My Willa.

Willa Cather was born in Virginia but spent her formative years on the plains of Nebraska where the drama of the landscape and the pragmatism of prairie life mingled in her mind. She set out to become a physician, an unusual pursuit for a young woman at the turn of the last century, but her gifts as a writer were obvious at a young age and she switched her major to English at the University of Nebraska. After moving back east, she wrote for journals, newspapers, and magazines for ten years in Pittsburgh, PA, home to my favorite female authors, before moving and settling for the rest of her life in NYC, in Greenwich Village at the age of thirty-three. Here she wrote her masterpieces, Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction, much of it on Bank Street where you can still see her home. Her work is full of wistful romanticism flavored with an unusual economy, the hallmarks of her life in Nebraska, and while she produced quite a bit of verse, it is the free-form flowing prose-poetry I highlight here, a bit of wonder from My Antonia.

The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers...I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

Hughes and Poem.

Born in Joplin, Mississippi, you cannot talk of Harlem without talking of Langston Hughes. The Harlem Renaissance was nearly his invention, he certainly was its greatest voice, and he sought to give African- and Caribbean-Americans a similar voice, one without self-hatred, fear, or shame. He wrote columns, novels, and plays, but I love him for his poems, many short, some epic, all empowering. He inspired his contemporaries like Thurgood Marshall, Zora Neale Thurston, and Aaron Douglas and many foreign authors including black writers in French-speaking Africa. He discovered Alice Walker. Published often in The Crisis, the official literary magazine of the NAACP, he is most known for The Negro Speaks of Rivers, The Weary Blues, Let America be America Again, and Harlem, What Happens to a Dream Deferred? But it is the short poem below that took the wind out of my sails one day and I've never been quite the same since. It says nearly nothing, but because it is so specific, a moment we've all experienced--a poem about not having the words to write a poem--that it says everything to me, the bravery of a heart that puts a friendship in a box on a shelf because the silence is far more powerful than the poem. That is a courageous writer. And every time I encounter this piece, part of me cracks with a perfect sadness.

Poem.

I loved my friend.

He went away from me.

There's nothing more to say.

The poem ends,

Soft as it began--

I loved my friend.

Poe, alone--

Edgar Allan Poe wrote the poem below at the age of twenty, upon the death of his stepmother who raised him, on the very verge of his move to New York City. Poe was a haunted man, and the deep wellsprings of his passions were tightly wound around a moroseness and longing he harnessed with the exactitude of his verse. See how he breaks up the lines here, tearing apart his own meter he had perfectly established. The effect is as isolating as his words, as isolated as his heart. Poe was born in Boston, raised in Richmond, attended UVA and West Point, wrote Israfel, To Helen, and The City in the Sea in NYC, moved to Philadelphia, and wound up wandering a street in Baltimore where he was hospitalized then died, all and by the age of forty. But not before inventing the detective novel, some precursors to science fiction, and penning some of the most widely-read better-known and hauntingly beautiful American poetry.

Alone.
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
My passions from a common spring —
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow — I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone —
And all I lov’d — I lov’d alone —
Then — in my childhood — in the dawn
Of a most stormy life — was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still —
From the torrent, or the fountain —
From the red cliff of the mountain —
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold —
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by —
From the thunder, and the storm —
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view —

Milay.

While many places may claim her, her birthplace in Rockland, Maine, her childhood home in Camden of the same state, Poughkeepsie where she wowed them at Vassar, even Paris where she made a splash, we, here in New York, sing her praises perhaps the loudest, the city where she wandered Greenwich Village at the height of its Bohemia, and produced some of the loveliest poetry and in particular the most splendid sonnets in the English language, certainly the American canon. I love Edna St. Vincent Millay for her complicated heart. Hers was raw and fierce and brutally honest. As wonderful as life was, it was a painful affair to be sure, and as full as life was, it was unfair that it be snatched from even anyone in death. She lived by Thomas' words, raging against the dying of the light. In the poem below, she turns beauty on its head and I understand the terror of a brightness so brilliant that it blinds, the darkness in the light, an unrequited, thwarted love, the foul fairness, the poisonous libations that both beckon and maim:

When I too long have looked upon your face,
Wherein for me a brightness unobscured
Save by the mists of brightness has its place,
And terrible beauty not to be endured,
I turn away reluctant from your light,
And stand irresolute, a mind undone,
A silly, dazzled thing deprived of sight
From having looked too long upon the sun.
Then is my daily life a narrow room
In which a little while, uncertainly,
Surrounded by impenetrable gloom,
Among familiar things grown strange to me
Making my way, I pause; and feel, and hark,
Till I become accustomed to the dark.

Whitman.

I brought my new friends to Brooklyn the other day, at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge in the shadow of two massive monuments, the bridge itself and Walt Whitman's newspaper the Brooklyn Eagle. The Fulton Ferry Landing is quiet anymore to the traffic of steamboats, but alive with New Yorkers, Americans, and international travelers longing for the view. The new fences that try to hold this humanity back from the East River are wisely adorned with Walt Whitman's words, our greatest poet I think, our American myth-maker. The myth of cities never so clearly rendered throughout the centuries, Ur, Cairo, Athens, Rome, Constantinople, have never been glorified and rarified so tenderly and courageously as Whitman tenders New York City. Read his stirring words as I did again on the fence just the other day, and get a glimpse of why we love the idea of city where every single corner and every single moment vibrates with possibility:

Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!
Gorgeous clouds of the sun-set! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me;
Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!
Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta!—stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!
Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!
Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!
Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house, or street, or public assembly!
Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name!
Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!
Play the old role, the role that is great or small, according as one makes it!

All hail the Municipal Building.

The City Beautiful movement was an urban planning model that swept the US in 1890, a response to the overcrowding of tenements and the burgeoning skyscrapers of NYC and Chicago especially. Its proponents heralded a return to classicism and studied French and Italian Renaissance architecture at L'École des Beaux Arts in Paris. They hoped that a beautiful city would promote civic pride and civic virtues, and lend order to the chaos of unprecedented population growth. Marking the end of this movement was the construction of NYCs Municipal Building.


New York City incorporated all five boroughs in 1898. Overnight, the city grew five times over and was desperate for the office space to keep this megapolis running smoothly. After coming in second place in the international competition to build a new Grand Central Terminal, the firm of McKim, Meade and White won the commission this time around and proposed a 40-story tower. It is pictured here going up and completed in its early years.

When I cross Chambers Street, this new Colossus never fails to catch my breath and capture my imagination. Built rather like a Roman Column in three phases, base, shaft, and capital, this building incorporates French and Roman Imperial elements: An 'Arch of Constantine" flanked by a colonnade announces the entrance, a Guastavino-tiled vaulted ceiling, an echo of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, leads to a subway station, the first building to incorporate a subway station in its design. A U-shaped facade soars up to the pinnacle. 

At the top, a multi-drummed tempietto rises in stages of Corinthian columns leading the eye to a 25-foot gilded statue, Civic Fame, the third largest statue in Manhattan and the highest. Surrounding the tower are four other gothic-like turrets representing the four other boroughs being tied to Manhattan.

It is a magnificent building, copied the world over, and particularly badly in the former Soviet Union where Josef Stalin, having stolen the design on a trip to NYC, had no less than seven of them built, known as the Seven Ugly Sisters. But whenever I pass ours, or on the few occasions I've had to go in, I feel particularly proud to be a New Yorker. The City Beautiful movement weaves its spells on me and my civic virtue exactly one hundred years later.

The old Hotel Astor.

As I look out my living room window eastward, down the block is the somewhat uninspired Minskoff Building, a tower recognizable for its fins at the top. But until as late as 1967, that view would have been of the second-empire Beaux-arts bubble of a building called the Hotel Astor, built in 1904, with its copper mansard roof dotted with rows of ox-eye windows, elaborately-themed ballrooms, rooftop gardens, and exotic restaurants, it brought elegance to the backwater that was once Longacre Square before it was Times Square, and built right out to the street side lending a bit of claustrophobia to the later years of its life in the growing neighborhood, in the neighborhood that fell down under its watch, and so, it had to go. It did have to go. It had nothing to do with what Times Square is today. That's ok. But it's fun to remember.

The old Waldorf Astoria.

Designed by Henry Hardenbergh who gave us The Plaza and The Dakota, the Waldorf Astoria sat on 34th Street and 5th Avenue. It was a fantasy of a building, like a chateau in the Loire Valey, like a castle on a hill in Bavaria, like a Russian Orthodox temple in Odessa. Hardenbergh used elements of Beaux-arts ornamentation, Ottoman onion domes, and gothic length to give us this eye candy that was obsolete in thirty-six years. Astounding. The wealth moved uptown, leaving the Waldorf Astoria in the dust, the same dust that would give rise to the Empire State Building that sits on the site today.

The old Grand Central.

The predecessor to Grand Central Terminal, this was a building reminiscent of The Louvre for its enormous mansard roofs, it's heavily articulated rusticated cornices, the ornate clock faces, and the delicate grille-work. Designed by John Snook whose cast-iron warehouses, department stores, and office building still dot SoHo, this building remarkably, stood only for thirty-two years.

The old Met.

Critics called The old Met "The Yellow Brick Brewery" for its industrial look sitting where it did at Broadway and the whole block between 39th and 40th Sts. in the middle of the Garment District. Opened in 1883 with a production of FAUST, it was gutted by fire just a few years later in 1892 and the interior rebuilt under the artful eye of architects Carrere and Hastings. This is The Met most people remember, with it's golden proscenium inscribed with the names of six composers, Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Gounod, and Verdi. New Yorkers regularly saw enormous set pieces on the street at the back of the theatre. It was clearly not big enough to be a world-class modern opera house. After several proposals to move The Met to Rockefeller Center and Columbus Circle, The new Met opened at Lincoln Center in 1966 and The old Met was razed the following year.