Castorini and Cammareri

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

That’s the Castorini family’s house in Moonstruck (dir. Norman Jewison, 1987). It’s a wow of a house, with considerable history in the world of non-fiction.

And here’s the Cammareri Bakery, which became the corner bakery in Moonstruck. It didn’t even have to change its name. “Cammereri’s Bake Shop,” Chrissy (Nada Despotovich) says when she answers the phone.

[502 Henry Street, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

In 1940 Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Cammareri lived at 502. I’d like to think that’s Mr. Cammareri out in front.

[Click for a larger view.]

[Click for a larger telephone directory.]

And look: another bakery, in Boro Park. Any relation? That’s a rabbit hole down which I will not go. But you can see Cammareri’s Bakery (as its sign says) in the Municipal Archives.

A 1943 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about the 11th Avenue bakery mentions Angelina and Grace Cammerini, “handsome Italian girls,” originally from Palermo. A plaque in the bakery marked their brother Andrew’s second year in military service.

In 1998, the Henry Street bakery, by then known as the Cammereri Brothers Bakery, closed after nearly eighty years. No. 502 today houses MozzLab, a cheesemaker and food purveyor. No. 5910 is now a residential behemoth.

A wonderful bit of TV from when the bakery was flourishing: WABC-TV’s Chauncey Howell went to Carroll Gardens and interviewed residents about Moonstruck. Priceless stuff.

*

April 1: A reader sent links to the Daily News articles with the bakery: one and two. “Cher, she goes crazy when she eats the lard bread.” Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

A Bronx candy store

[983 Mace Avenue, The Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

A reader who likes looking in the archives spotted this Bronx candy store. The same reader found a Board of Education photograph of the store’s interior, identified as “PS 89, Bronx: surroundings.” It would seem that the BOE wanted photographs of locations near the school. This candy store was right across the street from P.S. 89. Here is retail density at its finest — not to mention a sweet setup for schoolkids. Do click for a larger view. You won’t regret it.

[983 Mace Avenue interior. Photograph by A. J. Hickey, March 31, 1939. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. I hope the photographer bought something.]

An sidenote: the meaning of “light lunch” was at issue in a 1924 New York court case. At issue: whether a candy-store chain was doing the business of a restaurant in offering “light lunch”:


The court’s answer: yes, they were doing the business of a restaurant, and no, candy stores can’t do that. (Don’t tell no. 983.)

No. 983 is now a three-family behemoth. P.S. 89 still stands.

Thanks to the reader who found this store, outside and in-, and the court case.

Related reading
More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives : All-Nite Service density : Harvey’s Hardware density : May Drug Co. density : Whelan’s Drug Store : Woolworth’s density

The Oteris and Marty

Previously on Orange Crate Art:

We visited no. 2376, once the home of Arthur Avenue Noodle & Macaroni Manufacturing. Today we’ll look at the two establishments that once flanked AAN&MM. To the south, the Baccalà Store.


[2374 Arthur Avenue, The Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Baccalà, salted cod, is a traditional Italian food. No, I’ve never had it.

And just north of AAN&MM, the Oteri Bros. Prime Meat Market.

[2378 Arthur Avenue, The Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

These photographs would be worth posting for their own sake — they’re beautiful streetscapes. But there’s a bonus.

Danielle Oteri tells some of the Oteri history here and here: her great-grandfather and great-grandmother, Albino and Grazia Oteri, opened the baccalà store in 1918. The Oteris’ son John (Danielle’s uncle) converted the store to a butcher shop post-World War II. Danielle confirms in a Facebook message (thanks, Danielle; thanks, Elaine) that John previously ran a butcher shop for a short time at no. 2378.

The later shop at no. 2374 is the butcher shop in the opening scene of Marty (dir. Delbert Mann, 1955). You can watch here. Look closely and you’ll see the shadow of the street address on the wall.

[Ernest Borgnine as Marty Piletti. Click for a larger view.]

More from Danielle Oteri:

The scenes of Marty working were shot in Oteri’s Butcher Shop. Uncle John had to teach Ernest Borgnine, who also won Best Actor for his performance, how to cut meat, specifically sausage, so that his scenes would be realistic.

Although the screenplay indicates that Marty’s boss was to be named Mr. Gazzara, Uncle John was able to convince them that his name should be used instead, and in the final cut, Marty refers to his boss “Mr. Oteri” at least four times.

In 1980 my Uncle John sold the shop to Peter De Luca, who runs the shop today. Peter has a butcher pedigree as well. He grew up working in his father’s butcher shop on 143rd Street and Morris Avenue. (The current store is named Vincent’s Meat Market in honor of his father.)

Vincent’s Meat Market is still going strong at no. 2374. No. 2378 is now the second-floor residence above the now-defunct Club Fiasco at no. 2376, which took up the storefronts at nos. 2376 and 2378.

You can hear Marty refer to “Mr. Oteri” twice in the scene with Clara (Besty Blair) in the luncheonette and twice in the scene with his cousin Tommy (Jerry Paris) on the Piletti porch. The second (silent) butcher in the opening scene is played by Silvio Minicotti, husband of Esther Minicotti, who plays Marty’s mother Teresa Piletti.

Related posts
More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives : A corner in Marty (White Plains Road and E. 211th Street) : Happy birthday, Mr. Piletti (Marty and Clara post-Marty)

And from NYC in Film, a detailed look at various Marty locations, with a photograph of Ernest Borgnine and John Oteri. As Marty would say, Holy cow!

The Harlem Branch Y

From Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B,” from the book-length sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). The writer (not “speaker”) has been given an assignment: write a page, “And let that page come out of you — / Then, it will be true.” He wonders if it’s that simple:


Here’s the poem. Imagine being an instructor and getting that page in response to an assignment.

The college is the City College of New York at 160 Convent Avenue. The park is St. Nicholas Park. Eighth Avenue is now Frederick Douglass Boulevard; Seventh, now Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. And here is the Y:

[Harlem Branch YMCA, 180 West 135th Street, New York, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The Y still stands. When I taught this poem, I liked to use Google Maps to follow the poem’s path (though one can’t get across the park by map). And I liked to play samples to give a sense of the writer’s eclectic musical interests: “Bessie, bop, or Bach,” his own three Bs. I didn’t know about the tax photos in the NYC Municipal Archives then.

Here’s some Harlem Branch Y history, with Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Jackie Robinson, Cicely Tyson, and Wesley A. Williams.

*

It occurred to me only today that Hughes‘s poem fits perfectly on one typed page.

Related reading
More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

The Langston Hughes House

[20 E. 127th Street, Harlem, New York City, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

It’s now the Langston Hughes House, not yet open to the public except for scheduled events. Here from New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, is some history about Hughes and this address, his home from 1948 until his death in 1967.

The NYC Municipal Archives recently posted this photograph with a 1957 recording of Hughes speaking about “The Writer’s Place in America.”

Another Hughes location in a tax photograph: the Harlem Branch Y.

Related reading
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[Some sources give 1947 as the year Hughes moved in. Arnold Rampersad’s The Life of Langston Hughes (2002) notes that Emerson Harper, whom Hughes regarded as his uncle, made the purchase on December 23, 1947, evidently keeping Hughes’s name out of the transaction to keep down the price. Harper and Hughes then became joint owners, as did Harper’s wife Toy, whom Hughes regarded as his aunt. Hughes moved to this address in July 1948.]

Schrafft’s, plural

Two weeks ago I posted a tax photograph of a Childs restaurant. I realized after the fact that next to that Childs stood a Schrafft’s. You can see both restaurants, albeit at distance, in this tax photograph:

[Schrafft’s, 291-293 Broadway, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Like Childs, Schrafft’s restaurants were once ubiquitous in Manhattan: the 1940 telephone directory lists twenty-nine of them. When my mom and dad, not yet parents, worked in Manhattan, they would sometimes meet for lunch at a Schrafft’s. Noticing this Broadway outlet made me want to look for the Schrafft’s where my mom and dad may have eaten lunch.

So I called the Paul Drake Detective Agency and told what I know: my mom would walk from American Cyanamid (30 Rockefeller Plaza); my dad would walk from Johns Manville (22 E. 40th Street). Drake’s conclusion is that they must have met at the Schrafft’s at 556 Fifth Avenue: an eight-minute walk from Rockefeller Plaza, a ten-minute walk from 22 E. 40th. (Paul Drake is never wrong.)

[Schrafft’s, 556 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Wikipedia has a brief history of the chain. Vanishing New York has some good photographs. The New York Public Library has menus that take forever to load. Here’s one from 1955, when my parents, not yet my parents, may have been Schrafft’s-ing. And here’s a description of Schrafft’s from a 1964 guide to New York.

There’s a website for a revived Schrafft’s whose tone — “Where the Forward Thinkers and Life Seizers, the Night Owls and the Morning Dealmakers banter amongst the Famous and soon-to-be Famous, the Old Guard and their Tiny Titans to be” — and spelling — “fashionable not fadish” — leave me cold. The revival as yet seems to be more idea than reality.

Related reading
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Two or more grocery stores

  [Roulston’s and 11th Ave. Market, 4512 and 4510 11th Avenue, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click either image for a much larger view.]

As a young Brooklynite, I never made it to 11th Avenue, but there I am today, where I noticed these grocery stores side by side. What was that all about? I think I know.

Roulston, it turns out, was a major name in groceries. Thomas Roulston (1840–1918) founded what became a chain of at least 700 stores in Brooklyn, Long Island, and Staten Island. His son Thomas H. Roulston (1874–1949) succeeded him. The New York Times headline for Thomas H.’s funeral: “1,000 in Last Tribute to Thomas Roulston.” The chain was sold in 1951.

Here’s a bit of Roulston history and some sample advertisements:

[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 30, 1936. Click either image for a larger view.]

[Home Talk, September 23, 1908. Click for a larger view.]

[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 6, 1921. Click for a larger view.]

[The Brooklyn Daily Times, June 17, 1921. Click for a larger view.]

[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 18, 1949.]

Here’s my idea about 4512 and 4510 11th Avenue: I can’t imagine a grocery store opening next to the outlet of a long-established chain. I suspect that the 11th Ave. Market came first. Some circumstantial evidence: the 1940 Brooklyn telephone directory lists 161 Roulston’s stores. But there’s no listing for this Roulston’s, which makes me suspect it’s a relatively new addition to the chain. Move in next to an established business and — you already know the story. Notice the contrast between Roulston’s many slick-looking signs and the two homemade signs in the windows of 4510.

One more detail: if you click for the larger image, you’ll see a grown-up and a child looking out the window above the ls of Roulston’s.

Before sealing up this rabbit hole, here’s one more Roulston’s, just twelve blocks away. This might be the sharpest, most beautiful tax photo I’ve seen:

[5702 New Utrecht Avenue, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections.Click for a larger view. You really should.]

Related reading
More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives : The Roulston warehouse : The warehouse, repurposed

T SIDE and WEST SID

[591-593, 610-12 Something, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click either image for a much larger view.]

I chose these photographs for the signage and for the fellow who appears to be iceskating his way into the frame. The 1940s.nyc website shows both locations on West Street, with nothing nearby that would make them identifiable. The Municipal Archives have nothing for these street numbers. The 1940 Manhattan telephone directory has nothing. Several sources in Google Books from the later 1940s give 801 Greenwich Street as an address for West Side Iron Works — perhaps that was a later address. Without placards showing block and lot numbers for these locations, I give up. As did, it would seem, the keepers of the signage.

Related reading
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Yow-Zah’s

[2192 Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Snow was on the ground and a beer advertisement on the side of the building when the tax people took this photograph.

The full text:

Yow-Zah’s
Model Airplane Shop
And Other Hobbies
Gas Motors, Parts & Gas Kits
Boats, Accessories, Balsa Wood
And Supplies.

It looks to me as if “And Other Hobbies” and “And Supplies” were afterthoughts. Or they were forethoughts painted over, or sort of painted over. The words now compete with the NYC.gov/records watermark that runs across the photograph.

The date of the building’s construction, according to the Municipal Archives: 1931. A 1931 classified advertisement lists a cigar and stationery store for sale at this address. When this photograph was taken, Yow-Zah’s may have already been defunct (notice the disarray of the windows). By May 1941 the address housed the Paragon Chimney and Furnace Cleaning Company. By 1952, it was Harry’s Hand Laundry (“Shirts 18¢, Sheets 14¢, Pillow cases 6¢.”) Today the address is home to Kaché Restaurant and Lounge, serving Carribean-American cuisine.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang dates yowza! or yowzah! to 1933: “a general excl., either of approval or of vaguely non-committal agreement.” Yow-Zah’s Hobby Shop is listed in the Brooklyn Telephone Directory, Winter 1939–40: ESplanade 7–9003. And yes, it’s the only Yow-Zah’s in the book.

Thanks, Brian, for finding this photograph.

*

February 4: An eagle-eyed reader reports that the advertisement on the side of the building is for Stegmaier’s beer.

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[I searched for the 2192 address in the Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Newstand, a great resource for time-traveling Brooklynites.]

Clarkson Diner

[152 Leroy Street or 586 Washington Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The employees of T SIDE and WEST SID, otherwise known as the West Side Iron Works, would have had an easy time of it when the lunch half-hour came around: they were just a short walk away from the Clarkson Diner.

The 1940s.nyc website shows this diner facing Washington Street, with Leroy Street to the north, Clarkson Street to the south, and West Street to — that‘s right — the west. The site has three photos, with this outtake showing the diner to best advantage. If you click for the larger view, you can see a Bell Telephone sign, a Schaefer Beer sign, the name Clarkson, and several blurry pedestrians.

In the Municipal Archives the diner’s address is 152 Leroy Street. The 1940 telephone directory has the address as 586 Washington Street. But the diner itself (listen closely) whispers, “Call me Clarkson!”

[Click for a larger view.]

Today there’s a FedEx warehouse.

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Slim’s Radio Service

[Madison Avenue between 118th and 119th Streets, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Quite a variety of establishments in this stretch of Madison Avenue: a grocery store, Sun Shine Lunch, Slim’s Radio Service, a fish and vegetable market (“Fresh Fish Daily”), and Ebenezer Spiritual Church. I chose this photograph for Slim’s, which might be at 1820: there are few photographs and much ambiguity for this stretch. I like Slim’s signage.

The Municipal Archives’ online materials have been reorganized: tax photographs now seem to be searchable only by address, not with the block and lot codes preserved in the photographs themselves. And the photographs are now available sans watermarks. I’ve posted an especially large version of this one: if you click for the larger view, you‘ll see many details.

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The Grennie Pharmacy

Staten Island, like Upper Manhattan, is a mystery to me. Wanting to post a WPA tax photograph to give the borough at least some slight representation in these pages, I thought of New Dorp, the Staten Island neighborhood whose high school was the setting for Peg Tyre’s celebrated 2012 Atlantic article, “The Writing Revolution.” So off I went, to New Dorp.

[The Grennie Pharmacy, 253 New Dorp Lane, New Dorp, Staten Island, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

If the building looks newish, that’s because it was. The NYC Archives date it to 1958 (!), but the more likely date is 1939. I was drawn to the Grennie Pharmacy by the glossy black (glass? granite?) and the elegant capital R.

[Click for a slightly larger view.]

Frank L. Grennie (1896–1969) had a distinguished career as a pharmacist: a page at Find a Grave will give you an idea. An entry in a 1930 compendium of Staten Island lives has more. A prescription box from the Grennie Pharmacy, dated 1942, is for sale at eBay.

What I didn’t expect to find when searching for grennie new dorp : Frank Grennie’s son Richard. He was born in 1924 and enlisted in the Army in 1943. He died in St. Lo, France, on July 13, 1944, in the aftermath of D-Day. The Kells-Grennie American Legion post on Staten Island bears his name.

Today no. 253, still standing, houses a shoe-repair shop, a nail salon, a driving school, and a car service.

Related reading
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Tip-Top Diner

[Tip-Top Diner, The Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The archives have the address as 2448 Prospect Avenue, which can’t be right: no. 2448 is at one end of a row of rowhouses. Looking at Street View of 1940s New York makes me think that this diner resided on Crotona Avenue, next to what is now the Grace H. Dodge Career and Technical High School. There’s a fenced lot where (I think) the diner once stood.

Tip-Top is a lovely name for a diner: it suggests, at least to my ear, a modest spiffiness. The plates and coffee cups shine. The water glasses gleam. The counterman is wearing a bowtie. No cigarette dangles from his lips.

I would have guessed tip-top to be a nineteenth- or twentieth-century invention. But no. The Oxford English Dictionary dates it to 1702. From its beginnings, it had both literal and figurative meanings: “the very top; the highest point or part; the extreme summit”; “highest pitch or degree; extreme height; acme.” The earliest citation, from a translation of Cicero: “When a Wise Man is at the Tip-top of all Felicity, can he wish Things were better with him?”

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[Beer and ale? That’s a Ballantine billboard.]

Loring Grill

[156 West Fordham Road, The Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Recall Brooklyn’s Unique Diner: in The Bronx, as in Brooklyn, urban planning apparently required that a dining car to be dropped into the empty slot.

The archives give no street address for the Loring Grill (a short walk from Loring Place), but searching for block=3225 AND lot=169 BX reveals the address. In recent years, no. 156 has been building-less. I suspect it has been building-less since the dining car disappeared. Google Maps shows the location from 2007 to 2022 as a vacant lot, a holding area for an auto-repair shop, a holding area with a storefront security door, and a vacant lot with a storefont security door. The brick building that housed the Gulf station and later auto-repair shop still stands, now boarded off from the sidewalk.

Telephone number for the Loring Grill in 1940: FOrdham 4-8824.

*

An assiduous diner-friendly reader found on two relevant pages. Here’s a view of the diner and environs from the east. And here’s a 1947 yearbook advertisement for Charles Tschudin’s Tolentine Diner — same address, different phone number. The yearbook is from St. Nicholas of Tolentine High School. St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church is a block away, at the corner of West Fordham Road and University Avenue.

Also: “A young woman and three men who stole a taxicab yesterday morning and then held up a lunch wagon at 156 West Fordham Road, the Bronx, were captured after they had led two policemen a wild chase for miles through the northern part of the Bronx and Harlem”: The New York Times, January 27, 1931. The owner was a Fred Zucht. The lunch wagon was held up at 1:00 a.m.

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[Why do I insist on capitalizing the t? Because it’s The Bronx.]

Grim, grey, unaffordable

[829–849 39th Street, Sunset Park, Brooklyn. c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click any image for a much larger view.]

The archives say 38th Street, but in fact it’s 39th, between 8th and 9th Avenues, not far from New Utrecht Avenue. I like this grim, grey assortment of buildings and think all four of these photographs belong in one post.

Can you spot the mysterious figure in one of the photographs? Gotta click through.

By 1943, Allied Builders Supply Corp. had run into difficulty with creditors. In the 1980s, its address, 829–833, was still home to a building supply business, whose tax photo is far too blurry to yield a name. Today, 829–833 houses a Holiday Inn Express and a condo development. No more auto wrecking at 839: Model Garage has been at that address since at least the 1980s.

And 849? It still stands as a funky residence, now valued at more than $1.5 million. You begin to understand why we gave up on the idea of retiring to Brooklyn. These photographs are much more affordable.

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A Brooklyn public library

A few years ago, when I was asking my mom for memories of her Brooklyn childhood, I wrote this down:

As a girl, Mom walked to the Boro Park library on Saturday mornings. It was on 13th Avenue, toward the higher street numbers.

And there it was, between 52nd and 53rd Streets:

[Brooklyn Public Library, Boro Park branch, 5211 13th Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The 1940 telephone directory gave me an address. The Archives gave me the photograph. Should you need to call the library c. 1939–1941, the number was WIndsor 6-7050. The library’s double-wide storefront is now split betweeen Lane Card and Gift Shop and Hoffy’s (computers, electronics, &c.)

When we were kids in Brooklyn, the Boro Park branch of the Brooklyn Public Library was here. And still is. But the Boro Park branch no longer has its copy of Alvin’s Secret Code.

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Apples?

[70 East 102nd Street, Manhatttan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click the second image for a much larger view and some choice details.]

The vagaries of the archives: that first photograph, an outtake, misidentifies the lot number. I’m not sure how I found my way to the second photograph. I just traipsed the streets.

What’s that stand of apples doing there? Or are they tomatoes? Or plums? Did the photographer put the stand there for fun? Perhaps at the grocer’s request? I would like to know if the stand appears in a photograph from the opposite side of the street, but photographs from this street are few.

Golden Bantam is a variety of corn. I can find no evidence that it was ever a name for an apple (or tomato, or plum). The mystery deepens.

I chose these photographs for the fruit, but when I checked Google Maps, I realized that I know this location, at Park Avenue and 102nd Street, from a movie and from life.

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5 Patchin Place

[5 Patchin Place, West Village, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Last Sunday I posted the tax photograph of 154 W. 10th Street, home to Three Lives & Company and, in the past, Djuna Books. Which leads me today to 5 Patchin Place, long the home of the writer Djuna Barnes. The street is one with considerable history. No. 5 is to the right of the stone fireplace in the photograph above.

From Phillip Herring’s Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (1995):

Back in New York, the happiest news of these years in Djuna’s life was that she found an apartment, upstairs at 5 Patchin Place, a private court with iron gate (usually open) near Greenwich Avenue and Tenth Street. Patchin Place, a picturesque reminder of what Greenwich Village once had been, contained fifty flats in two rows, built in 1848 as boardinghouses for the Basque waiters at the old Breevort Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Many famous writers and intellectuals had dwelled in the short cul-de-sac, including John Reed, Theodore Dreiser, Padraic Colum, and Jane Bowles. E.E. Cummings lived across the way from Djuna, downstairs at number 4.

Barnes moved to no. 5 in September 1940. Her rent: $40 a month. Aside from a brief stay in a nursing home, she stayed on Patchin Place, largely a recluse, through numerous and varied adversities, for the rest of her life. Herring tells a well-known story:

In 1952, [Barnes] fell and broke her shoulder. She crawled to her telephone and called on her neighbor E.E. Cummings, who climbed the fire escape, let himself in, and telephoned for the ambulance that took her to the French Hospital. Thereafter he would occasionally raise his window and shout, “Are you still alive, Djuna?” She outlasted Cummings by twenty years.

From Andew Field’s Djuna: The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes (1983):

In 1963 a developer purchased Patchin Place for $630,000 and said that, if the tenants would not permit him a reasonable return on his investment, then he would be forced to rip down the old buildings and erect a multi-storey on the site. There was a tenants’ protest meeting (reported in The New York Times, September 30, 1963: “Patchin and Milligan Tenants Unite to Preserve Quiet Corner”). Miss Barnes spoke at the meeting and said that she would die if she was forced to move uptown. More than that, the neighbourhood needed to be preserved as it was so that the young people had a suitable place to practice their mugging. The landlord backed away, and life continued on for her as before in small, difficult days.

Barnes’s rent in 1963: $49.50 a month.

[From the Times article, for which Barnes consented to an interview. The article does not mention a Barnes appearance at a protest meeting. Click for a larger view.]

Djuna Barnes died in her apartment on June 18, 1982, days after her ninetieth birthday.

Here’s more about 5 Patchin Place, from Ephemeral New York and the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. Here’s a famous photograph of Barnes standing inside the Patchin Place gate. And here are Trulia’s real-estate photographs of the apartment’s interior, all 500 square feet of it. The apartment is off the market.

I’m no Barnes expert, but I can highly recommend the novel Nightwood (1936), which I dared to teach several times. It’s a great modernist novel, a great modern novel, and a great novel.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard) : “Smith going backward” (A phrase from Djuna Barnes)

Kids making the scene

[1013 38th Street, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I always like seeing kids in these tax photographs, standing around while the WPA fellows take their pitcher. This photograph struck me because of the words written on the door: NO KIDS UNDER 16 YR ALLOW. The sign above the building reads JUNK SHOP. I can understand why a junk-shop proprietor would keep the younger set out. But that hasn’t stopped these kids from making the sidewalk scene.

What happened one day on 38th Street: those three kids followed the photographers down (or up) the block. These kids would not be denied, though I doubt that anyone was trying to deny them. Click any image for a larger view.

[1001 38th Street.]

[1003 38th Street.]

[1005 38th Street.]

[1013 38th Street.]

[1023 38th Street.]

And down at the end of the block, still-younger kids have taken over.

[1071 38th Street.]

The three stars of these photographs appear only on the north side of 38th Street. Why? No doubt because they were too young to cross the street by themselves. If they’re still around, they’d now be close to or over ninety, and perhaps too old to cross the street by themselves. Who knows? My wild hope is that someone with an older relative who lived on this block will go browsing at 1940s.nyc and see someone they know. You never know. That kind of thing does happen. More than once.

“And that's why I have a blog.”

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