Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel *****

I've known Up in the Old Hotel by reputation for many years and finally got around to reading it. It's a collection of pieces from The New Yorker in which Mitchell profiles colorful downtown New York characters; as the back cover has it, "saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old 'seafoodetarian." I procrastinated because I was afraid that its down-and-out milieu meant a romantic writing style akin to the Beats or Charles Bukowski, of which I am not a fan.

My apprehension was misplaced. Mitchell has a straightforward journalistic writing style, "curiosity without judgement." He presents each person in their own terms, as if they were bank presidents or celebrities for whom there is no question about the value of getting to know them.  "Even when Mitchell wrote about circus freaks or barroom types, there was no kitsch in his portraits." Collectively the pieces combine into a rich portrait of New York during the first half of the 20th century.

The first half of the book concentrates on the area around the Bowery during the 1930s when it was becoming seedy after losing its status as a theater district. After a brief foray into Mitchell's (less successful) fictional pieces, it turns its attention to the Fulton Fish Market and the then-dying culture of fisherman in New York Harbor. The last hundred pages revisit Joe Gould, one of the protagonists from the first section who was working on "An Oral History of Our Time."

Mitchell is a master at placing his subjects in their context. For instance, his piece about Commodore Dutch, a vagrant who considers the friends who give him money as constituents paying dues for membership in the Commodore Dutch Association, incidentally provides a view into the operations of Tammany Hall. Politics is also in the background of Mitchell's account of the lost traditions of "beefsteaks." He puts all exposition into the mouths of his characters, such as when he has Henry Lyons explain the mechanics of shad fishing from the deck of his barge to an audience that is occasionally distracted by the rhymes of schoolgirls jumping rope ashore. 

Writers would certainly benefit from studying and emulating Mitchell's approach. They would be greatly assisted in this task by the final piece, "Joe Gould's Secret," which provides something like a commentary track for the creation of the earlier profile "Professor Sea Gull" as well as giving substance to the idea that Mitchell identified with his subjects.