Photos: No stranger in this Village, James Baldwin recognized with official plaque

New York City laid a claim to one of its most distinguished native sons last Wednesday, October 7, when a plaque honoring James Baldwin was officially unveiled at 81 Horatio Street in Greenwich Village.

The plaque in honor of James Baldwin at 81 Horatio Street
in New York City, unveiled on Oct. 7, 2015.

Baldwin lived at 81 Horatio Street from 1958 to 1961 and wrote part of his 1962 novel Another Country there. The plaque commemorates his time at the address and acknowledges in a more tacit way the influence Greenwich Village had on Baldwin’s art and activism ever since he first found a refuge there, while still in his teens, in the early 1940s. (Rufus Scott, the doomed protagonist of Another Country, thinks of the Village as “the place of liberation”—years before real-life events in the neighborhood would give that term added resonance.)

The plaque is a project of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, with the support of the Two Boots Foundation; its unveiling made an apt coda to the recent citywide “Year of James Baldwin” marking what would have been the author’s 90th year.

At the ceremony Library of America publisher Max Rudin was part of a roster of speakers that included James Baldwin’s nephew Trevor Baldwin, writer Fran Lebowitz, and Gregory Pardlo, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Enjoy photos from the scene via the gallery below, and click here for the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation’s video of the complete ceremony.

All photos © Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.

Trevor Baldwin addresses the crowd on Oct. 7, 2015.

Library of America Publisher Max Rudin, writer Fran Lebowitz,
and Karen Loew of the Greenwich Village Society for
Historic Preservation before the unveiling on Oct. 7, 2015.

Max Rudin offers remarks on Oct. 7, 2015.

A crowd fills Horatio Street to hear Fran Lebowitz speak
from the stoop (far right) on Oct. 7, 2015.

Click here for complete information on Later Novels, the third and final volume in The Library of America’s Baldwin edition.

Related posts:

• Photos: At Edith Wharton’s house, James Baldwin receives his due
• James Baldwin, resurgent on screen and on the page in 2015

Love it? Hate it? “There is no middle ground.” Teresa Carpenter plumbs 400 years of diaries about New York

Guest blog post by Teresa Carpenter, editor of New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009, just published by The Modern Library

Today I arrived by train in New York City, which I’d never seen before, walked through the grandeur of Grand Central Terminal, stepped outside, got my first look at the city and instantly fell in love with it. Silently, inside myself, I yelled: I should have been born here!

Edward Robb Ellis

April 22, 1947

Edward Robb Ellis’s wonderstruck Midwestern boy’s ardor for New York never waned throughout his long life in the city, a period of fifty years during which time he became one of its best-known newspaper columnists and most faithful diarists.

His entry stands in marked contrast to that of eleven-year-old Anaïs Nin who, wrenched from her beloved Barcelona to relocate in New York, wrote on August 11, 1913:

It was 4 o’clock when the ship began to move again . . . Now, leaning on the railing, I couldn’t hear anything. My eyes were fixed on the lights that grew closer, I saw tall buildings, I heard the whistling of the engine, I saw a great deal of movement. Huge buildings went by in front of me. I hated those buildings in advance because they hid what I love most—flowers, birds, fields, liberty. . .

. . . Although I admire New York for its progress. I hate it, I find it superficial. I saw it as an ugly prison…

The point is: You either love New York at first blush or you want to turn and take the next train out. There is no middle ground.

My own experience was closer to Ellis’s. A Midwesterner as well, I came in through the modern and infinitely uglier Penn Station and I nearly fell to my knees and kissed the pavement. Who can explain that kind of spontaneous love you first feel for a city? New York just seems to open its arms and whisper, “No matter how strange you are, I accept you.”

Loving New York, I think, is not so much a mark of character as an indicator of temperament. You have to be comfortable with change—constant, rapid change. You must even thrive on it. You can be as public as you want or as private as you need to be. That’s possibly why celebrities like the city so much. Some days in New York you just naturally have the wind at your back, other days it’s like you’re tacking into the gale. Some will argue that it’s not the ideal place for creation of books or music or paintings; too many distractions and the ubiquitous temptation to party. Others will insist that it’s the ideal place because it marries ability and opportunity. I hold with the latter.

I’ve spend the last seven years culling through four hundred years of diaries about New York. I’ve seen the city at its worst, and in creating New York Diaries I didn’t shy away from the ugliness. To some readers I may seem a ruthless portrayer of cupidity, vice, personal betrayal, and the pity of war. Mine is not, as one reviewer noted, a Hallmark card sensibility.

But I was as deeply moved by the stories of hope and the restless striving for beauty recorded in those pages. One of the collection’s most captivating figures is Jonas Mekas, a Lithuanian refugee who was shipped to the U.S. as a displaced person in 1949. He kept a diary of those years, later published as I Had Nowhere to Go: Diaries, 1944-1954. Pursuing concurrent careers as filmmaker, critic, and the first director of Anthology Film Archives, he would later be hailed as “The Godfather of American Avant-Garde Cinema.”

During his early days in New York, Mekas lived hand to mouth as a factory worker. In an entry of November 16, 1949, he writes:

Still with G.M.Co. Putting together scissors, pliers, screwdrivers, but most of the time I don’t even know what. When we get an order of drills, the palms get covered with blisters. I can’t even touch anything, even with gloves. They keep rotating the workers from one table to another, but it’s of little help. 

The fingers are working automatically. They lead their own automatic lives. I may as well let them. Who cares about the fingers. I leave them alone. They keep moving. … Suddenly I catch myself dreaming, making plans, completely unconscious of the activities of my fingers. I have no idea what they did in the meanwhile. Maybe they strangled somebody. I wouldn’t know. I am not responsible for my fingers at all. I am a space traveller.

I am taking off again! Next to my knees the radiator is boiling. I am standing at a long table, with my back to other workers. The radiator sizzles. Behind my back a monotonous noise. In another corner some women are singing, their voices are very high. It’s their own form of space travelling. They must be off to somewhere.

Went to see Firebird (Balanchine).

Clocking off the assembly line to catch the ballet? Is there any place in the world for such a man? Of course there is: New York.

Also of interest:

• “The man who wrote the century”: Laura Johnston profiles Edward Robert Ellis on Salon 
• “Writers in love: walking in New York and the light of Los Angeles,” a previous Reader’s Almanac post 
• “The Duel,” an O. Henry parable about New York, a previous Story of the Week 
• “Reviewing how writers have coped with 9/11,” a previous Reader’s Almanac post 

Related LOA works: Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (includes entries by many of the writers in New York Diaries); American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now (includes six essays by Jonas Mekas)

Writers in love: walking in New York and the light of Los Angeles

In the past two months Flavorwire has collected bouquets of literary love letters to America’s two largest cities—and we couldn’t let them go unrequited. In May Kathleen Massara assembled memorable quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. B. White, Ralph Ellison, Gary Shteyngart, Colum McCann, Joseph O’Neill, Patti Smith, John Steinbeck, Don DeLillo, and Zadie Smith on different facets of New York City. The quote from Patti Smith’s Just Kids conjures with “Frank O’Hara territory” and reminds us of the long tradition of New York “walking around” poems that began with Walt Whitman. Phillip Lopate traced some of this history in his introduction to Writing New York: A Literary Anthology, the LOA’s motherlode of New York love:

Once Whitman perfected the catalogue or list, it became a favorite technique among New York poets for conveying sensory saturation. Whitman’s impact on later peripatetic city poets (such as Frank O’Hara, Charles Reznikoff, and James Schuyler) was vast, partly because the all-embracing, synthesizing persona he developed offered a solution to the problem of integrating the random stimuli of modern life. The walk poem is a species of travel literature in which the writer puts himself through culture shock in his own city.

Here is Whitman not just walking but traversing time in a passage from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever
        so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look at the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright
        flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift
        current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-
        stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

In poems like “A Step Away from Them” and “The Day Lady Died,” Frank O’Hara built on Whitman’s walk poem to create “diary poems” that, in Lopate’s words “found some larger resonance in the trivia and detritus of the passing moment. You can hear Frank O'Hara, Patti Smith, and others read some “walking around” poems on this Poetry Foundation UbuWeb podcast.

Last week Massara paid homage to the other coast’s big city with Literary Love Letters to Los Angeles. Enjoying quotes from Joan Didion, Christopher Isherwood, Raymond Chandler, Steve Erickson, Karen Tei Yamashita, Charles Bukowski, Bret Easton Ellis, James Ellroy, Nathanael West, and the bicoastal F. Scott Fitzgerald, we were delighted to find that seven of these ten are among the seventy-seven contributors to Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology. One commenter found “all of [the quotes chosen by Massara] pretty damning” and, for a corrective, we immediately turned to Lawrence Weschler’s luminous essay “L.A. Glows” in which he interviews artists, poets, scientists, cinematographers, environmental engineers, art gallery directors, and even Vin Scully, the veteran Dodgers announcer, to probe the ethereal quality of L.A.’s light. Here’s a taste from his session with writer and public information officer D. J. Waldie, author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir:

It seems to me, actually, that there are four—or, anyway, at least four—lights in L.A. To begin with, there’s the cruel, actinic light of late July. Its glare cuts piteously through the general shabbiness of Los Angeles. Second comes the nostalgic, golden light of late October. It turns Los Angeles into El Dorado, a city of fool’s gold. It’s the light William Faulkner—in his story “Golden Land”—called “treacherous unbrightness.” It’s the light the tourists come for—the light, to be more specific, of unearned nostalgia. Third, there’s the gunmetal-gray light of the months between December and July. Summer in Los Angeles doesn’t begin until mid-July. In the months before, the light can be as monotonous as Seattle’s. Finally comes the light, clear as stone-dry champagne, after a full day of rain. Everything in this light is somehow simultaneously particularized and idealized: each perfect, specific, ideal little tract house, one beside the next. And that’s the light that breaks hearts in L.A.

Also of interest:

• San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles: Discovering your own infinite city, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• The students at Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles have been compiling an online bibliography of literature about Los Angeles
• Wikipedia’s ongoing listing of books set in New York City
• What is the best novel about Washington?, a previous Reader's Almanac post

Related LOA works: Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (includes “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and the two O’Hara poems); Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology—ON SALE: $9.95 (includes William Faulkner’s “Golden Land,” Lawrence Weschler’s “L.A. Glows,” and an excerpt from D. J. Waldie’s Holy Land)

San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles: Discovering your own infinite city

Reading Adam Kirsch’s recent review of Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas—and viewing some of the book’s engaging maps on 7x7—makes us want to take up the author’s call to “discover your own infinite city.” Kirsch describes Solnit’s lyrical approach to cartography:

Ordinary maps show only the physical infrastructure that these "many worlds" share—streets, rivers, monuments. The maps in Infinite City, on the other hand, treat the physical city as a blank slate, on which many different experiences can be overwritten, like texts on a palimpsest.

Like poems, some of these maps are inspired by witty conceits and unlikely juxtapositions. "Death and Beauty" plots the locations of the 99 murders that took place in San Francisco in 2008 and, on the same map, shows where to find stands of Monterey cypress—trees whose "stable, silent lives," Solnit writes, "made them the right counterweight to violent death."

These maps reminded us of other reimaginings of familiar places, like the Literary Map of Manhattan that Randy Cohen and Nigel Holmes created in 2005 which showed where “imaginary New Yorkers lived, worked, played, drank, walked and looked at ducks.” Or New York Magazine’s “Ten Little Cities” which contended that “each person’s city is a map of his obsessions.” (Don’t miss the “Lit Guy” map.) Or Wired’s painstakingly researched Unofficial Thomas Pynchon Guide to Los Angeles, a must companion to his 2009 L.A. homage Inherent View.

What’s your favorite remapping or reimagining of a familiar place?

Related LOA works: Writing New York: A Literary Anthology; Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology