Night Scene, West from 500 Fifth Ave, showing Times, Paramount, Astor & Edison Hotels.
Byron Company, 1937 (photographer unnamed)
Sarah Wrote That
Recent Fiction
"All the Summers Ahead" | Five Chapters
"Barnegat Bay" | The Good Men Project
"Light at New Latitude" | PANK
"Social Utility" | Keyhole
"Where the Dust Went" | Atticus Review
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Pennsylvania Station
New York City
September 6, 1962Photographs by Walker Evans, commissioned by LIFE for “America’s Heritage of Great Architecture is Doomed…It Must be Saved” - published July 5, 1963. These photos were from a total collection of 141 that Evan’s shot for the commission.
(© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
With some things, nostalgia, golden age-ism, is merited. Come and go from Manhattan by way of a crystal palace? How would I!
Reblogged from Maury Postal -
by Wired New York contributor @ddny2k
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The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton | Part 2, Chapter 11:
Lily, lingering for a moment on the corner, looked out on the afternoon spectacle of Fifth Avenue. It was a day in late April, and the sweetness of spring was in the air. It mitigated the ugliness of the long crowded thoroughfare, blurred the gaunt roof-lines, threw a mauve veil over the discouraging perspective of the side streets, and gave a touch of poetry to the delicate haze of green that marked the entrance to the Park.
As Lily stood there, she recognized several familiar faces in the passing carriages. The season was over, and its ruling forces had disbanded; but a few still lingered, delaying their departure for Europe, or passing through town on their return from the South.
Lily in her eventual destitution does a lot of walking around Midtown, which was evidently even more devoid of places to rest without buying something than it is today.
I’d forgotten that Wharton refers to “a little restaurant in Fifty-ninth Street,” not on. I wonder when that usage changed.
photo: Museum of the City of New York
Easter Sunday outside St Patrick’s Cathedral ca. 1902
Edwin Levick, Frederick Lewis -
![Edith Wharton in 1905photo: Edith Wharton Restoration
Tuesday is Edith Wharton’s 150th birthday and the Times is on it with the Downton Abbey angle, which despite its if you like [x] you might also like [y] is not really a stretch (Americans with no titles and aristocracy with no money).
Wharton’s birthplace (14 W 23rd Street) is now a Starbucks.
Noodling through some of her stories,* I’m struck by how, though the language is dated, it’s no differently dated than other (nonfiction, non-‘literary’) pre-Modernist writing—I don’t have a sense of passing through some impermeable barrier into Art where every sentence is held in such tension that to remove one word brings down the whole affair. They read lightly and like gossip; they assume you know what happened in Milan or Modena and what any Vanderleyden would do in such a situation… or else why would you be reading?
Which is not to say say she’s unserious. She has such a gift for epigram, as in “The Descent of Man”:
Her marriage had been too concrete a misery to be surveyed philosophically… […] Her husband’s personality seemed to be closing gradually in on her, obscuring the sky and cutting off the air, till she felt herself shut up among the decaying bodies of her starved hopes.
Much of Wharton would not fare so well in show-don’t-tell workshops. Too bad for us. I do think one can’t write these days with the same assurance about readers’ background and beliefs**, and reading Wharton I cringe occasionally at figures of speech (“every fiber of her being”) and gestures (“the blood rushed to her face”) that have now and maybe always had long passed their expiration date. But the stories—the plots—are so good.
Largely because they are very much of and at home in the world. I think that’s one of the reasons A Visit From the Goon Squad resonates so, and so differently than much contemporary (and arguably more crafted) fiction. There’s as much living and looking there as there is writing.
* let’s just shove copies of House of Mirth at people and deny Ethan Frome exists** or maybe not, ahem Freedom](http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly2onfaVbV1qa0rqvo1_500.jpg)
Edith Wharton in 1905
photo: Edith Wharton RestorationTuesday is Edith Wharton’s 150th birthday and the Times is on it with the Downton Abbey angle, which despite its if you like [x] you might also like [y] is not really a stretch (Americans with no titles and aristocracy with no money).
Wharton’s birthplace (14 W 23rd Street) is now a Starbucks.
Noodling through some of her stories,* I’m struck by how, though the language is dated, it’s no differently dated than other (nonfiction, non-‘literary’) pre-Modernist writing—I don’t have a sense of passing through some impermeable barrier into Art where every sentence is held in such tension that to remove one word brings down the whole affair. They read lightly and like gossip; they assume you know what happened in Milan or Modena and what any Vanderleyden would do in such a situation… or else why would you be reading?
Which is not to say say she’s unserious. She has such a gift for epigram, as in “The Descent of Man”:
Her marriage had been too concrete a misery to be surveyed philosophically… […] Her husband’s personality seemed to be closing gradually in on her, obscuring the sky and cutting off the air, till she felt herself shut up among the decaying bodies of her starved hopes.
Much of Wharton would not fare so well in show-don’t-tell workshops. Too bad for us. I do think one can’t write these days with the same assurance about readers’ background and beliefs**, and reading Wharton I cringe occasionally at figures of speech (“every fiber of her being”) and gestures (“the blood rushed to her face”) that have now and maybe always had long passed their expiration date. But the stories—the plots—are so good.
Largely because they are very much of and at home in the world. I think that’s one of the reasons A Visit From the Goon Squad resonates so, and so differently than much contemporary (and arguably more crafted) fiction. There’s as much living and looking there as there is writing.
* let’s just shove copies of House of Mirth at people and deny Ethan Frome exists
** or maybe not, ahem Freedom -
Impressions of the Maiden Voyage of the ‘Queen Mary’ to New York (1936)
Charles Chislett
Yorkshire Film Archive | Cunard Queens [blog]You really do want to click through to this 30 min. black and white silent film (unfortunately not embeddable). Chislett brought his camera through Times Square at night, on the El, up to “The Yankee Stadium,” and to the top of the Woolworth and Empire State Buildings. He traveled across the Atlantic third class:
The cost of a trip to New York was, for cabin class, £53.15s (equivalent to £2,710 in today’s money, r.p.i.) – according to Merseyside Maritime Museum, this was enough to “keep a family with three children in food for over a year.” The cost for third class was £18.10 (equivalent to £942 in today’s money, r.p.i.) …[…] taking into account how average earnings have risen since 1936 makes it equivalent to £3,530. A considerable sum for a 31 year old bank employee (and this may well have been the cost for just for a one-way ticket!).
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(via Stanley Kubrick’s New York: Incredible Photos of Life in the 40s)
Great series.
Reblogged from DunnRaw
