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Fom the NYTimes
ESSAY
We'll Map Manhattan
By RANDY COHEN
Published: May 1, 2005
propose to create, with the help of the Book Review's readers, a literary map of Manhattan -- not of its authors' haunts but those of their characters, a map of the literary stars' homes.
I began thinking about this map years ago while reading Don DeLillo's ''Great Jones Street.'' Bucky Wunderlick gazes out the window of his ''small crowded room'' at the firehouse across the street. I realized: there's only one firehouse on that street and few buildings that contain tiny apartments rather than commercial lofts. I know where Bucky Wunderlick lives. Or would live if he existed. He's got to be at No. 35. Knowing this made walking around the neighborhood like walking through the novel. But I walked without a map. Shouldn't there be a map of imaginary New Yorkers?
It would be a lush literary landscape -- the house on Washington Square where Catherine Sloper waited and yearned, the coffee shops where the characters of Ralph Ellison and Isaac Bashevis Singer quarreled and kibbitzed, the offices where John Cheever's people spent their days, the clubs where Jay McInerney's creatures wasted their nights, the East 70's and Upper West Side avenues where the Glass family bickered (Salinger gives several addresses), downtown where Ishmael wandered the docks.
This first map will display fiction set in Manhattan (in the future, I can imagine maps of Brooklyn, Chicago, London and more). It could include novels, poems and stories from all eras (from Hart Crane to James Baldwin to Michael Chabon to William Gibson) and all genres -- literary fiction (Truman Capote, the Roths, Henry and Philip), pop fiction (Bertice Berry and Sophie Kinsella), Ed McBain mysteries, Ira Levin thrillers, children's books (Faith Ringgold's ''Tar Beach,'' E. B. White's ''Stuart Little''). It will be a kind of Global Positioning System for the characters of Dawn Powell, Han Ong, Meg Wolitzer, Mario Puzo, Colson Whitehead, Tom Wolfe and Thomas Pynchon (from ''V.'' -- ''This alligator was pinto: pale white, seaweed black.'' Where is that alligator? Where is the sewer where Benny Profane hunted it down?)
Since nobody is widely enough read -- I'm not widely enough read -- to know the haunts and houses, the offices and bars and subway stops of so diverse a population, I appeal to Book Review readers to send in their favorites. The graphic artist Nigel Holmes and I will put them on the map and credit the first person to submit a site we use.
Sometimes that information is explicit. ''In my wallet was a supply of engraved cards reading Archie Goodwin, With Nero Wolfe, 922 West 35th Street.'' (In other books, Rex Stout gives the street number as 506, 618 and 938.) Curiously, the 900 block of West 35th Street would be in the Hudson River -- it's a non-address, the real estate equivalent of those 555 telephone numbers used in movies.
Locating other houses requires close reading or at least alert looking. Bernard Waber places Lyle, Lyle Crocodile for us: ''This is the house. The house on East 88th Street.'' But where on East 88th Street? The clue comes in an illustration: the amiable reptile stands on his front stoop looking at a house to his left marked No. 234. That puts Lyle's own house at No. 236. Alas, a visit to the block shows not the charming brownstone where Lyle lolled but an ordinary tenement. Lyle's house, like Lyle, is a fiction. As it happens, Harriet the Spy lives in the same neighborhood, in a house on East 87th. You'd think someone as clever as she would have noticed a crocodile around the block.
While some houses are an author's creation, others are authentic New York landmarks, akin to the actual historic figures who appear in period fiction. The Plaza Hotel is home to Kay Thompson's Eloise; Woody Allen and F. Scott Fitzgerald characters also checked in. The El Dorado at 90th and Central Park West is where the parents of Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar dwelt in the bourgeois splendor she was so eager to escape.
Houses are not the only sites that merit a place on the map. There is also the lagoon at the southeast corner of Central Park that Holden Caulfield frets over (where do the ducks go when it freezes?), and the beautiful St. George's Church on Stuyvesant Square where ''Kay Leiland Strong, Vassar '33, the first of her class to run around the table at the Class Day dinner, was married to Harald Petersen, Reed '27'' in ''The Group,'' by Mary McCarthy.
Some addresses can only be approximated. In Edith Wharton's ''House of Mirth'' Lily Bart drifts toward Lawrence Selden's apartment in the Benedick without quite meaning to. ''As she reached 50th Street . . . she decided to walk across to Madison Avenue.'' Midblock, she notices ''the Georgian flat-house with flower boxes on its balconies. . . . A few yards ahead was the doorway they had entered together.'' Even though we know only Selden's block, we'll map it.
Then there are the truly elusive. Melville obscures the address of the faceless office building where Bartleby works -- or prefers not to. The unnamed narrator declares, ''My chambers were up stairs, at No.---- Wall Street.'' The view gives no hint; the windows face an airshaft: ''Within three feet of the panes was a wall.'' Ingenious readers are encouraged to pinpoint this building.
Easier to deduce is the workplace of Vladimir Girshkin in ''The Russian Debutante's Handbook'' by Gary Shteyngart. ''His story begins in New York, on the corner of Broadway and Battery Place, the most disheveled, Godforsaken, not-for-profit corner of New York's financial district. On the 10th floor, the Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society greeted its clients.'' But which corner? Simple. To the south is Battery Park and the Custom House. Bowling Green is on the northeast. Thus, the office can only be in the handsome 10-story building on the north-west corner, at 1 Broadway -- although in the real world there is nothing disheveled about it. Of course Shteyngart's No. 1 Broadway, like all these addresses, is imaginary architecture, as fictional as the characters who inhabit it. But it's no less real, and no less mappable, for that.
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Throughout his life, from childhood until death, he was beset by severe swings of mood. His depressions frequently encouraged, and were exacerbated by, his various vices. His character mixed a superficial Enlightenment sensibility for reason and taste with a genuine and somewhat Romantic love of the sublime and a propensity for occasionally puerile whimsy.
harry Wrote: I understand that you, of all people, know this crisis and, in your own way, are working to address it. You, the madras-pantsed julip-sipping Southern cracker and me, the oldman hippie California fruit cake are brothers in the struggle to save our country.
FT Wrote: LooGAR (the straw that stirs the drink)
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