January 2011

Good fences make good neighbors,” wrote Robert Frost, and he meant that fences did more than just enclose space; like his woods and roads, they bounded a social and psychological landscape. That fences also form a kind of historical document is suggested by the photographs on these pages.

The earliest urban examples quite naturally reflected the architectural styles of the homes they surrounded. Fashionable Georgian town houses of pre-Revolutionary days had elaborate wrought-iron fences and gates, the designs copied from European stylebooks and the ironwork itself often imported.

Charles F. Mootry had met his wife when she was dancing in a seedy Los Angeles cabaret called the Club Theater, and married her with the intention, he told his friends, of putting her to work as a prostitute. Soon he took up with another woman and started saying that he wanted to get rid of his wife. Then he shot her—or so it seemed to everyone in the courtroom in December of 1899. Neighbors testified that they had heard the couple quarreling before the gunshot, and Mootry’s contention that his wife had committed suicide was, to say the least, unconvincing. Moreover, Mootry was not an attractive witness. He chewed gum constantly, leered at the jury, and once when two women he knew entered the courtroom, he beamed, clapped his hand to his mouth, and yelled out, “Oh, Mama!” Things didn’t look so good for Charles Mootry.

Bellevue Hospital, the oldest hospital in the United States, turned 250 last year. It started as a six-bed ward for the poor, part of an almshouse on lower Broadway, back in 1736, when New York had a population of about nine thousand. As the city grew, Bellevue grew. By 1810 the population of New York was 96,373 and the city fathers were looking for a place to build a real hospital. They purchased a part of what was then Kip’s Bay Farm, between what is now Second Avenue and the East River, around Twenty-eighth Street. The gentleman who originally owned the adjoining land in 1772 had called it Belle View. By 1793 the name had changed to Belle Vue, and in 1825, when the hospital was well established, it was called Bellevue, the name it has had ever since.

Some good books about Bellevue include Belleuue Is My Home , by Salvatore Cutolo, an assistant superintendent at Bellevue for nearly forty years (Doubleday, 1956); Belleuue , by Don Gold, a journalist who spent several months as an observer at the hospital in the 1970s (Harper and Row, 1975, now available in a 1983 Dell reprint); and An Account of Bellevue Hospital with a Catalogue of the Medical and Surgical Staff from 1736–1894 , by Robert Carlisle (originally published in 1893 and reprinted in 1986 by the Society of the Alumni of Bellevue Hospital).

When I was twenty-five, I spent a year tutoring the son of the king of Siam and his friend, the son of the Siamese prime minister. Fifty-five years later I am still filled with wonder when I think about it. 1 had just finished two years at Cambridge University in England and was full of myself. I had returned home a month before the 1929 Crash, which changed the lives of everybody and changed mine right away. Here I was, filled with energy and enthusiasm for life and feeling good about my career at Cambridge. My first book of poetry, A Bravery of Earth, was soon to be published, and yet I was witnessing the economic downfall of my country. Soon, like others, I was pounding the pavements looking for work, in New York City.

Richard Eberhart,” says his fellow poet James Dickey, “is the most giving of all poets. The wonderful thing about his work and about him is the spontaneous unasked and unasking bestowal of himself to whoever wishes it.” Eberhart is one of a handful of renowned living American poets. He has won most of the prizes—Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Bollingen Prize in Poetry—and he holds one of the fifty chairs in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Oscar De Mejo, like an artist of the Renaissance, creates series of paintings on historical themes. For the Bicentennial he painted a sequence on the Revolution. In 1985 he was commissioned bv John W. Kluse. founder of Metromedia and a resident of Albemarle County, to paint this series on Virginia to celebrate Mrs. Kluge’s naturalization. Exhibited last year at the Bayly Art Museum in Charlottesville, the paintings bear the artist’s characteristic imprint: strong narrative, inventive composition, and the recurring presence of a flagdraped figure that he says represents “the future America.” The future was to include De Mejo himself who, born in Trieste, became a U.S. citizen in 1952.

—J.C.

On February 9, 1911, Congress approved a bill authorizing construction of a monument to Abraham Lincoln in the nation’s capital. The notion of building such a memorial had long moved many people for varied reasons. The Republican party naturally wanted to honor its greatest hero. Millions of Americans saw a memorial as a way of finally announcing the end of sectional animosities as the Civil War receded into history. And Lincoln had long before become the national hero he remains today, symbolizing many American traits and ambitions that rose above section or party.

Anaheim is filled with motels of every grade; but Disney was stretched financially when he was building Disneyland, and even the “official” Disneyland Hotel is under separate ownership. It is up to immaculate Disney standards, nonetheless, and is the only hotel served by the park’s monorail. There are two especially attractive Disney-owned hotels at Disney World: the Contemporary and the more relaxed Polynesian Village. Both are very good, and the fact that they are linked to the monorail—it goes right through the Contemporary’s lobby—makes them particularly convenient. For information on prices and hours in Disneyland, call 714-999-4565; in Disney World, 305-824-4321. Steve Birnbaum wrote the official guides to both parks, and they contain all the information anyone needs to plan a Disney vacation.