Lately I've been reading a Gay Talese collection of essays and stories, freshly packaged in a recently published book, A Town Without Time, Gay Talese's New York.
Anyone who knows anything about writers knows that Mr. Talese has been writing and being published since the Eisenhower administration. He has a shelf full of books, having started as a copy boy for The New York Times.
Much more interesting, especially to a native New Yorker, is the saga of the brownstone that Dr. Nicholas Bartha blew himself up in and thoroughly destroyed in 2006 that created a gap between buildings that only added to the tale of how a 20 x100-foot rectangle of land on Manhattan's Upper East Side, hard by Central Park, can continuously spawn so many stories.
Dr. Bartha was upset about a divorce settlement which would have resulted in his losing ownership of the property. His recourse was much more violent than the fellow in New Jersey who decades ago after getting the decree that his wife would get half the house, climbed up to the peak, after probably drinking waaaay too much, and with a chain saw started to cleave the house in half. He was stopped before he accomplished what he set out to do.
Mr. Talese takes us on a chronological journey of what has occupied what is now 34 East 62nd Street and who has owned the townhouse and the land it sits on. He goes back to the time of the Revolutionary War. The story is a masterpiece of real estate research.
But as we progress with the story, we get to the point where an architect is finally hired who is going to design and build on what has been a cleared empty lot for many years, a new town house that will blend in with the other buildings on the block in this historically designated part of Manhattan. No mean feat.
We meet Henry Jessup who grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut painting houses as a kid, and doing other handyman-type jobs for people who lived in the area.
Not having a clue what to do after high school, he set out touring Europe on a bright yellow motorcycle be bought in London for $600, and rode it as far as Turkey and Greece, all the while absorbing the architectural styles of everything he saw.
He learned to master the skills of carpentry and started a construction company at 19 that would eventually pay for his four-years of tuition at Brown University in Providence, Rhode island where he emerged with a degree as an art-history major.
Encouraged by an architect client for whom he had built a house in Katonah, New York, Mr. Jessup enrolled in the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, graduating in 1978.
Forty years after graduation his firm on Lower Broadway had completed nearly 500 projects of varying sizes all over the world. He was becoming well known, and was eventually hired by the latest developers to own the empty plot of land created by Dr. Bartha's anger (The press had referred to Dr. Bartha as Dr. Boom.) to build a five-story townhouse—with an elevator.
Reading tribute obits, or even anticipating tribute obits, it can be easy to get down on oneself for never having achieved as much as the departed subject.
And even though I started as a kid painting every inch of my family's two-story clapboard house built in 1923, inside and out, along with the detached two-car garage in Flushing, I didn't go on to tour Europe on a yellow motorcycle, or graduate from prestigious universities (or any universities for that matter), or run an architectural firm that produced a French limestone masterpiece on Manhattan's elegant Upper East Side, I'm happy enough.
You just won't read about me in the paper.
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