Imagine two celebrities today greeting each other on a Greenwich Village street, then sitting on a park bench together just shooting the breeze, apparently unrecognized.
That’s what happened one day in September 1887, when Mark Twain took the train from his Connecticut home to New York to meet Robert Louis Stevenson, the popular writer of Treasure Island.
“The Scottish-born Stevenson was staying near the square at a hotel on Tenth Street and University Place,” writes Emily Kies Folpe in the wonderful It Happened in Washington Square.
Stevenson, suffering from tuberculosis, was passing through the city on his way to an upstate sanitarium.
“The two famous writers strolled down to the park and, following Stevenson’s doctor’s orders to take in the sun every day, settled down on a sunny bench to enjoy a good talk.”
So what did they discuss? According to the website of the Hotel Albert (now a co-op), where Stevenson likely stayed on 10th Street:
“The two men settled comfortably into a sunny part of the northwest corner of the park and spent the next five hours telling stories to one another, ‘regardless of wives, lunch and doctors, from 10 a.m….until 3 in the afternoon.'”
Twain moved to the Village in 1900 and spend the rest of his life as a New Yorker. Stevenson died at 44, seven years after his park meetup with Twain.
Tags: Gilded Age New York, Hotel Albert, It Happened in Washington Square, Mark Twain Greenwich Village, Mark Twain in New York City, Mark Twain's New York, New York City in 1887, New York writers, Robert Louis Stevenson, Twain and Stevenson
Ephemeral New York 
June 30, 2011 at 3:31 pm |
I have to comment on what a beautifully done rendering of the two of them this is. Thank you for posting this.
July 1, 2011 at 4:37 am |
From the recently published Autobiography of Mark Twain, whose editors fix the park bench meeting during Stevenson’s April 19-26, 1888 stay in the city, Twain speaks of their chat in the park:
Stevenson, at a later date, and far away, took a bit of sun, and described a scene so very different from a day with Twain in New York. From In the South Seas:
July 1, 2011 at 8:55 am |
Thank you for sharing to us.
Well written, hope to have more articles
Come on, hard.
July 1, 2011 at 9:17 pm |
I will keep this in mind next time I’m in Washington Square Park.
July 3, 2011 at 5:24 am |
[…] Pie in the Sky (Village Voice) Historic Districts Council Announces its 2011 Landmark Lion (HDC) Two Famous Writers Meet in Washington Square (Ephemeral New […]
September 12, 2015 at 8:57 pm |
The park bench meeting WAS in April 1888 after Stevenson’s stay in Saranac Lake.
February 17, 2017 at 5:39 am |
[…] Robert Louis Stevenson booked a room in this lovely Victorian Gothic building, receiving Augustus St. Gaudens as a […]
January 26, 2020 at 9:21 pm |
I love the article, but my sources say that they met on a different day – Fred Kaplan says April 1888 in his ‘The Singular Mark Twain’ biography, and Nicholas Rankin says Spring 1888 in his ‘Dead Man’s Chest’. I was hoping it would be 23rd April as that was an important date for both Shakespeare and Cervantes!
January 27, 2020 at 2:02 am |
Glad you enjoyed it! It’s one of my favorite posts, actually. I went by what the website of the hotel said, which was September. I don’t know where they got that information, but it certainly could be wrong and Kaplan or Rankin is correct.
June 10, 2020 at 6:55 pm |
[…] Pie in the Sky (Village Voice) Historic Districts Council Announces its 2011 Landmark Lion (HDC) Two Famous Writers Meet in Washington Square (Ephemeral New […]