Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Urban Underworlds was conceived in The Hole, a grimy, graffiti-covered bar in the East Village with no sign advertising its secrets and no locks on the bathroom doors. What drew me there on Friday nights when I was a PhD student was the promise of strong drinks in plastic cups, threadbare couches, and video projections of art-house films over a dancing crowd that almost always included an indie star whose career I followed and the bassist for a popular post-punk band whose CDs I owned. Not far from The Hole was an illegal, unlicensed, amazingly cluttered bar operated by a low-level member of the Italian mafia, to whom I had been introduced one memorable evening in 2002. Inside an apartment building, away from prying eyes on the street, the bar’s door was guarded by a bouncer who one night showed me the “Saturday Night Special” he kept tucked inside the puffy winter jacket he wore in all seasons. Such places taught me that much life in the city transpires not only out of view but also “off the map,” hidden from the official channels of publicity in order to protect itself from curiosity seekers, as well as the police. I like to think that many of the writers in Urban Underworlds, whose novels travel through places far more seedy, would have felt at home in these clandestine locales of twenty-first-century New York. The Virgilian guides for Urban Underworlds have been many, but I would like to thank first and foremost Ross Posnock for his high standards . He has been a source of constant inspiration and a model intellect , one whose rigorous scholarship and clear, crisp writing I hope x / acknowledgments to emulate. This project is also indebted to Phillip Brian Harper, who helped steer me through graduate school and prepared me for the world beyond it. I would also like to thank Bryan Waterman for his enthusiastic support, which kept me from going under. Alan Williamson, who taught me to ignore the voices that said one could not be an academic scholar and a writer, has left his imprint on my career in ways that I cannot quantify. My close friends John Beckman, Andrew Strombeck, Robert Balog, and Chris Hosea, with whom I often commiserated, lent their companionship, support, and wisdom on our high and low escapades through the city in the late hours of the night. My wonderful research assistants , Stephanie Dixon and Max Karpinski, proofed and fact-checked Urban Underworlds, thus saving me time and eyesight. I want to offer my appreciation to my many excellent colleagues and students at New York University and McGill University for the smart, challenging, and invaluable feedback I received in the form of conversations, seminars, and papers over the years. Without the fellowships, grants, and research hiatuses I received at both schools, this book might have never seen the light of day. For permission to reprint photographs and figures, I have several individuals and organizations to thank. The Museum of the City of New York has been kind to allow me to reprint images from the Jacob Riis collection. I want to thank Frank Oppel for his permission to reprint illustrations and photographs from Tales of Gaslight New York. The photograph “Cabaret Dancers, ca. 1937,” by Aaron Siskind, appears here courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago and the Bruce Silverstein gallery, which holds the rights to the photographs of Aaron Siskind. The University of Chicago Press has granted the right to reproduce Ernest Burgess’s figure “Urban Areas.” I would like to thank the UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, Los Angeles Times Photographic Archives , for its photographs of Bunker Hill and Pershing Square; and I would like thank Yves Rubin for allowing me reprint his photograph of the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. I am grateful to Margaret Morton for allowing me to reproduce one of the striking images from her book The Tunnel (Yale University Press, 1995), a photographic record of underground homelessness in New York City. Part of chapter 2 appeared in a slightly different form in Twentieth Century Literature (55.3, Fall 2009) and is here reprinted with permission of the journal. My editor at Rutgers University Press, Leslie Mitchner, has lent me her expert stewardship and insightful commentary, for which I am deeply acknowledgments / xi indebted. Anonymous readers...