"A bossy, yellow-haired blonde named Mazie P. Gordon is a celebrity on the Bowery. In the nickel-a-drink saloons and in the all night restaurants which specialize in pig snouts and cabbage at a dime a platter, she is known by her first name."
Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell.
Mitchell's portrait of Mazie -- who owned a low-rent movie theater and ran the ticket window day in and day out for decades -- is one of many absorbing stories about the colorful characters he studied while working as a reporter for the New Yorker from the 1930s through the 1960s.
My friend Bob from the fabulous Art Scatter blog left this comment about Mitchell and this wonderful book:
This book is just great, great personal journalism, and it brings back the flavor of a New York that will never be again. Mitchell was a staff writer for The New Yorker who spent the last 20 years or so of his life going to the office faithfully every day -- the routine became a legend at the magazine -- but, after an extraordinarily prolific career, never wrote another word. He'd simply written himself out.
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