Bookstores
When I was little I didn't know what a bookstore was, being only familiar with libraries. When my family was on vacation in Door County, a good six hour drive from my home, we went to a bookstore and my parents bought me a Babar book. We were getting ready to go home and we were taking the book with us. I was so confused. I was so worried about how we'd get it back to the "library" on time, being convinced that no one could own a book outright. The revelation that you could have books that you kept obviously changed my life. So therefore I will now present to you "libraries" where you get to keep the books!
If you're anything like me you can't be content just looking at sights when visiting a new city, you need to add to your bookshelf. Not only is it a new world to explore locked between a front and back cover, but it is a souvenir of your time away from home. I know this need to own more books is a condition that is almost worthy of professional help, but I've decided to embrace it, because it's not like I have any other vices! New York has one of the most famous bookstores in the world, The Strand. Located a few blocks northeast of Washington Square Park at 828 Broadway, on the corner of Broadway and East 12th Street is this hallowed bookstore.
The Strand literally boasts miles and miles of books.While I personally have no way to confirm or deny the exact mileage of the books being eighteen, I can guess it is pretty accurate. The first time I saw The Strand I was down at Union Square Park and my friend Orelia and I were hungry and we wandered into a restaurant that happened to be right across the street from the bookstore. I don't know what reason prevented me from going in, but it wasn't until later that year when I returned to New York that I finally made the pilgrimage.
What I remember most about The Strand is that on entering there was this lovely pillar and around it was where they displayed their more reasonably priced collector's edition. Needless to say I kind of hovered there and this is where most of my purchases were made. Signed editions of books, like Alistair Cooke's autobiography, which was actually a present for my father, made their way into my shopping cart. And yes, I do remember where I bought books almost a decade ago, don't you?
The thing you have to realize on going into The Strand is that you are going into a maze. Plan ahead, bring provisions (aka lists of books you're looking for) or you might easily be overwhelmed. I am very lucky in that Madison is a veritable book haven, with amazing used stores such as Frugal Muse. This means that I have very high standards in my bookstores. Aside from the collector's section I was actually a little underwhelmed by the store. Perhaps this is more because I didn't find any of the rare books I often hunt for. One hopes upon going to the mecca of bookstores that you will find that one book you can never find anywhere else, but alas it wasn't to be. Yet a used bookstore isn't entirely to blame for this. They are at the mercy of what people bring in to sell. So I blame the New Yorkers who hold onto all their cool books and don't let bookish tourists like me get them for their own collections!
The most interesting thing I found at The Strand was their rare book room. Having the room isn't strange, this is one of the biggest bookstores in the world, what I found strange was the rules. I had to check all my belongings, sign a waiver that if I did anything to any book I would pay for it. I was so scared at this point that I basically walked around the upper room with my hands tightly behind my back for fear of damaging something. The room felt too much like a library where you knew the librarian would never let you check out a book no matter how sweetly you asked, and yes, I had one such librarian at my grade school growing up, and yes, she was a nun, a very scary nun. As for the books on display on various tables? Traps to lure you into staying! Seeing as at this time I was applying for grad school I couldn't afford anything there, in fact even if I won the lottery I probably couldn't afford anything there, so I calmly backed out, made my more reasonable purchases and moved a few doors down to the comic shop, and yes, they do have a Forbidden Planet in New York!
If you think that the store itself might be too tempting or overwhelming, or dare I say, too Downtown (note to self, stop typing Downton), there's a stall for you! The Strand operates a book kiosk on 5th Avenue on the Central Park side across from The Pierre Hotel (which has an awesome afternoon tea FYI, get their house blend and don't be afraid to ask for more sandwiches). So for those feint of heart or those easily tempted, make your way to 5th Avenue and East 60th Street, open 10AM to Dusk, weather permitting of course. But don't forget, that The Strand is just one of many bookstores, and I mean many. I had planned on checking out a great many of these, but, alas, it wasn't to be. But the joy of New York is just stumbling on a store and walking in, you can find the best places this way, places you never knew existed. Of course if you are more organized, as I obviously am to a psychotic degree, just google New York Bookstores and you will get an amazing array of places throughout the city, places that I hope you and me will one day visit.
The literature of New York can not be discussed without including that most important of writer, the playwright! New York is known for Broadway and Eugene O'Neill was destined to be a part of that history, being literally born for it, coming into this world right in Times Square at the corner of Broadway and 43rd Street, it's now a Starbucks, but at least there's a plaque. The plaque in fact states he is "America's Greatest Playwright" and it is hard to argue with that fact. O'Neill brought the realism of plays that was being employed abroad by Ibsen, Chekhov, and Strindberg, to the United States in plays rich with the American vernacular and people on the fringes of society whose stories would usually end in tragedy and disillusionment. His most famous plays are The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. Though I hold a special place in my heart for The Hairy Ape, having read this play for my undergraduate degree in Theatre, and being forever amused by the death by ape ending. I think it's just the idea of having to have a man in an ape suit onstage in the 1920s that makes me laugh and oddly think of Trading Places...
Of all O'Neill's work though it's The Iceman Cometh that many hold most dear, especially if they don't find apes as funny as I do. O'Neill got his idea for this seminal work from hanging out at his local "hell hole" The Golden Swan, and immortalized it and it's owner, Thomas Wallace, in the play. Occasionally O'Neill was known for sleeping one off in Wallace's apartment above the Swan. The Golden Swan was Greenwich Village's seediest yet most influential hangout for the artists and playwrights of the Village. The patrons made the Swan famous, O'Neill being the most famous. Though O'Neill loved to refer to it by it's secondary name, "Hell Hole," and frequented it on and off throughout his life. Sadly it didn't survive the construction of the subway lines under New York that required many buildings to be torn down. 
But as often happens, if something is destroyed in New York it comes back in another form. Oddly enough the seedy bar has taken seed and grown some roots and become a garden. On the site of such former debauchery there is now the Golden Swan Garden. Next to the West 4th Street Courts at West 4th Street and the Avenue of the Americas (aka 6th Avenue) you can enjoy this little slice of wildlife. In fact, after visiting the Garden you can continue east on West 4th Street as it turns into Washington Square South and you'll be passing by Eugene O'Neill's home (think how drunk he was when he couldn't make it the two blocks home)! Sadly NYU has taken over and rebuilt many of the buildings on the south end of the park so 38 Washington Square South doesn't exist anymore, so this is more a tour of buildings that no longer exist. But as I said with Edith Wharton, the whole area around Washington Square Park retains that old world charm, and you can stalk two dead authors at the same time! 
But I feel to really pay homage to O'Neill you need to go to Broadway. And I don't mean just to take in a plaque at Starbucks, I mean, go to a show! Sure Broadway is all about the magic of the musical, and I can't deny the lure, having taken in a musical almost every time I have been to New York. But Broadway is so much more. It's plays written by the greatest writers in the world performed by the most amazing talent out there. Yes, it's great to see a play anywhere and to support the arts, but if you want the pinnacle of perfection, the true theatrical experience, then you need to go to New York! 
And there is one theatre you should visit above all others, the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. Located at 230 West 49th Street, it's between 8th Avenue and Broadway. Six years after O'Neill's death the Coronet Theatre was renamed after him. For awhile another great American Playwright, Neil Simon, owned it, but now it's owned by a theatrical producing company, Jujamcyn Theaters, that owns many other theatres. In recent years it has put on two very well known and successful musicals that seemed a bit outre before the reviews started flooding in, I'm talking about Spring Awakening, and the show that is still there, The Book of Morman. So, when you go to "The Great White Way" think of the fact that it would never have happened, would never have been possible if not for writers like O'Neill, out there putting stories into the world and up onto the boards. 
When one thinks of old New York and the literary scene you can't help but instantly think of Edith Wharton. Wharton was a writer of great note, she was not only repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence. Friends with many of the literary elite of the day, she was able to combine her insider's view of America's privileged classes with her own insights to create works with depth and a social and psychological conscience. Her books captured New York at the turning of the last century for all readers. What better way to step into the past then to pick up The Age of Innocence and be lost in the doomed affair of Newland Archer and the Countess Olenska? But what is truly amazing about New York is that there are pockets within the city that have barely changed in a hundred years. There are houses and parks that remain just as they are, like they are trapped in a little time bubble. It is just as easy to get lost on a side street and end up in Wharton's world as it is to turn the pages of a book.
Washington Square Park was the epicenter of literature and wealth at the end of the 1800s, before everyone fled uptown. Being in the heart of Greenwich Village, it is still a center for culture, only a little less affluent. Aside from a lack of gallows, this park located at the end of 5th Avenue could easily be the same as it was when Wharton looked out her windows. A few years back when I was visiting New York I was in search of the old city and was on my way to the 
Anyway, back to Washington Square. While yes, the arch does dominate the scene, I found myself entranced by the luscious red brick buildings that surround the park. Of course it was one of these buildings that Wharton lived in. Before leaving the city of her birth and building The Mount up in Massachusetts, she lived at 7 Washington Square North. As Wharton sat in her house she could look out and see Robert Lewis Stevenson talking to Mark Twain, as they met there in 1888. Many artists from the Hudson River School might have dropped by the park to paint it. At the nearby Hotel Albert, 23 East 10th Street, three blocks away from the park on the corner of University Place and East 10th Street, everyone from Walt Whitman to William Faulkner were mingling. Wharton had the cream of the literary crop always a moment away. 
There is a feeling in the park that I can't describe, an old and a new coming together to form that ineffable feeling that is what makes New York so unique and indescribable all at the same time. This painting captures for me that feeling in a way my words will always fail. Looking at this gorgeous painting Wharton's house would be that building on the right of the arc. She was there. She was in the center of it all. She is, in my mind, what true Literary New York is and always will be.
One Fifth Avenue by Candace Bushnell
