There are several probable reasons for this. The art of writing drama, fiction and poetry dates back to before the beginning of this nation. New York is one of the oldest cities-if not the oldest city-in America; so, logically, the writers were here first. But, more importantly, New York was settled by the Dutch as a business venture. They allowed immigrants from just about anywhere to settle here and work, unlike the more insular Puritan New England cities or Catholic Baltimore. Therefore, diversity, new cultures, and new ideas were tolerated here-or had to be, at least. But differences of opinion naturally arose, especially after the British took over the colony.

In 1733, the Royal Governor of New York, William Cosby, attempted to suppress German-born newspaper publisher William Peter Zengler for printing "seditious and libelous" statements about the crown. In a famous trial-one that is inexorably connected to our Freedom of the Press-Zengler was absolved of the charges. The result was an influx of writers and publishers, eager to capitalize on New York’s liberalism that continued well after the American Revolution. Bowne & Co., one of America’s largest and oldest printers, got its start in New York in 1775. (It is still headquartered here.) In 1817, John and James Harper would start a publishing house that would become publishing giant HarperCollins. By the middle of the 19th century there were so many printers and newspapers in The City that they needed their own neighborhood, known as "Printing House Row". (See below.) The Pulitzer building is the tall domed affair just left of center, The Tribune is the pinnacled building just right of center, and The New York Times is taller building on the right with the five arched windows. The photo was taken in 1899.

Because New York continued its policy of allowing outsiders in-whether from foreign countries or from within the nation’s expanding borders-The City became home to hundreds, if not thousands, of writers over the decades.

But New York City didn’t just become the place where writers lived and worked; it became the place that writers wrote about. Its bustle, its roar, its array of characters, the potential for success and tragedy it provided, its traffic, its slums and its mansions all provided unique fodder for generations of writers. This essay seeks to present those literary landmarks that are still extant in The City. These selections are only a small sampling, and are highly subjective. Some of these locales are famous and others not so. The only organizing principle is that these landmarks begin at the southern tip of Manhattan and proceed uptown, following the island’s growth over the centuries. If you want to see more, come on by and I’ll gladly give you a couple of walking tours.

Wear comfortable shoes.

Part One of Three Parts
FROM SOUTH STREET TO THE WHITE HORSE TAVERN

South Street Seaport and environs
"I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of old Manhatto…"
--From Melville’s Moby Dick

Very little survives from pre-Civil War New York; the proliferation of fires, great and small, as well as the real estate pressures to build higher and higher offices buildings, doomed the three- and four-storey cityscape that had ruled Manhattan almost since the old Dutch days. One notable exception is the cluster of buildings along Fulton and South Streets, some of which date back to the 1850s. See photo below.

The area is now a shopping Mecca, replete with boutiques and gadget shops. But if you can mentally block out the modern buildings and the thousands of digital camera-toting visitors, you can easily imagine these structures as being the center of the busiest port in 19th Century America. See image below.

For decades throughout the 19th Century, the incredible activity here attracted the attention of several writers, sometimes for opposite reasons. To Herman Melville, the seaport represented escape from the pressures and drudgeries of city life. One can imagine the distracted Bartleby the scrivener walking here from his nearby Wall Street office. Ishmael, in Moby Dick, is enormously sensitive to the desire to escape the rigors of mercantile New York:

"Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall northward. [n.b.-These streets are all part of the seaport area.] What do you see? - Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week-days pent up in lath and plaster - tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks."

Others, especially Walt Whitman, thrilled, not at the prospect of leaving Manhattan, but at watching new people and goods come into it. His famous "lists" of the sights of the seaport are just hints of the vibrancy and energy that once defined this place:

"The countless masts, the white shore-steamers, the lighters, the ferry-boats, the black sea-steamers well-model’d;
The down-town streets, the jobbers’ houses of business-the houses of business of the ship-merchants, and money-brokers-the river-streets;
Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week;
The carts hauling goods-the manly race of drivers of horses-the brown-faced sailors;
The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds aloft…"
--From "Mannahatta"

The Brooklyn Bridge
"Come like a light in the white mackerel sky,
come like a daytime comet
with long unnebulous train of words,
from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying."
--From Elizabeth Bishop’s "Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore" (1969)

Just north of the South Street Seaport is the Brooklyn Bridge. Designed by John Roebling, and built by his son, Washington, the Brooklyn Bridge was completed after nearly 15 years of construction. It finally opened in 1883. The "great bridge", as it came to be known, is probably the most filmed and most photographed bridge in America. (Photographed so much that I won’t even bother including an image of it here.) However, it is easy to forget how often it appears in literature, and in so many different lights.

There’s Hart Crane’s epic The Bridge (1930):

"Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path--condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms…

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God."

Then there’s Jack Kerouac’s quirky "The Brooklyn Bridge Blues" (1956):

Chorus # 1
"Winter, too cold to write
on the bolts of the beams
in the bridge steel
High,
overlooking whole auroras
of Sangsara sun dusk
down by the Statue of Liberals holding
soon to be lighted
torch to the dim dank
Atlantic famous sky…
I would I were a wave
and had vanished now
than bawl and blot
with pencils in screaming
rooms here on earth
so fool stupid blind

Chorus # 2
that's intro
And that's horse shit verse.
Let me tell you the truth
of the world at last.
I started in Brooklyn
and went over the Span
and at the middle hump
I looked and thought.
My mother had just told
a fib, and in the process
made me a liar in my
stepsister's eyes. I lookt
my mother dead in the face
and her eyes were hard
to find and almost hidden
behind those glasses and all
that "insecurity" necessitous
grime that had accumulated
there in the form of
Sangsara's Sorry Flesh."

To me, however, the most surprising contribution comes from Vladimir Mayakovsky, who, in spite of his Bolshevik credentials, could not help but gush in his 1925 poem, "The Brooklyn Bridge":

"Give, Coolidge,
a shout of joy!...
I too will spare no words about good things.
Blush at my praise, go red as our flag,
however united states of america you may be.

As a crazed believer enters a church,
retreats into a monastery cell, austere and plain;
so I, in graying evening haze,
humbly set foot on Brooklyn Bridge.

As a conqueror presses into a city all shattered,
on cannon with muzzles craning high as a giraffe -
so, drunk with glory, eager to live,
I clamber, in pride, upon Brooklyn Bridge."

The Lower East Side
"All the children we spoke to said that they went to school, and they were quick and intelligent. They could mostly speak English, while most of their elders knew only Yiddish. The sound of this was around us on the street we issued into, and which seemed from end to end a vast bazaar, where there was a great deal of selling, whether there was much buying or not. The place is humorously called the pig-market by the Christians, because everything in the world but pork is to be found there. To me its activity was a sorrowfully amusing satire upon the business ideal of our plutocratic civilization."
--William Dean Howells, "An East-Side Ramble" (1896)

Roughly stretching north from the Manhattan Bridge to 14th Street, and East to the Bowery, the Lower East Side has always been the home for New York’s poor, recently-arrived immigrants. It was not, however, until the 1880s when a gigantic influx of mostly Jewish (and some Italian) immigrants jammed the streets and tenements of the district that it took on its now-legendary qualities. The photograph of Hester Street taken in 1898, above, was a typical scene of the enormous crowding of the area. Life was hard, to understate the point. The squalor and poverty of the area was the focus of Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives (1890) and countless other books aimed at reforming the neighborhood.

However, and equally important for our discussion, the neighborhood also flourished with countless Yiddish theaters and plays, whose plots and structures would go as far as to influence the composition of Broadway plays. Because so many of the Yiddish works focused on immigrant life in the New World, it suddenly became acceptable, if not, stylish, for Broadway writers and producers to write about street life in The City, rather than looking to London or "classical theater" for fodder, as they had been doing.

In fiction, the neighborhood was home to or the subject for such writers as Irving Howe, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and E.L. Doctorow, to name a very few. Even today, the neighborhood—although annoyingly gentrified-is still a magnet for writers, artists, and bohemians.

75 1/2 Bedford Street

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light.
--Edna St. Vincent Millay

I wouldn’t recommend burning anything in this place; in fact; I wouldn’t even dare light a match. It is one of the narrowest buildings in The City at a claustrophobic 9 ½ feet at its widest, two feet at its narrowest. Although New Yorkers would like to brag that Millay wrote her famous "My Candle Burns at Both Ends" poem in this building, the fact is that she had written it years before moving here in 1923. However, she did write a bulk of "The King’s Henchmen" in these cramped quarters before moving out to wider horizons in 1924.

The White Horse Tavern
567 Hudson Street

We all know that after consuming 17 whiskeys in one sitting, the great poet, Dylan Thomas, died of alcoholic poisoning while seated at a booth in this lovely pub on November 1, 1953. And that just before the ambulance arrived he uttered his famous last words "Seventeen whiskeys; a record, I think," Right?

Wrong! It’s another New York myth. Although Thomas did love this watering-hole, and he did binge here on that night, he lived another week before succumbing to pneumonia at St. Vincent’s Hospital. (Recent investigations, however, seem to indicate that Thomas died of medical malpractice). And, to set the record straight, before he went into that good-night, his last words, according to his friend, Jack Heliker, were, "After 39 years, this is all I’ve done."

In the next installment: Pete’s Tavern, Washington Square, Chelsea, Algonquin Hotel, Times Square and other spots. Rocco Dormarunno was born and raised in New York City. He eared his BA in Humanities from Brooklyn College, his MA in English literature and language from Rutgers University, and was a student at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop. He has taught at each of those institutions, and currently teaches at he College of New Rochelle, Manhattan Campus. Along with his passion for literature, he also concentrated his studies in American and, specifically, New York City history. He and his wonderful wife Jenny live close to the city in West Orange, NJ.
Read More