Tag: the Bowery

New York as it was

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Frank Oscar Larson (1896-1964) was born in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, of Swedish immigrant parents and lived in Flushing, Queens most of his life. As an adult, Larson spent his days at a branch of the Empire Trust Company (now Bank of New York Mellon), working his way up through the ranks from auditor to vice-president, and spare time on weekends taking photographs of street life throughout New York City.

He was an accomplished photographer who eloquently documented 1950s Chinatown, the Bowery, Hell’s Kitchen, City Island, Times Square, Central Park, and much more.

This exhibition is compiled from thousands of negatives recently discovered stored away in his daughter-in-law’s house in Maine in 2009. Soren Larson, his grandson and a television news camera man and producer, has been scanning and printing the 55-year-old images found stored in over 100 envelopes filled with mostly medium format, 2-1/4 x 2-1/4″ negatives, and neatly noted by location and date in Larson’s own hand.

Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories is on view at the
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Times Square Tintypes: Irving Berlin

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In this chapter from his 1932 book, Times Square Tintypes, Broadway columnist Sidney Skolsky profiles perhaps the greatest of American songwriters, Irving Berlin.
 

THE BIRTH OF THE BLUES

HE has a name that will live forever and he bought it for a song. IRIVING BERLIN.
Came to this country at the age of four, the youngest of eight children. In Russia his father was a cantor. Here a kosher butcher.
He has yet to find a hat to fit him.
He eats a lot for one of his size.
Plays the piano by ear. And only in F sharp. Has a specially constructed piano with a sliding keyboard. When the music calls for another key he merely moves the lever.
He is not a one finger player. Uses all his fingers badly.
Has a scar on his forehead. It was received on a Washington’s Birthday in Cherry Street, trying to start a bonfire.
Thinks he is a good stud poker player. His friends say he’s lucky.
His pet aversions are riveters and second verses.
Ran away from home at the age of fourteen. His first stop was Callahan’s saloon. Here he sang “The Mansion of Aching Hearts” until enough coins were tossed at him to pay for a night’s lodging. Later became a singing waiter at Nigger Mike’s place, 12 Pell Street. The barker on the trip to Chinatown bus now points out the place.
He wrote “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” credited with starting the jazz vogue, at the age of twenty-three.
Crowds frighten him. So do certain individuals.
His idea of a great achievement is writing a song that reaches the million copy mark.
Maintains a home in West Forty-sixth Street. But lives elsewhere. The first of every month generally finds him moving.
His square moniker is Israel Baline. For a time, he went under the name of Cooney. Became Berlin because that was the way the Bowery pronounced Baline.
As a singing waiter he kicked a hoofer named George White out of the place for being a pest, and he served Al Smith.
Is always chewing gum. This can be observed by merely watching the funny way his hat moves on his head.
His favorite biographer is Alexander Woollcott.
He composes in this fashion: First playing the song on the piano. Then singing it to Arthur Johnson, his right and left hand man, who records upon paper what he hears. Then Johnson plays the written manuscript. This is the first draft. From this Berlin works on to the final version. Often after a song has been published he changes it.
His bill for flowers for the Mrs. is $1,000 a month.
His patent leather dinner shoes have more cracks than his hair has waves.
Of all the songs he has written, a figure exceeding four hundred, his favorite is “The Song Is Ended But the Melody Lingers On.”
Is very restless. Can’t sit or stand still. Always paces the floor. He walks miles in any room he is in. It is the only exercise he gets.
As far as playwrights go, his taste begins and ends with George S. Kaufman. As for music, he’ll whistle anything by Jerome Kern. For lyrics he hands first prize to B. G. De Sylva. And if asked to name the swellest guy in the theatrical game, he’d shout Sam Harris.
He has had to change his entire working schedule since he became a father.
He has never worn a diamond. The only jewelry he wears is, occasionally, a pearl tie pin.
Never eats the crust of bread or rolls. Always plucks the filling. This can be seen circled about his plate.
After finishing a song he sings it to the first person he meets. A bell boy at Palm Beach was the first person to hear “Lazy.” A Broadway taxi driver was the first to hear “All Alone.” A bewildered stranger, occupation unknown, was the first to hear “Say It With Music.”
He never writes anything in longhand but his signature on a check. Everything else he prints.
The one thing in life he is looking forward to is walking into a restaurant with his daughter, Mary Ellen.
Of all the songs ever written the one he’d love to be the author of is “The Rosary.”
On the fly leaf of a book containing every song he wrote there is this ditty which he believes sums up everything:

Let Me Be a Troubadour,
And I Will For Nothing More
Than One Short Hour Or So
To Sing My Song And Go.

He has a form-fitting couch which was especially designed for him.

Times Square Tintypes: Times Square

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In this chapter from his 1932 book, Times Square Tintypes, Broadway columnist Sidney Skolsky profiles not a person, but the Crossroads of the World, the area that gave Skolsky’s book its name—Times Square.

MY STREET

FORTY-SECOND Street and Seventh Avenue . . . Everybody calls it Broadway. The Rialto Theatre. A hanging says it is “The House of Hits”. . . . But the big line is at the Paramount . . . Sightseeing buses . . . Old women sitting in them . . . Making a living as decoys . . . See the Bowery . . . A lecture through Chinatown . . . Why, all the Chinks own restaurants on Broadway . . . There ain’t no Chinamen in Chinatown . . . The chap who is shouting that he is going to point out the historic places . . . Did you know he only arrived here from Portland last week? . . . See the old man selling The Birth Control Review . . . He’s doing it for the wife and kiddies. . . .

“A million horns from motor cars,
A million lights that dim the stars. . .”

The Astor Hotel . . . Must have been nice when it was a big farm . . . More people live outside than in . . . That drug store diagonally opposite . . . Gray’s . . . You know, that’s where you buy theatre tickets at half-price . . . Best seats for all the “hits” in town . . . Isn’t that a well-dressed man? . . . Tuxedo . . . High hat . . . He’s got class . . . Sure has poise . . . Must be some big society fellow . . . Wait a moment and his shirt will light up, advertising a brand of cigar . . .

“That’s Broadway, Broadway
Heart of the World . . .”

Loew’s New York Roof . . . It’s called the old men’s club . . . They go there to sleep . . . Did you know it once had an elegant French name and house the first Ziegfeld Follies? There’s a nut embarrassing couples by trying to make the girl take a rose and make the guy pay for it . . . Another Nedick thirst station . . . Hungry, have a hot dog, too . . . Just like Coney Island . . . A shabby, fate-beaten old man . . . Once was a great architect and built many theaters . . . He now haunts the lobbies of those theaters . . .

“A painted smile, a hard-luck tale,
A helping hand—they’re all for sale,
On Broadway, Broadway. . . .

A Lucky Strike display situation . . . Try to edge your way near the window . . . The blonde is worth seeing . . . Better than most chorus girls . . . Don’t have to pay $5.50 either . . . The fight at Madison Square Garden round for round in the doorway of a sheet music shop . . . And if you’re interested in art, you can look at the picture postal cards also . . . Childs . . . See them tossing buckwheat cakes . . . This is their Broadway place . . . Only the best performers work here . . . No newcomers . . . The crowd is too large and critical . . . Newcomers always get stage fright . . . Another United Cigar store . . . Say, if they prohibited smoking where would we find telephone booths? . . . The Palace across the street . . . It used to be the dream of all vaudevillians to play there . . . Now if the movie houses don’t get them, they’re there . . .

“And there’s a crowd there lauding you and applauding you
When you’re on top;
Same crowd hissing you and dismissing you
If you should flop . . .

The photomatic . . . You can take you picture . . . Eight for a quarter . . . They’re all ready to take home in five minutes . . . Say, isn’t this a wonderful age? . . . Let’s get tomorrow’s paper today and see what has happened tomorrow . . . This sure is great . . .

“But those who fail must learn to say
Tomorrow is another day . . .

Here we are at Fifty-second Street . . . Just ten blocks . . . It’s dull from here up . . . Broadway’s a small place, isn’t it? . . . Just ten blocks . . . Ten blocks for all the world to get famous in . . .

“That’s Broadway, Broadway,
The Heart of the World. . . .”

Talmadge in the Times

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A couple of worthy recent stories from The New York Times — one by Dave Kehr about the life and career of silent star Norma Talmadge:

An Independent Woman, Nobly Suffering in Silents
She was perhaps the biggest female star of the silent era. Her dark, depthless eyes gazed from the covers of influential fan magazines, projecting a nobly suppressed pain and longing; in the stories inside, she — or her ghost writers — advised the emerging independent American women of the 1920s on matters of fashion and home décor. She regularly topped the popularity polls, outdistancing rivals like Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri and Mary Pickford. She and her husband, the producer Joseph Schenck, founded their own production company in 1917; by 1924, The New York Times was identifying her as “the highest salaried screen actress.”

Yet Norma Talmadge is barely remembered today. Worse, she is misremembered, having inspired two unfair caricatures that have lived on in a pair of popular films. In “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952), she is parodied as Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), a silent diva whose Brooklyn accent undermines her talking debut in a French historical drama. (Talmadge’s second sound feature, the 1930 “DuBarry, Woman of Passion,” was indeed a failure, but Talmadge’s faint accent was the least of its problems.)

More malignantly, Billy Wilder used Norma Talmadge as the obvious if unacknowledged source of Norma Desmond, the grotesque, predatory silent movie queen of his 1950 film “Sunset Boulevard.” Enthusiastically interpreted by Gloria Swanson, Talmadge’s rival in the 1920s, the Desmond character draws on Talmadge’s reclusiveness (she left films in 1930, living in a Beverly Hills mansion on the considerable fortune she had earned in her prime), her well-known affair with a younger man (the actor Gilbert Roland, her co-star in several ’20s hits) and her reputation for erratic behavior (suffering from severe arthritis, she became addicted to painkillers and in 1946 married her doctor) to compose the movies’ ultimate symbol of female sexual hysteria.

Norma Desmond has become ubiquitous in American popular culture, but Norma Talmadge has become all but invisible. Although an unusually high percentage of her films survive — “Of her 51 features, 32 are currently thought to be complete and 10 more are preserved in part,” Greta de Groat writes on her excellent Talmadge Web site (stanford.edu/~gdegroat/NT/home.htm) — until now only a handful of her earlier movies have been available on home video.

“The Norma Talmadge Collection” from Kino International corrects that lamentable situation by offering two Talmadge features from her glory years: the 1926 comedy “Kiki,” directed by Clarence Brown, and the 1923 melodrama “Within the Law,” directed by Frank Lloyd. Oddly, neither film is typical Talmadge. “Kiki” is a wholly anomalous comedy, with Talmadge as a Parisian street urchin who becomes a music hall star, and “Within the Law” strays from melodrama into crime-film territory. But there is enough here to get a sense of who Talmadge was and what her gifts were…. [read more]

And another, by Dan Barry, about a century and a half in the colorful life of a small hotel on the Bowery in New York City:

On the Bow’ry
Open the door to a small hotel on the Bowery.

A small hotel, catering to Asian tourists, that used to be a flophouse that used to be a restaurant. That used to be a raucous music hall owned by a Tammany lackey called Alderman Fleck, whose come-hither dancers were known for their capacious thirsts. That used to be a Yiddish theater, and an Italian theater, and a theater where the melodramatic travails of blind girls and orphans played out. That used to be a beer hall where a man killed another man for walking in public beside his wife. That used to be a liquor store, and a clothing store, and a hosiery store, whose advertisements suggested that the best way to avoid dangerous colds was “to have undergarments that are really and truly protectors.”

Climb the faintly familiar stairs, sidestepping ghosts, and pay $138 for a room, plus a $20 cash deposit to dissuade guests from pocketing the television remote. Walk down a hushed hall that appears to be free of any other lodger, and enter Room 207. The desk’s broken drawer is tucked behind the bed. Two pairs of plastic slippers face the yellow wall. A curled tube of toothpaste rests on the sink.

Was someone just here? Was it George? [read more]