More News from the 50s and 60s. 

In the summer of 1960 I lived in the three story “Artists’ Colony” next to the burned out site of the Sea Cliff Summer Theater.  The three story wooden warren of little rooms and common bathrooms had once served to house the supporting casts of shows that drew fashionable crowds from New York to watch stars like Lilian Gish.  As I recall Barbara Gilson also lived there that summer.  Ed Johnson, a sometime school janitor, had one of the rooms next to mine and hacked and coughed his way through many hot nights.  A pair of elderly Russian opera singers sometimes sang on a side fire escepe and told me they were glad to see me going bare foot, "in contact with the earth's energy." The owner’s Italian mother, known to residents as Mamalina, was living her last days in a room on the ground floor, and she and I spent many evening hours talking.  Ellen  Fender’s (’59) parents also lived there, along with a cast of characters fit for a Tennessee Williams drama. 

The two story building had a center staircase and two end wall fire escapes. Each floor had a central corridor with narrow rooms on either side. All the rooms shared the one or two bathrooms on each floor so some residents had bed pans, chamber pots and jars as in-room toilet facilities. 

In late June 1969 I wrote to a college friend: “We had a fire in this rat trap of a building last night.  A roomer came in drunk about midnight and fell asleep smoking in bed.  The cigarette dropped to the floor and set the rug on fire.  A woman passing down the hall saw smoke rolling out underneath the door and knocked loudly enough to wake up the smoker.  He fled stark naked and soon a host of other roomers were forming a bucket brigade and clearing stuff out of his room.  I thought we had all become orphans, but soon the blaze was out and everyone was joking about it and reminiscing about the last one when another drunk tried to extinguish the flames with his beer.  This one was almost as absurd: one man was using his bed pan as a water carrier.  Except for drunks and one near accidental drunken suicide by a man falling off the fire escape, the week has been uneventful.”