September 9th, 2009
Park Row 1952
>A Labor Day treat for me was an hour and a half spent watching “Park Row” on the Turner Classic Station with my mom. At age 12, film director Samuel Fuller got his first job as a copyboy on the New York Journal. At 17, he was a crime reporter for the San Diego Sun. Park Row (1952) was the movie that really expressed his great affection and respect for the newspaper business. In re-creating every detail of the street in Lower Manhattan where he worked as a kid, a turbulent neighborhood between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Bowery, Fuller created a historically rich tribute to the New York City of the late 19th century. The film included a sub-story about the invention of the Linotype machine. I couldn’t find a Linotype keyboard to photograph, so I went with the keyboard from an old manual typewriter I saw in a downtown antique shop.