Photograph by Therese Mitchell. Courtesy of Nora Sanborn and Elizabeth Mitchell.
A black-and-white photograph, three and a half by five inches, shows a figure in profile—a silhouette in suit and hat, alone on a giant heap of demolished buildings far above the cathedral tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. I found it in a stack of photos stored inside a small envelope with a handwritten label: “NY Downtown, Summer 1971.” The man’s expression is hidden, but his stooped posture and tiny scale against the massive pile make the picture feel lonely. His eyes are fixed on something beyond the frame, but the longer I studied it, the more I could see him staring at the Twin Towers, which, though unfinished, had reached their full height.
The man in the photo is the writer Joseph Mitchell, who was then in his early sixties, or “well past what Dante called the middle of the journey,” as he wrote in his notes. From 1938 to 1964, he published legendary profiles as a staff writer at The New Yorker, mostly portraits of ordinary people in disappearing worlds on the edges of the city. By 1971, he was a stranger to himself. Increasingly he wandered the city by day and at night, surprised by the intensity of his emotion. The beauty of commonplace images—“a sunflower growing in a vacant lot”—had become almost unbearably moving to him, and sometimes he stared for a long time at certain old buildings in the city, trying to understand why he felt so drawn to them.
For more than three decades, the story goes, he went to his office at The New Yorker on West Forty-Third Street almost every day, worked behind his closed door, and never submitted another story. But unpublished fragments—notes, drafts, letters, photographs, and found objects—attest to another Mitchell, one who would leave his desk to visit an old cemetery or enter a demolition site, where, he noted, he worked as hard as he ever did. In his published stories, he preserved lives that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, then he gathered objects from their threatened worlds. Mitchell couldn’t find one single way to describe what had changed—he called it “living in the past,” “living with the dead,” “living as in a dream, or, I might as well say it, as in a nightmare”—but he claimed to know the exact moment when he metamorphosed into an obsessed collector.
It was 4 A.M. on the Friday of October 4, 1968. Mitchell woke from uneasy dreams, then got out of bed as quietly as he could, so as not to disturb his wife, Therese, and set out from their 44 West Tenth Street apartment for the Fulton Fish Market, where “the smoky riverbank dawn, the racket the fishmongers make, the seaweedy smell, and the sight of this plentifulness,” as Mitchell wrote in his 1952 profile “Up in the Old Hotel,” always gave him a feeling of well-being. But urban renewal projects had doomed much of Lower Manhattan, and the wrecking ball was destroying whole blocks. (In the previous year, more than sixty acres of buildings were demolished.) The piles of rubble depressed him, so he went to the Paris Café at Meyer’s Hotel, which afforded a good view of the East River. He ordered coffee, found a spot at the bar, and as he observed people cooking fish on the riverbank and box fires built against the blackened posts of the elevated highway, he saw his oldest friend in the city, Joe Cantalupo.