I wait near a Victorian barber’s chair. It still has a butt mark despite that it hasn’t been sat in for a decade. Next to it is a drafting desk with a drawing taped to its center. A white railing protects it all.
It is a tribute. The desk belonged to the caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. The New York Public Library replaces the featured drawing once a month. They will never run out. Hirschfeld did the New York Times theater drawings for seventy-five years.
Most people know Hirschfeld as the guy who hid his daughter’s name in the hair, sleeves, and feathers of his drawings. This started on the day Nina Hirschfeld was born in 1945. He tried to stop hiding her name once, afraid it was eclipsing his work. Furious letters were sent to The New York Times; people had searched for days. Hirschfeld relented and continued to hide the name till he died. The drawings were used by the Pentagon to train pilots to spot targets.
I was trained, too, shoved in my dad’s armpit, racing my sister to find all the Ninas.
Hirschfeld’s desk is now hidden like a Nina underneath a stairway in the Library for the Performing Arts (L.P.A.).
Drawing by Al Hirschfeld (5 hidden Ninas)
The old Donnell Library had a tribute as well. It was to Winnie-the-Pooh and friends in the form of the original stuffed animals. The ones that inspired A. A. Milne’s stories. They were displayed on the children’s floor. I didn’t visit them often, but was glad to know Piglet and Eeyore were safe in their bulletproof case above me.
I remember the Donnell. The teen floor always got control of the library’s windows on Fifty-Third Street, filling them with Popsicle stick skyscrapers and Valentine’s poetry. Signs in the bathroom warned: “No Hair Combing.” But most of all I remember the viewing cubicles in the basement. The Donnell’s basement was where the New York Public Library’s Reserve Film and Video Collection was born.
The collection is a curated archive of educational, avant-garde, political, industrial, out-of-print, rare, foreign, local, and historic films. The holdings are as diverse as the city of New York. Preserving Marcelo Ramos—The Firework Maker’s Art and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire with the same importance. Providing the public equal access to Kustom Kar Kommandos, directed by Kenneth Anger, and The Case of the Elevator Duck, directed by Joan Micklin Silver.
At least once a week I would set up an appointment to watch films at the Donnell—films I plucked semi-randomly from the database using keywords. Two days’ notice was required so that the librarian had time to pull the films from deep in the subbasement.
At the appointed time, I’d sit in one of the six small viewing alleys with a pair of headphones. In the beginning the librarian worked the projector. Soon I threaded it and wound the reels myself.
“Mrs. Shopsin!” Johnny says as we approach the info desk.
“Mr. Gore,” I say back.
Johnny used to work at the Donnell.
“Gore” was easy to remember because he liked bloody kung fu films, and when I met him Al Gore was vice president, but his first name escaped me. Johnny not only remembered my whole name, he knew my fourteen-digit library card number by heart. Embarrassed to ask his first name, I called him “Mr. Gore.”
The Donnell was shut down in 2008. I cried the day I found out; I think a lot of people did.
It was a short building in a sea of tall buildings. The NYPL sold it to a developer that promised to put a library in the ground floor of their big hotel.
The film collection is never going back.
I still refer to the film collection as Donnell, though the collection now lives permanently in the L.P.A.
Mr. Gore leads us to the viewing alley of the L.P.A. There is just one viewing space now, though a whole class can fit in it.
We sit in ergonomic office chairs.
Mr. Gore loads the reels. We put on the supplied headphones. Black-and-white footage of the Lower East Side in 1934 plays. Pushcart vendors sell oysters and silk. Rag pickers wander. Boys jump off piers into the East River. New York is unpaved and dust flies in people’s face.
The film cuts to footage of the same spot in 1959. It is in color. Men wear hats. Women wear dresses.
“This whole film is silent, isn’t it?” Jason says.
I take my headphones off as well.
How Do They Make Baseballs? (1970)
Me and Jason’s first date was watching movies at the real Donnell.
It wasn’t a date.
Jason was using my boss’s office to check his e-mail. He mentioned skiing or Werner Herzog. I told him about The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner, with its slow-motion footage of a ski-flyer flying too far and shots of spectators in the trees.
The film couldn’t be seen anywhere. It was rare and the Internet was still finite. The Donnell was the only place I knew of to watch it.
So I made an appointment.
I tacked on two extra films: How Do They Make Baseballs?, an educational short that involved women wearing horn-rimmed glasses rhythmically sewing red thread through white leather.
And Incredible Machine, made in 1968 by Bell Labs about their discoveries in computer arts. The film is full of men wearing ties, women in shift dresses, car-sized computers, cathode ray monitors, magnetic tape, and isometric animations. The labs’ advances are laid out one after the other, climaxing with a talking computer repeating the phrase “I like my coffee black” in multiple inflections.
After the films, Jason walked me home.
It was fifty-five blocks to my apartment, which was located above what used to be The Store. And by the time I got home, I no longer gave two shits about collecting plastic grapes.
SHANGRI-LA
A breed of people hear my last name, twinkle, and say they went to The Store once and then decided they imagined the place, because they were never able to find it again.
This was the first hurdle to eating at Shopsin’s.
After you found The Store, you had to obey the rules—rules that were not posted on a sign. Some were common sense: no outside beverages, everyone has to eat. Some were common sense to my dad: no copying the order next to you, don’t ask for the best thing on the menu, no parties larger than four, no allergies, no assholes.
It was a test. You passed or were kicked out.
Cheating was allowed—if your friends gave you the answers, that was cool.
Next, scan the giant menu to find your perfect match of a dish. Careful: if my dad is in earshot you can’t ask what is in the dish.
So it was a triumph to eat at Shopsin’s.
For the people that were right, it lived up to the obstacles.
If you were wrong it likely sucked, even if you got through the gauntlet.
I am sorry.
But if it was right my dad could take any problem and make you see it in a new way, finding hidden truths and humor that made the whole store tear up. Meanwhile my mom would set you up with your best friend, soul mate, or close to it.
But the thing that got people in the door was the food.
My mom would steal from customers’ plates before the dish got to their table. Little bits just to taste. My dad might never make it that way again. Unless she told him it should always be made like that.