Edward Hopper’s 1929 painting Chop Suey is a reminder of a much older New York, when this dish was advertised in neon outside Chinese restaurants around the city.
“These fashionable women are dining at a modest Chinese restaurant not unlike one the Hoppers frequented,” writes the National Gallery of Art.
“Characteristically, Hopper depicts a moment before or after the main event—here, the meal—takes place. Also typical is the isolation and ambiguous relationship between the figures: it is not clear whether the dining companions are even looking at or conversing with one another.”
Tags: Chinese restaurants New York City, Edward Hopper, Edward Hopper Chop Suey, Greenwich Village in the 1920s, New York street, paintings of New York City
Ephemeral New York 
January 16, 2012 at 6:21 am |
“All I ever wanted to do was paint sunlight on a wall….” – Edward Hopper
January 16, 2012 at 5:45 pm |
Great and appropriate quote
January 17, 2012 at 12:44 am |
I’ve seen several references to chop suey places as dicey places. In the article from the NY Tribune (link below) there is a line “This owner of assignation houses, chop suey ‘joints’ and poolrooms”…
(Poolrooms at that time usually refer to illegal gambling parlors, often times they didn’t even have pool tables. 😉
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1903-10-25/ed-1/seq-2/;words=chop+suey?date1=10%2F26%2F1900&date2=12%2F31%2F1903&searchType=advanced&lccn=&proxdistance=10&state=New+York&rows=20&ortext=&proxtext=&phrasetext=chop+suey&andtext=&dateFilterType=range&page=2&index=2
In “City of Eros”, Timothy Gilfoyle quotes someone as saying that prostitutes in the upstairs “chop suey parlor indulged in various forms of lovemaking …in the semi-privacy of booths.”
The footnote isn’t clear, but I think that’s from the Committee of Fourteen, ca. 1914.
That’s a great book if you haven’t read it. As is his other one on NY, “A Pickpocket’s Tale”.
One other thing, I came across a map with S. Greenfield. It’s a topographical map from 1898. It also illustrates how sparse the buildings were in that area.
November 27, 2012 at 6:57 pm |
[…] ARTICLE: Taste of a Decade – 1920s Restaurants (Restaurant-ing Through History) Fashionable Women at a Chop Suey Restaurant (Ephemeral New […]
May 20, 2015 at 8:44 pm |
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April 8, 2019 at 2:49 am |
[…] Hopper spent four decades chronicling the isolation of modern urban life: people unconnected to each other in a cafe, a lone person on an elevated train, and building facades almost empty of […]
April 8, 2019 at 4:14 am |
[…] Hopper spent four decades chronicling the isolation of modern urban life: people unconnected to each other in a cafe, a lone person on an elevated train, and building facades almost empty of […]