A lost New York City tradition
Behind the Book by
Daniel M. Lavery
Daniel M. Lavery reveals the research that went into his delightful slice-of-life historical novel, Women’s Hotel, and discusses the universally torturous experience of moving house.
Like most people, I hate moving house. Wherever I’m living at any given moment, I want to die there, no matter how cramped the apartment or inconvenient the neighborhood. I never want to have to pack up my things, or unpack my things, or measure the width of a door frame to see if the couch is going to fit through it.
“Of course the couch is going to fit through it,” I say, every time. “The very fact that the couch is here now is evidence that the couch fits through the door.” Nevertheless, on every moving day it transpires that I was somehow wrong, that the couch must have been transported through the door and into the living room by acts of contortion or wizardcraft, or it has gained weight in the interim, because it certainly doesn’t fit through the door
now.
“Wherever I’m living at any given moment, I want to die there.”
“Leave it, then,” is my only moving strategy. “I don’t want it now.” No matter how attached I might have formerly been to an object, be it my own bed, a box of books, an antique, or half my wardrobe, if it causes me even a minute’s extra work or mental calculation on moving day, all I want to do is get rid of it. Once I am moved into my new place, of course, the old spirits of avarice and acquisitiveness return to me in greater strength. I begin to meditate again on the pleasures of the getting of things. But ownership in all its forms is hateful to me on moving day; there is no possession I treasure more highly than
lightness.
I didn’t realize just how good I had it. During my research for Women’s Hotel at the New York Public Library, I came across some old newspaper columns about the local tradition of Moving Day. For hundreds of years, well into the middle of the 20th century, all New York City leases expired at the same time on May 1st, which meant that everybody moving house in a given year did so not only on the same day, but at the same hour, as this column,
“May Day,” from the April 30th 1873 New York Times describes:
“When New Yorkers celebrate the day, as they do invariably, it is, if not in sack-cloth and ashes, amid dust and piles of carpets and confused heaps of furniture. . . . The annual spectacle of a whole drove of Gothamites struggling amid pots and pans, and pictures, and rolls of carpet, to break away from the ties of place and friendship just as they are warming in their old nest, to find a new and cold home and cultivate fresh friendships, is not the kind of picture to gaze on with poetic rapture.”
The heyday of the women’s residential hotel was very short-lived; it really only existed in a handful of major cities for a relatively small portion of the population. I knew I was trying to capture a brief phenomenon that never much resembled how most people lived most of the time. Part of the pleasure of writing historical fiction, for me, has to do with attempting to re-create the experience of an extinguished tradition, to capture a kind of urgency that no longer exists. Women’s Hotel takes place over a period of several years in the early-to-mid 1960s, and I knew I wanted to open the action with a small-scale, vestigial remnant of Moving Day at the Biedermeier Hotel.
“I like to start a book by considering what, and when, everybody eats.”
There’s a temporal lag at the Biedermeier, although not from any active attachment to the past. It’s a few years out of step, more by default than by accident, although there’s plenty of the accidental there too. The height of popularity for women’s hotels came during the 1920s and ’30s; the Biedermeier is the sort of place women are more likely to land in without meaning to than to aim for directly. Most of the hotel residents have no plans for the future, only anxieties, and half of them aren’t even able to join in with the present. They are formally unattached people; everyone who lives at the Biedermeier, lives alone.
Few of them have ever been married, but none of them is married at the time of their residence. Even fewer of them have children, but those who do either cannot or will not live with them. They are not allowed to cook in their rooms (although at least one of them secretly owns a hot plate for drinking midnight cups of cocoa in bed), and the hotel has recently stopped providing breakfast. I like to start a book by considering what, and when, everybody eats, and so Women’s Hotel begins with “It was the end of the continental breakfast, and therefore the beginning of the end of everything else.”
It’s always the same way with me, whenever I have to move. Come to think of it, it’s the same way with me before I’ve had breakfast. I can never see past it and into the afternoon.
