Joseph Torch Logo

The logo of the art store around the corner from where we lived on 7th Avenue. Torch on 14th street was a tiny place loaded from floor to ceiling with art supplies. Torch, an independant owner loved artists and talking to them about what they were doing and knew all about art supplies and how to get rare items.

He is probably long forgotten....but I'm saluting him here in behalf of all the artists of that period who were his customers.

7th Avenue Apartment

My version and Jack's of 7th avenue and 14th street.

My next school move was PS41, the old one, on Greenwich Avenue between 10th and 11th Streets and the next apartment move was from Waverly Place to 7th Avenue, between 14th and 15th Streets. This is the one apartment that no longer exists. It is now one of those huge apartment complexes, taking up the whole block, probably condos by now.

Across the Street was a hotel. Around the corner on 14th Street was the art store my parents used for years, Joseph Torch and a restaurant where you could take out dinner on a paper plate, with another plate on top.

My girl friend Greta lived upstairs and we would walk to school together going through the underpass on 14th Street, the biggest Street we had to cross. Greta’s parents also bought the Sunday Journal American that had all the comic strips. Of course my parents wouldn’t have that ‘rag’ in the house…only The New York Times for them. No strips, and my dad was a cartoonist? Uncle Don used to read the comics on Sunday mornings, so I’d go up to Greta’s to listen and follow along. One year they had a newspaper strike and Mayor LaGuardia read the strips to us with passion.

Greta’s father had a woodshop on 15th Street and I think that shop started my love of wood and wood chips…I can still smell the sawdust. We also had a deli on 15th Street. Barneys near 17th Street and Street and Smith publishing where my mother inked comic books freelance for a while.

Now for the apartment. I don’t remember it at all, or Greta’s. How can that be? I remember everything surrounding it. I think my father had a studio in the apartment, he usually did. My mother was unhappy about her art arrangements. As usual she was shunted off, this time to the bathroom. The bathroom was pretty large and had North light, but still.

Another Christmas Card by Jack

Christmas Cards by Jack

I have a box of sold and unsold greeting cards by Jack. This is one of my favorites I call "Christmas Shopping" Though it was done years ago, it could be Christmas 2010 without the cell phones.

Margaret-Unfinished Self Portrait

Margarets Sketch Book-World War II

Sort of grim, but I liked the drawings. She sketched all the time.

Margaret's sketch book-Kisses

The Little Red Schoolhouse and Waverly Place

I read on another’s blog that the tuition a year in 1938 was $125.00 a year, and now it is around $24,000. WOW!

Well, my parents scrapped up the $125. and I went to this progressive private school for two years…what they called the sixes and sevens (1st and 2nd grade) The funny thing is that I remember so much about it.

We sang a lot of folk songs every day, complete with a teacher playing the guitar.. Our lunch was served in a basement a few blocks away and we had to walk hand and hand. My partner was often Spike, who had one fingernail, grown long, that he used to grind into the palm of my hand.

We did a wonderful program on the Dutch in Old New York. We pretended to live there and even made candles and soap.

I met Mickey and Lauren Tucker there and knew them for years after. Once Mickey hit me in the hand with a belt, and I still have the scar amid the wrinkles. Boys were already giving me a hard time. Mickey made up for it years later when he came to see me after my sister died and had a long comforting talk with me..

I was still going over to Greenwich House afternoons and doing pottery, art and participating in their theatrical productions at Christmas.

While we were living in our second apartment in Waverly Place my mother’s cousin Traff came to visit and brought me a pretty silk dress. Traff was the scandel of the family. He was in the Navy, and had left a wife and son in New Jersey. While in China he had met a nurse, Jane (I remember her name because I thought it was so romantic) divorced his wife and married her. After that his name was only mentioned with scorn, except for his sister, Emily and my mother. He was her favorite cousin. Oh, yes. He was really good looking in a rugged way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Red_School_House

The Dreaded Arrival of My Little Sister

Susan Emily Markow 1938-1951

When I was Six years old I was told a little bundle of joy was soon to be added to the family. I, the spoiled, talented princess, sole owner of my parents, was to be replaced.

In the olden days, mommys were shipped off to the hospital for 10 days...a nice rest after giving birth. While my mother was gone, it was decided I would spend one week with Jack's family and one week with Margaret's family. I was totally miserable.

At Jack's family, my Aunt Sylvia, thought I looked too much like a waif and had my hair permed. I hated it. The only highlight of that was week was seeing Shirley Temple in "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm"

The week with the Traffords went no better. I drew pictures all over my Aunt Gillete's living room wall. She yelled at me "I don't know what they do in the big city, but we do not deface walls here". Obviously I was not meant to be outside the art community.

I finally went home. We lived in an awful place on Waverly Place, next to a Catholic girls school, and across the street, which was later to become a favorite watering hole, Julius' Tavern.
.....and there she was, my little sister.

Later we moved nearby to a much larger apartment, and she was still with us. I remember walking into the place one day and all I saw was Susan in her play pen, with a little blue knitted sweater on. During this time I put on my snow suit over my pajamas and ran away to the corner and begged passer bys for a nickel for an ice cream cone. Somebody did give me a nickel after I told him that I was a poor neglected child. (He must have been amused by that) As I was licking my icecream cone, my father came storming out of the house, none too pleased with me. By this time I didn't want the cone and was in tears. My parents very coldly said that I should eat the whole thing...since I had gone to so much trouble to get it. Boo-Hoo!

Of course I learned to love my sister (even though I used to scare her, once in a while) She was a very calm, even tempered person, and she adored her older sister (that always helps) She died when she was only thirteen years old, and I've missed her ever since.

Janet Drawing

Greenwich House

Settlement House:
Neighborhood institution generally in an urban slum area, where trained workers endeavor to improve social conditions, particularly by providing community services and neighborly cooperation.

I don’t know if you would consider Greenwich Village an urban slum area, even then. But it was a lot cheaper to live there than it is now.
The first school I ever went to was Greenwich House (a settlement house) at Barrow Street and 7th Avenue. I attended Nursery and Kindergarten there

You went through the double doors and up some steps, I think. There was a gated area on the right with desks for the staff and some benches. Opposite the front door was the entrance to the theater. I think a teacher came down and collected her charges.
This was the depression, around 1936, so on arrival every day we got a dose of cod liver oil, orange juice and a piece of French bread with a smear of peanut butter.
I don’t remember what we did all day, or half a day. But I do remember naptime on pads with a blanket and the roof playground. I also remember improvisation where we all danced around in little green tunics, led by a teacher with wild black hair tied back with a scarf. Remember it was the days of Isadora.
Since I was very thin, it was decided that I have “Sun baths” now and then. All this was done right there at Greenwich House. I think my mother did a wall border for one of the rooms. I remember a parade of animals near the ceiling.

The worst day I ever had there was my brave day. I must have been around four or five. I told my mother that she could leave me at the door and I’d walk in alone. I panicked just inside the door and ran out, just in time to see my mother’s bus going up 7th avenue.
I was in tears when I got into the building, but the worst was yet to come. They mixed me up with a child that had a doctors appointment that morning and by the time my mother got back I was hysterical. It’s amazing that young as you are, you remember things like that.

Every Christmas we had a pageant in the theater directed by Mrs. Murphy. She would yell and push us around, but I guess we were pretty good. I remember one play we did for a number of years “A Star Has Fallen” I started out as a little angel polishing the stars and graduated to one of the crowd.

The theater was also used by Equity players and I was the daughter Mary in a production of O’Neill’s “Beyond the Horizon” I was given a teddy bear by the cast and I died by the second act. I found the script for my part a while ago and it was all “Yes, daddy” and “No, mommy.”

All this was looked over by Mrs. Simkovitch, who would walk around saying hello to all of us. http://greenwichhouse.org/about-us/history
A wonderful place that launched us all.

Jack's WPA card

Jack claims this was the only time he got a steady paycheck for his art work. Because of the artist's section of the WPA, murals were painted in public places and all sorts of prints were distributed to museums and libraries. Enriching America/

Abandoned Carousel

One of Jack's lithographs done for the WPA (1930's):

Margaret and Piano

This piano went with us from apartment to apartment. I still have the lamp...I'm looking at it right now.

This lithograph doesn't look like Jack or Margaret's work. I would guess it's an early Jack?

Margaret's Stove

I think this painting was done at my grandparent's house, where we spent most of our summers. There was a stove like this in the attic....or it could be from the many rented vacation houses. Wish they had put more information on their sketches and paintings.

Well, where ever it was, its a pretty neat picture.

Walking through Greenwich Village

I have been having such fun walking through my old neighborhood thanks to Google Map. Trying to find old haunts and came across 202 West 14th Street. It looks the same. The Mexican store was on street level and there was some sort of place above it...maybe a perfume distributor? I'm not sure which floor we lived on. Later we moved to a smaller apartment in Waverly Place, but Jack kept the front room of 202 for a studio and rented out the back.

202 West 14th Street

The first apartment I remember was on 14th Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues, in New York City. I had started out life in Sunnyside, Queens, where my parents thought it would be a better place to bring up a child. The day they moved in a child was hit by a car in front of the building, so then it was off to Red Bank, NJ for a while. I don’t remember either place. We moved a lot. In those days you would get a free month’s rent and a paint job when you moved in. I think my mother got restless and liked a change of scenery. Whereever we lived the piano went with us. Was it a baby grand? I’m not sure, but it wasn’t an upright.

I remember bits of 14th Street. The kitchen and bath were between two big rooms. There may have been a couple of side rooms(?) My father worked in the front. I don’t know where my mother did her art. I never remember her sitting down in any specific place and drawing anything, just like I can’t remember where in all the apartments and summer places my parents slept. Hmm, that’s interesting. I once asked my father years later why my mother never seemed to have an outside studio or a special place to do her work, while he always did. His answer was that he made more money than she did. What kind of chauvinistic statement is that?

Down on the ground floor of the building was a Mexican shop that sold my summer shoes, small espidrilles, canvas with lace up fronts and down the street was a cafeteria, where we ate a lot. My mother hated cooking, I think., she did as little of it as possible, though she did go to nutrition lectures.. You would go into the cafeteria and pull out a ticket from a machine and when you got your food the ticket would be punched and you would pay as you went out.

The apartment on 14th Street is where the tickle dream started. I’d be sitting on the couch and some ghost person would come in and tickle me in the ribs…I was terrified. Ha-Ha!

Portrait of a Very Young Janet

I was about three or four when Margaret painted my portrait. This is just a segment of it.

Flying Jack

Found this picture the other day, but I don't know too much about it. My father did mention once that he had flown somewhere in an airplane, where they had to stop for fuel several times. The time must be the late twenties or early thirties. My father is the guy with the Hitler moustache, holding hat in front of plane door.

Jack and Margaret on 14th St. 1930's

Margaret's Sketch Book

Back Yard-New York City

Margaret-Spot Drawing

Both my parents would occasionally sell a spot drawing to a magazine. The New Yorker used to buy a lot of them from outside artists and though they still are used at the end of articles, they are mainly by the inner circle of artists there.

My mother tried for years to sell them a cover painting with no success...so I have some wonderful paintings with rather blank tops, where the logo would have been.

Tree Study-Margaret (1930's)

Jack's lithographs 1930's-WPA

Margaret's Sketch Book 1930's/1940's

Margaret's Sketch Books-1930's/1940's

More me from Jack's sketchbook

More Me

Young Me

I was born at The Women's Infirmary in New York City. My mother liked that hospital because it had women doctors and a women's medical school. I didn't know much about the place until recently when I looked it up. I guess women doctors were still not excepted at most hospitals in the 1930's. The hospital started on the Lower East Side, moved to Styvesant Square (around East 15th St.)where I was born, and then went through a lot of changes to wind up as Downtown Hospital serving in lower Manhattan, where it is today. Here is a link on the founder http://www.winningthevote.org/EBlackwell.html and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Downtown_Hospital

Some sketches of me by my father