Up in the Old Hotel Paperback – June 1, 1993

You don't have to be of a certain age or from a certain time or place to appreciate Joseph Mitchell. He transports you. He sees things the rest of us miss, or if we notice them at all, he sees in them things we don't. He takes us places unknown, and disappearing, as Charles Kuralt did in "On the Road." What he writes is literature. You can recognize that, even if what he writes or how he writes it doesn't particularly appeal to you. It DOES appeal to me! He could make a grocery list a rewarding read. If I had to be marooned on a desert island with one book, this would be the one. I write this on the occasion of buying yet another copy to give as a gift (to the surgeon who commented knowledgeably when he found me reading the Memoirs of U.S. Grant). If there were room to store them I'd buy a googolplex, not to run out if it goes out of print again.

I pride myself on the amount of reading I have done about New York City but I have to admit that my experience with Joseph Mitchell was extremely limited. I don't know why. It wasn't intentional; it just happened. So, I finally picked up this book, and now, wow! A part of me is full of regret: I had been missing so much. On the other hand, I am experiencing the writing of this great essayist and storyteller for the first time. And as with everything in life that is pleasurable, the first time is usually the best. I am living it up.Joseph Mitchell and his people occupied a New York before my time. (Even though he had passed away when I was quite young, he hadn't published much for years because of his infamous writer's block.) What Mitchell presents is the dirt under New York's fingernails. The characters all live on the cliched fringes of the metropolis. And if they weren't the patrons of McSorley's or some dive or flophouse, they were just as iconic as The Empire State Building or a Lower East Side tenement. As others have mentioned, the Joe Gould essay is as poignant and fascinating as essays get.When I had first heard of Mitchell and his milieu, the words grittiness and realism always seemed to be the adjectives surrounding his work. Immediately, the photographs of the legendary Arthur "Weegee" Fellig came to my mind. However, after reading these tales, this comparison utterly falls on its face. Weegee's works, as much as I admire them, were often staged, and even the ones that weren't have a self-conscious shock value attached. Mitchell's "grittiness" and "realism" is actually naturalist. There is an acceptance, respect and grace to his subjects, and in the writing surrounding the people and places he is describing for us. He had no need to embellish or stage anything. And, for me, a first time reader, this is the biggest source of my enjoyment.Nice meeting you, Mr. Mitchell. And thanks.

Fantastic book

So far this book is great. However, the Vintage edition starts with the title page, and continues with the introduction and first 44 pages of the book. Then it re-starts again with the title page, the introduction and again the first 44 pages of the book, followed by the rest of the 700+ pages. Seeing that other people have reported missing pages in their editions I guess we should be happy that we just got re-printed pages. Amazing that a reputable publisher like Vintage would do such a horrible job of printing, though.

I never heard of Joseph Mitchell before reading a few lines about him in a review for a different author. And I never knew what I'd been missing! Captivating tales about everyday people from a gifted natural storyteller.Mitchell used to write the types of "feature articles" found in this book for The New Yorker; in fact, this book is mostly a collection of those and other articles. I remember back in the day (70s and 80s) The New Yorker had a section of great stories about quirky people of the streets and shops of the city. Once Tina Brown took over, that section became stories about celebrities and celebrity name dropping, the opposite of interesting. This book reminded me, very fondly, of how engrossing those old stories about otherwise anonymous, interesting real-life characters had been. Especially in the hands of a master craftsman.

… from the golden age of The New Yorker. Mitchell specialized in beautifully drawn portraits of eccentric, essential NYC oddballs from the late 30s through the late 50s, and boy did he make them shine. A classic!

Mitchell's portraits of people he meets in Manhattan are consistently interesting, at times funny, and at times sad. "Lady Olga," an essay about a bearded lady who performs in circus sideshows, is profoundly moving and one of the finest pieces of its kind I have ever read. Towards the middle of the book Mitchell turns his attention to describing various Southern characters from his past, and these pieces are quite inferior to his other work. The tongue-in-cheek, drawling irony of "The Downfall of Fascism in Black Ankle County" attempts to un-mask and un-man the Ku Klux Klan through mockery, but comes off as merely naive for a modern reader only too aware of the savage white racists who will later murder college students and young school children. Despite these missteps, however, Mitchell's essays about clam-hunters, deaf mutes, tavern characters, and other acquaintances capture the nuanced voices, urban sounds, and sidewalk life of New York when it was still a human-size town.