A Blog of Personal Thoughts
The Quaker Penington, Part 1
July 2024
In May I returned to New York City for my 65th prep school (high school) reunion at Friends Seminary. I posted about that June 1. This is the first of two posts about a very special week at the Quaker Penington, now a residence house, called a hotel in 1948-1949 when I lived there. Visiting there 73 years later, I have a sense of Alice going down the Rabbit Hole into Penington history. Not only did I go there in my thoughts but with my emotions as well.
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The front steps of The Penington |
I walked up the front steps with the legs of a seven-year-old and those of an 82-year-old. I was home. How seldom we can walk into a building of seventy-some years ago where we lived and where so little has changed. It’s such an elegant building inside. Some of the furniture in the long living room, double parlors in the nineteenth century private home when it was built, is the same as when I lived there. The newer furniture blends in well. The oriental carpets are the same; they never wear out. The stairways are still elegant, long, and slightly curved at the top. There are no landings, just many stairs from the first floor to the second, the second to the third, the third to the fourth. There are fewer from the ground floor that houses the kitchen and dining room.
When I lived there, I was seven. My room was on the third floor in the back. I felt quite mature living so far from my parents. Not only did I have my own room in this small Quaker hotel, but I had my own closet with a rack for clothes and a sink. My bedroom in Massachusetts didn’t have its own sink. Each morning and night I brushed my teeth with my red and white striped wintergreen-flavored Ipana toothpaste. My mother came every evening to supervise and tuck me in. A set of two bookshelves fastened to the wall above the head of the bed. A book was always at the ready for me to read when she left. I don’t know how long I read, perhaps a chapter, before inserting the bookmark and turning out the light.
The 3rd Ave El created the terror of my nights. All night long the trains roared by half a block away. They woke me often. Sometimes the train sounded like it was about to come through my room. Even years later, I had nightmares about these trains. That remains the only negative part of living in The Penington.
I had many fun aspects of living there. Penny Penington the cat. My English friend Winifred. The cooks. Threading needles and learning to cross stitch from the old ladies who lived there. Going on the balcony to touch the meetinghouse one inch away. Going to my parents’ room every morning before breakfast.
My mother didn’t like cats. Therefore, I didn’t either, until I met the grey kitten, Penny. The kitchen had acquired her to control the mice. This kitten, not much bigger than a mouse or my hand, had some growing to do before he could become a good mouser. Meanwhile, those months gave me time to have a pet. Penny made learning to like cats easy since he needed a playmate too. I couldn’t take him out of the kitchen, so the kitchen and basement became our territory. The basement was dark and scary, full of nooks and crannies, but also a place where Penny went and I could go search for him.
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A 2024 look of the basement, much brighter and cleaned up than in 1948-49. |
I cuddled him. I carried him around. I even crawled under the huge gas range when he wouldn’t come out from the warm spot in the back. I told Anna, the main cook, when I headed under the stove and when I’d crawl out. I didn’t want her to trip over me when stirring dinner or carrying a huge pot of hot food. If that happened, Anna would get hurt, I’d have hot food all over me, and we’d both get in trouble.
I retrieved Penny with one hand. Once out, I exclaimed, “Look, Anna! He’s covered with dust kittens!” I enjoyed my pun, something I’d learned from my father, but Anna nor Penny seemed impressed. I cleaned Penny off and cuddled him. I don’t remember playing with him with yarn or any toys, but the cuddling definitely had its mutual rewards.
When I sat in the dining room in May, I half expected to see Penny saunter in, something he never did in his 10 years there. That didn’t matter. I still saw my 25-pound, yard-long, short-haired, grey tomcat forever own the ground floor and basement of the building.
My parents and I moved to Maine for three years before returning to New York to live in Greenwich Village. At the time there was no “East Village.” Union Square and on down remained the northern part of the Bowery. Two years after moving back to the city, I walked over to the Penington to visit Anna and Penny. I was now 12 and Penny five. Anna told me no one had touched him since I left and he’d never let me near him. Sadly, I accepted that. I sat in a chair by the table against the wall opposite the stove, a wall now modernized with cabinets.
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A modernized kitchen. The table where I sat with Penny in my lap is now where the counter and freezer are. A new stove sits where the old range did. |
Up from the basement and around the corner came this powerhouse of a cat. He ruled the alleys and his ears showed a brawl or ten. I looked at him, but he didn’t pause for a glance. He leapt into my lap, curled and purred. I petted, petted, and petted him. Within minutes I was covered with gray hair and my nose itched from all his hair flying around. He wasn’t going to move and I wasn’t about to move him. We were happy.
Anna told me not to worry about the hair wafting above and on me, the table, the air. She said his hair flew so because no one had touched him in the years since I’d been gone. He wouldn’t let anyone else get close to him. She had even told me, “Oh honey, you’ll never touch him. No one has since you left.” I realized then I was probably the only person in his life who ever touched him. He stole my heart and to this day I like cats. Penny Penington, my best friend, when I was seven-years-old.
Every morning when I woke up, I dressed, brushed my teeth and walked to my parents’ room at the front of the hotel on the second floor. They had a mahogany bureau with a mirror above it between the two windows that looked out on 15th Street. That was important because my father and I stood there while every morning I tied his tie in its Windsor knot. Their twin beds, a couple of comfortable chairs, an once-functional fireplace and mantle, and a nice carpet completed the décor. After breakfast when I left for school, they left for work. My mother worked at Lord & Taylor’s and my father at 500 Fifth Avenue.
I came home before they did. I spent my afternoons with Penny, Anna, Sadie (the retiring cook) and her husband Alfred, in the kitchen, or going to various rooms to thread needles for the old ladies who didn’t see well, or in good weather I went on the balcony to touch the meetinghouse, which was one inch away. As a seven-year-old, I fetched my ruler to measure it precisely.
My other spot for afternoon visits took me to my friend who lived on the fourth floor in the room directly above mine. Winifred was from England. All adults seemed the same age—old, but Winifred was probably 25. She was English and had been injured in a bombing in Bristol during the war. A nurse herself, she had come to the States for medical treatment. Her fiancé and two of her three brothers were killed in the war. Having been presented to the King at a debutante ball, she taught me the formal curtsey to the king. At age seven, I was very impressed with learning this. This friendship developed into a livelong one with both my mother and me. Come the future, I visited Winifred a lot, three weeks when I lived in England at age 15, many back-and-forth visits when my mother and I lived in Scotland in the 1960s, and another long visit in 1985. She also stayed with us in Maine and in our Massachusetts home helping my mother make the draperies for the Maine apartment and Massachusetts house. I still have and use those draperies. They haven’t faded one bit. Even when I was a child, Winifred always had great faith in my writing prose but especially poetry. Thank you, Winifred. You were one other part of The Penington that helped shape my life.
Anna and I exchanged letters when she retired to Baltimore and I lived in Colorado. Winifred had a lifelong friendship with my mother and with me. I had a lifelong friendship with Penny. I also have a lifelong relationship with The Penington.
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