Charlotte Canda

My obsession with Charlotte Canda is well-known by readers of this blog or of my book, Boroughs of the Dead: New York City Ghost Stories. Charlotte Canda was a Victorian-era debutante who lived in New York City. She died in a tragic accident on February 3rd, 1845: her 17th birthday.

According to the historians at Green-Wood Cemetery, where she is interred,

The story of Charlotte Canda and the creation of her monument is a true Victorian drama, filled with tragedy, symbolism and beauty. Charlotte was the only daughter of Charles Canda, a Frenchman who had served as an officer in Napoleon’s Army and later emigrated to America.

On Charlotte’s seventeenth birthday, as she was returning home from her party in a storm, she was thrown from a carriage when the horses bolted. She died in her parents’ arms shortly after the accident.

Her tomb is an exquisite "richly carved Gothic Revival structure in the form of a tabernacle [and] an open, arched canopy flanked by two slender spires contain a portrait statue of the young woman wearing a garland of seventeen rose buds representing the years of her life," though when I look at it it seems more to resemble the bed of a Sleeping Beauty in a fairy tale than a tabernacle. I can imagine her slumbering there, frozen in time. (She'll never wake to her lover's kiss, though; in a sad post-script, "her fiance Charles Albert Jarrett de la Marie, a French nobleman, took his own life out of the grief of losing Charlotte. He is buried in the adjacent plot marked by an elegant headstone bearing his coat of arms.")

Victorian-era New Yorkers were quite taken with the tragic tale of the beautiful Charlotte, and her grave became a major tourist attraction. I can certainly understand why; her story is captivating and the monument itself is arresting. Most incredible of all is the designer of her monument: Charlotte Canda.

Yes, that's right. Charlotte Canda designed her own grave.

The artistic Charlotte had been designing a monument for her recently deceased aunt and had sketched the ideas for it on paper. Her father adapted the design concept and personalized it for Charlotte by adding her initials, musical and drawing instruments, books, sculptures of her pet parrots and other symbolic details. The concept featured a niche containing a portrait statue of Charlotte with a star above her head symbolizing immortal life.

When I first read this, I was so taken with the concept of the pretty girl who made her own grave that I decided to immortalize her in a story. I did so in "A Fitting Tribute," a ghost story of Victorian New York. Since today is February 3rd, I'd like to offer the free story as a gift to my readers in tribute to Charlotte, who will not be forgotten as long as obsessive writers live next to Green-Wood. The real story of Charlotte will linger in your mind. (My fictionalized version is scandalously inaccurate, but don't let it fool you.)

Happy birthday and seventeen pink rosebuds to you, Charlotte.

Ghost Building

Last week my friend Mike and I went walking around the financial district to gaze at old graves and dream of Dutch colonial things but, this being the financial district, couldn't help but crane our necks upward and get carried away by skyscrapers. Inspired by the hollow grandness of the bank buildings, I blathered on a bit about how I love narratives of financial ruin, the sheer drama of histories of crashes and panics. Then we stumbled on a gorgeous Art Deco building at the corner of Wall and Pine, and, well, witnessed history.

Fascinated by its sleek elegance, we trotted round and round the edifice, vainly looking for an open door, but all ingress and egress was blocked off and everything was shuttered up tight. Odd, considering it was five o'clock on a weekday afternoon.

At last we found a single open entrance and passed through a revolving door into an unusually
quiet lobby suffused with warm-colored marble. (I remember it being a gingery gold color, but memory is fallible. I should have snapped a picture, darn it.) A plaque informed us of the building's ownership, and we walked through the hushed, utterly deserted interior to the only people in the place: two uniformed security guards. They stood amidst the silence and half-packed cardboard boxes.

We greeted them and asked, "Is this the AIG Building?"

The kinder of the two guards replied slowly: "Used to be."

We spoke to him some more, and he revealed to us that the building had been sold "to the Koreans." I asked him if he would keep his job. "I don't know. I'm just living from day to day," he replied. (Reverting to a strange Little Orphan Annie diction that overtakes me sometimes, I piped up, "You're real nice, mister, I'm sure you'll keep your job, sure you will!") The other guard stood stoically, as soundless as the empty lobby.

At one point a slim young man with light-brown hair and a sad face came into the building. He was dressed in what I imagine bankers wear on weekends, and had on a backpack. As he passed by the stack of boxes, I realized he was likely going upstairs to pack the last of his work things into that backpack.

We waved goodbye to the friendly security guard (I really do wish I had more of a controlling stake in the universe so I could ensure him a job with the new owners) and headed back into the darkening afternoon. As we left, we saw a lone, white-haired lady, perhaps some ancient secretary, shuffle noiselessly across the floor, swipe her ID card at a golden turnstile, and move toward the elevator bank.

***

P.S. Did you know there are no happy hours in the financial district? A waitress explained, "We don't really need them down here."

Gentrification Mysteries, Pt. II

Richard Price's Lush Life was miles better than Lake House, though not without its flaws. The main difference being, of course, Price can write. Here's how he sums up the "atmosphere of massive archaeological discovery" that is the Lower East Side:

"But for all this reborn carriage house's ingenuity, its artful attempt at appeasing its own history while declaring itself the newest of the new, it was the double layer of evicted ghosts -- pauperish tenants, greenhorn parishioners -- that still held sway for him, Matty already having been afflicted with Cop's Eyes; the compulsion to imagine the overlay of the dead wherever he went."

The plot's very basic: a kid, Ike Marcus, gets shot on the LES, two cops bungle the investigation and spend the rest of the novel getting it back on track. "The rest of the novel" being 350 pages or so. Mainly, it's an exploration of the neighborhood, with a failed writer/actor-bartender at its center. The failure, Eric Cash, has been characterized as what you start being "when the hyphen stops."

"He’s modeled partly on [myself]," says Price, "He’s me if what has been hadn’t been. I’ve always been interested in when the hyphen disappears — you know, actor-waiter, cabdriver-writer — and you have to settle for who you are."

In a way, this is a far subtler characterization of becoming an adult than Laken's narrative was. The moment when you realize your dreams are never coming true? That's when you grow up. The depressing nature of big box stores is nothing but adolescent whining compared to that.

Lush Life has other brilliant touches, beside just the exploration of failure.

Other standout scenes include the awful parade of egos at Ike Marcus' funeral, emceed by a self-involved hipster par excellence, an awful aspiring actor named Steven Boulware. Price's skewering of the trust-fund set is dead on, awkward, embarrassing, hilarious. One obnoxious girls, who calls herself Fraunces Tavern, uses Ike's funeral as a venue to discuss their sex life, completely traumatizing the kid's little sister. Then the parade of hipsters in sleeve-garters and handlebar mustaches give Ike an old-timey jazz funeral send-off, complete with the band-leader handing out his business card at the end of it.

Characterization, other than the great caricatures of hipsters, and the bitchy passive-aggressive cop, Yolanda, was a bit flat. Matty, the other cop, had flaws that were just a bit too on the nose (in a story about a son dying, Matty's got problems with his own sons ... meh). And the little ghetto kid who writes bad raps in his notebook I'm sure is supposed to be "authentic" but comes off as merely monodimensional. However, the bad raps themselves were perfect:

I'm a player a slayer
so be understandful
of the handful
that I am

Obviously, the most important character is the LES itself, and that, my friends, is masterfully developed. I loved the scene in the Chinese funeral supply store, and Price's descriptions, as above, are dazzling. It's also fun to play the roman-a-clef game. Do you think the bar Chinaman's Chance = Happy Ending?

Price says, “This place is like Byzantium. It’s tomorrow, yesterday — anyplace but today," adding that "he thinks of the neighborhood as a very busy ghost town, where many of the ghosts milling around still speak Yiddish." Price points out the irony of 5th generation kids whose ancestors clawed their way out of there now paying 2 grand a month for the privilege of residing in former tenements. Circle of life and all that.

The main symptoms of gentrification, besides the condos, of course, are "the liquor stores [that] no longer sell Thunderbird." Liquor stores, I think, can be seen as the ultimate litmus test. Walk into a liquor store, and if the counter is behind bulletproof glass, your neighborhood is not gentrified. Try it, it works.

Of course, what's really interesting is reading the book from a post-economic collapse perspective. There's a fabulous conversation where the cop, Yolanda, tries to get a kid on the straight and narrow, advising him to get a construction job because, well, he'll be sitting pretty then! Oh, what a difference a few months makes. Better off sticking to a life of crime, kiddo.

(Above quotes from: NYT)