Tony Hiss
Hiss is the author of 15 books, most recently “Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth,” and the award-winning “The Experience of Place: A New Way of Looking at and Dealing With our Radically Changing Cities and Countryside.” He was a staff writer at “The New Yorker” magazine for 30 years and has been a visiting scholar at New York University for over 25 years. Hiss has lectured around the world; is a consultant on planning, place, biodiversity, and conservation issues; and is now at work on a new book, “The Biosphere: A Biography.” He lives with his wife, the writer Lois Metzger, in the Greenwich Village apartment he’s called home since 1947. Highlights from his oral history include memories of corresponding with his father, Alger Hiss, a government official accused of spying for the Soviet Union during the McCarthy-era Red Scare, during Alger’s incarceration; reflections on watching the Village change from the window of his apartment; and thoughts on how to tell the story of a neighborhood while looking both to the future and to the past.
Clip from Oral History
Excerpts from Oral History with Tony Hiss:
“A place like the Village helps you think back seven generations. This apartment — it took me a while to figure this out, of course — is part of a piece of land that has had a very interesting history. There was a farm called the Minto Farm. About 200 years ago, it was bought by a Captain Randall, a seafaring man whose father had made a lot of money plundering English ships, and decided on his death to — at the advice supposedly of Alexander Hamilton — he said, “I don’t know where my money should go.” He said, “Well, it came from the sea. It should go back to the sea.” So he decided to set up a home for elderly sailors, indigent sailors, and they set up something called Sailors Snug Harbor. These old, washed up sailors would — they were called snugs — would have a lifetime of ease. Before any kind of benefits were available.
Now in those days, things were back to front, as we would say. This was still countryside north of New York. And the main road north was the Bowery coming up the east side, which then funneled into Fourth Avenue. So, this farm insofar as it had a direction, faced east towards the Bowery… And in fact, the back of the farm in what is now Fifth Avenue, was defined by a meandering stream called Minetta Brook, whose name we still have with Minetta Lane…So, we’re at the back end of this old farm, which was, some say, a quaint little farm. Some say it was an orchard and just because of the accidents of the way the property was later developed. I like to think it may not be true, but I’d like to think that the backyard to this apartment, which is actually stretches up and down the block, is perhaps the one piece of the Minto farm that never got built on, so that we can through it, look back through all these generations and feel connected to.” (p. 7-8)
“There was a French hotel on University Place called The Lafayette. The Irish shop boys in the Peter Reeves supermarket actually had to speak a few words of French, making deliveries. Around on Fifth Avenue, there was another old-time hotel called The Brevoort, which was beloved. And the neighborhood really had a kind of strength that few neighborhoods had achieved. I mean, it wasn’t just Bohemian. We had our own department store, John Wanamaker, over at Broadway. An enormous building connecting via skybridge to the block next door where this gorgeous, older department store, former A.T. Stewart building, was built around a central courtyard. It had pipe organ recitals during the day. …And we had a famous art museum. We had the Whitney Museum on West 8th Street, because Gertrude Whitney had lived and worked down there. So this was pretty solid.” (p. 13-14)
“I don’t see much continuity in the way of things that you feel like you still have with you. I’ve always thought that what is important about preservation is you’re not trying to preserve the past. You’re trying to preserve the present. You are trying to make sure that something that has made its way from the past into our lives continues to be part of the lives of people who will come hereafter. But on the other hand, it transformed this apartment into what I started thinking of as a time funnel. You look out the front and you see a highrise across the street. You look out the back, you see the exact view they were seeing a hundred years ago when these buildings were converted. You see what Edward Hopper saw when he looked out his window. Because his studio was on Washington Square. You see chimney pots and you see birds wheeling through the sky. And we are awakened in the morning by birdsong, here, in New York.” (p. 15)
“Well, if change means we’re always on the move, then it’s a question of what do we carry with us? And what do we abandon and leave behind? And I think we need to — it’s useful for us to carry with us a sense of where we’ve come from. Because that gives us more of a context for being intelligent about what the next step is gonna be…You know, it seems to me that every generation secretly thinks that history began when they were born. And everything before then was pre-history. But that’s just an illusion. So I think we have a chance now — we have to face up to the fact that we’ve been better at doing things that make problems than we have been at doing things that solve problems.” (p. 28)