Coney Brothers Funeral Home

On the table were six large cardboard storage boxes. I took thetop off of one and peered inside: chaos. Manuscripts, letters, loosepapers, and manila envelopes, all jumbled together as if they’d beentossed in the box by movers in a hurry—which, as it happened, they had.The boxes contained the accumulated detritus of the poet DelmoreSchwartz, who died, of a heart attack, at the Columbia Hotel, in TimesSquare, on the night of July 11, 1966, while taking out the garbage. Hisbody lay unclaimed in the morgue at Bellevue for two days until areporter noticed his name on a list of the dead. The next morning, alengthy obituary, accompanied by a photograph of a tormented-lookingSchwartz, appeared in the Times. He was fifty-two.It was his old friend Dwight Macdonald, one of the great critics of thatera, who salvaged the papers that had been strewn about Schwartz’s hotelroom at the time of his death. They would have vanished forever if ithadn’t been for a chance encounter in a bar between Macdonald’s sonMichael and the owner of a moving company in Greenwich Village.Macdonald took on the role of Schwartz’s literary executor—no one elsehad volunteered—and for years afterward the papers were stored atHofstra University, on Long Island, where Macdonald was teaching at thetime. But three months before my visit, in the fall of 1974, he arrangedfor them to be transferred to his own alma mater, Yale. I would be thefirst person to examine what Macdonald had rescued—barely—from oblivion.It was nearly five now, and the library would soon be closing for theholidays. There wouldn’t be time for more than a brief look atSchwartz’s papers, but I was eager to see them. I was twenty-five andhad signed a contract with the distinguished publishing house Farrar,Straus & Giroux, committing me to write a biography of Schwartz withouthaving any idea whether, in fact, there was enough material to do so.What was in these boxes—they could have been the junk of a collegestudent moving out of his dorm—would determine the course of my life.I pulled out a letter from the top of the pi... (The New Yorker)

Relatives gathered at the Coney Island Memorial Chapel on Neptune Ave. in Brooklyn to say goodbye to the 30-year-old mother-of-two, murdered on Friday in Sea Gate. “My daughter was a hardworking, loving girl,” said Olga Alvarado, Alvarado-Genao’s mother. Alvarado-Genao, 30, was working as a nurse at a veteran’s hospital in Maryland, but returned home to Coney Island recently. She had two daughters, aged 4 and 9.NYC man calls for son suspected of killing wife to surrender Her husband remains on the loose. Authorities allege that Gabino Genao, 30, shot his wife twice in the face outside her relatives’ home after she rejected his attempt at reconciling their marriage. “They had split up some time ago, but he wouldn’t let go,” Alvarado said Tuesday. “He was jealous. He is a sick man.” Alvarado-Genao’s brother-in-law, former Mets star Melvin Mora, said the family is reeling from the loss. “She wanted nothing to do with him,” Mora said. “I don’t know what could have crossed through his mind. She was beautiful, just beautiful.”Tags:gun violencenew york murdersobituariesSend a Letter to the EditorJoin the Conversation:facebookTweet... (New York Daily News)