Up in the Old Hotel

Joseph Mitchell was the city reporter for the New Yorker for about half a century. This is a collection of his magazine stories. Many of them involve the old Fulton Fish Market, but he also wrote about weird things like dime museums, gypsies, and stag banquets. 

To me, every story in this collection is like a time capsule. This is the book that made me want to write about New York City because it suggests there is a history on every block there worth recording. If you don’t like a chapter or two, then skip to the next one, but… show more.

Mitchell chronicled life in New York City during the Great Depression and beyond. His stories of the colorful and fragile lives on the fringes of oblivion are unforgettable. This is one book I return to over and over again and I always find more to love in his prose and the lives that were being lived when the city was populated by people living from one meal to the next. Most of the book consists of tales of the characters down on the old Seaport – the oyster fishermen – Sloppy Louie, and most famously Joe Gould – a homeless… show more.