“The lower fishbody”

A dead mermaid washes up on the shore of a public beach, and a town responds.

Steven Millhauser, “Mermaid Fever,” in Voices in the Night (2015).

And suddently I’m seeing mermaids (and mermen): in the stylish low-budget movie Night Tide, with Dennis Hopper, in the Route 66 episode “The Cruelest Sea of All,” in the Netflix series Merpeople. And my young granddaughters are all in the grip of mermaid fever. The kids these days.

You can read “Mermaid Fever” at Harper’s.

Thanks, Chris, for recommending Night Tide.

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Heather Cox Richardson today

In the latest installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson writes about what would likely happen in a second Trump term. Short answer: a dictatorship.

Hodwy

I for one hope that hodwy acquires some currency.

Example: “Hodwy do?” “Oh, we did pretty good.”

Related reading
All OCA misspelling posts (Pinboard)

Robert, Jack and Jill, and others

Annye C. Anderson, “Mrs. Anderson” to all, is Robert Johnson’s stepsister. She was a toddler when Brother Robert, as she calls him, was a young man. She is now in her later nineties, Here are details that I culled from Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, by Mrs. Anderson with Preston Lauterbach (New York: Hachette, 2020):

Robert Johnson played harmonica and piano in addition to guitar. He yodeled too. The pinstripe suit in the famous photograph was made by Eggleston the Tailor or Hooks Brothers, both on Beale Street. (At different points the memoir identifies each clothier as the maker.) While it’s been said that Johnson kept ideas for songs in a notebook, Mrs. Anderson says that she never saw one.

Robert Johnson liked fried pumpkin, spaghetti (“black folks’ spaghetti,” Mrs. Anderson calls it), Bull Durham “roll ’ems,” and Dixie Peach pomade. He paid close attention to westerns, Joe Louis, and Negro League baseball. He would ask a listener, “What’s your pleasure?”

“He didn’t get his abilities from God or the Devil,” Mrs. Anderson writes. “He made himself.”

Titles of songs (in addition to those on record) and rhymes that Johnson played, sang, recited, as Mrs. Anderson recalls them:

44 Blues : 1937 Waters (to the tune of Didn’t It Rain) : Annie Laurie : Auld Lang Syne : Beale Street Blues : Careless Love : Casey Jones : Coon Shine Baby : Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? : Dry Bones : Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush : Humpty Dumpty : Jack and Jill : John Brown’s Body : John Henry : Joshua Fit the Battle : Let Yourself Go (accompanying his stepsister, after seeing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Follow the Fleet ) : Little Boy Blue : Little Sally Walker : Loch Lomond : Mary Don’t You Weep : Mary Had a Little Lamb : Memphis Blues : Mr. Froggie Went to Courting : My Bonnie : Pennies from Heaven : Poor Boy a Long Way from Home : Precious Lord (Take My Hand) : Salty Dog Blues : She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain : Sittin’ on Top of the World : St. James Infirmary : St. Louis Blues : Swing Low Sweet Chariot : Take a Little Walk with Me : TB Blues : Tell Me Mama : That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine : Trouble in Mind : Waiting for a Train (“Jimmie Rodgers was his favorite”) : We Go Lokey, Lokey, Lokey : When They Ring Them Golden Bells

Brother Robert is a powerful rebuttal to the mythologizing that made Robert Johnson into a rootless, doomed existentialist. And it’s a lacerating depiction of the machinations of two white men — Mack McCormick and Steve LaVere — in their dealings with Mrs. Anderson’s half-sisters, Bessie Hines and Carrie Spencer Thompson.

The one thing this book is missing: a family tree, though I wouldn’t want to be the person making it.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Johnson posts (Pinboard)

Pocket notebook sighting

[From Four in a Jeep (dir. Leopold Lindtberg and Elizabeth Montagu, 1951). Click for a larger view.]

Bad sound made the movie unwatchable. But at least I got a notebook out of it.

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : The Bad and the Beautiful : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : The Case of the Howling Dog : Cat People : Caught : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Deep Valley : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : The Flight That Disappeared : The Fearmakers : A Foreign Affair : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : The Girl in Black Stockings : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : I See a Dark Stranger : If I Had a Million : L’Innocent : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Lost Horizon : M : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : What Happened Was . . . : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once : Young and Innocent

More 14th Street

Robert Caro’s mantra is “Turn every page.” I think that for browsing the 1939–1941 tax photographs of New York City buildings, the mantra ought to be “Walk every block” — at least figuratively. Because who knows what you might find?

I posted this photograph last week for its retail density. Please notice, among other details, the sign for the Gypsy Den:

[106 East 14th Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. All photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click any image for a much larger view.]

A sharp-eyed reader went further down the block. What do you notice here?

[108 East 14th Street.]

You are correct: at some point between these photographs, a sign either came down or went up for the N.Y. Freiheit Mandolin Orchestra. The orchestra was founded in 1924 and continues today as the New York Mandolin Orchestra. Here’s an article with some history. Thanks, Brian.

Other small differences make it fairly certain that these photographs were not taken on the same day: the FOR RENT sign between the top-story windows of 106 disappears; the open window below is now closed; the vertical pivot windows are open at different angles; the BASEBALL sign has been replaced by JANTZEN, and the clamp that holds the upper part of the tripod shaft in place is at a different height.

I went farther down the block and found a further surprise:

[112 East 14th Street.]

It’s Lüchow’s, a New York landmark for many years. I’ll let Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (1964) do the talking for me.

Nostalgia, noise, and food are all served up here in equally huge helpings. Lüchow’s, established in 1882, was once the favorite dining spot of such celebrities as Lillian Russell and Diamond Jim Brady. Since the turn of the century this vast landmark has accumulated a hefty reputation.

The several enormous rooms are separated by lofty, carved archways. Festooning the dark, oak-paneled walls are beer seidels, stuffed moose heads, ship models, and huge, ornately framed oil paintings of formidable sentimentality. Add the black iron chandeliers, the many mirrors, and the blue-and-white checked tablecloths, and you’ve got something reminiscent of a gemütliche Munich beer-hall.

Lüchow’s always seems to be mobbed, and there’s a general air of frantic festivity. Evenings, from 7 to 10 o’clock, a small string orchestra valiantly pits its schmaltz against the din, and is rewarded after every selection with lusty, beaming applause.

If you seek subtlety in your victuals, don’t come here. The food, like the atmosphere, is robust and heavily Teutonic. Sauerbraten with potato dumplings, Boiled Beef, various kinds of Schnitzels are all on the menu, along with something called Drei Mignons à la Berliner, which consists of filets of beef, pork, and veal. There are goulashes, ragouts, and chickens-in-the-pot galore.

For lovers of tartar steak, Lüchow’s Schlemmerschnitte combines raw tenderloin with a side helping of Russian caviar. Sausage lovers have a good assortment of wursts to choose from, mit sauerkraut if desired. Hunters, real or vicarious, can gorge on venison or pheasant when these are in season.

And for dessert, there are Flaming Pancakes. This tour de force is a huge pancake flavored with lemon, cinnamon and sugar, then filled with lingonberries, and finally rolled up and doused with Kirschwasser, which is then set aflame.

A tall steinkrug of dark, imported beer is $1.10; and a glass of German Moselle or Rhine wine is 80¢ (with seltzer, 15¢ extra).

An average dinner will come to $5; lunch will run about $2 less.

Here is a 1951 menu.

Did the WPA photographers break for lunch at Lüchow’s? Were members of the N.Y. Freiheit Mandolin Orchestra eating there? Were Flaming Pancakes being brought to someone’s table? Some mysteries are meant to remain so.

Notice that there are different cars parked in front of Lüchow’s in the second and third photographs. Perhaps the three photographs were taken on three different days.

Winter Carnival (dir. Charles Reisner, 1939), a comedy-romance, starred Ann Sheridan (Ann “Oomph” Sheridan, the marquee calls her) and Richard Carlson. The cast of She Married a Cop (dir. Sidney Salkow, Cal Dalton, and Ben Hardaway) a comedy with music, has just two names I recognize: Jerome Cowan and Horace McMahon. Both films were released in July 1939.

Today 106, 108, and 110 house tall buildings, one of them an NYU dorm, University Hall, aka UHall.

I realized only yesterday that I have a 2022 post celebrating the retail density of East 14th Street.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Emporia, firing Eleven fired faculty members have brought a lawsuit.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Steve Mossberg, has the arch (29-A, ten letters “Psychomotor learning experts”), the indirect (52-A, five letters, “Drops off”), the surprising (8-D, nine letters, Moby-Dick’s ‘lively sketches of whales’”), and the tricky (54-A, five letters, “Be stingy”). Something for everyone, and a really delightful puzzle.

I started with tamer clues — 33-D, four letters, “Musical note’s vertical line” and 41-A, three letters, “Sub-Saharan staple” — and then meandered with a mazy motion, a word here, a word there, doubting I’d get everything. The clue whose answer made me think I would: 13-A, four letters, “Type of batter bread,” which made many things fall into place.

Some more clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, four letters, “Galaxy clusters.” Tricky, but it didn’t fool me.

10-D, five letters, “Poet pal of Tolkein.” Good to see the name in a puzzle.

13-D, ten letters, “Peruvian brandy cocktail.” Wha? I don’t know how I know this.

26-D, ten letters, “Similar color to Flame Orange.” Yow! But the clue should really read “Color similar to Flame Orange.”

34-A, fifteen letters, “One averse to innovation.” Worth an outright guess, Could it be? Yes.

36-A, ten letters, “Rustic jam.” But the spelling might be a challenge.

42-D, five letters, “Thoroughfare bordering Yale U.” A thoroughfare, really? Okay, I suppose it is.

45-A, five letters, “Deconstruct.” Sort of.

46-D, five letters, “Slip away, in a way.” Of course, ERODE. Uh, no.

My favorite in this puzzle: 14-D, seven letters, “Starting point.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“So thick with phantoms”

Steven Millhauser, “Phantoms,” in Voices in the Night (2015).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Zippy under the El

Today’s Zippy: “Street Smart,” with Dana Andrews, Victor Mature, Ida Lupino, and the Third Avenue El. So much art in these panels.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)