170 Nassau Street: “Vermin Castle.”

Here’s a thought that might keep you up at night: The real, live descendants of Archy the cockroach may be scurrying around the streets and alleyways and high-priced real estate of lower Manhattan at this very moment.

That’s right, Archy, the most famous insect in American literature, was based on a cockroach that once was very much alive. His home was in the newsroom of the old Evening Sun newspaper, but his real name was Erasmus, not Archy. Don Marquis revealed Archy’s origins and commented on his enduring appeal — and his frequent reincarnations — in an essay he wrote in 1934 for The Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper at Cornell University.

“Archy crawled into my life about twenty years ago, when I was doing a daily column on the New York Evening Sun,” Don wrote. “There was a story in the news columns about a garage up town somewhere that was haunted, . . . the type-writer in the garage office would keep clicking of nights, when no one was in there. So they thought it was a ghost, which is about what a lot of garage loafers would think. It didn’t occur to any of them to put a sheet of paper in the machine and give the ghost a chance to have his say. One night they found a mouse running back and forth on the keyboard; he was the ghost. 

“Why not (says I to myself) both a mouse and a ghost? A mouse inhabited by a ghost? A mouse into whose little carcass a ghost has insinuated its way? A case of transmigration? Some of the old Doc Pythagoras stuff? So I sat down and wrote what the mouse-ghost was trying to get across. Then I thought, No; a mouse isn’t good enough. Then I remembered a cock-roach I knew; a cock-roach named Erasmus, who lived behind the water cooler in the Sun news room. Erasmus was a very learned-looking cock-roach and used to crawl out from behind the cooler, when you went to take a drink of water, rear up on three or four of his hind legs, and look you over with an immense scorn, the scorn of a pundit, the scorn of a philosopher, and then back away again, leaving with you a sense of your own inferiority. But Erasmus wasn’t a good enough name for my cockroach; I made him Archy, which is a kind of peppy name, and yet ingenuous, somehow: easy to say and easy to remember.

“Archy soon developed a friendship with all the mice, rats, spiders, and other small deer, who hang around a big old building; and finally Mehitabel came along and joined the throng, ‘so many, and so many and so full of glee.’ (Class in English, look that quotation up. What! Great guns, that isn’t from Keats’ Endymion, is it? Read the whole poem and get your mind away from trash like Archy and Mehitabel.)

“The stuff caught on at once largely because of its typographical appearance. It has always been easy to do, because I never do it when I don’t feel like it. I never think when I do it, and I never plan it. There is some sort of queer vitality in it which I don’t understand myself. After I had been doing it nearly every day for a year, I got terribly tired of it, and killed Archy off; stepped on him and squashed him with the big flat foot of authority. I was surprised at the number of letters I got, after I announced his death, protesting. That showed me I had something which people wanted, for some queer reason, or for no reason, and I resurrected him. I killed him four or five times during the next ten years , but there was always a demand for his resurrection. This was easy enough to manage. All I had to do was have the soul of Archy  — the real Archy, the essential Archy — crawl into the body of another cockroach, and carry on, which he could do without missing a strophe. It was a great joke for five or six years, and one which the inspired jesters never seemed to weary of, to send me by mail dead Arches in little pill-boxes, — I get them from Maine, California, the Canal Zone, the Philippine Islands; from all over the infested world.”

*  *  *

Don barely changed any of the facts in his now-famous introduction to Archy, first published in his Sun Dial column on March 29, 1916, in The Evening Sun and reprinted in “archy and mehitabel” in 1927: 

“Dobbs Ferry possesses a rat which slips out of his lair at night and runs a typewriting machine in a garage. Unfortunately, he has always been interrupted by the watchman before he could produce a complete story. It was at first thought that the power which made the typewriter run was a ghost, in stead of a rat. It seems likely to us that it was both a ghost and a rat. . . . And since this matter has been reported in the public prints and seriously received we are no longer afraid of being ridiculed, and we do not mind making a statement of something that happened to our own typewriter only a couple of weeks ago.

“We came into our room earlier than usual in the morning and discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping about upon the keys. . . .”

*  *  *

The American Tract Society Building, left, and the former New York Times building.

There is one more story that deserves to be told. The building where Don created his Archy character still stands, at 150 Nassau Street, but the home of Erasmus is long gone. That site today is the northeast corner of Pace University’s administration building at 1 Pace Plaza, although the address is known in history books as 170 Nassau Street.

Located across Park Row from New York City Hall, at Frankfort Street, the five-story brick building at 170 Nassau once was the home of Tammany Hall, the powerful political machine ruled by the infamous Boss Tweed. It was built in 1811 and had been home to The Sun and Evening Sun since 1868. However, by 1912, when Don joined the Evening Sun staff, it was decrepit and crumbling. Don’s good friend Christopher Morley, writing in his 1918 book “Shandygaff,” called it “Vermin Castle,” and he identified it as Archy’s birthplace.

In fact, Archy was born a block away. In July 1915 the Sun newspapers moved from 170 to 150 Nassau, at the southeast corner of Spruce Street, in the former home of the American Tract Society, a publisher of religious books and pamphlets. Erasmus was presumably left behind, and the old Tammany Hall was demolished that fall. But Don carried the memory of old Erasmus with him to 150 Nassau where, less than a year later, he gave him new life as Archy.

280 Broadway: “It shines for all.”

Marquis and the Sun newspapers would move again, in 1919, across City Hall Park to 280 Broadway, formerly the home of the historic A.T. Stewart Dry Goods Store. The building is still identified by a four-sided clock and a two-sided thermometer attached to the front facade, both announcing The Sun’s storied motto: “It shines for all.” This is the building that E.B. White wrote about in his classic 1949 book “Here is New York”:

“I’ve been remembering what it felt like as a young man to live in the same town with giants. When I first arrived in New York my personal giants were a dozen or so columnists and critics and poets whose names appeared regularly in the papers. I burned with a low steady fever just because I was on the same island with Don Marquis, Heywood Broun, Christopher Morley, Franklin P. Adams, Robert C. Benchley, Frank Sullivan, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Ring Lardner and Stephen Vincent Benet. I would hang around the corner of Chambers Street and Broadway, thinking: ‘Somewhere in that building is the typewriter that archy the cockroach jumps on at night.’ “

Today, both 280 Broadway and the old American Tract Society Building are recognized as New York architectural landmarks. The former is a now a city government office building; the latter is a luxury condominium complex where, one presumes, its notoriety as the birthplace of a literate cockroach is not mentioned to prospective tenants.

Newspaper Row, circa 1915: City Hall and the Municipal Building are at left. A golden dome sits atop the World Building, later torn down to widen the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. To the right, the old Sun Building is dwarfed by the Tribune Tower, both now the site of 1 Pace Plaza, and the American Tract Society Building peeks out from behind the old Times Building.

Mark your calendars! Fans of Archy and Mehitabel are already making plans to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Archy’s first appearance in Don Marquis’ Sun Dial column in the New York Evening Sun. March 29, 2016 will be a cockroach centenary like no other, and we’d like to hear about your plans — in New York and around the world. (The 1927 classic “archy and mehitabel,” after all, was popular in Canada, England, India and Australia as well as the United States, and translated editions were published in German and Italian.)

Is your theater group planning a production of “archy & mehitabel”? Maybe your school, library or book club can host a poetry reading, or a poetry slam. Or host a showing of the 1971 animated feature “Shinbone Alley.” A group in New York hopes to sponsor public displays and performances, and we welcome your ideas and involvement. Check out the link at the top of this page, “archyFest!” for more, and use the Twitter hashtag #archyfest! to keep in touch!

When the reality TV show “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” first appeared, in 2007, Americans justifiably wondered who in the hell were these dysfunctional egotists and why did they deserve to be on television? They were simply “famous for being famous,” a strange concept that seemed to be a result of today’s celebrity culture. 

But there’s nothing new under the sun. Don Marquis was laughing at the same sort of people more than a century ago, as the following poem makes clear. It appeared in The Evening Sun on February 14, 1912, and is reprinted here for what is almost certainly the first time since then. This was Don’s first byline in The Evening Sun — barely a month after he joined the newspaper and a year before he started writing his Sun Dial column.

A SOCIAL STUDY
By Don Marquis
The Evening Sun, February 14, 1912

I.

Though Papa was worth twenty millions or more
We had never made much of a social uproar;

Though we paid a gent cash just to prove we were kin
To some prominent kings, yet we couldn’t butt in;

It wasn’t because Papa’s manners were bad,
For he didn’t have any, the darling old Dad;

Even ginks who grew up spading pie with a knife
Have got by with the help of a Wad and a wife.

It wasn’t because we were tight with the kale,
For we burnt it like Pittsburghers, bale upon bale;

 But nobody smelt it. And nobody stared.
And nobody wondered. And nobody cared.

Nobody got jealous. And nobody called.
By Hek! Can you wonder that Mamma was galled?

II.

But now we are in. The Climbers all hug us.
Newspaper photographers frequently mug us.

For Dad hired a press agent, Jonathan Hepp,
Who landed us space. But it cost us our rep.

He sent brother Jim on a joy-riding whirl
That slaughtered four cripples and one little girl;

And I robbed a bank and got pinched with the loot,
And Papa got served in an anti-trust suit.

“Thank heaven,” says Mamma, “some one is invited
“To something at last,” when Dad was indicted.

Sister Jane ran away with the chauffeur, and Mayme
Bought a title; a Duke was wrapped up with the same;

And Mamma she smuggled – determined and proud,
And bound to rise out of the crude, common crowd –

And she shoplifted some – triumphant and pale
But mostly she smuggled; and landed in jail.

And we’re here – though Mamma affirms that it drove her
Insane, we are in! We have jumped through and over.

And the reason we know we are in is because
Whenever we fracture a fresh set of laws

The papers all say “The family stands well;
They are awfully wealthy and socially swell.”

Don Marquis used his newspaper columns to poke fun at popular fads and conventions of the day. Reincarnation and free-verse poetry were skewered with every mention of Archy and Mehitabel, and Don’s Old Soak character owed its long and successful run to the nagging persistence of Prohibition. The era’s rich and powerful politicians and business leaders were targets, too, as evidenced by the following item from Don’s Sun Dial column, reprinted here for the first time since it appeared nearly a century ago.

LETTERS WE’D WRITE IF WE DARED TO
By Don Marquis
The Evening Sun, September 5, 1922

DEAR MR. ROCKEFELLER: Enclosed is a stamped, addressed envelope. Won’t you please tell me by return mail how to develop a golf game to the place where it will bring me a million dollars a week without working at anything else?

Thanking you in advance for this information, &c.

*  *  *

DEAR PRESIDENT HARDING: How in the world did writing editorials that read just like a marshmallow tastes ever get you so far ahead in politics? I have been writing bad editorials for many years, and all they ever got me was a raise in salary. What I want is the confidence of the people.

Eagerly waiting anything you may or may not say, I am, &c.

*  *  *

DEAR LORD ASTOR: I heard a lot of chauffeurs and footmen and things in a hash joint up near the Plaza Hotel discussing whether the Astor family is an English family with an American branch, or an American family with an English branch, and I would like to know the truth of this. If you don’t know, or don’t want to tell, of course, there is no harm done; I want to be tactful about the inquiry and make you feel at ease in saying anything you have to say.

I am, your Lordship, as Dr. Johnson would say, your Lordship’s most respectful, most humble and most obedient servant, &c.

*  *  *

DEAR MR. HEARST: Once, a good many years ago, I worked for you, although you couldn’t be expected to know about it, for the city editor found it out first, and told me to get to hell out of there. But there was a fellow working there that used to be a Congressman, the boys said, and you were being nice to him because he used to be a Congressman, and everything. Well, what I want to know is this: After this Mr. Hylan gets through being a Mayor, and everything, will you give him some kind of a job around one of your offices, with not much to do, and have everybody treat him kindly? Because, you know, he was a pretty good friend of yours when he was somebody. You ought to. Just between you and me, there wouldn’t be much to that man if his friends dropped him, and I’m kind of worried about his future.

I am, as ever, one of your most amused spectators, &c., &c.

*  *  *

DEAR DAVID LLOYD GEORGE: Still getting away with it, old cock? Heh! What?

Regarding you, as always, with a mixture of skepticism and admiration, I am, &c.

Many of Don Marquis’ funniest pieces have never been published in books. Unless they involved Archy, Mehitabel or the Old Soak, almost none of the sketches, poems and smart-aleck observations that made his newspaper columns so much fun were include in later compilations

The following poem is one of those forgotten gems. It’s from one of Don’s earliest columns in The Evening Sun – even before the column got its name, “The Sun Dial,” and before Don was given a byline. It has never been directly attributed to him until now.

Don was hired at The Evening Sun in January 1912 as a feature page editor, but he quickly moved to the editorial page. Besides writing full-length editorials he also contributed filler material, much of it in the form of single paragraphs under a standing headline, “Notes,” and then “Notes and Comment.”

By August 1912 “Notes and Comment” had been given a permanent home on the right side of the editorial page, and on Sept. 23, 1912, at the top of the column was a poem titled “The Spartan Oyster.” Its preposterous theme and clever wordplay identify the poem as Don’s handiwork, and it was precisely this sort of inspired lunacy that made his readers – and editors – stop and take notice. Don’s byline was added to the column on April 4, 1913, and it was renamed “The Sun Dial” three days later. The rest, as they say, is history.

THE SPARTAN OYSTER
By Don Marquis
The Evening Sun, September 23, 1912

Dr. Wiley says that the oyster cannot tell the pain it suffers when it is served on the half shell. – News Item.

– – –

The dogfish bark and whimper,
The Catfish mew and whine,
But the oyster suffers in silence
That man in peace may dine;
There are no roistering oysters,
They are Spartan from their birth;
There are no boisterous oysters,
Whether in grief or mirth!

The peanut screams in the roaster,
The popcorn bursts with a cry,
And the blood of the stabbed tomatoes
Flows red as they writhe and die;
And when the cloistered oysters
Are plucked from their quiet cells
Grief makes ’em moister oysters,
But never an oyster yells!

– – –

And indeed the whole clam family has a reputation for reticence.

Here’s a treat: a YouTube video of actor Sam Waterston reading, with great solemnity, one of Don Marquis’ craziest and most enjoyable poems, “archy interviews a pharaoh.”

The occasion was a May 14 gala in Manhattan to benefit the literary magazine Lapham’s Quarterly — the first of a series of “Decade Balls.” This one celebrated the 1920s and included readings of works by Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker and Don. 

Waterston’s selection was a poem that first appeared April 26, 1922, in Don’s Sun Dial in The Evening Sun and was later included in the 1927 book “archy and mehitabel.” Archaeological digs were making headlines at the time and so was Prohibition, making a perfect combination for satire.

Academics and social critics take note of Don Marquis for his wry commentary and biting satire, but many of us love his writing simply for its good fun. Take, for example, this brief exchange in one of Don’s Sun Dial columns:

ANTONY (To Cleopatra’s lady-in-waiting): Please tell your mistress I am here and would like to see her.
LADY-IN-WAITING: Not today, good sir.
ANTONY: Why not?
LADY-IN-WAITING: She’s in bed with tonsilitis.
ANTONY: Wait till I get hold of that dirty Greek!

Edward Anthony, author of the biography “O Rare Don Marquis,” said this gag got Don in hot water with his publisher, the renowned crank Frank Munsey, who thought it inappropriate for a family newspaper. Munsey never understood Don, and such opprobrium probably only inspired him to further bits of cheap and eminently enjoyable fun.

Don Marquis in Atlanta, circa 1903

Happy birthday Don Marquis!

July 29, 2011, is the 133rd anniversary of Don’s birth. He entered the world in Walnut, Illinois, the eighth and youngest child of Dr. James S. and Elizabeth (Whitmore) Marquis.

Growing up in “a little town with muddy streets” on the Illinois prairie, 100 miles west of Chicago, Don spent his childhood fishing when he could, tending the family garden when he had to, and reading every book he could get his hands on. He worked brief stints as a chicken plucker, canal digger, sewing machine salesman, schoolteacher and weekly newspaper editor (and printer) before moving to Washington, D.C., in 1900 to take a job with the Census Bureau. He drifted into big-city newspaper work as a part-time reporter for the Washington Times.

After an exceptionally brief editing job at the Philadelphia North American — it’s unclear whether he was fired or just supremely unhappy — Don moved to Atlanta in 1902 to take a job at the Atlanta News and then the Atlanta Journal as editorial writer.

Don was a popular newspaperman in Atlanta, and his carousings with sportswriter Grantland Rice and columnist Frank L. Stanton were literally the stuff of legends (more on that another day). In 1907 he was recruited by Joel Chandler Harris to join a new publishing venture, Uncle Remus’s Magazine, as associate editor, and his star never stopped rising. But there’s another reason why Don always talked fondly of Atlanta: That’s where he met and married Reina Melcher, a freelance writer at Uncle Remus’s. She was the great love of his life.

Don and Reina moved to New York City in 1909 without a job but with plenty of enthusiasm, and in 1912 — after more than a year at the Brooklyn Eagle and his first book, “Danny’s Own Story,” getting strong reviews — he joined The Evening Sun, where his daily column, The Sun dial, debuted a year later to instant acclaim. Archy the cockroach made his first appearance in print on March 29, 1916, and the rest, as they say, is history. Happy birthday Don!