A BLOCK IN TIME

A native New Yorker recounts the history of the city by way of a microcosmic block.

“Bordered by Twenty-third Street to the south, Twenty-fourth Street to the north, Sixth Avenue to the west, and Fifth Avenue and Broadway to the east, the block once lay far north of the settled city, then at its epicenter, and then on its cultural periphery once again,” writes Bird in the preface. At the center of this urban world stood a hotel that was the scene of political glad-handing, deal-making, prostitution, and other such activities. Perhaps the most famous of the characters inhabiting these pages is the doomed architect Stanford White, gunned down during an affair with a woman whose husband suspected him of “blackballing him from New York’s elite clubs.” The woman in question slipped away into the shadows of the demimonde, at first commanding the tabloids for her “drunken brawls, arrests, evictions, unpaid bills, suspected abortions,” and then largely falling into oblivion. Other of Bird’s subjects are better-heeled, including Marietta Stevens, a social climber who amassed a fortune sufficient to have made her the model for Mrs. Lemuel Struthers in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. She owned much of the aforementioned hotel and plenty of other chunks of downtown, having acquired through various means a treasury of about $86 million in today’s dollars, albeit mostly administered through a trust. Stevens made enough of a stir in life that “at a time when few newspapers ran obituaries for women, all the major New York papers ran one for Marietta, a testament to her hard-earned social status.” Not so for the grifters, drifters, and other lowlier denizens of the block. Bird offers a lively account packed with memorable NYC characters, though it’s less useful in sussing out the tribes of modern New York and a touch less well written than Ada Calhoun’s St. Mark’s Is Dead, based on a similar conceit.

Students of an ever changing Gotham will take pleasure in Bird’s well-researched narrative.