My Grandparents

When I was growing up, my family eventually moved out of New York and into the suburbs.   I used to visit my maternal grandparents in New York; I would stay for the weekend, and my grandmother would take me to the NY Philharmonic.  They lived in an apartment at 9 East 10th Street, just north of Washington Square.   They were party types.  There are rarely any pictures of them without a drink in their hands; I think they lived a life of partying and going to the theater, and they had a whole circle of eccentric friends.  My grandfather was a Yale educated lawyer and worked for the family law firm in Brooklyn, and my grandmother was a great beauty who had lived in Paris before WWI, and who most likely had numerous affairs.

Here they are:

(No, I have no idea what the hookah is about, I think they were just goofing around..)

A number of years ago, I started to read the great novels of the American writer Dawn Powell, who wrote in the 1930's and 40's.  One of the things I enjoyed about the novels was that most of them take place in the Greenwich Village milieu, featuring characters that could (I imagine) have been found in my grandparent's living room.   What later astonished me was that I later found out that Dawn Powell had actually lived in my grandparent's building, which was not a large one.  I don't know if they actually overlapped in time, but it is an amazing coincidence.

The building itself is still there, and has a remarkable facade, with decorations in carved  teak.  The neighboring building, built by a teak dealer, has an even more elaborate facade.


Pictures:

The neighboring window:

Seeing unexpected architectural flourishes like the above window is one of the things I love about walking around New York; you never know what you might see.