Why Grub Street NYC?
New Grub Street is a novel by George Gissing, about writers in 19th century London. Grub Street, the actual street, was gone by the time Gissing was writing, but a hundred years earlier, so many barely employed writers had low-rent digs in this run-down part of London that “Grub Street” came to refer to the place in the world such writers inhabit; the writers themselves were called “Grub Street hacks.” I am a sucker for stories about writers and publishing, and New Grub Street is one of the great ones.
The East Village of NYC, where I’ve lived for twenty years or so, was once a sort of Grub Street; you couldn’t throw a painter without hitting a writer. There was a novel a while ago, by Emily Listfield, It Was Gonna Be Like Paris, about life in the punk/art/junkie low-rent East Village, that captured those days pretty well.
Things have changed a lot here, and the East Village of Listfield’s book is as much a part of the vanished past as the original Grub Street. You’re not going to find anyone selling dope on the corner when you walk out your door, any more than you’re going to find an apartment a young writer can afford to live in, but somehow the cafes and coffee shops are still filled with people banging away on laptops. You can write anywhere, of course, and the best place to do it is probably as far from the constant temptations and distractions of a place like this as you can get, but somehow, writers still come here, looking for Grub Street.
(Yeah, yeah, Williamsburg, whatever.)