MEYER BERGER’S NEW YORK
BY MEYER BERGER
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS, 356 PAGES, $20
MOST newspaper stories are written on sand, doomed to be erased from readers’ memories by the tide of fresh events.
There are rare moments, however, when a reporter miraculously contrives to fashion a yarn that keeps echoing in memory after the newspaper itself has yellowed to dust. Consider the following lead paragraph from a 1947 front-page story in The New York Times about the first return of U.S. World War II fatalities.
“The first war dead from Europe came home yesterday. The harbor was steeped in Sabbath stillness as they came in on the morning tide in 6,248 coffins in the hold of the transport Joseph V. Connolly.”
It’s the word ‘Sabbath’ instead of Sunday that casts the spell, subtly hallowing the harbor and the city as they receive the fallen soldiers. The passage and the many paragraphs that follow are lean and lofty at the same time, akin to the cadences of the King James Bible and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
The writer was Meyer “Mike” Berger, a self-effacing grammar-school dropout who worked most of his career as a reporter for the Times. You would be hard-pressed to name a reporter who has written more memorable stories. Young Winston Churchill covering the Boer War comes to mind, although his deadlines were certainly kinder.
For about a year before the outbreak of World War II, Berger wrote a column called “About New York” that reported on the lives of mostly obscure people and offered an array of little-known facts about the city.
The column gained popularity, but was regarded with some disdain by the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who “fretted that Berger’s subjects were ‘light’ and ‘un-Times-like,’ ” according to Edwin Diamond in his 1994 book “Behind the Times.” The column was scrapped, ostensibly as part of a program to conserve newsprint for the war effort.
The column was revived in 1953 and Berger felicitously filed three times a week to the delight of fellow journalists and readers around the world until his death in February 1959 at the age of 60. A collection of his columns, titled “Meyer Berger’s New York,” was published in 1960 by Random House, and now Fordham University Press has reissued the book in paperback with a terrific photograph of Berger on a rooftop overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge.
Pete Hamill, himself a winner of the Meyer Berger Award, has written a new introduction to the book, movingly placing Berger’s columns within the context of the nostalgic affection many New Yorkers feel for their city. But in Berger’s unique perspective, it is a nostalgia for a city few New Yorkers in the ’50s could ever have known. Many of these columns are not so much journalistic as they are belle- lettristic explorations of an age of innocence.
“In Maiden Lane almost 300 years ago, Dutch girls did the family wash in a stream that ran across the island there,” Berger delightedly confides in his own introduction. “At night they walked the lane with the village beaux who knew it as The Maidens’ Path. A mill actually stood in Mill Street.”
Berger obliquely describes himself as “a chap who likes to worm out the origins of things.” and on the occasion of the circus coming to town in March 1954, he sets out to determine when the city had its first circus, and concludes that it was “around the close of the 18th century . . . the first troupe set up its platform in the marshes above Collect Pond at Broome Street and Broadway. There was no admission charge . . . but a girl performer passed the tambourine.”
“Meyer Berger’s New York” is not a book you read cover-to-cover in one swoop, as you might a crime thriller. It is a book you savor, and drop in on, as you would an old friend.
Al Ellenberg is a former Metro editor of The Post.