In 1948, H. L. Mencken published a piece in The New Yorker about the novelist Theodore Dreiser’s much anticipated move from the Upper West Side to Greenwich Village, in the early nineteen-hundreds. At the time, the Village had a bit of a dubious reputation. “Dreiser, moving to Tenth Street, found himself in a dense mass of such Little Red Riding Hoods and their attendant wolves,” Mencken writes. “They swarmed in all the adjacent courts and alleys, and spilled out into the main streets and even into Washington Square. He had no more than unpacked his quills and inkhorn and hung up his other suit when they began to besiege him.” Mencken’s misgivings seem amusing to us now, but Manhattan has always been a source of intrigue and fascination, both for those who reside here and for others around the country. For writers, the subject of New York—and its inhabitants—can often be inexhaustible.
This week, we’re bringing you a selection of pieces about the people and the characters who help make the city such a captivating place. In “Sophie’s World,” Rebecca Mead explores the exuberant imagination of an eight-year-old girl who lives on the Upper West Side with her family. Hilton Als profiles Dorothy Dean, The New Yorker’s first female fact checker and a galvanizing presence in New York’s gay scene for nearly twenty years. In “Putting Myself Together,” Jamaica Kincaid recalls the heady days and nights of her early years in the city. Michael Korda examines the life of Jacqueline Susann, the author of “Valley of the Dolls,” and Calvin Trillin meets the irascible owner of Shopsin’s, a beloved eatery in Greenwich Village. In “Coffins! Undertakers! Hearses! Funeral Parlors!,” Joseph Mitchell chronicles the idiosyncratic adventures of Hugh G. Flood, the unofficial mayor of the Fulton Fish Market. (The subject of Mitchell’s piece is a composite of various city characters.) In “The Life of the Party,” Jane Kramer reports on Roz Roose, a left-wing socialite who ran an intellectual salon in Manhattan for decades. Maeve Brennan writes about the changing landscape of downtown New York in the nineteen-sixties. Finally, in “King of Cats,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recounts the influential life of the cultural critic Albert Murray. It’s hard to capture the spirit of a city—but we hope that these pieces evoke some of what makes New York so unique.
“Sophie’s World”
“Like grownup Manhattanites, Sophie has a busy, Filofaxed life, with back-to-back appointments and obligations.”
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“Wasn’t She Great?”
“It’s nearly impossible to find a copy of any of Jacqueline Susann’s books in New York—a fate that would have been sadder for her than anything else. She had always counted on her books for immortality, and, in the end, they failed her.”
“Don’t Mention It”
“Even now, grown and living out of the city, my daughters consider Shopsin’s General Store—or Ken and Eve’s or Kenny’s, as they usually call it—an extension of their kitchen.”
“King of Cats”
“The most outrageous theorist of American culture lives, as he has lived for three decades, in a modest apartment in Lenox Terrace, in Harlem.”
“Changed and Changed and Changed Again”
“As her doomed neighbors came tumbling down—no dignity, all secrets exposed—the Whitney Museum huddled more and more into herself, like a poor old woman pulling her shawl around her shoulders in wintertime.”
“Coffins! Undertakers! Hearses! Funeral Parlors!”
“One morning a while back, I got a letter from a tough old Scotch-Irishman I know, Mr. Hugh G. Flood, inviting me to come down to his hotel in the Fulton Fish Market district and help him eat a bushel of black clams.”
“Putting Myself Together”
“In the New York days of my twenties, the streets were wide and open and always sunny, not narrow and closed and dark, the way they are now when I walk down the same streets.”
“The Life of the Party”
“Roz Roose put the Upper West Side left together at her parties, and people on that left helped give the city the feisty, subversive tone that the rest of the country found so strange.”
“Friends of Dorothy”
“For nearly two decades, Dorothy Dean reigned, with both cruelty and compassion, over that site of urban gay culture she called ‘the fruit stand.’ ”
“The Life of an Artist”
“Nine-tenths of the alleged writers and artists who infested the Village lived on women, and I never heard of one who produced anything worth a hoot.”