The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  These period labels were tricky affairs. The Gilded Age, not to be confused with the Golden Era, began obscurely, somewhere in the 1880s, and ended quite distinctly on the night of June 25, 1906, when Harry Thaw shot Stanford White.

  White was the Gilded Age’s figurehead. It was a period of great wealth and confidence, of aesthetic striving and ostentation, real grandeur and vulgar display, elegance, garishness, and just plain foolishness, and White was all of it in one. He was both artist and city slicker, a gentleman and a player. As an architect, a beaux arts blend of classicism and bombast, he defined and dictated public taste. As a boulevardier, he set more private styles.

  His energies were volcanic. For twenty years, a massive and rufous presence, six feet two and 240 pounds, with an all-devouring eye, superb moustachios, and a thatch of flaming barbed-wire hair, he seemed to be everywhere at once, at every opera premiere and theatrical gala, every restaurant and regatta and celebrity trial. He built mansions for the Vanderbilts and Astors, the Players Club and the Century, the Mall in Washington, the Lincoln Memorial, most of the Chicago World’s Fair, and, to counterbalance so much worldliness, the Church of the Ascension, Madison Square Presbyterian Church, the porticoes of St Bartholomew’s.

  Publicly, he reached his apogee with the second Madison Square Garden. In private, his greatest conquest was Evelyn Nesbit. At the end, the two became inextricably mixed.

  The Garden came first. By 1890, Barnum having retired, the old Hippodrome site was losing money. New and enlarged quarters were needed, and McKim, Mead & White got the call. For some $4 million, a blocklong Palace of Pleasures arose, with a main amphitheater seating seventeen thousand, two smaller theaters, the city’s largest restaurant, an arcade of shops, and a rooftop cabaret, all crowned by a tower modeled after the Giralda Tower of Seville; and, topping that, as a sort of glacé cherry, a nude statue of Diana, the work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, some three hundred feet above the sidewalk.

  Old photographs convey the elephantiasis but not the lunatic profusion: ‘A riot of loggias, niches, girandoles, cartouches, carved flora and fauna, columned belvederes, shielded colonnades,’ wrote Michael Macdonald Mooney, the best of White’s biographers.

  The Garden’s roof was topped by eight domed cupolas. Sheltered by their Byzantine shade, White could labor by day in his new studio, then climb by night to his theater beneath the stars. From there, seated in solitary state at his private table by the stage, he commanded all of Broadway, as no man before or since.

  The world over which he presided was idyllic, entirely unreal. New York in the 1890s, far from gilded, was in general a hell. The millions of immigrants who poured through Ellis Island and filled the Lower East Side endured some of the most abject conditions that viciousness and neglect had ever contrived anywhere. But White’s Broadway, not five miles away, might have been on another planet.

  From his Garden rooftop, looking north, he saw only incandescence. Electric streetlights had replaced gas, and now the nightly blaze reached clear to Forty-second Street. O. J. Gude, a publicity man, had introduced the phrase Great White Way and put up the city’s first electrical sign, BUY HOMES ON LONG ISLAND SWEPT BY OCEAN BREEZES, right across the park from the Garden. For block after block, the colored lights flashed and glowed, intertwined, drifted apart, and the carriages paraded, and the dice rolled in Richard Canfield’s Casino, and Diamond Jim Brady wolfed down lobsters and champagne in Delmonico’s, and the great hotels – the Fifth Avenue, the Hoffman House, the Brunswick, and the Gilsey House – flushed the sidewalks with music, dazzle, the promise of certain magic.

  Evelyn Nesbit appeared in 1901. She was then sixteen, a chorine in the hit show Florodora, recently arrived on Broadway from Pittsburgh via Philadelphia. She was most exquisite, with heart-shaped face and copper hair flowing to her waist, a delicate Pre-Raphaelite style of beauty ideally suited to the moment. Photographers lined up to pose her as a shepherdess, a water nymph, an Undine with lilies entwined in her hair and two striped tigers painted at her flanks. So she came to the notice of Stanford White, and he fed her champagne in a loft studio on West Twenty-fourth, well away from public gaze. At one end there was a red velvet swing, with green smilax wound around its ropes. White swung her in it, higher and higher, till she could kick her feet through a paper Japanese parasol hung from the ceiling. Later, he dressed her in a yellow satin kimono embroidered with festoons of wisteria, and seduced her in a room filled with mirrors.

  Afterwards, when she woke up and started crying, White petted her and kissed her. ‘Don’t. Please don’t. It’s all over,’ he said. ‘Now you belong to me.’

  There was the whole age, caught in a single encounter. Enshrined as Stanford White’s new mistress, Evelyn sat in the red velvet swing stark naked and kicked her feet even higher; posed, in the most famous photograph of the era, as Tired Butterfly, curled up in another kimono and sprawled on a polar-bear skin. When her course was run, she moved on and married Harry K. Thaw, a crazy person but heir to $40 million.

  The marriage was not a success. Thaw force-fed his wife on uncut cocaine, beat and whipped her at will, but did not cease to resent Stanford White, the big yellow brute who drugged and wronged her. At last, on the opening night of Mamzelle Champagne, Thaw made his way to the Madison Square Roof Garden and put three bullets between Stanny’s eyes.

  With White’s death, and the death of his time, Madison Square lost its cachet. Already the coming of the Flatiron Building in 1902 had introduced the first smack of vulgar commerce. And vulgar lust with it. The skyscraper’s sharp profile and prow-shaped tip had the side effect of whipping up sudden gusts and windflaws liable to upend a maiden’s skirt and expose her stockinged ankles. At which revelation, the passing populace would invariably disgrace itself. Talus-crazed, the mob raised such Cain that a special police squad was required to keep it at bay.

  Twenty-three Skidoo was the cant phrase then. But nowadays the law did not rate a ‘Cheese It, the Cops!’ When I showed up for my tryst with Sadie, two men were splitting a deck of powder beneath the obelisk to General Worth, smack in the middle of Broadway, while an officer passed, eyes tactfully averted, a few yards away.

  The site she’d appointed was Saint-Gaudens’ monumental and angel-swathed statue to Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, he of Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead! ‘Another dumb male thing to say,’ Sadie crabbed, but her morning mood was light, almost blithe. She had exchanged her black night uniform for bluejeans and a white T-shirt scrawled with DYING FOR A DRINK. She wore it over a faded blue workshirt, buttoned to the wrists to cover her tracks; and her scrubbed face glowed naked, a too-bright pink, as if she’d made penance with a pumice stone.

  ‘Wanna see something sick?’ she asked. She gave me no time to reply. Behind an infants’ playground filled with slides and climbing bars, she led me to a blackened tree trunk. Someone had gouged out a hunk of the bole with a blunt knife. The ravaged wood showed jaundice-yellow, carved roughly into a heart, and inside the heart, etched in green ink, were the words Tired Butterfly.

  ‘SOS,’ Sadie said. ‘Same old shit.’ She drew me back towards the admiral, sat me down beneath a great oak. Her black nail polish was chipped, beginning to fade, but the nails were newly bitten, her thumbs ripped raw. ‘This morning I witnessed. Gave evidence,’ she said. ‘I never do; I never say a word. But I did today.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘The usual.’ She picked up my hands, inspected my own thumbs. They too were raw. ‘Passing out. Throwing up in the soup. Waking up in the mornings with someone I never saw,’ she said. ‘They like that stuff, they lap it up.’ She let my hands fall. ‘But it isn’t what I was thinking.’

  ‘What were you thinking?’

  ‘Cocks,’ Sadie said.

  Her head hung so close to mine her black hair brushed my cheek. It felt lacquered, as stiff as a bootbrush. ‘That’s what I was thinking,’ she said. ‘But you can’t say what you think.’

  ‘Why not?’

&nb
sp; ‘Everyone else would start.’

  She had been sober for eighteen months. Before that, she’d been an addict for eighteen years. She had come out of Babylon, Long Island, where her father was a fireman and her mother had taught her that men were gods.

  In this world, women existed only to serve and service, keep men satisfied. And Sadie had believed that. Or rather, she had not questioned it. When her turn came, she spread her legs without fuss. It felt good, so she did it often. Too often, her father said, and kicked her out of the firehouse, one hot August morning, right after her period hit. He called her a whore, a roundheels, in front of everyone, the fire chief and all. Sadie, Sarah Johanna then, was bleeding and she had no tampons, the blood was leaking out of her, she could feel it ooze, and her father kept on yelling, and she just could not move. Slut, he called her. Tramp. She was wearing white hot pants, it was that time, and she was standing by one of the firetrucks, shiny red just like the picturebooks. She put her hand flat against the paintwork, to get support, she guessed, and her father went bug-eyed, he screamed as if she’d told him she was pregnant and the Pope was the lucky man. Get your hand off that goddamn truck, he screamed. We keep those goddamn trucks clean. So she snatched her hand away, the red paint was misted, damp from her sweat, and she felt her blood come down. Clean, her father was screaming. We keep our firetrucks clean. And Sadie looked down, her white hot pants were all blood. Everybody could see. The fire chief and everybody. Chippy, her father called her. Go pull a train, her father said.

  She moved into the city; she came to Broadway. She lived up and down the boulevard, in TriBeCa, on the Upper West Side, in Washington Heights, and the train she pulled was rock and roll. Just hanging out, getting high a lot, shacking up with a lot of musicians, serving them and servicing, keeping them satisfied, like her mother always told her. She was a waitress, she kept bar, she worked in a used-clothing store, she sold a few drugs and turned a few tricks, nothing heavy, just to stay housed and high. And ten years went by, the way that ten years do. ‘A decennium,’ Sadie said. And she was still hanging out on Broadway, a Broadway baby; she had two rooms on Eighty-fourth, crummy rooms really, a sewer, but her sewer. And this one day, it was fall, she was tripping on mescaline. She was with three guys; they were screwing on the floor. That’s where she always slept, it kept her ear close to the ground. ‘Ho Ho,’ Sadie said. And her and these three guys, they were all everywhere, bodies tangled and twisted, it looked to her like a train-wreck. And then it just stopped. She looked down herself, and there were these three cocks, and Sadie thought Ohmygod, she thought. Sweet suffering Jesus. Because they looked just ludicrous. These dicks, pricks, joysticks. These mighty swords. How quite bizarre, she thought. Three pickles left out in the rain.

  It was not the cocks’ fault. They did their best. But their nature was absurd. Little bits of sticks, if you didn’t laugh you could cry, Sadie thought. And yet the fuss they caused. Her whole life, it seemed, had been spent soothing them. For what? A few minutes’ pleasure, a kiss, a pat on the head. The staff of life, she thought. Is that all?

  She spoke in one great rush – it seemed in a single breath – gaining pace in the straightaways, disdaining to break for the turns. But she must have hit a wall. Whatever, she stopped dead. ‘I forget,’ she said.

  The pulse in her throat was jumping again. She lit one of her cigars, set off towards Broadway, where the Toy Center stood. The pathway was lined with warning signs saying CAUTION: RAT POISON, but an old man in spotted pants and a houndstooth jacket was scrabbling in a rhododendron bush. ‘The women feed the pigeons. Bread pellets,’ he explained. ‘Sometimes the pigeons drop them.’ His voice, hoarse, indifferent, seemed to calm Sadie down. Breathing deep, she sat down again. ‘Where was I?’ she asked.

  ‘Cocks.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sadie. ‘Them.’

  There wasn’t much else to tell. Her lease had run out, so had her twenties, and she’d drifted back to the Island. She got married to a carpenter; it didn’t work out. She came back to St Mark’s and took up with a dealer. Heroin, mostly, and a few pills. She got hooked, and the dealer got busted. So then she got another dealer, she stayed stoned for another four years, almost five, but she couldn’t remember them, not a lot. And then? Then she stopped.

  It was funny the way it went down. All those years that the CIA had sponsored and nurtured drugs. Then one day Washington turns around, just ups and decides that dope isn’t nice. ‘Just say No.’ But, of course, it wasn’t that simple. When the new word filtered down to the street, there was just chaos. So the same cop that had been Sadie’s dealer for years now upped and busted her, threw her ass in jail: ‘To save his own, I guess. And saved my life on the side.’

  She was not sorry he had. She was not thrilled to bits, exactly, but she was not complaining. She went to her meetings, and she went to work; she walked down Broadway in the morning and back up Broadway at night. There were no drugs, not much sex, but in the time of AIDS, who was counting? ‘Not Sadie,’ she said. Sometimes, like last night, she’d loiter outside Cafe Society or the Palais de Beauté. Dry humps and simulated blow jobs, sex-change goddesses, Satan: The Real Deal – she did not feel so deprived. ‘Bored maybe, but not cheated,’ she said. ‘I would not say I pine.’

  All that she missed was herself. There were moments – how could she express this? – when she thought of another Sadie and really wished she’d met her, maybe even got to know her. ‘Does that sound sappy?’ she asked. ‘Or only sick?’ She hated self-pity; it made her puke. She had just picked the wrong time and place. ‘Why Broadway? What’s it to you?’ she asked. She did not wait for an answer. ‘All I know,’ she said, ‘it hates women.’ She ground out her cigar; she chafed her raw hands. ‘To death,’ she said. ‘Just hates them to death.’

  I thought of EmCee Marie. I thought of Ellen Fogarty and Enid Gerlin, of Lush Life, of Sadie herself. But she had already rushed on. In some club downtown, in the ladies’ room, there was a graffito she could not forget: ‘In the country of the castrate, the one-eyed snake is king,’ Sadie said. It gnawed at her, enraged her. ‘Jesus God,’ she said. She turned away, then she turned back. In that moment, she had got old again. ‘Shut up,’ she said. Her white hand whipped back, black nails poised to scratch and claw. ‘Just shut the fuck up.’ The hand fell back. ‘Why don’t you?’

  Through the trees came Sasha Zim.

  It was his first week out of the hospital; he still wore the badges of honor. One bandage angled rakishly above his left eye, another covered his ear. Otherwise, he looked depressingly fit. ‘Vsegda gotovy. Always ready,’ he said, clicking heels, and we set off walking again.

  The morning’s duty was light. Just a quick surge towards Herald Square, through the blocks of the Gilded Age, and a slow fall back to earth. But even that felt too far. The hallowed turf of Delmonico’s and the Brunswick Hotel was now a global K-mart, the junkyard of the nations. There was Taiwan crockery, cheap Burmese rugs and Indian jewelry, Japanese home computers, Korean gloves, and Hong Kong everything. There was even a Sasha Handbags. Trade north of toy belt is widespread as corners of earth that has sent its merchants, the Soverican read. But still are reminders of more elegant, if more parochial past.

  Not many. What traces survived of Stanford White’s day were fair-to-middling hideous. The Gilsey House, a favorite of Oscar Wilde and Diamond Jim Brady, had recently been refurbished, made over into a beaux arts Liquorice All-Sort. Perspicacious developers. Juxtapositions of architectural anachronisms, Sasha droned on. His bandages gave him a pirate look, a man of loot and plunder. Enduring is comparative word in city that rarely looks back. When even newer money comes along, it builds its own monuments on ruins of old.

  The monuments in question were South of Lebanon Fashions, Dong Jin Trading, Nageena Indo-Pak. Somewhere among them had stood the Hoffman House, its bar inflamed with Nymphs and Satyrs, the monumental William Bouguereau nude. There Jubilee Jim Fisk had sheltered from the Hell’s Kitchen mobs in the Orange Day riot
s of 1871. There Maurice Barrymore had brawled with Howard Burros in the Great Blizzard of 1888. Now it sold black awareness T-shirts: By Any Means Necessary; Knowledge Is the Key. Sprawling in the doorway, a body-double for Big Daddy Kane was spitting sunflower seeds. When he saw Sasha’s bandaged skull, his upper lip curled. ‘Whitemeat,’ he said, ‘I am not deflowered by your veneer.’

  It was not a negotiable verdict. Big Daddy spat again, examined his knuckles, and we scuttled down West Twenty-eighth Street, the original Tin Pan Alley and, before that, Satan’s Circus.

  Deflowered by veneer. In 1900, the currency on Broadway itself had been red velvet and Bouguereau nudes. But just yards away, down the side streets, sex had dealt in a cruder coin. Underneath the Sixth Avenue El, wreathed in gaslight, was the Tenderloin – Satan’s Circus – the grossest guignol of gallimaufry and moral gangrene under God’s canopy.

  In the 1880s, deadfalls like the Haymarket and the Cremorne, Dan the Dude’s, Paddy the Pig’s, and Worth’s Museum, where the pickled head of President Garfield’s assassin was on permanent display, had been among New York’s greatest tourist attractions. The Reverend Talmadge, having cruised here undercover, called down the Lord’s burning rain. Satan’s Circus, he thundered, was ‘a Cotopaxi, a Stromboli, a Vesuvius, ready to bury us in ashes deeper than that which overwhelmed Pompeii or Herculaneum.’ But no plague came, just the wrecker’s ball.

  It was a tame strip now. Pickled heads and woman’s flesh had been replaced by pocket calculators made in Taiwan. Only one small kiss of the past lingered. ‘No part of Man is not for purchase here,’ the Herald had declared. Sure enough, a discreet door advertised SOUL SALES.

  Perhaps it was the fumes of dead vice, perhaps just the exercise. Whatever, Sasha began to flag. When we dropped back to Madison Square, he started fussing for gewgaws and baubles. But all the toymen were either locked up or defunct. Only one House of Fun, a bright-blue playpen called Gordon’s, stood open. MASTERS OF MERRIMENT, its sign proclaimed. CANES, GRAB BAGS, LANTERNS, WIGS, BEARDS. ‘And rude noises, I bet,’ Sasha said, perking up. ‘Invisible ink. Rubber spiders for dropping down collars. Red noses lighting up in dark, buttonhole roses pissing mud in eye.’ He pushed in the door like a born-again Baptist storming Heaven’s Gate. ‘Codpieces. Fright masks. Exploding pies,’ he cried. ‘Yob tvoyu mat!’