Reluctantly, I leave Jim and Gina and Maverick and the comfort of Chumley's, bound for Grove Court between Bedford and Hudson Streets where O Henry's daughter is said to have lived and which is said to have been the inspiration for the setting of O Henry's “Last Leaf.”

It is easy to imagine this as the place where Johnsy lay withering and waning in her bed, watching the leaves of an ivy vine on the brick wall outside her window disappear by the day with her strength and where the unsuccessful abstract artist, Behrman, refurbishes her will to live with a realistic painting of an ivy leaf on the wall – at the cost of his life; he falls from the ladder into the snow and, drunk, unable to rise again, he freezes to death. As all of O Henry, melodramatic, sentimental, contrived, moving and unforgettable – it sticks like gum to a shoe. The gate to Grove Court is locked behind a sign that sternly identifies it as private – an elegant place that once was a home for the struggling poor.

Grove Court between Bedford & Hudson Streets, setting of O Henry's “Last Leaf”

        O Henry is of course all over the city, not least in the excellent Pete's Tavern at 129 East 18th Street that I won't have time to visit today, though often have in the past,

Pete's Tavern, 129 E. 18th St., where O Henry wrote “The Gift of the Magi”

sitting whenever it is vacant at the booth by the front doors where O Henry wrote “The Gift of the Magi” – another of his unforgettable concoctions, five of which were filmed in 1952 as O. Henry's Full House, introduced and narrated by John Steinbeck and starring, inter alia, Marilyn Monroe. Pete's Tavern has been in continuous operation since 1851, first as a “grocery and grog,” during prohibition disguised as a flower shop. The kitchen is Italian, the food excellent, the martinis near psychedelic.

But I am now headed for Carpo's. I cross Sheridan Square at West 4th and Christopher where I stop to marvel at the irony of juxtaposing sculptures of General Sheridan in dark heavy bronze and two life-sized gay couples with white-painted finish by George Segal (1924-2000). These commemorate the birth of the Gay Liberation Movement in 1969 when the police tried to bust the Stonewall Bar at 51-53 Christopher Street and found, to their surprise, a gay clientele not willing to lay down and whimper. It took some doing and many years before the city finally allowed this memorial to be christened in 1992.

Sheridan Square, W 4th & Christopher: Gay Liberation Monument by George Segal

        Across the street at the Village Cigar Shop, I purchase from a dour clerk a fresh, $8.00 Partagas, rolled of “100% tobacco” grown on Cuban seeds, which – while across the avenue yuppie types dine on expensive junk in the Gourmet Garage – I smoke at an outdoor table of the Riviera Café, nursing a bottle of Heinekin. I gaze across to the Segal sculpture, considering how at least some aspects of life have improved. On the table, a sign informs me that smoking is permitted, though the Surgeon General wishes to remind me it is a nuisance for others and a danger to myself. The Surgeon General makes no comment on the carbon monoxide fumes pumping from the pipes of scores of gasoline-burning automobiles that roll past just below my nose.
        The only other customer is a young businessman at a nearby table. He sits over a juicy Riviera burger and speaks into a cell phone: “No no no, Chuck, no. You meet me here, you'll meet a tonna fuckin' people, ya know what I'm sayin'? Ya know what I mean? Don't meet me here.”

Riviera Café, W. 4th & Christopher Streets: Smoking is permitted but discouraged, inhalation of carbon monoxide inevitable

        From Sheridan Square is a short walk over 4th to 189 Bleecker at Macdougal Street to Carpo's, formerly San Remo's, where I order a five-dollar Heinekin from a sweet-faced waitress and sit at a table out on the narrow strip of

Carpo's Café, 189 Bleecker at MacDougal Street, previously the San Remo, featured as The Mask and transplanted to San Francisco in Kerouac's The Subterraneans

Bleecker sidewalk. Here in the free and open air, an endless fleet of yellow cabs excrete carbon monxoide into my air. I deserve it, I think, lighting a Petit Sumatra. The formerly smiling waitress descends upon me with wrath: “You cannot smoke here, sir!”         “Actually,” I explain feebly, “I don't inhale.”         “Well I do, sir!”         I stub out the lovely, barely-smoked Petit, apologizing. “Have a good monoxide.”         At a table behind me, two attractive women chortle, one blonde and the other auburn-haired, the latter wearing high heels and a polka-dotted summer dress that strikes me as 1950s.

        “Are you dreaming of San Remo?” I ask. The brightness of their quizzical smiles tells me they are either out-of-towners or hard-core members of the post-911 corps of pleasant New Yorkers. I recently heard someone bemoan the passing of the rude New Yorker: If only someone would growl at me, I'd feel like things were safe again! The first 30 years of my life were spent here, and I know the New York crust covers a friendly heart; I wonder what the new New York smile might cover.
        I explain to the ladies that Carpo's used to be the San Remo Bar, opened by Joe Santini in 1923, a Bohemian headquarters until well into the '50s where the regulars included people like James Baldwin, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Miles Davis, Norman Mailer, Jackson Pollock, William Styron, Dyan Thomas, and Tennessee Williams. Jack Kerouac was a regular for years, and it served as a model for the café “Mask” in San Francisco in his 1958 novel, The Subterraneans. According to Bill Morgan, the idea for the Living Theater was also born here.
        “Oh!” says the polka-dotted young lady, “I'm studying acting myself. In San Francisco.” It turns out she is the daughter of the other young woman, from West Virginia, who confides to me she is 40. I had thought they were both around 27, but it seems too feeble a line to pitch. “Why don't you go knock on the door of the Actors Studio while you're here?”
        “That's exactly what I told her,” the mother says. “Tell her to do it.”

Mother and daughter at Carpo's

        “Do it,” I say, though actually I walked past it earlier in the day and the front doors were wide open, but with a chain across them on which hung a sign that read, This is not an entrance. Which I suppose could be interpreted in a number of ways. Considering how to tell about that, I am suddenly distracted by shouting on the other side of the street, and a cameraman runs past my table on the sidewalk. His red hair looks familiar. Then I notice a guy yelling and dressed up like tooth decay.
        “You guys get around, don't you?” I call to the cameraman, who flashes a smile, and the West Virginian mother asks if I will introduce her, as she is a photographer herself. “I've taken some good pictures,” she says, “some of Shari, too, even where her ankles don't look so thick.”

Patchin Place where e e cummings lived at no. 4 and Djuna Barnes at no. 5

But the cameraman and the running decay are already gone, and I finish my beer, bow and take my leave, on to Patchin Place at West 10th between Sixth and Greenwich Avenues. Here, at 4 Patchin Place, lived Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962) from 1923 until his death. I recall cummings outstanding line, “there is some shit I will not eat,” and wonder if I can boast the same. Among cummings houseguests here were Eliot, Pound,

Dos Passos and, Bill Morgan notes, “a very drunken Dylan Thomas.” In the late 1950s cummings was also once arrested for public urination on the Rue Git-le-Coeur in Paris, described on the French police blotter as ”un Américain qui pisse.” But that is another story.
        Across the narrow way, at 5 Patchin Place, Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) lived reclusively for the last 42 years of her life. Her best known novel, however, Nightwood (1936), was written in Paris where she lived until the war forced her home.
        Other literary residents of Patchin Place at various times included John Reed (1887-1920), “terror of the

industrialists”; John Masefield (1878-1967) in the years before his four decades as poet laureate of England; the Irish writer Padraic Colum (1881-1972) and Janes Bowles (1917-73).         Further north and east at 14 West 10th between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, at the beginning of the 20th century lived an author not commonly associated with the Big Apple: Samuel Langhorne Clemmens, a.k.a. Mark Twain (1835-1910). In fact, according to my guidebook, it was in New York that Twain first donned the white serge suit that became his trademark.

14 W 10th between Fifth & Sixth where Mark Twain lived for a time

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) resided, author of the 1883 sonnet, “The New Colossus,” which contains perhaps the most quoted lines of any American poem, inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:

Plaque at 18 E. 10th commemorating Emma Lazarus, author of sonnet “The New Colossus” inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty

“Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shores,-/Send these, the homeless, tempest-tosst to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

        These days when one enters the country by flying ship, the poetry of welcome takes the form of questions printed on a green form about whether one suffers from contagious diseases or mental illness, whether one has ever been arrested for a serious crime, engaged in espionage, sabotage or moral turpitude: answer yes or no, please.

The Albert, 23 E. 10th at University Place where Thomas Wolfe worked on Look Homeward, Angel

Chelsea Hotel, 222 23rd St, between Seventh & Eighth, where innumerable writers, artists and musicians have stayed, including Bob Dylan who reports in his song “Sara” that he wrote “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” there

        At 23 East 10th at University Place in the Albert Hotel's room 2220 from 1923 to 1926, Thomas Wolfe (1900-38) stayed while he taught writing at NYU and worked on Look Homeward Angel – “ a stone, a leaf an unfound door…” In his Of Time and the River, The Albert appears as the Hotel Leopold.
        Wolfe – and many other writers, artists and musicians – also stayed for a time at the Chelsea Hotel between 7th and 8th Avenues at 222 23rd Street. The Chelsea's many celebrated guests included Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Mark Twain, O Henry, Edgar Lee Masters, James T Farrell, Mary McCarthy, Brendan Behan, Arthur C. Clarke, Nelson Algren, Nabokov, Yevtushenko, Burroughs, Corso, Ferlinghetti, and the punk rocker Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols who murdered his girlfriend in Room 100 here before ending his own life, although there have been recent assertions that both were murdered by a third person.. Bob Dylan, too, in his song “Sara” on the Desire album, reports having written “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” in the Chelsea.
        Among the fiction of Thomas Wolfe is the extraordinary story “Only the Dead Know Brookyln.” It seems to me only the dead could know the immensity of New York's literary history. I give up, refrain from visiting Kerouac's apartment at 454 W 20th between 9th and 10th, or Auden's at 77 St Mark's Place between 1st and 2nd or the statue of Washington Irving a Irving Place and 17th Street.
        Instead I head back to my hotel, still on foot, wading through the heat of the darkening evening to the Hotel Carter on 43rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, a family-owned hotel recommended to me by Mike Lee of the Cape Cod Voice, across the street from the New York Times offices.
        Once known as The Dixie, the Carter was subject of an April 1986 Village Voice exposé by Laurie Stone entitled “Heartbreak Hotels,” about the more than 3,000 homeless familes temporarily housed in run-down, overpriced hotels. Clearly, the Carter has seen better days as well as worse days, but on the Manhattan hotel market it can hardly be called overpriced today. My room on the 21st floor costs $89 a night and has a view, or a scrap of a view out the bathroom window, of the Hudson River. I am in room 2131, which is about 7 by 15 feet with a ten-foot ceiling, a walk-in closet which looks like a basement utility room, deckpainted green. There is a good bathroom, three windows, three good mirrors – one strategically positioned at the foot of the king-sized bed for those who like to watch themselves en embrace. Above the bed hangs a single, faded, framed print that seems to want to simulate Paris, and another view out the windows in the sleeping room down to the traffic on 43rd and Eighth.
        At night when the tall narrow neon sign that climbs the outer wall blinks on, the name of the hotel changes to HOTE CAR E, the 'L', 'T' and terminal 'R' having burnt out a couple of years before. It occurs to me that if the E's go, one at a time, in succession, the hotel will assume, by turns, the names HOT CAR E and HOT CAR, maybe at some point it will be just HOT.
        Hot it is tonight as I greet the night manager, Abdul, seated at a desk and swivel chair in the middle of the broad dim lobby. He knows I am writing about New York and invites me to join him in the elevator to visit the ghost floor on 24, peopled now by old laundry wagons full of discarded cables and bedding, old mattresses and other rubble. A sign on the wall still advertises the defunct Circle Bar and Lounge and Terrace Restaurant (Dinner from $3.75, lunch from $1.25), but the stairway to the roof is impassable, blocked with chunks of plaster and refuse.

Hotel Carter, $89 a night

HOTE CAR E on West 43rd Street “in the heart of the theater district”

        Just as well. I retire to my Bogart noir room with its battered mismatched furniture, a bed table with a drawer but no pull knob, a plastic chair. Thank god it has functioning A/C. I drink a tepid cocktail of Stolichnaya from a cellophane tootbrush glass and munch a turkey curry sandwich purchased from the 24-hour deli that adjoins the lobby, watching kids skateboard a few floors below on the roof of a building across 43rd.
        It occurs to me that those kids' New York is one I will never know. And perhaps they will know little of the New York I see. William Sidney Porter (1862-1910), aka Oliver Henry, aka O. Henry, wrote his New York tales of The Four Million (1906), and each episode of the 1960s TV series about New York, The Naked City, concluded, ”There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” It seems to me now, watching those roof-top skateboarders I will never know, that perhaps there are eight million New Yorks.
        No one will ever know more than a tiny fraction of them.