That New York: The Nation’s Metropolis has fallen far short of canonical status is reflected in the lack of materials available to anyone wishing to research the life of Peter Marcus, its author. Indeed, when Marcus died, in the summer of 1934, the New York Times – chronicle of the city Marcus had depicted with such astonishing concern – announced his death in a three sentence obituary which did not mention his one published work. He had passed into obscurity, apparently, some time before he passed from the Earth.
Marcus’ death marked the final event in his book’s decade long journey into virtual disappearance. The year before he died, Brentano’s – the book’s publisher – closed its doors under the financial weight of the Great Depression. Brentano’s has begun in the nineteenth century as a bookseller specializing in books imported from abroad. The company soon began printing American editions of books which were widely available only in Europe. In the early 1920s it began a large scale expansion into other areas of book publishing, fuelled no doubt by New York City’s vigorous economic growth. Published in the spring of 1921 with a cover price of two dollars, New York: The Nation’s Metropolis was an early part of Brentano’s diversification. Even in the booming economy of the early 20s, however, the book seems to have been known to few, purchased by even fewer, and written about on only those who had a personal stake in its success. It was not reviewed in New York Review of Books or New York Times Book Review; it has no entry in Book Review Digest; even in Brentano’s advertisements that spring, the book received almost no attention. Of the 14 Brentano’s advertisements to appear in Publisher’s Weekly during 1921, only one mentioned New York, the Nation’s Metropolis, and even that one referred to the book in a list of eight other works. It is nonetheless the only advertisement for the book that of which I am aware. Publisher’s Weekly was also the only publication I encountered to feature for the book a review and a notice of publication.
If the book received little attention among mainstream Manhattan book-buyers, it appears to have received far more among the Architectural elite with whom Marcus socialized. In 1920 he was elected to the Architectural League of New York, and was at the time of New York: The Nation’s Metropolis’ publication a Resident Associate Member. It is not clear to what extent League members participated in the book’s composition or aided in its publication, but it is certain that they were at some level directly involved with the project. League president J. Monroe Hewlett introduced the book with an "Appreciation," and Marcus’ work was featured prominently in the Catalogue for the League’s 1921 Annual Exhibition. Reproductions of two of Marcus’ drawings appeared in the Catalogue; "Times Square," which appears both as the frontispiece, and as the illustration for Chapter One of the book, was the third full-page illustration in the exhibit catalogue. "Exchange Place," which appears in Chapter Three, served in the exhibit catalogue as the illustration on the table of contents page for the "Illustrations" section.
Some time in the years after the publication of his book Marcus moved from his apartment at 30 East Seventy-Fourth Street to a leased stone mansion in Mystic, Connecticut. In the fall of 1924 a fire destroyed the mansion and everything in it, including what a local paper described as "articles of historical value [which could] not be replaced." It is presumed that the original drawings and draft materials relating to New York, the Nation’s Metropolis were among the articles so designated. Despite the loss, Marcus remained in Connecticut. He moved to the nearby town of Stonington where he lived until he was killed by a heart attack on 7 June 1934. He was forty-four years old.
At the time of his death Marcus was, predictably, a member of the Mystic Art Association, but he was not-so-predictably a member of the Mystic Masonic Lodge. I was unable to discover at what point his association with Freemasonry began, but portions of New York, the Nation’s Metropolis resonate with Masonic symbolism in a way that suggests an association with the fraternity which goes back at least as far as 1921.
After Brentano’s collapse in the early 1930s, larger more solvent publishing houses purchased the rights to the parts of the Brentano’s catalogue which they saw as showing a potential for profit. Marcus’ book was not among those selected. The assets of the publishing house were collected by the Irving Trust Company, a corporation which has since ceased to exist. It is not certain what became of Brentano’s publishing records (or of the records of their correspondence with Marcus) after the dissolution of the Trust Company. Even in the event that Marcus’ records were destroyed by the fire of 1924, the publishing house would most likely have retained copies of its correspondence with him in their records. William Stanley Braithwaite Papers at University of Virginia’s Special Collections include letters the editor received from Brentano’s through the 1910s and early 1920s, including letters from 1920 and ‘21. All the letters he received from the publisher appear to have been typed onto carbon paper, the carbon copy having been sent to Braithwaite and the original (presumably) retained in the publisher’s files. Marcus’ relations with Brentano’s may not have been so thoroughly documented as he was living in New York and could be met with in person (Braithwaite lived and worked near Boston), but there is no reason to assume that exchanges between Marcus and Brentano’s which were put in writing were not carbon copied in a like manner. The materials from which the story of this book’s publication might be told are, quite possible, still intact but as yet uncatalogued.