Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll find out about a new acquisition by the New York Public Library: the papers of the writer Gay Talese. We’ll also get details on Amtrak’s choice of a developer to remake Pennsylvania Station.
The phone said “spam risk,” but it was definitely not spam. The writer Gay Talese was calling. The conversation that followed was mostly about the New York Public Library’s newest acquisitions: Talese’s papers — notes, handwritten and typed; drafts of articles showing the revisions he made; letters he sent and received in the days when people sent and received such things. And calendars. “Sixty-some years of calendars,” he said. “Every day of my life” from when he was a teenager on. He is 94 now. The library says there is so much material that processing it all will take three years. Talese saved and filed away everything from his first byline (in The Press of Atlantic City, N.J., when he was 16) to the scene-by-scene breakdown of “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” the classic Esquire magazine article about what he did while waiting — and waiting and waiting — for an interview with you-know-who. To Talese’s admirers, it’s like an illuminated manuscript. “I’m probably best known for ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,’” he said. “I’m not happy about that, but I’m happy I at least had that.” He mentioned “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” a controversial volume on the sexual revolution that was published in 1981 — “the worst-reviewed book I had by far,” he said. “Now it’s history. Then it was scandal.” And it spent months on the best-seller lists. But about his papers. Why save them? “I wanted to leave a record, something of what I saw,” he said. He had an eye on the future: “I wanted to live on through my observations, my note-taking and my curiosity.” He kept the files in what became known as “the bunker,” the room in his townhouse in Manhattan where he worked. Many of the files “are very personal recollections — it’s a history of memory,” he said. Talese said the files included notes on controversies in his career, including the storm that swirled around his 2016 book “The Voyeur’s Motel,” about a Colorado motel owner who spied on his unsuspecting guests, looking through vents he had installed over the beds in their rooms. Talese, who had trailed the owner on several viewing sessions, wrote that the man was “an inaccurate and unreliable narrator.” But ethical criticism and questions about the motel owner’s reliability were raised after an excerpt was published in The New Yorker in 2016. “My facts are right,” Talese told me this week. “The facts are still right as I wrote it.” Meredith Mann, the library’s lead curator on the collection, said the file boxes containing Talese’s files are themselves artifacts, because Talese had “customized and personalized” them with collages. One box is covered with photographs of and headlines about the former Yankees catcher (and Phillies manager) Joe Girardi, whom Talese profiled in The New Yorker in 2012. On another box he pasted the words “The Bridge” and a photograph of the Verrazzano-Narrows, the subject of his first book, published in 1964. Another box carries the words “A Writer’s Life,” the title of the autobiography he published in 2006. Mann said that the files offer a glimpse into Talese’s methods. He took notes, but not when the person he was interviewing was talking — he wrote out notes immediately afterward, on stiff white shirt boards from the laundry that he had cut to fit in the breast pockets of his well-tailored jackets. “I thought that that was such an interesting lens into his work,” Mann said. The interviewer and his subject were “unmediated by a tape recorder or even just looking up and down between your notebook and the person that you’re speaking with.” I asked Mann if Talese had included a typewriter, as Robert Caro — who has won Pulitzers for his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson — did when his papers went to the New York Historical. “No typewriters,” she said. “The shirt cardboards, but not the shirts.” WEATHER Expect cloudy skies and possible showers with temperatures nearing 63. Cloudy conditions will continue tonight before gradually clearing. The low will be around 53. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Friday (Shavuot). QUOTE OF THE DAY “Persistence is what’s going to create that opportunity.” — Dan Dilling, on graduating from college and hunting for a job in a tough market, 25 years after his mother did the same. The latest New York news
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A day after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told a Senate hearing that the federal government would spend $8 billion to remake Pennsylvania Station, Amtrak named a developer to turn the dreary transit hub into a “brand new, world-class station.” Duffy and Amtrak said the master developer, chosen from among three qualified bidders, would be Penn Transformation Partners, which is led by Halmar International, a construction company involved with other transportation projects in New York, including the Second Avenue subway. Duffy has said that work on the Penn Station project will begin before the end of next year, even though Amtrak, which owns the station, has not made a detailed plan public or said how the project will be paid for. Amtrak said that the project would involve building a “grand entrance” on Eighth Avenue leading to a new train hall, replacing “cramped, decrepit walkways with open beautiful concourses.” Gov. Kathy Hochul, who once called Penn Station a “hellhole” and promised to fast-track a long-overdue redesign, discussed Penn Station in a White House meeting in March 2025. On Wednesday, Hochul said that she would “thoroughly review the proposal” that Amtrak had chosen, adding that since it was a federal project, the cost should not be borne by commuters or taxpayers in New York. She also said that the changes needed to “dramatically improve the experience for every rider who passes through Penn Station, from the A train to the Acela,” without adversely affecting the Long Island Rail Road. Improving Penn Station, the nation’s busiest transportation hub, has been complicated by the presence of Madison Square Garden. It was built atop the station in the 1960s after the original Penn Station was torn down. That station had been conceived as a “thoroughly and distinctly monumental gateway” to New York but had become rundown as the Pennsylvania Railroad slid toward bankruptcy. The demolition helped spur the preservation movement. Over the years some architects and urban planners have called for the Garden to be moved to make room for a new station. Amtrak made it clear that the arena would stay where it is but said that the design “takes inspiration from this lost architectural gem while fitting with the major structures there currently, particularly Madison Square Garden and Moynihan Train Hall.” METROPOLITAN DIARY Race day
Dear Diary: I was running cross the Manhattan Bridge when a woman ran past me. She was a few paces ahead, so I picked up my speed to pass her. Then she sped up and passed me. Then I sped up again. She eventually matched my pace and looked over at me. “Let’s do this,” she said. We raced the rest of the way across the bridge. When we got to the bottom, we high-fived and went our separate ways. — Hilary McCanse Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. I’m going to take the next 10 days off. See you on June 1. — J.B. Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
