the needs and rights of its people. “By making government to be not only a contrivance of human wisdom, but a monopoly of wisdom,” Paine argues that Burke advocates “put[ting] the nation of fools on one side, and places his government of wisdom, all wise men of Gotham, on the other side; and then [Burke] proclaims, and says, that ‘Men have a RIGHT that their WANTS should be provided for by this wisdom.’” This government next “proceeds to explain to them what their wants are, and also what their rights are” (80). Paine employs the satirical potential of the Gotham tales to criticize the manipulation of wisdom into tyrannical rule. Displaying a greater degree of premeditation and malice than their medieval counterparts, Paine’s Gothamites are those corrupted men who would feign wisdom to further their own ambition. Yet, while Paine draws on the long association between Gotham and political satire, fifteen years later Washington Irving would redirect the satiric potential of the Gotham tales toward the social pretension of early-nineteenth-century New Yorkers. In the tradition of Steele and Addison’s playfully satiric Spectator and Tatler, Irving, his brother William, and friend James Kirke Paulding published Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. and Others between January of 1807 and January 1808. Here they exercised prodigious wit in commenting on the social and aesthetic inclinations of aspiring New York City citizens. In Number II, published February 4, 1807, Irving first refers to Manhattan as Gotham. In a piece titled “Mr. Wilson’s Concert,” narrator Anthony Evergreen targets the musical taste of New Yorkers. He graphically describes the listener’s experience of the fiddle: “[H]is very bowels seem to sympathize at every twang of the cat-gut, as if he heard at that moment the wailings of the helpless animal that had been sacrificed to harmony” (43). And though the French horn “was very excellent in his way,” Snivers, the audience member under examination, “could not relish his performance, having sometime since heard a gentleman amateur in Gotham play a solo on his proboscis, in a style infinitely superior” (43). Nose music, it seems, is the standard of taste in Irving’s aesthetically challenged Gotham. The twelfth paper, published in June 1807, deepens Manhattan’s branding as Gotham. Intent on “open[ing] the great volume of human character,” the narrator Langstaff pins his satiric stylus to Tom Straddle, a recent immigrant from Birmingham (283). Disappointed that New Yorkers aren’t the savages depicted in British travel literature and thus realizing he is not the gift of civilized society 26 g oLOST t h NEW a mYORK : the other new york he thought himself to be, Straddle devises a new strategy to gain respect and lady admirers. After buying horse and coach, Straddle makes “a furious dash at style in a gig and tandem” (290). To Langstaff’s consternation, this extravagance meets with approval: “for though pedestrian merit may strive to become fashionable in Gotham, yet a candidate in an equipage is always recognized” (291). Feigning admiration, Langstaff continues: Oh! Gotham, Gotham! most enlightened of cities!—how does my heart swell with delight when I behold your sapient inhabitants lavishing their attention with such wonderful discernment! (291) Replacing the insinuating Straddle as the subject of derision, Manhattan and its shallow residents earn a new label—Gotham. Vanished is a New York founded on earnestness, hard work, and simple pleasures, replaced by an “other” New York, a Gotham of grasping materialism. Not the silly fools of old, this new generation of Gothamites allows itself to be fooled by pretension and social artifice. Irving would repeatedly refer to Manhattan as Gotham in the Salmagundi Papers, targeting such inadequacies as false modesty and imperviousness to true talent.3 The November 11 issue (No. XVII) includes an eleven-page treatise titled “Of the Chronicles of the Renowned and Ancient City of Gotham,” narrating the siege of Gotham by a troop of dancers who stage a “coup de pied” and convert Gothamites into dancing fools. This thinly disguised fiction of New York City recreational habits targets the perceived abandonment of the morals and dignity of polite society. In the Salmagundi Papers, Irving plots Gotham as both place and type. In invoking the term, he draws heavily on its satiric traditions and rhetorical associations with fools, while intentionally fixing the term to the social milieu of early-nineteenth-century New York City.4 Yet to honor Irving as the originator of New York City’s nickname tells an incomplete story at best. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Gotham would continue to be redefined, reappropriated, and redeployed in attempts to anchor the dynamic character of New York City. Mid-nineteenthcentury literature and periodicals reveal an ambivalent Gotham, at once an Irvingesque city of naïve social climbers and a picturesque city alive with creativity and change. Gotham is potential. In John Bradford’s 1815 New York publication, The Poetical Vagaries of a Knight of the Folding-Stick, of Paste-Castle, the narrator offers a quirky description of a bookbindery. Omitting the author and printer’s name on the title page, the only locating element is the publication city: “Gotham.” Though certainly this publishing designation signals the less-than-serious content within, Gotham is nevertheless the place where books h iNEW g hYORK land LOST 27 are made, stories told, meaning created. “The WORLD’S a huge BINDERY” and Gotham as publisher stitches these stories together (7). Here, Gotham is the space of imagination and creation. Used to capture the positive essence of the city, Gotham could evoke an idealized New York City, especially to outsiders. An 1854 notice in the Washington, D.C.–based National Era proclaimed the popular Bullard’s Panorama of New York “a very truthful representation of the city.” Commending its size, scope, and content, the reviewer remarks “to those who have never visited the great city of Gotham [the panorama] will give a fair conception of the place and the habits of the people” (Bullard’s). Divested of its ironic undertones, Gotham is associated by this reviewer with grand scales and dynamic activity. Edgar Allan Poe, writing for Pennsylvania’s Columbia Spy in 1844, also focuses on Gotham as grand scale and motion. His third letter to the paper opens, “The city is brimful of all kinds of legitimate liveliness—the life of money-making, and the life of pleasure” (39). He advises the visitor: [W]hen you should visit Gotham, you should ride out the Fifth Avenue, as far as the distributing reservoir, near Forty-third Street, I believe. The prospect from the walk around the reservoir is particularly beautiful. You can see, from this elevation, the north reservoir at Yorkville; the whole city to the Battery; and a large portion of the harbor, and long reaches of the Hudson and East Rivers. (40) If New York as Gotham presents an idealized image from a distant, surveying perspective, the street level offers a rather different view. Poe distinguishes between the “natural beauty” of New York Harbor and the facades of Brooklyn “grievously disfigured” by the “displays of landscape and architectural taste” of the “Gothamites” (65). Indeed, caught somewhere between Irving’s condemnation of Gotham’s crude aesthetic taste and Whitman’s celebration of natural Mannahatta, Poe presents a schizophrenic Gotham, at once New York City’s best version and its worst. In later literature, Gotham evolves to signify this very division, a New York City split into the haves and the have-nots, divided by class and geography. Publishers described Joaquin Miller’s 1886 sensational novel The Destruction of Gotham as a “most graphic story of the times, showing the conflict between the upper and lower strata of society in New York, ending in a great disaster to the city itself” (5). The novel traces the path of a young country girl propelled by poverty to the city in search of relief from her rich Fifth Avenue cousins. The 28 g oLOST t h NEW a mYORK : the other new york cousins, unfortunately, have hit upon hard times and have moved from their wealthy digs. Left on her own, Dot is seduced by her cousin’s fiancé, gives birth to a daughter, and befriends a reporter who happens to be in love with her cousin. Combining the conventions of seduction and sentimental novels with the sensational city tale, Miller uses the reporter as a vehicle to explore the various depravities of Gotham living. Resolved to record the struggles of the “great Gotham” (77), Miller offers a visceral image of that dark “other” of New York City: “The great city lies trembling, panting, quivering in her wild, white heat of intoxication, excitement, madness—drunken and devilish pursuits of power, pleasure, and gold. . . . The blood in men’s veins is at fever-heat. This drives them on to the consummation of deeds that have no parallel, that have no historian” (8–9). Here, Gotham is that New York City that has veered from the path laid out by history—a rogue version of New York that ultimately collapses upon itself. As the novel ends, Dot dies in despair of her wealthy lover’s abandonment as a mob of Gotham’s poorest converges on Union Square. Walton, the reporter, rushes to his office to record the riot as Stone, the Wall Street speculator indicted in this fatally divided Gotham, shrinks to the perimeter of the rioters. Neither rich nor poor are granted amnesty, however, as “the colossal front of one of the lofty edifices [on Union Square] on flame broke loose and fell out and over the square in a vast sheet of flame, covering the mad and trembling multitude” (214). Gotham, a twisted, alternative New York City taken to the extremes of greed and depravity, collapses and consumes itself. The image of Gotham as New York City’s dark, divided other explored in nineteenth-century texts is resurrected in the twentieth-century comic world of Batman. A vigilante on the criminalized streets of Gotham City at night, Batman retires to his day job among the wealthy elite as the respectable Bruce Wayne. The caped crusader first soared between the buildings of New York City; in February 1941, he moved to “Gotham City.” In the afterword to his novelized adventure, Knightfall, Dennis O’Neil maps Batman’s Gotham haunts to “Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November” (386). As a “mirror-world counterpart” of New York City, Gotham City has generated its own similarly dynamic mythology in the expanding fictional histories of the city developed in the comic series. The Batman films have likewise variously imagined the urban landscape of Gotham City, from director Tim Burton’s menacing and eccentric Gothic city to Joel Schumacher’s futuristic Gotham and the dark realism of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Yet if Gotham City’s landscape can include both Bruce Wayne’s intimidatingly wealthy manor and the diabolical Arkham Asylum, New York City as h iNEW g hYORK land LOST 29 “Gotham Court, 38 Cherry Street,” c. 1890. Photograph by Richard Hoe Lawrence. The Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob A. Riis Collection. 30 g oLOST t h NEW a mYORK : the other new york Gotham likewise invokes both the high and the low, the light and the dark. In 1851, a Quaker established Gotham Court on Cherry Street between Franklin Square and Roosevelt Street, in the heart of the Lower East Side, as an experiment in model tenement living. Yet with its peculiar design opening on narrow alleys as well as its ventilation challenges, the tenement became by the 1860s one of the most deadly and notorious tenement slums (“Mr. Cutting’s Good Work”). Immortalized in Jacob Riis’s 1890 How the Other Half Lives, Gotham Court “challenged public attention more than any other [tenement] in the whole city and tested the power of sanitary law and rule for forty years” (31).5 Fifteen years after Riis’s exposé, in 1905, the Gotham Hotel opened its doors to Fifth Avenue, becoming the city’s tallest building for a short time (Gray). Catering to a very different clientele, the Gotham Hotel, today the Peninsula New York, emphasized a prosperous, extravagant version of New York City. Considered together, both Gotham edifices—whether by design or by association—represented different, “other” versions of New York City: Gotham, the pinnacle of high-class wealth and taste, or Gotham, the cramped and sordid skeleton of a city. The question of a divided Gotham and which version—that of a wealthy social elite or one of the poor immigrant working classes—would dominate was a concern in reformist literature written in the space between Gotham Court and Gotham Hotel. James Wesley Johnston’s 1898 novel Dwellers in Gotham charts a course through the “other” New Yorks in an attempt to stitch the two together. Acknowledging a divided population and the association of Gotham with the grasping moneyed classes, Johnston wryly comments on the supposed summer exodus of New Yorkers: “It is true that in certain sections uptown,” the homes seem deserted: Possibly the population of the city is not perceptibly affected, but people should be weighed as well as counted, and what are numbers as compared with quality? East Side Gothamites are not of much account except by census takers; the real dwellers in Gotham are in the uptown regions. (32) Satirizing the implicit division embedded in the “Gothamite” label, Johnston’s tale proposes transgression of the boundary between these two other New Yorks through progressive social reform. The explicit moral of the novel, aimed squarely at the elite Gotham population, asserts that all are “dwellers in Gotham.” In seeking to reconcile the “others” understood as Gotham—either the upwardly mobile urban dream or the nightmare of destitution and decay—writers associated Gotham with a particular brand of historical amnesia. Though the h i NEW g h YORK land LOST 31 term “Gotham” carried its own rich history, to live in Gotham required an act of forgetting. Targeting the illusory notion of class difference, The Proud Miss McBride. A Legend of Gotham, a humorous, didactic poem published in 1874, comments on the Gotham legend of origins: Of all the notable things on earth, The queerest one is pride of birth, Among our “fierce Democracie”! A bridge across a hundred years, Without a prop to save it from sneers, — Not even a couple of rotten Peers, — A thing for laughter, fleers, and jeers, Is American aristocracy! English and Irish, French and Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, and Danish, Crossing their veins until they vanish In one conglomeration! So subtle a tangle of Blood, indeed, No modern Harvey will ever succeed In finding the circulation! (17–18) Residents of Gotham, not simply linked by geography or in a shared interest in reform, are here part of one genealogy, a “tangle of Blood” in a single family tree.6 Difference grows out of a willful forgetting of the recent past. The “legend of Gotham” is a tale of both the lost and found—a conveniently “lost” past of the mixing and “conglomeration” of New York City in favor of a “found” pureness of an old world past. Whether Gotham allows a personal reinvention, denotes a variously deprived or propertied populace, or projects an image of a dynamic, creative city, it is always “other,” an alternative version—variously dark and menacing or progressive and promising—of New York City. Irving’s initial labeling of New York City as Gotham was only the beginning of the term’s complicated evolution. Inflected by genre and historical perspective, Gotham spins outward from Irving’s initial application to invoke not simply the foolish, but also the sensational and the seductive, the modern and grand, and the fortunate few and the forgotten masses. Indeed, the story of New York City as Gotham continues to be written. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s magisterial history of New York to 1898, Gotham, published in 1999, positions New York’s ever-evolving nickname as the very stuff of history. If Gothamites of old may have conveniently 32 g oLOST t h NEW a mYORK : the other new york revised their pasts, the Gothamites of now are invested in preserving that past (xxii). This is a Gotham with none of Irving’s irony. Citing a tale not included in the print editions of Gotham tales, though one traditionally associated with the canon—that of King John’s thwarted travel through Gotham—Burrows and Wallace reinterpret the fools’ tale as a trickster narrative, ascribing a cunning sensibility to and a method in the madness of the Gothamites.7 Observing that “Manhattanites would not likely have taken up a nickname so laden with pejorative connotations,” Burrows and Wallace argue that it’s “this more beguiling—if tricksterish—sense of Gotham” that is accepted in the nickname (xiii–xiv). Indeed, it’s possible that a cultural knowledge of Gothamites as ingenious carried over, even if not in print versions of the tales, but I’d argue, rather, that New Yorkers didn’t “accept” the nickname at all. It was applied, over and over, and through these various applications—to different people, with different goals in mind—the nickname gradually lost its ironic import and, in the twentieth century, its reform implications. Gotham today is a construction forever in progress, much like the city itself. As a history, a type of construction as the Gotham authors remind us, Gotham records the accumulation of myriad New York City imaginaries existing alongside and shaping our experience of the city itself. notes 1. Though the 1526 and 1565 publications of the Gotham tales may be among the first to record the tales of Gotham in print, the association of Gotham with fools is evident in earlier oral culture. The Oxford English Dictionary records a reference in the Towneley Mysteries (1460) to Gotham: “Now god gyf you care, foles all sam, Sagh I neuer none so fare bot the foles of gotham.” Thus, the printing of the Gotham stories should be read as an attempt to give new form to an old tradition. 2. For more on the Gotham tales and real-life parallels, see Alfred Stapleton’s fascinating book, All About the Merry Tales of Gotham (Nottingham: R. N. Pearson, 1900). 3. Publications that reference Gotham include No. III (February 13, 1807); No. VIII (April 18, 1807); No. XIII (August 14, 1807); No. XVII (November 11, 1807); No. XX (January 25, 1808). 4. Indeed, in his 1809 mock-history, A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (New York: Inskeep & Bradford, 1809), Irving refers back to the original tradition of the Merie Tales of the made h iNEW g hYORK land LOST 33 men of Gotam: Radamanthus, that judge of man’s labors, “will undoubtedly class [writers] with those notorious wise men of Gotham, who milked a bull, twisted a rope of sand, and wove a velvet purse from a sow’s ear” (40). 5. This history seems lost to the developers of Gotham Court between Essex and Ludlow Streets in 2004. Their unironic description: “Gotham Court was designed to be an urban oasis, consistent with the historical character and charm of the neighborhood.” 6. The European list of “mixed” nationalities conspicuously omits the African American population of New York City, excluding them from the genealogy, or citizenship, of Gotham. This omission skirts, though interestingly also alludes to, developing fears over miscegenation and ignores New York City’s dynamic and often violent history of race relations. 7. This tale describes the Gotham townspeople’s reaction to an imminent visit from King John. Not wanting to bear the expense of a public highway—a designation applied to all roads traveled by the king—the Gothamites feign madness, successfully, in order to detour the king. Works Cited Anon. A, C, mery talys. London: J. Rastell, 1526. Boorde, Andrew. The Merie tales of the made man of Gotam gathered together by A.B. of phisike doctour. London: Thomas Colwell, 1565. ——–—. The Merry Tales of the Wise Men of Gotham. London, 1750. Bradford, John. The Poetical Vagaries of a Knight of the Folding-Stick, of PasteCastle. Gotham, 1815. Bullard’s Panorama of New York. The National Era. December 7, 1854. Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Churchill, Charles. Gotham: A Poem, Books I–III. London, 1764. Gray, Christopher. “Streetscapes / The Old Gotham Hotel, Now the Peninsula New York; A History Shaped, in Part, by State Liquor Laws.” New York Times, January 3, 1999. Irving, Washington, William Irving, and James Kirke Paulding. Salmagundi; or, the Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. and Others. 3rd ed.; Vols. I–II. New York: Thomas Longworth, 1820. 34 g oLOST t h NEW a mYORK : the other new york Johnston, James Wesley. Dwellers in Gotham: A Romance of New York. New York: Eaton & Mains, 1898. Miller, Joaquin. The Destruction of Gotham. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1886. “Mr. Cutting’s Good Work; How He Changed the Character of Gotham Court from Being a Notorious Resort for Bad Characters.” New York Times, May 23, 1892, p. 9. O’Neil, Dennis. Afterword to Batman: Knightfall. New York: Bantam Books, 1994. Paine, Thomas. Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution. In The Works of Thomas Paine, Esq. London, 1792. Poe, Edgar Allan. Doings of Gotham. Pottsville, PA: J.E. Spannuth, 1929. Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. New York: Penguin, 1997. Rogers, W. G. Wise Men Fish Here: The Story of Frances Steloff and the Gotham Book Mart. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965. Saxe, John G. The Proud Miss McBride. A Legend of Gotham. Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1874. h iNEW g hYORK land LOST 35 E. E. Cummings. Tom. New York: Arrow Editions, 1935. Frontispiece by Ben Shahn. Fales Library, New York University. The language and context of Cummings’s ballet scenario’s four episodes deeply associate the figure of Tom with movement and the revelation of the word, represented by the “Book,” the Bible. In the “dance of the Book,” Cummings elaborates on this relationship: “before this writhing line of worshippers lovingly Tom dances to the book, cradling the book as if the book were a babe; then, lifting his babebook high, falls on both knees facing the audience” (11). By contrast, Shahn’s frontispiece depicts Tom as silent and immobilized in a rigid posture, standing upright against what could be the scene Cummings describes as the St. Clare plantation in Episode Three, in which “lines of elaborate white columns recedingly approach each other” (21). 36 LOST NEW YORK Diving in the “Dumps”: Myth and Performance in the Ultimate American City Jane Greenway Carr n 1899, D. Appleton and Company, a publishing house located on Union Square, printed The New Metropolis: Memorable Events of Three Centuries, 1600-1900, From the Island of Mana-hat-ta to Greater New York at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. The tome celebrates the 1898 consolidation of New York City and describes the city’s story as “more fascinating and wonderful than the most imaginative tale ever written” (Zeisloft iii). In his introduction, editor E. Idell Zeisloft claims that “the destiny of the island city has been the destiny of America” (iv).1 Zeisloft’s grafting of The New Metropolis onto American destiny is part of a long tradition of mythologizing the history of the city and its inhabitants. For instance, it both resembles and coincides with what the historian Christine Stansell diagnoses as the “penchant for mythmaking” prevalent among Greenwich Village bohemians between 1890 and 1920 (iv; Stansell 3). Like Zeisloft, Stansell recognizes the ascendancy of New York City as the “ultimate LOST NEW YORK 37 American city” and highlights literary and artistic activity as central to that process (4). Studies of this period reveal the ways in which myth dictated fashion and structured a relationship between nostalgia and loss. Describing the archive of the Byron Company, which provided roughly four-fifths of the photographs included in Zeisloft’s book, E. L. Doctorow writes that “New York is now, as it has been since the 1860s, a global city, the archetype city of everyone’s future” (qtd. in Simmons 11). This cosmopolitan vision of the city replaces the lost pasts of New York’s new arrivals with a “more fighting kind of life where initiative can count for something” (11). Drawn by this mythology-in-the-making, in the early twentieth century scores of dancers, artists, writers, and thinkers departed the reaches of New England and the Midwest in order to take to the streets of Manhattan. Among the singularly iconic of these were Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), whose reputation as a sensuous girl-poet and the author of “Renascence” followed her from Vassar College to Greenwich Village in 1917, and Dawn Powell (1896–1965), who came to New York in the fall of 1918. After first attempting to join the Navy, Powell settled into a boarding house on West 85th Street before migrating downtown to the Village in 1924, where she established herself over decades as one of the city’s most outspoken satiric wits.2 E. E. Cummings (1894–1962), whose social pedigree set him apart by elevated class and education status—in addition to gender—from both Millay and Powell, nonetheless joined the cacophony when he settled on Patchin Place, a Village bohemian retreat, that same year. As rough contemporaries, Millay, Powell, and Cummings were primary participants in and recipients of the literary myths under construction during the early 1920s, but their unique combination of lost mythologies with dramatic performance at the advent of the Depression set them apart from compatriots. When we look at what these writers were producing between 1927 and 1935, we can observe what the literary scholar Jani Scandura has called “dumps,” moments that contain the refuse of lost cultural mythologies that only occasionally made their way from text to stage.3 The presence of these dumps suggests that these writers were using literary histories to generate a sense of place and fashion and were doing so in order to create a mode of performance in which the mythology of New York City played a significant role.4 In this essay, I examine three works that function as exemplary “dumps,” in which these authors reworked literary history to express a nostalgic desire for a New York that remained lost or inaccessible by other means. Millay, Powell, and Cummings each reinvented the past by using the materials of literary performance to animate the refuse of myths generated for and about New York spaces and audiences: a bohemian Greenwich Village lost to rural domesticity and the 38 d i LOST v i nNEW g YORK in the “dumps” impending Depression, the public swagger of “walking out” on Broadway given over to an era of urban transformation, and the legendary outpouring of response to stage adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, sparked by New York audiences in the mid-nineteenth century and expanding geographically with the ensuing decades.5 Millay’s libretto to Deems Taylor’s 1927 opera The King’s Henchman displays a fascination with Anglo-Saxon language that Millay shared with many nineteenth-century American readers, who viewed Anglo-Saxon lineage as a means to assert national superiority through whiteness, and with Thomas Jefferson, who associated the Anglo-Saxon language with American democratic idealism (Hall 133). For Millay, however, the fantasy of Anglo-Saxon history offered an outlet for a personal anxiety surrounding her move from Greenwich Village to upstate New York with her husband in 1925 and a way to capitalize on her own status as a mythic figure. Dawn Powell’s 1931 play Walking Down Broadway invokes a particular ritual of the public promenade, long adopted into New York City lore. At the same time, Walking Down Broadway disrupts Powell’s own configuration of her New York writings, especially the novels. This disruption coincides with a tension between the urban spaces of the Upper West Side, land of the proper and sexually proscribed single girl, and Greenwich Village, den of rakes and whores. Powell’s play captures the literal and psychological slippage between these two supposedly binary neighborhoods, in part by using the idea of girls walking out. Finally, Cummings, in his published but never-performed ballet scenario, Tom (1935), seeks to animate the legacy of adaptation surrounding Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By interjecting his formal hallmark of compound poetic language and conjuring “silences filled only by the natural noise of feet,” Cummings’s scenario wrestles productively with past stage representations of Uncle Tom, Little Eva, and Eliza, as well as the ongoing but ever-changing cultural and literary impact wrought by the novel (Garafola 26). As Sarah Meer points out in Uncle Tom Mania, it was largely the success of dueling representations staged in New York City in the 1850s that launched the widespread phenomenon of the touring Tom show nationwide (106). During the period of modernity framed by these works, nostalgia was becoming less effective as a counter-measure to cultural (and economic) loss, which prompted writers to reshape the myth of New York City as America’s destiny. With nostalgia less and less available as a way of recovering a desired past, some writers invented pathways that harnessed nostalgia by reinventing the remainders, rather than by mimicking or reconstructing the past directly. Here, I propose that these works by Millay, Powell, and Cummings may frame the carr LOST NEW YORK 39 transition from the 1920s into the 1930s in New York City as a period in literary history when the performance of lost mythologies became especially acute. In 1925, Deems Taylor’s The King’s Henchman was the first commission ever given by the Metropolitan Opera to an American composer since the company’s founding in 1883. As the music critic at the New York World, Taylor (1885–1966), a native New Yorker educated at New York University, had spoken out in favor of a greater national interest in American music (Pegolotti 21). He and his wife, Mary, had met Edna St. Vincent Millay in Paris in 1922, and Mary suggested that Millay—whom she deemed an “extraordinary” person with “something to say”—write the libretto for Taylor’s new commission (Milford 271). As female librettists were rare, if not unheard of, in opera, Taylor’s choice of Millay only intensified the distinctly sexualized and feminist overtones of Millay’s legendary status among young New Yorkers, who approved of her “affectations of smartness” (Fass 322). Millay abandoned her first attempt—an adaptation of Snow White entitled The Casket of Glass—in favor of a story set in tenth-century England. Though Millay’s husband wrote to Taylor that she drew her inspiration from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Millay’s story was equally about a love triangle with a firmly established literary provenance that was anything but purely Saxon in origin. The King’s Henchman tells the story of Aethelwold, thane and fosterbrother to Eadgar, who travels with his harper and servant, Maccus, to woo the lady Aelfrida on Eadgar’s behalf. Struck by her beauty, Aethelwold lies to Eadgar that Aelfrida’s beauty has been overstated and marries the lady himself. When Eadgar comes to visit them, Aethelwold begs Aelfrida to disguise her charms, but she boldly presents herself in all her glory. Exposed as disloyal and dishonest, Aethelwold kills himself. Far from being original to Millay, this love triangle motif was foremost among those “drawn from Anglo-Saxon history” and presented on the British stage beginning in the Restoration period and continuing into the late eighteenth century (Scragg 8–9).6 It persisted across the Atlantic into the mid-nineteenth century with Frances Sargent Osgood’s A Wreath of Wild Flowers from New England (1846), published in London, which opens with “Elfrida, A Dramatic Poem, in Five Acts” (Poe 134). Edgar Allan Poe’s review of Osgood in Godey’s Lady’s Book, which acknowledges Osgood as a “household word with the readers of our magazines,” illustrates the story’s appeal to an earlier generation of U.S. readers and describes the poem’s basic plot, which approximates Millay’s. In No Place of Grace, the historian Jackson Lears links the “erotic appeal of medieval character” to the revision of cultural and sexual mores in the early twentieth century, represented by the “flaming youth” whom Millay so brazenly typified (160). Thus, Millay’s contact with the past popularity of the 40 d i LOST v i nNEW g YORK in the “dumps” Aethelwold myth acts out what Lears identifies as the “gradual, almost imperceptible fits and starts of cultural change stretching back into the late nineteenth century” (160). Millay’s adaptation also resembles Athelwold, a play Harper & Brothers published in 1892 by literary ingénue Amelie Rives, author of the salacious, bestselling novel The Quick and the Dead? (1888), whose reputation as “that erratic, erotic Amelie” anticipated Millay’s as a love poet.7 Donald Scragg, a scholar of Anglo-Saxon studies, suggests in his account of literary adaptations of AngloSaxon history that Millay’s adaptation borrows directly from Rives’s Athelwold, though little textual evidence supports this claim beyond the writers’ shared reputations as embodiments of a sexually liberated New Woman (Miller 19).8 After much wrangling between Taylor and Millay about Eadgar’s final aria (Millay argued successfully that it was the “best scene in the opera”), the word “messenger,” and the simplification of the characters’ names (Millay objected strongly to modifying “Eadgar” to “Edgar,” and so on), their joint venture became The King’s Henchman and premiered on February 17, 1927 (Pegolotti 152). Millay and Taylor nearly missed the premiere. They had originally been promised box seats by Florence Mixter, a wealthy poet and socialite whose Fifth Avenue apartment Millay often used as a pied-à-terre in the city after she moved upstate. However, Millay and Taylor found themselves outside on the corner of 39th and Broadway after Mixter discovered nude photographs of Millay and her friends taken by Arthur Ficke, a mutual friend of Millay’s and Mixter’s, during a recent visit in Santa Fe (Meade 189). After Mixter attempted to shame Millay with the pictures, Millay told her off and was turned away from the promised seats. According to Taylor’s biographer, Metropolitan officials rescued them from the ticket line outside just in time to hear the “Song of the Harper,” the opera’s opening scene, which illustrates Millay’s commitment to Saxon diction and alliteration as Maccus sings: Wild as the white waves Rushing and roaring, Heaving the wrack High up the headland; Hoarse as the howling Winds of the winter… (Millay 3)9 After receiving front-page headlines like “‘King’s Henchman’ Hailed as Best American Opera,” the show’s performance schedule was expanded, and it played to sold-out audiences. Though the opera itself clearly generated excitement and acclaim, the print version of Millay’s libretto prompted an even more enthusiastic response. By March 8, the New York Evening Post was reporting that carr LOST NEW YORK 41 Henchman was in its fourth edition, with 10,500 copies in print, and that autographed editions were “inciting riots in the larger book stores” (Milford 293). An artist’s edition printed on handmade paper and numbered specifically by hand was “impossible to buy anywhere, for any price” (293). These editions also included an orchestral tear sheet signed by Taylor of the music from the finale, the scene that Millay had previously insisted on preserving. While Henchman was taking the stage by storm, spawning riots in bookshops and earning Millay $50 per day in royalties, its reviews and Millay’s reaction to them testify to her feelings of loss associated with no longer living in New York. Edmund Wilson, once infatuated with Millay and a longtime friend, championed Henchman in the May 11, 1927, issue of The New Republic alongside Hart Crane’s White Buildings as the “only two [literary] events . . . of the first interest” in American poetry that year (Milford 290). Millay’s biographer recounts an anecdote Wilson told about a dinner he shared with Millay the weekend after the premiere. Describing her as “nervous, trembling, worried and dismayed,” he recalled that Millay had not heard of Hart Crane, whose first book of poems, White Buildings, had been published less than a year earlier. Wilson raised his eyebrows at her ignorance, implying that she had lost touch with the latest fashion on the New York literary scene. The words Millay chose to voice her objection to Wilson’s suggestion—“I’m not a pathetic figure—I’m not!”—indicate the degree of degradation carried by that perceived loss of status (Meade 191). Millay’s fear of falling out of fashion and being a “pathetic figure” threads its way through the text of Henchman in the subtext of fashion itself. In the first act, the stage directions establish, “Nearly all present are men between the ages of sixteen and thirty; in these times only yokels lived to grow old” (5). The slippage between “these times” of Anglo-Saxon England and “these times” of Millay’s Greenwich Village days becomes clear when read alongside perhaps her most famous lyric, “First Fig.” The stage directions associate surviving past the age of thirty with being a “yokel,” and the short poem, taken from A Few Figs from Thistles (1922), equates beauty with being ephemeral. Youth and cultural currency go hand in hand for Millay as the means to access lyric perfection. This equation, a dearly held literary value for Millay, also became the one most closely associated with her fame and reputation as poet, a mythology of self: My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah my foes, and oh, my friends— It gives a lovely light! 42 d i LOST v i nNEW g YORK in the “dumps” A person who “lasts the night,” then, can only be a “yokel,” the inverse of urban sophistication. Later in the same act, two of the women in the king’s hall discuss the cloth one of them is embroidering. Upon learning that her brother procured the cloth from Ghent, the first woman exclaims, in marked similarity to Doctorow’s comment on New York as a space of future possibility: Think of it . . . Think of it . . . By my heart, I would strip me bare of all I own, And peddle pins for bread, Might I but once take ship, and get a sight Of Ghent in Flanders! (15) The other woman quickly agrees, “Yea, ’tis a shining town. ’Tis a town to dream on” (15). In the third act, when Aethelwold realizes that Eadgar is coming and his secret will be exposed, he proposes to Aelfrida that they flee to Ghent. Aelfrida, “with astonishment and delight,” exclaims, “Great town of my many dreams! . . . henceforth in sighing silk / And gossamer I go” (97–98). Aethelwold’s exposure and subsequent suicide destroy not only the dream of his and Aelfrida’s great love, but also the fantasy that she will wear illustrious fashions in the city of her “many dreams.” Though it comes in the midst of a love triangle set in tenth-century England, Millay’s intention here is to create a mythology for and about New York to counter her own loss of fashion (and the sense of identity carried therein). Nina Miller describes Millay’s love lyrics of the early 1920s as deriving a specifically modern self from her status as the “Muse of bohemia” and argues convincingly for a relationship between Millay’s poetic play with language and her irrepressible sexuality as linked tools for projecting that modern self. As she writes, “love itself proves to be . . . a means of entry into public speech” (139).10 The King’s Henchman, in its combination of lyric and dramatic form, as well as its constructed ideal of Ghent in Flanders, narrates a world in which such synthesis breaks down (36). This separation becomes apparent in the contrast between Aelfrida’s fantasies about gossamer silks and Maccus’s bitter response to Aelfrida’s grief at Aethelwold’s death: “Stand back, pretty lady. / Look to thy weeds . . . I would not have thee foul this blood” (128–29). Aelfrida’s clothing, as an instrument of the beauty that betrays Aethelwold’s secret to Eadgar, becomes an overgrown contaminant. Because she and Aethelwold will never escape to “get a sight” of Ghent in Flanders, Aelfrida’s sexuality and dreams of fashion can never be realized, just as Millay herself, once removed from life in New York, feared becoming “pathetic” and unaware of great poetry. Thus, Millay helps to carr LOST NEW YORK 43 create two mythologies of a lost past in service of performing a romance for New York City audiences: an Anglo-Saxon love triangle and her own reputation as the living emblem of bohemian literary fashion. Far from being an icon to New York fashion, Dawn Powell was more often than not the sharp-tongued comic, chronicling its absurdities and transgressions along with her own. Like Millay, Powell created a body of work and an identity that are inextricable from the city she made her postcollege home. Unlike Millay, neither this association nor its poetic dimensions relied on the ephemeral; the durability and longevity of Powell’s fictional engagement with New York prompted critical notice. Edmund Wilson, in a November 1962 piece on Powell in The New Yorker, called “Greenwich Village in the Fifties,” gives a retrospective gloss on Powell’s portraits of the city in her novels, from the “raffish N.Y.U. professors” in The Golden Spur to the “careerist women” of A Time to Be Born. Wilson concludes that Powell’s real theme is the “provincial in New York who has come on from the Middle West”—in other words, a version of herself (527). In her own diary, Dawn Powell describes her 1936 novel, Turn, Magic Wheel, as her first and “most perfect New York Story” (Diaries 106). While the novel’s story of “one woman’s tragedy” does indeed enact a new phase of urban satire in Powell’s work, her classification of it as the first of her New York novels is disingenuous. In her diary and throughout most of her career, Powell disavowed her actual first novel set in New York, Whither, published in 1925. Whither features a protagonist, Zoe Bourne, whose experience of New York is, as Powell’s biographer notes, “all present tense—a book about a New York woman writer in her twenties by a New York woman writer in her twenties” (70). Like Powell, Zoe moves to Manhattan from a small town in the Midwest and settles into a rooming house just off the Hudson River. She experiments with the geography of the city, getting drunk in speakeasies and spending her evenings in Greenwich Village. Like Millay, Zoe represents a challenge to the traditional taxonomy of smartness; as the “clever sort,” she begins to sell articles to a magazine, Vanity Box, presumably a thinly veiled reference to Vanity Fair, where Millay’s Nancy Boyd sketches were appearing while Powell was writing Whither. While writing the novel, Powell herself was plotting a move downtown; as one male friend tells Zoe provocatively during a visit to his Bank Street apartment, “You should live down here” (Page 71). Tim Page asserts that as readers of Whither, we are meant to “feel the pull of Greenwich Village, but never told just why” (72). Zoe’s passion is not for the Village itself, but for the trajectory from her single girl’s boarding house uptown to what awaits her downtown. In Powell’s 1931 play Walking Down Broadway, two Upper West Side roommates, Marge Bonner and Elsie Dorfman, from 44 d i LOST v i nNEW g YORK in the “dumps” Marble Falls, Ohio, offer an ample demonstration of the allure and danger of such a journey. For women, the walk down Broadway becomes an illicit indulgence of sexual desire made public, while for men it promises sexual pleasure with women willing to make the trip. In Act One, Marge and Elsie bring back two men, Chick and Dewey, to their room in the West Nineties. Though the play does not actually stage it, Elsie reports that she and Marge had been “walking up Broadway and back down the Drive” for “nearly an hour and a half” to catch the men’s attention (356). Ashamed of the pick-up, Marge exclaims, “it was the limit the way we acted” (357). Nonetheless, she and Chick find common ground as small-town folk—“both of us crazy about New York”—and engage in a love affair that results in Marge getting pregnant. In Act Two, Powell portrays the Village as an area of selective freedom in the form of Mac, Chick and Dewey’s roommate, whose fast-talking persona presents an archetype of licentious male behavior. Once alerted to the pregnancy in Act Two, Chick wants to marry Marge, but Mac reminds him of the pleasures reserved only for the single man downtown in New York City: “I got my pick of the finest women in New York City. . . . Remember that red-haired girl I introduced you to in that Village joint the other night?” (387). At Mac’s urging, Chick rejects Marge. Tacitly, the play negotiates between the domestic spaces of the Upper West Side and the sexualized geography of the Village. In the traversal between them, Powell unflinchingly addresses the subject of Marge’s subsequent abortion with certain characters, but uses the idea of New York with others as an intervening euphemism for the pregnancy. When Elsie asks, “What’s got into you, Marge?” instead of disclosing the pregnancy itself, Marge tells her, “I’m getting tired of New York, that’s all” (416). No longer being attracted to the city becomes synonymous with sexual transgression gone wrong and social oblivion as an abandoned and destitute single mother. Ultimately rescued by a sexually liberated neighbor, Eva, who pays for her abortion, Marge reconciles with Chick by concluding that New York really is a “swell town” (453). Much of Powell’s play is about loss and a shifting moral landscape, but a casual line at the beginning also dramatizes the cost modernity imposes on the city. When showing their room to Chick and Dewey, Elsie climbs up on a chair on their balcony to show them the view of the Hudson. Marge says, “That’s why we took this room—the view of the river. Of course we won’t have it after that big building goes up on the corner” (340). This comment, in combination with the play’s focus on walking the city, demonstrates Powell’s awareness of the city’s changing geographical landscape. As Ann Douglas points out in Terrible Honesty, five major skyscrapers went up in the two years prior to the publication of Walking Down Broadway, and the city itself was in a flurry of architectural carr LOST NEW YORK 45 The New Metropolis: 1600—Memorable Events of Three Centuries—1900. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1899. Index to Sections XIII and VIII, Map of Manhattan Borough. Fales Library, New York University. 46 d i LOST v i nNEW g YORK in the “dumps” E. Idell Zeisloft’s 1899 description of the jolly “girl bachelor,” who “gaily entertains her Bohemian friends of the literary, musical, and art world,” anticipated figures like Edna St. Vincent Millay, for whom Greenwich Village represented what Zeisloft called the “Bohemian life of New York—that is, the life of the wandering nomads of literature, art and journalism” (265). For Millay, Powell, and Cummings, the Village (or in Millay’s case, the memory of it and its role in her career) proved Zeisloft’s designation of Manhattan as the “great literary workshop of the continent” (398). carr LOST NEW YORK 47 upheaval (17). At the same time, though the girls describe walking up Broadway and back down Riverside Drive to get the boys’ attention, Powell titles her play in the opposite geographical direction. In acknowledging the city’s fluctuating topography while preserving the trajectory of attraction and migration between uptown and downtown, Powell portrays a loss in progress while invoking the city’s nineteenth-century past, when, as both historians of theatre and culture have noted, walking down Broadway meant literally parading a subversive identity in public, performing in what theatre historian Marvin McAllister terms one’s “own civic showcase” (22).11 Though Walking Down Broadway was never staged in Powell’s lifetime, it does hold significant status in her career.12 First, beyond all her other writing, its sale as a motion picture brought her the greatest single profit—$6,509.70 according to her 1931 diary entry and listed as $7,500 in 1938.13 Also, it sealed her commitment to creating a body of work about New York in which she could take pride. Unlike Whither, whose melodramatic plot and faulty prose caused her embarrassment, Powell reported in a June 4, 1953, diary entry feeling “depressed last week or two over novel and inadequacy. No reassurance coming from outside, but read my old play, ‘Walking Down Broadway,’ and astonished at how good it is” (Diaries 325). In the same year that she reports rereading her play, the demolition of the Hotel Lafayette, a loved establishment across the street from her apartment on East Ninth Street, prompted her completion of The Wicked Pavilion, Powell’s only certified best seller, in which the hotel—portrayed under the pseudonym of Café Julien—plays a prominent role.14 Powell documented her proclivity for preserving lost histories in a letter to John Hall Wheelock at Scribner’s dated September 19, 1950: The focal point [of what became The Wicked Pavilion] is an historic old café (soon to be torn down) because I am dealing with people who are chronic café-people. I do not mean drinkers, I mean people waiting for something to happen or for somebody. . . . I regard the city as a kind of café (not the convivial kind) where you read the French papers, play checkers if with someone, mark time till the Answer. (Letters 177-78) If The King’s Henchman and Walking Down Broadway offered Millay and Powell the opportunity to revisit and revise their own histories of New York, Cummings’s Tom, in its appeal to a broader cultural phenomenon, speaks more directly to New York as Zeisloft envisioned it, as telling America’s story. New 48 d i LOST v i nNEW g YORK in the “dumps” York City had been central to the consolidation and dissemination of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in all its staged forms, and thus, amid reports of the Tom show’s demise in the 1930s, Cummings’s ballet scenario took on further significance as part of the mythology of historical nostalgia those shows represented. On New Year’s Eve, 1930, the New York Times lamented that after a “continuous showing of seventyseven years,” there is “now not a single company in the country playing it.” With the headline, “Uncle Tom Has Died for the Last Time,” the Boston Globe reported similarly that “not a single booking agency in New York City . . . could furnish a route for any one-night-stand company” who wished to perform Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Quite literally, according to some critics, radio killed the minstrel show star.15 Hart Crane. Autograph postcard signed to Richard Rychtarik, April 3, 1931. Richard Rychtarik/Hart Crane Collection. Fales Library, New York University. Raymond Orteig, who also ran the nearby Brevoort Hotel, purchased and named the Hotel Lafayette (formerly the Hotel Martin) at Ninth Street and University Place. Hart Crane’s description and recommendation of the hotel to his friends in 1931 as “the nicest hotel in the world” spoke to the success of Orteig’s efforts to foster the location’s celebrity. When Dawn Powell moved to 35 East Ninth Street in 1942, she reputedly told a friend that she was so close that she could “look out the window and watch her own checks bouncing there.” When the hotel was demolished in 1953 to build apartment housing, Powell lamented in her diary on August 24, “Lafayette is down.” The next year, her fictionalized portrait of the Lafayette as the Café Julien was published in her novel, The Wicked Pavilion. carr LOST NEW YORK 49 Constructed into four “episodes,” Tom uses Cummings’s signature compound constructions (George “writhesswoonfully dancing” to Eliza, for example) and imagined dances to showcase and re-invent famous moments from the stage adaptations of Stowe’s novel—Eliza crossing the ice, the tableau of Tom and Little Eva, Legree’s Satanic violence, and Tom’s beatific end, in which he and Eva disappear together. This immersion in landscape takes shape in Ben Shahn’s frontispiece to the published scenario, in which an emotionless Tom stands at attention in front of a white house, whose columns match his posture, but whose ramrod verticality is belied by the outlines of what could be either urban brownstones or plantation slave quarters in the background.16 In the text that follows, Cummings crafts physical violence as the negation of literary value (Tom 32). In Episode Four, Tom dies during Legree’s “dance of the Unbook,” and the stage directions underscore Cummings’s intent in invoking Tom’s performance history: to use movement and silence to conscript American, and specifically New York City, audiences into a new kind of participation through rage, not sentiment: Cassy’s sprouted life glides leftward, disappearing while between protagonists and audience billowingly lives a snowy silence screaming crimsonly KILL. (33) Lincoln Kirstein wanted to stage Tom for Ballet Caravan, a venture with George Balanchine (who had been appointed ballet master at the Metropolitan Opera in 1935) in which both impresario and choreographer expressed a fervent desire for an integrated American dance (Garafola 20). Balanchine did not like Cummings’s scenario—he remained “baffled by its verbal emphasis” (Kennedy 371). However, Kirstein described Tom thus as part of Balanchine’s “articulate program” for American dance: In his first choreodrame, Tom, based on the Stowe novel of slavery in the South, E.E. Cummings has heroically theatricalized that serious historic situation. The spectacle as realized will be more pantomime than dancing, more speech than song, more myth than ritual—but on its way to a closer realization of an enlarged drama, popular in its deep sense. (Kirstein 217) Kirstein’s assessment supposes that simply through the act of adapting an adaptation, Cummings has “heroically theatricalized”—in other words, performed without performance—a version of history that otherwise might have been left behind in favor of broadcast technology and eventual racial progress. As such, 50 d i LOST v i nNEW g YORK in the “dumps” the text’s commitment to a past myth of Tom on the New York stage, eulogized just a few years prior by the New York Times as woven into the fabric of national history, keeps those performances alive, just as Millay’s star turn as a Village icon and Powell’s experience as a Midwestern girl yearning to move downtown are lost but contained in The King’s Henchman and Walking Down Broadway. In Cummings’s case, we might question the artistic motivation and advisability of attempting to sustain such a lost theatrical history, but the fact that his Tom lay dormant gives evidence that by the 1930s, “Tomming” was the refuse of an earlier moment and a prior stage. For these three writers personally, New York became their “archetype city.” Whether they stayed and continued to write about its details and its changes, as Powell did, or took their leave from it and continued to draw creative inspiration from its mythic absence, as Millay chose, the historical moment delineated by The King’s Henchman, Walking Down Broadway, and Tom stands as one in which even what was fashionable was already being transformed into what was lost. Between the premiere of Taylor’s opera in 1927 and Powell’s sale of the film rights to Walking Down Broadway, Hart Crane—exemplum of Millay’s fall from fashion—would be a Guggenheim recipient and author of The Bridge, a text that more than almost any other offers a concrete vision of New York as the ultimate American city. Just prior to the release of Hello, Sister!—the film adaptation of Powell’s play that totally eradicates all trace of the original—Hart Crane would become a suicide and a legend. As Kirstein’s account of the choreodrame reveals, Tom—in all its verbal excess and questionable politics of sentiment—grew from a desire to create a vital performance from a hybrid of art forms. Even Kirstein’s vision for Ballet Caravan, of an avant-garde that could generate a new American audience with national social and political relevance, of which Tom stands as an artifact, could only have been conceived in New York. As the years of urban transformation and economic depression continued during the transition from the 1920s into the 1930s and beyond, even the “ultimate city” threatened to vanish for these writers under the weight of their own dreams and ambitions for it. As a result, all three of these texts, approached as “dumps,” remain valuable repositories for the myths of lost New York. carr LOST NEW YORK 51 notes 1. In Gotham Comes of Age: New York Through the Lens of the Byron Company, 1892– 1942, Peter Simmons points out that although the exact relationship between the Byron Company and Zeisloft’s project remains unclear, the sheer volume of Byron images used in The New Metropolis confirms a strong association between the two. Simmons suggests that Byron was hired as the project’s official photographer. 2. In a letter to editor and drama critic Barrett Clark dated January 5, 1933, Powell describes her journey from Lake Erie College to New York City in the fall of 1918 and recounts the story of her marriage and move to Greenwich Village with advertising executive Joseph Gousha. In the letter, Powell—who was known primarily as a novelist—describes drama as “far easier and more agreeable” as a form, as it “achiev[es] its ends more quickly and powerfully” than the novel does (Letters 81–82). 3. In Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression, Scandura presents depressive modernity as an affective component of American culture that emerges during moments when national foundational myths are challenged. Scandura argues that the Great Depression constitutes such a moment and distinguishes usefully between “dumps” and “archives.” While the latter represents an affirmative collecting process, the former contains or reclaims cultural refuse. 4. I borrow my understanding of performativity from Tavia Nyong’o’s definition, an “ongoing purchase upon the indexical present” or recursive and continuous “presenting [of ] the past” (7). In The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory, Nyong’o acknowledges and quotes from the work of anthropologist and historian Greg Dening in his formulation. 5. According to Jo-Anne Morgan, the New York Daily Mirror reported at least forty-nine traveling companies in the 1870s out “Tomming.” 6. For further discussion of the relationship between these early plays and the circulation of the triangle and other stories of Anglo-Saxon kings, see the introduction to Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, 8–17. With respect to Athelwold, Edgar, and Elfreda particularly, Scragg and Weinberg cite (among others): Edward Ravenscroft’s King Edgar and Alfreda (1677), Thomas Rymer’s Edgar, or the English Monarch (1678), Aaron Hill’s Elfrid (1710, revived in 1723 and 1731 as Athelwold ), and William Mason’s dramatic poem, Elfrida (adapted for the stage in 1779 and 1796). 52 d i LOST v i nNEW g YORK in the “dumps” 7. “A Love Play of Old England,” 392. 8. Scragg’s assessment of both writers as “minor novelists” is inaccurate in both scope and formal content. Rives, having sold 300,000 copies of The Quick and the Dead? was far from “minor” in her own time. Millay, by the time The King’s Henchman was published in 1927, was already a winner of the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the first woman so honored. She was also known as the columnist “Nancy Boyd” for Vanity Fair, but was rarely if ever mentioned as a “novelist” or writer of pure fiction. I would argue that neither writer was understood as a “minor novelist” in her own context, but I remain indebted to Scragg’s sketching of the cultural arc achieved by the love triangle before British and American audiences from the Restoration onward. 9. According to Millay’s biographer, Nancy Milford, Millay’s husband Eugen Boissevain had offered Deems Taylor this portion of the libretto as a demonstration of Millay’s claim that “there is not one word in the libretto which was not known in one form or another in English a thousand years ago” (282). 10. In this citation, I am indebted to Catherine Keyser’s article on Millay’s magazine publications, “Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Very Clever Woman in Vanity Fair.” 11. In the first chapter of his book White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies & Gentlemen of Colour, Marvin McAllister recounts the Sunday promenades on Broadway by Afro-New Yorkers. McAllister quotes Stansell’s account of similar behavior by white workingclass women, for whom “walking out” constituted an “elaborate system of mobile flirtation” (23). Tavia Nyong’o also underscores the transgressive nature of this geographical trajectory in his discussion of press coverage of an 1850 altercation between Frederick Douglass and white New Yorkers. Nyong’o quotes the New York Globe account of the “impudent negro” who had “the audacity yesterday morning to walk down Broadway, the principal promenade of our city, with two white women resting on his arms” (126). 12. Though outside the temporal parameters of this essay, the 2005 performances of Powell’s play offer compelling opportunity to study the recent revival of interest in her work. The Mint Theater Company staged Walking Down Broadway as part of a full season dedicated to reviving neglected plays by American women playwrights. In his review of the best productions of the year, New York Daily News critic Howard Kissel was “astonished at how smoothly . . . [the performance] caught the mood and style of the period” carr LOST NEW YORK 53 (Kissel 2005). While the New York Times lamented the “pressure of period conventions,” Daily Variety lauded the show’s staging of moments “when this old-fashioned play suddenly feels very contemporary” (Jefferson 2005; Stasio 2005). 13. Released several years later as Hello Sister!, the film version bears little resemblance to the original. 14. According to Wetzsteon, the two features Powell “most appreciated” about the Lafayette were “the coffee cups in which the management discreetly served wine to regulars during Prohibition and a telephone girl who could always be counted on to call her away whenever the company proved dull” (510). Powell was far from alone in her love for the establishment—in a color postcard of the Lafayette dated April 3, 1931, Hart Crane described it to his friend Richard Rychtarik as “the nicest hotel in the world!” 15. According to this same report in the Boston Globe, “The talking pictures and the radio have combined to kill both the minstrel and the Tom shows.” All of the periodicals cited above regarding the advent and demise of the Tom show were accessed from the multimedia archive Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture, administered by Stephen Railton at http://www.iath.virginia.edu. 16. Shahn was a photographer with the Farm Security Administration and a major proponent of social realism; his commitment to social change through art warrants much more than a footnote. However, textual documentation of his involvement with Cummings in Tom remains limited. Dance historian Lynn Garafola outlines the relationship between Kirstein and Shahn as indicative of the former’s interest in making Ballet Caravan a vehicle for the mixing of artistic genres among the avant-garde and the latter’s interest in recruiting Kirstein into the Communist Party. 54 d i LOST v i nNEW g YORK in the “dumps” Works Cited Anon. “A Love Play of Old England.” Book News 11, no. 129 (1893): 392. ——–—. “End of the Longest Run.” New York Times. December 31, 1930. http://www.iath.virginia.edu/onstage/revus/osar05at.html (accessed June 29, 2009). Crane, Hart. Postcard to Richard W. Rychtarik, April 3, 1931; Richard W. Rychtarik/Hart Crane Papers; MSS 103; box 1; folder 59; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. Cummings, E. E. Tom. New York: Arrow Editions, 1935. Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995. Fass, Paula. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Garafola, Lynn. “Lincoln Kirstein, Modern Dance, and the Left: The Genesis of an American Ballet.” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 23, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 18–35. Hall, J. R. “Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Anglo-Saxonism: The Question of Language.” Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity. Edited by Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, 133–56. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. Jefferson, Margo. “Young Lovers Find Romance, and Its Consequences.” New York Times, October 1, 2005, Arts Section. Kennedy, Richard S. Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings. New York: Liveright Publishing, c. 1980. Keyser, Catherine. “Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Very Clever Woman in Vanity Fair.” American Periodicals 17, no. 1 (2007): 65–96. Kirstein, Lincoln. “Revolutionary Ballet Forms.” In New Theatre and Film, 1934– 1937: An Anthology. Edited by Herbert Kline, 217–19. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. Kissel, Howard. “Curtain Calls 2005: Replaying the Best Stage Shows of the Year, From ‘Jersey’ to ‘Boozy.’” New York Daily News, December 26, 2005, Sports Final Edition. carr LOST NEW YORK 55 Lears, Jackson. Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920. New York: Harper, 2009. ——–—. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920. New York, Pantheon Books, 1981. McAllister, Marvin. White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies & Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown’s African & American Theater. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Meade, Marion. Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. New York: Harvest Books, 2005. Meer, Sarah. Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Random House, 2001. Millay, Edna St. Vincent. The King’s Henchman: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927. Miller, Nina. Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York’s Literary Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Morgan, Jo-Anne. Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Visual Culture. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007. Nyong’o, Tavia. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Page, Tim. Dawn Powell: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. Pegolotti, James A. Deems Taylor: A Biography. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. Poe, Edgar Allan. “Literary Criticism.” Godey’s Lady’s Book (March 1846): 134–39. Powell, Dawn. The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965. Edited by Tim Page. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1995. ——–—. Selected Letters of Dawn Powell, 1913–1965. Edited by Tim Page. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. ——–—. Walking Down Broadway. In Four Plays by Dawn Powell. Edited by Michael Sexton and Tim Page, 335–454. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1999. ——–—. The Wicked Pavilion. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1996. 56 d i LOST v i nNEW g YORK in the “dumps” Scandura, Jani. Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Scragg, Donald, and Carole Weinberg. Literary Appropriations of the AngloSaxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Simmons, Peter. Gotham Comes of Age: New York Through the Lens of the Byron Company. San Francisco: Pomegranate, 1999. Smith, Fletcher. “Uncle Tom Has Died for the Last Time.” Boston Globe. January 12, 1930. http://www.iath.virginia.edu/onstage/revus/osar54kt.html (accessed June 28, 2009). Stansell, Christine. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000. Stasio, Marilyn. “Walking Down Broadway.” Daily Variety, October 3, 2005, Legit Reviews Off-Broadway. Wetzsteon, Ross. Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village, the American Bohemia, 1915–1950. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Wilson, Edmund. “Dawn Powell: Greenwich Village in the Fifties.” The New Yorker, November 17, 1962. Reprinted in The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950–1965. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965. Zeisloft, E. Idell. The New Metropolis: Memorable Events of Three Centuries, 1600–1900, from the Island Mana-hat-ta to Greater New York at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. New York: D. Appleton, 1899. carr LOST NEW YORK 57 Fuck You/ a magazine of the Arts 5, no. 5 (1963). Back cover. Fuck You, edited by Ed Sanders, was one of the most important Lower East Side magazines of the early 1960s. It included work by many of the then avantgarde, but now canonical Beat writers. Downtown Collection. Fales Library, New York University. 58 LOST NEW YORK Secret Locations in the Lower East Side: Downtown Poetics 1960–1980 John Melillo rom the 1960s to the 1980s, a hodgepodge collection of poets, visual artists, and performers established a new arts scene in downtown New York City. Based primarily in the East Village and Lower East Side, these downtown artists used their marginal (and cheaply rented) space in New York as the staging ground for an eclectic set of noninstitutional artistic practices. Whether printing a magazine from a “secret location in the Lower East Side” or playing a punk rock show at a dirty, unknown club on the Bowery, these artists discovered new ways to use the forgotten parts of the city as a creative communal space. Contrary to the visions of canonical modernists like T. S. Eliot who imagined the city as an anonymous and isolating place, downtown artists used their urban environment as a site of possibility. In particular, they used spaces within it that seemed lost to mainstream, white, bourgeois “culture.” Their various aesthetic productions—little magazines, happenings, poetry readings, musical LOST NEW YORK 59 performances, and more—reflected their social situation as artists in the city. Crowded and noisy, New York acted as a kind of force field, pushing and pulling different people, methods, and arts together in new ways. These artists not only cultivated new ideas of how one could make art but also imagined new possibilities for community and self-definition. For many, the work of making—poesis—did not happen statically on page or canvas but in the always-changing relationship between the aesthetic object and its readers, viewers, or listeners. Poets and other artists played with the act of constructing meaning—in language, fashion, sound, and many other media (or multimedia). One might say that these artists became, in the idiom of the critic Marshall McLuhan, obsessed with the “mediumicity” of their various media, and the paradoxical effect was a synaesthetic interweaving of the arts. Poets were musicians; painters were event organizers; sculptors, landscapers; dancers, actors; composers, architects. . . . The swirling interdisciplinarity that defines this era in New York art rejected any and all stable boundaries. Though Greenwich Village had a long bohemian history dating back to the early twentieth century, by midcentury artists saw the Village slowly transforming into a bourgeois enclave and a tourist trap (Kane, All Poets Welcome 3). The Lower East Side—which had its own long history of immigrant communities and radical politics—provided a cheap alternative outside of the Village where artists could set up an oppositional, experimental community. Downtown artists had a way of finding and reusing spaces in a way that reflected a wider change in poetics. Whether at poetry readings at Café Les Deux Mégots (on Seventh Street near Second Avenue), Café Le Metro (on Second Avenue at Tenth Street), or St. Mark’s Church; happenings like Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable on St. Marks Place; or music performances at the Mercer Arts Center, CBGB’s, and Max’s Kansas City, making art had a theatrical, incantatory, and celebratory element. Authors, in particular, saw this incantatory element as the starting point for a poetics of direct expression, personal liberation, and community creation. Of course, the practice of this poetic urge morphed from the diaristic, sexually open work of the Beat and second-generation New York School poets to the dry, rocklike surfaces of proto-Language poets like Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer. Despite the radically different practices of the many authors in downtown New York over these years, meaning became a process that was literally worked out—in the air, in the community, on the actual page, on the body. A swirling interdisciplinarity defined this era in New York as artists rejected any and all stable boundaries. The first downtown spaces opened to this brand of outsider poetics were the coffee shops Café Les Deux Mégots and Café Le Metro. Seedy and drug- 60 s e LOST c r eNEW t YORK locations in the lower east side infested places, these coffee shops (first Deux Mégots and then, after a change in management at Mégots, Le Metro) hosted poetry readings where poets new and old could gather, drink, and play. For a short while, second-generation “New York School” poets such as Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, and Ed Sanders; “Black Mountain” poets such as Paul Blackburn and Joel Oppenheimer; “Fluxus” composer/poets such as Jackson Mac Low; and Beat generation writers such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg used these cafés as hidden zones outside of academics’ or publishers’ scrutiny or care. As such, a sense of ephemerality and fun pervaded the scene. The poet Dan Saxon created instant publications out of these readings. He would have poets write down (or in some cases type) their performed poems on rexograph paper1 and then bring collated copies to the next week’s reading. This publication series, called, respectively, Poets at Les Deux Mégots and Poets at Le Metro, not only recorded every night’s readings but also actively established a fluctuating poetic community (Kane, All Poets Welcome 36). Dan Saxon’s publications, along with many other Lower East Side magazines, took part in what has been called the “mimeograph revolution.” Using the newly invented mimeograph machine (a forerunner to today’s office copy machines), writers could create quick and cheap publications that avoided the inhibiting codes of taste and unofficial censorship that guided mainstream publishing. In addition to Dan Saxon’s publications, Ted Berrigan’s C: a Journal of Poetry, Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Diane DiPrima’s The Floating Bear, Ed Sanders’s Fuck You/ a magazine of the Arts, Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci’s 0 to 9, and many other magazines allowed more poets to publish whatever outsider, incomprehensible, or sexually charged material they desired. Sanders famously declared in his magazine, “I’ll Print Anything!” Fuck You/ (1961–1965) was a particularly aggressive example of poetic boundary breaking. A joyful (if somewhat misogynist) celebration of sexual desire (in all forms), the magazine lived up to its name. Though not every poem printed had sexual content, many poets used the magazine as a place to push against cultural taboos. Imagined by Sanders as a “Total Assault on the Culture,” the poetry—from Al Fowler’s ironically charged poems about desire for his daughter to Peter Orlovsky’s very matter-of-fact recordings of sex with Allen Ginsberg, to Sanders’s own obsession with “cocks,” “cunts,” and “fucking”— displayed a casual but revolutionary lack of decorum. One poem, “Camping Out with Ed Sanders” by Mark Samara, Ooooooooooooh Ooooooooooooh e lYORK illo LOSTmNEW 61 Ooooooooooooh Ooooooooooooh, OoooooooooooooH, OooooooooooooooooooH! “Not Bad!” (Fuck You/ 1, no. 5, unpaginated) seems to reproduce a sexual encounter by using the poem as a kind of sound recorder, capturing moans of pleasure. In magazines like Fuck You/, the preservative powers of poetry turn toward the accidental, the “dirty,” and the unconscious in a way that questioned what a poet could do and say.2 Tied in with this question of poetic possibility was the communitybuilding function of these little magazines. Through the sixties, little magazines and the coffee shops, bookstores, and alternative spaces associated with them not only provided a safe place for experimentation but also created a kind of textual glue that connected the various poets living in or around the Lower East Side. The social environment took on textual form, and, conversely, text took on social force. While Dan Saxon’s quick and ephemeral publications recorded a specific set of readings at a particular moment in time, other magazines, like Fuck You/, imagined a community in and through print (though that community still revolved around local poets and artists). Sanders would often dedicate the back page of Fuck You/ to the various contributors in that number. Rather than a simple enumeration of the authors’ biographies and publication histories, these notes told funny stories, gave writers epithets, and provided a series of in-jokes and advertisements that made the magazine work as a kind of “community newspaper” (Kane, All Poets Welcome 76). In addition to creating this communal feel, Sanders’s handwritten, handdrawn editorial pages explored the possibilities of combining text and image that paralleled other Downtown poets’ interest in orality. While most of the poetry in Fuck You/ still looked recognizably like poetry—mostly short, mostly left-justified, with line breaks—much of the editorial matter of the magazine was written in a quasi-hieroglyphic text-image argot that emphasized a visual relationship to meaning. As the back page from Number 5, Volume 5, shows, words were handwritten and interspersed with little quasi-Egyptian doodles and symbols. Sanders, a classics scholar and a student of Ezra Pound’s work (he even illegally published Pound’s Cantos 110–116 in 1967), used this text-image combination in much the same way as Pound, influenced by the scholar Ernest Fenollosa, would combine Chinese characters and text in his Cantos. The pictographic Chinese 62 s e LOST c r eNEW t YORK locations in the lower east side characters, though often supplemented by Pound’s alphabetic translations, supposedly provided a direct image to the reader without the arbitrary process of translation from alphabet to meaning, from signifier to signified. Sanders’s brand of doodled hieroglyph seems to partake in this same quest for immediate access. Stylized penises and eyes, unrecognizable symbols, motion lines, and other visual effects transform the writing into a consciously visual experience, reminiscent in many ways of the handwritten look of text in comic books. In a sign of the mixing inherent to the Downtown scene’s mixed spaces, a “high” modernist interest in the language of immediacy becomes indistinguishable from a “low” comic book or doodling style. This mixing of high and low, in addition to the bare fact of words as visual display, invited readers into the poetic community before them. Eventually this kind of textual and social experimentation became more and more localized around the St. Mark’s Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, a block away from Café Le Metro. By the late 1960s, the Poetry Project had quasiinstitutional status; it had government funding, a workshop series, and its own publication, in addition to a regular reading series. The church became (and remains) a central place for the East Village avant-garde community of poets and artists. The Poetry Project was instrumental in expanding the scene’s experimental scope, as represented by new work from poets and artists published in Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer’s small magazine, 0 to 9. The institutionalization of St. Mark’s fit within a general process of fragmentation and change. By 1968, even before the last gasps of hippie love and community at Woodstock and Altamont a year later, the Lower East Side was already beginning to feel the effects of a conservative and economic backlash. There was a general deflation of mood that had much to do with seeming political failure. Many poets either dropped out of political engagement or did the opposite, dropping out of poetry for more political engagement. Some poets, disenchanted with city life, moved to Bolinas, California, where a community of writers had recently relocated. Ted Berrigan, the acknowledged “godfather” of the Poetry Project, left for an academic job in the Midwest, as did other poets. Of course, while many of the founding members of the East Village poetry scene left New York, the Poetry Project continued to grow—in both numbers of poets associated with it and in critical stature. People were taking notice. Theoretically and stylistically, two poles seemed to emerge at this moment. At one end, there was a continuation and intensification of the performative, public, and oral aspects of contemporary poetry. At the other end, a poetics informed by the theoretical work of poststructuralists questioned the way that language and meaning worked and were produced. Bernadette Mayer led some of the first workshops at the Poetry Project, and they emphasized the word as illo LOST mNEWe lYORK 63 thing and the poem as constructed object. She would lead fellow poets to experiment with various automatic processes, cut-up methods, and group authorship. As an editor in 0 to 9 along with Acconci, she championed this kind of languageoriented poetic experimentation, which moved away from the challenging and lurid content of magazines like Fuck You/ and toward the problem of what language could be made to do on the page. Cutting up poems—a Dadaist technique given new life by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin—was only the beginning. Dan Graham’s diagrams, Sol Lewitt’s drawings, Robert Smithson’s maps, and Jackson Mac Low’s reading scores, in addition to experiments in repetition from authors such as Gertrude Stein (reprinted by the editors), John Giorno, and Clark Coolidge, continued the Downtown tradition of testing the limits of language, but in an aggressively formal, quasi-scientific way. Rather than placing specific moral standards on display, these artists began to investigate the social construction of meaning in language and other systems. A poem like Clark Coolidge’s “Nothing I-XIII” provides a good example: I. the a these but the any with on I them even they for of the every they I in the a and the I then with with what that the to my to in all the no my the who or what any I I the in not when the I we but (0 to 9, no. 4 [June 1968]: 1) By using only pronouns, definite and indefinite articles, and prepositions, Coolidge’s poem highlights the forgotten parts of language, the connective tissue taken as a given in communication. At the same time, the poem plays with the 64 s e LOST c r eNEW t YORK locations in the lower east side line between sense and nonsense, forcing a kind of instant collaboration with its audience. We create meaning out of detritus. Though the poem is seemingly “nothing,” it still has a sense of communal engagement à la Sanders and other Downtown poets, but that communal engagement is caught up in questioning the distinction between meaning and nonmeaning rather than the conflict between the sayable and the unsayable. The classic poetic “I” here becomes another part of the stammering, a-grammatical beat rather than the privileged, controlling perspective of the poem. The poem is more collective song than individual experience. Though seemingly very distant in practice and attitude, the early work of the writers who eventually founded the musical movement known as “punk”— Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine, and Patti Smith—connects in many ways to the formal experimentalism of Coolidge, Mayer, and Acconci (and of Language poets like Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein). Though often forgotten or ignored by its fans, the roots of punk rock music lie in the do-it-yourself (DIY) Downtown literary scene. Ten years after the first readings at Deux Mégots and Le Metro, such poets as Hell, Verlaine, and especially Patti Smith would take the possibilities of an oral poetics back to the world of music, but they also imbibed some of the extreme experimentalism of the proto-Language writers and other Downtown artists. Patti Smith’s first public reading, at St. Mark’s Church in February 1971, was not simply the reading of one poem from the page after another but rather a full sonic assault, with Smith improvising, chanting, and singing, all backed by noise guitar from the writer and rock critic Lenny Kaye. Richard Hell, as Richard Meyers, published such Language-oriented poets as Clark Coolidge and Bruce Andrews in his own literary magazine, Genesis : Grasp in the early seventies. Verlaine and Hell coauthored a book, Wanna Go Out? under the pseudonym Theresa Stern, a persona imagined as a half–Puerto Rican hooker from Hoboken.3 Alongside these important literary interconnections, a guiding poetics of immediacy and noise made punk not a sui generis break in pop music but rather another expression of a larger countercultural tendency to test the boundaries between the possible and impossible in every aspect of art and life. Hell’s Genesis : Grasp has an important place in this story. Even as a teenage writer, Hell understood the power of little magazines to form communities. He initially started the magazine to “assert [himself ] as a writer, as well as enter or help fashion a community of writers in which I fit” (interview with author). Bruce Andrews, a contributor in the last issue of Genesis : Grasp, recognized the same qualities in little magazines: “the only kind of angle into the small press poetry world was the radical fringe of what was going on at St. Mark’s, some loose formulation of experimental poetry which at that point would include illo LOST mNEWe lYORK 65 concrete, visual, conceptual or sound work” (qtd. in Kane, All Poets Welcome 198). Genesis : Grasp, despite its small scale—about 500 copies were made of each issue—was another community fashioned out of this scene of poetic production and radical, do-it-yourself values. Within this magazine’s imagined community, the bodily, almost scatological focus of earlier sixties writers combined with the language play of the Acconci-Mayer school. Hell printed minimalist poems by Coolidge, such as the funny “urn urn,” which consisted of the word “urn” repeated twice, separated by a large white space, and centered in the middle of the journal page. He also printed poetry by his friend Tom Miller (soon to be Tom Verlaine) that focused on eyes and bodily malfunction, like the alien-Emersonian I lay down I become a giant eyeball green, greasy, softly buzzing. (Genesis : Grasp 5/6, p. 59) Hell himself printed conceptual, visually oriented works under the pseudonym Ernie Stomach. The last issue of Genesis : Grasp includes the poem, “Hello, I,” which consists of a blank page with “Hello, I” halfway down the page against the far right margin. The poem acts as nothing but strangled communication, begun but never finished, a telephone call without a connection—but also a telephone call with infinite possibilities for continuation. One can detect the same detached, wry, seemingly nihilistic but also playful attitude in one of Hell’s later creations, a T-shirt that says, “Please Kill Me”—a staple image in punk mythology. One of the last productions Hell made with Genesis : Grasp Press was a short, staple-bound book by Ernie Stomach entitled uh. A “flip-movie dance alphabet peepshow toy enigma boring book,” uh consists of an alphabet constructed with a stylized font that subtly makes each letter out of a variation on a basic ovoid shape. Flipping through the book, there is no narrative plot as in a child’s flip book but rather an almost musical variation of fixed shapes. But it is not all constructivism: the “peepshow” of the title refers to the penislike shape of the title when written in the ovoid forms of Stomach’s invented font. The book sardonically combines an experimental interest in repetition and variation with a childish fascination with penises. Ernie Stomach’s author bio supports this: “Ernie Stomach was born in 1949, but has been 11 years old since 1968” (uh, unpaginated). The flip book format seemed like one answer to a major problem for Hell and other writers in the Downtown scene: how does one make poetry physical 66 s e LOST c r eNEW t YORK locations in the lower east side Ernie Stomach [AKA Richard Hell]. Uh, Flip-movie Dance Alphabet Peepshow Toy Enigma Boring Book. New York: Genesis : Grasp Press, 1971. Ernie Stomach’s stylized “u,” “v,” “w,” and “x.” Downtown Collection. Fales Library, New York University. illo LOSTmNEWe lYORK 67 and “catchy”? The eventual move by Hell, Verlaine, and Smith from poetry to rock ’n’ roll was not simply an embrace of the bardic oral tradition, it was also about transforming poetry into an intense and noisy experience. In a letter to Bruce Andrews, Hell defines his aesthetic: “I want each page in the mag to be as direct as possible. I don’t want words from the imagination or intellect. I want them from the muscled energy of a being and/or more particularly from the page. I want to turn people on” (Richard Hell to Bruce Andrews, Feb. 12, 1971). In a return letter to Hell regarding the possibility of Hell publishing a little book under his new Dot Books imprint (the same that would produce Theresa Stern’s Wanna Go Out?), Bruce Andrews seemed to hit upon the thing Hell was looking for: “I think I know what you want: quick hits, which is only possible with a short and lean (uncomplicated) supercharged poem—EROTIC ROCK N’ ROLL DOPE poems” (Bruce Andrews to Richard Hell [undated 1973?]). Andrews thought some of his poetry worked under this rubric, but before the book could happen, Hell’s musical career had begun and “EROTIC ROCK N’ ROLL DOPE” became Hell’s preferred form of making art. Famous songs like “Blank Generation” and “Love Comes in Spurts” combine relatively staid strophic forms with blasts of high-energy guitar noise, a primal backbeat, and Hell’s own nasal, over-the-top delivery. Television was the first punk band to arrive at CBGB’s, an unknown bar at the corner of Bowery and Bleecker on the Lower East Side, and their work slowly transformed that backward hole-in-the-wall into a new center for Downtown art. The nascent punk scene came into its own by the mid-seventies with the creation of fanzines like Punk Magazine and New York Rocker. Given a name (“punk”)4; an aesthetics of blankness, indifference, distortion, and incomprehensibility; a series of heroes (Marlon Brando, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Joey Ramone, Blondie); and energetic songs, punk slowly developed into a popular entertainment. This popularity primed the wide-ranging, do-it-yourself underground music scenes of the 1980s, the grunge explosion of the early 1990s, and the currently flourishing world of independent music. Though poetry seemed far away from punk in its most aggressive forms, even Punk Magazine (the primary creators of the image of punk as drunken, loud, fast, and snotty) continued to maintain its literary associations. Punk #5 had a poem by Theresa Stern, and as late as February 1977 (Punk #7), the magazine published poetry by Patti Smith as part of an interview spread, “Delicate Delinquent.” Punk’s mixture of text, photomontage, and advertisement kept it thoroughly in the Downtown tradition of media mixing and textual experimentation. The “Delicate Delinquent” interview and photo spread immediately confuses and playfully challenges readers’ expectations because it is upside 68 s e LOST c r eNEW t YORK locations in the lower east side Punk no. 7 (1977): 8. “Delicate Delinquent,” a Patti Smith poem/photo spread/interview in this issue of Punk was originally printed upside down, as it is here. Downtown Collection. Fales Library, New York University. illo LOST mNEWe lYORK 69 down relative to the rest of the magazine’s material. In addition, the handwritten poem, titled “A Poem by Patti Smith,” combines with a photo of someone far away in a tunnel to create a kind of surrealistic gloss. The photo, according to the poem, is the “TRUE TEXT.” Smith (along with the magazine’s editors) seems to comment on the possibilities of poetry as text. Broken up, unfinished, and “fucked up,” this poem shows Smith engaging in the same conflict between meaning as something read versus meaning as something seen that Ed Sanders worked with in Fuck You/. Smith’s multilayered references—from a W. B. Yeats poem, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” to the photo, to the description of her language as “future century / American”—make not only the words but also the entire mishmash of quotation and requotation the subject of the page. In other words, poetry happens here not by itself but through the interaction of a community of readers: “somebody will understand it.” Interestingly, the poem is set against an interview that begins another system of quotation and requotation via the spoken, recorded, and transcribed word. This poem/picture/gloss/interview is, then, a microcosm of Punk Magazine’s general attempt to form a community. It teaches a new language and a new way of reading. Ultimately, other aspects of Punk’s creation of an imagined communal space—star-creation, goofy cartoons, pictures, ironic poses, excessive editorial opinion (most famously, in the “Fuck Disco” editorial in Punk #1), and reader participation through contests and write-in ballots for the “Punk 99” list—were built upon this “future century American” language that included not simply words but a whole set of subcultural poses and practices for the young and disaffected to use. Downtown artists continued to test and challenge even these countercultural conventions. “No Wave” musicians such as James Chance, Arto Lindsay, and Lydia Lunch attacked and rethought punk, pop, and poetic language in their own attempts to refigure the values of art. Performance artists such as David Wojnarwicz and writers such as Kathy Acker and Dennis Cooper took punk lessons about the invention of community and stardom and turned them on the reinvention of identity. Great synthesizers such as the band Sonic Youth came along and reattached many a conceptual and critical sense of stardom, identity, and community to new and extreme musical forms. For all these artists, the question of the proper poetic response to social reality remained fundamental. Art making and critique, both made possible in secret underground spaces, remained interlinked. The Downtown scene slowly dissipated in the late eighties as poets and artists found that their spaces and their practices could not remain secret for long (even if they wanted them to remain so). Fame lured some away from the city, capital moved into previously cheap neighborhoods, and 70 s e LOST c r eNEW t YORK locations in the lower east side the expansion of telecommunications made community no longer an interpersonal but an interfacing relationship. Still, the vibrant arts scene of New York’s Downtown continues to leave its mark on contemporary music, literature, and art. Some of the conditions that defined the Downtown scene may now be lost, but its intellectual and experimental residue continues to affect the daily lives of New Yorkers, a testament to the power of avant-garde ideas within a popular milieu. notes 1. Along with the mimeograph, an early form of small-scale copy-making. 2. The magazine ended when Sanders was charged with obscenity by the New York City police. Though he eventually won the court battle, he moved on to other projects, such as his musical performance group, the Fugs. 3. See Daniel Kane’s “From Poetry to Punk” for more on the literary roots of punk rock. 4. See Bernard Gendron’s Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde, pp. 227-77, for a history of punk’s naming and the conflicts between supporters of both the “punk” and “new wave” labels. Works Cited 0 to 9. Edited by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer. New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006. Andrews, Bruce. Letter to Richard Hell. Undated [1973?]. Richard Hell Papers. Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. Fuck You/ a magazine of the Arts. Edited by Ed Sanders. New York: Fuck You/ Press, 1961–1965. Gendron, Bernard. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Genesis : Grasp. Edited by Richard Meyers and David Giannini. New York: Genesis : Grasp Publications, 1968–1971. Hell, Richard. E-mail interview with John Melillo. April 5, 2005. ——–—. Letter to Bruce Andrews. February 12, 1971. Richard Hell Papers. Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. e lYORK illo LOSTmNEW 71 Kane, Daniel. All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. ——–—. “From Poetry to Punk in the East Village.” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York City. Edited by Cyrus R. K. Patell and Bryan Waterman. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. Punk Magazine. Edited by John Holmstrom. New York: Punk Publications, 1976–1979. Stern, Theresa. Wanna Go Out? New York: Dot Books, 1971. Stomach, Ernie. uh. New York: Genesis : Grasp Publications, 1971. 72 s e LOST c r eNEW t YORK locations in the lower east side Designer: J. Geddis Creative Director: Dirk Rowntree Editors: Cyrus R. K. Patell and Bryan Waterman Copy Editor: Elizabeth Mickel The serif typeface used in this catalog is Mercury text, and the sans serif typeface is Knockout, both designed by the Hoefler & Frere-Jones type foundry. The cover was printed on Utopia 1X Silk cover, and the text was printed on Utopia 1X Silk text weight by CRW Graphics, Pennsauken, New Jersey. In keeping with NYU’s commitment to sustainability, this publication is printed on FSC-certified paper that includes 20 percent post-consumer fiber. (The FSC trademark identifies products that contain fiber from well-managed forests certified in accordance with the rules of the Forest Stewardship Council.) For more information about NYU’s Green Action Plan, go to www. nyu.edu/sustainability. 73 LOSTNew NEWYork YORKUniversity. Produced by Advertising and Publications,