Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Their building was on the edge of Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood occupying a bluff rising sharply from the East River and looking across to Manhattan. The Heights had long been an aristocratic enclave of fine brownstones, a swank suburb of New York, really, though its luster dimmed a bit when the subway arrived in 1908 and with it less high-toned commuters. Just a few blocks from where the Butzner women lived, a street called Columbia Heights flanked the river; from it, the Lower Manhattan skyline could seem close enough to touch; on most days you could see the Statue of Liberty. Up Columbia Heights near the Brooklyn Bridge was Fulton Ferry, the stretch of riverside Walt Whitman had commemorated almost a century before in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” but now seedy, overgrown with flophouses and greasy restaurants; Jane and Betty lived a block from the print shop on Cranberry Street where Whitman had set type for Leaves of Grass. Their stretch of Orange Street was lined with both newer apartment buildings and grim “old-law” tenements that reformers had tried to root out but which still housed miserable hundreds of thousands all over the city. The street came to an end at Fulton Street, with its shops and clattering elevated trains.

  From almost the beginning of that first year in Brooklyn and for most of her first two years in New York, Jane bounced between jobs—occasional jobs, part-time jobs, jobs that looked like regular jobs but vanished when her employer did, as happened more than once. Early on, she worked for a financial writer for the Hearst papers, Robert H. Hemphill, a former utilities executive, Federal Reserve Bank official, and sometime inventor who held decided views about the decidedly wobbly Depression-gripped banking system; she kept his clipping files, did his research, took his dictation. She helped a broker who thought he was writing a book about the stock market. She sought work at the Markle Foundation, Aunt Martha’s benefactor—but came up empty. She worked for Westclox, makers of Big Ben, the “polite alarm clock,” a mainstay of American bedsides, filing orders “from all the exotic places on Earth”—that’s how Jane put it. For one heady moment, she felt “involved in this great enterprise, in which soon everybody in the world would be supplied with clocks.” What she actually did all day, of course, was type and file, file and type. Ultimately, she realized that the great enterprise would never be done, “that the clocks would break down or get lost, and that the work was going to be interminable.” The big Up, then the precipitous Down—played out across a single week, at the end of which she quit. Give her a break; she was eighteen years old.

  It was the only time Jane actually quit a job during these years. Often she had no work at all. And jobs she did land might pay as little as $12 a week. “I could barely scrape by on it,” she later wrote. She’d remember one that was particularly boring—working all alone, endlessly filing colored slips of paper. Coming to feel “hopeless and depressed,” Miss Jane Butzner turned to gambling. Well, not exactly—but she did shell out $1.25 for a share of an Irish Sweepstakes ticket, which was illegal at the time. She’d been raised to disapprove of gambling “as stupid, feckless and in some way immoral…But in my mood of futility,” she bought in. “I couldn’t afford it. It meant postponing new soles for my shoes, making do instead with pieces of inserted cardboard.” She didn’t win, yet never regretted it: “Suddenly, and so easily, I had purchased suspense, anticipation, hope,” she’d write. “I’m still grateful for the weeks of nutty anticipation when I needed it so badly. The daring and delicious illegality didn’t hurt either.”

  Betty was doing a little better than she, making about $14 a week. When both of them were working they could sometimes even afford to get their apartment cleaned. But occasionally, too, they were reduced to eating Pablum, a bland, precooked baby food that, however unappetizing, was at least nutritious, or so their father said. More often, they’d chop up onions, tomatoes, and green pepper and mix in some beans and a little hamburger. And some garlic: “We thought we were really in the avant-garde,” Jane would remember. “We’d never had garlic in Scranton.” They called their concoction “catchabeano,” because “it had lots of beans in it and we just thought it was a catchy name.” Compared to Pablum, “it was our equivalent of a grand gourmet thing.” At some point, Mrs. Butzner gave them a copy of The Fanny Farmer Cookbook; when once Jane complained to her that she’d never taught her how to cook, Mrs. Butzner shot back, “Well, I taught you how to read, didn’t I?”

  Later, Jane never made much fuss about the difficulties she faced in adapting to New York; it was adapting to the Depression she remembered with a shudder. “I think that’s the hardest time I ever had,” she’d say. And yet, it wasn’t as hard for her as for many others. For people in their thirties who’d watched newly launched careers crash, or those in their forties or fifties flattened by rejection and idleness, the Depression was devastating. Back in 1929, the national unemployment rate had been 3 percent; in 1935, it was 20. But for Jane and some of her young friends, she’d write, they could still “make stories out of our rejections and frugalities and the strange people we met up with in our futile searches and could bask in the gasps or laughs we generated.”

  The short-lived, ill-paying jobs Jane held during these years might seem the most justly omitted element of a successful woman’s résumé, the kind that, further along in your career, you simply forget to mention. Jane, though, was grateful for them. “It was not what I wanted,” she’d write, “but it was interesting and I enjoyed myself.” Indeed, they were just the jobs her Powell training had prepared her for; Jane could take shorthand at 110 words per minute and type 70—not extraordinary, but respectable—and she was proud of it. Jobs like hers gave her a peek into the underside of American business that many of her college-bound classmates probably lacked.

  Many mornings, after scanning the classified ads for work, Jane took the subway into the city. Sometimes, though, she hiked into Manhattan across John Roebling’s eternally glorious Brooklyn Bridge, along its wood-slatted promenade, under and through its great Gothic towers. The bridge’s four muscular steel cables began their ascent from their moorings on either shore, climbed up to the towers, reached across the river. From the cables dropped steel suspenders, and from the towers diagonal stays; the two were clipped together where they met, shivering in the wind and traffic. At mid-span, the cables swung down to the roadway, then disappeared beneath it. So when Jane reached that spot, equidistant from either shore, high above the water, it was just her, and the river, and the great city below.

  Sometimes Jane would be sent off for a shorthand or typing test. Sometimes she’d be turned down flat. But by late morning, in any case, there’d often be nothing left but to explore wherever she found herself, or else invest a nickel on the subway and take it to some random stop. There, she’d climb the stairs to the street, maybe pause for an instant as she emerged into an unfamiliar prospect of buildings, people, signs, and shops, then push off into the surrounding streets. “I didn’t know where I was most of the time,” she’d say. She had only the dimmest sense of the colossus that was New York. “But it fascinated me. It was wonderful. Every place I came out I was amazed.”

  Mornings scrounging for work, afternoons exploring the city—that was the pattern. It was toward the end of her first year in New York that one such voyage of exploration landed her in Manhattan’s fur district, west of Sixth Avenue in the West Twenties, crowded with carts hauling pelts of mink, muskrat, and ermine, sometimes an errant tiger skin, on their way to becoming wraps and scarves. Jane’s face must have betrayed her wonder, for at one point a man stepped from his shop, introduced himself, and soon was regaling the eager nineteen-year-old with tales of the fur district.

  And just then, in the late summer or early fall of 1935, Jane Butzner took a giant step into her life’s work. Back at Central High, being a writer mostly meant poetry. But a few times, something or someone capturing her interest, Jane had looked, listened, taken notes, and written of it not in poetry but in prose. Then, at the Republican, she’d taken her turn as unpaid cub reporter. Now, she would get paid by a n
ational magazine, Vogue, for what in Scranton she’d given away free.

  “Everyone in the New York fur district seems to know everyone else—but not everyone speaks to everyone else.” That’s how she began the article she’d write about it. Competition was intense. “Each packet of furs, in its journey from trapper to fur-farmer, to auctioneer to dresser, stirs up feuds.” She was astonished by all she saw and heard. She wrote of racks and handcarts, heaped with furs, parading up and down Eighth Avenue; of an auction catalog promoting the sale of the hides of ten thousand mountain lions, seventeen thousand wolves; of fur theft so common that trucks had “hold-up horns” and shops had inner doors of iron bars. “Inside the barred doors and behind the wire grating back of the shop-windows,” she wrote, “the shops are dark and eerie. Mounted heads of ferocious animals project from the walls. Mounds of furs cover crates and hand-carts, filling the shop with a rank, musty odour.”

  Jane would later minimize what she had done, would say her fur district account owed “practically word for word” to the gentleman, Mr. Edgar Lehman, who’d stepped from his shop to talk to her. But in her piece, you could see a real writer’s sensibility at work, one alive to curious details. “Every Christmas,” she concluded it, “thousands of white whiskers made of strips of Angora goat are sold for department store Santa Clauses. Just now, the district is hopeful that the hanging of red fox tails on radiator caps, a fad started by some taxi-drivers, will bring a boom to the fox-tail business.”

  In the November 15, 1935, issue of Vogue, fashion-conscious readers learned of the recent Paris collections, read about wool and fur pom-poms on hats, one-shouldered gladiator necklines, crocheted Spanish shawls, fringes dangling from tailored black dinner jackets. Modern women were advised that now they were free to “Dine in Suits” or “Dance in Pleats.” A jeweler showed off rings with bands of alternating rubies and diamonds. Jane’s one-thousand-word story, “Where the Fur Flies,” fit right in.

  It was quite a coup for a nineteen-year-old just out of high school. She’d written the piece, impressed an editor enough to have it accepted, and pocketed $40—two or three weeks’ worth of typing and dictation in the uninspiring office jobs she had such trouble finding—and finally was pleased to see it appear in print, her name right there at the top of page 103. And her editor wanted more. Over the next year and a half, she delivered three more pieces to Vogue, each celebrating another of Manhattan’s specialized wholesale districts: leather, flowers, and diamonds. Jane wrote of bullfrogs and sheep intestines made into novelty leathers. Of how on flower district sidewalks the “damp, sweet perfume [of cut flowers], blowing across the pavement, filters from hampers and crates piled beside doorways.” Of how it took pawned diamonds thirteen months to reach the auction house; outside, meanwhile, on the Bowery, “the ‘El’ roars, trucks rumble, bums sprawl beside the curbstone, Chinamen from Mott Street mince by, snatches from foreign tongues are caught and lost in a reek of exotic and forbidding odors.”

  Each article offered a peek into the business of fashion; that’s why they were in Vogue in the first place. Each delivered a streetside grittiness that could seem to foreshadow its author’s life, forever linked to cities. But more than anything “urban” about them, each displayed a love of color and oddity, a curiosity about how the world worked, that reflected her deepest sympathies.

  —

  Living on Orange Street in Brooklyn Heights, Jane and Betty Butzner were New Yorkers—more or less, sort of.

  Betty’s daughter, Carol, would grow up hearing of the charming triplet of streets—Orange, Pineapple, Cranberry—that defined their Brooklyn neighborhood. Jane would adjudge it “delightful.” Back in Walt Whitman’s time, before 1898, when it relinquished its independence to become a mere “borough” of the City of New York, Brooklyn was its own city, sitting contentedly across the river from New York; until the Brooklyn Bridge went up in 1883 it was linked to New York only by ferry. When Jane moved there its population, at 2.6 million, was more, by 800,000, than that of Manhattan; just by itself, it was the third largest city in the United States, after only New York as a whole and Chicago. It had its own downtown core, its own stately blocks of brownstones, its own slums, its own shopping and industry; even in places like Flatbush or Midwood its own suburbs. On Orange Street, Jane lived closer to Lower Manhattan’s luster, growl, and grit than most Manhattanites did. After a two-block walk to the Clark Street subway station and the elevator down to the tracks, she was fifteen minutes from Times Square, four from Wall Street.

  But of course none of that counted; Brooklyn wasn’t New York.

  It couldn’t have been long into her life there that Jane learned what every New Yorker knew, that “the city” was Manhattan, period. The fur district she’d stumbled upon so fortuitously was in Manhattan. So was the diamond district. Vogue itself, New York fashion personified, was in Manhattan. The jobs she got that first year were all in Manhattan, as were the better jobs she sought now. So were Broadway, Times Square, Fifth Avenue, the tall towers, the publishing houses, the galleries, and practically all the other iconic places of New York. It was hard not to feel the pull. Jane had only to glance down Henry Street, at the great stone arches that were the Brooklyn Bridge approaches, to take herself in her mind’s eye to Manhattan. For Jane, as for any young person of curiosity and spunk, the city beckoned.

  On one of her forays into Manhattan near the end of that first year, probably in late summer, Jane got out at the Christopher Street subway stop; she “liked the sound of the name,” she’d say. She had no idea where she was, “but I was enchanted with this place…I spent the rest of the afternoon just walking these streets.”

  As she got off the train, she’d have seen the name of the station set in mosaic tile, as in most of New York’s four hundred–odd subway stations:

  CHRISTOPHER ST.

  SHERIDAN SQ.

  Sheridan Square was no “square” at all, of course. But out of its irregular and unlovely expanse radiated Seventh Avenue South and wide West Fourth Street. Stroll along them, or on Grove Street, Washington Place, or Waverly Place, which all converged there, and soon you found yourself among a warren of little streets south and west of the square, the clubs and bars lining West Fourth Street that drew revelers from the outer boroughs, art galleries, small shops, modest apartment buildings.

  It was here, in a low-lying bowl of cityscape mostly off the tourist maps, far from the great employment centers, not grand, not rich, maybe a little ragtag, that Jane now found herself. No neatly defined shopping districts here in the streets near Sheridan Square, nothing like upscale Fifth Avenue or proletarian Fourteenth Street—no neatly defined anything. Blocks of handsome brownstones across Sixth Avenue that could have stepped out of a Henry James novel, musical Italian filling the shops and stoops of the tenements to the south, gritty warehouses and a sprinkling of small-scale industry to the west. Along Bleecker Street, a bakery selling Italian bread for a nickel a loaf, a cheese shop selling ricotta for twenty-five cents a pound. Peasant smocks, antique jewelry, and secondhand books for sale arrayed on one block. A drugstore selling cosmetics and contraceptives. An ice cream parlor where the neighborhood’s young Italian men hung out. The scale was small, the range and variety stunning, the streetscape obeying nothing like cool Cartesian order. This wasn’t New York in its bigness, its numbers, its densest crowds that Jane found here. If anything, it was New York in all its smallness, its irregularity, its turn-the-corner-and-what-do-you-find little shocks and surprises.

  The Manhattan street grid fell apart here, as if by an abrupt, invasive fault in an otherwise orderly crystal matrix. West Fourth Street, obediently grid-bound just to the east, at Sheridan Square abruptly veered northwest and, after a few blocks, dared to run, against all sense and logic, into West Eleventh Street. Other streets, like Carmine, Cornelia, and Jones, simply disappeared after a block or two. A conscientious student of urban life, Professor Caroline Ware of Vassar College, had recently tallied the “contents” of
one block of Jones Street. She counted old-law tenements and 1840s-vintage houses, an apartment house that went up only in 1929, factories that made feather mattresses, children’s toys, and Italian ice cream; an old stable, a settlement house, two grocers, a tobacco and candy store, an ice dealer’s cellar, a French hand laundry, a barber shop, a tea room, an “Italian men’s café,” a wrought iron workshop, and (it still being Prohibition at the time of her census) three speakeasies. All in a single block. Behind this line of five-story façades—inside, unseen, hidden—life played out each day and night, in all its struggles, pains, and pleasures; on the busy sidewalks outside, traces and whispers only of those silent stories, spilling out into the city’s everyday jangle.

  Spend an afternoon on streets like Jones Street, as Jane did, and any part of the brain habituated to easy order was bound to come away bruised. But Jane? She “liked the little streets,” she’d remember. “I liked the variety of it and there were craft shops of hand-made things of ingenuity and artistry. I had never seen shops like those. I just thought it was great.” The whole neighborhood was great. Could she have said why, exactly? Maybe not. She was nineteen. She was all enthusiasm. Toward evening she found her way back to Sheridan Square, took the subway back to Brooklyn, soon was trudging up the flights of stairs to her apartment. There she told Betty of her adventures and announced—in Jane’s several tellings of this story, it sounds like a command—that where she’d been that day was where they would have to move. Across the next thirty-three years, Jane had only three homes in New York City, all within five hundred yards of where she’d emerged from the Christopher Street subway stop that day.

  One weekend sometime later, Jane brought Betty back to the neighborhood and by around October they had moved into the first of the three. It was an apartment in an ordinary six-story building, a bank of fire escapes affixed to its face, on a stretch of Morton Street a block from Jones. Once a walk-up, it had been fitted with a small elevator. Here Jane and Betty, sometimes with other roommates, lived for the next eight years. The rent (in 1940) was $50 a month. Neighbors included a photographer, a teacher at neighboring New York University, a music teacher, an office manager at a law office, and a novelist and his illustrator wife. It’s a little hard to credit, but Jane would insist “that we lived there quite a while before we knew we were in Greenwich Village.”