Deborah Noyes - Ten Days a Madwoman: The Daring Life and Turbulent Times of the Original

An 1882 caricature of New York Citys major morning newspaper publishers.

Dear Q.O.,

I am off for New York. Look out for me.

Bly

W hen the ambitious young reporter Elizabeth Jane Pink Cochranknown to her readers as Nellie Blyleft her life and family behind in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she was confident one of New York Citys major daily newspapers would hire her at once. She had spunk. She had experience. She was fearless and eager to learn.

And she was wrong.

Nellie left her mother, Mary Jane, behind in Pittsburgh on a May day in 1887, promising to send for her when she found steady work. She stepped up onto a train and later stepped down into the most populous city in the nation wearing a flowered hat she had bought while reporting in Mexico. Like thousands of other young hopefuls, twenty-three-year-old Nellie Bly was on her own for the first time in her life.

She rented a tiny furnished room overlooking an alley on West Ninety-Sixth Street. Her lodgings were in the northernmost part of settled Manhattan, where Broadway became Western Boulevard, and the boulevard wasnt paved yet. Goats wandered through, nibbling weeds in vacant lots between squat houses. It was about as far from where Nellie needed to be every day as it could get.

Her destination was Park Row, also known as Newspaper Row, a street slanting northeast from lower Broadway where newspaper offices hunkered along one side near City Hall. The trek downtown each day was epic. Nellie rode a steam locomotive a half hour south on the Ninth Avenue Elevated Railway. Then she walked east on streets where people lived grimly packed together in tenements (and were often roasted, as newspaper reports of the day liked to put it, in devastating blazes). Typhus, cholera, and influenza swept through the area at regular intervals. Gambling dens and bordellos thrived while the police looked the other way. Robbery and murder were commonplace, keeping city reporters on their toes. The streets were a hazard in their own right. One of thousands of horses hauling the citys carts, carriages, hansom cabs, omnibuses, and streetcars might bolt at any moment, their transports careening into bystanders.

Nellie pounded the Park Row pavement in vain. The gatekeepers at the Tribune, the Times, the Sun, the World, the Herald, and the Mail and Express, who turned away aspiring reporters every day, were unimpressed by her Pittsburgh portfolio.

To scrape by that first summer in New York, Nellie wrote freelance articles for her old newspaper, the PittsburghDispatch, where she had made her start and a (literal) name for herself. They were the sort of Sunday style stories she hated, about the rage for puffed sleeves among fashionable New York women, for example.

Around the time that her money and patience were beginning to run out, the Dispatch forwarded a letter from a young Pittsburgh woman. An aspiring journalist wanted Nellies advice: Was New York the place to get a start? Could a woman writer make her mark there?