street below. We couldnât see them for the fences around the exercise yard, but their voices carried out into the evenings: âHey, Sonny. Come on up and get some.â Merely the thought of getting some from a female prisoner was enough to light the night, even if most of us were hazy at best about what it meant to get some. But how free they were, lusty, brassy in captivity, their tinny voices sparking through the air like downed electric wires. They were fearless. âCome up and visit us, boys. Watcha got to lose? Your virginity?â The spinning echoes of their taunting laughter. What were the guards going to do to them? Toss them in jail?
And Tenth Street itself. In the summers, it was so crowded with trees in bloom, you could not see from one end of the block to the other. In winter, now, the sightline is clearâpast the especially wide town houses, pink, white, and brown; the carriage houses; a tiny northern Italian restaurant beside an apartment house that wasnât here when I was a kid; and Holistic Pet Care. Makes me miss my holistic terriers. Tonight, I walk west on Tenth, across Greenwich Avenue toward Patchin Place, a mews of little houses, then back up the avenue, between Tenth and Eleventh, pausing at Partners & Crime, mystery-book sellers, with old copies of Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen, and Mickey Spillane in the window. The store must be newish. I would have remembered if it had been here before.
My first girlfriend, Abby Abrams, lived in a brownstone at the end of Tenth near Fifth. In the summer, her family invited me to their home on Fire Island. I was thirteen. Our bedrooms, Abbyâs and mine, were on the second floor, across a short hall from each other. In the mornings, Abby would come into my room, wearing only a towel. A gifted artist. Big-hearted. She was a little younger than I, but way ahead of me, probably not in experience but definitely in instinct. I had no idea what was expected of me, so I just talked a blue streak. In the evenings, Iâd play piano. In the daytime, I swam, swam a lot.
At the time, I did not know about the things that made Tenth Street historically noteworthy, some of which had connections to my detective work and to my life. The prison itself had a history of famous residents, including the black radical Angela Davis, the Catholic radical Dorothy Day, and Ethel Rosenberg, who awaited her execution there. A library at the corner, on Greenwich Avenue, once served as the Jefferson Market Courthouse where, in 1907, Henry K. Thaw was found insane after heâd shot and killed Stanford White, the preeminent New York architect of the period, one of whose buildings was the National Arts Club. White had been fooling around with Thawâs wife. With its salmon-color turrets and traceries, the library looks as if it had a hard time deciding not to be a castle.
Oh, but here is where George C. Scott, playing Holmes, did research in They Might Be Giants. And memorable real people lived on Tenth Street, too: John Reed and Louise Bryant, in number 1; E. E. Cummings, in number 4; Theodore Dreiser, Djuna Barnes, and Marlon Brando, in number 5; Mark Twain, in number 14, which was also the site of the murder of little Lisa Steinberg in the 1980s. Emma Lazarus, whose âgive me your tired, your poorâ poem is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, lived in number 18. Dashiell Hammett lived in number 28, from 1947 to 1952, the height of my detective years. I wish Iâd known it then.
Such information would come to me piece by piece in later life. In those days, all I knew was that at the Greenwich Avenue end of the block were the lady sirens yelling at us to come and get some, and near the Fifth Avenue end, sweet Abby was calling to me in a more innocent way to do the same thing. Someday, I hoped, I would know what all that meant. One cool thing about a private eye: He can look like he knows what heâs doing, when he hasnât a clue.
Â
N OW, G
And Tenth Street itself. In the summers, it was so crowded with trees in bloom, you could not see from one end of the block to the other. In winter, now, the sightline is clearâpast the especially wide town houses, pink, white, and brown; the carriage houses; a tiny northern Italian restaurant beside an apartment house that wasnât here when I was a kid; and Holistic Pet Care. Makes me miss my holistic terriers. Tonight, I walk west on Tenth, across Greenwich Avenue toward Patchin Place, a mews of little houses, then back up the avenue, between Tenth and Eleventh, pausing at Partners & Crime, mystery-book sellers, with old copies of Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen, and Mickey Spillane in the window. The store must be newish. I would have remembered if it had been here before.
My first girlfriend, Abby Abrams, lived in a brownstone at the end of Tenth near Fifth. In the summer, her family invited me to their home on Fire Island. I was thirteen. Our bedrooms, Abbyâs and mine, were on the second floor, across a short hall from each other. In the mornings, Abby would come into my room, wearing only a towel. A gifted artist. Big-hearted. She was a little younger than I, but way ahead of me, probably not in experience but definitely in instinct. I had no idea what was expected of me, so I just talked a blue streak. In the evenings, Iâd play piano. In the daytime, I swam, swam a lot.
At the time, I did not know about the things that made Tenth Street historically noteworthy, some of which had connections to my detective work and to my life. The prison itself had a history of famous residents, including the black radical Angela Davis, the Catholic radical Dorothy Day, and Ethel Rosenberg, who awaited her execution there. A library at the corner, on Greenwich Avenue, once served as the Jefferson Market Courthouse where, in 1907, Henry K. Thaw was found insane after heâd shot and killed Stanford White, the preeminent New York architect of the period, one of whose buildings was the National Arts Club. White had been fooling around with Thawâs wife. With its salmon-color turrets and traceries, the library looks as if it had a hard time deciding not to be a castle.
Oh, but here is where George C. Scott, playing Holmes, did research in They Might Be Giants. And memorable real people lived on Tenth Street, too: John Reed and Louise Bryant, in number 1; E. E. Cummings, in number 4; Theodore Dreiser, Djuna Barnes, and Marlon Brando, in number 5; Mark Twain, in number 14, which was also the site of the murder of little Lisa Steinberg in the 1980s. Emma Lazarus, whose âgive me your tired, your poorâ poem is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, lived in number 18. Dashiell Hammett lived in number 28, from 1947 to 1952, the height of my detective years. I wish Iâd known it then.
Such information would come to me piece by piece in later life. In those days, all I knew was that at the Greenwich Avenue end of the block were the lady sirens yelling at us to come and get some, and near the Fifth Avenue end, sweet Abby was calling to me in a more innocent way to do the same thing. Someday, I hoped, I would know what all that meant. One cool thing about a private eye: He can look like he knows what heâs doing, when he hasnât a clue.
Â
N OW, G
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