http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/nyregion/27twain.html
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Mark Twain’s portrait at the Players, a club he helped found and that is still flourishing on Gramercy Park. Hanging above it is a pool cue said to be his.
“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..
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/football/jets/2009/01/31/2009-01-31_forty_years_later_joe_namaths_still_supe.html
APJoe Namath embraces his father after the Jets win Super Bowl III on Jan. 12, 1969.
TAMPA - Forty years later the biggest star of the big game is still Joe Namath of the Jets. It's not because he was the best quarterback to ever play in the Super Bowl because he wasn't. If you are looking at everything, the best quarterback in the history of the game is Joe Montana, who played four Super Bowls and won them all and threw 11 touchdown passes in those games and still hasn't thrown an interception. If you want to talk about one game, then it is probably Phil Simms, who was 22-for-25 one time in Pasadena. Still the biggest star is Namath. Terry Bradshaw won four Super Bowls, Montana had his four. Troy Aikman had three. So does Tom Brady. Namath only had the one. And somehow it remains the one. For one Sunday at the Orange Bowl 40 years ago, Namath was Ali and Babe Ruth combined. Nobody ever proved that Ruth actually called his shot in that World Series against the Cubs. Namath called his. People have been making predictions like Namath's ever since. His is the one people remember. He had so much help that day, from his running backs and receivers and the guys blocking and all the forgotten heroes of the Jets' defense. But he dominated the day with cockiness and style, the way Ali could in those years. And all this time later, it is the only game worth talking about for the team he played for, the New York Jets. January 12, 1969 has now become what 1940 was for the New York Rangers. The Giants have won three Super Bowls now, played in another. The Jets, who won as an important game for their sport as the Colts did in that sudden-death championship game against the Giants in 1958, have not been back. Even though the Cardinals are not a huge underdog against the Steelers, we still talk about the other unlikely champions today. It is always part of Super Sunday and the conversation always starts with the Jets of Super Bowl III, who shocked the world that Sunday in 1969, if not themselves. Because the more Namath and the rest of them looked at the film, the more they were sure they could win the game. "Weeb wasn't happy with me," Namath told me one time in Miami, when the big game had gone back there and Dick Schaap and I went and sat with Namath one afternoon. Namath smiled then and said, "But I'd been raised to tell the truth." He is as much "The Franchise" as Tom Seaver is with the Mets. He is still the greatest quarterback in Jets history. There were others who had some years. Vinny Testaverde had a huge year for Bill Parcells and was as much an MVP as anybody in the league the last time the Jets made it to a championship game, against the Broncos. But there was just the one Super Bowl. Even Namath never made it back before his knees were completely shot. Now the Jets are starting over again. They do that every few years. A few years ago there was great excitement because they had gotten Eric Mangini, a young guy off Bill Belichick's staff, and when he took the Jets to the playoffs his first year, he was exactly what the Jets needed: A young Belichick! Super Bowl here we come! Even if Belichick had quit on them after being the "HC of the NYJ" for one day. Only then Mangini went 4-12 in his second year and this year his team fell apart after being 8-3, and his departure became so vicious it was as if Woody Johnson and Mike (Not My Fault) Tannenbaum had fired Isiah Thomas. Now Rex Ryan is exactly what the Jets need, meaning he's exactly not Mangini. It has gone this way for a long time. They do not just correct, they over-correct. They went from Walt Michaels, who was supposed to be too tough, to Joe Walton, who was supposed to be a players' guy. They thought Rich Kotite was a huge upgrade over Pete Carroll. Bruce Coslet was in there somewhere. The only time they really looked like a Super Bowl contender was when Parcells came back and somehow got the season of Vinny Testaverde's life out of old Vinny and it didn't fall apart for them until the second half of the championship game at old Mile High Stadium. They didn't make it. They are the Jets. They watch as the Patriots become great in this decade. They kick a quarterback like Chad Pennington to the curb and watch Pennington become Comeback Player of the Year again and make the playoffs when the Jets can't. They are the Jets. Watching another Super Sunday in another season when they were supposed to have a chance. All this time later, they are one game. Now the Cardinals make it to the Super Bowl and the Jets still can't make it back. Maybe Joe Namath can give us a prediction about when they will. *** Rex Ryan looks to be a real tough guy, and he'll need to be if he ever gets pistol-whipped on his way out the door the way Eric Mangini was. It was reported the other day that the Yankees, because of Joe Torre's book, now might want to have a "non-disparagement" clause written into all their contracts. Considering the way they operate sometimes, I think they should just stick with the unwritten law of "omerta." But think about it: A "non-disparagement" clause for a team that was run for all those years by George Steinbrenner? The Knicks get the Lakers and the LeBrons and the Celtics at home this week, and everybody is saying this is the toughest stretch of opponents, record-wise, in the history of the franchise. But even if the Knicks get boxed around for three straight games, this recent stretch of theirs has been the most entertaining in nearly 10 years. Which ought to tell you exactly what has happened to their brand in that stretch. If it is only a one-year deal, the Mets ought to think about Bobby Abreu. For one of the very best pieces yet about the way the whole deal between Caroline Kennedy and our wacky governor played out, read Chris Smith this week in New York magazine. Forget about everything else with Roger Federer, maybe the most extraordinary thing he's done is make the semifinals of 19 straight major championships in tennis. I always thought Pete Sampras was the best player of them all, even if he never won the French. Then came Federer, who has more talent for the game than anybody I've ever seen. But when you talk about the greatest player of them all, you always have to remember something, because sometimes it's too easy to forget: Rod Laver won the Grand Slam twice. He won it when he was an amateur and then turned pro and went all those years without being allowed to play the majors, and then when tennis became truly open, Laver came back and promptly won the Grand Slam again. So how can you talk about his record in the majors without mentioning that he missed a total of 19 of them over nearly five years. Ken Rosewall? By turning pro when he did, he missed, oh by the way, eleven years of majors. And there is no telling how many majors Pancho Gonzales would have won if he hadn't turned pro as a kid. Federer is something to see, the same as Pete was. But the more you remember what Laver missed, this conversation still has to start with him. And as Mary Carillo always points out, how can Federer be the best player of all time if he's still got a losing record, in HIS time, against Nadal? We are now being told that the Cardinals are the same kind of lock to beat the Steelers today as the Giants were a couple of weeks ago to beat the Eagles. It was interesting to see how the fever to burn Torre's book subsided once people began to actually read it. If your kids liked "Hoot" and "Flush" by my friend Carl Hiaasen, they're going to love his new one, called "Scat." One of the reasons the Yankees say they're worried about people writing mean future books about them is that they don't want anybody stealing their business "model." What, you think people need to read books on how to spend money? If Bruce Ratner scales down his own business model on that great, big, change-the-skyline plan for the Nets and Atlantic Yards, it's going to resemble a model train set. You think Nick Swisher is as excited to play for the Bombers as he originally was? It is still astonishing how the City Council, and big media in this city, completely played dead for Michael Bloomberg when he changed the rules on term limits. There's nothing better to spark a good debate about books than hearing the literary criticism of Prof. David Wells. If you asked Wells about Harry Potter, he'd want to know which team the guy played for. Or maybe where the guy liked to party. When that Wall Street idiot John Thain redecorated his office, it should have been in orange. To match the jumpsuit he ought to be wearing.
One guy.
Reprinted From : www.granitegrok.com/
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.
Winston Churchill
