Parker Dorothy - A Journey into Dorothy Parkers New York

Some years ago I learned that young Dorothy Parker, while she was still Dorothy Rothschild, had lived in a rooming house at Broadway and 103rd Street. Exactly where was hard to say, after the passage of more than a half-century, but a combination of deduction and wishful thinking led me to situate her boardinghouse on the east side of Broadway, on the site of Lamstons five-and-ten.

Regrettably, the dime store is today a paint and wallpaper business. I myself was in the habit of nipping into Lamstons a few times a week because there are plenty of reasons to visit a five-and-dime, while the need for paint and wallpaper arises once or twice in a lifetime, if that. I suspect Dorothy Parker might have agreed because she had never been known to step foot in such an establishment. Saloons yes, paint stores no. Lamstons, I like to think, was her type of joint, a romantic emporium offering such essential wares of life as bobby pins and emergency Alka Seltzer.

If Dorothy Parkers spirit did not really frequent Lamstonsand Im afraid it didnther association with countless other buildings is a documented fact. Should you think that a tour of her world must involve curiosities from a long-lost civilization, something equivalent to picture postcards of Pompeii and Herculaneum, youd be wrong. What most startles me is how many of the buildings relating to her life still exist. Certain theatersand those marvelous speakeasiesmay have vaporized, but the Algonquin Hotel remains in the same spot, and a few doors down West 44th Street is the same office building where she found a job on Vogue in 1915. For that matter, the store in which she actually did buy her sundries, Zitomers on Madison Avenue, is still thriving today.

With devotion and invention, Kevin C. Fitzpatrick has created a delicious illustrated guide to New York City and the doings of one of its legendary citizens. A Journey into Dorothy Parkers New York moves from the 1890s in the Upper West Side neighborhood where she lived until the age of twenty-seven, through the 1920s with its bootleg booze and jazz music, to the Cold War hysteria of the 1950s and the years beyond. The book offers chapters of literary and political history, popular culture, urban architecture, and theatrical lore, not to mention something else that is particularly fun to read: sidebars full of useful facts.

The last chapter traces Dorothy Parkers final years, when she made her home at the Volney, a quiet residential hotel on the Upper East Side. Frail and in poor health, she had trouble lifting her hands to the typewriter keys but continued writing whenever possible. One of her last pieces, published in Esquire in November 1964, paid tribute to the work of John Koch, a painter known for his elegant still lifes of well-bred New Yorkers. In New York at 6:30P.M., she vividly reprised her intimate, bittersweet memories of that alluring hour of day, when the late afternoon sky was flushed Renoir blue and real fires were being lighted in real fireplaces. With a touch of sadness she noted, There is no such hour on the present clock as 6:30, New York time. Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, youll live through the night.

For a glimpse into the heart and soul of the metropolis, for a chance to begin understanding those things that only New Yorkers know, the place to start is A Journey into Dorothy Parkers New York.

MARION MEADE