I discovered Up in the Old Hotel almost a dozen years ago and fell in love with Joseph Mitchell and his paean to times gone by in New York City. He spoke to me of places I’d visited, some that seemed familiar, and others I could only imagine. For example, there was the Fulton Ferry Hotel, a six-story place on South Street that housed Sloppy Louie’s 80-seat restaurant that opened at 5:00 a.m. for the fish peddlers and mongers. The area was pungent with the smell of the market then and the ghosts of generations now gone. (Louie used the bottom two floors, but never dared take the rope-propelled elevator to the floors above.) My friends once lived in lofts like this.Mitchell’s book is an anthology of his writing for the New Yorker — four books, actually — : McSorley Wonderful Saloon (1943), Old Mr. Flood (1948), The Bottom of the Harbor (1960) and Joe Gould’s Secret (1965). And these books were each a compendium of stories. And what stories!Back in the day, Mitchell’s acquaintances swore they could tell which part of the ocean — from Staten Island to Long Island — that an oyster came from, simply by its taste. And the other characters include Mazie, the bearded Lady Olga, Professor Sea Gull, Santa Claus Smith and so many more who make up the anthology of McSorley’s ale house. (No women were allowed there until recent years.) I’ve drunk McSorley’s green ale at thirty-five cents a glass and eaten their crackers and horse radish and can only feel remorse that I wasn’t a grownup decades earlier when it was a hangout for newspaper reporters.Especially wonderful are the anecdotes surrounding 94-year-old Mr. Flood, who lived near the fish market. Mitchell recounts Flood’s tale of “an old farmer [who] lived beside a little branch-line railroad in south Jersey, and every so often he’d get on that train and go over to Trenton and buy himself a crock of applejack. He’d buy it right at the distillery door, the old Bossert & Stockton Apple Brandy Distillery and save himself a penny or two. One morning he went to Trenton and bought his crock, and that afternoon he got on the train for the trip home. Just as the train pulled out, he took his watch from his vest pocket, a fine gold watch in a fancy hunting case, and he looked at it, and then snapped it shut and put it back in his pocket. And there was a drummer sitting across the aisle. This drummer leaned over and said, ‘Friend, what time is it?” The farmer took a look at him and said ‘Won’t tell you.’ The drummer thought he was hard of hearing and spoke louder, ‘Friend,’ he shouted, ‘what time is it?’ ‘Won’t tell you.’ The drummer thought a moment and said, ‘Friend, all I asked was the time of day. It don’t cost anything to tell the time of day.’ ‘Won’t tell you,’ said the farmer. ‘Well, look here, for the Lord’s sake,’ said the drummer, ‘why won’t you tell me the time of day?’ ‘If I was to tell you the time of day,’ the farmer said, we’d get into a conversation, and I got a crock of spirits down on the floor between my feet, and in a minute I’m going to take a drink, and if we were having a conversation I’d ask you to take a drink with me, and you would, and pretty soon I’d take another, and I’d ask you to do the same, and you would, and we’d get to drinking and by and by the train’d pull up to the stop where I get off, and I’d ask you why don’t you get off and spend the afternoon with me, and you would, and we’d walk up to my house and sit on the front porch and drink and sing, and along about dark my old lady would come out and ask you to take supper with us, and you would, and after supper I’d ask if you’d care to drink some more, and you would and it’d get to be real late and I’d ask you to spend the night in the spare room, and along about two o’clock in the morning I’d get up to go to the pump, and I’d pass my daughter’s room, and there you’d be, in there with my daughter, and I’d have to turn the bureau upside down and get out my pistol, and my old lady would have to get dressed and hitch up the horse and go down the road and get the preacher, and I don’t want no God-damned son-in-law who don’t own a watch,’”Mitchell wrote for The New Yorker from 1938 until he died in 1996. Charles McGrath wrote in the Apr. 27, 2015 issue.”Mitchell practiced what he called a ‘wild exactitude,’ and his style is hard to describe except by extensive quotation. His writing is at once spare and leisurely, lyrical and precise, funny and a little mournful.” His writing, while not entirely fiction, may be classified as “creative non-fiction” for the quotes he massaged until the poetry emerged. Even Harold Ross, who founded the magazine, recognized no one really spoke in complete, articulate paragraphs. My Shakespeare professor used to call nostalgia “soft cultural primitivism” — a longing for the good old days. But Mitchell didn’t drown in the pathos or the romance or the graveyard humor of these characters. He called his subjects “visionaries, obsessives, imposters, fanatics, lost souls, the-end-is-near street preachers, old Gypsy kings and old Gypsy queens, and out-and-out show freaks.” In a New York Times profile in Oct. 23, 2005, Mitchell was described as a writer whose “observations have a lapidary quality that freezes a moment in time.” He simply made people and events beautiful as I’ve tried to do in my own writing.
Luc Sante's wonderful Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York is in some ways a pendant piece to Up in the Old Hotel. Though Sante's vision is darker, and he has a keener eye for the con, it's as if both he and Mitchell were coming at the material from different angles. Sante is a cultural historian; Mitchell's focus by contrast is more on the individual. But both have a special forcus on the gritty demimonde of the Bowery in the late 19th century and, after its decline, marked by the death of Big Tim Sullivan in 1913 (See "A Sporting Man"), its move to new digs on lower Broadway. Here for instance is a quote that might be right out of Sante's Low Life:At that time, in 1894, the Bowery was just beginning to go to seed; it was declining as a theatrical street, but its saloons, dance halls, dime museums, gambling rooms, and brothels were still thriving. In that year, in fact, according to a police census, there were eighty-nine drinking establishments on the street, and it is only a mile long." p. 128The stories -- perhaps profiles is the better term -- are brilliantly written in a straightforward expository style, and often laugh-out-loud funny. "Lady Olga," for instance, is a profile of circus sideshow bearded lady Jane Barnell in her sixty-ninth year. "Professor Sea Gull" is about the inimitable Joe Gould, about whom Mitchell would later write a longer piece, "Joe Gould's Secret," also included here. Mitchell's summary of Gould's nine-million word treatise "An Oral History of Our Time" (unpublished) is fascinating and alone worth reading, yet the essay offers so much more. In a many essays, it's as if Mitchell is simply taking testimony. "The Gypsy Women" is mostly a verbatim talk that was given to the author and two novice NYPD detectives by the longtime Commander of the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad. In "The Deaf-Mute Club" he relates a visit to self-same club where he exchanged long handwritten notes with the club's president, which are transcribed without interruption. In one essay we learn of the penniless drifter who wrote improvised checks on paper bags for many thousands to kind people who'd helped him; and the man who couldn't abide swearing and started the Anti-Profanity League in 1901.Mitchell, like Whitman, celebrates the individual, and like the great poet he has a penchant for the catalog, which he uses to brilliant effect. His rhythms, moreover, his prosody, can be downright sonorous. He has a fantastic ear for demotic speech and the writing is jam-packed with vivid description, yet never overly freighted. What's tremendously cool for me as a New Yorker is the sense of place I get from the essays. All the streets I've walked for so many years -- past McSorley's Ale House off Cooper Square, the old Police Headquarters on Centre St. and so on -- take on rich historical depth. I can see now how Mitchell's book will serve as a nice stepping stone to Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Burrows and Wallace, a doorstop that's been unread on my shelf for too long. Ah, the joys of reading.
What do You think about Up In The Old Hotel (1993)?
A disclaimer: I only read about 2/3rd's of this book. It's around 750 pages, but some of the stories were either too antiquated to read or were of a topic too sensitive for me to read (ex. the raising of terrapins for future consumption - couldn't handle that. Although, it did remind me of the magical Terrapin Station!). Otherwise, Mitchell's book is fantastic. He was a reporter for the New Yorker from the 1930's to the 1990's. These stories are all profiles he made of the common man and, specifically, Depression-era New York . If you're even remotely a fan of history and the forgotten people of America this book is a must read. The subjects are nobodies: bums, gypsies (very politically incorrect story), scam artists, clam fisherman, and seedy bar owners among others. Mitchell really digs into these misfit's lives and exposes a kind of lost America. I couldn't help thinking of these people as characters in a Tom Waits song. In particular the story Joe Gould's Secret, which is apparently Mitchell's crowing achievement, is fascinating. This guy was compiling a book called the Oral History of the World. Basically, he was just an eccentric drunk, but Mitchell's ability to flesh out such a unique character and turn him into a kind of hero is very impressive. His talent was his ability to turn the common into the exceptional. The sad fact is that after Joe Gould's Secret (1964) was published he spent the next 30 years until his death unable to write. His writer's block was so severe that he would check into his office at the New Yorker every day with a pen and paper, work a full day, and leave having written not a single word - for 30 years. However, Up In the Old House verifies his life's work in stunning fashion and I recommend this book to anyone who appreciates the misfit and his unappreciated role in society.
—Eric
Joseph Mitchell voiced an ambivalence about the past, particularly in the old city that he loved and that was slipping away from him, with an insight and style I've yet to encounter anywhere else. The title story - a masterpiece - simultaneously revels in the beauties of a fading place and time while delivering a sobering caution against the pitfalls of nostalgia. The first time I read it I thought I was reading one kind of story when suddenly Mitchell set me straight with a knock on the jaw tha
—Karl K
I knew nothing about Joseph Mitchell before I picked this book up and out of a sale bin. Am I ever happy that I did because now I know just how well he wrote.Apparently he never wrote a thing again after the last bit in this collection "Joe Gould's Secret". Thirtyish years going to his offices in the New Yorker everyday but never writing anything again. Part of me feels, sayang, but the other part of me thinks, its okay because what he did produce before those dry years was astonishing.Mitchell gained a reputation on his ability to find and portray the eccentrics of New York and he does it in a way that combines a good reporters detached attention to detail, an astonishing ear and memory for dialogue and a bit of dry, sometimes black humor. His portraits bring his subjects to stark life - some are a little less then flattering - softened with just a touch of understanding fondness.It's very rare to find this sort of writing in the features section nowadays. Essays that actually TELL you about a person, place or event so that you actually feel like you LEARNED something about it while still being entertained and engaged. Mitchell's New York and the eccentrics that populated them might be long gone but, in his work, he captured and immortalized them. Not a bad legacy, and I can understand the respect people had for him that no one questioned his dry spell.
—Katrice
