Clifford Browder's Blog, page 26

319. 569 Hudson: Buddha, a Speakeasy, Greek Yogurt and Romance

JOYS AND HORRORS OF THE WEST VILLAGE AND OTHER NEW YORK STORIES
Reading at Jefferson Market Library, 425 Avenue of the Americas (near West 10th Street), on Sunday, October 8, 2-4 p.m.  I will read excerpts from my novels and New York stories, sign books, and take questions.  Books will be available for purchase.  I'll be glad to see a friendly face or two there.

Dark Knowledge:  Release date January 5, 2018, but copies now available from the author.  Adult and young adult.  A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront. More excerpts to come.


The back cover summary:

New York City, late 1860s.  When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled.  Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade.  Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered.  Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts.  How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure?  And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
__________________________________________________

Early reviews

"A lively and entertaining tale.  The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent."  Four-star LibraryThing early review by BridgitDavis.
"At first the plot ... seemed a bit contrived, but I was soon swept up in the tale."  Four-star LibraryThing early review by snash.

"I am glad that I have read this book as it goes into great detail and the presentation is amazing.  The Author obviously knows his stuff."  Four-star LibraryThing early review by Moiser20.

_________________________________________________________________

         Every old building in New York City has its history, whether recorded or not, and 569 Hudson Street, on the northwest corner of Hudson and West 11th Street just one short block from my apartment building, is no exception.  Today at ground-floor level it houses Philip Marie, a restaurant with tables outside in good weather, offering what it terms a fusion of New American cuisine, plus wines from all over the world.  Its name is a combination of the middle names of the owner and head chef, John Philip Greco III, and his wife, Suzanne Marie, who also acts as hostess.  Though I have often lunched there on Sunday, I cannot evaluate the cuisine, since I am quite content with their delicious Greek yogurt with strawberries and granola, perhaps followed by a cappuccino, its double espresso topped with frothy foamed milk lightly sprinkled with cinnamon.
         When I last lunched at Philip Marie, three waiters came in turn to welcome me back.  Seated inside at a small table in front, I noticed a menu offering Brunch Madness at $26.95, with Bloody Marys and Mimosas on the house.  The noise was deafening, but at least the patrons were having a good time.  And taking full advantage of something, as well, for I saw a tall waiter visit many tables repeatedly, filling everyone’s glass from a pitcher of an orange-colored liquid that I now know was Mimosa, a cocktail combining champagne and chilled orange juice. The restaurant asks brunch patrons not to linger more than 75 minutes and entreats them to “enjoy responsibly,” explaining that they reserve the right to refuse service to anyone who has had a glass too many.  Have they ever had to refuse anyone, I asked the hostess as I left, and she thought a moment and said, “No.”  At brunch, then, a joyous, noisy crowd, but no drunks.  And on one wall I noticed a quote from the Buddha defining happiness as existing in one’s mind.  Wisdom as well as good food and, with the brunch, free booze.  I left unboozed, but was told that my cappuccino was on the house.  Needless to say, I’ll be back.
         So much for today, but 569 Hudson has a history going back years, even centuries.  When John Greco bought the building in 1998, he broke down a brick wall in the basement in order to get more space.  Behind the demolished wall he found a small room with a trap door to a sub-basement that he hadn’t even known existed.  Going down the stairs to the sub-basement, he found a makeshift bar and some old broken chairs – the remains, he realized, of a hidden speakeasy of the 1920s, now unused because the room didn’t meet city regulations.
         But that wasn’t all.  He also decided to tear down a sheet rock wall and ended up breaking through four layers of sheet rock to reach a brick-and-limestone wall.  Behind that wall he found the remains of a kitchen of a farmhouse that once stood on the site, probably dating back to the 1700s.  It had two fireplaces and a window, and in the ashes in the fireplaces were oyster shells and clay smoking pipes left by the farmhouse’s original inhabitants.  But wait – a window in an underground structure?  Yes, because in those days the Village was hilly farmland and the home was above ground.
         When I learned of these underground excavations, I became fascinated by the history of 569 Hudson Street.  A farm in the 1700s and now a popular restaurant with delicious yogurt and Mimosas, but how about all those years between?  So I set out on an online voyage of discovery, tracking down every scrap of information that I could find.  Bits and pieces of history – tantalizing, but frustratingly incomplete – emerged.  Here is what I found.
         According to the Greenwich Village Historic District Designation Report of 1969, the four-story brick corner building at 569 Hudson Street was originally two buildings, a corner house built by one Abraham Miller in 1836, and a rear house at 303 West 11th Street built in 1857-58, both of them altered in 1874.  The cornice, the projecting ledge that tops the entire building today, dates from that time, though the casement windows are later additions.  The three fire escapes on the West 11thStreet side date from when the building was converted to multiple tenancy.  Originally, I assume, the two buildings were private residences.
         Now follows a long gap in my knowledge.  The building was said to have served as a hospital during the Civil War, but I haven’t been able to confirm this.  The Proceedings of the Board of Aldermen of August 6, 1895, lists a Grognen & Co. at 569 Hudson Street.  What this company was up to, I have no idea, but we can assume that by now Hudson Street in this neighborhood was no longer residential, if it ever was, but decidedly commercial.  Confirming this is mention, in the Democratic newspaper The Tammany Times of January 15, 1900, of Gwynne & Richardson at no. 569, a highly regarded dealer in builders’ hardware doing an immense business with New York City contractors.  So now the site is helping to build up the city.
         A speakeasy in the basement?  A 1922 publication entitled The American Perfumer, vol. 17, p. 508, reports that Sardou, Inc., at 569 Hudson Street, is in involuntary bankruptcy at the instigation of a number of creditors, including George Sardou, who is owed $5,000.  This, of course, was the Roaring Twenties, when Prohibition gripped the nation, and government agents had seized fifty barrels of alcohol in the company’s warehouse at no. 569, alcohol that the company was allegedly diverting to “illicit uses,” which, I suspect, meant the gullets of thirsty New Yorkers.  And sure enough, the New York Times of July 26, 1922, reported the seizure of $20,000 worth of grain alcohol on the premises when the firm’s head – Mr. Sardou himself, I assume -- tried to sell it to the agents.  So the hidden basement room was perhaps not a speakeasy, but storage space for forbidden booze.  Sardou, Inc., the article added, was a manufacturer of toilet articles with branches in London, Paris, and Bombay.  Ah, how the mighty have fallen!
         Fast-forward to circa 1975.  A photograph in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York shows the corner building with two enterprises on the ground floor: La Sangria restaurant on the corner, and next to it on Hudson Street, the Bendix Supermatic Laundry.  And looming next to them at 571 Hudson was a five-story building housing Liberty Moving and Storage.  I had moved into 286 West 11thStreet in 1970, so this was what I found on Hudson Street just one short block away.  I don’t recall the restaurant and laundry, but I do recall Liberty Moving and Storage in the five-story building next to them, where it remains to this day.  La Sangria, presumably serving Spanish food, is the first restaurant that I am aware of at no. 569, and the presence of the laundry and Liberty Moving suggests that Hudson Street, still decidedly commercial, was servicing residents of the West Village like myself who lived nearby in old buildings on quiet residential streets.
         An ad on p. 102 of New York Magazine of May 24, 1982, announces  the Hudson River Café, featuring Nouvelle American Cuisine, at 569 Hudson Street.  Next, the New York Times of April 18, 1988, mentions the newly arrived Harlequin Restaurant, a stylish Continental restaurant, at no. 569.  And on p. 124 of New York Magazine of May 22, 1995, an ad appears for the Nine Muses Café at that address, offering Greek Mediterranean Cuisine, which another ad that year mentions as including fresh grilled octopus and fish brochettes, plus quantities of ouzo.  Finally, the May 15, 1998, issue of Eating Out, listing Greek restaurants in the city, mentions Uncle Nick’s, a handsome Greek seafood taverna at no. 569, offering sautéed Greek sausage, and an appetizer named saganaki in which a sheep’s milk cheese is set aflame and served in lemon-butter sauce.  So the site is definitely enticing restaurants, but unlike the legendary White Horse Tavern just across West 11th Street, they don’t seem to last very long.  But their presence implies a sophisticated residential community in the West Village and beyond, with a taste for international cuisines.  But Uncle Nick’s was presumably ousted when, in that same year of 1998, John Greco bought the building, began his excavations, and launched Philip Marie.
         And today?  The studio apartments on the floors above the restaurant at 303 West 11thStreet are going for an average monthly rent of $2,550.  And the so-called hidden speakeasy?  The space one flight down has been converted into the Wine Room, a “romantic, private dining room for only two,” voted one of the top places for romance by the New York Times, the superlative arbiter of romantic atmosphere and taste.  Yes, just above where barrels of illicit booze were once stashed, loving couples now dine intimately under a ceiling with thirteen eyebeams that have protected this secret vault for over fifty years.  “Do couples really dine there?” I asked the hostess when I last lunched in the restaurant upstairs, and she answered with an emphatic “Yes!” and assured me that a couple had been there just the day before.
         So what does a couple experience in these intimate nether depths?  I can’t say from first-hand experience, not being in the market for romance and romantic settings, but online sources have given me an inkling.  Descending the narrow staircase, guests find themselves in a small room lined on all sides with wine bottles stored properly on their side.  Behind an iron gate are bottles of champagne and the secret trapdoor leading to the subterranean tunnels, but exploring those tunnels is taboo.  After a glass of champagne and an assortment of hors d’oeuvres, your private server offers suggestions for the three-course meal to follow, plus wine selections perfectly matched to your choices.  A stereo system provides jazz or romantic classics, and if you bring your own musical selections, your server will be glad to play them for you.  Customized flower arrangements, live musicians, and special cakes and pastries can also be arranged in advance.  And all this for only $195.00 per couple, plus sales tax and 20% gratuity.  But if you want special items ordered in advance, as for instance grilled venison with juniper berry sauce for the main course, or deep-fried chocolate truffles for dessert, add $20 for each. 

         So there you have it: venison in juniper berry sauce, chocolate truffles, and romantic music in a room just above where barrels of illicit booze were once stashed, and above the remains as well of a farmhouse kitchen where farmers once gobbled oysters and smoked clay pipes.  But in this age of feminism, who pays?  The guy?  The girl?  Both, equally?  And what if she earns more than he does?  And are gay couples welcome?  Complicated matters that ages before our own could never have anticipated.  So let’s leave the financial arrangements to the guests, and the question of same-sex couples to management, and wish the diners well in their intimate, wine-girt dining.

BROWDERBOOKS  
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1.   No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World  (Mill City Press, 2015).  Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe.  In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you.  An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.

Review 

"If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you.  Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way. A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint."  Five-star Amazon customer review by Bill L.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

2.   Bill Hope: His Story  (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series.  New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder.  Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.

Reviews
"A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure.  A must read."  Five-star Amazon customer review by nicole w brown.
"This was a fun book.  The main character seemed like a cross between Huck Finn and a Charles Dickens character.  I would recommend this."  Four-star LibraryThing review by stephvin.  

"This is an easy read about a hard life.  Interesting characters, a bustling city, poverty, privilege, crime, injustice combine to create a captivating tale."  Five-star Goodreads review by John Wheeler.

Available from Amazon.
3.   The Pleasuring of Men  (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.

What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York?   Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn).  Women have read it and reviewed it.  (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)

Reviews
"At times amusing, gritty, heartfelt and a little sexy -- this would make a great summer read."  Four-star Amazon customer review by BobW.
"Really more of a fantasy of a 19th century gay life than any kind of historical representation of the same."  Three-star Goodreads review by Rachel.
"The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters.  Highly recommended."  Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.

Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

T

Coming soon:  Interview:  A Male Prostitute and His Clients.  I interview characters in my novel The Pleasuring of Men and add a note on sources.

©   2017   Clifford Browder

318. A Venerable New York Institution: the Saloon

JOYS AND HORRORS OF THE WEST VILLAGE AND OTHER NEW YORK STORIES
Reading at Jefferson Market Library, 425 Avenue of the Americas (near West 10th Street), on Sunday, October 8, 2-4 p.m.  I will read excerpts from my novels and New York stories, sign books, and take questions.  Books will be available for purchase.  I'll be glad to see a friendly face or two there.

Dark Knowledge:  Release date January 5, 2018, but copies now available from the author.  Adult and young adult.  A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront. More excerpts to come.


The back cover summary:

New York City, late 1860s.  When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled.  Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade.  Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered.  Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts.  How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure?  And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
_________________________________________________

Early reviews

"A lively and entertaining tale.  The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent."  Four-star LibraryThing early review by BridgitDavis.
"At first the plot ... seemed a bit contrived, but I was soon swept up in the tale."  Four-star LibraryThing early review by snash.
_________________________________________________________________

         New Yorkers have always liked to guzzle.  Prohibition doesn't stand a chance in the Big Apple; it was tried twice, once in the nineteenth century (briefly) and once in the twentieth, and both times it failed. 




         Back in Dutch days residents guzzled in taverns, to the extent that Peter Stuyvesant, the one-legged governor of New Amsterdam, complained in 1648 that one house in four was a tavern, and then imposed strict limits on their hours of business – perhaps the first attempt to discipline imbibing New Yorkers, and far from the last.
         When New Amsterdam became New York, the English tavern became the norm: a big room heated by a large fireplace that provided both heat and cooked food, with the bar itself a small cabinet not accessible to the public, so as to secure liquor from brawls and theft.  A hot dinner was offered at noon, and a cold supper in the evening.  There being no hotels in those days, out-of-town visitors were lodged in small rooms on the second floor or, failing that, on pallets near the fireplace where they could snore snugly with feet outstretched to the fire.  Ales and porters were popular, but rum, brandy, and Madeira were also available.  Stagecoaches might stop there, and taverns lured patrons – men only – with lectures, bear baitings, cockfights, and rat killings.  So from the very start, the tavern was central to the social life of the city, or at least, to the social life of males.  And the women?  They were home tending the kids, churning butter, putting up preserves, doing the wash, and gossiping with neighbors.
         The tavern continued as the site of public drinking into the nineteenth century, when that new phenomenon, the hotel, emerged as a place of lodging, and luxury hotels soon followed.  From then on the tavern’s successor, the barroom or saloon, could devote itself to moistening the gullets of customers, and otherwise keeping them happy.  The word “saloon,” by the way, derives from the French salon, meaning a large hall; by the nineteenth century it indicated a large compartment on a steamboat where passengers could lounge, and then, in the U.S., a public bar.  And that bar existed on every level, ranging from the liquor groceries of the slums to the luxury bars of the fanciest hotels.
         In slums like the notorious Five Points almost every corner housed a liquor grocery well stocked with everything the neighborhood might need for daily living: heaps of cabbages, potatoes, turnips, dried apples, chestnuts, and beans; bins of coal, nails, plug tobacco; shelves of firewood sold by the stick; other shelves with candles, crackers, sugar, tea, pickles, and mustard; casks of lamp oil, molasses, rum, whiskey, brandy, and any number of cordials concocted in a back room; hams, sausages, and strings of onions hanging from the ceiling; and maybe in one corner a short counter offering fresh-baked pies, hot coffee, and cheap cigars.  So much for the “grocery” part of “liquor grocery.”  And the liquor?  Across one end of the room ran a counter, maybe just a plank of wood on top of a couple of barrels, offering liquor at three cents a glass.  And to this all-purpose enterprise the neighbors flocked, the missus as well as her hubby, and often enough a merry time was had by all.  The proprietors prospered, often even to the point of buying a nearby tenement and renting out slivers of rooms to the indigent (Hugo’s miserables), while alcoholism in the neighborhood raged. 


The Five Points slum in 1827.  Look close: a liquor grocery on almost every corner.
         A notch or two up in the hierarchy of watering places was the stand-up saloon, often with a long bar backed by a mirror, and shiny glasses and an array of bottles on display in front of it.  There might be sawdust on the floor to cushion the patrons’ feet and absorb spat tobacco juice and spilled beer, while  a pot-bellied stove in the middle of the room put out waves of thirst-inducing heat.  On the walls were pictures of pugilists in noble poses, sleek racing horses, a local politician, and maybe a bevy of buttocky female nudes. 
         Conspicuous by its presence was the free lunch, offering spiced ham, pickles, olives, pretzels, sauerkraut, crackers, and tangy sardines: fare well calculated to keep the working-class customers – again, all men – thirsty.  Conspicuous by their absence were tables and chairs, so the establishment could accommodate hordes of workers who flocked there on their lunch break or after work.  The saloon was their place of recreation, a refuge from the harsh reality of their lives, a place for conviviality, for drinks and jokes and gossip.  And on pay day also a place to spend generously of their wages, downing their whiskey neat or wetting their whiskers in foam-topped mugs of beer, while their wives waited anxiously at home, wondering how much money would be left for groceries, clothes, and the rent.  Little wonder that middle-class female reformers, fighting for the vote, saw the saloon as a bastion of male intemperance and irresponsibility, prompting working-class males to close ranks against this assault on their sanctuary.
         The saloon owner was often a Tammany alderman who used the place as his headquarters at election time, when anyone coming to him able to deliver a hundred votes would be invited to a back room with a table and chairs, so the caller could state what he wanted in exchange for those votes.  Many an alliance was sealed in that legendary smoke-filled room, and many a betrayal conceived.  With an election approaching, a rally might be held outside on the street, with fiery campaign rhetoric topped off by an offer of free drinks that sent hordes of voters surging to the beer spigots and bottles of whiskey inside.  Despite periodic middle-class calls for reform, in this way many a Tammany man recruited votes and assured his re-election.



The Hoffman House bar, with the famous painting on the right.
         But there were fancy saloons also, often in luxury hotels.  Foremost of these in the 1870s and 1880s was the elegant seven-story Hoffman House at Broadway and 25th Street, whose barroom was a must for male visitors, not because of the handsome carved mahogany bar, or the tapestries allegedly once made for Napoleon, or the Turkish rugs on the tiled floor, but because of a huge painting by the academic French artist Bouguereau on the wall opposite the bar.  Topped by a red-velvet canopy and lit by a large chandelier, the painting, Nymphs and Satyr, showed four voluptuous female nudes cavorting around a satyr.  Needless to say, it wasn’t the goat-legged satyr that attracted the gaze of the patrons.  There were tables and chairs for guests, but gentlemen standing at the bar, with one foot on the requisite brass-plated foot rest while sipping a vermouth cocktail or creamy Hoffman House Fizz, could feast their eyes discreetly on the reflection in the bar’s huge mirror.  Reproduced in miniature on boxes of Hoffman House Cigars, the painting spread joy and titillation throughout the country, thus guaranteeing more visits to the bar by eager out-of-towners. 




         In their heyday Boss Tweed and his more presentable cronies were seen at the Hoffman House bar, as well as Buffalo Bill Cody, assorted specimens of European nobility, Texas cattle barons, Chicago hog butchers, and Colorado mining kings made rich by a strike in silver.  Resident there was the dapper man-about-town and perennial race track loser Ned Stokes, who for murdering financier Jim Fisk spent four dreary years in Sing-Sing before being released and allowed to resume his high living at the Hoffman House, of which in time he became part owner and, by purchase, owner of the painting as well.  Other residents at one time or another included Ulysses S. Grant, William Randolph Hearst, Sarah Bernhardt, and Grover Cleveland, who was living there when elected President in 1892.
         The twentieth century was not kind to the Hoffman House.  As the city continued to expand northward and elegance went with it, the hotel languished financially, declared bankruptcy, and closed in 1915, following which it was demolished to make room for a 16-story office building.  And the painting?  Following Stokes’s death in 1901, it was sold at auction to a buyer who stored it in a warehouse so as to keep its “offensive” content from the public.  In 1942 it was discovered in storage by the art collector Robert Sterling Clark, who remembered seeing it years before in the Hoffman House and now acquired it.  Subsequently it became part of the permanent collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, but when the institute underwent renovations, it returned to New York in 2012 and for two years was displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  No longer scandalous today, at best it elicits giggles from groups of visiting school kids.  If Bouguereau’s painting is not as highly esteemed as the works of his more adventurous contemporaries, the Impressionists, at least it had an interesting history as the memorable top attraction in one of New York’s fanciest bars.
         In stark contrast with the elegant bars of the fashionable hotels were the dives of the Bowery, a neighborhood that by the late 1900s had achieved its reputation as the last sanctuary of booze-ridden down-and-outers, a nest of cheap saloons, cheap hotels, prostitutes, and drunks, and the missionaries trying to reclaim them.  Especially infamous was McGurk’s ill-lit Suicide Hall at 295 Bowery, between Houston and East 1st Street, which, minus that name, opened in 1893.  The proprietor, John H. McGurk, was a veteran in the business, have already run a string of saloons that, each in turn, had been shut down by the police.  Claiming to be a hotel so it could serve liquor on Sundays, the ground-floor saloon was patronized by soldiers, sailors, and longshoremen who did their imbibing at tables, and by prostitutes eager to entice them to a room upstairs.  Keeping order was the head bouncer, “Eat-’em-up Jack” McManus, an ex-fighter, who survived knife and gun attacks while felling unruly patrons and ousting them, while the owner sat quietly at another table, sipping a mug of ale in the company of a painted lady.

         McGurk’s saloon, one of many notorious Bowery dives, acquired its name when, in 1899, six prostitutes frequenting the place committed suicide and seven more attempted it, some by jumping out a fifth-floor window, and others by ingesting carbolic acid, a disinfectant used in surgery.  Bodies on the sidewalk were lugged to the corner of East 1st Street and the Bowery, soon christened “Suicide Corner,” to be removed from there by an ambulance.  Especially notable were Blonde Madge Davenport and her partner Big Mame, who agreed to exit together via carbolic acid.  Blonde Madge succeeded, but Big Mame only managed to spill the acid on her face, disfiguring her for life and causing her to be barred from the premises. 
         Said McGurk, “Most of the women who come to my place have been on the down grade too long to think of reforming.  I just want to say that I never pushed a girl downhill any more than I ever refused a helping hand to one who wanted to climb.”  But he then capitalized on the suicides by renaming his establishment McGurk’s Suicide Hall.  Which might seem weird, until you learn that other Bowery dives of the time were named the Plague, the Hell Hole, the Fleabag, the Bucket of Blood, and Paresis Hall, this last a hangout for male prostitutes, paresis being a form of paralysis then believed to be transmitted by homosexual acts.  All of which brings to mind the S&M bars of the Meatpacking District in the West Village in the 1980s, prior to gentrification: the Mineshaft, the Anvil, the Spike, the Hellfire, and the Toilet.
         The police, community leaders, and City Hall finally had had enough, and they pressured McGurk accordingly.  Arrested and out on $1000 bail, he left town for California with his wife and daughter and half a million in cash; in 1913 he died of heart failure at age 59.  Suicide Hall closed down as a bar in 1902 and became a hotel catering to bums – in other words, a flophouse.  Occupied by a co-op of women artists from the 1960s on, it was demolished by developers in 2005, to be replaced by the steel and glass marvels of Avalon Bowery Place, a luxury apartment building with a doorman, private terraces, and programmable heating and air-conditioning controls.


Leonard J. DeFrancisci         One survivor of the old days that is still thriving today is McSorley's Old Ale House at 15 East 7th Street in the East Village, which claims to date from 1854, making it the oldest continuously operating saloon in the city.  Founded by an Irish immigrant named John McSorley, it was an Irish working men's saloon for years and a men-only bar by tradition, with the motto "Good Ale, Raw Onions and No Ladies," until in 1970 it was forced by a court ruling to admit women.  Its walls are adorned with memorabilia from another age, and only in 2017 was its menu altered for the first time in over 50 years, with the addition of Coney Island hot dogs (there's no accounting for taste).  Described by poet e.e. cummings as "snug and evil," it still has sawdust floors and still offers ale and onions.


McSorley's today.
ingawh         On this note I will end my survey of New York City saloons, a subject too vast for a single post.  Omitted are many other species, including the pretty-waiter-girl saloons of nineteenth-century Sixth Avenue, the speakeasies of the 1920s, the Mafia-run gay bars of the twentieth century, and the singles bars of today.



BROWDERBOOKS  
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1.   No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World  (Mill City Press, 2015).  Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe.  In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you.  An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.

Review 

"If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you.  Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way. A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint."  Five-star Amazon customer review by Bill L.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

2.   Bill Hope: His Story  (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series.  New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder.  Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.

Reviews
"A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure.  A must read."  Five-star Amazon customer review by nicole w brown.
"This was a fun book.  The main character seemed like a cross between Huck Finn and a Charles Dickens character.  I would recommend this."  Four-star LibraryThing review by stephvin.
Available from Amazon.
3.   The Pleasuring of Men  (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.

What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York?   Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn).  Women have read it and reviewed it.  (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)

Reviews
"At times amusing, gritty, heartfelt and a little sexy -- this would make a great summer read."  Four-star Amazon customer review by BobW.
"Really more of a fantasy of a 19th century gay life than any kind of historical representation of the same."  Three-star Goodreads review by Rachel.
"The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters.  Highly recommended."  Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.

Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.




Coming soon: 569 Hudson: from farm to speakeasy to grilled octopus to romance.

©   2017   Clifford Browder

317. Martin Shkreli's Trial

JOYS AND HORRORS OF THE WEST VILLAGE AND OTHER NEW YORK STORIES
Reading at Jefferson Market Library, 425 Avenue of the Americas (near West 10th Street), on Sunday, October 8, 2-4 p.m.  I will read excerpts from my novels and New York stories, sign books, and take questions.  Books will be available for purchase.  I'll be glad to see a friendly face or two there.

Dark Knowledge:  Release date January 5, 2018, but copies now available from the author.  Adult and young adult.  A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront. More excerpts to come.


The back cover summary:

New York City, late 1860s.  When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled.  Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade.  Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered.  Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts.  How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure?  And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
_________________________________________________

Early reviews

"A lively and entertaining tale.  The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent."  Four-star LibraryThing early review by BridgitDavis.
"At first the plot ... seemed a bit contrived, but I was soon swept up in the tale."  Four-star LibraryThing early review by snash.______________________________________________________________________
         My last post on the remarkable Martin Shkreli was #306 of July 2, 2017, which covered jury selection for his trial in the Federal District Court in Brooklyn on securities fraud and wire-fraud charges, and ended with the empaneling of a jury, and the opening statements of the prosecutor and defense attorney.  (Prior to that I discussed this financial whiz kid and accused fraudster, now all of 34 years old, in posts #214 of January 10, 2016, and #223 of March 27, 2016 – more text, indeed, than I have devoted to our illustrious president, whom I see as being in some ways Mr. Shkreli writ large.  Or, better put, Mr. Shkreli can be seen as the Donald writ small.)  The trial ended on Friday, August 4, so let’s now have a look at it.
         The trial began on June 26, when more than 120 potential jurors were dismissed, some calling the defendant, “a snake,” “the most hated man in America,” or “the face of corporate greed.”  A jury was finally empaneled, and on June 28 the lawyers made their opening statements, the prosecution accusing him of fraud and of telling “lies on top of lies on top of lies,” while the defense described him as a dysfunctional personality “brilliant beyond words,” and stressed that disliking him personally was not a basis on which to  convict.
Testifying before a House committee in 2016.
         In the weeks that followed, the prosecution put on the stand a series of Shkreli’s former colleagues in his hedge fund MSMB Capital and his pharmaceutical company Retrophin, who told how he had charmed them into investing in his enterprises, then misrepresented the companies’ financial condition, and finally flat out lied to them.  Under cross-examination by Shkreli’s lead attorney, Benjamin Brafman, it became clear that wealthy investors in Retrophin – Shkreli’s presumed victims – had in fact realized a handsome profit when Retrophin’s stock, down to $3.35 in December 2012, rose like he phoenix from its ashes and soared to $20.  Shkreli, his attorneys insisted, was an erratic misfit who, by implication, could not have knowingly committed fraud.  A curious case, with the fat-cat victims sitting on a tidy profit, and the defense portraying their client as an oddball even to the point where the judge admonished them about it.    Throughout the trial, sparks flew, and more than once the judge had to tell the lawyers to stop sniping at each other.  Meanwhile Shkreli sat there in his usual dark jacket, open shirt collar, and khakis, but now often wearing glasses that gave his boyish features a slightly nerdy look, even while registering his familiar smirk.
         As the trial continued, Shkreli, while barred from Twitter under one account, evidently interacted with journalists and the public under another.  And on Friday, June 30, he chatted with some journalists, calling his prosecutors “junior varsity,” denying that one testifying hedge fund investor was a victim, and asserting that his critics “blame me for capitalism.”  Only when his lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, intervened, did Shkreli stop opining.  In papers filed on July 3 the prosecutors argued that Shkreli’s public statements risked tainting the jury, and asked Judge Kiyo A. Matsumoto to restrict him from further blabbing, which she did.
         Other highlights of the trial:
·      Steven Richardson, the former chairman of Retrophin, at first a friend and mentor of Shkreli’s, told how Retrophin declined financially under Shkreli’s management, how Shkreli lied to him, and their friendship came to an end.   ·      Tim Pierotti, a high-level MSMB employee, testified that in December 2012 Shkreli, desperately in need of money, screamed at him to sell his Retrophin shares to Shkreli, which Pierotti refused to do, prompting Shkreli to send a letter to Pierotti’s wife claiming that her husband had stolen $1.6 million from him, and saying that he hoped to see her and her four children homeless  --- a letter that was entered into evidence.·      Shkreli was described by his lawyers as being so obsessed with pharmaceutical research that he didn’t brush his teeth and slept in his office at night in a sleeping bag.
         Shkreli at first wanted to testify in his own defense, but then, no doubt on advice of counsel, decided not to.  The defense called no witnesses and in its summation on July 27 argued that their client had never intended to defraud anyone, and that his investors had in the end realized enormous profits; jurors should think carefully, Brafman warned, before snuffing out this brilliant mind with a felony charge.  “You don’t have him on the beach or a yacht,” said Brafman.  “He was in a sleeping bag in his office so he could build a company.”  The prosecution’s final four-hour summation emphasized once again how Shkreli had repeatedly lied to investors and presented him as a calculating con man who knew exactly what he was doing.  Meanwhile the subject of all this brouhaha had his nose deep in a book.
         The judge then read her lengthy instructions to the jury, and on July 31 the jury began deliberating.  They were closeted for five days, while the world waited, eager to hear the fate of “Pharma Bro,” whom the BBC, mindful of his pharmaceutical misdeeds, called “the most hated man in America” (a label questioned in some circles, where an even more eminent personage might be the preferred choice).
         Finally, on Friday, August 4, the jury announced the verdict: guilty on three of the eight counts of fraud, which might mean up to 20 years in prison on the first two, and up to five years on the third.  Shaken at first, Shkreli was soon again his upbeat, arrogant self, smiling defiantly and telling reporters outside the courtroom, “This was a witch hunt of epic proportions and maybe they found one or two broomsticks.”  Back in his Manhattan apartment, he resumed live-streaming while sipping ale, insisting that his sentence would be “close to nil”; after serving a little time in “Club Fed” playing basketball, tennis, and Xbox, he would soon resurface as a free man. 
         When interviewed, the jurors said that they thought that there was “a little something off” with Shkreli, and that he was certainly his own worst enemy, but they agreed that he knew right from wrong, knew what he was doing.  Not convinced that he had intended to defraud Retrophin or his investors, they acquitted him on the most serious count, but found him guilty on other counts after an orderly deliberation unmarred by the violent arguments and dissensions that often plague juries. 
         So much, it would seem, for the bad boy of pharmaceutical finance.  His sentencing is scheduled for the fall, and in the meantime he is free on bail, live-streaming and tweeting and being his deliciously obtrusive self.  As for Club Fed, before he sees its confines, I suspect that his attorneys will find ample grounds for appeal.

          But if you think that, prior to sentencing, this is the end of the story, you don't know Martin Shkreli.  On Thursday, September 7, federal prosecutors filed a motion with Judge Matsumoto to revoke his bail because he poses "a risk of danger to the community."  His offense?  On Tuesday, September 5, he published a post on Facebook urging people to grab a hair from Hillary Clinton, who is currently on a book tour; he promised to pay $5,000 per hair so obtained.  The Secret Service, whose duty it is to protect Mrs. Clinton,  a former First Lady, took the post seriously, fearing that some people would take Shkreli up on his offer, hence the request to the judge.   Shkreli soon added a line to his post saying his offer was satire and then, having promised his lawyer and the Secret Service that he would do so, deleted the post altogether.  On Thursday, September 7, he insisted on Facebook that "it was just a prank, bro," then later posted, "Come at me with your hardest because I haven't seen anything impressive yet."  Come at him they have, and surely will again.  Will the irrepressible Martin Shkreli serve time in jail, either before or after his sentencing?  The judge will rule on the prosecution's motion on September 14.  Stay tuned.
BROWDERBOOKS  
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1.   No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World  (Mill City Press, 2015).  Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe.  In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you.  An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.

Review 

"If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you.  Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way. A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint."  Five-star Amazon customer review by Bill L.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



2.   Bill Hope: His Story  (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series.  New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder.  Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.

Reviews

"A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure.  A must read."  Five-star Amazon customer review by nicole w brown.

"This was a fun book.  The main character seemed like a cross between Huck Finn and a Charles Dickens character.  I would recommend this."  Four-star LibraryThing review by stephvin.
Available from Amazon.
3.   The Pleasuring of Men  (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.

What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York?   Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn).  Women have read it and reviewed it.  (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)

Reviews

"At times amusing, gritty, heartfelt and a little sexy -- this would make a great summer read."  Four-star Amazon customer review by BobW.

"Really more of a fantasy of a 19th century gay life than any kind of historical representation of the same."  Three-star Goodreads review by Rachel.

"The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters.  Highly recommended."  Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.

Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.




Coming soon:  That old New York institution, the saloon.

©   2017   Clifford Browder

316. Death by Water in Central Park

Reading at Jefferson Market Library, 425 Avenue of the Americas (near West 10th Street), on Sunday, October 8, 2-4 p.m.  I will read excerpts from my novels and New York stories, sign books, and take questions.  Books will be available for purchase.  I'll be glad to see a friendly face or two there.

Dark Knowledge:  Release date January 5, 2018, but copies now available from the author.  Adult and young adult.  A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront. More excerpts to come.


The back cover summary:

New York City, late 1860s.  When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled.  Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade.  Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered.  Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts.  How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure?  And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?____________________________________________________________________________
         There are so many ways to die in the city – death by fire, death by hit-and-run, death by old age and loneliness – but death by water would seem to be a rare one, especially in Central Park.  The park is one of the glories of New York City: right in the middle of noisy, congested Manhattan, a big, long strip of green where New Yorkers go to relax, have a picnic lunch, jog, watch migrating birds and nocturnal raccoons, walk their dogs, or introduce urban school kids to the wonders of nature.  But also, it seems, to die.  This year, four deaths within three months, which is highly unusual, and three of them by water.
         Spring always means a melting of winter ice and snow, and possibly the surfacing of the drowned.  In nineteenth-century New York, when the Hudson froze solid for three months in the winter, warming spring rains initiated a grinding and cracking of ice, then a rush of broken ice down the river that snatched up anything loose in its way and finally swept past New York City into the inner harbor, the outer harbor, and at last the ocean, where shattered pier ends and crumpled small craft were deposited, and sometimes the thawing bodies of the long-frozen drowned.  But in our warmer climate of today this annual loosening of the ice, making the Hudson navigable again, is mostly a thing of the past, and seemingly unrelated to our beloved Central Park.  Until this year, that is.
         Around noon on Tuesday, May 9, a park worker spotted a man’s body, face down and naked, in the Jacqueline Kennedy Reservoir near East 86thStreet in Central Park.  The Reservoir is a vast body of water about 37 feet deep, with a strong current.  I have often hiked along its rim, marveling at the shimmering sunlight on its rippled waters and observing ducks through binoculars, while joggers and speed-walkers brushed past me: a scene of quiet recreation and calm.  Informed, the police came, marked off the area with yellow caution tape announcing POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS, retrieved the body, and examined it.  Because it was badly decomposed, they were unable to get fingerprints, but said that the man was probably in his 20s or 30s and appeared to have been in the water at least one month.  His clothes had rotted away, but there was no sign of trauma on the body, suggesting that no crime was involved.
The Reservoir in June.  Joggers, speed walkers, strollers, and occasionally a corpse.
Carsten Kessler
         Just one day later, at about 7:20 a.m. on Wednesday, May 10, a man’s body bobbed to the surface of the Pond, in the southeast corner of the park at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue.  The police again came, and medical examiner officials took photographs of the body, which was wearing only pants and shoes and had probably been in the lake’s seven-foot-deep water two weeks at the most.  An ID was recovered, identifying him as Anthony McAfee, a homeless man.  This on the heels of the first recovered body was highly unusual, and for the park’s joggers and tourists, unsettling, but again there was no sign of trauma on the body, except an eye nibbled by turtles or other wildlife.
The Pond.  Another nest of tranquility, not far from traffic and congestion.
Razum2010
         Unsettling too was the appearance that same day of a team of scuba divers who dove into the Reservoir to look for submerged bodies.  “Creepy,” said one daily stroller.  “But I love the park.  I’m not giving it up.”  As always, New Yorkers adjust.  But the police said that, of the bodies pulled from waters citywide, about half were recovered in the spring.  A forensic anthropologist explained that warm spring waters let bacteria grow in the gut or chest cavity of submerged bodies, producing gases that make them more buoyant, though if lobsters or crabs start scavenging, the gases can be released, and a body might never come to the surface.  Hence the scuba divers, though in this case no body was found.
         One month later, at about 8 a.m. on Sunday, June 11, a passerby spotted someone floating in the Conservatory Pond near Fifth Avenue and East 74th Street and jumped in to effect a rescue, only to find that he was rescuing a corpse.  The would-be rescuer then phoned 911, but by the time the police and fire department arrived, the fully clothed body had been fished out of the water and was lying on the ground.  It was a male African American who appeared to be in his 20s or 30s.  Once again, an unusual and unsettling incident in the most tranquil of settings, a pond where children float radio-controlled model boats, or climb over a nearby statue of Alice and various creatures from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 
The Conservatory Pond, with radio-controlled sailboats.  At the time of this photogrpah, no corpse.
Ingfbruno
         Finally – if one dare say “finally” – the body of a woman was discovered around 6:30 a.m. on Thursday, July 13, lying face down on a rock near the East Drive and East 62nd Street.  Fully clothed and apparently in her late 20s or early 30s, she too showed no signs of violence, but a pill bottle was lying next to the body.  At last report she, like two of the others, remained unidentified.
         Four deaths in Central Park in a two-month period, three of them in water – unprecedented.  Or is it?  An article by Lauren Evans in the Village Voice of July 7, 2017, lists deaths in the park since 1884, when the body of a man was discovered in the Reservoir.  In 1889 a suicide was reported there of a fashionably dressed young man in patent leather dancing shoes who removed his topcoat and derby, climbed over the Reservoir railing, and walked into the waters to his death.  The reason?  Lack of funds. 
         The Evans article also recorded numerous other suicides in the Reservoir, usually motivated by failure in business or love, though in one case by failure as a writer, and in another, because of schizophrenia.  Reservoir deaths declined noticeably after a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire was installed around its rim in 1926, but even after that, suicide was still an option for those able to scale the barrier.  And there were always alternatives: the Conservatory Pond already mentioned, and the Harlem Meer in the northeast corner of the park.  If people want to die by water in the park, they will always find a way.  Meanwhile joggers and dog-walkers and birdwatchers and picnickers continue to flock to its grassy fields and woods, and people rent boats to go boating on the Lake, unmindful of the deaths that have occurred in its tranquil expanses.


Daniel Schwen
Source note:  This post was initially inspired by an article by Benjamin Mueller and Emily Palmer, "2 Bodies Found This Week in Central Park Waters," in the New York Times of May 11, 2017, supplemented thereafter by other newspaper articles, including the one by Lauren Evans in the Village Voice of July 7, 2017, cited above.

BROWDERBOOKS  
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1.   No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World  (Mill City Press, 2015).  Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe.  In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you.  An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



2.   Bill Hope: His Story  (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series.  New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder.  Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.


For two new LibraryThing reviews of Bill Hope: His Story, go here.

3.   The Pleasuring of Men  (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.

What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York?   Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn).  Women have read it and reviewed it.  (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)

For Goodreads reviews, go here.  Likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.






Coming soon: Martin Shkreli's trial: the jury's finding in the trial of the "most hated man in America."

©   2017   Clifford Browder

315. Bananas, Chiquita, and the CIA

Reading at Jefferson Market Library, 425 Avenue of the Americas (near West 10th Street), on Sunday, October 8, 2-4 p.m.  I will read excerpts from my novels and New York stories, sign books, and take questions.  Books will be available for purchase.  I'll be glad to see a friendly face or two.

Dark Knowledge: Release date January 5, 2018, but copies now available from the author.  Adult and young adult.  A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront. More excerpts to come.


The back cover summary:

New York City, late 1860s.  When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled.  Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade.  Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered.  Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts.  How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure?  And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
_____________________________________________________________________


 For my two short poems "Rush" and "Signals," published by the online poetry review Colloquial, click here.
_______________________________________________
The Cavendish banana, the only kind we get.
         I’ve always had a thing for bananas.  I buy them from stands in the street, and when winter rages or summer seethes, rendering those on the stands half frozen or half cooked, I get them from the supermarket.  Yes, they're phallic, egregiously so, but that has nothing to do with it.  I prefer them not quite ripe, and therefore am leery of bananas with skins speckled brown, which pronounces them ripe.  And of course I have always heeded Chiquita Banana’s warning:
I’m Chiquita Banana and I’m here to sayBananas have to ripen in a certain way.Don’t put bananas in the refrigerator.
Little did I know at first that the lady’s sponsor was Chiquita Brands International, the chief producer and distributor of bananas in the United States, and that this was the successor to the United Fruit Company of ill repute, which saw fit to change its name.
Seal of the CIA.         Founded in 1899, the United Fruit Company came to dominate the international banana trade throughout much of Latin America, especially Central America, whose small nations came to be known as banana republics.  There is little doubt that the company engaged in neocolonialism, never hesitating to interfere in the internal politics of those small countries.  Especially flagrant was its lobbying the U.S. government to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, whose leftist policies of reform threatened United’s interests.  This was the time of the Cold War, and to the U.S. government Arbenz looked dangerously leftist, even Communist.  In 1954 a small CIA-backed army invaded Guatemala, and Arbenz was forced to resign and flee, replaced by the right-wing dictatorial regime of Castillo Armas.
Carlos Castillo Armas Color, president of Guatemala, and a friend of United Fruit and
the CIA.  Assassinated in 1957, he was celebrated as a martyr by the Guatemalan right.
         In the early 1960s, innocent of any strong political opinions, I visited Mexico and Guatemala as a tourist eager to see ancient Mayan sites, climb pyramids, improve my Spanish, and buy bright-colored serapes in the open-air market of Oaxaca.  In both countries I saw bananas on a tree with big, floppy leaves, and was informed that the tree would bear two years and no more.  And in the markets I saw kinds of bananas I had never seen before: big green things called plantains, which were meant to be cooked, and others that I don’t now clearly recall. 
A banana plantation in Guatemala.  On the tree, bananas grow
pointing up.  The blue bags keep off bugs.
Dennis Jarvis
         But there in banana land I sensed a distinct difference in political atmosphere between the two countries.  In Mexico I encountered a relatively free political atmosphere and in the heart of Mexico City witnessed a massive march of protesters hostile to the government of the long-ruling, monopolistic Institutional Revolutionary Party.  Jokes were even permitted about López Mateos, el señor presidente.  In Guatemala, on the other hand, I saw no hint of political activity, only posters with a photograph celebrating the benign rule of the bemedaled military officer then in power.  Nor did I have any awareness that in the very year of my visit, 1962, guerrilla warfare against the regime was beginning, inspired by Fidel Castro’s recent success in Cuba.
         Only later did I learn that United Fruit had worked hard, and with success, to influence my consumption of bananas in New York State.  New York is a great apple-growing state and always has been.  One October, when going upstate by bus to a cousin’s wedding, for miles on either side of the highway I saw vast orchards laden with apples fully ripe and begging to be picked, which within a few days they surely were.  And in the New York City greenmarkets I have seen dozens of kinds of apples flood the stands in September and October, when fresh-picked apples have a taste they will never have again.  Even in late spring I have counted eleven different kinds of apples in a single greenmarket stand, and this was late in the season for last year’s crop.
         So why this digression about apples, in a post about bananas?  Because long ago United Fruit with infinite cunning undertook to supplant the native-grown apple with the imported banana as New York State’s favorite fruit.  How to do it?  By making bananas even cheaper than apples.  To do this, United cleared rain forests in Central America, planted vastly, built railroads to transport the fruit, and devised refrigeration techniques to control ripening.  There are hundreds of kinds of bananas in the world, but by growing just one kind, the disease-resistant Cavendish, United made sure that all the bananas in a shipment would ripen at the same rate, thus realizing huge economies of scale. 
Four kinds of bananas.  From left to right: plantain, red
banana, apple banana, Cavendish.
TimothyPilgrim
         But United went further than that: it promoted its product in ways unknown to apple-growing farmers and grocers: discount coupons, jingles (“I’m Chiquita banana…”), and placing bananas in schoolbooks and on picture postcards.  Doctors were hired to convince mothers that bananas were good for children.  And to keep prices low, United conspired with (or arm-twisted) Latin American governments to deny workers health care, decent wages, and the right to organize.  Result: according to a 2008 article in the New York Times, Americans eat as many bananas today as apples and oranges combined.  One might think otherwise, seeing all the orange peels that litter the American landscape, along with used condoms and plastic spoons, but such is the case.  And this, even when Americans are being urged to eat foods grown locally, and New York City is a seething mass of self-proclaimed locavores.
Before containers: New York longshoremen taking bananas from a
conveyor belt to freight cars that will carry them to points west, 1937.
         Just getting the bananas to sidewalk stands and groceries is an almost epic endeavor.  In an article entitled “The Secret Life of the City Banana” by Annie Correal, in the Metropolitan section of the New York Times of Sunday, August 6, the whole undertaking is chronicled.  Huge container ships bring 4 million bananas each in refrigerated containers to the Red Hook Container Terminal in Brooklyn, but many more refrigerated bananas arrive by truck from out-of-state ports like Wilmington, Delaware.  Since bananas are rich in potassium, which is slightly radioactive, those arriving by ship go through a radiation detector at the terminal, and a few containers are inspected there by customs and border protection personnel.  Next, the bananas are sent in cartons by truck to a ripening warehouse in North Bergen, N.J., where, still green and hard, they are placed in stacks in a cool, dark ripening room filled with ethylene, a synthetic version of the hormone that sets off ripening.  Four days later, ripe at last, they are trucked to restaurant and fruit-stand suppliers, wholesalers, and groceries.  And so they appear at the sidewalk stands where you can buy them, usually four for a dollar.  And buy them I do, while I can, for the Cavendish is susceptible to a new strain of Panama Disease known as Tropical Race 4, or TR4, which will in time afflict it.  Meanwhile I buy and I chomp.
[image error] I'm not the only one who likes them.
The Dame          Just when I thought I was done with bananas, I encountered a full-page statement on page 15 of the first section of the New York Times of Sunday, August 20, announcing that on Monday, August 21, Chiquita would move the moon in front of the sun to create an enormous yellow crescent in the sky, known as the Chiquita banana sun, a fiery Cavendish to be seen by everyone on the planet.  Those thinking the totality -- the total eclipse, seen only in certain areas -- was worth traveling a long distance to behold, were misinformed; what counted, the ad insisted, were the two momentary banana suns, one before the totality and one after, which everyone in North America could see ("We planned it that way!").  How Chiquita would create the two banana suns was illustrated clearly with pictures, accompanied by a warning not to look at the Chiquita banana sun without protective eyewear.  The source of this delicious nonsense: thebananasun.com, where the brand name continued to be linked to the eclipse.  As always, Chiquita knows a good thing when she sees it, and gets her name in front of the public at every opportunity.  Clever, I admit.


BROWDERBOOKS  
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1.   No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World  (Mill City Press, 2015).  Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe.  In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you.  An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



2.   Bill Hope: His Story  (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series.  New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder.  Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.


For two new LibraryThing reviews of Bill Hope: His Story, go here.

3.   The Pleasuring of Men  (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.

What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York?   Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn).  Women have read it and reviewed it.  (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)

For Goodreads reviews, go here.  Likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.





Coming soon: Death by water in Central Park.


©   2017   Clifford Browder

314. Bond Street: Gentility, Murder, S&M and Art

Reading at Jefferson Market Library, 425 Avenue of the Americas (near West 10th Street), on Sunday, October 8, 2-4 p.m.  I will read excerpts from my novels and New York stories, sign books, and take questions.  Books will be available for purchase.  I'll be glad to see a friendly face or two.

Dark Knowledge:  Release date January 5, 2018, but copies now available from the author.  Adult and young adult.  A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront. More excerpts to come.


The back cover summary:

New York City, late 1860s.  When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled.  Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade.  Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered.  Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts.  How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure?  And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
_____________________________________________________________________


         New York is a city that is, and always has been, in flux, each neighborhood going through periodic transformations, for better or for worse.  No street has undergone more radical changes than Bond Street, which runs from Broadway on the west just two short blocks in NoHo to the Bowery on the east, one block north of Bleecker Street.  (NoHo, by the way, is a fairly recent coinage designating the area north of Houston and south of Astor Place, between Broadway and the Bowery, a skinny district squeezed in between the West and East Village.)
         In the 1830s Bond Street was the most elegant residential street in the city, desirable above all because it led nowhere, stopping at Broadway on the west and at the Bowery on the east.  A quiet side street, it was lined with red-brick Federal and Greek Revival row houses.  The Federal style had low stoops, and roofs sloping toward the street and sprouting twin dormer windows.  The Greek Revival style had a projecting cornice at the top, white marble trim, and an entrance fronted by a low stoop and flanked by pilasters meant to give the house a “classical” look.  The houses had a tasteful, neat appearance, stylish but not ostentatious, and in front of each were two trees that gave the street a leafy, shady look.

         The residents of Bond Street were merchants, doctors, lawyers, judges, bankers, Congressmen, an occasional affluent clergyman, a mayor, and widows – in short, the city’s very solid upper middle class.  Among them were trustees of this and directors of that; the president of the New York Historical Society; a South Street merchant who sent fast-running packets to course the seven seas; and a distinguished physician who, unlike most of his colleagues, clung to the time-honored but dubious practice of bleeding.  (It is said of the doctor that he once summoned his wife from a dinner table thronged with guests to an adjoining room where, over her piteous protestations, he bled her, being convinced that she was about to suffer a stroke of apoplexy.)  Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, was born at her banker father’s home on Bond Street, and General Winfield Scott resided there while a major general and second-in-command of the Army, prior to harvesting laurels of glory in the Mexican War. 
         But in nineteenth-century New York the population doubled every sixteen years, prompting a steady expansion in the only direction possible – uptown, or northward -- on the cigar-shaped island of Manhattan.  In this ever growing, ever changing metropolis, no residential enclave preserved its peace and calm for long.  On Bond Street the first subtle sign of decay was the presence of “fashionable” boarding houses run by widows in need of income (no Social Security back then), who termed their boarders “guests.”  Soon afterward came the unmistakable dread sign of decay: dentists’ offices.  After that, elegant shops and hotels invaded the neighborhood, and residents decamped uptown to the high-stooped brownstones of Fifth Avenue and Madison Square.  Further deterioration came in the form of tailors’ and shoemakers’ shops, a trunk store, and a dancing school, and by 1851 Bond Street was considered “plebeian,” harboring no less than seven dentists.  Among the residents thereafter 
were a minstrel, a journalist, a harbor master, a carter and, at some cost to the neighborhood’s diminished respectability, an actress.  Stoops and entryways were demolished, to be replaced by storefronts, and later in the century old houses once graced with gentility resonated with the click of typewriters and the whir of sewing machines.
49 Bond Street, a Greek Revival house built circa 1830 and altered in 1882 to become a library, and altered again in 1919 to house 
stores and lofts.  Now a mix of commercial and residential use.
Beyond My Ken         Scandal as well afflicted the once exclusive street.  On the morning of January 31, 1857, a youth employed by Dr. Harvey Burdell, a successful society dentist, arrived at Burdell’s residence at 31 Bond Street and found the dentist sprawled dead on the floor of his office in a pool of blood, his face black, his tongue protruding.  The boy ran screaming from the room and alerted all the house’s boarders, who were then at breakfast.  The police were notified, and a doctor summoned from his nearby residence.  Examining the body, the doctor concluded that Burdell had been strangled with a cord or other binding, and his body stabbed deep fifteen times.  Since the walls of the hall were likewise splattered with blood, it seemed likely that the victim had struggled with his assailant.
Dr. Burdell (above), and the opening of Mrs. Cunningham's
trial.  From an unidentified contemporary publication.
         Suspicion fell on Mrs. Emma Augusta Cunningham, a widow and the dentist’s former housekeeper and lover, with whom he had had a stormy relationship.  He had leased the house to her, and she resided there and rented the upstairs rooms to boarders.  At the coroner’s lengthy inquest Mrs. Cunningham threw herself on the open coffin and cried, “Oh, I wish to God you could speak and tell who done it.”  She then claimed to have quietly married the dentist, which would make her his heir and let her provide for her daughters.  Servants and boarders testified that Burdell had feared for his life, and that Mrs. Cunningham had boasted of having a halter around his neck, so that he had to do her bidding.  The murder immediately became the talk of the town, and the dentist’s funeral at fashionable Grace Church on Broadway was attended by more than 8,000 people.
         Mrs. Cunningham and a boarder named John Eckel, a tanner who may have been her lover, were indicted, but only Mrs. Cunningham was tried; the courtroom was packed.  Her daughters testified that she had been with them on the night of the murder, and her lawyer argued that a woman of 39 afflicted with rheumatism could not have committed such a brutal crime.  Burdell, it turned out, had a less than savory reputation, having often traded his dental services for sexual favors from prostitutes.  Given the lack of incriminating evidence, Mrs. Cunningham was found not guilty.  She then produced a child that she claimed to have had by Burdell, a newborn that she had in fact obtained from Bellevue Hospital.  Since the Bellevue doctor involved had notified the district attorney, who then raided her house for evidence, it is possible that this was a scam arranged by the D.A. to entrap her.  When the Surrogate’s Court ruled that she could not inherit Burdell’s substantial estate, Mrs. Cunningham left the city.  Eckel is said to have ended his days in prison, but Mrs. Cunningham later returned to the city under another name and died here in poverty in 1887. 
         The murder was never solved, and for well over a century the descendants of both Harvey Burdell and Mrs. Cunningham disowned them and let them rest in unmarked graves that happened to be only a few hundred yards apart in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.  Then, in 2007, at the urging of an amateur historian obsessed with the case, two sparkling granite headstones were installed, with an inscription on hers: “May God rest her troubled soul.”  Though we’ll never know for sure, it seems likely that Eckel committed the murder at her instigation.
         By the end of the nineteenth century Bond Street was irretrievably commercial, with many old houses demolished to make room for cast-iron or brick-fronted loft buildings housing light industry.  Bond Street’s width attracted manufacturing tenants, since the narrow streets of SoHo and other neighborhoods admitted much less light.  In the 1930s whole swaths of the remaining old houses were demolished.
         Following World War II industry moved out of the area to find cheaper land beyond Manhattan that was better served by highways, and many lofts fell vacant.  But where rents are low and space is available, artists are sure to follow.  By the 1960s they were moving into Bond Street’s spacious lofts, and since it was illegal to live there, they often had to hide their mattresses in the morning.  New legislation in the 1970s legalized residential loft tenants, and the pioneering artists were soon joined by legions more.
         In the 1970s the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe moved into a fifth-floor studio in an old industrial building at 24 Bond.  Fascinated by the S&M world, he invited men there for sex, drugs, and photography, “photography” meaning their posing for his Polaroid; the result was a corpus of work drenched in sensuality, often graphic and controversial, but rendered with true artistry that the world would in time come to recognize.  Besides male and female nudes (for he did females too), his work included still lifes of flowers that brought out lushly and suggestively their innate sensuality.  But this was the age of AIDS, and his freewheeling life style doomed him; diagnosed in 1986, he died of AIDS three years later. 
24 Bond, with the Gene Frankel Theater at ground level.
Beyond My Ken
         In the year of his death, 1989, the Gene Frankel Theater, where I had taken playwriting lessons years before on MacDougal Street, moved into the ground floor at 24 Bond, promoting a mission to nurture living playwrights and artists and revive NoHo as a cauldron of LGBTQ art and ideas.  (Interesting, since I remember Frankel, a genius director and teacher, as somewhat scornful of gay people in theater.)  Further consecration of the building has since come in the form of gold statuettes adorning the wrought-iron and brick façade, the contribution of artist and longtime resident Bruce Williams, who wanted to brighten with a touch of fantasy the otherwise heavy industrial look of the neighborhood. 
The uptown (north) side of Bond Street, from Lafayette Street to the Bowery, in November 2007.
But where, oh where, is that "wow factor" building at 40 Bond?  Were both of those old buildings
fronted by rows of columns sacrificed?  No sign of other recent constructions either.
GK tramrunner229
         Today the signs of gentrification on Bond Street are unmistakable: morning dog walkers, antique stores, a photo lab, restaurants, and luxury housing as well.  Once again after all these many years, Bond Street as a residential enclave is “hot.”  In 2003-2008 an eleven-floor luxury housing building was built at 40 Bond.  Hailed as an architectural masterpiece designed for "effortless luxury living," and taking the "wow factor" to a whole new level, it features a spaghetti-like ground-floor adornment, an aluminum tangle meant to mimic graffiti.   (The affluent future residents were presumed to want a touch of street art.)  In 2016 a tenth-floor four-bedroom apartment in the building sold for $14.5 million, at the time a record for NoHo.  Such architectural joys are possible because the NoHo Historic District, designated in 1999, ends at Lafayette Street on Bond; from there to the Bowery it's fair game for developers.



40 Bond Street, a huge glass box with street-level spaghetti.  
Beyond My Ken



Unique on Bond Street: a cast-iron factory building built in 1879-80, with a mansard 
roof (1-5 Bond).  Mansard roofs were all the rage in the 1860s, often being added onto 
an existing building topped with a cornice, a feature reproduced here.Silas Berkowitz
         Bond Street today is a curious mix of architectural styles, ranging from commercialized Federal to Screamingly Modern.  The trend is definitely upscale, but with occasional throwbacks to an earlier era, like the D & D Salvage Corporation, a dealer in scrap metal on the ground floor at 51 Bond, a Federal-style house with Greek Revival elements that was built as a private residence circa 1830.  The original stoop and Greek Revival doorway were removed in 1916 to accommodate lofts and offices, but the building still has the Federal-style dormer windows and retains its nineteenth-century look.  Next door is a trendy delicatessen, and above the delicatessen an extension of Billy Reid, a luxury clothing designer whose main store is across the street at 54 Bond. How long can a scrap dealer, established in 1953, resist gentrification? Time will tell.



D & D Salvage Corporation at 51 Bond Street. 
Silas Berkowitz
         By way of contrast, at the northeast corner of Bond and Broadway there looms an impressive five-story red-brick building with sandstone trim in Victorian Romanesque style, with rounded arches over the windows.  Built in 1873-74, it housed the Brooks Brothers clothing store from 1874 to 1884, and small manufacturers thereafter.  Today it is home to a self-proclaimed "new center for high performance living" with "heroically scaled studios" and "expansive fitness floors" -- namely, Equinox Bond Street, a "luxury experience" gym in "one of downtown Manhattan's hottest neighborhoods."  So on Bond Street today luxury fitness is in, scrap metal is out.


Broadway and Bond Street today.
Beyond My Ken
         Visiting Bond Street recently, I noticed that even today its short length, going only two blocks from Broadway to the Bowery, gives it a relative tranquility that contrasts with the roaring traffic of the nearby thoroughfares: Broadway, the Bowery, Bleecker Street, and Houston.  Tranquility, yes, but alas, there are no trees.



BROWDERBOOKS  
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1.   No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World  (Mill City Press, 2015).  Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe.  In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you.  An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



2.   Bill Hope: His Story  (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series.  New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder.  Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.


For two new LibraryThing reviews of Bill Hope: His Story, go here.

3.   The Pleasuring of Men  (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.

What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York?   Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn).  Women have read it and reviewed it.  (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)

For Goodreads reviews, go here.  Likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.





Coming soon: The Banana and Me: the Cavendish, and how the CIA made sure we'd keep on eating it.  


©   2017   Clifford Browder

313A. Dark Knowledge excerpt: Chris Interviews a Slaver

                                             Chris Interviews a Slaver



Reading at Jefferson Market Library, 425 Avenue of the Americas (near West 10th Street), on Sunday, October 8, 
2-4 p.m.  I will read excerpts from my novels and New York stories, sign books, and take questions.  Books will be available for purchase.  I'll be glad to see a friendly face or two there.


This post is an excerpt from my novel Dark Knowledge, set in late 1860s New York.  Young Chris Harmony suspects that some members of his seagoing family, including his deceased grandfather, Caleb Harmony, may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba.  Appalled, he is determined to learn the truth.  Helping him is his cousin Rick, who arranges for him to interview a Captain Matthews.

            “Did I know Caleb Harmony?  By God, what a question!  Of course I knew him!  Who on the waterfront didn’t?  A wide-awake type, if ever there was one.  All was fish as got in his net.”            A sharp-featured man with iron-gray hair, Captain William Matthews, sipping the whiskey cobbler Rick and I had offered him, had a faraway look, seemed disposed to reminisce.  With Rick’s help I had found him at the elegant Astor House bar on Broadway, a prime meeting place for ship’s masters and shippers, contractors sniffing about for contracts, and Go Ahead types of every kind, who hobnobbed noisily by gaslight, smoking fat cigars.  This being my first experience of a bar, I tried not to gape at the ornate pillars, handsome tile flooring, and busts of chesty females.  Having introduced me, Rick had distanced himself discreetly, so the captain and I could talk one to one.  When barely sipped, the brandy cordial that Rick had ordered for me had flamed in my throat; it sat all but untouched on the counter.            “You sailed his ships many a time, I gather?”            “Indeed I did.  To Callao, the port of Lima, and to Guayaquil, which, God bless ’em, boasts the handsomest women on earth.  And to Buenos Aires and Rio and a hundred other ports.  Harmony & Biggs were constant and heavy shippers of goods.  Likewise Harmony & Sons.”            “To Havana?”            “Aye, to Havana, too, and often.”            “Dealing with a Señor Martinez, I believe?”            “Señor Martinez?”  He searched his memories a moment.  “Yes, possibly.”            “While avoiding dealings with the American consul there?”            “That depended on the consul and the cargo.  They could devil you up, for sure.”              He took another sip of his cobbler, savored it, seemingly unaware of the babble of talk all around us.  Farther down the bar Rick was watching discreetly.            “What kind of cargo, captain?  To Havana, that is.”            “Any blamed thing in demand down there.  Carriages, furniture, machinery, cordage, cotton, and crates of good hard liquor.”            “But didn’t ships leaving New York also carry casks marked ‘rum’ and boxes marked ‘soap’?”            “Rum and soap?”  His features tightened and he shot me a glance.  “Kid, what kind of a course are you charting?”            “I just want to know about the trade of that time.”            He lowered his voice, looked sly.  “You mean the slave trade, don’t you?”            “Yes sir.  Attitudes here have changed since the war and emancipation.  I want to get back into the mood of that time and understand how things worked.”            “They worked, all right, but with risk.  A slaver could be caught at this end by a U.S. revenue cutter, or off the African coast by a British or American man-o’-war.  If boarded while going over, the large quantities of water and food – far more than needed for the crew – gave ’em away.  Coming back, it was the niggers themselves.  Since slavers didn’t have the men and guns to fight off a boarding party, all they could do was make a run for it, and some pretty wild chases resulted.”            “Then why take the risk?”            “Greed, pure and simple.  On the eve of the war, a prime male slave costing forty dollars in Africa brought at least tenfold that in Havana.  How else could you haul in jack like that?”            “What if you got caught?”            “Damned inconvenient, with a loss of profits and maybe the ship, but nothing more.  Here in New York judges and marshals could be bribed – a few hundred for a marshal, a thousand or two for a judge.”            “I see.  Sir, were respectable merchants involved in that trade?”            “Some yes, some no.  It depended.”            “Maybe some that you knew?”            “Quite a few.”            “I can see how that might have been – the money and all, and so many others doing it.”            “Plenty of ’em.  And some big names, too.”            “I see.  Captain, was Caleb Harmony in that trade?”            A long silence, then a canny smile, a soft-voiced reply.  “Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t.”            “Well, I guess it wasn’t for just anyone.  All those risks you mentioned.”            “And yellow fever, and at this end of it, in the Caribbean in late summer, hurricanes.  Many a ship was lost, with not one survivor.”            “So it must have taken courage, as well as plain old-fashioned Yankee know-how.”            “You can say that again.”            “A real adventure.  Sir, were you in the trade?”            Another silence; the smile persisted.  “Maybe I was and maybe I wasn’t.”            “I’m not out to judge anyone, Captain Matthews.  I just want some facts.”  (Rick had advised me to take this tack.)            “Yes, you nosy little bastard, and I’ve given you facts aplenty.”            “Yes sir, thank you, sir.  But you see, sir, your name appears in some of Caleb Harmony’s correspondence, with mention of a Señor Martinez in Havana, sums for gratuities, and two sets of papers.”            “My name?  Captain William Matthews?  If you say that, I’ll have to break your jaw.”  He clenched his fists, glared.            “Well, sir, the letters say ‘Captain Matthews.’ ”            “It’s a common name, you green little lubber.  There’s dozens as bear it.”            “I know, sir, I’ve interviewed six.  But frankly, sir, you seem to fit the bill best.”            His eyes flashed.  “Are you trying to make me trouble?  If you are, hard work you’ll have of it.”            “Sir, I don’t want to make you or anyone trouble.  I’m just trying to learn how things back then worked.”            “You’ve put your oar in here enough.  I’ve said all I’m going to say, and maybe too much.  Clear out!”            While the captain turned back to his cobbler and took a quick swig of it, I decided to haul anchor with my jaw intact.              “Thank you, sir.  Very helpful.  No offense intended.”            I left.  Rick followed me out and caught up with me on the street.            “Well?”            “It’s him!  He’s the one!”            “He admitted it?”            “No, he was cagey.”            “Then how can you be sure?”            “He knows a lot about the slave trade.”            “So do you and I lately.  That doesn’t make us slavers.”            “It’s him!  I’m sure of it!”            “Why not any of the six others of that name you’ve talked to?”            “They stayed cool as custard.  This one got worked up and threatened me.  He gave himself away.”            “If you’re right, it doesn’t look good for Grandpa.”            “It sure doesn’t.  But at last, after all these false starts, I’m beginning to learn something.”            “So what now?  What do we do next?”

Dark Knowledge has a release date of January 5, 2018.  It is available now from the author.  Contact him at cliffbrowder@verizon.net or see him at the reading.
Coming soon:  Bond Street: Gentility, Murder, S&M and Art

©   2017   Clifford Browder

313. Wild, Crazy Dancing

Dark Knowledge: Release date January 5, 2018, but copies now available from the author.  Adult and young adult.  A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront. More excerpts to come.


The back cover summary:

New York City, late 1860s.  When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled.  Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade.  Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered.  Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts.  How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure?  And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
_____________________________________________________________________


 For my two short poems "Rush" and "Signals," published by the online poetry review Colloquial, click here.

________________________________________________

       I’ve always danced, starting with a stately minuet in a grade-school play, then the waltz in sixth grade in ancient Miss Pocock’s genteel after-school class, followed by the fox trot in seventh and eighth grade in classes with vibrant, young Miss Little, who in a school gym on Friday nights dominated hordes of budding teenagers with her clacking castanets.  Soon I was fox-trotting with the best of them, but Helen Witherspoon’s ramrod stiff right arm kept me at a distance, when my teen-age libido craved something more intimate.  Especially popular at the time was the lindy hop, where the couple half embraced, then swung apart, then half embraced again, so that partnered dancing alternated with solo.  Dancing of a different sort came with the conga line, an import from Cuba where dancers formed a long line and, with your hands on the hips of the person in front of you, did a rhythmic three-step: one and two and three, kick, one and two and three, kick.  Fun at first, if done with a Latin flair, but in the end monotonous.


The lindy hop is still done today.
Patrick M. Len
The conga line is still popular, and even seniors do it.  In this instance, at a governor's ball.
Alan Light          Admittedly, hindsight tells me that in those young years I was a slave to convention, unoriginal, restrained; at high-school dances I and others left  jitterbugging to those few practiced couples who exploded into rhythmic frenzy.  Years later, after college, being ebulliently gay, I danced with my partner to brain-numbing music in a Greenwich Village discothèque, the two of us jigging and jagging and leaping and bouncing about, but never, as was then the custom, touching.  But this was the mating dance, and just the beginning of my wild dancing, of totally letting go and becoming utterly  uninhibited in a who-gives-a-damn why-not-make-a-fool-of-yourself go-for-broke kind of dancing.  Such total letting go perhaps comes with age, when, being free of mating obsessions and rituals, you can immerse yourself in the moment and dance for the sake of dance.  In this last phase of my dancing I  partnered with a cousin’s wife or a friend or anyone at family wedding celebrations in a joyous spectacle of movement, of whirling into total surrender, rhythmic mindlessness, cosmic oblivion, dance.
         Likewise in my golden years I learned the Charleston, that craze of the Roaring Twenties that I had heard of all my life, seen onstage in the Broadway musical The Boyfriend, but had never done.  Whetting my lust for it was a short film I saw in an exhibit of American art of the 1920s, showing nothing but a flapper’s feet dancing frenetically in what had to be the Charleston.  Fulfillment came at last, thanks to You Tube, when a knowledgeable and gracious young woman taught me the dance: one two three four steps forward, five six seven steps back.  One two three four forward, five six seven back.  Of course you’re turning your feet as you do it, and swinging your arms, and then you touch your knees together, move them apart, touch again, move apart, with your hands crossing from one knee to another all the while.  Hard to visualize?  Of course.  You’ve got to see it to get the hang of it.  And I did get the hang of it,  however ineptly, and derived much joy therefrom.  I felt wild and free because at long last, to imagined jazz, alone, I was doing the Charleston!

Dancing the Charleston.
         There’s dancing even in the Bible.  King David, wearing a linen garment, whirled about with all his might before the ark of the covenant to express his joyful gratitude to God (2 Samuel 6:14).  Admittedly, at first I thought that “linen” meant underwear, and the thought of King David dancing in his undies delighted me.  But no, he was wearing a priestly garment of linen, quite appropriate.  Even so, his dancing shocked his wife Michal, all the more so since he was doing it in front of commoners.  But David made no apologies for dancing before the Lord in public, and Scripture records that wife Michal had no child unto the day of her death (2 Samuel 6: 21-23).  Yahweh, it seems, approved of dancing … especially if done in his honor.
A dancing Maenad, with a small Eros
thrown in.  An 18th century terracotta
sculpture by Claude Michel.         The early Christians are said to have worshipped with ecstatic dancing and communal joy, in a manner that recalled the pagan worship of Dionysus, the god of revelry, fertility, and wine.  But the god’s followers the Maenads, wild women drunk with wine, had a habit of ripping animals to shreds and  eating them raw, and fear of such excesses prompted the Church to discouraged direct contact with God, substituting sober priest-led rituals instead.  Said Gregory of Nazianzus, a fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople and theologian, “Let us sing hymns instead of striking drums, have psalms instead of frivolous music and song,… modesty instead of laughter, wise contemplation instead of intoxication, seriousness instead of delirium.”  For Christians, such admonitions put the kibosh on worship through dance, and the kibosh still holds.  A few years ago I attended a Catholic wedding that tried to inject a bit of freedom into the tradition-bound sacrament.  A dancer pranced about sprinkling holy water, and the presiding priest at one point slowly clapped his hands.  But this modest effort at innovation clearly butted its head against tradition and could only go so far.
         But the impulses of the hoi polloi are not so easily squelched.  The churches and cathedrals were given over to orderly worship, but the people created carnivals where, just as in the Roman Saturnalia, everything was turned on its head: men dressed like women, ordinary folk insulted kings and bishops, and drunkenness and ribaldry prevailed.  And there was dancing, wild, crazy dancing.   Indeed, a Dancing Plague swept through much of Europe in the middle ages, with dancing, hallucinations, and irresistible hilarity.  In 1278 two hundred people danced on a bridge in Utrecht, causing it to collapse.  And in Cologne in 1374 more than a thousand women reportedly became pregnant as a result of orgiastic dancing.  Demonic possession, said the Church, but to this day carnival is celebrated in Roman Catholic countries just prior to Lent, permitting a last stab at revelry before forty bleak days of austerity.


Dancing Peasants, by Rubens, at the Prado.  The Church couldn't hold them back.
         But dancing, riotous or otherwise, is not confined to Christianity.  I have often seen Hindu sculptures showing the god Shiva, the ecstatic cosmic dancer, deftly poised on one foot while lifting the other foot high in the air, his whole body ringed by cosmic flames.  Three of his hands hold fire, a snake, and a drum, while the fourth points to his raised foot, and his loose hair spreads out like a fan.  He is the Lord of Dance, and his dance creates, maintains, and dissolves the universe.  I could spend years studying the symbolism of the dancing Shiva, but his elegant frozen movements enchant me, win me over to his world dance, his doing and undoing of the universe.  Quite a contrast with the Christian deity, who in art looms like a dour patriarch, never as a dancer.


A dancing Shiva in bronze, 900-950 CE.
sailko
         On one occasion many years ago, when I was doing volunteer work for the Whole Foods Project here in New York, the Project invited some Sufis to come and dance for us.  They came, and we all sat in a circle and, following their lead, began swaying from side to side.  Then they had us stand and sway, and finally we began dancing in a circle, while the sheikha and two of her followers stood in the center and chanted.  Having long heard of the whirling dervishes, and of Sufis and Sufism, an Islamic discipline that worships through chanting and dance, here I was at last, not whirling like a dervish, but dancing with passionately committed Sufis, though dancing only as a neophyte can.  I didn’t myself become a Sufi, but today there are orders of Sufis throughout New York City, and some of them whirl with abandon.


A whirling dervish at a Turkish festival in Canada.
Malikmuradov
         My Dictionary of Symbols tells me that dance is an image of becoming, of the passing of time, and of the act of creation.  It seeks to transform the dancer into a god or a demon, or some other chosen form of existence.  It is magic, it is eternal energy.  And to this I would add: it is movement and flux, the enemy of stasis, of rootedness, of fixity, of everything that locks us up, ties us down, freezes us, denies our need for change.  It is fire, it is flux.  No wonder it is feared by authority, by tradition, by the apostles of order and sobriety.  Dance is revolution.
A belly dancer in Cairo.
Judith Scheepstra         For some cultures, dancing – even dancing by yourself without a partner – is a tradition.  In the film Zorba the Greek the protagonist Zorba, played brilliantly by Anthony Quinn, expresses his feelings through dance.   And long ago, at a Middle Eastern café in the West 40s, I saw a woman of middle years get up and dance slowly and gracefully to music.  I marveled at a culture where anyone could get up and dance alone to express their mood of the moment.  That same Middle Eastern culture offers the belly dance, with agile young females prancing and shimmying and doing marvelous  things with their torso, but that’s another kind of dance.

         And the danse macabre of late medieval art, with dancing, grinning skeletons leading the high born and lowly alike to the grave, what of that?  Another twist, and a grim one, on dance as a path to oblivion, total surrender, the ribaldry of death.


From an incunabula.  We're missing the kings and the bishops,
 but never was there such a joyous bunch of skeletons.
Wellcome Images
        One passionate dancer whom I’ve heard of and chronicled, but never met, was Brooke Astor, the patrician philanthropist and dedicated do-gooder who, always fashionably and expensively dressed, spread her funds and quirky sense of humor throughout the five boroughs of this city.  When not so doing she attended the social functions of the affluent and well connected, and if there was music – wild, savage music – she felt it pulsing through her and danced.  Though we moved in vastly different circles, I would have loved to rub shins with her, to have felt that same music pulsing through me, and with her to have wildly and feverishly danced.  Born to dance, that woman danced well into her old age.  Yes, she and I could have danced up a storm.


BROWDERBOOKS  
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1.  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015).  Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe.  In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you.  An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



2.  Bill Hope: His Story (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series.  New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder.  Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.


For two new LibraryThing reviews of Bill Hope: His Story, go here.

3.  The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.

What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York?   Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn).  Women have read it and reviewed it.  (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)

For Goodreads reviews, go here.  Likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.





Coming soon:  Bond Street: Gentility, Murder, S&M and Art.  And before that, another excerpt from Dark Knowledge: Chris interviews a slaver.

©   2017   Clifford Browder

312A. Dark Knowledge excerpt: The Mysterious Chest.

                                          The Mysterious Chest

Here, as promised, is an excerpt from my novel Dark Knowledge, set in late 1860s New York.  (Release date January 5, 2018.  Available now from the author.)  Young Chris Harmony suspects that some members of his seagoing family, including his deceased grandfather, Caleb Harmony, may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba.  Appalled, he is determined to learn the truth.   He and his twin sister Sal have been looking at old documents in a sea chest that their grandfather left in their house.  Their widowed mother has invited their Uncle Jake and Cousin Dwight to dinner.


            Uncle Jake and Dwight came to dinner by carriage, which Ma considered just a bit flash, since we didn’t keep one.  They had a hint of pomade in their hair, and both sported gold cuff links and a diamond tiepin.  Ma used our best dishes, a set of blue-and-white chinaware that Grandpa had brought back from Canton long ago.  Jake and Dwight raved about Ma’s roast turkey, which Jake carved with a flourish, eyes flashing, announcing, “The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat!”  They ate with gusto, pronouncing Ma’s turnips and spuds delicious and her plum cake “confoundedly good.”   Ma’s cooking was super, but I thought their praise just a bit much.  Throughout dinner, and afterward in the parlor as well, they regaled us with stories, Dwight telling about running the Vicksburg batteries with Farragut and his fleet in ’62, and Jake relating how years before on the brig Hunter, bringing palm oil and ivory from the Guinea coast, he took command when the captain and mates were stricken with fever, and sold the cargo for a roaring good price in New York.            “You know how I never come down with fever, not in Africa or in the Americas either?  I took the advice of a Spanish gent who’d been in those parts many a time: soak your feet in brandy, wear thick wool socks, avoid night air and the noonday sun.  Other poor devils took sick, turned yellow, and wasted away, but I was in fine fettle.”            Finally he sent Dwight to fetch their carriage; a look passed between them.  Then, to end the evening with a bang, he entertained us with a host of anecdotes about old merchants and skippers he had known.  This was Uncle Jake at his best.  He had us laughing one minute, and shocked or all but in tears the next.  Yet as he talked, he kept fingering his gold penknife, which struck me as odd.  When he launched into yet another yarn about a sailmaker who married three ladies of property – albeit one at a time – and had even Ma, who was kind of straitlaced, laughing to the point of tears, Sal slipped quietly out of the room.  Moments later we heard her shout, “Chris, they’re stealing the chest!”            I was on my feet in a flash.  Darting into the hallway, I found Dwight and Uncle Jake’s black coachman Luke lugging Grandpa’s heavy chest toward the open front door, while Sal shouted and protested.  Making a flying leap, I landed on the chest, which under my weight crashed to the floor.  Luke stepped back in astonishment, but as Sal and I yelled “Thief!” at the top of our lungs, Dwight’s look of surprise changed to rage.  Lunging, he pummeled me with his fists.  I tried to hit back, couldn’t, so I huddled up and fended off his punches as best I could, while still yelling “Thief!  Thief!  Thief!”  By the time our cries brought Ma and Uncle Jake from the parlor, and the cook and the maid from the kitchen, my face was bloodied up and pretty much of a mess.            “Stop it, Dwight!” yelled Jake.            Dwight stepped back, breathing hard, scowling.            “Thief!” I cried, pointing at Dwight.  I was sitting crumpled on the floor, one eye shut, nose bleeding.            “Sal,” said Ma, “fetch a wet towel and help your brother stop the bleeding.  Annie and Meg, get back to the kitchen.  Dwight and Jacob, what’s this all about?”            The servants left.  Dwight started to speak, but his father cut him off.            “Martha, I was only taking what’s rightfully mine; I didn’t think you’d care.  But Dwight’s too free with his fists; I’ll deal with him later.”            “Jacob, that chest isn’t yours.”            “I’d be doing you a favor to take it off your hands.  What do you want with all those old papers?”            “More to the point, Jacob, what do you want with them?”            “Just a matter of winding up some loose ends from Pa’s estate.  Dull legal stuff.  Those papers may or may not be relevant.”            Ma eyed him something fierce.  “The chest stays here.  Put it back where you found it.”            Jake’s features tightened, but at a nod from him Dwight and the coachman lugged the chest back into the library.            “And now, Jacob, you and your minions can leave.”  She said “minions” with a sting of contempt.            “That chest is mine, Martha, and I mean to have it.”            “Jacob, you are not a gentleman.”            “Martha, I never said I was.  But thanks for the dinner.  I hope you’ll make it into half mourning soon; Mark would approve.  When you do, I’ll welcome you back to the land of the living.”            Preceded by his “minions,” he flashed a sour smile and left.            Sal came with a wet towel and dabbed my face; I was surprised by the splotches of blood on the towel: roses, a whole bouquet.  Then she ran to a front window, looked out.            “They’re going,” she reported.  “They’re gone.”            “Did they put the chest back exactly where they found it?” asked Ma.            Sal ran to the library, looked.  “Yes, Ma, they did.”            “And that’s where it shall stay.  Christopher, I advise you to take up boxing; I don’t think Dwight is done with you.  As for the chest, the two of you must go on searching it.  Jacob’s worried about something; find out what it is.”            “Yes, Ma,” we chorused.            “Sal, put some salve on your brother’s wounds.  Annie and Meg will see to the dishes.  I’m going to bed.  I suggest that you two do the same.”            Of course we didn’t.            “Dwight really hates you,” said Sal, as she put on the salve.            My bleeding had stopped, but the sight in one eye was a blur.  “I guess he does.  I didn’t know it until today.”            “Me neither.”            “But why?  I’ve never done him hurt.”            “He’s jealous, because you were Grandpa’s favorite.”            “I wasn’t!  He liked all of us.”            “Dwight was the oldest, biggest, strongest, and fastest, and we all knew it, but Grandpa liked you best.”            “Why?”            “You were the youngest of the boys, not as big and strong as the others.  You had a wonderful smile, an even temper, and you loved to hear his stories.”            “We all did.”            “Yes, but as Dwight got older, he got bored with them, he fidgeted.  He didn’t want to hear any more about Grandpa’s adventures; he wanted to get out and have adventures of his own."            “He did.  Look at all he went through in the war.”            “But he’s still jealous.  Take Ma’s advice, learn to box.  I’d love to see you punch him in the face.”            “So would I.”            “Chris, you’re a hero.  The way you jumped right on that chest!”            “I feel like mush.”            “You’re a hero.”            “And I’ve never been in a war.”            “You’re in one now!”

For this and other Browder books, click here.

Coming soon:  Wild, Crazy Dancing.

 ©   2017   Clifford Browder

312. Why I Love New York

It's here at last!  Release date January 5, 2018, but copies are now available from the author.  Adult and young adult.  A fast-moving historical novel about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront. Excerpts will follow soon.


Having trouble reading the fine print of the blurb?  Of course you are.  So here it is in bigger print:



New York City, late 1860s.  When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled.  Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade.  Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered.  Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts.  How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure?  And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?

And now, on to why I love New York.


         There are lots of reasons to hate New York.  For instance:
·      It’s big.·      It’s noisy.·      It’s congested.·      The pace is too fast.·      It’s in your face, blunt.·      The rents are stratospheric.·      The infrastructure is crumbling: broken water mains cause floods, and broken gas mains explode and destroy whole buildings.
And so on, and so on.  In short, it’s not gentle, restful, subtle, snug, discreet.  Guilty on all counts.  (I don’t add “rude,” having disposed of that myth in post #175.)  But I still love it; here’s why.
INTENSITY 
         I love New York, first, for its intensity.  You sense it in those multitudes of New Yorkers striding purposefully to work, those streams of them converging in subway stations like Union Square and Times Square, where several subway lines meet.  You might think that those streams would collide, with confusion and injury to all, but no, somehow they manage to pass one another without damage.  A visitor might well be intimidated by the spectacle, but these converging masses are simply what New York is all about: hordes of highly motivated New Yorkers on their way to work or to some meaningfully activity.  Upon first visiting the city, a friend of mine exclaimed, “The pace of New York!”  She knew Boston and had just visited Washington, D.C., but New York was something else again.



         New Yorkers are doers; they want to do, to accomplish, to achieve.  And it’s always been that way.  Already in the 1830s visitors were reporting that the typical New York merchant walked as if he had a good dinner ahead of him and a passel of creditors behind him.  From its very founding by the Dutch, the city was a place where people came to do things, to trade with the native peoples, to acquire the furs that were so in demand in Europe – above all, beaver for the men’s top hats then in fashion.  It was a place to trade, to scheme, to acquire, to make money … and it still is.
Schuyler Shepherd       

         My latest encounter with the city's intensity came recently when I attended a college alumni gathering in Midtown.  At about 6 p.m. on a Thursday I got off the subway at Times Square, but that was not my destination, though it seemed to be everyone else's.  The crowds crossing the street were thick, and the Times Square lights flickered and flashed and blazed.  I went on to my event on 43rd Street near Fifth Avenue, but coming back some two hours later I found hordes of people still surging along 42nd Street between Sixth Avenue and Times Square.  Passing some Christians quietly offering their Bibles and messages of faith to the unresponsive Great Unwashed, I flashed them a smile and reaped some smiles in return.  There were sidewalk vendors and beggars, and a man wearing a strange face mask who drew a large crowd as he busily concocted something, I couldn't figure out what.  Nearby, a man lay asleep on the sidewalk, seemingly oblivious of the passing crowds, and farther on I saw a huge mass of discarded cardboard bundled for recycling, including one placard proclaiming SALE.  Before retreating into the subway, I took a quick glance at Times Square and the huge light show perennially on display, with beams of light soaring skyward and a big screen saying CHASE  CHASE  CHASE, the name of my own dear bank.  If New York is intense, the Times Square area is a hub of that intensity.

DIVERSITY 
         I love New York, second, for its diversity.  If you go out on errands, you may hear Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Russian or some other Slavic language, Korean, Japanese, and who knows what else?  You may see a woman in a sari, a bearded man in a turban, a bunch of giggling young girls wearing head scarves, African-American women with their hair done up in a bun on top, a woman in a burka with only her eyes visible, dark-suited Orthodox Jews with long, curly sidelocks, and women of various ethnicities wearing granny skirts or miniskirts or pants suits or whatever other style happens to be in vogue.  And when my health insurance outfit sends out a statement, it includes a notice offering free language assistance services in fifteen languages other than English.  No wonder, since it is believed that some 800 languages are now spoken in the city, including 138 alone, as reported in the 2000 census, in the most diverse borough, Queens.  Among those in Queens, for instance, are Tamil, Sherpa, Tlapaneco, Ibanag, Maranao, Tontemboan, Tzotzil, and Basa Ugi.  Basa Ugi, anyone?
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                 There have never been more languages spoken in the city than now, but the city was a mix of peoples right from the start.  Back in Dutch New York – or, properly speaking, Nieuw Amsterdam – there were Dutch and English residents, Norwegians, Germans, Italians, Danes, Jews, Africans (both slave and free), Walloons, Bohemians, and Munsees, Montauks, Mohawks, and other native peoples.  And besides honest fur traders there were pirates, prostitutes, smugglers, thieves, and every conceivable kind of hustler out to make a quick buck, or rather a quick guilder.  New York has always been a mecca for hustlers, and surely always will be. 
         But a mecca for those fleeing oppression as well.  Among the inhabitants of Nieuw Amsterdam were refugees from New England, fleeing the dour and repressive Protestantism of those colonies, where even dancing around a Maypole and drinking beer was termed the “beastly practices of ye mad Bacchanalians” and repressed.  In the eighteenth century there was a synagogue for Sephardic Jews, who had been expelled from Spain by their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella, and a church for Huguenots who had fled France after His Solar Majesty Louis XIV, the Most Christian King of France, revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, thus depriving Protestants of protection from persecution.  And the city’s population today includes Catholics (at the top of the heap), evangelical and mainstream Protestants, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Orthodox, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, other tiny groups, a vast deal of Unaffiliateds, and a handful of Don’t Knows.  

         And in the Dream Street Park on East 124th Street between Second and Third Avenues in East Harlem, a grassy little park used by locals as a dog run, there is a wrought-iron gate displaying a large reddish heart with curlicues that some identify as a symbol used to summon the spirit Ezili, the voodoo goddess of love.  How the symbol got there is a mystery, but Ezili requires rum, animal sacrifices, and blood to conjure her power, which suggests strange doings in the neighborhood.  Yes, diversity.  Where but in New York?
CREATIVITY
         Third, I love New York for its creativity.  Walk down the street – any street – and you will see graffiti, some of them clumsy and coarse, but others with a distinct artistic flair.  Back in the 1970s the city was afflicted with subway cars sprayed over with graffiti, some of them true works of art.  The New York City Transit Authority vowed to eliminate the graffiti, and so it did, in the 1980s, through increased surveillance and security, but in so doing, in purifying the cars of these polychrome outpourings of ego-driven urban ghetto youth, it made the city more orderly, more drab.
Graffiti, 1973.

Graffiti, 2015.
Beyond My Ken
         But the city’s creativity produces more than graffiti.  The Gay Pride Movement got started here, as did Occupy Wall Street.  The Union Square Greenmarket is the granddaddy of them all throughout the country, and the city itself now hosts 23 greenmarkets in Manhattan, 5 in the Bronx, 7 in Queens, 13 in Brooklyn, and 2 in Staten Island, for a total of 50.  Central Park, a vast expanse of green in the very heart of congested Manhattan, was nineteenth-century New York’s great creation, albeit at the price of driving out squatters and eliminating a whole little village of African Americans (creation always comes at a price). 


         Architecturally, New York has produced both monstrosities and wonders.  The monstrosities include those big glass boxes of high-rises that especially afflict the East Side of Manhattan, clunky outbursts of modernism, uninspired, that I could do without.  Perversely, I might add two personal dislikes.  The National Maritime Building on Seventh Avenue, far too close to where I live, is an oddball shiplike structure that makes me seasick, though now mercifully converted into an emergency room and medical care center that at least serve the public.  And the newly perpetrated New School University Center at Fifth Avenue and 14th Street is a 16-story multipurpose brass-and-glass horror that afflicts my eye every time I pass it on a bus, though its interior no doubt serves worthy educational purposes.  And if these be monstrosities, and I insist that they are, they are nonetheless evidence of the city’s fierce creative urge.
         Countering these eccentricities are wonders like the tragically demolished massive grandeur of the Penn Station of yore, and the miraculously preserved Grand Central Station of today, its little-looked-at south-facing façade on 42nd Street a gem of Beaux-Arts inspiration, with a giant clock surrounded by Minerva, Mercury, and a heroic near-naked Hercules, sculptures representing the Glory of Commerce while presiding over the commuting hordes below that are contentedly unaware of their presence.  To these wonders I would add the Art Deco magnificence of Rockefeller Center, and the haunting nighttime beauty of Lincoln Center, with all its great halls illuminated, and its fountain lit up and gushing gently in the middle of the plaza.  
The Sky Building on West 42nd Street, 2017.  Not a big clunky box.
Godsfriendchuck
         And to show that I’m not totally old fogyish and resistant to change, I’ll add the glory of certain sky-stabbing Midtown high-rises, tall and lance-like thin, and certainly pricey, now casting svelte shadows onto Central Park.  This latest phase of high-rise construction at least departs fiercely from the boxy glass chunks of yore.  Especially striking is the high rise at 53 West 53rd Street, now known as the MoMa Expansion Tower (a junky name) and formerly and more imaginatively as the Tower Verre (verre = “glass” in French).  This new neighbor of the Museum of Modern Art sends its soaring faceted exterior upward to taper in a set of glass pinnacles.  Designed by the renowned French architect Jean Nouvel, it has been called innovative, exciting, even a “scream for freedom” from the confinements of the modern architectural grid.  Which goes to show that the creativity of New York can be an international undertaking, and that includes financing as well.                  Another example of unsettling creativity can be found on West 11th Street not far from my building, where a glance skyward reveals the Palazzo Chupi.  This is a  monstrous superstructure of Italian-style loggias in Pepto-Bismol pink, its five luxury residences plunked down on four unpretentious lower floors that once housed a stable and a factory.  Yes, it’s a horror, but at least an interesting one, and not a humdrum repetition of those boxlike high-rises afflicting the Upper East Side.  The brainchild of Brooklyn-born painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel, it’s as big as his ego.  Blazoned high above the street, its name baffled many and invited diverse interpretations, until it was revealed that “Chupi” is Schnabel’s nickname for his Spanish Basque wife.  At first the palazzo horrified me, but its blatant pink has softened with the years, and I’ve come to see it as a deliciously flagrant example of New York creativity run wild.  It’s too tall, too egregiously Mediterranean for the West Village, whose historical district ends just short of it, but if you don’t look up, you won’t even know it’s there.
Palazzo Chupi
Beyond My Ken
         I could go on about the city’s creativity – fashion, the arts, the writers -- but I think I’ve made my point.  So now I’ll link these aspects of New York in an equation:
INTENSITY + DIVERSITY = CREATIVITY = NEW YORK
Because it all works together.  Intensity combines with diversity to produce the creativity that is New York.  And that’s why I love the city.
Marco Verch


BROWDERBOOKS  
All books are available online as indicated, or from the author.
1.  No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015).  Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe.  In her Reader Views review, Sheri Hoyte called it "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City."
If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you.  An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



2.  Bill Hope: His Story (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series.  New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder.  Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.


For two new LibraryThing reviews of Bill Hope: His Story, go here.

3.  The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.

What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York?   Gay romance, if you like, but no porn (I don't do porn).  Women have read it and reviewed it.  (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)

For Goodreads reviews, go here.  Likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.





Coming soon: Wild, Crazy Dancing.  Me and the lindy hop, the Conga line, the Charleston, and other crazinesses, plus King David, the drunken Maenads, Shiva, and the whirling dervishes.


©   2017   Clifford Browder