{"id":1306,"date":"2014-04-18T22:10:42","date_gmt":"2014-04-19T02:10:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mindfulwalker.com\/?p=1306"},"modified":"2021-05-04T16:03:05","modified_gmt":"2021-05-04T21:03:05","slug":"joseph-mitchells-regard-for-ornament","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mindfulwalker.com\/wordpress\/explore-new-york\/joseph-mitchells-regard-for-ornament","title":{"rendered":"Joseph Mitchell\u2019s Regard for Ornament"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joseph Mitchell possessed a lifelong fascination with New York City\u2019s survivors, both its characters and its buildings, especially ones that often escaped notice. For some 26 years, from 1938 to 1964, his essays in The New Yorker<\/em> portrayed the city\u2019s inhabitants from the bearded Lady Olga of circus sideshows and the stout Germans carrying their own sets of knives who were the chefs of the old East Side school of beefsteak dinners to the fringe of the fringe who peopled McSorley\u2019s saloon and even the minutiae of the types of rats that populated the city\u2019s five boroughs. Then after 1964, no essay of Mitchell\u2019s appeared in The New Yorker<\/em>. Yet, through the rest of his time there until his death in 1996, Mitchell continued to go the magazine\u2019s office each day.<\/p>\n

Though Mitchell did not submit a word for publication after the mid-1960s, he kept on writing \u2013 and walking the city. Mitchell’s walking was an obsession that set in early. When Mitchell first came to the city in 1929, at the age of 21, one of his editors at the New York Herald Tribune<\/em> advised Mitchell to \u201cwalk the city, get to know every side street and quirk and character,\u201d according to an introduction to a Mitchell essay in The New Yorker<\/em>. He obviously took this to heart, for many decades, and his stories rendered the results of his explorations as he depicted the city\u2019s steelworkers, longshoremen, restaurant proprietors, movie house bouncers, social club operators, and others among the unsung and the oddball.<\/p>\n

But his love of buildings drew attention much later. An essay published after his death revealed more about how Mitchell walked the city constantly and noticed with his writer\u2019s fine eye the distinctive, the beautiful, and the quirky in New York\u2019s buildings. During what others have called Mitchell\u2019s \u201cperiod of silence,\u201d he was writing, at work on a memoir that he apparently never completed. The New Yorker<\/em> published an excerpt of this unpublished memoir, \u201cStreet Life,\u201d on Feb. 11, 2013. (While doing research in Mitchell\u2019s papers, Thomas Kunkel, who is writing a forthcoming biography of Mitchell, found unpublished excerpts of his writing and gave the excerpts to the magazine.) \u201cWhat I really like to do is wander the streets aimlessly in the city,\u201d Mitchell wrote. \u201cI like to walk the streets by day and by night.\u201d He also might ride in a \u201cdozen or fifteen or twenty\u201d different buses in a day.<\/p>\n

To Mitchell, New York\u2019s buildings were imbued with life and spirit in the same ways as the people he had written about. He was especially captivated by the ornamentation and features of the city\u2019s older buildings, and he would get off buses or take sudden detours in his walks to get long and closer looks at them. Older churches that people had transformed for other denominations enthralled him, as did many other old buildings, such as hotels, restaurants, saloons, courthouses, newspaper plants, piers, ferry houses, and banks. If more of the financial interests today believed as Mitchell did, New York might well not see so many sleek new glass towers in place of the older buildings with their carvings, cast-iron medallions, gnarled stone faces, terra cotta cherubs, metal cornices, and such.<\/p>\n