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History of Tribeca Buildings
In the News: Tom Colicchio’s Restaurant Has a Name
••• Tom Colicchio’s all-day restaurant at the Beekman Hotel will be called Fowler and Wells “after a couple of phrenologists—or pseudoscientists who studied the shape of the head as a basis for personality traits—who used to work in the building, Colicchio says.” The menu “will feature classic New York dishes that were popular at the turn of the century, with specials like lobster Thermidor and beef Wellington.” They’re shooting for late May or early June. Above: A rendering of the lobby lounge. —Eater
••• A report on the first public meeting of the Financial District Neighborhood Association. —Tribeca Trib
••• “The proposed 500-foot-tall mixed-use building at 77 Greenwich Street (a.k.a. 42 Trinity Place) suffered a setback on Tuesday. The Landmarks Preservation Commission did not vote to approve its proposed cantilevered portions.” That’s the building with the new school at the base. —YIMBY (which has many more renderings)
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Fowler & Wells’s greatest claim to fame: they were the original publishers of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:
http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_82.html
Walt W. also came to the neighborhood to get his picture taken at the great Civil War photographer Mathew Brady’s studio, 359 Broadway.
BTW, TC: thanks for the clip of “Think Pink”–seen it a million times, but always makes me smile…
Lots of great stuff here: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/walking-tour-walt-whitmans-soho-historic-district-new-york-city
Including:
“308 Broadway: Fowler & Well’s Phrenological Cabinet
“Whitman’s relationship with the phrenologists started when he was given his first phrenological analysis. It revealed a way to self-knowledge that exhilarated him, and it also led to friendship with his analyst, Lorenzo Fowler. Eventually Fowler & Wells offered to act as agent for the first edition of Leaves of Grass. The green cloth-covered book with its gold-stamped title twined with sprouting gold leaves went on display in the New York Cabinet shortly after July 4, 1855, and later in the Philadelphia and Boston Cabinets.
“The New York Cabinet was a Broadway Health Palace visited by hundreds of persons each day from all over the country, but not those on the lookout for a book of poems. Fowler & Wells published books catering to the mid-19th century reformist movements in health and medicine. Leaves of Grass took its place among treatises on hydropathy, mesmerism, hygiene, women’s rights, vegetarian and “Grahamite” (whole wheat flour) cookbooks; anti-tobacco and temperance tracts; “how-to-books,” including how to succeed in business and instruction in shorthand; paraphernalia for preserving fruit, etc. Fowler & Wells published anonymously the 1856 (second) edition of Leaves of Grass, which went on display in the New York Cabinet and branches. But in 1857, Whitman was complaining:
“Fowler & Wells are bad persons for me. They retard my book very much.—It is worse than ever.—I wish now to bring out a third edition—I have now a hundred poems ready (the last edition had thirty-two )—and shall endeavor to make an arrangement with some publisher here to take the plates from F. & W. and make the additions needed, and so bring out the third edition.—F & W. are very willing to give up the plates—they want the thing off their hands.”
FYI – “Grahamite” (whole wheat flour) cookbooks are related to the Rev. Graham who invented the Graham cracker, and not as a treat for children …