Patchin Place, 2013
(Click on image to see larger)
In New York City near the intersection of West 10th Street and 6th
Avenue (aka Avenue of the Americas) are two little glimpses into mid-19th
Century life. Milligan Place, entered through a narrow gap between two
buildings on 6th Avenue, and Patchin Place, which runs off West 10th
Street, are both small gated residential enclaves. They’re extremely desirable and
expensive addresses in today’s real estate market because of their location,
quietness and quaintness.
But it wasn’t always that way.
Milligan Place and Patchin Place were both built around 1850 to house servants—mostly Basque
immigrants—working at a nearby hotel.
Throughout much of the 1900s, Greenwich Village
was a hive of creative and bohemian life. The apartments at Patchin Place were popular with artists and writers, including
Theodore Dreiser, Djuna Barnes and John Reed. (Today, Patchin Place is famous
for the number of psychotherapists who live there.)
A close family friend of my
parents when I was growing up, the painter, illustrator and author Shane
Miller, lived for many years with his wife at Patchin Place. Shane Miller was
an easy-going self-described elf of an Irishman. In his lifetime, Shane pursued
many spiritual paths, and along the way also illustrated cartoons for Warner
Brothers (where composer Hoagy Carmichael was his creative partner), painted portraits and wrote and
illustrated books about the history of New York City, Rome and Athens. Shane
was serious when it came to his work. But as a friend he had a wonderful humor
and a smile that warmed all who knew him.
Everyone, that is, except for
his Patchin Place neighbor, the poet e.e.cummings, with whom Shane and his wife
shared a fire escape that was also the passageway used to take their garbage down
to the street.
For most of us, e.e. cummings is
best known as a poet whose work is immediately identifiable by its exclusive
use of lower case letters. As a neighbor in Patchin Place during the 1940s and
1950s, though, cummings was best known for his hard drinking and general
crankiness, which is saying something considering that just about everyone
living at Patchin Place in those days was known for his or her excessive and idiosyncratic
behavior.
e.e. cummings didn’t have much
to do with his neighbors at Patchin Place. He and Shane never shared a social drink,
a nibble of food, a war story or complained about publishers.
The only time cummings ever
spoke to Shane occurred late one night when the two men found themselves taking
out the trash at the same time. Shane greeted his neighbor on the way down the
fire escape, but got no response. On the way back up, cummings paused only long enough to touch Shane’s shoulder and tell him, “Your wife’s sure got a big
ass.”
Hahaaaaa. Always loved cummings' poetry, but I have read about him and so this sounds credible. Those Patchin Place sidewalks remind me of my childhood...
ReplyDeleteGreat story. Well told!
ReplyDeletePatchin Place is included on my Greenwich Village Walking Tour {http://walkaboutny.com/the-tours/greenwich-village-art-and-history-walking-tour/}. Learn more about it and many other Village sights.
ReplyDelete