The First App

Been diving back into 'McSorley's Wonderful Saloon' by Joseph Mitchell as much to re-read some of the pieces as to also take advantage of something to read by flashlight that I can finish before going to sleep and dreaming of electricity. But we're back. We think.

The pieces are so old now that I can understand how it might be hard to believe that the people he's written about even existed. Or, that prices and rents were ever really as described. But I entered my early teen-age years at the start of the 1960s in Manhattan, and caught the cusp of Mr. Mitchell's atmosphere at street level through the windows of the family flower shop.

Another of Mr. Mitchell's portraits is of a street preacher, the Reverend Mr. James Jefferson Davis Hall, residing at 360 West 45th Street in a $30 a month cold water flat, reachable by telephone at CIrcle 6-6483. Reverend Hall pays $3.54 for the monthly phone service, a 25% discount from New York Telephone because he's a member of the clergy.

At the point Mr. Mitchell chronicles the Reverend' s life, he's up there in age. But still someone who can tell you that his father was a physician for the Confederate Army, and that he, James, was born in 1864, before the surrender to the Union Army in the War of Northern Aggression.

The profile was written in 1943 under the title, 'A Spism and a Spasm.' I can remember people who fit the behavior of Reverend Hall, even if I didn't observe them from the doorway of a saloon, dispensing their 'halleluiah hypodermics' to the seated and those leaning in on the brass rail. There was no shortage of them and very left-leaning socialists who filled up a section of 14th Street's Union Square Park. But how do I find someone who knew the Reverend? Everyone's dead.

Well, archaeologists never feel inhibited from recreating what life was like when they dig through dirt and sand and find what likely wouldn't get a second glance from any of us. Junk. So, how do I get in "touch" with Reverend Hall and make sure he prowled the streets and gave out his card to have people call him with their troubles--in what might have been perhaps the first religious app?

Mr. Mitchell has certainly provided enough clues. Very full name, address and telephone number. Go to the phone book.

Like the clever lawyer in 'Miracle on 34th Street' who proves to the court that there really is a Santa Claus if the post office delivers his mail to him, there surely there was a Reverend James Jefferson Davis Hall if he can found in the phone book.

Just so happens the New York Public Library has digitized the 1940 phone books for New York City's five boroughs, or counties. Easy to find, easy to use.

Hall J J D Rev  360W45 CIrcle 6-6483.

Hallelujah!