Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  I walked into the NBC studio for the first rehearsal expecting to see the entire cast. But only Toscanini was there, sitting alone at the piano. He looked up at me and stared for about five minutes. I was very young; Germont was the role of the father. Finally, he said, “Avanti” [come here].

  I walked close to him.

  “Are you a father?”

  “No, Maestro. I am not even married.”

  He looked at me for another couple of minutes. Then he played my part, and I sang it with him. Afterwards he said, “All right, I make you a father.” I sang the role again, this time for his historic broadcast with the NBC Symphony.

  He was not a difficult person to work with if he liked you and thought you were serious about music. “Merrill,” he would tell me, “I see you take a good breath.”

  HILTON KRAMER: I went to Syracuse University as an undergraduate, and it was during that period, either 1948 or 1949, that I made my first real visit to New York. A friend’s father had taken a suite of rooms at a hotel for a long weekend. I saw the Matisse retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, and what I think was the first solo performance of Merce Cunningham at the 92nd Street Y.

  I was familiar with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and had been to the theater in Boston. Boston was a great city, but it wasn’t New York. After that weekend, I knew if I went to graduate school, it had to be in New York.

  In 1950, I came to Columbia to study literature and philosophy and stayed through the following fall semester. This was the period right after the war, the time of the GI Bill of Rights. My whole undergraduate and graduate school experience was very much shaped by that because there was a level of commitment on the part of these ex-GIs that raised the level of seriousness in the classroom.

  At Columbia, I studied with Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, Eric Bentley, Gilbert Highet, Ernest Nagel—it was a tremendous faculty in those days. Most of the courses were big classes with three to four hundred students. I didn’t meet Lionel Trilling until much later because he was just a dot on the horizon giving a lecture, but his writing and lectures had a tremendous influence on me. Gilbert Highet especially stays with me. He was a Scotsman with this marvelous accent who had been an undergraduate at Oxford, like all the aesthetes of his generation. You know how academics generally dress, but Gilbert was a fashion plate. His course was on the influence of Greek and Latin classics on later English and European literature. He was particularly funny about Joyce’s Ulysses, which he loathed, although his edition of Ulysses was bound in black velvet. He generally loathed all of modern literature; compared to the Greek and Latin classics, he felt it was decadent.

  In January 1951, I left New York because I had run out of money. When I came back in the fall of ’52, I started looking around for a job in journalism and landed one on the night shift of the New York bureau of the Agence France Press, the big French news agency in the AP Building at Rockefeller Center. Then, in 1953, I published my first essay on art in Partisan Review, and as soon as I did, my phone began ringing with people asking me to write about art. I started reviewing exhibitions for the old Art Digest, a fortnightly that covered the art scene.

  It became very convenient to be working on the night shift for the Agence France. I could see the exhibitions during the day and, since nothing ever went on in that office at night anyway, write my reviews at night. French journalists were lazy beyond imagining. They got what they needed out of the New York Times or the Herald Tribune. The only times I actually had to send anything to Paris on the teletype machine was when the sports editor was too drunk to send the scores.

  I was supposed to work from four to midnight but it was French hours. One night I wandered in at six, and the general manager, whom I’d always heard spoken of but had never seen, and whom the French didn’t regard as French because he was from Alsace, was there. The place was in an uproar. What happened? It was the day Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe.

  One day I walked into the office of Art Digest and asked the general manager if there was a chance of a regular job there. It turned out one of the editors had just been fired that very morning. So I went to work for Art Digest, which became Arts Magazine. By the early sixties, I was freelancing and teaching part-time, and all the while the art world was getting bigger and bigger. Then one day in 1965, I got a call out of the blue asking if I’d be interested in coming to work as an art critic for the New York Times.

  WALDO RASMUSSEN: I was born in a small town near Spokane, Washington. When I was fourteen, we moved to Portland, Oregon, as my father got a job working in the shipyards for the war years. I didn’t want to move away from my extended family, but I came to Portland and discovered two things right away: the Portland Art Museum, which was the first museum I ever saw, and the Portland Symphony, which performed the first live concert I ever heard. That did it. The first show I saw at the Portland Art Museum had works by Mark Tobey, and, of course, I had never seen art like that. But instead of being hostile, I was interested.

  At Reed College I minored in art, and at the same time I worked at the Portland Art Museum. When I graduated in 1954, the director of the museum said I should leave and go to New York. He didn’t fire me; he was promoting me in a sense. And so together with my wife, our sixteen-month-old child, and a baby on the way, we set off with borrowed money and no place to live. Instead of going west, we headed east.

  My wife and I had to move around a few months until we found an apartment on 83rd between Lexington and Third. Yorkville had Germans, Poles, Irish—all hating one another. We were a young couple with a child and soon another baby in a building filled with older couples who hated kids. I made sixty dollars a week; the rent was one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, so it wasn’t too easy. My wife was homesick; she had a very hard time at first.

  But a friend from the Portland Museum who was now at the Modern helped me get a position there in a new program that sent American art abroad and brought in exchange exhibitions. And for me, being at the Modern was unimaginable. The abstract expressionists were there. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman were showing at that time. Modern art had become my passion, and I was at the place I wanted to work in more than any other in the world.

  CAROLE RIFKIND: I am a New Yorker born and bred—that is, if you count Brooklyn as being part of New York. My husband is Manhattan born and bred, and when we began dating in 1954, he was told by his parents that I was not a New Yorker. His father, a proper and gentle man, was very definite in letting his son know that he needed a passport to get across the Brooklyn Bridge.

  As a kid living near the next-to-the-last subway stop on the local in Bay Ridge, I thought Manhattan was a very big deal. Brooklyn was isolated; Manhattan was where it was at. One of the most profound experiences for me was in 1947 when my sister took me to the Frick Museum. I saw a Rembrandt, and afterwards I remembered which Rembrandt it was. It was an experience that influenced all my life. Later on my sister went to NYU. She lived in the dormitory at Judson Hall, and every so often, my mother would send me into the city to bring her some money when she ran low. The movie My Sister Eileen was around that time. I identified my sister living in her Greenwich Village dormitory with the film.

  Still, it was rare that I crossed that bridge to Manhattan until I transferred to Barnard after two years of college at Mt. Holyoke. It was that Frick experience. My interest was always in art and the history of art, and Barnard seemed like the place to go.

  I couldn’t get in the dorm because they had a perennial shortage of rooms for the New York City students. Neither Barnard nor your parents would let you live in an apartment—in those years women were very protected. And there was no way I was going to commute the hour and a half each way from Brooklyn. Fortunately I found the Parnassus Club, a protected residence for women on West 115th Street just west of Broadway. It was a six-story building run by Miss McMillan, who looked more like
a madam in a whorehouse than a chaperone for a bunch of young women. But she ran a very tight ship. No young man ever got upstairs, and worse, each one was interviewed when he came in.

  This was New York in 1954. The Parnassus Club was full of women who were attending the Juilliard School of Music, or the Fashion Institute of Technology, or Barnard School of General Studies. It was almost on campus, yet it was a world apart, a thrilling thing. You met terrifically diverse students, not just the academic grinds that you met at Mt. Holyoke. They were into the arts, fashion, music.

  The neighborhood around Barnard was fairly seedy and getting worse. A lot of apartments were doubled up with Hispanic and black immigrants. Landlords were illegally allowing double occupancy. This impacted on Columbia and Barnard. The campus was fine, but a few blocks out, especially to a girl of protected and limited experience, you felt wow!—this is something strange. You would hear stories about people taking the 2 train instead of the 1 train, getting off at 116th Street in Harlem and having to walk up through Morningside Heights Park to get back to campus. It was frightening.

  But the entire scene was a tremendous learning experience because you got to appreciate the diversity and the energy of these people who were striving. The college was alive. It wasn’t about grades; it was about learning and participating and being a part of things. As an art history major, I went with Professor Julius Held to the Metropolitan Museum of Art every week. He’d take us to auction houses, art galleries. He encouraged us to be participants in the art scene, not just academics. It was the time of abstract expressionism. I would ask him, rhetorically of course, what art I should buy—eighteenth-century Venetian or this or that—and he’d always say, “Buy from the New York School!”

  On the other hand, the thinking was terribly paternalistic, patronizing. College was very in loco parentis in those days. They supervised your social life; they supervised your physical fitness. We had to pass a swimming test; they made us tread water for five minutes. It was very much a fifties scene—a timid, fearful time, and you felt that.

  By my senior year, I was able to get a room on the fifth floor of the Barnard dorm on 115th and Broadway. My window overlooked Broadway, and to this day whenever I walk by, I look up at it. I would cross Broadway, amazed by the cacophony. I’d look uptown and see the geography of Manhattan Island, the heights of Morningside Heights. Nobody thinks Manhattan has any geography, but it does. I’d look downtown with all the traffic, and I felt Broadway went on forever and ever and ever.

  Although affiliated with Columbia, Barnard has always had a separate identity. It’s on the west side of Broadway, and Columbia is on the east side. They were two separate campuses, but the architecture was very similar. The whole Barnard-Columbia complex is a very powerful place, one of the great public places in New York City. It’s a very strong, heavily designed campus, and it was homogenous—much more so than it later became—in terms of the uniform corner lines, the neo-Georgian classical buildings. The pattern of the campus, the repetition of open spaces in a very organized way with the quadrangles and courtyards, gave you a very strong sense of place. I felt very privileged being there.

  ALAN GREENBERG: I showed up in Manhattan in March 1949 and went down to Wall Street looking for a job. At that time, all the firms in the investment banking industry were located there. It was a very impressive group of old-line firms, most of which have since gone out of business. The big ones had their own buildings.

  One reason all the action was down there is that securities were moved back and forth physically. There were all these little guys with big briefcases running around, carrying securities from one firm to another. All the bookkeeping was done by hand.

  But the whole street was dead. Everybody was starving. The volume of the New York Stock Exchange was one million shares a day.

  People asked me, “Where are you from?”

  “Oklahoma.”

  “Go back,” they told me. “There’s no future in Wall Street.”

  I went to maybe six firms, they all said no. It was a Wasp-oriented business. Some of them favored Ivy League applicants. But Bear Stearns was a partnership, and probably seventy-five percent were Jewish. There were about 125 people in the whole firm then.

  They hired me as a clerk in the oil department for $32.50 a week. Oil wells were being drilled in Canada and west Texas, and my job was to put pins on a map. I felt lucky to get the job because Bear Stearns was making money despite the conditions. Still I fought very hard to get out of the oil department and become a clerk someplace else. When I became a clerk in the trading room, I felt at least I was in an area where I could grow.

  JERRY DELLA FEMINA: We lived behind the Sea Beach subway in Brooklyn. I heard that train coming and going. The night I got married was the first time I slept away from the subway. Without the noise, I couldn’t fall asleep.

  My parents were Italian immigrants. Every morning my father would wake up at six o’clock, go to the 86th Street station of the Sea Beach and sell newspapers at the stand. At 7:30, the guy would give him four or five dollars, and he would take the train to Manhattan. He worked for the New York Times as a press operator in the composing room, but he probably never walked ten blocks in any direction in the city. I’d wait at the station for him at about 6:30 in the evening. He would kiss me, walk home, and have his dinner. Then he’d go to work as a soda jerk at a candy store underneath the Culver Line El on Avenue U until eleven, twelve o’clock. He’d come home, go to bed, and start the day again. On weekends in the summer, he’d operate the rides in Coney Island. That was his life.

  Our Italian neighborhood was a ghetto. Italian was the spoken language. People built this wall around them to keep the outside world from coming in. No one could get in, but no one could get out. They were content to be longshoremen, to lift things for a living. If someone got into trouble, he’d go to a Jewish lawyer. If someone got sick, he went to a Jewish doctor. You paid rent to a Jewish landlord. That meant in times of stress, you had to turn to someone Jewish, and that bred resentment. But my mom, instead of resenting, got me to understand there was a better way to live. She would take me along with her to Mr. Kahn’s house on Buckingham Road in Flatbush to pay the rent. “Look at this. This is the way you want to live,” she’d say to me. My mom always felt I could do something, be someone. So I had this work ethic from my father and “you-can-do-it” support from my mom.

  Going to Manhattan was a way of climbing over the neighborhood wall. You could get on the subway and ten cents later you were on 42nd Street. It was safe then, and it was glittering, really shining. Manhattan seemed to me to be the realization of the dream, glamour, lights, intelligent people who wore suits and ties to work. I wanted to be a part of it.

  By the time I was sixteen, I was working in Manhattan. I’d leave Lafayette High School at three o’clock, take the train, and head for the Mercury Messenger Service on West 23rd Street. I delivered messages until eight o’clock at night, wandering the streets because I was able to save a dime if I walked instead of taking the subway or bus. Walking from place to place, I got to know the streets and neighborhoods. I got a feeling for the city that you just can’t get otherwise. Once I delivered a message to 30 Beekman Place. I had never been there before. I said to myself, “Someday I’m going to live here because this is the most beautiful place in the world.” Once I delivered to Ed Sullivan’s apartment and got to see his wife. I went home and told my parents. Occasionally I’d get a tip. If someone tipped me a dollar, it was big-time stuff.

  When I was seventeen, I got a job delivering advertising for the New York Times. They sent me to Lord & Taylor, Best & Company, Bergdorf Goodman. By the time I got there, the stores were closed. They’d let me into a side door, hand me the advertising, and I’d rush it back to the Times. Sometimes I made pickups at advertising agencies. One day I came into an agency it was four, five o’clock, and I saw a guy with his feet up on the desk. Being a curious kid, I asked, “What does that guy do?”

&nbs
p; “He’s an advertising copywriter.”

  “Wow! A job where you put your feet on the desk and they pay you? How much does he make?”

  “Thirty thousand dollars a year.”

  From that day on, I wanted to be in advertising.

  In 1954, I got out of high school and began trying to break in as a copywriter. It took me seven years. In between, I worked as a shipping clerk; for a shirt company; for National City Bank, where my job was to carry this giant heavy satchel filled with canceled checks from 11 West 42nd to 10 Exchange Place.

  Meanwhile just being in the city was magic. Everybody was young, excited and growing. There were so many opportunities. It was almost guaranteed that we would do better than our parents.

  LINDA KLEINSCHMIDT: In the spring of 1960, my freshman year at Lawrence College in Wisconsin, I decided I wanted to transfer to another school. But when August came around, and I wound up with no school to go to, my mother in her infinite wisdom said, “You are not taking this year off and hanging around the house. I am sending you to Katharine Gibbs in New York.” I went kicking and screaming as I was not especially interested in going to a secretarial school to learn typing and shorthand.

  Nevertheless, the next month I found myself at the Barbizon Hotel for Women on 63rd and Lexington, where the top five floors were appropriated as a dormitory for the Katharine Gibbs girls. The rest of the hotel was reserved for single women, supposedly from good families, who lived at the Barbizon because they kept an eye on you. Men could only come up to the second-floor level; they could never enter a young lady’s room. There were curfews, and you were in deep trouble if you came back after the check-in time. Many of the residents were aspiring models or actresses; others were hoping for the ultimate secretarial job. Grace Kelly had lived there when she first came to New York and worked as a model.