This Place on Third Avenue

by John McNulty, Faith McNulty

"No one came closer to catching the common parlance of New York in all its uncommonness than John McNulty." —Phillip Lopate

"This Place on Third Avenue is a gift of a book, long overdue, and with a tender and delicious memoir by Faith McNulty, John's widow... McNulty's characters are the ones you just chatted with in the street, the elevator, or, God help us, in the saloon. He shows us that wherever you look, there's a story."-Frank McCourt

"John McNulty, city man and newspaperman, self-assigned in his mature years to human-interest stories of the world around him, left a body of work that throbs with his love of life...American writing in our time developed few men with so keen an eye and so sharp an ear. [He] cannot be replaced."- James Thurber, in his New Yorker obituary of McNulty

Author Biography: From 1937 until his death in 1956, John McNulty walked many beats for The New Yorker, but his favorite—and the one that he made famous—was Tim & Joe Costello's, an old-fashioned Irish saloon at Third Avenue and Forty-fourth Street. The place is gone now—it was leveled and replaced by the lobby of a skyscraper in 1973-but it and its hard-living mid-century patrons live on in these twenty-eight immortal stories and sketches, many of them collected here for the first time.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2001

About the author

Date of Birth: 1895
Date of Death: 1956

One of The New Yorker reporter-stylists who enlivened that magazine in the 1940s, McNulty (1895-1956) was best known for his humorous dispatches from an Irish saloon of quotable regulars on Third Avenue (the real-life Costello's on East 44th street). To readers, McNulty's characters became a sort of ensemble group, as indeed they were in life: there's the gruffly solicitous proprietor Tim Costello; Grady the aged cabbie; assorted horse players, "scratch bums," "sour beer artists," and a diminutive handyman called The Slugger "because he talks very furious whilst drunk . Like his better-known New Yorker colleagues A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell, McNulty came from the world of newspapers, where one awed reporter observed that "just as dogs will make up with some people and not with others, the English language will do things for Mr. McNulty which it will not do for the rest of us."

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

McNulty is my kind of scribe: one that is constantly observing and taking notes, knowing that the dialogue might mean something later on, after the earth is scorched. Spawning from the 1940s New Yorker of Thurber and my other literary hero E.B. White, John McNulty captured the mundane and made it monumental. Banter at the bar, the daily struggles of lower-middle-class Manhattanites (long before they were priced out into Brooklyn, Queens and then beyond), the strive and strife...McNulty captured it all and set it to paper with a loving hand. This Place on Third Avenue is a brilliant read: part nostalgia, part documentary of an era long-gone. Or all too close to our current hearts.

[Mario · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book of short vignettes set in 1940's New York City, slices from the lives of working class people—bartenders, bar patrons, smalltime horse track bettors, delivery truck drivers, and cabdrivers. My grandfather drove a cab in New York back then, and in the author's efforts to capture the color and colloquialisms of the places and people he writes about, I can hear the familiar cadences of my grandfather's speech. In a way it brought him back for me, some 25 years later. I think that's part of what I enjoyed about this book. The stories themselves are by turns funny and poignant. Some are rather low key and inconsequential. Others stay with you. They're basically stories brought back from the bar, told by someone who has an ear for how these kinds of stories are told.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short short stories that capture the speech rhythms of the denizens of 3rd Ave in mid-century Manhattan. Very much like Damon Runyon's Broadway tales but McNulty avoids Runyon's sometimes mawkish sentimentality.

[Danadoodle]

alternate

[Jed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honest, gritty, hilarious. Through a series of vignettes, McNulty creates what seems to be an authentic experience of New York City before it became Disnified.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant writing, incredible mood-- a book I keep by my bedside for frequent reading and turn to again and again.

[Jeanne Simoneau · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some stories were really good, some I found boring. Still, there's no denying of McNulty's talent to capture an anecdote.

[Fran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short stories of New Yorkers, circa late 1940's, early 1950's

[Eightwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

So witty