Excerpt
Vital Little Plans
chapter 1
While Arranging Verses for a Book
New York Herald Tribune,
January 22, 1935
I should approach these sheets with reverent eye,
Thinking, with mental halo, how I sought
The perfect word to clothe the perfect thought,
The phrase to bring a tear, a smile, a sigh.
Or, failing that, I think at least I ought
To sweat again on seeing fragile verse
I brought into the world with groan and curse,
Whose every rippling foot was ripped and fought,
Or think of how it should have been, and moan,
And wish for the effects I seem to miss,
But all the things I’d think I’d think are flat,
The words and sheets have memories of their own:
I ate brown sugar while I thought of this,
And my nose tickled when I worked on that.
Diamonds in the Tough
Vogue, October 15, 1936
“Everything comes to the Bowery, if you wait long enough,” say the dealers in the diamond center between Hester and Canal Streets, one of the largest and strangest jewel exchanges in the world. There, seventy percent of the unredeemed jewelry pawned in the country is bought and sold. Through this single block of shops, a glittering island in the most squalid section of New York City, has passed every sort of quaint and lavish jewelry, the most extraordinary pieces in the world—crown jewels of royalty, seal-rings of lords, love-tokens of courtiers, and unsophisticated lockets of children.
No one seems to know why this location was chosen or why the district continues here. Twenty-five years ago, the first of the merchants settled in this incongruous setting for no reason now remembered. It is adjacent to no allied centers; it exists by itself, across the street from the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, surrounded by the almost legendary Bowery life.
None of the dealers rents a whole shop. Each has a counter in a store with a dozen or so other dealers. The more affluent ones also rent little partitioned spaces in the show-windows and put up such signs as all articles here may be purchased only at third counter to left.
No effort is made for artistic or dramatic displays, but some bizarre effects are unwittingly obtained by festooning quantities of jewelry haphazardly over little statuettes that seem to bear no relation to the other merchandise. A plaster goat, probably of bock-beer ancestry, has several rings suspended from one horn, a necklace rakishly wrapped around the other, a watch over his tail, and assorted trinkets along his back. King Arthur, already burdened with his armor, supports several necklaces about his shoulders, a wristwatch around his waist and a lavaliere from his visor.
In the showcases, there is no black velvet, no particular gem placed to catch the eye, but row on row of gleaming diamonds and shining gold, or sometimes just a jumble of rings and watches and bracelets. Frequently bold, definite-looking prices are marked on the jewels, but these represent chiefly a starting-point for dickering.
The specialty of the district is diamonds, of course, but every other sort of jewelry and precious metal work is also traded in. Probably the most magnificent article now in the district is a samovar, said to have been made about three hundred years ago for the Czar of Russia. Seventy-six pounds of solid silver, finer than sterling, with an intricate gold inlay pattern! It was bought from a pawn shop where it had been left by gypsies. No one knows where the gypsies got it.
Some of the jewelry sold in the Bowery is new, but most of it comes through the three large auction houses on the block between Hester and Canal Streets. It is sent there by pawnbrokers after the twelve months stipulated by law—and one month of grace—have elapsed from the time it was pawned.
Except in the summer, sales are held nearly every day. The jewelry to be sold is put on display for the dealers to examine and to make notations of its value. These notations are all in codes of a primitive sort, letters representing numbers, and each dealer keeps his a secret. The notes are to remind the dealer in the excitement of the sale what, in a cooler moment, he considered paying.
The auction proceedings are baffling to an outsider. They are completely silent. All the dealers able to touch the auctioneer crowd around him, and the rest sit on two benches facing him. The auctioneer indicates a figure to begin the bidding, and the dealers raise it silently. Those near the auctioneer squeeze his arm, nudge his ribs, or press his foot, and those on the benches wink, hold up their fingers, rub their elbows, or make any other noticeable gesture. With half their minds, they seem to be making bids, and, with the other half, they are figuring out their neighbors’ bids. It is all done quickly; in a moment the jewel is awarded to the highest bidder, and everyone seems satisfied. It looks extremely haphazard, a cross between hocus-pocus and mind reading.
Some of the gems that reach the Bowery are reset there, particularly those with settings that are more valuable for bullion than for their workmanship. One dealer has used forty-eight rubies, once belonging to the Romanoffs, to make a bracelet, a small diamond between each ruby. In the center is a diamond-studded plaque that snaps open to reveal a tiny watch.
One of the oldest articles is not really a jewel at all, but a fifteenth-century etching-plate made in Vienna, a portrait of the Pope. In addition to its antiquity, it has a peculiarity. The eyeballs seem to move, not merely to follow the observer as they do in many pictures, but actually to shift from side to side.
An example of early American metal work is a stiff little silver statuette of an Indian holding an eagle. In position and general appearance, he is a miniature cigar-store Indian.
From time to time, a “poison ring,” with a secret cavity and sometimes a sharp little prong to give a lethal prick, reaches the Bowery. These are usually melted down because, although people like to look at them, they don’t buy them.
Initial rings, however, are not often melted. Eventually someone with similar initials finds the ring irresistible.
All sorts of wedding rings reach the dealers. One early French engagement ring has no gems, but is a cluster of gold lovers’ knots that shake with a sweet jingle.
One of the few pieces whose complete history is known is a watch, made in England and bought one hundred and forty-four years ago by a Vermont college professor. The face is so clear and so beautiful and the engraving on the edges so artful that at first there seems to be no crystal covering it. The professor used it only a few years and then put it in a vault to be kept for his son. Somehow, it was forgotten until long after the son had died, and it has never been used since.
A graceful little French clock, one hundred years old, rests on two Ionic pillars, and on a rail at the base of the pillars sits a laughing ivory cupid. A bracelet made about the same time in France has six sections, each with a peasant figure in exquisite mosaic of brilliant colors.
On a large cameo necklace is the profile of a lady with an identical cameo on her necklace, and on that cameo, microscopic but clear, another necklace with a cameo. Is it a likeness of the lady who wore it so that she could complete the sequence of ladies with their portraits on their necklace?
With how much fantasy and imagination were these jewels made, with how much love were they given, and with how much sentiment were they treasured? Maybe there was bitterness, too. At any rate, loved or hated, here they all are on the Bowery, waiting to be sold, to begin another cycle that will doubtless return them once more to the Bowery.
Many of the jewels have come back again and again. The most frequent repeater is a man’s enameled fob-watch, which is intricately designed and valuable, but it is also massive and pink in color, and seems to be the first thing its owners pawn.
The dealers say it is hardly possible for jewels to stay in a family more than a few generations. Estates must be settled, or money is needed, or the old jewels are traded for more modern ones. Nearly every day, the gems of royal and of famous people pass through the exchange and are sold for their intrinsic worth, with little regard for sentiment. The only jewels with associations that seemed to have impressed the blasé dealers in recent years were those of Rudolph Valentino and Texas Guinan.
Occasionally, someone, usually a lady, attempts to redeem an article just after it has gone to the auction rooms. It is traced to the dealer who almost invariably has sold it, for the turnover in the exchange is fast. Sometimes, it must be traced through several subsequent buyers before the woman retrieves it.
There has never been a robbery in the center, probably because of the precautions taken. No jewels are left in the show windows overnight, or even in the showcases inside the stores.
Upstairs, in small light rooms over the stores, diamonds are cut and polished and set or reset, and silver is buffed. The doors and vestibules to the rooms are barred, and there is no superfluous furniture, just the tools and tables where the workmen sit with hammocks to catch the chips and dust of diamonds and metal.
Silver is polished against a cloth-covered revolving wheel. There is a pleasant acrid odor of burning cloth, caused by the friction, and infinitesimal bits of metal are sent like dust through the room.
All the sweepings are carefully saved to be refined, and the silver recovered. The walls and ceiling are brushed, and the old oilcloth coverings and work clothes of the men are burned to extract the silver dust. Even the water in which the workmen wash their hands is saved. A small room where silver is polished may yield to a refiner hundreds of dollars’ worth of metal a year.
Outside on the Bowery, the lusty, tumultuous life of the Lower East Side converges. The “El” roars, trucks rumble, Chinamen from Mott Street mince by, snatches from foreign tongues are caught and lost in a reek of exotic and forbidding odors. Absorbed in the raucous chaos, the visitor forgets the cool diamonds and the metal until, a few blocks away, he sees the glittering gold-leaf roof of the new building at Foley Square.
Flowers Come to Town
Vogue, February 15, 1937
All the ingredients of a lavender-and-old-lace story, with a rip-roaring, contrasting background, are in New York’s wholesale flower district, centered around Twenty-Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. Under the melodramatic roar of the “El,” encircled by hash-houses and Turkish baths, are the shops of hard-boiled, stalwart men, who shyly admit that they are dottles for love, sentiment, and romance.
Apprentices, dodging among the hand-carts that are forever rushing to or from the fur and garment districts, dream of the time when they will have their own commission houses. Greeks and Koreans, confessing that they have the hearts of children, build little Japanese gardens. Greenhouse owners declare that they would not sell—at any price—the flowers which grow in their own backyards. A dealer plans how to improve the business that grandfather started. And orchids in milk-bottles nod at field-flowers in buckets.
Early in the morning, the market opens. From five o’clock on, boxes and hampers of flowers are brought into the district and unloaded. Most of them, from Long Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey, arrive in the city via truck, but those from Florida, California, and Canada come by fast express, and those from South America and Holland by ship. Occasionally, a shipment of gardenias is flown from California by airplane.
For most of the morning, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of cut flowers and blossoming shrubs fill the shops and overflow onto the sidewalk. Their damp, sweet perfume, blowing across the pavement, filters from hampers and crates piled beside doorways.
By noon, most of the flowers have been taken away by retail florists or peddlers, and, in the early afternoon, the rest are put in storage or sent to other markets. Then the cool, sweet-smelling shops have an empty, leisurely air. A few buckets of peonies and lilacs splash against the dark walls, and the proprietors and workers, sitting on the high, metal-topped tables, their feet dangling, smoke and talk.
The wholesale market started about fifty-five years ago, well within the memory of the older dealers. At that time, most of the growers lived on Long Island and brought their flowers over in market-baskets every morning. They were met by the retail florists at the ferry landing at Thirty-Fourth Street and the East River.
As competition sharpened, the growers appeared earlier and earlier in the morning, and—in order to get the choicest flowers—the florists also appeared earlier and earlier, until the first sales were made in the middle of the night!
Near the docks was a place called Dann’s Restaurant, run by a horse-car conductor and kept open all night for the patronage of other conductors. Flower buyers and sellers began to drift in there to conclude their dickering, until finally they used it to house a fairly well-organized market. The first rule adopted was that no one could take the cover off his basket until a gong rang at six o’clock.
In a few years, some of the growers started a competing market at Twenty-Third Street. Then, both groups leased a building at Twenty-Sixth Street and Sixth Avenue. The New York Cut Flower Association was formed and located on the second floor of the building. Other growers took the third floor.
Before the growers brought their flowers to Thirty-Fourth Street, retail florists had to go to the country themselves—to buy, if they could, what their customers wanted. Sometimes they didn’t succeed and had to substitute sentiment. One early florist, commissioned to get nineteen pink roses for a girl’s birthday, could find among all the near-by growers only eighteen blossoms and one very tight little bud. So, with this bouquet, he sent a card: “For eighteen happy years and one to come.”
Two actresses and an actor—Lotta Crabtree, Clara Morris, and Lester Wallack—financed what is now the oldest floral house in Manhattan and established it in the lobby of the old Wallack Theatre in the Bowery, where it became the favorite flower shop of a generation of theatrical people. At first, its most popular flowers, and sometimes the only ones in stock, were pond-lilies, picked by Mr. Le Moult, the proprietor, in Washington Heights and Westchester. This shop (like, perhaps, a third of the wholesale houses) is managed by the grandson of the founder. Most of the other dealers are former employees or sons of employees of these first flower merchants and played among the roses and cornflowers and daffodils before they were old enough to help.
