CONTENTS
Acknowledgments xv
INTRODUCTION 1
1. AND NEVER LOOKED BACK 4
Billy the Kid 4
Éamon de Valera 5
Norman Rockwell 7
Al Capone 8
Burt Lancaster 10
Maria Callas 12
Antonin Scalia 15
Colin Powell 16
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar 18
William Barr 21
Lee Harvey Oswald 23
2. EXTENDING THE GRAND TOUR 25
Chateaubriand 25
Frances Trollope 26
Alexis de Tocqueville 28
Charles Dickens 30
3. COLLEGE DAYS 35
Amelia Earhart 35
Federico García Lorca 38
Sylvia Plath 39
Barack Obama 41
Neil Gorsuch 44
4. ROOMMATES 46
Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart 46
Marlon Brando and Wally Cox 49
Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall (and Gene Hackman) 52
Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve 54
5. TYING THE KNOT 56
Daniel Webster 56
John Tyler 58
P. G. Wodehouse 59
6. “FUN CITY” 62
James K. Polk 62
Mary Todd Lincoln 64
Arthur Conan Doyle 66
Woodrow Wilson 69
Warren G. Harding 69
Salvador Dalí 72
Albert Schweitzer 74
7. MY NEW YORK YEARS 75
Captain William Kidd 75
Anna Leonowens 77
Zane Grey 78
Jim Thorpe 79
CONTENTS IX
William O. Douglas 82
Gregory Peck 84
Grace Kelly 86
Dwight D. Eisenhower 88
James Dean 91
Willie Mays 93
Johnny Carson 96
8. ON THE PEOPLE’S BUSINESS 99
Maxim Gorky 99
Fidel Castro 101
Nikita Khrushchev 103
Bishop Tutu 106
Nelson Mandela 107
9. THE OBLIGATORY BOOK TOUR STOP 110
Davy Crockett 110
William Makepeace Thackeray 112
Mark Twain 114
Oscar Wilde 118
Gertrude Stein 120
W. B. Yeats 123
10. ON THE ROAD TO FREEDOM 125
Sojourner Truth 125
Frederick Douglass 127
Harriet Tubman 128
Rosa Parks 130
11. A WIDER AUDIENCE 132
Jenny Lind 133
Gilbert and Sullivan 135
Sarah Bernhardt 137
X CONTENTS
Pyotr Illich Tchaikovsky 139
Antonín Dvořák 142
Arthur Rubinstein 144
Gustav Mahler 146
Charlie Chaplin 147
Marie Curie 150
Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo 151
12. NOT A FAN (PERHAPS WITH GOOD REASON) 155
Thomas Jefferson 155
Henry James 157
William C. Macready 160
Booker T. Washington 162
Josephine Baker 163
13. JUST PASSING THROUGH 167
Benjamin Franklin 167
Paul Revere 169
Phileas Fogg 170
Robert Louis Stevenson 172
Sigmund Freud 174
George Bernard Shaw 175
Ernest Hemingway 177
14. OUT- OF- NETWORK 180
Winston Churchill 180
Grover Cleveland 183
Rudyard Kipling 184
The Shah of Iran 186
Martin Luther King, Jr. 188
15. BEFORE REMOTE WORKING 191
Noah Webster 191
Margaret Fuller 193
CONTENTS XI
Frank Lloyd Wright 195
Edward Teller 198
Theodor Seuss Geisel 199
George H. W. Bush 201
16. CROSSING THE MASON- DIXON LINE 203
Jefferson Davis 203
Robert E. Lee 205
Flannery O’Connor 206
17. CHOUETTE NEW YORK 208
Georges Clemenceau 208
Marcel Duchamp 210
Marshall Pétain 211
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 213
Jean-Paul Sartre 215
Albert Camus 217
Simone de Beauvoir 219
18. TICKER-TAPE PARADES 222
Albert and Elisabeth, King and Queen of the Belgians 223
Queen Marie of Romania 224
Charles Lindbergh 225
19. STATE VISITS 229
Prince William Henry 229
The Prince of Wales (the Future Edward VII) 230
King Kalakaua of the Sandwich Islands 232
Elizabeth II 234
20. EXILES, REFUGEES, AND WARTIME VISITORS 236
Giuseppe Garibaldi 236
Louis Kossuth 239
Talleyrand 240
Louis Philippe 241
Joseph Bonaparte 242
Louis-Napoleon 244
Sergei Rachmaninoff 245
Sun Yat-sen 247
Ho Chi Minh 248
Leon Trotsky 250
Alan Turing 252
Béla Bartók 253
Marc Chagall 255
Richard Nixon 256
21. EASTWARD HO 259
Bat Masterson 259
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 261
Sitting Bull 263
22. THE KENNEDYS OF THE BRONX 266
23. A GOOD PLACE TO RETIRE 269
John C. Fremont 269
Ulysses S. Grant 271
Alexander Kerensky 274
Greta Garbo 275
Harper Lee 278
24. CROSSING THE BAR 281
Anne Hutchinson 281
Nathan Hale 282
James Monroe 284
Thomas Paine 287
Lorenzo Da Ponte 289
Abraham Lincoln 292
CONTENTS XIII
Stephen Foster 294
Ignacy Paderewski 296
Willa Cather 298
Sholom Aleichem 301
Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Soong Mei-ling) 303
Woody Guthrie 305
Max Beckmann 309
Dylan Thomas 311
Buddy Holly 313
John Lennon 314
25. A GAPING HOLE IN AN OTHERWISE FULL LIFE: NARY A TRIP TO GOTHAM 317
Appendix: The Cutting-Room Floor 319
EXTENDING THE GRAND TOUR
The era of the Grand Tour—ritual travel by wealthy Europeans through the Continent and the Holy Land—ended around 1850, with the rise of railroads making travel more commonplace. This chapter groups European travelers who, though from that era, ventured beyond the Grand Tour’s destinations to travel to the New World—with a stop in New York City.
The advent of the railroads and steamships made world travel somewhat less extraordinary. The earlier travelers in this chapter contended with bumpy carriage rides on unpaved roads to reach a New York that was far from the world-class city it would become.
CHATEAUBRIAND
One of the earliest visitors from Europe in this book, Chateaubriand, today is associated more with sirloin than sojourns. Born in Brittany in 1768, Francoise-René de Chateaubriand was one of the most distinguished Frenchmen of the first half of the nineteenth century in the fields of literature, politics, history, and diplomacy.
When the French Revolution broke out, Chateaubriand, a nobleman, understandably thought it timely to see something of the world beyond
France’s borders. He sailed to Philadelphia in 1791 and continued to New York City by stagecoach. Years later, he described New York as “a gay, populous, and commercial city, which, however, was then far from being what it is at present.” He was unimpressed by the architecture, noting the “uniform level” of the buildings and the absence of “scarcely anything that rises above the mass of the walls and roof.” After continuing on to New England, Chateaubriand returned to the city and from there sailed up the Hudson River to Albany. He made it as far west as Niagara Falls. He captured his grand tour in his 1827 Travels in America and Italy (which followed his 1811 Travels in Greece, Palestine, Egypt and Barbary).
After fighting for the Royalists upon his return to France in 1792, Chateaubriand lived in exile in London until 1800. Returning to France at the start of the Napoleonic era, he played a prominent role in French government and society through the First Empire, the Restoration, and the July Monarchy, dying as the Revolution of 1848 was raging.
FRANCES TROLLOPE
Frances Milton “Fanny” Trollope is less remembered than her son, the novelist Anthony Trollope. But Mrs. Trollope’s time in New York merits our attention. In 1827, she traveled with her children—the teenage Anthony left behind—from England to America on a trip that would extend to four years.
New York City was not Fanny Trollope’s primary destination; her Atlantic crossing took her first to New Orleans. She hoped to remake life for herself and her children in a utopian community in Tennessee. The Trollopes lived there for a couple of years before moving on to Cincinnati. Failing to find her footing, Trollope decided she might turn things around by writing a book on America. The result, Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in England in 1832, made her fame.
Trollope recognized that to complete her book she would need to familiarize herself with the larger cities on the eastern seaboard. She spent seven weeks in New York City in 1831. Although she was critical of much of what she saw in America, she was favorably impressed by New York, writing, “I have never seen the Bay of Naples, I can therefore make no
comparison, but my imagination is incapable of conceiving anything of the kind more beautiful than the harbour of New-York.” She further observed, “Situated on an island, which I think it will one day cover, it rises, like Venice, from the sea, and like that fairest of cities in the days of her glory, receives into its lap tribute of all the riches of the earth.”
Trollope praised the “beautiful” public promenade along the Battery and “splendid” Broadway, with its “handsome shops, neat awnings, excellent troittoir, and well-dressed pedestrians.” “Hudson Square and its neighborhood is, I believe, the most fashionable part of town,” she wrote of the neighborhood also known as St. John’s Park, which was completely obliterated in the late 1860s by Cornelius Vanderbilt’s acquisition of the park as the location for a train depot, later to be replaced by the approach to the Holland Tunnel.
Despite her children underfoot, Trollope evidently got out after dark, observing, “At night the shops, which are open till very late, are brilliantly illuminated with gas, and all the population seems as much alive as London or Paris.” During her stay she visited the three major theaters, finding the Bowery Theatre “superior in its beauty” to the Park and the Chatham. “The hackney-coaches are the best in the world,” she wrote, even though she was once greatly overcharged by a driver who preyed on tourists.
Trollope also familiarized herself with the life of Black New Yorkers:
There are a great number of negroes in New York, all free; their emancipation having been completed in 1827. Not even in Philadelphia, where the anti-slavery opinions have been the most active and violent, do the blacks appear to wear an air of so much consequence as they do in New York. They have several chapels in which Negro ministers officiate; and a theater, in which none but negroes perform. At this theater a gallery is appropriated to such whites as choose to visit it; and here only are they permitted to sit; following in this, with nice etiquette, and equal justice, the arrangement of the white theaters in all of which is a gallery appropriated solely to the use of the blacks. I have often, particularly on a Sunday, met groups of negroes elegantly dressed; and have been sometimes amused by observing the very superior air of gallantry assumed by the men, when in attendance on their belles, to that of the whites in similar circumstances.
Trollope ventured up to the Bloomingdale district, now Morningside Heights but then an area of country estates with commanding views of the Hudson River. She apparently was received at one of them, called Woodlawn, located at what is now Riverside Drive and 106th Street. She later described it as the loveliest mansion in the beautiful village of Bloomingdale.
Trollope never returned to New York, despite her view that it “was one of the finest cities [she] ever saw, and as much superior to every other in the Union (Philadelphia not excepted) as London to Liverpool, Paris to Rouen. Its advantages of position are perhaps unequaled anywhere.”
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
The observations of Alexis de Tocqueville on American society and government, as recorded in his 1835 Democracy in America, have been thoroughly analyzed by true historians. But what did he think of New York?
Traveling to America with a fellow aristocrat, lawyer Gustav de Beaumont, Tocqueville arrived by ship in Newport, Rhode Island, after a swift crossing of just more than a month. He continued by steamship to New York. His initial impressions of New York City as the steamship approached its harbor were favorable: “We cried out in admiration on seeing the outskirts of the town. Imagine shapely banks, their slopes covered with lawns, flowers and trees right to the water’s edge; and more than that, countless country-houses, no bigger than chocolate-boxes [bonbonnières] but excellently crafted. Further imagine, if you can, a sea covered with sails, and you have the entry to New York from the Sound.”
On shore, he wrote back to his mother in France:
Here we are in New York. From a Frenchman’s perspective, it looks disarmingly weird. There isn’t a dome, a steeple or a large edifice in sight, which leaves one with the impression that one has landed in a suburb, not the city itself. At its very core, where everything is built of brick, monotony rules. The houses lack cornices, balustrades, carriage entrances. Streets are ill paved, but pedestrians have sidewalks.
Lodging was a problem at first because foreigners abound at this time of year and because we sought a pension, not an inn. At last we found one that suits us perfectly, on the most fashionable street in town, called Broadway. [The exact address was 66 Broadway, near Wall Street.]
Tocqueville later climbed a church tower to look out across the skyline: “At last, after much trouble, we arrived at the top and enjoyed a wonderful sight: the town of 240,000 inhabitants built on an island bordered on one side by the Ocean, on the other side by vast rivers on which could be seen a multitude of ships and barges. The port is of an immense size. The public buildings are few and on the whole unimpressive.”
Tocqueville was somewhat taken aback by the free-and-easy behavior of New York’s colleens:
You will find the deportment of young women even more outlandish [than that of spouses]. Picture the daughters of prominent families, dolled up at one in the afternoon, blithely scampering through all the streets of New York, from shop to shop, or riding horseback unescorted by a parent, by an uncle or aunt, or even by a servant. But there‘s more. Say a young man (and this has happened to us several times) crosses paths with one such equestrienne. If they already know each other, they stop, and chat amicably for a quarter hour at a boundary-post. The young woman thereupon invites him to visit her and tells him when she will be home to receive. He then proceeds to call upon Mademoiselle So-and-So at the stated hour and often finds her alone in her father’s drawing room, where she does the honors.
Tocqueville’s traveling companion, Beaumont, in a letter home, wrote:
You ask if there is a museum in New York. There are doubtless several. But do you know what one finds on display? The magic lantern and some stuffed birds. Tocqueville and I had a good laugh when, seeing the sign “American Museum” on the façade of a building, we entered and found the above items instead of paintings. There are a few public libraries, but they contain twenty thousand volumes at most and go unfrequented.
Moreover, literature is not held in high regard. People learn to read, to write, and to calculate; in a word, to acquire as much knowledge as enables them to conduct business. But belles lettres hardly matter. We are told that things are different in Boston and Philadelphia. We shall see.
An honored representative of the French government, Tocqueville was presented to the governor of New York, and the mayor and city officials gave him a tour of charitable and benevolent institutions, the ostensible purpose of his trip. Tocqueville was shown the city’s prisons, workhouse, deaf-and-dumb asylum, and Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. To reach certain of these institutions, he was rowed halfway across the East River to Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island). At the invitation of the district attorney, he observed the trial of “a famous thief,” likely at City Hall. Sailing thirty miles up the Hudson to visit Sing Sing prison, he wrote, “You can’t imagine anything more beautiful than the North River or the Hudson.”
Tocqueville recognized the connection between New York and the rest of the United States, observing in a letter, “New York is located in one of the most admirable sites I know, with an immense port, at the mouth of a river, which war vessels can sail up for thirty leagues. It is the key to northern America. Through it each year arrive thousands of foreigners who will populate the wilderness of the west, and all the manufactured items of Europe which then stream rapidly toward the interior of the land.”
After seven weeks in New York and its environs, Tocqueville began his tour of the rest of “northern America.” There, he presumably learned what all foreigners learn: that New York is not America. Tocqueville returned to New York City to sail back to France. He never again traveled to the States, but his Democracy in America remains an academic fixture here to this day.
CHARLES DICKENS
Dickens first visited America in 1842. At that point in his literary career, he was already a publishing phenomenon, having written The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Barnaby Rudge. He arrived in Boston on January 4, and, after stopping en
Profoundly interested in penal reform, Charles Dickens made a point of visiting The Tombs on Centre Street during his 1842 visit to New York, seen here in an engraving from 1850.
The New York Public Library route in Worcester, Hartford, and New Haven, reached New York City a month later. Dickens found that the “beautiful metropolis of America is by no means so clean a city as Boston, but many of its streets have the same characteristics; except that the houses are not quite so fresh-coloured, the sign-boards are not quite so gaudy, the gilded letters not quite so golden, the bricks not quite so red, the stone not quite so white.”
In New York, Dickens stayed at the Carlton Hotel on Broadway. He and his wife were given “a very splendid suite of rooms,” but at a cost that was “enormously dear.” (The bill for his two-week stay came to £70.) Washington Irving sought him out, and the two socialized throughout his stay. One morning at the Carlton, Dickens breakfasted with three of America’s leading literary figures, all members of the Knickerbocker Group: Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and Fitz-Greene Halleck. (Halleck is almost completely forgotten, but a statue of him in Central Park attests to the extent of his nineteenth-century fame.)
Here is a sampling of Dickens’s observations on Gotham from his 1846 American Notes:
On the Financial District: “This narrow thoroughfare, baking and blistering in the sun, is Wall Street: the Stock Exchange and Lombard Street of New York. Many a rapid fortune has been made in this street and many a no-less-rapid ruin.”
On the Tombs jail: “What is this dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an enchanter’s palace in a melodrama!—a famous prison, called The Tombs.” (Dickens, who had a deep interest in penal reform, was taken aback by the Tombs’ wretched conditions.)
On Broadway: “Take care of the pigs. Two portly sows are trotting up behind this carriage, and a select party of half-a-dozen gentlemen hogs have just now turned the corner.”
On Five Points: “There is one quarter commonly called the Five Points, which, in respect of filth and wretchedness, may be safely backed against Seven Dials, or any other part of famed St. Giles’s.” (Prudently, Dickens was accompanied by two police officers when he toured this neighborhood one night.) “We have seen no beggars in the streets by night or day; but other kinds of strollers, plenty. Poverty, wretchedness, and vice are rife enough where we are going now. . . . Debauchery has made the houses prematurely old. . . . What place is this, to which the squalid Street conducts us? A kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without.”
On Roosevelt Island: “One day, during my stay in New York, I paid a visit to the different public institutions on Long Island, or Rhode Island: I forget which. [It was Blackwell’s Island, now Roosevelt Island.] One of them is a lunatic asylum. . . . I cannot say that I derived much comfort from the inspection of this charity. . . . A short distance from this building is another called the Alms House, that is to say, the workhouse of New York. . . . In the same neighborhood is the Farm, where young orphans are nursed and bred.”
On the theater scene: “There are three principal theatres. Two of them, the Park and the Bowery, are large, elegant, and handsome buildings, and are, I grieve to write it, generally deserted. The third, the Olympic, is a tiny show-box for vaudevilles and burlesques.”
A dinner was held for Dickens at the City Hotel, at which Washington Irving spoke. The Park Theatre on Park Row was elaborately redecorated for a Boz Ball held in Dickens’s honor—Boz being his early pen name— complete with tableaux vivants. Dickens attended services at St. John’s Church on St. John’s Park (today Hudson Square, the approach to the Holland Tunnel), then one of New York’s most fashionable neighborhoods.
After a little over three weeks, Dickens left by train for Philadelphia, a trip that, in those days, would have begun with a ferry ride to a New Jersey train station. He traveled in America another three months, venturing as far south as Richmond and as far west as St. Louis.
Dickens was embittered by the American piracy of his works. In all his talks during his first visit, he sought to promote international copyright law. Although he did not make any money from pirated versions of his works published in America, they did make him famous in this country, and he soon commanded large fees for speaking engagements.
But Dickens’s criticism of America in his American Notes and the unflattering depiction of its people in Martin Chuzzlewit aroused negative feelings in the late 1840s and 1850s. These faded over time, and by the 1860s, the American people were clamoring for another U.S. tour. Thus, after the Civil War, Dickens made his second and final tour to America, in 1867 and 1868. He covered not quite as much ground as on his 1842 trip, going south only to D.C. and west only to Buffalo.
The fashionable Manhattan hotels had moved uptown since his 1842 visit. For his second trip, Dickens stayed at the Westminster Hotel on Irving Place, which he described as “quieter than Mivart’s in Brook Street,” “quite as comfortable,” and with “French cuisine immensely better.” His suite opened directly to the street. Dickens noted the changes to the city in the twenty-five years since his last visit: “New York has grown out of my knowledge, and is enormous. Everything in it looks as if the order of nature were reversed, and everything grew newer every day, instead of older.”
Dickens visited Central Park, which had not existed in 1842. At Niblo’s Theatre he saw The Black Crook, which is considered the first American musical.
Tickets to Dickens’s readings were a hot item. The first such reading was given at Steinway Hall, on Fourteenth Street east of Union Square. Audiences were enthralled by the readings from his works, which, since his 1842 visit, had multiplied and included, among others, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Bleak House.
The high point of the tributes was a banquet given in Dickens’s honor by the New York press at Delmonico’s (then located at Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street). Dickens, feeling unwell, arrived leaning heavily on the arm of Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New-York Tribune, and Henry J. Raymond, founder of The New York Times, delivered a warm tribute.
The tour was a huge financial success for Dickens. His receipts totaled $228,000, minus expenses of $39,000. After paying an enormous fee to convert his receipts into gold he still cleared £20,000 (roughly $100,000). But the lucrative American trip took a tremendous physical toll, and Dickens died two years after his return to England. However, he would return to New York from beyond the grave. In 1985, the unfinished novel Dickens was writing at the time of his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was adapted for the stage and performed at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.
“Destination City is not about New York’s residents but about people like Charles Dickens, Desmond Tutu, Dwight Eisenhower, James Dean, Sojourner Truth, Gertrude Stein, Bat Masterson, Abraham Lincoln, and a hundred others who just passed through the metropolis and recorded their observations. Robert Pigott has done a superb job of summarizing their Gotham encounters and reminding us of the magic and mystery of what is still the greatest city in the world.”
—Kenneth T. Jackson, editor in chief of The Encyclopedia of New York City
“E. B. White said no one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky. In Destination City, Robert Pigott captivatingly reminds readers that an amazing cast of characters had to be lucky to visit the world’s greatest city too!”
—Sam Roberts, author of A History of New York in 101 Objects
“Brisk, entertaining, and full of surprises, Destination City showcases the New York experiences of historical figures who aren’t typically associated with Gotham yet spent enough time there to be shaped by the city in some way. Their wellresearched, lively stories will resonate with city natives as well as newcomers and transplants.”
—Esther Crain, author of The Gilded Age in New York, 1870–1910
“Pigott has compiled a collection of interesting notables, held together by the variety of their personalities and the lively readability of their descriptions. This book is informative, but most of all it is entertaining. And in its totality, it provides a feel for the movers and shakers of the world who have spent at least some time in New York City.”
—Andrew Alpern, author of The Dakota: A History of the World’s Best-Known Apartment Building
“Unexpected nuggets abound for the reader interested in the surprising history of New York City. Pigott’s subjects represent a sprawling roster of characters: poets, outlaws, pilots, politicians, actors, revolutionaries, assassins, soldiers, singers, potentates, artists, and even a pirate. They are testament to New York’s gravitational pull for all those seeking diversity, opportunity, and culture.”
—Michael Miscione, former Manhattan borough historian
Robert Pigott is the general counsel of a New York City nonprofit that develops affordable housing. He is a former section chief and bureau chief of the New York Attorney General’s Charities Bureau as well as the author of New York’s Legal Land marks , a lawyer’s historical guidebook to the city. A lifelong New Yorker, Pigott lives in Manhattan.
Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky