VIrtual walking TOURs
of NEw york’s
Printing Districts
created by mark j. noonan, institute director
THe Seaport District
Readings: Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” (1819); Joseph Mitchell, “The Cave” (The New Yorker, 21 June 1952); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “If I Were a Man” (The ForeRunner 1914); Scott Zukowski, "Walt Whitman, Trinity Church, and Antebellum Reprint Culture." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 37 (2020)
Suggested Additional Readings: Ezra Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher; Jared Gardner, The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture; Cindy Lobel, “Out to Eat: The Emergence and Evolution of the Restaurant in 19th-Century New York City” (Winterthur Portfolio Summer/Autumn 2010); Steven Carl Smith, An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic; Bryan Waterman, Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature
Printing House Square
Readings: Stephen Crane, “Experiment in Misery” New York Press (April 22, 1894); Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1860); Jean Lee Cole, How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920 (UMiss UP, 2020)
Suggested Additional Readings: Kirsten Doyle Highland, “In the Bookstore: The Houses of Appleton and Book Cultures in Antebellum New York City” Book History (Volume 19, 2016); David S. Reynolds, “Walt Whitman’s Journalism: The Foreground of Leaves of Grass” (2013); Justin Martin, Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians (NY: De Capo Press, 2015)
Union Square, Gramercy Park, and Madison Square
Readings: Willa Cather “Wagner Matinee” (Everybody’s Magazine, Feb. 1904); Edith Wharton, New Year’s Day (1922); Carole Klein, Gramercy Park: An American Bloomsbury
Suggested Additional Reading: Mark J. Noonan, Reading The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine
The West Village
Readings: Willa Cather, “Coming Eden Bower” (The Smart Set, August 1920); 13th episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (as it appeared in The Little Review)
Suggested Additional Readings: Rick Beard and Leslie Cohen Berlowitz. Greenwich Village: Culture and Counterculture; Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century; Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses
THe East Village
Readings: Allen Ginsberg, “Kaddish” (1961); Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died” (1964)
Suggested Additional Readings: Hannah Arendt, “Remembering W. H. Auden” (The New Yorker, 20 January 1975); Daniel Kane, “Community Through Poetry” from The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s; Carolyn Karcher, “Frances Wright of the Free Enquirer: Woman Editor in a Man’s World”; Isaac Metzker, A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side in the Jewish Daily Forward
View: Allen Ginsberg at the Knitting Factory: Kaddish
Listen: “Passing Stranger: The East Village Poetry Walk”