New York. O. Henry Part 2
Smog in New York is a Chrysler skyscraper. An old postcard. “The fact is that a gray mist took possession of the city that night, and a cold fear seized its guests by the throat.”
American literary critics sometimes refer to O. Henry as the man “who invented Manhattan.” However, if he mentioned Central Park, the Upper East Side, the 1950s, it was only in passing. His favorite places were the less fashionable parts of the city – the Lower East Side, Gramercy Park, Madison Square and the Iron skyscraper, Lower Fifth Avenue with its shops and restaurants, Herald Square, the artistic Greenage Village, the rowdy Hell’s Kitchen, Pete’s Tavern on Irving. The latter establishment was a favorite refuge of many residents of the East Side, and it was here that O. Henry wrote his famous story “The Gifts of the Magi” – perhaps the only one known to most modern Americans. Unfortunately, O. Henry is almost unknown in his native country. However, Pete’s Tavern is the starting point of “O’Henry’s Way”, which is essentially a short stretch of East 18th Street. The tavern has been serving the thirsty continuously since 1864 and functioned even during Prohibition, disguised as a flower shop.
East Village “The window overlooked one of those densely populated streets on the East Side where Satan opens his recruiting station at dusk.”
“There’s an old, old hotel in New York. You’ve seen engravings of it in magazines. It was built, if you will, at a time when there was nothing above Fourteenth Street but the Indian Trail to Boston and Hammerstein’s office. Soon the old hotel will be demolished. And at the time when the massive walls begin to be torn down and bricks fall with a crash in the gutters, crowds of residents will gather at the neighboring corners, mourning the destruction of a monument dear to them.” It is not known exactly which hotel O. Henry was referring to, but the oldest to date is the SoHotel, located on Broome Street and the Bowery. It first opened in 1805 as the Westchester Hotel, and has changed many owners and names over the past 200 years. It is unlikely that the writer lived there – in his time, this area had a bad reputation. Today, Soho is a trendy, youthful area of the city, with many galleries, coffee shops, restaurants and shops. If you are in those places, pay attention to houses with cast-iron facades. The Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century made cast iron relatively cheap and suitable for a range of applications, and by the mid-19th century it had become a common building material. In Soho, there are about 250 houses with cast-iron columns, porticoes, and balconies.
The Chelsea Hotel is famous
“Restless, restless, transient as time itself, are the people who inhabit the red-brick quarters of the Lower West Side. They are homeless, but they have hundreds of homes. They wander from one furnished room to another, not living anywhere, not attached to any of their shelters, fickle in thought and feeling. They sing “Motherland, Dear Motherland” to the rhythm of ragtime, they carry their lares and penates with them in hat boxes, their vines twining around a straw hat; O. Henry wrote about himself – for 8 years he changed many addresses: apartments – on the 24th and on Irving Place; hotels – Marty on the 24th, Caledonia on the 26th, Chelsea on the 23rd. The famous Chelsea Hotel, built between 1883 and 1885, has become home to many writers, musicians, artists and actors. In addition to O. Henry and his second wife, many celebrities stayed, lived and died there: Mark Twain, Arthur C. Clarke, Thomas Wolfe, Allen Ginsberg, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac… You can’t list them all. From the Caledonia Hotel, the writer was taken to the hospital, from which he did not return.
Madison Square “There was something idyllic in the soft air and delicate decoration of the little park; Everywhere green predominated, the main color of primordial times, the days of the creation of man and vegetation. “
The small park of Madison Square attracted the writer both in spring and autumn: “Spring winked at the editor of Minerva magazine with a transparent glass peephole and led him astray. He had just had breakfast at his favorite restaurant, the Broadway Hotel, and was on his way back to his office, when he got stuck in the shackles of the prankster of spring. That means, to put it simply, that he turned right on Twenty-sixth Street, crossed the spring stream of carriages on Fifth Avenue, and went deeper into the alley of the blossoming Madison Square. There was something idyllic in the soft air and delicate decoration of the small park; Everywhere green predominated, the main color of primordial times, the days of the creation of man and vegetation. The thin grass that made its way between the paths shone copper, a poisonous green permeated by the breath of the many homeless human beings to whom the earth had given shelter in summer and autumn. The bursting tree buds resembled something vaguely familiar to those who had studied botany by garnishing the fish dishes of a forty-five-cent meal. The sky overhead was that pale aquamarine hue that salon poets rhyme with the words “you,” “fate,” and “native.” Among all this range of greenery, there was only one natural, unalloyed green color – the fresh paint of garden benches, something between a pickled cucumber and last year’s raincoat, which captivated customers with its blue-black shiny surface and the brand “non-fading”.
A small green oasis among the stone hulks has existed as a public space since 1686 – then, of course, there was nothing around and hunting was allowed in the forest, then there was a farm, a hotel, a playground for baseball players and, finally, in 1847, a new public park was born – Madison Square. Interestingly, from 1876 to 2882, the right hand and torch of the Statue of Liberty were exhibited in the park to raise money to complete the statue’s erection. The park is home to monuments to politician Roscoe Conkling, Pirates of the Caribbean victor Admiral Farragut, 21st President Chester Alan Arthur, and statesman William Seward, the first New Yorker to be honored with a monument in the city. All of these monuments were already in place when Sopy sat in the park, “fidgeting on his bench in Madison Square. When flocks of wild geese stretch high in the sky at night, when women who don’t have cat coats become affectionate to their husbands, when Sonny starts fidgeting on her park bench, it’s winter.”
“For several years the hospitable prison on the Island had served as his winter quarters.”
Since Soapy is remembered, it’s worth talking about his dreams: “Soapy’s winter plans weren’t particularly ambitious. He did not dream of the sky of the south, nor of a yacht trip on the Mediterranean Sea with a stop in the Bay of Naples. Three months of imprisonment on the Island was what his soul longed for. Three months of shelter and food, in pleasant company, away from the encroachment of Boreas and the Pharaohs – for Soapy it was truly the limit of desires. The island in question is Blackwell Island (now Roosevelt’s Island) in the East River. In 1852, a workhouse was built on the island to house petty offenders in 220 cells. The last convicts were transferred from the island in 1935, when the prison on Rikers Island opened. In the 21st century, nothing reminds of the island’s criminal past – now there are residential buildings, educational institutions and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms Park – it was here that Hillary Clinton officially began her presidential campaign in 2016.