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A History of French Cinema

16 Aug

My review of Emilie Bickerton’s A Short History of Cahiers du cinéma is on the 3:AM Magazine site here.

Yet, it seems to me that what the early Cahiers critics did so well was to bridge the gap between commercial concerns and personal visions, and to acknowledge the possibilities of a quick-witted director harnessing the potential of the studio system. In this way, the Cahiers critics were negotiating the contradictions of attempting to produce highly personal cinema in an era of increased consumer capitalism. This image of the director as auteur may have been wishful thinking on the parts of Truffaut and Godard, yet this convenient fiction allowed them to imagine themselves in the role of director, an effort of the imagination that is even more astounding for having actually materialised. Their cinema, in actuality, took a markedly different form from their heroes Hitchcock and Sam Fuller: fewer studio sets, more filming on the street; lower budgets, smaller audiences. Perhaps the lessons about negotiating the commercial aspects of filmmaking were forgotten by Cahiers in later years; when it couldn’t survive as an autonomous concern, it fully embraced commercialism – again, mirroring Toubiana’s leap from Maoist to pillar of the industry (he’s now the Director General of the Cinématheque française).

 
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Posted in 3:AM Magazine, Cinema, Paris

 

I’m in the Market for Decline

16 Aug

When I think of the markets in Dublin, I think of overcast Saturday afternoons spent circling the deserted streets around the market buildings, camera in hand, recording the intricate stonework decorating the corners of the sheds. On walks such as this, I’d have made my way from Dawson Street, around the area surrounding St Patrick’s Cathedral, up Francis Street in the Liberties, down the hill from St Audeon’s Church, onto Church Street on the Northside, near the Four Courts. The streets at the back of the Four Courts, where the Luas runs along, have their own particular ambience: the terraced houses that adjoin Church Street provide a dense, atmospheric, network similar to the houses around Blackpitts on the South of the city.

Often, when walking near the markets buildings, I would stop and think about what they were like in their heyday, when surely they were busier than they are now: were the narrow corridors between fruit and vegetable stands constantly thronged by customers coming and going? Were the streets outside full to bursting with carts and carriages?

A lot of nineteeth century architecture in the central city forces me to think this way: what was it like back when it really mattered? Of course, this might just be a nostalgic projection provided by my own wishing that Dublin must have been relevant at some point in the past. The former Irish Parliament building on College Green, now the Bank of Ireland, was an illusory centre of Irish political life in the nineteenth century – the real power being vested in the Westminster parliament in London. It was an empty centre: Ireland was then a peripheral part of the British Empire, and now stands on the edge of Europe, both geographically and in terms of its political relevance to the wider European Union.

But what can you make of the psychological effect of this emptiness at the core, instituted perhaps by the shadow-puppetry of colonial assuagement, but nonetheless preserved meticulously, unthinkingly, right up to the present day? One aspect: an enduring scepticism about the real worth of institutions combined with a compulsive habit of tipping one’s hat to power, in the absence of anything else to do with one’s hat. Governmental, media [insert the name of the state broadcaster and major national newspaper you are currently thinking of here]: any institution gets it in the neck verbally, but no one knows what to do in order to occasion any tangible change. The net result: no change of any substance. This is the kind of impotence that makes Dublin, and Ireland in general, a circle of hell for anyone inclined to interrogate it in this way. Better to keep your head in the sand. Better, indeed, to get on with the business of living: commute expensively, accumulate, keep your taxes low and your house prices high; pave; re-tile; repeat ad nauseam.

 
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Posted in dublin, geography, history, ireland, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

The City’s Edge: Dublin in Fragments 3

13 Jul

Living in the centre of the city is both heaven and hell. Preferring the latter, I attempted to investigate the infernal underground workings of the area, drawn to the gloomy inky-dark streets of the south inner city. I lived just off a road called Blackpitts – its name a reference to the filthy puddles left by the River Poddle when its flow abated during the summer months. The street is built directly over the course of the river. I often wondered whether ‘Filthy Puddle’ wouldn’t be a better translation of Dubh Linn, one which would undoubtedly lend the city’s name a subversive undertow. Blackpitts is tucked to the west of Clanbrassil Street, down a short incline that hints at the presence of the river: the slopes on either side of Blackpitts are the valley, and the street itself is a substitute for the subterranean river that runs below.

Blackpitts is the gateway to a dense warren of streets packed with terraced houses and small factories, under all of which a complex network of man-made rivers runs. The houses date from different points over the last hundred or so years: the redbrick terraces grouped around Hammond and St John’s streets (this area was where I lived for a few years) are from the last years of the nineteenth century, and are the product of the Dublin Artisan Dwelling Company, who also built the terraces in Stoneybatter. Just behind the redbricks off Blackpitts is the area known as the Tenters, named after the ‘tents’ of flax fibres stretched out to dry on frames across the fields in the days when weavers were based in the locality. Houses were built here in the 1920s.

But it wasn’t just the history of the area around Blackpitts that interested me. Desirable as a place to live because of its proximity to the city centre, it was targeted in a serious way for redevelopment. It was an area that was far from settled: on a daily basis you could trace the changes as your footsteps drew you towards long-deserted warehouses, past fenced-off tracts of waste ground from which an old building had recently been cleared.

While the boom years made Dublin a site of constant flux in terms of property development, nowhere was the tension between construction and destruction more obvious to me than in the area where I lived. One day, as I walked down the street, a row of redbrick houses were being knocked down, brick-by-brick. I had previously thought the houses to be occupied – there were bicycles chained to the railings outside, and they otherwise showed no more signs of neglect than did my own residence. Half-knocked now, the lower floors of their front facade stood, sawn off just at the sill of the upstairs window, a spooky reminder of what was yet to be erased completely. The clinical precision with which the operation was being carried out made the top of the wall seem as sharp as a razor’s edge, when glimpsed in silhouette against the dull afternoon sky.

At the end of Blackpitts is Newmarket Square, an immense windswept plateau bordered by anonymous redbrick warehouses used by multinationals for document storage, and, at the western end, a cluttered and uncomfortable looking apartment development. A shuttered pub, Grey’s of Newmarket, stands at the north centre, on a corner where a road opens onto the new Cork Street extension. This pub was the scene of a gangland killing in 2004, and is one of a number of pubs that have been shut down in the Liberties area.

At number 48 Newmarket Square was a rooming house where Lily O’Neill, a young woman known as Honor Bright, lived; she was murdered in 1925, her body found on a quiet mountain road to the south of the city. Working as a prostitute, Lily made her way from her lodgings on the night of her murder along New Row, past St Patrick’s Cathedral towards Bishop Street, and onwards towards St Stephen’s Green. That walk was less than a mile, but it bridged two sharply contrasting worlds.

One of the streets she walked down, New Row, had also been built over the Poddle river – an early version of the streetname was New Row-on-Poddle. The point where the street meets the western end of the Coombe also marks the confluence of two different branches of the river, where the network of streams rejoins the Poddle proper. This is where George Sala, on an assignment in 1853 for Charles Dickens’s Household Words magazine, had found ‘semi-continental picturesqueness’ amongst the dirt and poverty of the Coombe’s inhabitants.

Tracking the different branches of the Poddle could occupy someone for weeks. For a while I became obsessed with tracking it, believing that an unlovely, unloved and largely hidden river was more valuable than those more celebrated watercourses: the Seine, the Thames, even the Liffey. I believed that its very insignificance held the key to its significance. That it was banished from sight as a result of its unholy stench made it even more intriguing. Yet it also emerged above ground briefly in the oddest places.

One day, I went a few steps from my house, and tried to find an exposed stretch of the river that appeared on maps of the area. In the grounds of Warrenmount Convent, I asked a groundskeeper about the river, and he brought me to the point where it had appeared on the map. A forbidding stone wall of at least ten feet in height, marking the extent of the convent’s grounds, stopped me in my tracks. There was no sign of the river within the boundary of the convent.

However, when I stopped and listened, I could hear the unmistakeable burbling of water, and I decided that it must be coming from the other side of the wall.

On the other side of the wall was a yard, used as a car-park by an Irish telephone company. As I walked onto the property, a guard emerged from his office, and told me I couldn’t continue my trespassing. I explained my reasons for being there, and eventually he relented, and pointed me towards the far corner of the car-park, where the gravel surface broke into scrubby waste-ground, and where there stood a couple of trees, which must have been 100 or so years old.

There, flowing freely along the other side of the convent wall, I found the Poddle – or, at least, one of its branches – and after a couple of minutes spent admiring it, I walked away satisfied, and the river disappeared from view once again.

 
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Posted in Love and Death, dublin, endotic, geography, history, ireland, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

The City’s Edge: Dublin in Fragments 2

09 Jul

It’s hard to believe how important Tallaght was to the historical development of Dublin city – at least it was hard to believe something like that when I grew up there. Nowhere seemed further from the dense, decaying streets of the city centre in the 1980s than Tallaght, with its vast and oppressive open spaces threaded with sinister-looking electricity pylons that you could hear a low buzz from when you stood beneath them. Tallaght, with its anonymous industrial estates seemingly dropped in the centre of housing developments – estates that, in turn, seemed to stretch for miles without end. Tallaght seemed like nowhere.

Tallaght never seemed part of Dublin, to me. It was distantly flung to the far south-western corner of the city, as if banished from the urban centre for some obscure crime. It was divided from Walkinstown by a large tract of farmland that subsequently, much later, became a park and a motorway. The road from Tallaght to the city – at least the one I was most familiar with – was the Greenhills Road, which runs along a high embankment between Kilnamanagh, where my family lived, and the roundabout at Walkinstown. As you travel north along the road, factories and warehouses stretch out below you to the left, as far as the eye can see. In the distance you can just about see the white papal cross in the Phoenix Park, but, at least from that perspective, that’s the nearest visible green space.

On our bus trips to the city – usually me, my brother and mother, on a 77 bus whose upstairs windows tasted of tobacco smoke when, one rainy day, I wiped my hand on the fogged glass, then licked it – you’d be introduced to the oddly fractured urban planning at work in the city, before reaching the snug terraced streets of the Liberties, the bus taking a sharp hairpin turn at the end of Cork Street before catapulting around the corner down the Coombe, past the disembodied doorway to the old hospital, preserved like an old limb in formaldehyde. Across from St Patrick’s Cathedral, a Dublin Corporation rubbish tip, where street cleaners dumped the refuse they collected along the city’s streets. The inner city intrigued me: it seemed everything Tallaght wasn’t.

Only later did I find out that Tallaght was flung there on purpose. Or at least part of it was. The extensive council estates located to the west of the village were, in part, the city’s response to a long-overdue need for proper social housing to allay the slum conditions in the inner city. Other building followed, as empty landscapes filled up with housing built by private developers on acres of rezoned land.

In the mid-60s, a master plan had proposed the development of a number of new towns in the west of the city, of which Tallaght was one. This expansion formed the western suburbs as they now stand, kept outside the city proper by the boundary of the M50 motorway, which serves as a link between suburbs, and to the roads out of the city.

When the M50 was being built, I still lived in Tallaght, and, before they had laid the road surface, I used to ride my BMX along the flattened earth of the motorway, as far, nearly, as the current interchange in the shadow of the quarry at Firhouse. At that point, there was an urban legend that a local gangster had buried a bag full of money from a robbery somewhere under the road. I cycled along, thinking about it: if you were to start digging, where would you begin? The roadworks were vast, and, by comparison, a bag full of stolen money seemed so small, no matter how much of it there was.

When they had put up a wall along the edge of the motorway, I was still drawn there – the strangeness of this incursion into everyday life had not yet abated. A small stream ran from the estate in Kilnamanagh under the M50. I was intrigued by the way a new concrete riverbed had been constructed to divert the river below the road, and I often pottered around there in the sunlight, watching the water trickle away into the darkness of a moulded cement tunnel. It was surrounded by a grubby scrubland pockmarked with spiky bushes and broken concrete blocks – the detritus of road-building. Discarded, presumably used, condoms could be seen here and there. The stream disappeared under the motorway, and I still don’t know where it emerges.

I went to school at the top of the Greenhills Road, near Tallaght village. Across the field – an open space, really, bordered on one side by an industrial estate, on the other by the Bancroft housing estate – was a small river that smelled like chemicals, but had a rich and intriguing history. The River Poddle had been Dublin’s first municipal water source, and ran from an unspecified source beyond the Belgard Road. It was spliced with a canal that drew water from the River Dodder further downstream, and supplied water to the city for many years. It had become notoriously polluted due to its path through teeming slum areas with virtually no sewage facilities, and had also been used for waste drainage by the tanneries in the Liberties, and, wisely perhaps, it had ceased to be used as a source of drinking water.

When you were out in the field, and you were a primary school child sweating in your uniform on a summer day, you smelled the river before you saw it. It ran down behind the cigarette factory that stood on the other side of the Greenhills Road, before running under the road and through a ditch that directed it eastwards towards Templeogue. The sweet smell of tobacco being rolled into cigarettes wafted across to the school most days – usually in the summer months when the windows were opened in an effort to cool the classrooms.

My abiding memories of Tallaght focus on how separate it seemed from the rest of Dublin. This was partially because of limited public transport, but it was also undeniably physically separate. It still is, to a large degree, thrown off to the edge of Dublin by some powerful centrifugal force.

 
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Posted in cycling, dublin, geography, history, ireland, modernism, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

The City’s Edge: Dublin in Fragments 1

08 Jul

Viewed on a map’s surface, as the city embraces the Irish Sea and lazily asses itself out towards Ireland’s midlands, Dublin appears curvy and welcoming, but, in person, it’s spiky and wants you to go fuck yourself. The Spire, a stainless steel needle that reached 400 feet into the air on O’Connell Street, is often nicknamed the Spike by those wishing it to stand humorously as a symbol of hard drug use in the inner city, but I prefer to think of it as a representation of the metallic, unyielding, non-stick attitude of Dublin and Dubliners in general. The city has an edge. As an additional point of comparison, it’s difficult to get a decent view of the Spire in the city centre. You can wander around the low-rise centre without ever seeing it at all; the same goes for Dublin. It’s simultaneously there and not there. For me, Dublin is still a great unknown, and I’ve lived here nearly all of my life.

This realisation led me to set myself tasks: would I be able to describe Dublin – not neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood, and not necessarily through its history – in a way that reflected what I think I already know about it, while also acknowledging that there are things about a city that constantly change, that you know only briefly before they’re spirited away, and there are things that you may never know.

Dublin is a place I hate; Dublin is a place I love. Both feelings jostle around inside of me as I make my way around the city’s streets by foot, by bike, by bus. I’ve never committed to either love or to hate the city, but often I decide on a position, before changing my mind later. I never really thought I did love the city, but sometimes I find myself doing so, before stopping myself. Sometimes the late evening light catches a stubby Georgian street a certain way, and you’re transported briefly to a transcendental city, one where you haven’t just stepped in someone’s vomit.

Dublin, most of all, is a city of fragments. It’s been broken into pieces. These pieces are spread around the map, and often, no matter how hard you try, it’s impossible to connect them all. Sometimes it’s impossible to connect any. This is partly a product of bad planning, partly because our minds rebel against the overwhelming experience of city life, and all we have left are fragments of urban experience to hang on to.

And this is the way I want to approach Dublin: through fragmentary glances down its streets and alleys, through midnight rambles in its industrial estates and exploratory hikes amongst its suburbs. Dublin is knowable through its fragments, or it’s not knowable at all.

In a way, all cities are the ruins of past civilizations, and Dublin is no different in this. The city, especially at its threadbare fringes and its sharp edges, testifies the recent death of a dream that consisted of full employment and house ownership for all. Incomplete developments that loom over country roads and adjoin supermarket car-parks concretize the optimism once felt about an ever-expanding property market, an optimism undermined by economic collapse. These estates are at times melancholy places, at times sites of a pioneer optimism. They are undoubtedly part of Dublin, but are also isolated fragments cast to the North, South and West of the city, thrown there by cheap land, the greased wheels of planning and good transportation links.

Dublin: pointy, sharp, steely, desperate, broken into pieces. Coming to a town near you, or it would be if you weren’t already there.

 
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Posted in dublin, economy, endotic, geography, history, ireland, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

Empty Spaces: The Case of Bram Stoker’s Plaque

08 Jul

A while ago I mentioned, in an article I wrote for the Guardian’s Comment is Free, that the commemorative plaque bearing Bram Stoker’s name was missing from the front of no. 30 Kildare Street, in the centre of Dublin. It’s still missing, and, as far as I can tell, no action’s been taken to retrieve it.

30 Kildare Street. The space where the plaque had been attached is visible between the two ground floor windows.

The plaque had been erected by the Bram Stoker Society on 27th July 1983, and Albert Power wrote recently, in his excellent history of the Society that it was ‘without doubt [...] the most significant achievement of the Bram Stoker Society in these early years’. (The Society had formed in 1980, and was based in Trinity College.)

Present at the unveiling were Leslie Shepard, Chairman of the Bram Stoker Society, Ann Stoker, the author’s granddaughter, Ivan Stoker Dixon, great nephew of Stoker, and the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Michael Keating. According to the Irish Times report on the occasion, two coachloads of schoolchildren passed by during the ceremony, shouting ‘Up Dracula!’ Stoker Dixon, an actor, then performed a portion of his one-man-show, ‘From Clontarf to Castle Dracula’ for the crowd.

Dublin Tourism were heavily involved in the unveiling (the organisation was responsible for the erection of plaques within the city, and each plaque bore the Dublin Tourism name), and its chairman, Gerry Byrne, gave a brief biographical talk at the ceremony.

The plaque, photographed in September 2006

When I rang Dublin Tourism in November to ask where their plaque had gone, they said it wasn’t their responsibility; that I should talk to someone in the city council.

I eventually established a narrative of the plaque’s disappearance: the building, which had been occupied by a solicitor’s firm, was sold in June 2006 for €2.3 million. In the adverts in the property section prior to the auction, the auctioneer emphasised that the building was ‘of historical note’ because of its association with Stoker, and showed a close-up of the plaque.

The building was sold to the Shelbourne Development group, who acquired the adjoining buildings at 31 and 32 in the same year. Their properties on Kildare Street are blurbed on the Shelbourne website here. The building is now occupied by a plastic surgery clinic, which moved in to the property in September 2008.

I attempted to contact Shelbourne Development, who, as my Guardian article pointed out, have many pressing problems at the moment; they failed to reply to my correspondence.

The plaque disappeared at some point between September 2006 (when I photographed it) and September 2008, when the clinic moved into the building.

The responsibility for the plaque lies with the owner of the building. Astoundingly, however, it seems that a plaque can be removed from a building by an owner at his/her own discretion. I have heard this several times, both first-hand and second-hand. However, if a building is listed as a protected structure, the owner must secure planning permission before making structural or cosmetic changes to a building.

The building at 30 Kildare Street is listed in the Dublin City Development Plan as a protected structure:

Planning permission was never sought to remove the plaque, nor, presumably, would it have been granted. Therefore, the plaque was removed illegally, and should be reinstated.

 
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Posted in Literature, dublin, history, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

Crosswords, lightly thrown

28 Jun

I’ve written a short piece about Georges Perec for 3:AM Magazine here. It’s the first time I’ve sat down to write anything about Perec since finishing my PhD, and I really enjoyed dipping in again to Perec’s novels and writings, which are often gleefully playful. My article gives a brief overview of Perec’s major writings, touching on some of the themes that colour his work. I’ve previously written about Perec and the rue Vilin here (on last 4 pages of magazine).

 
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Posted in 3:AM Magazine, Paris, Sixties, articles, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

Keep it concrete

24 Jun

I’m currently sitting on a sofa in an apartment in the Clongriffin development, to the far north of Dublin city (the dividing line between Dublin City and Fingal County is almost literally visible from the front windows of the apartment, across a vast expanse of scrubland that had been marked for development, but is now, quite excitingly, being reclaimed by nature as wetlands, the area’s natural state).

This zone has, to some commentators, become shorthand for the mistakes of property developers right at the end of the boom. And, in many ways, it is something of a wasteland (the half-built main street, is one notable example). However, in terms of transportation links to the city and beyond, Clongriffin is excellent. Recently, a DART station opened (see facile broadsheet colour piece here) at the east end of the development, and this serves commuters to the city well. A bus service, the 128, which runs through the city, terminating at Rathmines, runs every ten minutes during peak hours, and last night, when I jumped on one in Rathmines, the next bus was due only 20 minutes later.

The 128 bus

In addition, there are many good things about the place: the large park, located fairly centrally in the development, that locals run and cycle around; the decent positioning of the apartments in relation to the street, which resembles a small boulevard, or narrow dual carriageway. There’s no doubt that many residents like it here.

However, because of the comparatively low density, shops in the development are few and far between: there’s a small Centra shop, an off licence, and a chemists. Numerous commercial units stand unoccupied along street-level, and a large building near the DART station, which was to have been occupied by Superquinn, remains spookily empty. At night, no lights shine from within the building, and the image is disarming.

A view of the wasteland wetlands, with the Superquinn building beyond

 
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Posted in dublin, economy, ireland, recession, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

Tall stories

20 Jun

My review of Christian Salmon’s Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind is now online at 3:AM Magazine here.

 
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Posted in 3:AM Magazine, America, Politics, articles

 

A brief history of typewriters

17 Jun

When I was a small child, I remember typing on my mother’s electric typewriter. When the machine was at rest, the hum of the mechanism was obvious; when in use, the noise was loud and violent: the keys clacked away harshly, the typebars hammered against the paper on the black rubber platen, firmly imprinting the words on the page. Whenever I held down the shift key, the whole typewriter seemed to lurch dangerously.

Sometimes there wasn’t paper there at all, an oversight I was nearly always indifferent to. The typing was the thing. The sensation was all I sought. There was a dull thud as the metal typebar met the cylindrical platen, leaving oily traces of ink on the rubber.

My sense of reckless experiment didn’t only extend to the typewriter: at one stage I also noted how similar in appearance the turntable of my parents’ record player was to the potters’ wheel I had seen somewhere on television. I tried to find out if it could be used as one.

I was an impulsive child: with a messy combination of plasticine and water I had soon gummed up the whole mechanism at a speed of thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute.

The record player was destroyed, but the typewriter survived. Which, it seems is what typewriters do. The good ones could take about 20 years of robust use before they needed attention.

The writer Ian Frazier had bought one in the early seventies, but by 1994 the ‘e’ key on his typewriter had stopped working. After calling up a number of repairmen in New York, he found Martin Tytell, a typewriter man who worked out of an office on 116 Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan. Mr Tytell died on September 11th 2008, aged 94.

Martin Tytell

Fulton Street runs nearly all the way across Lower Manhattan; number 116 is a couple of blocks from the west end of the street, near the World Trade Centre site. Across from Tytell’s old offices is the green and gold awning of the Blarney Stone Grill, and on the wall just above the restaurant a yellow plastic sign reads ‘American Stamp MFG Company Inc’.

The other surrounding businesses include locksmiths, a shoe repair store and a discount jeweller. Some stores lie empty, and are up for rent. The street bears witness to a time not so long ago when things were repaired, not replaced.

There’s something about typewriters, something that evokes nostalgia in those who don’t use the machines anymore, and something that stirs an obsession in those who do. For both kinds of people, Tytell’s store was a treasure trove.

Underwood No. 5

For Tytell, the store was a testament to a lifetime spent working on typewriters. When he was a high school student, he had taken an Underwood No. 5 machine apart while answering phones in the school’s office. He took it apart again and again, but was unable to reassemble it; the typewriter had to be repaired each time. The repairman who fixed it eventually showed the young Tytell how to repair the machines, and soon Tytell went into business maintaining typewriters around New York City.

Tytell worked for the US military during the Second World War, adapting typewriters for use by paratroopers in France, adjusting the keyboard and fitting new typebars so that it was suited for the French language. The military also required Tytell to set up typewriters in a variety of other languages; the typewriters would enable airmen to communicate with locals in their own language by means of typed messages.

One assignment saw Tytell converting typewriters to 21 different Asian and South Pacific languages at short notice. Under severe pressure, Tytell mistakenly installed a letter on the Burmese typewriter the wrong way up. Years later, he learned that the upside-down letter had since become standard on Burmese keyboards.

Converting standard typewriters to foreign languages became a task he would perform at short notice for the stationery department of Macy’s department store. A customer, usually in town on business, would request a typewriter in a language such as Russian or Spanish. Macy’s promised they would supply the converted typewriter before the customer left town, and Tytell would quickly get to work.

Tytell’s masterful knowledge of typewriter mechanics had other uses. He was approached by the defence team of Alger Hiss, a suspected Communist spy who had been convicted of perjury in 1950. A key part of the prosecution’s case against Hiss had depended on typewritten copies of classified State Department documents that had purportedly been made by the defendant on his family’s Woodstock typewriter.

The prosecution’s case was built on the assumption that a typewriter’s print could not be reproduced, that it was unique, like a fingerprint. Tytell was employed to build a typewriter that would disprove this assumption. Over nearly two years, he assembled a machine that flawlessly reproduced the print of Hiss’s typewriter – proving that anybody could have typed the document – but his evidence was never used, and Hiss served 44 months of his five-year sentence.

Tytell retired in 2000, handing over operations to his son Peter. Within a year, the typewriter repair business had closed. ‘The last time someone brought in a typewriter for repair was February of last year,’ Peter Tytell confessed in April 2001.

However, the family business persists, albeit in a different form. Still working from the offices on Fulton Street, Peter Tytell is now in demand as an expert witness in legal cases through his work as a document forensic researcher. He specialises in handwriting analysis, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, typewriting identification.

 
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Posted in New York, articles, history

 
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