Al, I want to say; Al, you’re great, we all love you; now will you please get out of the picture? I had dreamed of one of those details from an old Skira art book, where a bit of Netherlandish cheek and a warty nose loom to the right of an exquisite pavilion of malachite and marble that you never would have noticed. The picture from which the detail has been cropped is called something like Adoration with Chancellor Rolin.

But this is New York, and romance is just a name on a language department.

Mr Gordon is shown at a north-facing window in his apartment, which, as I’ve known for decades, was at 10 Gracie Square — that last block of East 84th Street between East End Avenue and the East River. How did I know? Did my father tell me that? My father thought the world of Al Gordon. Everybody did. Anybody who didn’t must have thrown himself off a building in 1929.

The treetops are rooted in Carl Schurz Park. Regular readers will have seen them countless times.

To the left of Mr Gordon’s jesting head is 120 East End Avenue. This very handsome building, which I used to dream of living in someday, was built by Vincent Astor, who developed several blocks of luxury flats in the neighborhood back in the Twenties, when Germantown was becoming Yorkville. This is where Brooke Astor lived when Mr Astor was still alive. She had already lived nearby, at 1 Gracie Square, with her second husband, Mr Marshall. (The same Mr Marshall who was not-repeat-not the father of celebrity defendant Tony Marshall, né Kuser.) It seems positively bohemian of Mrs Astor to have strayed so far from Fifth and Park Avenues, but then it wasn’t her choice. She parked herself on Park when she finally had her druthers.

The building at the right-hand edge of the photograph is 170 East End Avenue, and it is no longer under construction. I don’t think that many people live there, but the external elevators were dismantled a while ago, not long before I saw a doorman-type person help a lady with two shopping bags get out of a taxi.

170 stands on the site of the former Doctors’ Hospital, which was famous, before its absorption into the Beth Israel galaxy, as a place to go and dry out. Or to recover from the vapors. In its Beth Israel days, Quintana Roo Dunne was hospitalized there with the dread infection that would later kill her. It was after a visit to her bedside that her father, John Gregory Dunne, collapsed and died in his apartment overlooking St James the Ugly. 

(This is nothing if not a small town.)

For about a year, round about the time that this photograph was taken of Al Gordon at home, construction at 170 East End Avenue stalled. Nothing happened for a very long time. I like to tell people now that the builders had “financing problems.” In fact I have no idea whatsoever of what it was that stopped the work. For all I know, a Viking burial mound was uncovered in the basement, requiring months of tedious dusting with the kind of brushes that used to be attached to those circular typewriter erasers. But when I say, “they had financing problems,” my interlocutors nod sagely, as if I’d just come from the very bank.  

One likes to think that Al Gordon knew.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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