Along came Mary, and a bookstore

[Hamburger Mary and the Liveright Bookshop, 15 and 17 West 51st Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

“Hamburger Mary”? I know that name. William Burroughs, from a Paris Review interview (Fall 1965):

There was a place in New York called Hamburger Mary’s. I was in Hamburger Mary’s when a friend gave me a batch of morphine syrettes. That was my first experience with morphine, and then I built up a whole picture of Hamburger Mary. She is also an actual person. I don’t like to give her name for fear of being sued for libel, but she was a Scientologist who started out in a hamburger joint in Portland, Oregon, and now has eleven million dollars.

In Burroughs’s fiction, Hamburger Mary is a member of the Nova Mob, a group dedicated to creating galactic chaos. (I’m simplifying greatly.) Among the mob’s members: Izzy the Push, The Subliminal Kid, and Mr Bradly Mr Martin. In our world, there’s now Hamburger Mary’s, “a drag-themed burger restaurant chain.” Any relation to West 51st or Burroughs? If there is one, the company’s history page isn’t saying. Wikipedia points to the use of “Mary” as a slang term for a gay man as the explanation.

Next door to Mary, the Liveright Bookshop. Boni & Liveright, the publishing firm founded by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright in 1917, was and still is a distinguished name in modern American literature. A 1963 New Yorker item describes the Liveright Bookshop as the work of two sisters, Addie and Babette Liveright, in business from 1924 to 1952. They were Horace Liveright’s cousins. A 1925 advertisement for the bookshop (which was then on West 49th Street) made an appearance in this OCA post.

If my map-reading skills are firing, 15 and 17 West 51st have been subsumed by 75 Rockefeller Plaza and an American Girl store.

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August 12: I went to the library to look up “Nostalgic Twins,” the 1963 New Yorker item about the Liveright sisters. Addie (1883–1968) and Babette (1883–1969) were twins, born in Philadelphia, educated in Quaker schools. “We are not intellectuals,” Babette told The New Yorker. Babette worked as a secretary, came to New York and took a course in bookselling, developed a following at Stern’s (a department store), and persuaded Addie to join her in starting a bookstore. The sisters began at 4 West 49th and moved to 15 West 51st in 1929. In 1945 they moved to the Associated Press Building on Rockefeller Plaza. John D. was among their customers. Others: Oscar Hammerstein II, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Parker, Dawn Powell, A.S.W. Rosenbach, and the Holland-America Line.

The New Yorker item ends with a joke: “‘Dr. Rosenbach bought from us, but we didn’t buy from him,’ Addie said.” A.S.W. Rosenbach was a buyer, seller, and collector of rare books. He owned the manuscripts of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Ulysses.

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More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives