I tried to get out to North Brother Island first, wanting to see for myself what it must have looked like from out there. Easier said than done. Getting a boat to take me out, regardless of bribes and inducements offered, was not doable in the time I had. The Coast Guard obligingly offered to take me, but canceled at the very last minute, claiming engine trouble. It was a very cold day in December with high winds, choppy swells in the river – and I couldn’t blame them even if they had simply decided it was better to stay ashore than lug some writer upriver to a deserted island and wait around in very tricky current where the Sound meets the river while he communes with the dead. I settled for a drive in the Bronx, down Fordham road, to the parking lot of a warehouse, where I stood by the shore and peered out over the water to the island only a few hundred yards away.
There’s a tantalizing and odd fragment on the Internet, some Web site where it is claimed that a portal to another world exists on the island in one of the moldering old structures that once comprised Riverside Hospital. An opening between walls, where some persistent true believer in Bigfoot, Living Elvis and Parallel Universes has painted a mural, decorating some imagined psychic transporter made of crumbling plaster. Empty rooms.
The cottage where Mary lived the last years of her life before her stroke is gone. But much of the hospital apparently remains, however ruined. I don’t know what I could have learned there, but I’m sorry I missed it. It’s an ominous sight, the island, especially in the harsh, gray light of winter – something a screenwriter or a novelist might describe as ‘brooding’. The tops of chimneys or smokestacks poke through overgrown trees and underbrush; dark shapes are seen through branches. A not-very-confidence-inspiring concrete mooring seems to sag into the water. In the distance, Riker’s Island looks positively cheery by comparison. It’s the end of the world. While the city and its skyline have certainly changed since Mary’s time there, the island can hardly have become much lovelier. It’s a Godforsaken piece of rock in the middle of nowhere. From where I was standing, the greenish water lapping at mossy stones, I could see discarded crack vials, used condoms, a doll’s head. The other shores looked no more inviting. On this day there were no pleasure boats. A single freighter scudded by on the way to the Sound, and that was it. I was glad to leave.
Thirty-third and Third, where Mary shacked up with Breihof, where Soper confronted her on the stairs, looks completely different from the old photographs of the site taken back in her day. No ghosts linger. The Third Avenue el, which must have rumbled noisily past her window as she snored in bed, her dog and her man close at hand, is long, long gone. All of New York’s got history. You can barely walk a block without passing the scene of a long-ago tragedy, a mob execution, the last resting place of a famous writer, a place you once scored or groped an old girlfriend, a one-time speakeasy, a KGB money drop, a place with freakish significance. Most now are just patches of concrete, somehow drained of soul over time.
I visited my mom in a hospital room on the exact site of Mary’s last place of employ. (It was nothing serious – a one-day visit.) It’s a different hospital now, a different world. A glimmer of recognition and wonder still tingles the senses when one walks through the Waldorf Astoria lobby – a place where Mary would hardly have been welcome, but where her masters undoubtedly visited and played. Madison Square is unrecognizable, the Flatiron building emanates something – but that’s probably because my publisher operates out of it – and I have yet to finish this manuscript. The old Luchows on Fourteenth Street, where I once visited during its brief revival as a nightclub, left a lasting impression – as did Keen’s steakhouse – both places where one can easily imagine Diamond Jim and Lillian Russell stuffing their faces. Did Mary ever get a good meal in a fancy restaurant? Did Breihof ever clean up a bit, throw on a suit, and take her out for a dance and some fine food, a couple of cocktails? I still don’t know.
The territory of feared street gangs, opium rings, white slavers, the tenement districts where Irish immigrants once lived, are expensive neighborhoods now. The Lower East Side looks like a theme park – a Disney recreation of urban living for the young, white and wealthy. Hell’s Kitchen is worse, the shabby burlesque houses and nightclubs and porno houses of even a few years back replaced by theme restaurants, merchandising outlets for the WWF and Warner Brothers.
The Holland Tunnel inspires awe, still. It’s hard not to imagine the amazement when it first opened, what an engineering miracle it must have seemed – even in a time filled with engineering miracles.
Oyster Bay? Dark Harbor? Tuxedo Park? Blur your eyes and pretend – and maybe, depending on where you’re standing, you can get a sense of what they looked like then.
St. Raymond’s Cemetery, in the Bronx, Mary’s final resting place, still has a powerful effect. I went up there in the freezing cold. Dead leaves blew dramatically over the acres of headstones. It took some doing, finding her headstone. They did a lot of dying in 1938, and most of the company around her passed on that same year. The names on the stones are immigrant names, Irish, Italian, a few Slavs and Germans. Plenty of history where Mary lays. Fat Tony Salerno is buried there. It’s where the ransom money for the Lindbergh baby was dropped. Mary’s gravestone, which she paid for herself, is simple and relatively undecorated, looking like thousands of others nearby. The pattern cut into the stone is unremarkable, and the inscription, jesus mercy, as tempting as it might be to infer as evidence of a guilty conscience, is the same as hundreds of others, along with rest in peace, and a score of other Hallmark-style sentiments. In Mary’s case, looking at it, the two words seem particularly personal, as if she herself was saying them. No dearly beloved or we will always remember you, signifying that loved ones remained. Hers, however ubiquitous in the poetry of the dead, reads as plaintive. A last cry for good fortune, better luck, salvation.
The ground is soft in spots at St. Raymond’s. Approaching her headstone, my foot pushed through the topsoil and plunged to the knee into soft, brittle earth. I didn’t want to get that close to her. I apologized to her neighbor for nearly stepping on his face and stood for a long time in front of her grave. I’d brought her a present.
In 1973, I bought my first chef’s knife, a high-carbon Sabatier with a polished wooden handle. I was so proud of it – and I’ve held onto it all these years, remembering how it felt in my hand when I first unwrapped it, the way the handle rested against my palm, the feel of the blade, the sharpness of the edge. It’s old now, and stained, and the handle is cracked slightly in spots. I long ago gave up using it or trying to maintain it. But it is a beloved object. Something a fellow cook would appreciate, I hoped – a once fine hunk of quality French steel – a magical fetish, a beloved piece of my personal history. And a sign of respect, I hoped, an indicator that somebody, somewhere, even long after her troubles and her dying, took her seriously, understood, if only a little bit, the difficulty of her life as a cook. It’s the kind of gift I would like to receive, one that I would understand.
I looked around the graveyard, making sure that no one else was watching, leaned over and with my hands, pulled back the grass at the base of her stone. I slipped my knife down there, covered it up the way it had looked before and left it for her. It was the least I could do.
A gift. Cook to cook.
Bibliography/Suggested Reading
Batterberry, Michael and Ariane. On the Town in New York. Routledge, 1999.
Bayor, Ronald, and Timothy J. Meagher, eds. The New York Irish. Johns Hopkins Press, 1996.
Botkin, B.A. New York City Folklore. Random House.
Byron, Joseph. New York Life at the Turn of the Century in Photographs. Dover Publications, 1985.
Cahill, Kevin, M.D., ed. The American Irish Revival: A Decade of the Recorder – 1974–1983. Associated Faculty Press.
Chambers, Julius. The Book of New York: 40 Years of Recollections of the American Metropolis. 1912.
Mrs. Child. The American Frugal Housewife. Carter Hendee and Co., 1833.
Crockett, Albert Stevens. Peacocks on Parade: A Narrative of a Unique Period in American Social History and Its Most Colorful Figures. 1931.
Deshon, Rev. George. Guide for Catholic Young Women: Especially Those Who Earn Their Own Living. Catholic Book Exchange.
Ellis, Edward Robb. The Epic of New York City. Kodansha, 1997.
Federspiel, J.F. The Ballad of Typhoid Mary.
Gordon, Richard. Famous and Difficult Patients: Amusing Medical Anecdotes from Typhoid Mary to FDR. St. Martin’s Press.
Groneman, Carol, and Mary Beth Norton, eds. To Toil the Livelong Day: America’s Women at Work 1780–1980. Cornell University Press.
Holt, Hamilton, ed. The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans As Told by Themselves. Routledge.
James, Henry. New York Revisited. Franklin Square Press, 1994.
Kouwenhoven, John A. The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York. Icone Editions, Harper and Row, 1953.
Leavitt, Judith Walzer. Typhoid Mary: Captive To The Public’s Health. Beacon Press, 1996.
Levenstein, Harvey. Revolution at the Table. Oxford University Press, 1988.
Markel, Howard. When Germs Travel. The American Scholar, Spring 1999.
Seitz, Sharon, and Stuart Miller. The Other Islands of New York City. Countryman Press.
Mitchell, Joseph. Up in the Old Hotel. Vintage Books, 1993.
Plante, Ellen M. The American Kitchen: 1700 to Present. Facts On File, 1995.
Ranhofer, Charles. The Epicurean: A Complete Treatise of Analytical and Practical Studies on the Culinary Art. New York, 1903.
Rosenberg, Charles E. The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849 and 1866.
Sante, Luc. Low Life. Vintage, 1990.
Soper, George A., Ph.D. The Curious Career of Typhoid Mary. Delivered before the Section of Historical and Cultural Medicine, New York Academy of Medicine, and published in the Bulletin of the Academy, Oct. 1939.
Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York. University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Wilkes, Roger, ed. The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes. Carrol and Graf.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to: Hope Killcoyne for her dogged and spectacular research on a difficult subject. Joel Rose, Gladys Bourdain (thanks, Mom), Michael Batterberry, the incredible Rose Marie Morse at Morse Partners. Brian Anderson. Assistant Comissioner of Geneology and Public Relations at the New York City Department of Records and Information Services, Ken Cobb, Bill Cobert of the Irish Historical Society, Dr. Kevin Cahill, Clem Berne, Melinda Gellman, Dimitri Kasterine. Maureen Hope. Peter Herb and Andrea Moss (legal documents). Jonothan Kuhn, Director of Arts and Antiquities for the New York City Parks Department, Ellen Morales at the Museum of the City of New York, Rebecca Tatem and Scott Norman at the BBC, Ed O’Donnel, The New York Historical Society – particularly Juliet Berman, Kathleen Hulser and the photo and library departments, the staff at the New York Public Library Reference and Microfilm departments. Lisa Westheimer. Paul Paradise of the Municipal Reference and Research Center, Bonnie Slotnick, Meryle Evans, Matt and Tracy at Kitchen Arts and Letters, my brother, Chris Bourdain, for getting me out to St. Raymond’s Cemetary and helping all the way. Kim Witherspoon. Camelia Cassin. Philippe Lajaunie and Jose de Meireilles at Les Halles. Edilberto Perez, sous-chef extraordinaire, Pascal Graf, chef de cuisine (for covering my ass in the kitchen) and to all the chefs and line cooks I’ve met in the last ridiculous and wonderful year. You know who you are.
Anthony Bourdain’s books include the bestselling A Cook’s Tour and Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook. His work has appeared in the New York Times and The New Yorker, and he is a contributing authority for Food Arts magazine. He is also the host of the Emmy Award-winning television show No Reservations. His latest book, Medium Raw, is a follow-up to Kitchen Confidential.
By the Same Author
Medium Raw
No Reservations
The Nasty Bits
Les Halles Cookbook
Bobby Gold
A Cook’s Tour
Bone in the Throat
Gone Bamboo
Copyright © 2001 by Anthony Bourdain
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used
or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission from the publisher except in the case
of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
For information address: Bloomsbury Publishing,
175th Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury, New York and London
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Bourdain, Anthony.
Typhoid Mary: an urban historical / by Anthony Bourdain.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-58234-133-8 (hardcover)
1. Typhoid Mary, d. 1938. 2. Typhoid fever--New York
(State)--New York--History. 3. Quarantine--New York
(State)--New York--History. I. Title.
RA644.T8 B68 2001
614.5’112’097471092--dc21
[B] 2001008444
First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2001
This e-book edition published in 2010
E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-518-3
www.bloomsburyusa.com
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Epilogue
Bibliography/Suggested Reading
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright Page
Typhoid Mary Page 11
