“Well, I was out of work in St. Louis, and didn’t fancy loafing in such a dry place, where there is no pleasure to be seen without paying well for it, and so I thought I might as well go to New York. I packed up my duds and left for this village, where I arrived, all right, this morning.”
The four-month sojourn was Samuel L. Clemens’s first visit to Manhattan — before piloting up and down the Mississippi, before christening himself Mark Twain, before the California gold fields and a certain jumping frog and immortality.
Mark Twain was a lifelong traveler, and his footsteps are all over New York City. Many of them are detailed in “Mark Twain: A Life” by Ron Powers (Free Press, 2005). Twain returned many times, renting, lecturing, being lionized and trying to raise money. Other Twain sites are better known, but on this, the centennial of his death, his ghost haunts a Twain enthusiast in New York.
There is Cooper Union in the East Village, where in May 1867 this Western humorist’s debut New York speech did for him what a speech in the same building had done forAbraham Lincoln seven years earlier — triumphantly cemented an outlander’s reputation in the East.
That year Twain attended Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, still at 75 Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights, to hear the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher — Twain would later speak there himself — and within a few days, got caught up in a plan of Beecher’s for an excursion to Europe and the Holy Land. Twain went, and his satiric travelogue “The Innocents Abroad” was a hit. A fellow passenger, Charlie Langdon, introduced him to his sister Olivia, whom Clemens married.
There is the Players, a club still at 16 Gramercy Park, which was founded in 1888 by Twain, the actor Edwin Booth and 14 other men of the arts. There is the old Delmonico’s, most likely the one at 44th and Fifth, where he was toasted on his 70th birthday, and the Lambs Club (at 130 West 44th Street, since sold) and the Century Association, a club still at 7 West 43rd Street, a few of the many places where he spoke.
There was also the brownstone, long since demolished, at 3 East 66th Street, where a dying Gen. Ulysses S. Grantstruggled in pain to complete his memoirs, and where Twain, Grant’s publisher, frequently called to cheer up his hero.
Brief lodgings by Twain included hotels, now defunct, at 16th Street and Irving Place, Broadway and Prince, Broadway and 24th, and the surviving Gilsey House (now co-ops) at Broadway and 29th. Twain’s ghost has reportedly been seen at 14 West 10th Street, where he lived in 1900-01 (and where, in a gruesome postscript, Joel Steinberg beat Lisa Steinberg, age 6, to death in 1987).
When the four-story house at 21 Fifth Avenue, at Ninth Street, where Twain lived from 1904 to 1908, was demolished in 1954, after an unsuccessful drive to save it, the loss was mourned in Pravda.
From 1901 to 1903 Twain leased Wave Hill, an 1843 estate in the Riverdale section of the Bronx where the young Theodore Roosevelt had spent two summers. Twain built a parlor in a chestnut tree and wrote of the formidable winter views of the Hudson:
“I believe we have the noblest roaring blasts here I have ever known on land; they sing their hoarse song through the big tree-tops with a splendid energy that thrills me and stirs me and uplifts me and makes me want to live always.”
The chestnut tree and its parlor are gone, but the building, the elaborate gardens and the view are still there, and open to the public.
On his first New York visit Sam got a cheap room on Duane Street and was soon setting type at a printing house at 95-97 Cliff Street, in Lower Manhattan. He saw a number of Broadway plays and, on a day off, thrilled with teenage delight at the New York Crystal Palace exhibition in what is now Bryant Park. “ ’Tis a perfect fairy palace — beautiful beyond description,” he wrote his sister, Pamela.
He marveled at the Croton Aqueduct system and complained of Broadway crowds not unlike those jostling in Times Square today. In a letter to his older brother, Orion, he wrote: “When I get in I am borne and rubbed and crowded along, and need scarcely trouble myself about using my own legs; and when I get out it seems like I had been pulled to pieces and very badly put together again.”
But what he loved the most, he told Pamela, was the Printer’s Free Library, probably at 3 Chambers Street, with more than 4,000 books.
Next month the Morgan Library & Museum will showcase some of its collection of Mark Twain manuscripts, letters and artifacts that relate to his ambivalence toward encroaching modern age in a special exhibition called “Mark Twain: A Skeptic’s Progress,” to run through Jan. 2.
Two essential Twain sites outside the city are in easy reach of New Yorkers: Elmira, N.Y., where he is buried; and Hartford, where his Victorian Gothic home has been restored and is now a national landmark.
Beginning in 1871 Twain and his family spent more than 20 summers in Elmira at Quarry Farm, owned by his sister-in-law, Susan Crane. Mrs. Crane surprised him in 1874 with an octagonal writing room, designed to resemble a riverboat’s pilot house, overlooking the Chemung River. It was Twain’s most productive period; much of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “Life on the Mississippi,” “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” “The Prince and the Pauper” and other works were written there.
In 1952 the study was moved to the Elmira College campus, where it is staffed by student guides. Quarry Farm itself, now owned by Elmira College, is a home for visiting Twain scholars. Hamilton Hall at the college displays memorabilia from Twain’s summers in Elmira.
Mark Twain’s restored 19-room 1873 mansion in Hartford is known both for its ornate architecture and for its Victorian modernism — like central heating, a burglar alarm and one of the first telephones in a private residence. An exhibition through January examines Twain’s legacy.
Twain’s ambivalent attitude toward the New York he kept visiting shows in two of many quotations. The first is from an 1885 notebook:
“All men in New York insult you — there seem to be no exceptions. There are exceptions of course — have been — but they are probably dead. I am speaking of all persons there who are clothed in a little brief authority.”
And in an 1867 letter, reflecting on the city’s impersonality, he spoke for the ages: “I have at last, after several months’ experience, made up my mind that it is a splendid desert — a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.”
CENTURY ASSOCIATION 7 West 43rd Street, Manhattan; (212) 944-0090,thecentury.org.
COOPER UNION 30 Cooper Square, East Village; (212) 353-4100, cooper.edu.
THE PLAYERS 16 Gramercy Park South (a stretch of East 20th Street); (212) 475-6116,theplayersnyc.org.
PLYMOUTH CHURCH OF THE PILGRIMS 75 Hicks Street, Brooklyn Heights; (718) 624-4743, plymouthchurch.org.
WAVE HILL Independence Avenue and West 249th Street, Riverdale, the Bronx; (718) 549-3200, wavehill.org.
Outside the city:
TWAIN STUDY AND EXHIBIT Elmira College, Elmira, N.Y.; (607) 735-1941,elmira.edu (search for Twain’s study).
MARK TWAIN IN ELMIRA Chemung Valley History Museum, 415 East Water Street; (607) 734-4167, chemungvalleymuseum.org.
WOODLAWN CEMETERY (Twain grave) 1200 Walnut Street, Elmira; (607) 732-0151,friendsofwoodlawnelmira.org.
MARK TWAIN HOUSE & MUSEUM 351 Farmington Avenue, Hartford, Conn.; (860) 247-0998, marktwainhouse.org..
