In New York: Christmas in a Small Place

By Roger Rosenblatt

Climbing over the fence was strictly forbidden, but I can tell you how it was done. Stand facing either the east or west gate (the method worked for both). Place your left foot between the wrought-iron bars directly over the lock, pull yourself up by holding the topmost spikes firmly with both hands, swing your right foot into one of the iron rings at the top of the gate, bring your left leg up and around, and you're home. That's all there was to it, in terms of the how. As for the why, I am not sure why the neighborhood kids bothered to learn to climb the fence, since our parents, as local residents, had keys to Gramercy Park. Maybe it was our way of pretending to be like other kids in less protected neighborhoods of New York, an unconscious gesture of expiation for the sin of growing up in so privileged a place.

The park superintendent has made life difficult for today's fence climbers by placing metal screening on the gates in the open space above the locks. But little else has changed in Gramercy Park in the past 25 years. The once titillating statue of the half-naked woman (or goddess or whatever she was) at the east end of the park has been painted dark (she was gold and white in different eras). One of the massive elms has died. Yet the grassy areas are as they were--four neat lawns cut in the shape of piano tops, on which no ballplaying is permitted. The gravel paths are the same, as are the benches, set at proper distances from one another to combine privacy with friendliness. Outside the park, the houses look pretty much the same as well. And the feeling of the neighborhood persists. People who have known each other for years pause on the sidewalks to chat. The cleaners and the shoe shop do not need to hand out claim checks. Dogs are greeted by name. Babies abound. Eccentrics have positions of honor.

The celebration of Christmas in Gramercy Park seems exactly as it was. Every December the Gramercy Neighborhood Associates hoist a tree on the south side of the park. A party is thrown for all the neighborhood at the National Arts Club. Clothing and toys are collected for the poor. Apartment house entrances are decorated with wreaths and lights. On Christmas Eve, the residents come together in the park around the tree, while a man with a portable organ leads them in bellowing carols against the night.

Typical small-town America? Yes and no. Gramercy Park is a bit too comfortable to be considered typical, and it has distinguishing characteristics one would not find in most small towns. An artistic tradition, for one thing. Over the 150 years of its existence the area has been home to William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Horace Greeley. Herman Melville lived out his life here, embittered by the public's dismissal of Moby Dick. Stephen Crane finished The Red Badge of Courage in his place on 23rd Street. Nathanael West, author of The Day of the Locust worked as night manager in the Kenmore Hotel near by. He used to sneak pals of his into the hotel, including Dashiell Hammett, who was working on The Maltese Falcon at the time.

John Barrymore lived in the building I grew up in, No. 36, the white one with the stonework gingerbread facade and the visored knights out front. Edwin Booth, whose statue still plays Hamlet in the center of the park, had a house remodeled by Stanford White to serve as the Players, a club for actors. When I was ten, I once waved to Charles Coburn as he emerged from the Players, and he waved back. The park's most mentioned artist-in-residence was William Sydney Porter, known as O. Henry, who lived on Irving Place and used to drink at Healy's Cafe, now Pete's Tavern, and still on 18th Street. One of the rare continuing neighborhood disputes concerns O. Henry. The people at Pete's claim that he wrote The Gift of the Magi in a booth there. A plaque at Sal Anthony's, a restaurant on the site of O. Henry's home, half a block from Pete's, insists that he composed the story in "two feverish hours" sitting in his wide front window--writing of the wife who sells her beautiful hair at Christmastime in order to buy a watch fob for her husband, who sells his watch in order to buy her a pair of combs.

The main difference between Gramercy Park and other American small towns is that this town is located in the heart of Lower Manhattan. Its character derives from its location. In a sense, the neighborhood serves as a pocket of resistance in the city, a sudden green rectangle cut out of the gray slabs, and away from the taxi horns. Yet the park needs the city, too, the way everyone needs strife to feel alive. When Christmas is celebrated here, life is celebrated, the life of a civilization huddled against itself. Nothing is really special about the people of Gramercy Park, other than that they chose Gramercy Park to li live in, choosing one another's company as much as the old trees and pretty houses. Like most people, they behave better than people are generally reputed to behave, proclaiming their value, as O. Henry said of the watch fob in The Gift of the Magi, "by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation."

Fair-minded people. Reserved people. Intelligent but not excessively learned or witty. People you do not notice in a crowd because they try to avoid crowds. In my day they consisted of those like my father, a neighborhood doctor, to whom the kids brought underfed cats and crippled birds, and shy Mr. Platt who led us around on Halloween, and blind Mr. Chevigny who wrote of his seeing-eye dog in a bestseller, My Eyes Have a Cold Nose, and Mr. Homer, who had a booming Bostonian voice with which he asked every child over the age of six: "When do you plan to enroll at Harvard?" On the floor above ours in No. 36 lived three spinster ladies, Miss Prescott, Miss Cutler and Miss Jourdan, who would hire a car on Christmas Eve to drive them up and down Fifth Avenue so that they might enjoy the store displays. These were the sorts who would gather in the park and sing. Once the caroling was finished, they would not weep or embrace or say sentimental things, but merely nod and shake hands and wish one another well.

I conducted my own small ceremony as a child on Christmas Eve. My window faced the park, and I always waited for the caroling to start before I went downstairs, so that I could, for a few moments, look down from my ninth-floor perch and take it all in--my neighbors, the music, the tree. I think I half expected something wonderful to happen as I watched, or perhaps I dimly realized that something wonderful was already happening. On those nights, as on every Christmas Eve since they came into being, the man and wife of The Gift of the Magi were exchanging then-gifts, which turned out to be the gifts of each other. Such is the exchange transacted frequently in this park, in this city, and in more than a few small places in the world.

--By Roger Rosenblatt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.