It was just the kind of peek into a dark brick hallway that Joseph Mitchell would have appreciated, a glance at a crooked passageway on an upper floor of 6 Fulton Street, at South Street Seaport.
But now we were doing it virtually, through a screen. In fact, with a trace of excitement in her voice, a tour guide hinted the glimpse into the hallway would even be beyond what a group touring the upper reaches of the former Fulton Ferry Hotel in person would be able to do. This is the area where Mitchell ventured in 1952 with Louis Morino, the owner of Sloppy Louie’s seafood restaurant on the ground floor of the premises, via a shaky, boarded-up manual elevator to the abandoned upper floors. It wasn’t surprising that Mitchell would uncover something long-neglected as he so often did composing the essays for The New Yorker for some 26 years and continuing to write, though not publish, for years afterward and walk the streets of New York City. The man looked like he was born standing in the doorway of one of these old buildings, ever-attuned to all around him, in fedora, tie, and suit.
That day 68 years ago, Mitchell and Morino came across a long-abandoned room inside the building, which had been a 19th century hotel when the seaport was teeming with boat and ship traffic. When they came upon it, the room was like a place stopped in time, explained Martina Caruso, who was conducting the virtual tour. It was the old reading room of the Fulton Ferry Hotel.
Under layers of dust, Mitchell later wrote, the two men found a rolled-top desk, a marble-top table stacked with three seltzer bottles with corroded spouts, four sugar bowls “whose metal flap had been eaten away from their hinges by dust,” two brass spittoons, six bureaus with mirrors lined up, and a wire basket “filled to the brim with whiskey bottles of the flask type,” and other oddities left there over who knows how many years. Mitchell described this encounter with the forgotten remains of hotel rooms in his essay, “Up in the Old Hotel.”
Caruso, the guide, who is the director of collections at South Street Seaport, said that she tries to reread “Up in the Old Hotel” at least once a year. She relayed how Mitchell, who immortalized the fishmongers, street preachers, a bearded lady, and other characters of the streets and harbor in his New Yorker stories, became involved in the early years of South Street Seaport’s preservation. Mitchell served on the Museum’s Restoration Committee from 1972-1980, and prior to that was already a notable historian of the Fulton Fish Market.
The upper floors have other implements and features that reflect its past. Caruso pointed out large original sinks that the Morton Brothers steam laundry operated in the upper floors at another time. One could almost feel the heat and steam that must have permeated the close quarters. At various points during this virtual experience, Caruso encouraged the audience to picture what had existed in the buildings’ earlier lives and how, outside the small windows, the harbor must have looked crowded with steamships, ferries, and other ship traffic.
The tour, “Inside Schermerhorn Row: A Virtual Tour of the Seaport Museum’s Landmark Buildings,” was part of Archtober, the 10th annual New York-based Architecture and Design Month. The Center for Architecture hosts this festival each October. This year, Archtober still had its amazing array of events, exhibitions, panel discussions, and tours, from entities such as the Historic House Trust, the Urban Green Council, Wave Hill, Bard Graduate Center, Untapped New York, and the Consortium for Sustainable Urbanization. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, only some tours and activities were in person. Most were virtual, and many tours are archived and still available, like a video of the tour inside Schermerhorn Row’s landmark buildings.
South Street Seaport with the Brooklyn Bridge in the distance, an image from the Detroit Photographic Company around the turn of the 20th century
Based on the troubling surge of COVID-19 cases that is occurring, which public health experts project to keep intensifying into the late autumn and winter, we’ll need to keep doing more virtually. To the extent that we can experience places virtually more and travel far less, we’re being mindful not only of one’s health but of seeking to not tax the health care systems and the doctors, nurses, and health care workers who are enduring the strain and difficulty of this pandemic so heavily. [Read more →]
