W.H. Auden in New York

This weekend marks the fortieth anniversary of the passing of poet W.H. Auden, who died September 29, 1973. Born in Britain in 1907, Auden moved to New York in 1939, ultimately becoming an American citizen. He lived a number of places around the city between 1939 and 1953 before settling in a tenement at 77 St. Mark's Place, where he would live until a year before his death.

Auden's first home in New York was the Hotel George Washington at Lexington Avenue and 23rd Street. He lived there for two months before moving to the Upper East Side and when he left, he gave them a lengthy poem, which includes the lines:

It stands on the Isle of Manhattan
Not far from the Lexington line,
And although it's demode to fatten,
There's a ballroom where parties may dine....

[T]he sheets are not covered with toffee,

And I think he may safely assume

That he won't find a fish in his coffee

Or a very large snake in his room.

Auden moved to 237 East 81st Street, a nondescript tenement apartment; he had come to America with his friend Christopher Isherwood who joined him on East 81st Street, but Isherwood evidently thought the place haunted. In general, Isherwood was overwhelmed by New York City, and by the end of 1939, he'd decamped to California, never to return.

Auden, meanwhile, relocated to Brooklyn Heights, where he lived at 1 Montague Terrace 1939-40; a plaque on the side of the building at that address trades off the Auden connection, but the apartment complex that stands there now is not the building where Auden lived.

Leaving Montague Terrace, Auden moved into the famed "February House" at 7 Middagh Street, which he shared with an eclectic group of artists: Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee.

Over the next decade, Auden moved around a great deal; he taught at the University of Michigan and Swarthmore College. He was drafted but turned down for service in World War II. Eventually, he ended up at 77 St. Mark's Place (which, many years earlier, had housed the Russian newspaper Novy Mir, which counted among its staff writers exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky).

Auden purchased a summer house in Austria, but spent his winters in New York, drinking at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge ("You could never say when he was drunk, because he was drinking all the time") and writing poetry. Hannah Arendt later wrote that Auden's "slum apartment was so cold that the toilet no longer functioned and he had to use the toilet in the liquor store at the corner."

Auden was a parishioner at St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery nearby on Tenth Street, but he's not buried in their magnificent churchyard. He died in Vienna and is buried in Austria near his summer home.

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What's in a Name?: The Bowery

Last week, Curbed and Racked pointed out that at least one new boutique on the ever-gentrifying Bowery would like to rename the entire neighborhood the “Bowery District.” This is just the most recent in a long line of attempts to change or repurpose the Bowery name over the years.

The original lane that now bears the name Bowery—the English corruption of the Dutch bouwerij or “farm”—led from the city of New Amsterdam into the countryside. The original lane now goes by three different names in its different sections: Park Row, the Bowery, and Fourth Avenue.

The most famous Dutch bouwerij was owned by Peter Stuyvesant, who lies buried in the churchyard of St. Mark’s in the Bowery on 10th Street and Second Avenue. For years, this church was known as St. 

Mark’s in the Bouwerie; its archaic spelling not only hearkened back to the days of the Dutch, but also helped distinguished it from the nearby thoroughfare. By the late 19th century, the Bowery had become synonymous with skid row.

A lot of the Bowery’s reputation was deserved, but at least part of the blame for its near-universal name recognition was the musical A Trip to Chinatown, which featured the song “The Bowery.” Its chorus boasts:

The Bow'ry, the Bow'ry
They say such things and they do strange things,
On the Bow'ry! The Bow'ry!
I'll never go there any more.

By 1916, the street’s reputation had gotten so bad that civic groups battled to come up with a new name for the thoroughfare. One suggestion was “Cooper Avenue” in honor of Cooper Union founder (and Jell-O pioneer)* Peter Cooper.

A rival proposition recommended “Central Broadway.” It’s hard to imagine the chaos this name change might have brought about in a city that already featured Broadway, West Broadway, and East Broadway.

Neither of these suggestions had any real traction, perhaps because there was still nostalgia for the old Bouwerie of Peter Stuyvesant. Indeed, that nostalgia was so strong that in 1956 a group of merchants suggested that Third Avenue be renamed “The Bouwerie,” to invoke the charm and refinement of a bygone age. (That this would have given the city a Bowery and a Bouwerie a block apart seems not to have figured into their calculations.) Plans were underway at the time to remove the last vestiges of the Third Avenue “El,” and it seemed logical to local boosters to get rid of the name Third Avenue—which they saw as intimately connected to the failure of the “El”—and replace it with Bouwerie, which would increase the street’s cachet and, presumably, retail rents.

(See our earlier post about York Avenue for another example of a street renaming in the same era for much the same reasons.)

* Peter Cooper and his gelatin fixation will be the subject of a future post.

 

You can read more about the Bowery in Inside the Apple; visit our home page www.insidetheapple.net.

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