Mike Wallace, Gotham’s Chronicler
Historian Mike Wallace, author of the Gotham trilogy of New York City history and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tried to capture everything about New York and the world through a droll, cheerful, humanistic Marxism.
The late historian Mike Wallace’s Gotham project set out to deliver history as something alive, something we are all a part of, something that can be acted on, something that we can change. (Anonymous / CC BY-SA 4.0)
Mike Wallace once handed me a matchbook, the kind of paper trinket that served like ticker-tape as a currency of the twentieth-century city: given out at corner stores and newsstands, boxing matches and cafeterias, free-flowing from cigarette and candy booths on subway platforms.
These flammable paper memes were often used for advertising: “Get yer alterations hemmed right here!” “Smoke Nat Shermans.” “Join the Army!” “Have a refreshing PAPAYA drink and a frank.” You could strike a match on an electioneering pitch or on a slogan: “Vote Jimmy Walker and good old Tammany!” “Boycott the Nazis and German goods.” “Look for the union label!” “Don’t buy where you can’t work!” You might strike your match on the matchbook from the nightclub you went to last Saturday night, or get a light walking home from the train at the end of the day, tired but relieved, as the next shift jammed the streets and the subway. Even the commanding heights had their own matchboxes and matchbooks, monogrammed like: Paul D. Cravath, Partner: Cravath, Swaine & Moore, ACQUISITIONS & TRUSTS.
Mike’s matchbook — all caps in an emphatic mid-century corporate-recruiting Helvetica, embossed on a cardboard square flint the hue of a big yellow taxi — said:
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