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| Ashcan School painter George B. Luks sketched dinner at Maria's restaurant in Greenwich Village, 1890s. |
In the 1890s, Maria’s
restaurant on MacDougal Street drew quite a crowd.
Maria herself presided over
the kitchen. While she cooked and served, men and women toasted each other,
recited poetry, sang, teased, and argued as they milled around large tables.
At Maria’s, a meal of soup
and spaghetti, roasted meat, salad, fruit, cheese, coffee, and Chianti could be
had for fifty cents.
That’s where Ernest Jarrold –
a newspaperman also known as Mickey Finn – often was goaded into singing
“Slattery’s Baby.” Like much of Jarrold’s output, the song mocked Irish
immigrants:
Oh, I’m sorry to shtate I’m in trouble of
late,
From Slattery as well as the
childer;
He tries all the while me patience
to rile
An’ me poor broken heart to bewilder.
. .
The scene at Maria’s
restaurant, dubbed “Bohemian” by social observers and participants alike, rolled merrily along gathering
artists and storytellers. Soon enough, it attracted uptown swells who hoped to
be fashionably edgy. When Maria’s moved to Fourteenth Street, everyone followed.
Intent on preserving their fun and exclusivity, the artists and writers
established The Pleiades Club which met weekly at the restaurant.*
After a while, the lawyer and
poet William E. S. Fales broke off to start The Blue Pencil Club. He located it
in lower Manhattan near Newspaper Row, and invited the bawdy Mickey Finn and other
journalists and illustrators to come along.
Among club members, the
cartoonist R. F. Outcault was especially well-known. He had made his name with the
inimitable character, the Yellow Kid. The bald urchin in an oversized yellow
nightshirt emerged from a comic strip about street kids called “Hogan’s Alley,”
which Outcault created for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Soon enough, William Randolph Hearst lured Outcault
to his New York Journal. It is said
that the term “yellow journalism” originated with the circulation battle that ensued
between the two papers. **
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| The Yellow Kid is front and center in this panel from R. F. Outcault's "Hogan's Alley." |
The irony is that newspapermen like Finn and Fales were a long way
from the down-and-out, unconventional style that took its name from the early-nineteenth
century vie de Boheme of Paris’ Latin
Quarter.
Still they persisted in
identifying as Bohemians, even declaring Fales “the King of Bohemia.” There are
many histories of Bohemianism in the United States, some of which mention the
crowd at Maria’s and none of which mention the Blue Pencil Club, but I won’t
split hairs.
What’s interesting is that the
newspaper offices where these men worked were spitting distance from the neighborhoods
where Chinese, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants had settled since the
1880s. In this way, they were right on top of the cultural and social changes
brought about by new demographics.
One change was the
proliferation of ethnic table d’hote restaurants
in lower Manhattan. In
those days, table d’hote referred to
a small restaurant, often in a cellar, where the chef and his family lived,
cooked, and served dinner to guests.
Something new and different,
unsullied by crowds hoping to be cool.
Besides, by 1900, a spaghetti
dinner could be had at one of many “Italian eating houses,” one writer would recall.
* The
Pleiades Club continued into the 1930s.
** Since the cartoonist had not copyrighted “Hogan’s
Alley” or its characters, the World was
able to continue the strip by employing a different illustrator and retitling
it. That illustrator was George B. Luks, who went on to become a member of the
Ashcan School of painting. Later, Outcault created Buster Brown, a comic strip
character as well as the mascot of the Brown Shoe Company of St Louis.
See posts: 1/25/17, 2/1/17, 2/14/17.
See posts: 1/25/17, 2/1/17, 2/14/17.
