Dustin Hoffman's New York

Dustin Hoffman, New York City, 1969: An Actor's Actor. Photo by John Dominis

Dustin Hoffman's New York - Jenny Thompson

In many ways, Dustin Hoffman can be seen as a quintessentially New York actor (despite having been born and raised in California). Many of the films Hoffman made through the late 1960s and 1970s not only captured the American zeitgeist, but also created a portrait of New York City. Hoffman, himself a resident of the city from roughly 1958 until 2002, lived through many changes New York underwent and his films capture those changes.

Mid-Century Modern: Inside the Mad Men's Living Room

Places! Don & Meagan Draper's NYC apartment, c. 1968

According to a brief shot of an envelope in a recent episode of Mad Men, Don and Megan Draper live on Park Avenue. No surprise there for an up and coming power couple; where else would they live if not in one of the most stylish areas of the city?

Summer Retreats: New York Style

"By the way, old chap, what do you people do in New York when summer comes?"

"We get out," Miss De Peyster broke in . . . "New York is simply deserted in summer. There is not a soul in town." 
Rupert Hughes, The Real New York (1905).

Mary Lincoln in New York

“It is imperative that I should do something for my relief, and I want you to meet me in New York, between the 30th of August and the 5th of September next, to assist me in disposing of a portion of my wardrobe." Mrs. Lincoln to Mrs. Keckley

On September 16, 1867, a small dark haired woman dressed in mourning clothes checked in as "Mrs. Clarke" at the St. Denis Hotel at Broadway and 11th St. She was waiting for a friend who would arrive any day. Mrs. Clarke had business to transact in the city.

How the Other Half Lived ...and Lives

"Bandit's Roost," Richard Hoe Lawrence, c. 1890, Museum of the City of New York

The New York City tenement of the nineteenth century once stood as perhaps the most potent symbol of poverty. The narrow, dark, and crowded houses populated New York City by the thousands in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

New York (on film): A View from a Window

Greenwich Village View: Rear Window was filmed on a set built at Paramount Studios in LA

Movies have long been filmed on location in New York City, from the earliest days of silent film production. But New York films set within interiors that offer a view of the city--or even just a suggestion of the city outside-- often brilliantly evoke the city as a thematic element that propels the plot forward. Indeed, these films set within sets often use the city to evoke the great "world outside," as it were, and infuse the drama with a heightened sense of the film's moral underpinnings.

A (New Yorker's) Christmas Poem

1862 Illustration from Moore's "A Visit From Saint Nicholas"

On July 15, 1779,  Clement Clark Moore was born in New York City. He graduated from Columbia University in 1798 and went on to enjoy a successful career as a professor. But he is perhaps best known and remembered as the author of "A Visit from Saint Nicholas," commonly known as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas."

Moore was born and lived in the family home known as the "Chelsea House" at roughly 420 W. 23rd Street (the house later giving the name to the NYC neighborhood).

Crystal Palace

 

Crystal Palace, New York City, Illustrated News, July 30 1853

In July 1853 two prominent news weeklies, the Illustrated News (July 23 and July 30, 1853) and Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (July 23, 1853), published commissioned engravings depicting events during the opening of the Crystal Palace.  

Food, NYC

The restaurant at Astor's swanky St. Regis Hotel, c. 1905

"God! The restaurants! 

New York has become the Florence of the Sixteenth Century. 

Genius on every corner." 

                                                    -Six Degrees of Separation

"No city in the world is better supplied with restaurants and eating-houses of every kind than New York." This observation in the 1896 edition of Rand McNally and Co's Handy Guide to New York City, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Other Suburbs is true today. The city's reputation as a food lover's paradise is well earned. From street food to fine dining, the available fare reflects the very city itself in its diversity and energy.

Storm Clouds

Words are difficult to come by after witnessing the devastation brought on by Hurricane Sandy. In the wake of that storm, it is hard to imagine the losses, suffering, and tragedies endured by so many along the east coast. Looking down the long path to the days and weeks and years to come, and the tremendous efforts to rebuild--and perhaps reconfigure--New York, it is tempting to harness the power of the cliches: New York, New Jersey, and all the areas affected by the storm will rebuild and be stronger and better than ever; Americans are resilient and come together to help each other in the face of tragedy.

Fashion on the Foot in Old Manhattan

"Only a shoe! How small a matter, and yet how important!

 The Human Foot by William Beneke, 1888

Fashion chronicler extraordinaire, Bill Cunningham, highlighted the appearance of some dazzling shoes on the streets of Manhattan in a September 2012 "On the Street" column and accompanying slide show for the New York Times. The idea of the "shoe on the street"--the display of fashion on the foot in Manhattan--is something that traces its origins back to the earliest days of the city itself.

"The Clock"-a New York Story

Joe: "Where will I meet you?"
Alice: "Under the clock at the Astor at seven." 

Released in May 1945, The Clock was filmed entirely in California, but set in New York City, with scenes taking place in sets standing in for Central Park, the Subway, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Astor Hotel, Pennsylvania Station, and various other locations.

High Class Apartments

Things are looking up: From 1901 until 1929, New York City residents would become largely apartment dwellers. With a new law passed in 1901, residential buildings were allowed to grow up, to stretch up to the sky at a height that was more than twice the width of the street on which it stood.

A Time To Be Born

Dawn Powell

Writer Dawn Powell (1896-1965) was born in the Midwest (Ohio) but lived the quintessential writer’s life in New York City. A prolific writer, she published fifteen novels, several plays and television scripts, earned a National Book Award nomination, and even saw a musical produced based on her 1942 novel, A Time to Be Born.

"I ♥ New York"

In 1977, while working for the NY advertising agency, Wells Rich Greene, Milton Glaser created New York's most iconic image: the "I ♥ New York" graphic. Glaser, a graphic designer who was born in New York City in 1929, provided his design services pro bono to the state's campaign to boost tourism. The campaign included not only use of the logo, but also a song and television spots.

Touring Greenwich Village

Born in Canada, Beals was devoted to documenting New York City

In the first two decades of the 20th century, Greenwich Village became known as a rather eccentric enclave. Artists and writers, Arnarchists and liberated women, inhabited the neighborhood. "Greenwich Village is the American parallel of the Latin Quarter," The Dial observed in 1914, pointing out that "a member of Greenwich Village is a person of a sort and not too closely of a place: he is a Bohemian."

Curiosity about the neighborhood filled with restaurants, theater, art, radical politics, and nightlife was high; and the Bohemian crowd itself was willing to instruct the outsider. Anna Alice Chapin's 1920 Greenwich Village was a perfect guide to all things Greenwich Village.

manhatta/manhattan

Still from "Manhatta" a 1920 modernist look at the city.

Painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand's 1920 short film "Manhatta" is an epic portrayal of the city, made just two short years after the end of World War One.  Restored in 2006, the film draws from several of Walt Whitman's poems to create the inter-title quotes.

New York Seen/Taught from a Distance

By Rodger C. Birt

In 1980 I was offered a rare opportunity and a pedagogical challenge:  the department I had recently joined at San Francisco State University asked me to prepare to teach a semester-long (15 weeks) course “on” New York City.  It would  become part of a group of courses constructed around this unifying theme:  a city is a specific, cultural artifact,  and the study of a selected city (in a humanities context) helps serve one of the educational missions of a large state university, namely to introduce

E.B. White’s New York

In the summer of 1948, writer E. B. White (1899-1985) wrote what would become one of his most famous essays and also one of the best pieces about New York City: “Here is New York.”

According to White’s foreword (to the 1949 book version of the essay originally written for Holiday Magazine,) the essay was written on a summer visit to New York, during a “hot spell.”  White then tells readers that his essay only momentarily captures a city in flux. Even within the short passage of time since it had been written, it seems, the piece had already become outdated.

“The reader will find certain observations to be no longer true of the city,” White stated, “owing to the passage of time and the swing of the pendulum. I wrote not only during a heat wave, but during a boom. The heat has broken, the boom has broken, and New York is not quite so feverish now as when the piece was written.”

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.