I knew Thomas Beller (of Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood) vaguely back in the 90s, when I lived in the West Village. While our addresses were almost identical—he lived across the street—our circumstances couldn’t have been more different; Beller was making it in the world of Letters while I was most assuredly not, a fact that was underscored whenever his then-girlfriend Parker Posey would appear topless in the windows to unwittingly torment broke ol’ celibate me.
While we never shared a masthead (or Parker), Beller and I do share a love of the Village the Way It Used to Be, an infinitely extendable era that’s only real definition is “fifty years before now.” So I really enjoyed Beller’s profile of one of my favorite New Yorker writers, the reporter Joseph Mitchell. Mitchell’s 1992 collection Up In the Old Hotel is one of my favorite books, highly recommended for anyone who’s ever fallen in love with the City below Fourteenth Street. Whether sung by Parker Posey or Edna St. Vincent Millay, the siren song of Greenwich Village hangs in the air like a voluptuous perfume. If you’ve lived there, you know; if not, Mitchell and Beller can explain it to you.