Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  For twelve years, with Big Tim’s support, Dutch netted an average of $2,000 a year out of the Gala Naval Ball. He abandoned Everett Hall, which had become too small, and switched to the old Tammany Hall, on Fourteenth Street. Shortly after the 1912 ball, however, everything went to pieces. In the summer of that year Big Tim began to suffer from delusions of persecution and had to be placed in a sanitarium. In February, 1913, he was removed to a house in the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx and friends hired a staff of guards to watch him. Occasionally he would tire his guards out and escape, usually turning up hours later at the Occidental on the Bowery, where, according to Dutch, he would ‘just sit in the lobby and stare until they come and took him away.’ ‘I seen him one day,’ Dutch says, ‘and I went over to him and I said, “Jesus Christ, Big Tim, old pal, ain’t there something I could do for you?” He just sat and stared at me. It broke my heart.’ Big Tim’s last escape took place on the evening of August 30, 1913. Next morning, around dawn, the body of a man who had been struck by a train was found beside the New York, New Haven & Hartford tracks just north of the Westchester freight yards. It was carried to the Bronx morgue, where it lay unidentified fourteen days. Just before it was to be removed to potter’s field a policeman took a look at it and said, ‘It’s Big Tim Sullivan, God rest his soul.’ Big Tim’s funeral, held in old St Patrick’s Cathedral on Mott Street, was one of the largest in the city’s history. ‘I marched in the procession,’ Dutch says, ‘and I cried every step of the way.’

  The decay of the Bowery as a night-life street set in after Big Tim’s funeral. The gamblers drifted up to Broadway and Dutch followed them. He found the going hard. Without political support, he was unable to sell tickets, and his 1914 ball was a flop. ‘With Big Tim in his grave, I was Mr Nobody,’ he says. ‘Until then, I hadn’t paid no attention to the Commodore Dutch Association; it was just a name. I seen I had to do something, so I figured to build up the association. I made honorary officers out of all the Bowery personalities that had moved uptown and for members I took in all the Broadway crowd I could get. And when you have members, naturally you collect dues. I began collecting dues in 1914 and I’m still at it. My ball don’t amount to a damn any more, but without I run a ball, what would be the excuse for an association?’

  After old Tammany Hall was torn down in 1928, Dutch began the practice of using the back rooms of lower Third Avenue saloons for his balls. For his most recent ball, which was a typical one, he used the Stuyvesant Grill, a neighborhood saloon on Third Avenue near Fifteenth Street. The Stuyvesant’s back room has a tiny bandstand and a small dance floor, on either side of which are seven booths, the kind with trellises to which artificial grapevines are fixed. Dutch got it rent free, of course. On his showcards, he had advertised that ‘festivities will begin with a bang at 9 sharp.’ However, most guests had sense enough to go late. Dutch himself did not show up until eleven. By that time approximately fifty men and women were sitting at tables in the booths. About half were members of the association. The others were curiosity-seekers from uptown, or regular customers of the saloon who had left the bar to see what was happening in the back room and had stayed. No tickets were collected; Dutch doesn’t bother any more. Drinks were brought in from the bar by a waitress; no free beer has been served at a Gala Naval Ball since 1912. Mr and Mrs Swiss Cheese sat at one table. Swiss Cheese, in a gay mood, was yodeling ‘Mexicali Rose’ and his wife was urging him to shut up. At another table sat Assistant Head President Madden and eight friends, among whom were Ed and Pegeen Fitzgerald, the radio commentators, and Father A. R. Hyland, chaplain of Clinton Prison, at Dannemora. At still another table sat Fiddler Cronin, F. X. Fitzsimmons, Peanuts Pelletier, and the Iron Horse, all elderly and irritable pugs who have known Dutch since his Bowery days. Pelletier, the youngest, fought last in 1906. They always show up for Dutch’s balls. Until they are drunk, they insult each other. After they are drunk, they call each other the greatest fighter that ever lived. ‘What you doing now, Peanuts?’ Cronin asked at the last ball. Pelletier said that he had just got a job as a night watchman for a big steam laundry in the Bronx. ‘I bet you’re one hell of a fine night watchman,’ Cronin said. ‘If some robbers was to come around, I bet you would pitch in and help them open the safe.’ ‘Listen here, Fiddler,’ Pelletier said, ‘you remember the night you fought Boxhead Tommy Hansen at the Pelican A.C.? As I remember it, you didn’t last out the first round. If ever I saw a no-good, two-bit fighter, it was you.’ ‘Oh, go to hell,’ said Cronin.

  With Dutch, when he came in, was a band he had hired, an outfit called the New York Ramblers, consisting of an elderly piano player, a banjo picker, and a girl violinist. The Ramblers, looking bored, went over to the bandstand, took their places, and promptly started playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ Everybody stood up. Dutch had a pasteboard suitbox under his arm, and after people began to sit down again he ducked into the men’s room. When he reappeared, he was wearing his admiral’s uniform. He lost his cocked hat and his pair of swords shortly after his first ball, but for forty years he has been lugging the moldy old uniform from one furnished room to the next; it is his most precious possession. Across the chest he had pinned four badges – ‘Private Detective,’ ‘Special Officer,’ ‘Sheriff,’ and ‘Sharpshooter.’ The guests clapped as Dutch walked jauntily across the dance floor to the bandstand. It had rained a little during the afternoon and he wore rubbers. He stepped up on the stand, held his clasped hands over his head for several moments like a prizefighter, and then took a bow. ‘Well, folks,’ he said, ‘we’re all here for a good time, so let’s all have a good time. The world-renowned New York Ramblers will play for you and I want everybody to step out and dance. That’s all the speech I’m going to make. I thank you one and all.’

  Swiss Cheese stood up unsteadily and shouted, ‘Just a minute, Dutch. Would it be all right if I entertained the crowd?’ ‘Certainly, Cheese,’ said Dutch, ‘go ahead and yodel all you want to.’ ‘Yodel, hell,’ said Swiss Cheese, ‘I’m going to do a dance.’ He walked to the middle of the floor, squatted on his heels, and began a Cossack dance. After two kicks, he sat on the floor. He got to his feet, guffawing, and yelled, ‘Hey, Dutch, you know what I am? I’m a gentleman and a scholar.’ Dutch looked at him disapprovingly. ‘You’re a very foolish man,’ he said. ‘You’re going to get your blood pressure all shook up and tomorrow you’ll feel awful. I wish you’d come up here and yodel.’ A few moments later, with Swiss Cheese yodeling happily, the Ramblers started on ‘My Wild Irish Rose.’ Several couples stepped out on the floor and began waltzing.

  Dutch went over to Madden’s table. ‘I got a party of slummers here that would like to meet you,’ Madden told him. Dutch was introduced. ‘Mr Commodore Dutch,’ said one of Madden’s friends, a young woman who didn’t know any better, ‘I understand you were quite a well-known figure on the Bowery during the gay nineties.’ ‘Madam,’ said Dutch, giving his one-toothed grin, ‘I am the last of the Bowery Boys.’ He unbuttoned the stiff, gold-braided collar of his uniform, sat down, and put his elbows on the table. Then, interminably, while the New York Ramblers played waltzes, while Swiss Cheese yodeled, while the old pugs drank beer and insulted each other, and while one curiosity-seeker after another became disgusted with the proceedings and stalked out, Dutch talked about the Bowery in the days of Big Tim Sullivan. He talked steadily until 1 A.M. At that time the music stopped and the piano player came over and said that the New York Ramblers did not propose to play another note until they had been paid. Dutch looked gloomily at his Assistant Head President. ‘Joe, old pal,’ he said, ‘could you slip me a couple of sawbucks? I wouldn’t ask it, only I know I can count on you.’

  (1941)

  The Cave Dwellers

  THE WINTER OF 1933 was a painful one. It seems like a hundred and thirty-three years ago, but I remember it distinctly. That winter, the fifth winter of the depression and the winter of repeal, I was a reporter on a newspaper whose editors believed that nothing brigh
tened up a front page so much as a story about human suffering. ‘The man on the street is so gloomy nowadays,’ one of the editors used to say, ‘that a story about somebody else’s bad luck cheers him up.’ In the three weeks preceding Christmas there was, of course, an abundance of such stories, and for one reason or another I was picked to handle most of them. One morning I spent a harried half-hour in the anteroom of a magistrate’s court talking with a stony-faced woman who had stabbed her husband to death because he took a dollar and eighty cents she had saved for Christmas presents for their children and spent it in one of the new repeal gin mills. ‘I sure fixed his wagon,’ she said. Then she began to moan. That afternoon I was sent up to the big ‘Hoover Village’ on the Hudson at Seventy-fourth Street to ask about the plans the people there were making for Christmas. The gaunt squatters stood and looked at me with a look I probably never will get over; if they had turned on me and pitched me into the river I wouldn’t have blamed them. Next day I was sent out to stand on a busy corner with a Salvation Army woman whose job was to ring a bell and attract attention to a kettle in the hope that passers-by would drop money into it for the Army’s Christmas Fund. ‘Just stand there three or four hours,’ I was told, ‘and see what happens; there ought to be a story in it.’ The bellringer was elderly and hollow-eyed and she had a head cold, which I caught.

  Day in and day out, I was sent to breadlines, to relief bureaus, to evictions; each morning I called on cringing, abject humans who sat and stared as I goaded them with questions. My editors sincerely believed that such interviews would provoke people to contribute to the various Christmas funds, and they undoubtedly did, but that did not help me conquer the feeling that I had no right to knock on tenement doors and catechize men and women who were interesting only because they were miserable in some unusual way. Also, the attitude of the people I talked with was disheartening. They were without indignation. They were utterly spiritless. I am sure that few of them wanted their stories printed, but they answered my questions, questions I absolutely had to ask, because they were afraid something might happen to their relief if they didn’t; all of them thought I was connected in some way with the relief administration. I began to feel that I was preying on the unfortunate. My faith in human dignity was almost gone when something happened that did a lot to restore it.

  Early one bitter cold morning, only a few days before Christmas, a man telephoned the newspaper and said that the evening before, while walking his dog in Central Park, he had come upon a man and woman who said they had lived for almost a year in a cave in the park. This was one of the caves uncovered when the old lower reservoir was emptied and abandoned, an area since filled in for playgrounds. He said he had discovered the man and woman squatting in the cave beside a little fire, and had been afraid they would freeze to death during the night, so he had persuaded them to leave the Park and had put them up in a furnished room.

  ‘I wish your newspaper would run a story about them,’ said the man on the telephone. ‘It might help them get jobs.’

  I went up to see the man and woman. They were living in one of a cluster of brownstone rooming houses on West Sixtieth Street, off Columbus Avenue, two blocks from the park. They were on the fourth floor. An inch and a half of snow had fallen during the night and there was a ridge of it on the window sill of their furnished room. The man said his name was James Hollinan and that he was an unemployed carpenter. He was small, wiry, and white-haired. He wore corduroy trousers and a greasy leather windbreaker. The woman was his wife. He name was Elizabeth and she was an unemployed hotel maid. When I arrived, Mr Hollinan was preparing to go out. He had his hat on and was getting into a tattered overcoat. I told him who I was.

  ‘I’d like to ask a few questions,’ I said.

  ‘Talk to my wife,’ he said. ‘She does all the talking.’

  He turned to his wife. ‘I’ll go get some breakfast,’ he said.

  ‘Get egg sandwiches and some coffee,’ she said, taking a few coins out of her purse and placing them, one by one, in his hand, ‘and we’ll have seven cents left.’

  ‘O.K.,’ he said, and left.

  I asked Mrs Hollinan to tell me about their life in the cave. While she answered my questions she made the bed, and she appeared to get a lot of pleasure out of the task. I could understand it; it was the first bed she had made in a long time.

  ‘Well, I tell you,’ she said, smacking a pillow against the iron bedstead, ‘we got dispossessed from a flat up in Washington Heights the middle of last December, a year ago. When we went to the relief bureau they tried to separate us. They wanted to send my husband one place and me another. So I said, “We’ll starve together.” That night we ended up in Central Park. We found the cave and hid in it. Late at night we built a fire. We been doing that almost every night for a year.’

  She smoothed out the counterpane until there wasn’t a wrinkle in it and then rather reluctantly sat down on the bed. There was only one chair in the room.

  ‘Of course,’ she continued, ‘some nights it got too cold and rainy. Then we’d go to a church uptown that’s left open at night. We’d sleep in a pew, sitting up. Most mornings we’d part and look for work. He hardly ever found anything to do. It was worse for him. He’s older than me. Couple of times a week I’d pick up a cleaning job and that would mean a few dollars, and we’d eat on that. We’d carry water to the cave and make stews.’

  ‘How did you sleep in the cave?’ I asked.

  ‘We’d take turns snoozing on a bed we made of a pile of cardboard boxes,’ she said. ‘We kept a fire going. A little fire, so the cops wouldn’t run us off. The Park cops knew we were there, but so long as we didn’t build up a big fire and attract attention they’d let us alone. Last summer the cave was better than a house. But lately, when it rained, we’d get rheumatism, and it was awful.’

  Mrs Hollinan’s dress was nearly worn out, but it was clean and neat. I wondered how she had kept so clean, living in a cave. I think she guessed what was on my mind, because she said, ‘We’d go to a public bath about twice a week, and I used to put my dresses and his shirts in an old lard stand in the cave and boil them.’ We talked for about fifteen minutes and then her husband returned. He had a cardboard container of coffee and two sandwiches in a paper bag. I knew they didn’t want me around while they ate breakfast, so I said goodbye.

  ‘I hope we get some relief this time,’ said Mrs Hollinan as I went out the door, and I realized she thought I was a relief investigator. I didn’t have the nerve to tell her she was mistaken.

  I wasn’t especially interested in Mr and Mrs Hollinan; compared with some of the people I had seen that winter, they were living off the fat of the land. In the story I wrote about them I mentioned the incident in which Mrs Hollinan told her husband that when breakfast was paid for they would have seven cents left, and I gave the address of the rooming house in case someone wanted to offer Mr Hollinan a job. I wrote the story hurriedly and it was printed on the front page of the first edition, which reached the newsstands around noon, and, unlike many stories in the first edition of an afternoon newspaper, it wasn’t dropped from subsequent editions but was kept in, and on the front page, throughout the day.

  Next day was my day off, but late that afternoon I dropped by the office to get my mail. My box was stuffed with letters and telegrams from people who had read the story about Mr and Mrs Hollinan, and attached to many of the letters were bills or checks to be turned over to them. In all, there was eighty-five dollars, and there were two telegrams, offering jobs.

  I had promised my wife that I would meet her and help her with some Christmas shopping, and I telephoned her that I couldn’t do so, that I had to go give eighty-five dollars to a man and woman who had spent a year in a cave. She wanted to go with me. I met her at Columbus Circle and we walked over to the rooming house. The streets were crowded with Christmas shoppers and store windows were full of holly and tinsel and red Christmas bells. The cheerful shoppers depressed me. ‘How can men and women be s
o happy,’ I thought, ‘when all over the city people are starving?’

  The landlady of the rooming house met us at the door. She appeared to be in an angry mood. I told her I was the reporter who had come to see Mr and Mrs Hollinan the day before. She said people had been calling on them since early morning, bringing them money and food.

  ‘They read that story you had in the paper last night,’ the landlady said. ‘They keep coming, but I haven’t let anybody upstairs this afternoon. That was a lot of baloney you had in the paper. Why, those cave people are upstairs celebrating.’

  ‘I don’t blame them,’ said my wife.