The Other Typist

Travel Guide

Visit the world of the other Typist New York and BookTrail style

The eclectic Lower East Side is where gritty alleys and tenement-style buildings mix with upscale apartments and chic boutiques. Nighttime draws hip, young crowds to the area’s trendy bars, music venues and restaurants. The neighborhood’s Jewish heritage lives on through Orchard Street’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum and old-world fabric stores, as well as traditional delis such as Katz’s and Russ & Daughters.

The world of the typing pools

“The typewriter is indeed my passport into a world otherwise barred to me and my kind.”

“They said the typewriter would unsex us.

One look at the device itself and you might understand how they – the self-appointed keepers of female virtue and morality, that is – might have reached such a conclusion. Your average typewriter, be it Underwood, Royal, Remington, or Corona, is a stern thing, full of gravity, its boxy angles coming straight to the point, with no trace of curvaceous tomfoolery or feminine whimsy. Add to that the sheer violence of its iron arms, thwacking away at the page with unforgiving force. Unforgiving. Yes; forgiving is not the typewriter’s duty.”

1920s New York in summer:

“With each mile we put behind us, I felt the air grow lighter in my lungs. It was as if the city had been one large pressure cooker, simmering in its own juices. With the top down on the coupe and a stalwart, man-made breeze blowing steadily in my face, I tallied the city’s many summertime brutalities: the heat that radiated from the gray asphalt and made the air dance in wavy shimmers; the stagnant ponds in Central Park that turned a milky, putrid, almost phosphorescent green and incubated countless mosquitoes; the blasts of hot dirty air that breathed upward from every subway grate; oh, and how the loud noises pouring from construction sites even somehow seemed to further agitate and heat the air!”