MIDTOWN MANHATTAN
Teodora Rajkovska
“Vehement silhouettes of Manhattan- that vertical city with unimaginable diamonds”
- Le Corbusier
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Skyline of New York City
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Manhattan, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. It is the urban core of the New York metropolitan area, and coextensive with New York Country, one of the original counties of the U.S. state of New York. Manhattan serves as the city's economic and administrative center, cultural identifier and historical birthplace. The borough consists mostly of Manhattan Island, bounded by the Hudson, East, and Harlem rivers; as well as several small adjacent islands. Manhattan additionally contains Marble Hill, a small neighborhood now on the U.S. mainland, separated from the rest of Manhattan by the Harlem Ship Canal and later connected using landfill to The Bronx. Manhattan Island is divided into three informally bounded components, each cutting across the borough's long axis: Lower, Midtown, and Upper Manhattan. Manhattan has been described as the cultural, financial, media, and entertainment capital of the world
Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements.
O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and content, and has been described as sounding "like entries in a diary". Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is "urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny" containing "material and associations alien to academic verse" such as "the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music, telephone calls from friends". O'Hara's writing sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be "between two persons instead of two pages."
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The Day Lady Died is Frank O'Hara's curious elegy written in memory of Billie Holiday, the jazz singer. The setting is New York City, a busy Manhattan street. It's summer and the speaker is going about his everyday business. This is a poem about mass culture, the vitality of being on the street, personal engagement with the surface of life, juxtaposed against profound change which comes in the form of a legendary jazz singer, Billie Holiday.
Frank O`Hara
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The Day Lady Died - read by "A Poetry Channel"
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Map of the locations in the poem
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East Hampton North is a census-designated place (CDP) in Suffolk County, New York, United States. At the 2010 census, the population was 4,142.
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Map of East Hampton
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Here we can see the Madison avenue 611 where the Golden Griffin was. Now it no longer exists.
The Golden Griffin was a bookstore at 611 Madison Ave.
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Golden Griffin
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The Ziegfeld Theatre
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The Five Spot Café was a jazz club located at 5 Cooper Square (1956–1962) in the Bowery neighborhood of New York City, between the East and West Village. In 1962, it moved to 2 St. Marks Place, until closing in 1967. Its friendly, non-commercial, low-key atmosphere, with affordable drinks and food, and cutting edge bebop and progressive jazz attracted a host of avant-garde artists and writers. It was a venue of historic significance as well, a Mecca for musicians, both local and out-of-state, who packed the small venue to listen to many of the most creative composers and performers of the era.
Sixth Avenue – also known as Avenue of the Americas, although this name is seldom used by New Yorkers – is a major thoroughfare in New York City's borough of Manhattan, on which traffic runs northbound, or "uptown". It is commercial for much of its length.
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Sixth Avenue
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The Ziegfeld Theatre was a Broadway theatre located at 1341 Sixth Avenue, corner of 54th Street in Manhattan, New York City. It was built in 1927 and, despite public protests, was razed in 1966.
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Five Spot Cafe
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Frank o Hara’s wandering in the colorful neighborhoods of Manhattan facilitates the understanding of the New York as a very diverse place. Through o Hara’s journey, the life of famous jazz singer Billie Holiday is being unveiled and new aspect of personality of inner self is projected.
Selected online sources and bibliography
Baldwin, Emma. "The Day Lady Died by Frank O’Hara". Poem Analysis, https://poemanalysis.com/frank-ohara/the-day-lady-died/. Accessed 14 December 2021.
Frank O'Hara and the Poetics of the Digital Author(s): Todd Tietchen Source: Criticism , Vol. 56, No. 1 (Winter 2014), pp. 45-62 Published by: Wayne State University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/criticism.56.1.0045
Sadoff, Ira. “Frank O’Hara’s Intimate Fictions.” The American Poetry Review, vol. 35, no. 6, American Poetry Review, 2006, pp. 49–52, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20683351.