After 10 years in New York, I’ve finally started to understand a thing or two about this city. One thing that I’ve learned several times over and am constantly reminded of is that New York University rules Gotham’s real estate. The University’s shaping the New York cityscape is beyond question, but it also has a cloak of invisibility on it. Once they’ve demolished and redeveloped, the city moves forward leaving hidden architecture and stories peering out from the alleys and corners of its buildings. Of course, NYU’s bullish expansion had a direct impact on the preservation of historic sites and buildings. In 2000, for example, a storm erupted around NYU’s plans to demolish Edgar Allan Poe’s house at 85 West 3rd Street. The facade was spared, but barely, and questionably.

Today, Writers’ Houses welcomes poet, essayist, and novelist Terese Svoboda as a new Guest Curator. The title of Svoboda’s new novel, Bohemian Girl, is inspired by Willa Cather’s short story of the same name. In her essay for Writers’ Houses, Svoboda hits the pavement in search of Willa Cather’s New York, and discovers a buried Bohemia. Cather’s New York is much changed by NYU’s mark on the city, but Svoboda finds that glimpses remain. Lucky for us, they glitter in the asphalt.

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I fell in love with New York City at dawn decades ago, watching a huge black man in a turban chant for the sun to rise behind Washington Square fountain. Bohemia was mine only a few months out of Nebraska! Willa Cather also quickly fell for the spectacle of the City. After all, men wore top hats to breakfast. But its enormous possibilities exact a price now from its tenants just the way the prairies’ seemingly unlimited opportunities did for the pioneers. All the distractions! All the ways we could fail! But mostly, what prospects! Moving from staid Pittsburgh, Cather chose to live downtown—as I did—for its Bohemian lifestyle, far from the mores of the real Bohemians she’d left behind.

Cather spent her formative years in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Unlike Cather, I am a native Nebraskan, but I too fled to New York. We both feared “we might die in a cornfield”—her words. But I am Bohemian, and have stolen the title of her most famous short story for my most recent novel: Bohemian Girl. She stole her title part of the plot and even some of the lines from the Balfe opera “The Bohemian Girl.” My story concerns a Bohemian girl living in the 19^th century West who answers Cather’s tales with her hard-won success. I wrote the book in New York City, not so far from where Cather lived, and I decided this summer to celebrate the expatriate in us by touring all five of her residences.

Like any sane New Yorker, I’m out of town. I have to take the Jitney in from Greenport, a small maritime village at the end of Long Island. Cather too found summer in the City intolerable and left for upstate or Provincetown or New Mexico or New Hampshire or New Brunswick. I don’t think she ever spent the season in New York—I wouldn’t run into her now even if she hadn’t died seventy years ago.

Washington Square Park is a glorious 90 degrees in the shade. The NYU coeds sun themselves nearly naked on the grass, and the fountain is in full force, with kids screaming and the police standing by for possible drownings—or maybe just to enjoy the spray themselves. The wading pool wasn’t there in 1906 when Cather took a studio apartment at 60 Washington Square South, and certainly NYU hadn’t yet gobbled up most of the surrounding buildings, including Cather’s own. Since 2003, the address has been the Helen and Martin Kimmel Center for University Life, with a guard partial to interrogations about I.D. A NYU Prague advertisement blinks its LEDs above him—shades of “The Bohemian Girl.” NYU also came close to demolishing the Lombardi-Romanesque frill of the Judson Memorial Church next door, built to memorialize a missionary to Burma, an institution that originally catered to the Irish and Italian immigrants who, along with Cather, occupied this side of the square. The elite, including Edith Wharton, lived opposite. But Cather’s view wasn’t so bad—her building faced Stanford White’s Arch and “ over yonder, Garibaldi, drawing the sword for freedom,” as Cather put it in her story “Coming, Aphrodite” about living in a Washington Square garret.

As I head for her next apartment at 82 Washington Place, dudes with multicolored tattoos pass me in hordes and I hear drumming from somewhere deep inside the park, a staple entertainment since the Beatnik era. Cather would have heard the clipclop of carriage horses—and the occasional roar of an early model car—which were then allowed passage under the Arch. The year before her move, all the Fifth Avenue front yards were condemned to make room for the increased traffic that forever slows to a crawl where it runs into the park-as-obstacle.

I pause at the park’s edge, with its chess players and sketch artists and note-taking benchwarmers.  The environs are perfect for an editor, the job Cather had when she arrived. The Square is still lively, unpredictable, stylish—but she, like many of the editors who live nearby today, wanted to write. A front row seat to the circus of the park might not be the best place to make the switch. Cather moved in just two years.

She settled into what was described as an elegant Beaux-Arts inspired building with her companion of five years, Edith Lewis. Hopefully, I thought, the place would be similar to 76, with its exquisite marble lintel and pale green brick, and not Number 78, peeling badly or 80, suffering major construction. But what’s left of 82 is sans Beaux-Arts anything, there’s just a plaque on the wall that she shares with Richard Wright, who wrote Black Boy in the same location thirty-some years after her tenancy. Trees still shade most of the block, keeping the leafy Village look intact. Not very far away Mark Twain rented an apartment—and she attended his 70^th birthday further downtown at Delmonico’s. Around the corner is bustling Sixth Avenue with its two blocks of outdoor bookstands, the Keats & Shelly Cliff Notes guarded by a elderly black man reading Walter Mosley. Psychics, banks, cafes—surely the same lineup in Cather’s time, but not the “Fuck the Fuckers” t-shirt of a passing coed. Cather probably ate at the very popular Gonfarone’s Italian restaurant that flourished nearby at the time. To get to the uptown plays she reviewed, she would have taken the elevated subway that ran alongside Jefferson Market Library, then a courthouse and jail.

Despite my Google map, I’m lost looking for 5 Bank Street, her next address. It doesn’t help that West 4^th street crosses West 10^th Street and there’s Little West 12^th as well as West 12^th. After a while, the confusion becomes more sexual, perhaps why Cather and Lewis kept this apartment the longest. What gender is the person walking the two Pekinese in front of me? The small buildings I wander past look turn-of-the-century as befitting their antique-collecting, often gay, inhabitants. A rock garden decorates the base of a parking meter, surrounded by a bamboo fence. Wrong way, says one of the workmen troweling a repair on a brownstone stoop not far from the White Horse Tavern and the Hudson. As I turn back, I notice deliverymen, supers, and construction workers enjoying breaks up and down the shaded streets. How many more would have been outside during Cather’s AC-free era?

The man detailing the inside of his car with the windows rolled must be air-conditioned. At first I think he is stealing the car. At last, staring through his windshield, I spot 5 Bank Street. It turns out to be plaqued too:  Cather wrote nine novels at this location, and left only because the building was slated to be torn down for the 7^th Avenue subway. Cather’s seven rooms had no central heating, but she did employ a maid and a cook, and disconnected her phone so she could work. She and Edith held at-homes there on Fridays, with written invitations for the likes of Elinor Wylie, Alfred Knopf, and Carl Van Doren. The back of the now defunct St. Vincent’s Hospital faces the building, an institution that must’ve been handy during her frequent illnesses. Two men dicker over the sale of an ex-ambulance parked in its driveway.

Crossing onto 11^th Street and heading toward Fifth Avenue, I spot a grand piano on a second floor that seems to be floating from my street-side perspective. At night you can see many of the interiors still have original moldings, 19^th century light fixtures, and grand mirrors. Reaching Fifth, I pass the First Presbyterian Church with a tower resembling Magdelan’s at Oxford, and then Cather’s favorite place of worship, the Church of Ascension, chained off now from casual visitors. The neighborhood’s full of doctors, dentists, even PhDs proclaiming themselves on the plaques in front of the buildings—but this time none for Cather.

Cather hated living at 47 Fifth Avenue, but more because of troubles at home than problems with the very respectable Grosvenor Club, whose building still boasts dark wooden paneling in the reception area and wall sconces that look original. NYU has again taken over here, and is in the process of converting it into another residence hall. Posing as an anxious parent doesn’t get me past the construction guard.

Cather, who had shunned attention and favored the simple life, finally moved uptown to 570 Park Avenue. My bus slowly fills with its denizens: nurse attendants, maids, elderly women with alligator shoes and big flowered purses, and a black man in a bespoke suit saying into his cell phone: “A true friend doesn’t do that.” Sixty-third Street, where I disembark, is the bastion of Jimmy Choo and Hermes and plaques remembering the 1922 founding of an insurance company. Money, money, money. The exclusive Colony Club still abuts Cather’s building. Arriving at this address in 1931, she escaped the Depression and World War II with a drawing room large enough for a dinner party of thirty. Now the space is surely worth over six million dollars. I ask its doorman if he knows which apartment was Cather’s and he smiles. So many important people have lived here, he says. And now? I ask. He laughs at my impertinence.

The Christian Science Church and Reading Room still faces the building’s Park Avenue side, perhaps reminding Cather daily of her first struggle with long-form prose, a biography of founder Mary Baker Eddy that she disowned. The church has been a focus of controversy in the neighborhood for some years because it rents out the ornate interior for events to support itself. “On-Time Elite” reads the media bus beside it. That could have been Cather’s motto, arriving on the literary scene like Amy Tan, with her great stories of immigrants just when the country was curious.

I wave down a cab to take me to a jitney that will bear me back to my summer place. It’s hard to leave the City once you’ve gone to all the trouble to arrive. Eight blocks away, in his 34-room Park Avenue home, Saul Steinberg drew his famous New Yorker map, with Nebraska just a skip and a jump away from Central Park. For those of us who have made that journey, it’s a much longer and willful trip.

Terese Svoboda is the author of five volumes of poetry and four novels, including Tin God (Nebraska 2006); a collection of short stories, Trailer Girl and Other Stories (available in a Bison Books edition); and a nonfiction book, Black Glasses like Clark Kent: A GI’s Secret from Postwar Japan, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Her new novel, Bohemian Girl, appears this month.

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