The brothers, Sidney and Bennie, were booking agents for Loews theaters, vaudeville acts. They grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and remember the 9th Avenue El. Yes, there was an El on 9th avenue, a towering erector set of steel beams and girders that allowed a steam driven subway line to run up and down the West Side spine on Manhattan.
Their parents were immigrants from Lithuania and their full name was Piermonsky, reflecting the Russian occupation of Lithuania.
Sidney was the father of friends of mine, two brothers, Dennis and David. Bennie was a lifelong bachelor, a WW I Doughboy who fought in France and who lived his adult life in the Prince Edward Hotel.
On Sunday mornings, Bennie would let Dennis, Dave and I into the Friars Club on 55th Street to gain unfettered access to the pool table in the game room. The Friars was a theatrical club that eventually ceased to exist some years ago. The building is still there. I just passed it a few months ago. The Friars Roasts of celebrities emanated from there.
These guys were show biz in the glory days of The Hotel Astor, Broadway, Lindy's, Stage Deli, Shubert Alley and Damon Runyon. Women were dames, gals, dolls, broads, tootsies, tomatoes, and either had great pins or gams (legs) or not. They knew Mayor Jimmy Walker and Toots Shor, and all who crossed Toot's bar/restaurant threshold, with Sidney introducing the gangster Frank Costello ("I pay my taxes.") to his young son David. They got shaves in a barber's chair, and might have even gotten some in the same chair Albert Anastasia last sat in at the Park Sheraton hotel.
Sidney's second wife was Susan, a ginger-haired USO singer who was Mike Todd's secretary. She was Dave and Dennis's Mom. Sidney went from being a vaudeville booking agent to being a TV producer for CBS, for the Gary Moore and Carol Burnett shows. He showed up at CBS's Black Rock building each morning and never came back to his desk after lunch and several glasses of Dewars at Toots's across the street. He was home by 3:00 P.M.
Sidney was a judge at the Miss America competition in 1945 in Atlantic City, and famously didn't vote for New York's Bess Myerson, the eventual winner. He was known well enough by the post office that he once got a piece of mail simply addressed Sidney Piermont, Times Square, New York. His telephone exchange was LOngacre.
The only reason I'm mentioning all this is that the Wall Street Journal's Ben Zimmer has done his weekly piece on the origin of the phrase "Tin Pan Alley" in the Saturday edition.
His research usually is a deep dive into some phrase that has been appearing in the news recently, but I guess it was a slow week for buzz word utterances by politicians and media types.
Ben does a good job researching printed references to the phrase and finds it was made as far back as 1903. He tells us the Tin Pan Alley district was on West 28th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. I didn't know it was that far removed from Times Square. The wholesale flower district still survives a bit in the area between 6th and 7th Avenues.
Mr. Zimmer writes of a reference to the famous street in the January 16, 1903 edition of the Morning Telegraph (a racing newspaper) telling us a reporter wrote that "William Morris, the vaudeville agent" had leased office space on West 28th Street, "more commonly known as Tin Pan Alley from the multiplicity of song publishers' pianos."
Mr. Zimmer uses the explanation of the sound of music coming from cheap pianos, "tinny" as the source of the area's' name. Consider buildings in Manhattan that behind frosted glass doorways with neatly painted gold leaf lettering pianos there were pianos constantly being played on by songwriters and music publishers, trying to churn out the next hit that Al Jolson or whomever was going to make famous.
Sheet music was a major product of the music business. Most homes had a piano of some kind in he parlor and someone in the household who could read music and bang out a few tunes.
Manhattan office workers then and now ate lunch in the office. I'd like to think one of the Piermont brothers told me that Tin Pan Alley got its names from the tin pie plates that the publishers plopped on top of the piano's hammers to disguise the melodies that they were trying to create from the ears of rival publishers in the building. After all, who wants to lose the rights to the next Swanee River?
Interestingly enough is the section of Manhattan on the East Side where several major hospitals are is known as "Bed Pan Alley." Bed Pan Alley became somewhat famous as the residents of the apartments watched from their terraces as the hospital staff shifts changed at 7:00 P.M. during the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020 and banged on pots and pans, blew trumpets, and in general made New Year's Eve type noise as a salute to the front line workers.
What goes around comes around.
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