The Boy Detective Read Free

1891. The book was found among his papers, and was not published till 1924. No evidence of his house today. The lot is occupied by an office building next to the 69th Regiment Armory, a blackened Moby-Dick of a building, where the International Exhibition of Modern Art was held in 1913, and where the neighborhood kids watched the New York Knicks in the early 1950s, before pro basketball got big.
    Writers always have been drawn to the Gramercy Park area, which contained what Henry James, another resident, called “the incomparable tone of time.” The park itself was a farm in the 1820s, bought by an entrepreneur, Samuel Ruggles, described as an advocate of open spaces, who spent $180,000 to drain the swamp on the property and create “Gramercy Square.” This he deeded to the owners of forty-two parcels of land surrounding it. The park was enclosed by a fence in 1833, and a landscaper, with the demanding name of James Virtue, planted trees and shrubs, as well as privet hedges inside the fence to enforce the border. Apparently, Ruggles’s definition of open spaces was limited to two acres (.08 hectares) of elaborately planned greenery and a gated Eden available only to those who lived directly around it and paid an annual fee for a key.
    For myself, I could not stand the studied civility of the place—the perfect rectangular park; the confident benches; the birdhouses, like restored Machu Picchu temples, one at each end; the gravel pathways running among four lawns cut in the shape of piano tops—exclusive, average, tame. That, above all, was what depressed me about Gramercy Park, more than its will for pointless order and enclosure and its smug prettiness—the feeling that the neighborhood might foster and contain creativity, but without the thrill of discovery, or self-discovery, or danger. Sea-level art. Gramercy Park seemed assured that it was better than anyone who lived there, with no evidence to support the assumption. Did Melville sense that as he walked these streets?
    Yet the still, green neighborhood offered something for literary New York. Edith Wharton was born in a town house on the site of the Gramercy Park Hotel, now an apartment house on the north side of the park, in 1862. The sister poets, Phoebe and Alice Cary, moved here from Cincinnati in 1850, and established a literary salon that attracted such people as Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, who advised young men to go west. Greeley had a three-story house at 35 East Nineteenth Street, and kept goats in his backyard. Stephen Crane moved in with three artists, in a run-down building on Twenty-third Street, where he found a fitting quotation from Emerson chalked on a wall: “Congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age.” The National Arts Club, founded in 1898 on the south side of the park, included Mark Twain, W. H. Auden, and, more recently, Frank McCourt among its members. E. B. White located Stuart Little in Gramercy Park. Hard to know if Stuart counts as a literary figure.
    William Sydney Porter, O. Henry to his readers, lived a bit better than most of the area writers, at 55 Irving Place, because he had a steady job writing weekly stories for the New York World at $100 a pop. He spent most of his time hanging around Healy’s Café across the street, and getting stinko with fellow writers, artists, and musicians. Healy’s Café became Pete’s Tavern, in which O. Henry was said to have written “The Gift of the Magi.” During Prohibition, Pete’s posed as a flower shop. Patrons walked past the cases of refrigerated flowers on their way to the bar. Summers, when we were in college, Ginny and I would sit here at the outdoor tables, nurse beers, and speak of the life ahead of us. Tonight the tables are cold and white with frost.
    Oscar Wilde lived at Seventeenth Street and Irving Place for a while. Minor