https://www.cityofsmoke.com New York in History and Anecdote Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:49:25 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.3 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1383 Wed, 11 Mar 2009 02:21:06 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1383 In his eight decades, Sadakichi Hartmann fried eggs with Walt Whitman, discussed verse with Stéphane Mallarmé, and drank with John Barrymore, who once described him as "a living freak presumably sired by Mephistopheles out of Madame Butterfly." Critic, poet, novelist, playwright, dancer, actor, and swaggering egotist, Hartmann might lift your watch]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1467 Mon, 16 Feb 2009 03:56:09 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1467 He wrote near the end that his life was divided into four rivers: writing, theater, body, and action. He memorialized all of it through photographs. Some were conventional. When Yukio Mishima came to New York with his wife for a belated honeymoon in 1960, they were photographed on the Staten Island ferry and before the Manhattan skyline, like any tourist couple. ]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1462 Wed, 11 Feb 2009 02:33:26 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1462 On May 15, 1877, fifty thousand people marched to Central Park's Mall to dedicate J. Wilson MacDonald's statue of a great poet. The National Guard escorted the dignitaries: the Cabinet, the Army's general-in-chief, the governor, the mayor. Brass bands thumped away until 3:00 PM. Then the venerable William Cullen Bryant]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1322 Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:55:33 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1322 In 1928 Herbert Asbury published The Gangs of New York, his masterwork on 19th century New York's virile young ruffians. That same year Herbert R. Mayes published Alger: A Biography Without a Hero, the first biography of Horatio Alger Jr., whose works--countless moralizing books for boys--presented his view of the]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1018 Sun, 21 Jan 2001 20:36:07 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1018 In 1910, Albert Jay Nock, then forty, joined the American Magazine. His writings, unusually good, were his best credential. Otherwise, no one knew much about him. Writing about Thomas Jefferson years later, he would characterize him as "the most approachable and the most impenetrable of men, easy and delightful of]]>