La cueva (En
el viejo hotel). 28 de junio de 1952
“De cuando en cuando, para
espantar los pensamientos de muerte y desolación, me levanto temprano y me
acerco al mercado de pescado de Fulton”… -comienza el relato. Suele llegar
hacia las cinco y media de la mañana y deambula entre los puestos sobre una
hora. “Luego entro en el Sloppy Louié´s…, donde me como un desayuno generoso,
barato y reparador…”. Hace 9 o 10 años que va a este lugar y el propietario del
restaurante (un italiano, Louis Morino) y él son buenos amigos.
Lo que sigue es una historia de vida de Louie, contada por
un gran escuchador, el periodista de
The New Yorker Joseph Mitchell. Con él sube en un viejo ascensor (“me recuerda
a un ataúd… o a una cueva…) de
poleas al segundo piso del edificio, en tiempos el Fulton Ferry Hotel, en el 92
de South Street. Y con su vida, la de
toda una calle, un barrio, una ciudad.
Pequeñas
pinceladas de él mismo
Además de lo que podemos
intuir o deducir, están palabras expresas; no muchas, pero algunas frases que
nos hablan del propio Mitchell; de sus gustos, sus actividades, sus actitudes:
caminar, buscar flores silvestres…
“Cuando la vida se me
atraganta, me pertrecho de una guía de flores silvestres y un par de bocadillos
y me acerco a la costa sur de Staten Island para dar un paseo por alguno de sus
viejos cementerios (según él, “no hay mejor sitio para buscar flores silvestres
que los cementerios viejos”) …”- inicia el perfil La tumba del señor Hunter, en 1956. “Después de pasar una hora
larga en cualquiera de estos cementerios…, se me levanta siempre el ánimo,
siento que me invade una extraña alegría y emprendo una larga caminata”…
En este caso, da con George
H. Hunter, de 87 años, presidente del consejo de administración de la iglesia
metodista de Sandy Ground, en Staten Island. “Recuerda mejor que nadie la edad
dorada de las ostras. Podría relatarle con todo detalle el auge y caída de la
industria ostrera en la costa sur de Staten Island”- le dice el párroco de la
iglesia de Saint Luke. Así que, un sábado coge un ferry a la isla, toma el
autobús de Tottenville a Rossville y sube a pie por Bloomingdale Road hasta el
pueblo de Sandy Ground, buscando una casa “con pararrayos”… De vuelta a su hogar,
además de una jugosa historia sobre el pueblo, la industria ostrera y sus
vecinos, se lleva un par de plantas para estudiarlas con la ayuda de una lupa, y un saber sureño
antiguo: “Los huesos son el mejor fertilizante del mundo para los rosales”.
SABER
MÁS
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1952/06/28/the-cave-joseph-mitchell. The cave (en inglés).
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1956/09/22/mr-hunters-grave. Mr. Hunter´s grave (en inglés).
https://stacyhorn.com/2007/10/30/mr-hunters-grave/. Mr. Hunter´s Grave en 2007, por Stacy Horn (en inglés). La tumba de Mr. Hunter en 2001.
“I went to Staten Island in 2001 to look for the cemetery and to find
out where Mr. Hunter was finally buried. I took the exact same Tottenville bus
Mitchell would have taken to get there. At the time I wrote: the cemetery is
well tended now. Vandalized in 1997, it has since been declared a New York City
landmark and restored. Too restored. It’s bare and cold and missing a sense of
renewal it might have had when it was lush, fragrant and overgrown. The wooden
crosses are gone, as are most of the trees, shrubs, and wildflowers. But Mr.
Hunter’s grave is unchanged. It’s exactly as Mitchell described it, except now
there’s a gravestone for Hunter’s only child William, who died in 1955. He lies
at the foot of his mother, Celia. Everyone thought William drank himself to
death, I later learned, but when they got him to the hospital they discovered
he had cancer.
There was no date of death for Mr. Hunter on any of the graves so there
was no way of knowing which grave he was in. I went looking for his church and
met Lois Mosley, a former tenant of Mr. Hunter’s who had just turned 75 the day
before, and she was able to tell me that Hunter
had died on April 6th, 1967, at 97, having never left Sandy Ground.
Sadly, he wasn’t buried with Edith as he had wanted to be, and he
wasn’t buried next to her, as he thought he would be. He was buried in his first wife’s Celia’s grave. I hoped he was
okay with that”.
https://nicholasgeorgianis.wordpress.com/2016/03/03/remembering-sandy-ground-settlement-staten-island/. Remembering Sandy Ground Settlement-
Staten Island.
https://southstreetseaportmuseum.org/remains-of-the-old-hotels-in-schermerhorn-row/. Soapstone sinks in the Fulton Ferry
Hotel laundry room, in 2012. En el Museo del Puerto de South St. The Fulton
Ferry Hotel at 92-93 South Street was named so in 1875 when Friederick and
Henry Lemmermann bought the Mackinley Hotel that occupied the same address
prior. The hotel stayed in business until ca. 1935.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/nyregion/thecity/13hote.html. Up in the New Old Hotel, por By Saul
Austerlitz, July 13, 2008. El Museo del Puerto, en South Street, toma posesión
del hotel a finales de los años 1980s.
“The low wooden ceiling is discolored and chipped. Walls of lath are
covered by layer upon layer of faded wallpaper, and bits of plaster cling
desperately to worn wooden planks.
Daggers of sunlight slice across the whitewashed brick in a darkened
room. Soapstone tubs and drying racks line the walls, and through the windows
at the end of the passage, wide-angle views of South Street, the East River and
the Brooklyn Bridge unfold where boards once blocked out the day.
We are in the laundry room of the partly restored Fulton Ferry Hotel…
By the time the museum took possession of the hotel in the late 1980s,
the space had again become an archaeological site, with lottery tickets from
1981 piled atop waitresses’ order books from the 1940s…
In 1996, shortly before the writer’s death, the two men (Mitchell and
Jack Putnam, 72 in 2008) returned to the Fulton Ferry, and in a photograph
taken that day, Mr. Mitchell is seen gripping a worn wooden door with fierce
intensity, as if afraid to let go”.
https://www.downtownpostnyc.com/south-street-seaport-museum-exhibits.html. SOUTH STREET SEAPORT MUSEUM EXHIBITS
BEFORE SUPERSTORM SANDY IN 2012. Antes de la supertormenta Sandy, el 29 de
octubre de 2012.
“Superstorm Sandy on Oct. 29, 2012, flooded Schermerhorn Row with seven feet of
salty water and the museum's electrical system was demolished. In April 2013,
the museum's Fulton Street galleries closed, awaiting the funding that would be
needed to restore the heating and cooling systems and the escalators and
elevator.
Until Superstorm Sandy knocked out the museum's electrical system,
visitors could also see remnants of the old hotels in the building”.
Otros personajes de Nueva York
https://quefluyalainformacion.blogspot.com.es/2013/02/joe-gould-un-personaje-de-nueva-york_26.html. EL SECRETO DE JOE GOULD.
https://quefluyalainformacion.blogspot.com.es/2012/05/en-nueva-york-con-long-winded-lady.html. EN
NUEVA YORK CON MAEVE BRENNAN.
https://quefluyalainformacion.blogspot.com/2018/06/la-mujer-singular-vivian-gornick-y-la.html. PASEANDO
NY CON VIVIAN GORNICK..
https://quefluyalainformacion.blogspot.com.es/2013/04/vivian-maier-la-ninera-fotografa.html. CON VIVIAN MAIER, FOTÓGRAFA.
