Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Although Edgewater is only a short ride by subway and bus from the heart of New York City, it has some of the characteristics of an isolated and ingrown old town in New England or the South. The population is approximately four thousand, and a large proportion of the people are natives and know each other, at least to speak to. A surprising number of them are related, some so distantly that they aren’t at all sure just how. The elderly people take a deep interest in local history, a good deal of which has been handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth, and nearly all of them who are natives consider themselves authorities on the subject. When these elderly people were young, quite a few men and women bearing the names of the original Dutch and Huguenot families were still living in old family mansions along River Road – one old man or one old woman living alone, as often as not, or, in some cases, two old bachelor brothers or two old spinster sisters living together, or an old woman living with a bachelor son or a spinster daughter – and they remember them. They know in a general way how the present-day old families are interrelated, and how several of these families are related to the original families. They can fish around in their memories and bring up vital statistics and stray facts and rumors and old jokes and sayings concerning a multitude of people who have been dead and gone for a generation, and can point out where buildings stood that have been torn down for fifty years. Sometimes, in the manner of old people in old towns, unable to tell only a little when they know so much, they respond to a simple question with a labyrinthine answer. One day, shortly after I began going up to Edgewater, I became acquainted with an elderly native named Henry R. Gaul, and went for a walk with him. Mr Gaul is a retired oil-company executive. For many years, the Valvoline Oil Company operated a refinery on the riverbank in Shadyside, and Mr Gaul was chief clerk there. He is secretary of the Undercliff Motor Boat Club and, to have something to do, he looks after the club’s winter-storage barges and its headquarters barge, the old G. M. Still. His friends call him Henny. Walking on River Road, Mr Gaul and I came to an automobile that had broken down. It was alongside the curb, and two men in greasy overalls were working on it. One had the hood up, and was bent over the engine. The other was underneath the automobile, flat on his back. As we were passing by, the man underneath thrust his head out, to say something to the man working on the engine. As he did so, he caught sight of Mr Gaul. ‘Hello, Henny,’ he said.

  Mr Gaul was startled. He paused and turned and peered down at the man’s face, and then said, ‘Oh, hello, Bill.’ ‘That was Bill Ingold,’ he said as we resumed our walk. ‘He runs the Edgewater Garage.’

  I was curious about the name; Mr Gaul had referred to several names as old Edgewater names, and I asked him if Ingold was another one of them.

  ‘Ingold?’ he said. ‘Well, I should hope to think it is. It isn’t one of the old Dutch names, but it’s old enough, and Bill’s got some of the old Dutch blood in him anyhow, through his mother’s people. Knickerbocker Dutch. Not that he’d ever mention it. That’s the way it is in Edgewater. There’s a number of people over here who have old, old families back behind them – much older, I dare say, than the families back behind a high percentage of the people in the Social Register in New York – but you’d never find it out from them. Bill’s mother was a Bishop, and her mother was a Carlock. The old Dutch blood came down to him through the Carlocks. The Carlocks were big people over here once, but they had a preponderance of daughters and the name died out. They owned land, and one branch of them ran a boatyard. The boatyard was torn down years and years ago, but I can tell you where it stood. Did you ever notice an ancient old clapboard building on the upper part of River Road with a saloon in it named Sulyma’s Bar & Grill? Well, in the old days that building was a hotel named the Buena Vista Hotel, only we called it Walsch’s, after the family that ran it. And just before you got to Walsch’s, on the right, in between River Road and the river, was Carlock’s Boatyard. Bill Ingold’s father was also named Bill – William, that is, William F. He was in the Edgewater Fire Department. In fact, he was Fire Chief. He was a highly respected man, and I’ll tell you a little story to illustrate that. There used to be an old gentleman in Edgewater named Frederick W. Winterburn. Mr Winterburn was rich. He had inherited money, and he had married money, and he had made money. His wife was a Vreeland, and she was related to the Dyckmans and the Westervelts. Among other things, he owned practically the whole of Shadyside, and he lived down there. He lived in a big house overlooking the river, and he had a rose garden in front and an orchard in back. On warm summer nights, walking along River Road, you could smell the roses in his garden. And you could smell the peaches in his orchard, all soft and ripe and still warm from the sun and a little breeze blowing across them. And you could smell the grapes hanging on a fence between the garden and the orchard. They were fox grapes, and they had a musky smell. I’d give anything to smell those grapes again. The garden had marble statues in it. Statues of women. Naked woman. Naked marble women. Goddesses, I guess you’d call them. In the moonlight, they looked real. It’s all gone now, and there’s a factory there. One piece of Mr Winterburn’s property surrounded the Edgewater Cemetery. His parents were buried in this cemetery, and his wife’s people all the way back to the seventeenth century were buried in there, and he knew he was going to be buried in there, and he took a personal interest in it. In 1909 or 1910 or thereabouts – it might’ve been a few years earlier or a few years later – Mr Winterburn was beginning to have a feeling that time was running out on him, he wouldn’t be here much longer, although to tell you the truth he lived quite a few years more, and one day he asked five men to come to his house. All of them were from old Edgewater families and had people buried in the cemetery, and one of them was Bill Ingold’s father, Fire Chief Ingold. “Sit down, boys,” Mr Winterburn said, “I want to talk to you. Boys,” he said, “my family owns much more space in the cemetery than it’ll ever need or make use of, and I’m going to set aside a section of it for a poor plot. Any bona fide resident of Edgewater who dies a pauper can be buried in this plot, free of charge. And suicides that are turned away by other cemeteries can be buried in there, provided they’re residents. And non-residents that drown in the river and wash up on the Edgewater riverfront and don’t have any identification on them, the way it sometimes happens, it doesn’t make any difference if it looks accidental or looks as if they threw themselves in, they can be buried in there. Furthermore, I’m going to set up a trust fund, and I’m going to fix it so the principal can’t ever be touched, where as the interest can be used in perpetuity to keep up the cemetery. And I want you boys to form a cemetery association and elect a president and a secretary and a treasurer, and the duties of these officers shall be to keep an eye on the cemetery and visit it every now and then and make a tour of inspection through it and hire a caretaker and see that he keeps the weeds cut and the leaves raked and whenever the occasion arises rule on who can be buried in the poor plot and who can’t be.” So they put it to a vote, and Fire Chief Ingold was elected president without any discussion whatsoever. It was taken for granted. That’s how respected he was. And after he died, Bill was elected president, and he’s held the office ever since. Did I mention Bill’s mother was a Bishop? Well, she was. The Bishops were …’

  Some of the people in Edgewater commute to jobs in New York City, and some work in the river towns south of Edgewater, which are, in order, going south, North Bergen, Guttenberg, West New York, Weehawken, Hoboken, and Jersey City, but the majority work in the factories in Shadyside. A score or so of men are spoken of around town as rivermen. This word has a special shade of meaning in Edgewater: a riverman not only works on the river or kills a lot of time on it or near it, he is also emotionally attached to it – he can’t stay away from it. Charles Allison is an example. Mr Allison lives in Edgewater and works in North Bergen. He is a partner in the Baldwin & Allison Dry Dock Co., a firm that operates a drydock and calks and repairs barges and drives piles and builds docks and does m
arine surveying and supplies pumps for salvage work, but that is only one of the reasons he is looked upon as a riverman. The main reason is that the river has a hold on him. Most days he is on or around it from early in the morning until sunset. Nevertheless, he often goes down to it at night and walks beside it. Even on Sundays and holidays, he often goes down to it. The offices of the drydock company are in a superstructure built on the deck of an old railroad barge that is permanently docked at a pier in North Bergen, and Mr Allison has had big wide windows put in three of the walls of his private office, so that he can sit at his desk and see up, down, and across the river. Every spring, he takes a leave of absence from the drydock, and spends from six weeks to two months living aboard a shad barge on the river and fishing two rows of shad nets with a crew of hired fishermen.

  Some men work full time on the river – on ferries, tugs, or barges – and are not considered rivermen; they are simply men who work on the river. Other men work only a part of the year on the river and make only a part of their living there but are considered rivermen. Mr Ingold, the garage proprietor, is one of these. His garage is on River Road, facing the river. It is a typical small, drafty, one-story garage, except that hanging on its walls, in among the fan belts and the brake linings and the dented chromium hubcaps and the calendars with naked girls on them, are anchors and oars and hanks of netting and dozens of rusty old eelpots. Also, standing in a shallow box of sand in the middle of the floor is a stove of a kind that would be recognizable only to people who are familiar with harbor shipping; it is shaped like an oil drum and burns coke and is a kind that is used in barges and lighters to keep perishable freight from freezing. Mr Ingold took it out of an old Erie Railroad fruit-and-vegetable barge. In the winter, a group of elderly Edgewater men, most of whom are retired, sit around it and gossip and argue; in the summer, they move their chairs up front to the door, where they can look out on the river and the Manhattan skyline. Mr Ingold owns two shad barges and several shad boats, and keeps them at a landing a short walk up the river from the garage. Off and on during the winter, he and another riverman, Eustus R. Smith, stretch shad nets across the floor of the garage and put them in shape. They rig new nets, and mend and splice old ones. They are helped occasionally by Mr Ingold’s son, Willy, and by Mr Smith’s son, Charlie. In the spring, Mr Ingold leaves the garage in the hands of two mechanics, and he and his son and Mr Smith and his son go out on the river and become shadfishermen for a couple of months. In the late fall and early winter, when the eels in the river are at their best and bring the highest prices, Mr Ingold and Willy set eelpots. They set sixty, and their favorite grounds are up around Spuyten Duyvil, where the Harlem River runs into the Hudson. Some nights during the eel season, after knocking off work in the garage, Mr Ingold gets in an outboard and goes up to Spuyten Duyvil and attends to the pots, drawing them up hand over hand from the bottom and taking out the trapped eels and putting in fresh bait, and some nights Willy goes up. On dark nights, they wear miner’s caps that have head lamps on them. Mr Ingold has been dividing his time between the garage and the river for thirty-five years. Invariably, at the end of the shad season he is so tired he has to hole up in bed for a few days, and he always resolves to stay put in the garage from then on – no man can serve two masters – but when the eel season comes around he always finds himself back on the river again.

  The Riverman I know best is an old-timer named Harry Lyons. Harry is seventy-four, and has been around the river all his life. He lives with his wife, Mrs Juel Lyons, in a two-story frame-and-fieldstone house backed up against the base of the Palisades, on Undercliff Avenue, in the upper part of Edgewater. He owns a shad barge and an assortment of boats, and keeps them anchored just off the riverbank, a few minutes’ walk from his house. Harry is five feet six, and weighs a hundred and fifty. He is one of those short, hearty, robust men who hold themselves erect and swagger a little and are more imposing than many taller, larger men. He has an old-Roman face. It is strong-jawed and prominent-nosed and bushy-eyebrowed and friendly and reasonable and sagacious and elusively piratical. Ordinarily, down on the riverfront, he looks like a beachcomber: he wears old pants and a windbreaker and old shoes with slashes cut in them, and he goes bareheaded and his hair sticks straight up. One day, however, by chance, I ran into him on a River Road bus, and he was on his way to a funeral down in Weehawken, and he was wearing his Sunday clothes and his hair was brushed and his face was solemn, and I was surprised at how distinguished he looked; he looked worldly and cultivated and illustrious.

  Harry spends a large part of his time wandering up and down the riverfront looking at the river, or sitting on his barge looking at the river, but he isn’t lazy. He believes in first things first; if there is anything at home or on the barge that should be attended to, he goes ahead and attends to it, and then sits down. He is handy with tools, and has a variety of skills. He is a good fisherman, a good netmaker, a fairly good carpenter, a fairly good all-round mechanic, and an excellent fish cook. He is especially good at cooking shad, and is one of the few men left who know how to run an old-fashioned Hudson River shad bake. Shad bakes are gluttonous spring-time blowouts that are held in the middle or latter part of the shad season, generally under the trees on the riverbank, near a shad barge. They are given by lodges and labor unions, and by business, social, political, and religious organizations, and by individuals. Former Mayor Wissel – he was Mayor of Edgewater for thirty years – used to give one every year for the public officials in Edgewater and nearby towns.

  When Harry is engaged to run a bake, he selects a sufficient number of roe shad from his own nets and dresses them himself and takes the roes out of them. He has a shad boner come up from Fulton Fish Market and bone them. Then, using zinc roofing nails, he nails them spread-eagle fashion to white-oak planks, one fish to a plank; the planks are two feet long, a foot and a half wide, and an inch thick, and have adjustable props fixed to their sides so that it is possible to stand them upright or tilt them backward. He nails two or three strips of bacon across each fish. When it is time to cook the fish – they aren’t baked, they are broiled – he props the planks up, fish-side foremost, in a ring around a bed of charcoal that has been burning on the ground for hours and is red-hot and radiant. He places the planks only six inches or so from the coals, but he gradually moves them farther back, so that the fish will broil slowly and pick up the flavors of the bacon and the oak; they broil for almost an hour. Every so often, he takes a turn around the ring and thoroughly mops each fish with a cotton mop, which he keeps dipping into a pot of melted butter. While Harry looks after the shad, Mrs Lyons looks after the roes, cooking them in butter in huge frying pans. Pickled beets and new potatoes boiled in their skins are usually served with the shad and the roe. Paper plates are used. The people eat on tables made of boards laid across sawhorses, and are encouraged to have several helpings. Cooked shad-bake style by an expert, shad is crusty on the outside and tender and rich and juicy on the inside (but not too rich, since a good deal of the oil has been broiled out of it), and fully justifies its scientific name, Alosa sapidissima, the ‘Alosa’ of which means ‘shad’ and the ‘sapidissima’ of which means ‘good to eat to a superlative degree.’ Shad bakes require a lot of work, and most of them are small affairs. Some years, the New Jersey Police Chiefs’ Association gives a big one. Some years, a group of boss fishmongers in Fulton Market gives a big one. Some years, the Palisades Interstate Park Commission gives a big one. The biggest on the river is one that Harry and Mrs Lyons have been giving for over twenty years for the benefit of the building fund of Mrs Lyons’ church. This bake is held on the riverbank a short distance above the George Washington Bridge, usually on the Sunday following Mother’s Day Sunday, and every year around two hundred and fifty people come to it.

  Mrs Lyons is a handsome, soft-spoken blond woman, quite a few years younger than Harry. She is a native of Fort Lee, the next town on the river north of Edgewater. Her maiden name was Kotze, her parents were Swiss
-German, and she was brought up a Roman Catholic. When she was a young woman, out of curiosity, while visiting a friend in Brooklyn, she attended a meeting of a congregation of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which is the oldest and most widespread of several schismatic branches of the Mormon religion. A number of prophecies and warnings from the Book of Mormon, an apocalyptic Mormon scripture, were read at the meeting, and she was deeply impressed by them. She borrowed a copy of the Book and studied it for some weeks, whereupon she left the Catholic Church and joined the Reorganized Church. The congregation with which she is affiliated holds its services in a hall in the Masonic Temple in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. Harry was brought up an Episcopalian, but he doesn’t feel strongly about denominations – one is as good as another to him – and since his marriage he has gone regularly to the Reorganized Church services. Harry and his wife have one daughter, Audrey. She is a member of the Reorganized Church, and went to Graceland College, a junior college sponsored by the church, in Lamoni, Iowa. She is married to John Maxcy, who is a Buick salesman in Englewood, New Jersey, and they have two children – Michele, who is sixteen, and Brian, who is eleven.

  Harry is generally supposed to know more about the river than any of the other rivermen, and a great deal of what he knows was handed down to him; his family has lived beside the river for a long time, and many of his ancestors on both sides were rivermen. He has old Dutch blood and old English blood, and gravestones of ancestors of his are all over the Edgewater Cemetery. He is related to several of the oldest families in New York and New Jersey. Through his mother, who was a Truax, he is a descendant of Philippe du Trieux, one of the first settlers of New York City. Du Trieux was a Walloon who lived in Amsterdam and who came to New Amsterdam in 1624 and build a house either on a lane that is now Beaver Street or on a lane that is now Pearl Street – the historians aren’t sure which. A scholarly study of his descendants – the name has been spelled Truex or Truax for generations – was published in installments in The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record in 1926, 1927, and 1928. In this study, Harry is listed in the tenth generation of descent from du Trieux.