— This piece was originally posted in December of 2013. It has been updated and expanded.
When I moved to Manhattan in the fall of 1976, just out of college, I was on a mission to be published by The New Yorker. Little did I know, when I rented an apartment at 113 West 11th Street, that I had moved to a street that was home, at one time or another, to a stellar array of the magazine’s artists and writers.
A day after getting the keys to my apartment, I was standing in the small vestibule of my new home, when a tall man with an Amish-like beard came bounding down the stairs. He paused to ask me what I was doing there.
After I introduced myself as the new tenant moving into 3R, he stuck out his right hand and introduced himself: “Donald Barthelme.” I didn’t know who he was — my initial thought was that he had an interesting name and interesting beard — but it didn’t take long before I learned I had moved into the apartment directly above one of the most acclaimed New Yorker writers of the day. I soon discovered that Grace Paley, another New Yorker writer, and a very good friend of Donald’s, lived across the street, just west of the public school.
(I met Ms. Paley in Donald’s apartment at a holiday party when we ended up sitting side-by-side on hassocks near the fireplace).
Over time, as I read up on New Yorker history, 11th Street continued to pop up:
E.B. White & Katharine White lived on 37 West 11th in the mid 1940s.
The man who invented The New Yorker, Harold Ross, moved into 52 East 11th following his time overseas during World War 1.
Steinberg lived in the Adams Hotel on the corner of West 11th and 6th Ave in 1942 – his first residence in this country. (In the late 1970s, Donald Barthelme introduced me to Steinberg in the garden behind 113 West 11th).
Peter De Vries (profiled on Ink Spill ) lived at 32 West 11th before moving up to Connecticut.
S.J. Perelman lived at 134 West 11th.
Ethel Plummer, who was in the very first issue of The New Yorker (and was the very first woman cartoonist in The New Yorker), lived at 112 West 11th, directly across the street from the building I moved into (a school now resides where Plummer’s building was).
And I learned that my hero, James Thurber, the fellow responsible for my wanting to become a New Yorker cartoonist, once lived at 65 West 11th. The address was less than a minute walk east from my building, past (what was then) Ray’s Pizza, across 6th Avenue, and just a few steps along 11th on the north side, right where the Eugene Lang College Of Liberal Arts At The New School building now stands.
I walked past the New School building many many times when I lived on 11th Street, always wondering what Thurber’s building looked like. And then, just the other night I remembered reading that the New York Public Library, that incredible institution, had put a gazillion photos of Old NYC online. I immediately looked up West 11th Street, and there, nicely labeled & dated (June 17,1921) was the photo you see below, showing 11th Street between 5th Ave and 6th Avenue, looking west.
The large building on the right of the photo, across the street from that fabulous car on the left (parked near a hydrant!) and directly behind a street lamp, is the building where Thurber lived. The two buildings next to it further west are still standing. The 6th Ave Elevated railway — that long dark horizontal rectangle you see floating just above 11th street — is long gone. 113 West 11th, where I lived, is approximately where you see the car on the right side of the street, past the El, past the people crossing the street.
And so finally, after all these years, that particular puzzle piece has been found. Now if I can only figure out exactly where Thurber lived on Horatio Street. He was living there when he broke into The New Yorker.
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If you’re curious about what NYC looked like a long long time ago, here’s the rabbit hole (click on the red dot on the map for the location you want to investigate).
Had no idea 11th Street has such a rich history. Thanks for this wonderfully informative memoir.
Fascinating. Serendipity.
I second the comments above. And though we live just few short blocks away on Thurber’s (!) Horatio Street, and have long known that Perelman had lived at 134, never realized W. 11th St. accommodated such a literary bounty. (And still don’t know Thurber’s address either…)