Old New York

I'm reading Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel, originally recommended by my friend David, whose father had had a copy. Feature journalism in Mitchell's mode was meant to combine studies of the human condition with the preservation of the world he circulated in. His profiles of eccentrics can have the parabolic heft of Isaac Bashevis Singer short stories, about which I want to write more; and at the same time they are redolent of the New York City I got a glimpse of in the Sixties when I went to visit my grandmother, who lived on East 86th Street in an area known as "Yorkville."