Central Park: Studied in Black and White

New York City's Central Park is a magical, stunning, wonderful place. The park initially opened in 1857.  In 1858, a competition to design the park was launched. Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux won with their innovative, brilliant plan for the park, "Greensward."

Implementing the plan of the park would take many years. Work began in 1858, but was interrupted by the American Civil War.  In 1873, the park was finally completed.

Over the years, the park has inspired writers, artists, and filmmakers. My friend and mentor, Dr. Rodger C. Birt contributes here a set of prints documenting the park in winter.

Cosmopolitan Standards of Virtue

1900 New York: Sister Carrie's City

“When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.” So wrote Theodore Dreiser in his 1900 novel, Sister Carrie. Carrie goes to the big city of Chicago, falls in with a salesman, Drouet, only to leave with another man, Hurstwood, and off the two go to the even bigger city, New York.  

Does she assume the “cosmopolitan standard of virtue”? She certainly does. And Dreiser uses the city as the backdrop for her simultaneous rise in fortune and decline in virtue.

NYC: Being a Guide Book as Well as a City

Like novels set in NYC, guide books offer a fascinating experience; they are a means to vicariously visit the city and, in essence, see the city through another set of eyes.

A guide it itself a literary creation; a rendition of the city at a certain time and through a certain point of view.

Like novels, they tell stories of the city.

Location, Location

Growing up in California in the 1970s, I was captivated by watching movies set in New York City. Films such as Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Barefoot in the Park (1967), and The World of Henry Orient (1964) offered a visual chronicle of the city in the 1960s, the locations gave me a cinematic peek at the city in which I was born.

George Roy Hill's The World of Henry Orient was particularly enthralling. The film, which follows two teenage friends as they engage in a game revolving around their obsession with a famous pianist, Henry Orient (played by Peter Sellers), leads viewers through a variety of locations, from Central Park to the streets of Greenwich Village.

The film, based on the 1958 novel by Nora Johnson, featured two young actors in the leading roles, Merrie Spaeth and Tippy Walker. Their relationship onscreen was perfectly rendered, with the adult characters played well by the supporting cast, including Angela Lansbury, Paula Prentiss, and Tom Bosley.

Shot in NYC from June 1963-October 1963, the film documents the friendship between the two young women as they navigate not only the city streets, but also their relationships with their parents, their insecurities, their dreams. And thus the city becomes their stage, a place to run and play, to lose themselves in fantasies as they struggle with their lives. The city is also a place where they catch glimpses of a slightly more jaded world, the world of adults and entanglements, that awaits them. And the city is also, sadly, a landscape upon which they wander in the face of a coming winter, with a heavy heart. Accompanied by Elmer Bernstein's lovely score, the visual images of the city parallel the evolution of the friendship between to the two women; Framed by the city itself, their journey, once young and flourishing and green, soon becomes darker, snowy and quiet.

Letter from New York

Helene Hanff (1916-1997), best known for her book, 84, Charing Cross Road, hailed from Philadelphia, but was a New Yorker, through and through.

From 1978 to 1984, Hanff worked for the BBC recording five minute snapshots of life in New York City for the British public. Published in a collection titled, Letter from New York, these essays provide a detailed look at life in an era of the city that was less glamorous than the New York of today (owing to the serious financial situation not only in the city but the whole country at the time), but down-to-earth and fascinating.

Hanff lived and worked in her apartment at 305 E. 72nd Street, in the Lenox Hill neighborhood of the upper east side. Her observations of daily life in her building, her neighborhood and her beloved city provide insight into the characters, rhythms and details of life in New York. From her accounts of her dog friends (and many trips to the park for runs and playing) to her attempts to describe just how New Yorkers manage in their tiny apartments (storing seasonal clothes at the dry cleaners, for example), Hanff records with wit and insight life in the Big Apple.

New York: Vanished

This is my first blog post that will take on something of my favorite place: New York City. Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated with the city. I was born there in 1966, but we moved to the west coast in 1970.

The two coasts at that time could not have been more different to me. One, urban, cement, weather extremes, energy contained on a small island. The other, sprawling, an ocean sending its breezes and fogs over a rambling, hilly city. The Bay Area seemed so "new" and full of possibilities. NYC seemed to me to be full of history.

Postwar Domestic "Film Noir" Novels

Betty Smith's bestselling wartime novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1944) was a nostalgic tale of girlhood in turn-of-the-20th century New York. Her postwar novel, Tomorrow Will Be Better (1948) was a riveting story of a young couple's struggle with money, marriage, and work. Both novels are domestic portraits of the American past, and each, although optimistic, is rather dark--the novelistic "film noirs" of the domestic fiction scene.

Two other postwar novels:A Member of the Wedding (1946) by Carson McCullers (1917-1967) and Gentleman's Agreement(1947) by Laura Kean Zametkin Hobson (1900-1986)also fall into the domestic film noir novel category. Both chronicle the dramatic relationships between individuals within a postwar state of uncertainty, racism, and desire.

Hobson's novel was famously made into a 1947 movie starring Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire and John Garfield. The theme of anti-semitism, explored in both the novel and the film, is framed through the love story between the two main characters. The dark side to their relationship--war, housing crisis, anti-semitism, and racism--seem to crowd in around them, turning their desire for domestic bliss into somewhat of a desperate and rather sad affair. Solving problems of American postwar life, according to Hobson's story, won't be easy.

McCuller's novel shares the same dark setting--a world broken by war, a country torn by racism and poverty. McCuller's central character, Frankie Adams, has one desire: to belong. To be the "We" of "Me." Her closest friends, domestic servant, Berenice, and young neighbor, John Henry, are not enough. The world seemed to be taking sides, after all, so why shouldn't she?

But like Hobson's novel, McCuller's story also asks us to view the idea of a blissful domestic side of American life as something that is both threatened and threatening. A happy life of belonging, fitting in, being fulfilled, and living happily ever after is something that McCuller's presents as a myth--something impossible not so much because of the larger world at war, but because of America's internal wars and strife: conflict among classes, genders, races, and institutions.

More postwar domestic novels later...there are plenty!

Kathleen Norris

Kathleen (Thompson) Norris (1880-1966) was one of America's most popular novelists of the 20th century. She published more than 80 books in her lifetime. Some of her novels including Manhattan Melody and My Best Girl were made into films.

Norris was married to author Charles Gilman Norris (1881-1945), whose brother was also a novelist: Frank Norris (1870-1902), author of several important works, the most famous of which is McTeague: A Story of San Francisco.

Norris was born in San Francisco and moved with her family to Mill Valley in Marin County. After her mother and father died, Norris worked to support the large family. She worked as a society reporter for San Francisco papers, a theme she later used in one her novels.

She began writing fiction while living in New York City with her husband. She was successful almost instantly, selling several stories to popular magazines. Soon she turned to the novel as a form for her stories and the couple moved back to the Bay Area, which serves as the setting for most of her novels.

Her books are fascinating portraits of the American Past. A young woman is always the main character, and her story is told via her struggles with work, family, men, marriage, and often poverty. In many ways, her books are formulaic: the central character must struggle to overcome some challenge (a bad marriage, etc.), and in the process she grows and thrives. There is almost always a love story to her novels, although the true focus is on the main, female character.

Norris concentrates greatly on the physical settings for her stories, and often uses the urban/rural divide to indicate themes in her writing. She also explores the domestic angle of a woman's life, chronicling in depth the meals, chores, clothing, and other daily details that are part of her characters' lives. The majority of her novels are set in San Francisco, Marin County, and the Peninsula, although a handful are set in other locations, including New York.

Norris has been brushed off as a novelist of mere romantic fiction or rudely dismissed as a writer of "women's fiction," but her work is first rate. Her novels are intensely gripping, fascinating tales of young, modern women and the issues they faced in their lives. Further, as cultural documents, they provide a clear window into the past that allow readers to see the early 20th-century from an angle that is not usually available in novels written by men.

Mary Pickford

Mary Pickford (1892-1979) was one of the world's first "movie stars." She was also an important leader in the film industry. As a young actress in New York when film was in its infancy (and looked down upon by the upper classes), Pickford worked with D.W. Griffith (who gave her the name Mary Pickford). She was the first to realize that actors looked better with lighting from below, and she is also credited with attempting one of the first "close up" shots in film. Noting how certain actors seemed to attract larger audiences than others, she fought to be paid a portion of the box office profits and not just a weekly wage as was the practice.

Along with her second husband, Douglas Fairbanks, and actor Charlie Chaplin, Pickford formed the first studio run by actors themselves: United Artists. She also helped found the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto, Canada. Her father died when she was young. Her mother supported Gladys and her younger brother and sister by renting out a room in their house. One of their boarders was a theater manager who gave Pickford her fist role on stage. Soon, the whole family was working the theatrical circuit, eventually winding up in New York City. Her mother encouraged her to apply at the Biograph studio when money ran short. The first person she met there was D.W. Griffith.

Pickford had a tumultuous life--full of excitement, hard work, triumph and tragedy. Her last silent film was an adaptation of the Kathleen Norris novel, _My Best Girl_. Released in 1927, the film is a miraculous vision to behold. Pickford is stylish, cute, funny, and an extremely fascinating actor. Her co-star and love interest in the film would become her third husband.