As I’ve walked around the West Village, I’ve been struck by the variety of wrought iron railing and fence designs. Some examples here plus notes on David Carr’s memoir and the Tenement Museum.
RECENT READING
The Night of the Gun by David Carr
At the Aspen Ideas Festival several years ago, I saw Andrew Rossi’s film, Page One, a documentary about the New York Times. Then I experienced seeing and hearing journalist David Carr on a panel following the screening. Mr. Carr was featured prominently in the film and was both articulate and a character. My curiosity piqued, I added his 2008 memoir to my to-be-read list. The book lingered on a wish list until finally I loaded it onto my Kindle and decided its time had come.
Sadly, Mr. Carr collapsed at work in February 2015 and died. His memoir is raw, graphic, sometimes tedious, and ultimately hopeful. A risk taker and addicted to crack cocaine, he, nonetheless, managed to hold down good professional jobs by day while hanging out with some of the less savory elements of society by night. In and out of detox facilities and arrested numerous times, mistreating one girlfriend after another, he was ultimately saved by being needed to care for his twin daughters.
Unlike the standard recovery memoir, this one takes the form of the author going to interview the people he hurt in the past to hear their account of events and how it tallied with his memory. Not an easy book to read, but I felt I learned a lot about David Carr and appreciated even more what he was able to accomplish.
IMMIGRANT FAMILIES
Thanks to a great recommendation from my friend Patricia, we visited the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in the Bowery. It was a lovely morning and so we walked the mile and a half, passing through less polished neighborhoods and lots of grafittied buildings. The museum purchased 87 Orchard Street, a 5-story tenement built in 1863, in 1989 and soon thereafter began offering tours of selected apartments.
Parts of the building are unrestored to preserve for visitors something closely akin to the residents’ experience. Other apartments have been restored to look like and be furnished like they were when real people lived in them. The building had 22 apartments and a German beer saloon on the ground level and was occupied by residents from the 1860’s until 1935. In that year, new legislation mandated changes to meet stricter building codes that the owner opted not to implement.
We did the “Hard Times” tour led by the very knowledgeable Rachel Wetter which introduced us to two apartments; one inhabited by the German Jewish Gumpertz family in the 1870’s and 80’s, and the other by the Italian Catholic Baldizzi family who resided there from about 1924 until 1935. The apartments were small and early on without electricity, running water or indoor toilets. Mr. Gumpertz was a shoemaker who disappeared one day and never returned to his family. His wife became a dressmaker for a time. Mr. Baldizzi was a carpenter. One day his daughter who spend some of her childhood years in that apartment just showed up at the museum. She subsequently gave the museum artifacts to add to “their” apartment.
There are several other tours offered each day and we plan to return. And next year, new stories of Puerto Rican and Chinese immigrants will be featured.
[All photos copyright JWFarrington]
