David and Judith Schubert

[A caution: This post makes reference to suicide, childhood trauma, and domestic violence.]

[6 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Yes, it’s a beautiful building. The AIA Guide to New York City (2010) identifies it as the Mrs. Hattie I. James House, built c. 1890:

Romanesque Revival with a strong, rock-face brownstone stair, elaborate foliate carved reliefs, and a bay window, not surprisingly, overlooking the bay.

But that’s not why the building appears in this post.

When a WPA photographer took this tax photograph, David and Judith Schubert lived on the top floor of 6 Pierrepont Street. He (1913–1946) was a poet; she (1909–1990), a teacher at a progressive school. Though he remains little known, David Schubert was an extraordinary poet.

William Carlos Williams:

To sit down for a little while and reread some of Schubert’s rare and poignant verse is like opening a window in a room that had become stuffy without one’s realizing it.

John Ashbery:

I myself value Schubert more than Pound or Eliot, and it’s a relief to have an authority of the stature of Williams to back me up.

Schubert had great difficulty getting published: he was, alas, too far ahead of his time, writing with the exuberance, obliqueness, and tonal complexity that would come to characterize the so-called New York School.

Schubert’s mental health was long fragile. He endured a horrific childhood: his father abandoned the family, his mother committed suicide, and David discovered the body. He and his siblings were split up among relatives. His stellar academic record got him into Amherst College when he was not quite sixteen, but his dedication to poetry made a mess of his college career. In adulthood, finding his efforts at publication stymied again and again, Schubert became ever more fragile.

In 1980, Judith (by then Judith Schubert Kranes) recounted the January 1943 breakdown that precipitated her husband’s institutionalization. He shouted and cursed, threw a picture frame out the window, picked up a pair of scissors, and threatened to kill his wife. She had to get out:

Moving to the closet, I reached for my good shoes (none of us had more than two pairs in those days), but David, snatching them away, threw them out of the open pane, into the snowy silence. There was a very wide expanse of red tiled roof under that window, and perhaps as late as April, after the snow was gone, to my amazement, standing upright on the sun–lit tiles, stood my shoes. I crawled out to rescue them, wondering how they could have remained in such perfect condition while we mortals — David and I — were falling apart.

Judith Schubert Kranes, in David Schubert: Works and Days, Quarterly Review of Literature 24 (1983).

Judith returned the next morning with David’s psychiatrist to find that David had wrecked the apartment and disappeared. He was later found in Washington, D.C., where he had gone to see Archibald MacLeish and enlist in the Navy. He was hospitalized, spent almost all of his remaining life in institutions, and died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-two.

The tiled roof, visible in the photograph above, appears to have been restored. (Google Maps photographs from 2011 and 2013 show flat tiles or shingles. At some point after January 2013, scaffolding went up, and a December 2017 photograph shows curved titles resembling those that appear in the tax photograph.)

Here is a real-estate tour of apartment 4A. I suspect that the third and fourth floor units were joined to make one much larger apartment. And I suspect that the realtor has no idea who once lived in the top-floor apartment.

Related reading
David Schubert, TR5-3718 : A David Schubert poem : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[AIA: American Institute of Architects. The Ashbery and Williams quotations are from Ashbery’s Charles Eliot Norton lecture on Schubert in Other Traditions (2000). In 1961 a selection of David Schubert’s poems was published as Initial A. The QRL volume, edited by Theodore Weiss and Renée Karol Weiss, presents all the surviving poems and an oral/epistolary biography.]