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 A walk back in time
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Looking up at an Ivy-covered West End Avenue facade. 11/11/07, 4:30 PM. Photo: JH. |
Today is a holiday across America and in other parts of the world, known as Veterans Day (or Remembrance Day elsewhere). It always falls on November 11, and is the anniversary of the Armistice that ended World War I when major hostilities were formally ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Remembering our veterans is a challenge for many Americans who forget the price veterans pay for the wars they serve in, notwithstanding all those who never return to civilian life. Someone told me a startling statistic, that one out of every four veterans today is homeless.
A beautiful autumn Sunday in New York. JH and I went over to the West Side apartment of Prof. Sree Sreenivasan, the Dean of Students at Columbia School of Journalism, and his wife Roopa. We were guests of a mutual friend, one Pranay Gupte, the international journalist who arranged our trip to Abu Dhabi a few weeks ago. Yesterday was the celebration of Diwali, the beginning of the Indian New Year, and the Sreenivasans put out a buffet of delicious Indian dishes.
The view’s from the Sreenivasan’s 28th floor apartment are spectacular encompassing west to east and all the way south – from New Jersey across the Hudson to midtown Manhattan to the Triborough Bridge across the East River.
No matter which part of town they live in, New Yorkers tend to certain areas they are familiar with and miss many of the other parts of town that are just as charming, astonishing, dramatic, and fascinating. I’m talking about our trip to the Upper West Side. Although we’re both familiar with it, I live on the Upper East Side and JH lives in the West Village. Neither of us get over to the UWS often, and yesterday’s vista from 96th and Broadway, was a first for me. |
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| Top to bottom: The southeast view from the the Sreenivasan's terrace; The kitchen table spread; Prof. Sree Sreenivasan and his wife Roopa; The casual Sunday afternoon gathering. |
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After leaving the party we decided to have a look at the neighborhood. Around West End Avenue. First stop was just a block away – Pomander Walk – which I first spotted from the Sreenivasan’s terrace and was intrigued. Tucked in between Broadway and West End and 94th and 95th Streets, it’s a tiny enclave of Tudor style two-story cottages behind a private gate. It was built in 1921 by a restaurateur, Thomas Healy who ordered the architects (King & Campbell) to recreate the set of an earlier play by the same name which was also the name of a small street in the Chiswick just outside London. Humphrey Bogart lived there as a young man (he was a native New Yorker, growing up in a house on 103rd Street off Riverside Drive).
Eighty-six years later Pomander Walk remains. Bourbon roses, Spanish lavendar and day lilies grew on both sides of the cement walkway between the two rows of 20 cottages. Although a few years ago, someone put up a 21-story condo next door, effectively blocking the tiny walkway garden from the sun for most of each day. However, the area was landmarked in 1982, so it will remain. |
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| Pomander Walk. |
| From Pomander Walk, we continued down West End Avenue which is populated with tall and substantial apartment buildings, many of which were put in the years before the Great Depression. Unlike its baby sister, East End Avenue, West End was a prosperous middle-class neighborhood in the first half of the 20th century, full of young families and occupied by business and professional people, and because of its access to Broadway, many prosperous theatre people. Not unlike its cousin, Central Park West, West End Avenue, the area experienced a decline beginning after the Second World War and extending into the late 1970s when its big, well-constructed buildings, now much cheaper to rent or buy than across the Park, became attractive again. Today it retains its homey atmosphere as well as the prosperity of its original settlers. |
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| Looking up at the autumn colors popping along West End Avenue. |
At 86th Street and Riverside, we stopped to look at The Clarendon where William Randolph Hearst lived with his wife and young family in the first two decades of the 20th century. Hearst, who was a mining heir (and an only child) was brought up in San Francisco, came to New York in 1896, as a young man, to establish a national newspaper empire, and he did exactly that.
Always an aficionado of theatre, especially the musical revues with lots of pretty chorines. He first spotted his wife Millicent when she and her sister and father were performing in a vaudeville act. Living in a townhouse in the 20s, he was attracted to Riverside Drive because it had become an upscale development of property and because it was in easy access to Broadway and his newspaper offices.
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The Clarendon. |
The Clarendon was built in 1908. Hearst bought the 12-story building from the developer, one Ranald Macdonald. Hearst's original apartment was huge – encompassing the 10th, 11th and 12th floors. He was already a compulsive collector of art, antiques, artifacts, armor, and European pre-19th century paneling, and besides his family, these collected items filled the place.
Shortly after he bought the building, he also took over the eighth and ninth floors where Mrs. Hearst’s father lived as well as the two young (twin) sons. He also added a vast 100 foot-long rectangular-shaped space under a copper mansard roof running the length of the building. This was for his collection of armor, tapestries, and stained glass.
Not many years after the Hearsts were ensconced, Mr. Hearst began his affair with the musical revue actress Marion Davies. He was 54 and she was 17. He kept an apartment in the Ritz Tower on Park Avenue and 57th Street (faithfully refurbished and restored by its present owners) and spent less and less time on 86th Street. By the late 1920s, he’d moved mainly back to California, to Los Angeles, Santa Monica and San Simeon where he lived with Miss Davies in splendor for the rest of his long life. The Clarendon was taken from the Hearst company in 1939, in a foreclosure. Millicent Hearst who remained the only wife, moved to the East Side for some ritzier digs. The new owners of the building gutted the building and turned its 24 apartments into 60. The former armory is now a 100 x 35 co-op apartment.
From 86th and Riverside, we strolled along the Drive looking for an entrance to the Riverside Park, also designed by Frederick Law Olmsted as Central Park was nearing completion. By the beginning of the 20th century, much of Manhattan north of 59th Street, both east and west, was beginning to be developed. The East Side had come into its own as the favored area of the rich but there was still a lingering idea that the West Side was a very desirable place for a private residence. This notion was emphasized with the building of a mansion for Charles Schwab, a partner of Andrew Carnegie in United States Steel who bought the entire block of land between West End and the Drive and 73rd and 74th Street for his house. |
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| A view of Riverside Drive with the Schwab House in the foreground. |
Charles Schwab’s house was begun abuilding in 1901 and completed in 1907 on a lot that cost $865,000, a huge sum for the time (comparable to 100 times that today). Schwab was a self-made man, like Carnegie. After U.S. Steel, he founded Bethlehem Steel. The original lot to the house which belonged to the Orphan Asylum Society, extended as far west to where the Ansonia Hotel stands today. The land was originally purchased from the Society by banker Jacob Schiff but his wife wanted no part of living on the West Side. The French architect, Maurice Hebert created a French Renaissance chateau placed in its own park. The façade facing the Drive was based on Chenonceaux. Parts of the rear of the house were based on the chateaux at Blois and Azay-le-Rideau. A two-and-a-half story hall surrounded by balconies led to a massive staircase.
There were garages for four cars, a separate area for receiving good, along with a service tunnel underneath the garden terraces. There was also an indoor swimming pool, a chapel and a roof garden. The house cost about $6 million (about 100 times that in today’s currency). When the 75-room Schwab House was completed, it outshone the Vanderbilt and Astor houses on Fifth Avenue which occupied all of their smallish plots of land. It encouraged other wealthy New Yorkers to also build along the drive (including William Randolph Hearst who shelved his original plans for a house when he bought the Clarendon).
However, as the 20th century rolled on, the West Side fell behind in terms of residential prominence and the East Side ruled. Mr. Schwab lost much of his fortune in the 1929 Crash and went bankrupt. He died ten years later, leaving his palace to the City of New York, proposing it for the Mayor’s Mansion. The mayor at the time, Fiorello LaGuardia is reported to have said about the idea: “What?! Me, in that?” (He moved into the more patrician Gracie Mansion on the other side of town.). The land was used for a Victory Garden during the Second World War. In 1948 the house was razed and two years later a 17 story 654-unit apartment building replaced it. By that time, the neighborhood all along Riverside Drive was declining while its East Side sister was gaining in prominence and prestige. However, with first the development of Lincoln Center in the 1960s, and then additional development in the past 20 years, the neighborhoods along the Drive and West End as well as much of the Upper West Side have returned to very desirable prominence. |
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The Schwab House in detail. |
Norman Mailer. The newspapers both here and in London are full of obituaries and recollections about Norman Mailer who died over the weekend at age 84. There was a very good obituary in the New York Times by Charles McGrath. Taki, first in the Telegraph of London and then on his web site www.takimag.com, wrote compellingly about the man. Jesse Kornbluth has kindly shared his memories of the man in today’s Guest Diary.
I didn’t know the man, although I was in his company several times over the last several years, because he and his wife Norris were frequent dinner guests of our mutual friend Alice Mason, the New York high-end real estate broker.
For decades Alice gave monthly dinner parties – always for sixty – gathering together some of the most influential, powerful people in New York (and the world) of the time. Norman, who was an old friend of Alice’s especially liked her dinners because she was shrewdly careful about choosing guests who were interesting and had something to say to each other.
This assured one of our greatest novelists that there would be good, very good conversation and so he was as eager as anybody to attend. Alice’s guestlist eventually numbered in the hundreds, but I think Norman and Norris Mailer were one of the few couples that attended almost every one if they were in town.
I was first aware of him in college where I had a fraternity brother named Kenyon Bee who idolized him and wrote his big paper on Norman Mailer. I, hearing Kenny Bee rant and rave about the Mr. Macho novelist, was intrigued. I was a John O’Hara man, so I half –understood the fascination, as Mr. O’Hara, older by a generation than Mailer, was also fixated on the macho notion, although it was expressed somewhat differently in his prose. Norman Mailer (and John O’Hara) grew up in an America with a sense of masculinity that has now departed us thanks to the advent of technological innovation and all those liberation movements that earlier generations detested as they developed.
I was cowed by him, frankly. I was much younger, much taller, and he was Norman Mailer, a somewhat unruly-looking, compact barrel of a man, a great writer; a giant. Hardly a charm for a guy who liked butting heads as much as a handshake. Furthermore, I never wanted to be a pugilist or be known as a tough guy. Nor am I anything more than amused (if not cowed) by such maleness.
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| Philip Gourevitch of the Paris Review interviewing Norman Mailer about the life of the writer at the 2006 Paris Review Gala, “Spring Revel." |
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However, it was that brand of maleness that made Norman Mailer famous as a persona (introduced to the world by his best-selling first novel “The Naked And the Dead”) and enhanced his style and his talent. By the time I had the opportunity to be in the same room, at the same dinner party with him, he was also a man in his seventies, and already wearing the mantle of age-acquired wisdom, along with that powerful personality he was born with. We never had a conversation, alas, and so I never knew the joys that he could evoke in my friend Kornbluth or my former college fraternity brother.
It was reported by Michiko Kakutani in the Times that he once said that his early fame had turned him into the kind of person aware that everyone was relating to him as a personality rather than an ordinary man. Not having had the experience of fame, I have no idea what it feels like, but when in his company, as a person he didn’t know, I had a sense of that divide. It was perhaps because of that that I never bothered to broach a conversation with him. That, and my own natural shyness. Furthermore, although I wasn’t a “fan,” I had great admiration and respect for him as a writer, to the point of awe.
Norman’s sixth and last wife Norris Church who survives him, and who was married to him for the last half of his adult life, is a beauty, a gentle soul who had the strength and presence of mind to live and deal successfully with the Master for so long. Norris has a very accessible manner that demonstrates both sympathy and sensitivity, which is why we are friends. Possibly by the time he met Norris who was very much younger than he, the man had mellowed and realized how lucky he was to have her as his partner. His readers, his fans will always have him but those who were closely connected will always miss him. |
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