Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  We’re in the lobby. We call to Delmore’s room, and he isn’t there. Just as we’re losing hope, into the lobby walks Delmore. The policeman starts questioning him. He says I’m making it all up.

  I had told the police that Delmore had been in and out of psychiatric care. The policeman asks Delmore for the name of his psychiatrist. Delmore says the name and telephone number are in his room. So my friend, Delmore, the policeman, and I take the elevator up to his third-floor room. Now he somehow manages to unlock the door, push his way in, and close the door behind him. “You can’t come into my room without a warrant,” he says. Meanwhile we get a little glimpse into the room, which is total chaos.

  Now the policeman becomes interested and calls the precinct to send a detective over. The detective tells Delmore he has to come down to the station for questioning. Delmore tries to talk his way out of it but can’t. They call a psychiatrist from Bellevue down to the station. Delmore is shrieking so much he more or less convicts himself. He admits he did have fantasies of his wife sleeping with other people, one of them being Nelson Rockefeller. They lock him up in Bellevue.

  When they heard about it, Leslie Katz, Saul Bellow, and some other people put together a sum of money to get Delmore out of Bellevue and into Paine Whitney, a private clinic. It was a very beneficent thing to do, but Paine Whitney couldn’t keep him there unless someone in his family took responsibility for signing him in. No one knew where Elizabeth was, and Delmore’s brother couldn’t be located. So the upshot was Delmore signed himself out and then demanded Katz and Bellow hand over to him the money they had put together for his incarceration.

  The first thing he did was go to see a former student of his who was now a lawyer. He brought a lawsuit against me on charges of false arrest and alienation of affections. I didn’t have any money in those days and had to borrow from one of my brothers to hire a lawyer. My brother always thought I led an irregular life. This confirmed all his misgivings.

  The lawsuit was still on the books when Delmore died several years later, because whenever it was time for depositions, his lawyer, who was devoted to him and wasn’t making a penny out of this, was smart enough to know the case would be lost if Delmore ever had to go before a judge and give a deposition. So he kept postponing, hoping I’d make some settlement out of court. All the while, Delmore was on the loose.

  That Sunday morning before I went to the police, I called a few people I knew were close to Delmore to ask their advice and see whether they could get him off my back. One was Saul Bellow, who advised me to call the police. Later he wrote a novel about Delmore called Humboldt’s Gift. There’s a very minor character in that novel who is on the make. The narrator, the Saul Bellow character in the novel, says, “Afterwards, this young man put it about that I advised him to go to the police.” That character was supposed to be me. In those days in the literary world, the idea of turning a poet into the police was unacceptable.

  So the Chelsea Hotel turned out to be an interesting place in which to live. Virgil Thomson had had an apartment there for many years. The painter Sam Francis had a big studio on the top floor that John Sloan had occupied at the beginning of the century. You always knew when Sam Hunter was in residence because on Sundays, limousines would pull up and these couples, the women in full-length mink coats, would arrive for brunch. Arthur Miller lived there for about six months. The artist David Smith used to stay at the Chelsea while I lived there, although when he started making money, he switched to the Plaza. It was not until after I moved out that the hotel became a scene for rock music and drugs.

  The neighborhood itself, however, was very undistinguished. Usually I ate in the Village or uptown. There was an Automat nearby, and if somebody I knew was coming to New York, we’d often go there. The food was remarkably good; they had the best baked beans in New York.

  KEN LIBO: At six or seven in the morning, the Automat was open already; it was always open. What a great pleasure it was on a spring morning to be able to go into the Automat and have a good cup of coffee from a shiny ornate urn with a spout that looked like the mouth of a lion. You’d get your nickels from the man in the center, on a surface made of marble with a little indentation. He was so quick; you gave him two dollars, you got forty nickels. And then you had the great joy, the real joy of New York: a hard roll. Good hard rolls are hard to come by. If you have the misfortune of walking around at 8 o’clock in the morning in St. Louis, Missouri, or Montgomery, Alabama, believe me—you’ll have to walk far and wide before you find a New York hard roll.

  I remember the wonderful people that you’d see in the Automat, people who lived in SROs, people on the fringe of society, barely getting by, individuals growing old, finding it hard to walk. The Automat was a place for them to go. They could sit down at a table and be a mensch.

  One of the great tragedies of modern civilization is the disappearance of the five-and-tens. I go into CVS and say, “What’s going on? Where is the five-and-ten of yesteryear?” The five-and-ten on 23rd and Eighth was the center of the village of Chelsea. All the goods were behind counters, which are so much more pleasant than shelves, and there were so many kinds of different things. There was a lunch counter where you got coffee and decent apple pie, cokes in the actual little coke glasses. The waitresses were kind and hardworking, a little long in the tooth, probably with drunken husbands at home.

  But Eighth Avenue seemed the most depressing avenue in the universe. There were no lights from stores, only dim streetlights on the corners. It was like a scene out of Charles Dickens, only worse because it was devoid of atmosphere.

  For whatever reason, in the 1970s gay life began moving north from the West Village into Chelsea. There were a few bars on the periphery of Chelsea, like the Spike and the Eagle on Eleventh Avenue near the warehouses; there were dangerous bars located in what was appropriately called the meatpacking area, which catered to people who were into self-mutilation. One known as the Mine Shaft was perhaps the most nefarious of all, although I happened to have known the owner, and he was a very nice person. There was no AIDS fear then, lots of pot, lots of amyl nitrate, which when sniffed from a bottle would intensify your erotic sensitivities for twenty or thirty seconds, but would also make your heart beat faster.

  The Irish landladies, as I remember, would take an interest in the gays. After all, New York has always had an enormous ethnic, religious, racial, and cultural mix. In 1654 when the first Jews came to New Amsterdam, there were twenty different languages spoken amongst a group of fifteen hundred people. And it was the very same thing among these Irish landladies in Chelsea. They were used to having people radically different from themselves. The gays didn’t live in the rooming houses at this time. But they would walk by, and the landladies would be quite friendly to them.

  I had dinner with W. H. Auden because I got to know his assistant, a six-feet-five strapping youth from Arkansas named Orlon Fox who lived in Chelsea. What Orlon assisted with, I don’t know. It was their business.

  The dinner took place in Orlon’s apartment on 22nd just off Eighth Avenue. Auden had told Orlon, “Invite three or four of your friends, and I will join you for dinner.” And there was the great man himself wearing a pullover that looked as though it hadn’t been brushed for many months and trousers that hadn’t seen a crease in a long time.

  When I came to New York in the 1960s, gays were very much undercover. I remember hanging around in a gay bar, and who should be standing there but the man who hired me for my job. “Oh, my God, my whole life is going to fall apart because the man who hired me knows I’m gay,” I thought. Of course I was so stupid because obviously he was gay as well.

  I had become very friendly with the head of a major New York publisher. We used to go to a bar that would be packed with gay people, and every so often, the police cars would drive by with their lights on and flash them inside. We would get frightened by it, and yet we sort of grooved on the fear that any moment they were going to throw us into jail. That was part of gay l
ife at that time. We felt perfectly happy and relaxed going to our little gay parties where people were gay or gay-tolerant. But outside of that circle, and the mothers of gays who were very open about it, you wouldn’t discuss the fact of your being gay.

  ELAINE MARKSON: I remember sitting next to a young man on the bus. We began chatting. When he told me he liked the color lipstick I was wearing, I said, okay, this is the signal that he’s gay. He didn’t know where to go. “Get off the bus with me,” I said. “I’ll walk you down 8th Street and show you.” There were gay bars in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, but they were gentler.

  The Village was a bohemian neighborhood then. All these writers and artists were around. A guy who looked like Eugene O’Neill would walk down the streets, and if you bought him a cup of coffee and a Danish he’d tell you what he was writing and whom he knew.

  The Village Voice was the real center of Village life. You got your apartment through the Voice, you read all the articles. It was our Bible.

  HILTON KRAMER: Greenwich Village was still Greenwich Village in those days, not expensive shoe shops. It was full of marvelous bookstores. The Eighth Street Bookshop was a great literary center. It had the best inventory of literary classics, including modern literature. Anatole Broyard, whom I was instrumental in having the Times hire many years later, had a bookshop on Cornelia Street. It was a very literary secondhand bookstore. Anatole wasn’t buying junk. If he didn’t like it, he wouldn’t stock it.

  Together with a friend, Anatole Broyard taught a course at the New School. The whole point of it seemed to be to meet pretty young girls, whom they both had a keen interest in. The New School was an intellectually lively place in those days, with a much more bohemian atmosphere than Columbia. Most of the professors were adjuncts, and I think for most of that period they were paid according to the number of people who signed up for their courses. Meyer Schapiro, who was a professor of fine arts at Columbia, gave lectures on the history of modern art at the New School. It was always standing room only. He was almost a matinee idol—charming, handsome, eloquent, and learned. About two-thirds of the audience were female of every age, and they would come back year after year to hear the same lecture. Although I have great respect for Meyer, I sat through quite a few of those lectures, and I must say at some point I found all of that eloquence fatiguing.

  ELAINE MARKSON: In the fifties and sixties, people who didn’t have a lot of money were able to live in the Village. We had a big beautiful one-bedroom apartment on 11th Street and Seventh Avenue that cost us a hundred dollars a month. I had two children there.

  It was hard to find an expensive meal in the area, and there were many wonderful Italian restaurants. Foreign films began coming into the small art theaters; some of them served coffee. The Limelight was a coffee shop on Seventh Avenue South that was always packed. I don’t remember people drinking coffee though; I remember them drinking booze. Then they’d go to one of the local diners to sober up.

  There was a lot of drinking going on in the literary milieu. MacDougal and Bleecker Streets had all these bars; the White Horse and the Lion’s Head were on Hudson and 11th, and each one had different crowds of noisy people who hung around all night. But in the 1950s, the scene in these bars was sweeter, more intense and writerly, even though being a drinker was part of being in the group. People wanted to drink the way Dylan Thomas or Malcolm Lowry drank.

  Fred Exley would come for dinner and afterward he’d say, “Let’s all go to the bar now,” and my husband, David, would say, “Fred, Elaine can’t—she has two children to take care of.” That was the routine. The men did not have parental responsibilities.

  We got to know Jack Kerouac through his friend who lived next door to us. After he had written On the Road and had become famous, Kerouac stayed with us for a while. He’d write these copious notes for his novel, pages and pages and pages. I thought he was funny, quite charming, and very handsome. But he drank an awful lot, and looking back, I think he was on marijuana as well. He was very much of the time, the Beats, the late 1950s.

  ANDY BALDUCCI: The Village had a lot of beautiful people. Not much money, but rich in culture and talent. Boris Karloff was one of our regular middle-of-the-night customers. Regardless of the weather, in the snow, rain, he’d come by two, three o’clock in the morning for a couple of tomatoes, a couple of peppers, a cauliflower, some leftovers. “Tell Andy I’ll stop in tomorrow to pay,” he’d tell the night man.

  A few days later, he’d come by. “Andy, I was in the other night, I took so and so. Would fifty cents be all right?”

  “Okay, Mr. Karloff, it’s all right.”

  I didn’t know how famous the man was.

  Judy Holliday was a regular, a very simple young lady, a little bit shy.

  NINA BALDUCCI: She would come in with her mother and her three-year-old boy in a stroller. I only knew her as Mrs. Oppenheimer, the doctor’s wife. James Beard lived on 12th Street. Once he discovered us, he came in almost every day or he’d ask for produce to be delivered. He loved raspberries.

  JOEL EICHEL: Leontyne Price has been a regular at Bigelow’s drugstore for years. Once she came in just before Christmas. There must have been a hundred people in the place. She was standing at the front counter, but she noticed me at the back counter, maybe twenty feet away. I was raised so I was visible.

  “Hi, darling,” she called out.

  “How are you?’ I called back, and added, “If I could sing, I would wish you a merry Christmas. . . .”

  With that, at the top of her bravado, she let out, “I wish you a merry Christmas . . .” and the entire store fell silent. “I wish you a merry Christmas,” she continued, “I wish you a merry Christmas,” and she went to the top of her scale, holding on to the last notes, “and a Happy New Year.” Everyone burst into applause.

  Our location at Sixth Avenue and 10th puts us right in the heart of Greenwich Village. So we’ve always had a million and one actors as customers, some famous and some journeymen, a tremendous amount of models. When I first started, this lady was banging on the door one night after we had closed. She opened up such a big mouth that she scared me, and I let her in. It was Bella Abzug.

  Ed Koch’s been a longtime customer. He used to come behind the counter even though we wouldn’t allow it and tell us how to organize our displays. His father owned a shoe store, he said, and he knows.

  Our customers have been the cream of the crop of the whole country, like the guy from Nebraska who’s going to write the great American novel. He doesn’t, but he ends up being a professor at NYU, lives in the Village, and shops at Bigelow’s.

  In the early 1960s, I was a student at the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy looking for a job. I didn’t know anything about the store or the area. But as soon as I walked in the door, my heart started pumping, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom. I felt like I was a cartoon character, that everyone could see the beating of my heart through my shirt. I saw the high ceilings, the elaborate gas chandeliers, the nineteenth-century oak fixtures, the bronze plaque on the wall from the late 1920s that marked the 85th anniversary of the store. I had never seen anything like it. And it was hopping.

  The going wage was $100 a week. I asked for $125 because I had been working in neighborhood drugstores in Brooklyn and Queens since I was about eight years old. I was hired, and my adventure at Bigelow’s began.

  IAN GINSBERG: My grandfather, Willie Ginsberg, was a little Jewish guy, an immigrant from Austria, who became a pharmacist. He owned a lot of little drugstores with other guys, made a living. Then in 1939, he bought Bigelow’s from Mr. Bigelow, who was an anti-Semite by the way, and that became his main store. It had been kind of trashed during the Depression, and my grandfather got it for real cheap.

  Pharmacy became the family profession; my father, my uncles and cousins worked at Bigelow’s. When I began, we still had eight or nine pharmacists sitting behind the second barrier, each one in his own space, with his own typewriter to type out the labels and a long stick with a
spatula on the end to reach the pharmacy books on the higher shelves.

  JOEL EICHEL: By the time I came on board, Ian’s grandfather was semiretired. But Uncle Willie, as they called him, taught me a lot of compounding tricks, gave me insights into the way things are done. A few years after I was hired, Ian’s uncle retired, and I became partners with Ian’s father.

  IAN GINSBERG: I used to deliver to the Electric Lady Land Recording studio that Jimmy Hendrix had built in the 1960s. Since I was a musician, I was absolutely enamored. I also delivered to the Women’s House of Detention across the street; the women would scream at me out the window. On Sundays, when the husbands and kids used to visit the women, they’d come into the store with various papers they needed to have notarized. A notary public who’d been working for us for fifty years, would take out the old pharmacopoeia, which has all the data and requirements of pharmacy, have them put their hand on it like it was the Bible, and raise their right hand. He’d say, “Repeat after me . . . ,” and they’d say, “I do, I do.” It was a whole ritual.

  JOEL EICHEL: My most memorable experiences were the two blackouts, one in the late sixties and the other in the early seventies. People didn’t want to go to sleep, or they couldn’t get to their apartments with the elevators not working. Everybody was on the streets. Gay guys came out from the West Village on roller skates. They rolled onto the intersection of 8th Street and Sixth Avenue and began directing traffic very flamboyantly with elaborate arm gestures. They were beautiful to watch. It was like a ballet.

  We stayed open all night using the old gaslights to illuminate the store; women were buying cosmetics by gaslight. We still had the soda fountain then, and people were having sandwiches until we ran out of food. At about six in the morning, the bread truck came in. The driver didn’t know what was going on. All the restaurants and stores were closed, and he had a whole truckload of bread. He said, “I’ll dump it all here. Whatever you don’t use, I’ll take back tomorrow.” The egg man came in from Jersey. Same thing. He loaded us with eggs from the floor to the ceiling.