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Le Fond du port
Dedalus du Lower East Side, Joseph Mitchell a su peindre les rues du vieux Manhattan comme retranscrire la drôlerie désespérée de sublimes anonymes bringuebalant l’Histoire dont ils sont les héritiers. Chacun de ses caractères entonne tour à tour son aria : le patron d’un restaurant, le marin-pêcheur, l’ostréiculteur, le prêcheur composent l’oratorio d’une cité en perpétuel mouvement. La déambulation hasardeuse de l’arpenteur urbain est à l’image de ses digressions fulgurantes : imbriquées les unes dans les autres comme les blocks aux quartiers. Quand en 1960 paraît Le Fond du port, Joseph Mitchell a cinquante et un ans. Soutier du journalisme, il est devenu un auteur littéraire à part entière. L’attention au détail, le sens de la construction, la minutie obsessionnelle, il avait élevé le reportage au rang d’art et mêlé fiction et réalité avec une maestria inégalée. Inoubliable volume, Le Fond du port, tient autant de la chronique d’un temps révolu que de la collection littéraire, au sens d’un inventaire cabossé par la poésie des rues et des noms, Fulton Street, Louie Morino, M. Hunter comme autant de notes d’un blues du macadam.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1959
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About the author
Joseph Mitchell
146 books188 followersThere is more than one author with this name
Joseph Mitchell was an American writer who wrote for The New Yorker. He is known for his carefully written portraits of eccentrics and people on the fringes of society, especially in and around New York City.
-Wikipedia
Joseph Mitchell was an American writer who wrote for The New Yorker. He is known for his carefully written portraits of eccentrics and people on the fringes of society, especially in and around New York City.
-Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
April 2, 2017
The inimitable Mr. Joe Mitchell gives voice to people who have never been listened to, and in so doing reaches the pulse of the city, explores lives that are so common yet unforgettable, and leaves a lasting record of a bygone way of life. Mr Hunter's grave, for example, has become a legendary place for Mitchell aficionados - and it would not be pompous for me to say that should I get a chance to visit the United States, I would love to stuff a wild-flower book and some sandwiches in my pockets and visit the site so lovingly described by him! He affirms the fact that every life is interesting. You just need to learn to listen.
In an arresting piece published in the New Yorker, titled Joe Mitchell's Secret, Mark Singer (himself a Mitchell fan), tries to profile the great profiler and comes up with beautiful observations, like this one: "Without playing dumb, he had the country fellow's deadly ability to sniff out pretentiousness three avenues away. And he possessed extraordinary courtesy and patience as a listener, an aptitude nurtured during a childhood spent among folk who never tired of telling stories about themselves." Not a bad aptitude to cultivate should one chooses to be a writer!
His reward was that, Singer informs us, to the end of his life, people wanted to talk to him. Mitchell was ever so curious to render the contents and the cadences of the "variegated New York vernacular". Like Joyce's Dublin, Mitchell's New York is a very curious place, found only in the pages of his books, and it must have inspired many to seek their own New York, or any city for that matter.
He mysteriously stopped writing in early 60s, and never published anything till his death, and that's thirty years of silence. Funny thing is that he would visit the New Yorker office regularly, and file the jottings he had made on loose papers. Colleagues thought he was working on a big fat piece, but it never came out. How he spent those thirty years? By meeting more people, by taking initiatives to preserve old buildings, by being member of various organizations..."When he came upon an old building in early stages of demolition, he would wander inside - a natty gent in a well-pressed business suit, usually carrying a shopping bag - and drag out whatever he could carry that looked interesting: bricks, shards of marble cornices, elevator pulleys". He was a hoarder of old hotel spoons, brass hinges, and other odd treasures, and had innumerable glass jars filled with them. "As long as he stayed attached to these relics, it meant that he hadn't stopped trying".
There are speculations that he was working on a personal piece, a grand memoir of the city, a life work, and one can only imagine how it would have turned out. When I read this book with that knowledge in my mind, a quiet remark from "Mr Hunter's Grave" (an extraordinary piece) gave me some idea of the work in progress, or I only think so:
"For some reason I don't know and don't want to know, after I have spent an hour or so in these cemeteries, looking at gravestone designs and reading inscriptions and identifying wild flowers and scaring rabbits out of the weeds and reflecting on the end that awaits me and awaits us all, my spirits lift, I become quite cheerful, and then I go for a long walk."
In an arresting piece published in the New Yorker, titled Joe Mitchell's Secret, Mark Singer (himself a Mitchell fan), tries to profile the great profiler and comes up with beautiful observations, like this one: "Without playing dumb, he had the country fellow's deadly ability to sniff out pretentiousness three avenues away. And he possessed extraordinary courtesy and patience as a listener, an aptitude nurtured during a childhood spent among folk who never tired of telling stories about themselves." Not a bad aptitude to cultivate should one chooses to be a writer!
His reward was that, Singer informs us, to the end of his life, people wanted to talk to him. Mitchell was ever so curious to render the contents and the cadences of the "variegated New York vernacular". Like Joyce's Dublin, Mitchell's New York is a very curious place, found only in the pages of his books, and it must have inspired many to seek their own New York, or any city for that matter.
He mysteriously stopped writing in early 60s, and never published anything till his death, and that's thirty years of silence. Funny thing is that he would visit the New Yorker office regularly, and file the jottings he had made on loose papers. Colleagues thought he was working on a big fat piece, but it never came out. How he spent those thirty years? By meeting more people, by taking initiatives to preserve old buildings, by being member of various organizations..."When he came upon an old building in early stages of demolition, he would wander inside - a natty gent in a well-pressed business suit, usually carrying a shopping bag - and drag out whatever he could carry that looked interesting: bricks, shards of marble cornices, elevator pulleys". He was a hoarder of old hotel spoons, brass hinges, and other odd treasures, and had innumerable glass jars filled with them. "As long as he stayed attached to these relics, it meant that he hadn't stopped trying".
There are speculations that he was working on a personal piece, a grand memoir of the city, a life work, and one can only imagine how it would have turned out. When I read this book with that knowledge in my mind, a quiet remark from "Mr Hunter's Grave" (an extraordinary piece) gave me some idea of the work in progress, or I only think so:
"For some reason I don't know and don't want to know, after I have spent an hour or so in these cemeteries, looking at gravestone designs and reading inscriptions and identifying wild flowers and scaring rabbits out of the weeds and reflecting on the end that awaits me and awaits us all, my spirits lift, I become quite cheerful, and then I go for a long walk."
October 13, 2012
This is one of North Carolinian Joseph Mitchell's love letters to the people and places of a New York that has now disappeared. In "The Bottom of the Harbor", Mitchell takes up the waters around New York, and the people and animals who lived in and around it. The book hits its stride midway through -- "Up in the Old Hotel" can be found elsewhere, and, while Mitchell's take on rats has his usual melodious accumulation of unending detail, it is when Mitchell found a natural storyteller that he was at his best. The moment where the book takes off is when Mitchell meets the caretaker of a cemetery in a little-known community of black oystermen on South Staten Island--in a place that has no doubt been paved by now. Mitchell had perhaps the best ear of any American journalist. Here is Mr. Brown, who the caretaker, Mr. Hunter, meets on the way to the cemetery: "I stay to myself. I was never one to go to people's houses. They talk and talk, and you listen, you bound to listen, and half of it ain't true, and the next time they tell it, they say you said it." Mr. Hunter is followed by Ellery Thompson, part-time bugler, painter, amateur oceanographer, fishing boat captain and full time character. The end of that piece, stories of the old community on isolated Block Island that lived off wrecks (and allegedly caused some), is worth the price of the book. "The Bottom of the Harbor" ends with a piece on the small municipality of Edgewater, which lies on the Hudson River on the New Jersey side below the Palisades, and the philosophical exchange between men who make their living off the water. The fact that Mitchell suffered a legendary writer's block from the sixties onward is attributed by some by his work with Joe Gould, the streetcorner philosopher who spoke at such length of his imaginary book. I wonder if it was not more because the New York that Mitchell loved, the place he came to inhabit during the Depression and chronicled with such apparent ease (no doubt after endless listening sessions), was disappearing, and his faith in his talent and the kind of journalism he taught himself to master, was going with it.
August 24, 2009
A classic New York book. Mitchell has an amazing knack for describing the people and places along the old waterfront-- whether he's writing about the old Fulton Fish Market or the specifics of fishing in the lower harbor, you can see every detail like it was right there in front of you. Most of these essays come from the late 40s and very early 50s, when the death of the waterfront from pollution and gentrification was just a few years away. This feeling of an age coming to an end permeates the book, and gives it a deep, soulful melancholy that's hard to shake after you finish reading.
December 18, 2021
I've read this book more than once, probably 3or 4 times. The first time was back in the late 70's. I always enjoy the way Joseph tells a story. When he is finished, you know the area, you know the people and you understand the ways they work. He retells great stories that have been told to him by the characters in them. He is a great historian.
i-get-the-picture
September 6, 2018What an astonishing writer! A writer’s writer, as they say.
February 22, 2016
These unhurried stories hardly seem like writing. It's as if Mitchell is a friend who is filling you in about something from the past without really trying to make a point. He seems to be just chatting to fill the time but I found myself enjoying the leisurely tempo. There is space in the narrative add your own internal images of the people and places so that you feel as though they are now your memories too.
October 3, 2007
love much of mitchells' writing. histories of new york waterways, ocean floors, harbors, abandoned seaport buildings, etc. throughout i wished i could have lived similar experiences first hand, but also nice to get an older local perspective from a new york journalist that liked to wander. however, a couple of the essays drag enough to make you look up how many pages you have yet to go...
November 20, 2007
It's ok. The first piece, about a hotel that time forgot, rises to a good story. And the piece about super sized harbor rats is creepily entertaining. There is something to be said for Mitchell capturing a disappeared bayfront culture. But the rest bogged down in the snooze-inducing detail of overly long New Yorker non-fiction: everything you wanted to know about clams.
July 7, 2018
This book was one of many that came from the library of a friend who passed away. I don't know why it caught my eye, but it looked intriguing. The dust jacket promused a look at New York City and its harbor as it used to be and a chance to enjoy really good writing. It definitely delivered. I found it an enjoyable read, with captivating prose, even though I don't know that I would have cared about the subject matter one way or another if I ran across it somewhere else. It was in many ways a soothing escape. Even the piece about rats.
I think my favorite entry was Mr. Hunter's Grave, although Dragger Captain was also quite good. I don't know enough about New York City to know for sure that all of these pockets of life are long gone, but I think they must be. The stories feel timeless in some ways, but very ancient in others, and evoke the idea of a simpler time and way of life in one of the most complicated places on earth.
I think my favorite entry was Mr. Hunter's Grave, although Dragger Captain was also quite good. I don't know enough about New York City to know for sure that all of these pockets of life are long gone, but I think they must be. The stories feel timeless in some ways, but very ancient in others, and evoke the idea of a simpler time and way of life in one of the most complicated places on earth.
November 18, 2024
The Bottom of the Harbor by Joseph Mitchell is a collection of essays that paints a vivid portrait of New York City’s waterfront and its people during the mid-20th century. Through detailed and lyrical prose, Mitchell captures the sights, sounds, and stories of the harbor, from fishermen and oystermen to longshoremen and the changing urban landscape. The essays evoke a sense of nostalgia for a bygone era, offering a rich glimpse into the lives of the people who worked and thrived by the water.
The Bottom of the Harbor transported me to a time and place we can’t travel back to, but Joseph Mitchell’s writing made the experience feel real and tangible. His visual and beautiful descriptions of the harbor brought the past to life, allowing me to see the beauty and the grit of the waterfront. It was a captivating read that made me appreciate the harbor’s history and the stories of the people who lived there.
The Bottom of the Harbor transported me to a time and place we can’t travel back to, but Joseph Mitchell’s writing made the experience feel real and tangible. His visual and beautiful descriptions of the harbor brought the past to life, allowing me to see the beauty and the grit of the waterfront. It was a captivating read that made me appreciate the harbor’s history and the stories of the people who lived there.
May 14, 2025
“ In St Luke's cemetery there is a huge old apple tree that drops a sprinkling of small, wormy, lopsided apples on the graves beneath it every September, and in the Woodrow Methodist cemetery there is a patch of wild strawberries.
Invariably, for some reason I don't know and don't want to know, after I have spent an hour or so in one of these cemeteries, looking at gravestone designs and reading inscriptions and identifying wild flowers and scaring rabbits out of the weeds and reflecting on the end that awaits me and awaits us all, my spirits lift, I become quite cheerful, and then I go for a long walk.”
Invariably, for some reason I don't know and don't want to know, after I have spent an hour or so in one of these cemeteries, looking at gravestone designs and reading inscriptions and identifying wild flowers and scaring rabbits out of the weeds and reflecting on the end that awaits me and awaits us all, my spirits lift, I become quite cheerful, and then I go for a long walk.”
August 24, 2023
Another lovely book by Mitchell, who again depicts a New York that was already vanishing in his time and has now been gone for more than 50 years. I’m particularly fond of “The Rivermen”, about shad fishermen in Edgewater, New Jersey, a long, narrow town across the Hudson from NYC that is wedged between the river and the bluffs of the Palisades. Once working class and industrial, it’s the latest victim of gentrification in what is now known as the Jersey Gold Coast. Though most if not all of the old Edgewater is gone, it’s wonderful to read how it was.
November 7, 2022
Oh boy, I found this to be an amazing read! I know MANY people will find the subjects boring and would think Mitchell offers way too much information but I didn't. I thoroughly enjoyed learning so many things about fishing and all the creatures in the harbors in and around NYC in the past. The character studies of the people in the Fulton Fish Market and the characters all around the area back in the day were absolutely fascinating.
November 7, 2019
Absolutely stunning. Masterful prose from a keen and generous observer of the human condition. As a New Yorker in exile, I found Mitchell’s vignettes of the city’s previous lives to be a brilliant way of discussing the passing of time in general. The closing discussion, among aging fishermen, of the meaning of life is really an earnest and beautiful summation of the collection's central theme.
September 6, 2020
I picked this up because it was mentioned as an example of great writing in the book Writing Well. The chapters were originally articles for a monthly. The subject matter is varied but all connected to New York Harbor area and history. Mitchell was able to write about subjects I normally wouldn't be interested in and yet it kept my interest.
July 7, 2023
Es un libro de crónicas del puerto de New York, las historias de reportajes son muy descriptivas, la descripción logra a uno meterlo en ese mundo de pescadores y algunas especies de peces que uno desconoce. Son historias muy humanas de un mundo que muy pocos conocen donde se habla de pestes, ratas y marinos que siempre han vivido junto al río y el mar
June 16, 2018
5/5
Joseph Mitchell was a journalist for the prestigious New Yorker for the majority of his career. He always wrote on the side but he never believed in his own texts. This is a collection of short chronicles on his New York. The harbor, the fishermen, the rats, the restaurants, a picture of a place that's long gone. He pictures it with such tenderness and care, it is truly fascinating. New York in the 1950's is not yet for bankers and billionaires, it is still full of strange corners and little mysteries.
All the anecdotes the author shares with us through his recounting of his conversations with locals, all the tiny details and descriptions of another world... Sometimes quite dark and eerie, quaint and run down, it is also a picture of change, of things that used to be but no longer exist or are starting to fade. It's beautiful and powerful in a quiet, careful way.
Joseph Mitchell was a journalist for the prestigious New Yorker for the majority of his career. He always wrote on the side but he never believed in his own texts. This is a collection of short chronicles on his New York. The harbor, the fishermen, the rats, the restaurants, a picture of a place that's long gone. He pictures it with such tenderness and care, it is truly fascinating. New York in the 1950's is not yet for bankers and billionaires, it is still full of strange corners and little mysteries.
All the anecdotes the author shares with us through his recounting of his conversations with locals, all the tiny details and descriptions of another world... Sometimes quite dark and eerie, quaint and run down, it is also a picture of change, of things that used to be but no longer exist or are starting to fade. It's beautiful and powerful in a quiet, careful way.
November 23, 2017
I rated this book as excellent. It was passed on to Dave. S. to give to his daughter Anna who was living in NYC at the time.
November 23, 2020
The last chapter killed it for me. Mitchell was a wonderful writer. Then he got writer’s block for about the last 30 years of his life. Strange.
July 4, 2021
Easily my favorite Joseph Mitchell collection so far, they transport me to a real and surreal NYC that it’s hard to believe ever existed
July 29, 2023
Great book!!
January 8, 2024
Thoroughly goated
June 29, 2024
4 1/2 ☆
March 8, 2017
I loved it! The language was perfect--simple yet effective. I could practically smell the water and hear the voices speaking. A perfect read for every New Yorker and every New-Yorker-wannabe, like me.
October 28, 2019
Comment Noel Perrin, The Reader's Delight, The Neglected Books Page
"The book contains six long essays, all connected with the waterfront. One–the only one some lesser person might have written–is about rats: the three varieties that inhabit New York, spread plagues, come and go on ships. That piece is merely brilliant reporting.
Cover of Vintage paperback of 'The Bottom of the Harbor'The other five are a kind of writing for which there is no name. Each tells a story, and is dramatic; each is both wildly funny and so sad you can hardly bear it; each tells its story so much in the words of its characters that it feels like a kind of apotheosis of oral history. Finally, like the Icelandic sagas, each combines a fierce joy in the physicality of living with a stoical awareness that all things physical end in death, usually preceded by years of diminishment. One winds up admiring Mitchell’s characters (all real people), loving them, all but weeping for them, maybe hoping to live as gallantly.
… Mitchell, who has a genius for finding real-life metaphors, tells you early on about an old graveyard in the lower part of the town. It’s quite a large one, and it’s still in use. It is entirely surrounded, however, by a modern factory–a huge one, belonging to the Aluminum Company of America. The cemetery forms a two-acre garden in the middle. Funerals go in an out through the factory gate, as do people visiting graves or people who simply want to picnic in the beautiful old graveyard. That was part of the agreement when the company bought part of what was once the Vreeland farm.
Not only that, there are rosebushes in there, descended from a rosebush that came from Holland in the 1630s. Or so, at least, Mitchell hears from an old woman whom he meets (and naturally gets to know) while she is gardening in the graveyard.
Mitchell himself could be called a gardener in a graveyard, if that didn’t make him sound much more lugubrious and much less fun to read than he actually is. … I do know that Mitchell has the gift of making roses bloom in the darkest and most unexpected places.”
"The book contains six long essays, all connected with the waterfront. One–the only one some lesser person might have written–is about rats: the three varieties that inhabit New York, spread plagues, come and go on ships. That piece is merely brilliant reporting.
Cover of Vintage paperback of 'The Bottom of the Harbor'The other five are a kind of writing for which there is no name. Each tells a story, and is dramatic; each is both wildly funny and so sad you can hardly bear it; each tells its story so much in the words of its characters that it feels like a kind of apotheosis of oral history. Finally, like the Icelandic sagas, each combines a fierce joy in the physicality of living with a stoical awareness that all things physical end in death, usually preceded by years of diminishment. One winds up admiring Mitchell’s characters (all real people), loving them, all but weeping for them, maybe hoping to live as gallantly.
… Mitchell, who has a genius for finding real-life metaphors, tells you early on about an old graveyard in the lower part of the town. It’s quite a large one, and it’s still in use. It is entirely surrounded, however, by a modern factory–a huge one, belonging to the Aluminum Company of America. The cemetery forms a two-acre garden in the middle. Funerals go in an out through the factory gate, as do people visiting graves or people who simply want to picnic in the beautiful old graveyard. That was part of the agreement when the company bought part of what was once the Vreeland farm.
Not only that, there are rosebushes in there, descended from a rosebush that came from Holland in the 1630s. Or so, at least, Mitchell hears from an old woman whom he meets (and naturally gets to know) while she is gardening in the graveyard.
Mitchell himself could be called a gardener in a graveyard, if that didn’t make him sound much more lugubrious and much less fun to read than he actually is. … I do know that Mitchell has the gift of making roses bloom in the darkest and most unexpected places.”
April 8, 2014
It's definitely illustrative of some great NYC history. I love the city and I love filling in some of my understanding of its past. Some of these stories make me want to go to the places they describe, other stories are enriching memories of places I've already been, and answering questions I had wondered about.
The stories are essentially interviews with various old timers, recounted in a professional reporter yet down to earth folksy manner. It's not fabulous writing but it's generally enjoyable.
I found myself skipping through some chapters when the story of the clam boats etc. got a little bland, then stopping again on the Edgewater story (pallisades side of the Hudson).
For anyone who really loves getting out and exploring NYC and surroundings, hiking, and biking - really seeing it - this book will enrich your understanding beyond the surface and here and now.
However, I may or may not finish it. It's kind of like a series of articles in the New Yorker - you don't have to read them all, just the ones you enjoy.
The stories are essentially interviews with various old timers, recounted in a professional reporter yet down to earth folksy manner. It's not fabulous writing but it's generally enjoyable.
I found myself skipping through some chapters when the story of the clam boats etc. got a little bland, then stopping again on the Edgewater story (pallisades side of the Hudson).
For anyone who really loves getting out and exploring NYC and surroundings, hiking, and biking - really seeing it - this book will enrich your understanding beyond the surface and here and now.
However, I may or may not finish it. It's kind of like a series of articles in the New Yorker - you don't have to read them all, just the ones you enjoy.
August 31, 2012
I was looking for an added, historic dimension to the city I have come to live in. This I got. Marvelous stories of a long bygone era, the days when Manhattan was still a harbor, and fishing the bays and sounds of New York and Connecticut still a significant industry.
As others have pointed out, Joseph Mitchell is an author of the word "and"; he lists and enumerates fact after fact, more so, he celebrates it: this existed, and this was the case, and this was there, too.
There is nothing in terms of analysis or any deeper insight. It would be a different book if there was, and Mitchell a different author.
As others have pointed out, Joseph Mitchell is an author of the word "and"; he lists and enumerates fact after fact, more so, he celebrates it: this existed, and this was the case, and this was there, too.
There is nothing in terms of analysis or any deeper insight. It would be a different book if there was, and Mitchell a different author.
February 19, 2015
This collection of Joseph Mitchell's work centers around the the waterways of New York city and the people that make their living from them. The first story is about the abandoned hotel above Fulton's Fish Market and Mitchell's curiosity that led him to explore it one day. My favorite is probably title story about the oyster beds in and around Manhattan and how they are fished with legally and illegally. Like all of Mitchell's stories he is in the background and the main characters are vividly brought to life.
March 8, 2016
Mitchell was one of the greatest journalistic writers "The New Yorker" ever produced, and these gritty, luminous sketches of a New York City that has now long become a memory...the New York City of fishermen, longshoremen, old saloons, colorful characters living on the fringes of society...are quiet, affectionate masterpieces. Truly brilliant writing.
January 11, 2008
A series of essays on the old fishing life of New York. Its sad as he's writing about how much is lost and this was copyrighted 1944 and you can't help but wonder how much has been lost since then. But it's well written and sympathetic without being maudlin.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews