Stories from a fascinating (and brutal) time and place - depression era New York City and the fishmongers, drunks, and preachers who populated tenements, taverns and harbors. I learned so much about what's at the bottom of the harbor and fish! Joseph Mitchell was a writer for The New Yorker at the time and these are his stories. Poor, poor Joe Gould.... ( )

From the father of literary nonfiction, an idiosyncratic history of New York City.

Well let me change from day today this book currently is in my top 10 favorite books. Mitchell was a long time reporter for various New York newspapers in later than New York or during the first half of the 1900s. His pieces are wonderful slices of New York history told through various character sketches and regions of New York that has long since disappeared. Each story is a gym starting with McSorley‘s old Ale House and moving onto other colorful characters such as Maisie who ran a movie theater on the lower Eastside waterman fisherman oysterman who worked the docs around New York Harbor and the Fulton fishmarket. He captures since of long last New York through a character Joe Gould described as a true Greenwich Village bohemian. Highly recommend. ( )

Great character stories and (no surprise) reads like a series of New Yorker articles. Did not have the time to dedicate to knocking them all off so it'll go on the shelf for the future. ( )

Saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old “seafoodetarian” who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades. These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books—McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret—that are still renowned for their precise, respectful observation, their graveyard humor, and their offhand perfection of style.These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its odder citizens—as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.