New York--Baltimore means many things to many people, and it does also to Tony Hiss, not the least because his family settled in the city more than 200 years ago. There's also the matter of his having spent the last year giving it the up-close-and-personal look for an article for the New Yorker. He likes the Inner Harbor, of course, and the municipal markets and the neighborhoods.
And then there's the tomato aspic.
We'll get to that later, but these are only some of the reasons Tony Hiss is charmed by Charm City. His upbeat depiction of the city, culled from interviews that ranged from Mayor Kurt Schmoke to a butcher at the Northeast Market, will appear in the April 29 issue of the New Yorker, which should be out early this week.
Although it was not his intention, writing the article was a coming home of sorts, Mr. Hiss acknowledges in an interview in his sunlit office in the new digs of the New Yorker.
"My grandmother lived there, so I was always going back to Baltimore as a kid," says Mr. Hiss, 49, a pleasant, low-key sort with an understated, self-deprecating wit that sneaks up on you. "I still have a cousin there."
Although he has lived in New York for most of the past 40 years, Mr. Hiss says that Baltimore "is a city I've had an affection all my life for, although largely from afar. My dad [Alger Hiss] being a Baltimorean, I grew up hearing about Baltimore and followed its resurgence with great interest, and wanted to know what the next step might be.
"Because I grew up hearing so much about the place, to me it seemed natural to write about three flowerings of Baltimore -- one, in the early years of the century after the [1904] fire, when my dad remembered it; the second, culminating in the Inner Harbor and redevelopment; and the prospective third one -- what's next. . . . I think there are signs that good things could be in the works. I see a lot of hopeful signs."
That hopefulness was apparent, he says, compared to the cynicism he sees every day in New York.
"People in Baltimore were as friendly as I had always heard they were," he says. "I'd say it was more reassuring than surprising, finding how many good people were devoting their best efforts to think about what comes next for Baltimore. It was a very encouraging sign, particularly to a New Yorker, because this city has developed an unfortunate habit of pessimism in the last couple of decades.
"One of the greatest achievements of what I was calling the second flowering of Baltimore is that the people really broke through that and regained not only a sense of themselves but a sense that they could get things done."
Perhaps because of his familiarity with the city, Mr. Hiss picks out aspects of the city that go beyond the more obvious parts, such as the Inner Harbor. He calls Baltimore "a city of unsung treasures," and that's where the aspic comes in.
"There are three rooms that I write about that became real favorites of mine, and that I kept coming back to, from the older Baltimore," he says. "One is the main reading room in the library of the Peabody Conservatory of Music, a wonderful place. Then there's the children's department of the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library -- I've never seen a room designed with such care to make reading something that a kid would just demand to do. And then there was the Woman's Industrial Exchange, where I would have lunch whenever I could.
"This may be because of my own upbringing, but the chicken salad and aspics reminded me of the food I ate when I was growing up. It was ambrosia to me" -- he breaks into a slight grin -- "and I liked the fact that the wonderful old waitresses there are the last living link to the old downtown department stores, such as Hutzler's -- the great dining rooms people would eat at when they came to Howard Street to shop."
Occasionally, he says, he would be asked about his last name, and whether he was related to the Alger Hiss -- the native Baltimorean and former State Department official who was accused of being a communist and spy, and spent nearly four years in prison in the early 1950s.
"It depended on the age of the questioner -- the early 40s is the cutoff," Mr. Hiss says. "Some people would just respond to it as an old Baltimore name, because there is a Hiss United Methodist Church somewhere up Harford Road, and then others in their 50s would remember the historical events. But the younger people -- nothing."
In "Recollections of a Life," published in 1988, Alger Hiss wrote of the impact his imprisonment had on Tony, who was 10 when his dad began his prison term in 1951. After a while, he writes, Tony stopped coming to see him at Lewisburg (Pa.) Penitentiary: "The prison visits had been too troubling for him."
And in his own book, "Laughing Last: Alger Hiss," published in 1977, Tony Hiss acknowledges he started seeing a psychiatrist during his father's imprisonment and had dreams about stepping in front of trains.
"It was hard, as a kid, just to see your name or your family's name in the newspapers," Tony Hiss says evenly. "But when you find the strength to get through something like that you learn a lot. I think that's one of the great things about my dad -- here's someone who was enriched by his experience, who was not embittered."
He says he still sees his father, who is 86 and lives in Manhattan, about once a week and talks to him frequently. And, he adds, "It was nice to find out how many Baltimoreans still had a warm spot in their hearts for my dad, and the Hisses in general."
Among the dozens of Baltimoreans Mr. Hiss talked to for his article was Richard Davis, director of the Municipal Markets Administration. Mr. Davis readily recalled taking the writer on a tour of some of the markets last year.
"He was very pleasant, very enjoyable," Mr. Davis says. "He clearly had a very good feeling for Baltimore's character. He enjoyed talking with the merchants in the markets. He had a nice long conversation with Al Fellner, who is one of our best meat merchants at the Northeast Market. Al practically gave him his life history."
PTC "He cleaned me out," Mr. Fellner agrees amiably. "He wanted to know what I knew, what I thought. I said all kinds of stuff I probably shouldn't have said."
Mr. Hiss' ability to draw out a reluctant source probably shouldn't come as a surprise. In nearly 28 years on the New Yorker, Mr. Hiss has written about an astonishing variety of subjects. He's done more than 400 "Talk of the Town" pieces and innumerable signed articles, including profiles of Henny Youngman and Clarence Nash, the voice of Donald Duck. His favorite piece: a story written in the early 1980s about Hoover, the talking harbor seal at the Boston Aquarium.
"He says, 'Hello dere, hello dere -- how are ya?' " Mr. Hiss says, leaning forward as he affects a startlingly vivid imitation of a talking seal. "He even laughs -- he goes, 'Heh, heh, heh.' The aquarium was a little embarrassed by it, but I found it irresistible."
As for getting a job at the New Yorker right after college, he concedes freely, "I sort of lucked into it. When I was in college I didn't have any idea of what I wanted to do and sort of found myself spending all my time on the college paper, the Harvard Crimson. Without realizing it, I found out I was equipped with a skill.
"Somebody told me that I could get a job as a copy boy at Newsweek, which sounded interesting. Then someone who I had known at Cambridge had applied for and gotten a job on the staff at the New Yorker. I thought, 'That's ridiculous, I'll never get on,' but I got hired as a writer for 'Talk of the Town,' much to my astonishment."
Doing a "Talk of the Town" piece requires a certain knack, he says: "The idea is to present some sense of the flavor of New York that week. Sometimes you're doing something very lighthearted and sometimes more serious, with some real reporting. It's almost a letter from home. It took me a while to get the confidence. You're following in the footsteps of [James] Thurber and [E. B.] White and other accomplished writers."
As he escorts a visitor around the lush new offices of the New Yorker on West 43rd Street, across the street from the old offices, he still seems to regard the magazine, and its storied writers, with just a touch of awe -- and with well-placed good humor.
Asked if any of the magazine's crusty old hands balked at leaving their beloved, albeit notoriously dusty and gloomy, old quarters, he turns and says with a slight smile, "Maybe, but I think most of us were relieved to leave the place. One of the editors said it was like an abusive marriage -- you didn't know how bad it was until you got out."
For a 22-year-old neophyte writer in 1963, he says, the magazine could be pretty forbidding. "The New Yorker was a bit of a funny old place in those days," he says as he leads the tour through the spanking new lunchroom (it even has a jukebox that plays -- for free -- everything from Mariah Carey to Kay Kyser). "It hadn't taken on too many younger people for some time, and subsequently my hiring sort of broke a logjam and they started hiring a new generation of writers, so there were more people to pal around with.
"But initially, it was a pretty lonely place. It had a very private kind of feeling. Everyone seemed to know what he was doing, but it didn't involve you. That's why I'll always have a soft spot for Brendan Gill. He sort of took me under his wing right away."
Two other longtime New Yorker writers also befriended him. A. J. Liebling, he recalls fondly, "took me out to lunch when I just got here, to a lobster house near the Times Square area. He ordered us each a dozen oysters and a dozen clams. He ate those, and then he said, 'Now let's order lunch.' He was such an icon -- I grew up worshiping his writing."
Then there was Rogers E. M. Whitaker, who wrote marvelous pieces about trains for many years under the byline of E. M. Frimbo. "Frimbo was in many ways an old curmudgeon," Mr. Hiss says. "But for some reason I took a liking to him and he took a liking to me. Then we started traveling around together -- on trains, of course."
In 1974, the two collaborated on the book "All Aboard With E. M. Frimbo," and Mr. Hiss retains an interest in writing about trains. His latest "Talk of the Town" piece, in the April 22 issue, was about Amtrak's inaugural run of its Hudson River service into New York's Pennsylvania Station. Amtrak in fact called the first run the E. M. Frimbo Special.
Other books he has published include "The Great Panda Book," for children, in 1973; "Know-It-All: a Fix-It Book for the Clumsy but Pure of Heart," in 1975; "Laughing Last"; and "The Experience of Place," which came out last year and deals extensively with the impact that different environments have on one's life. In addition, he edited "Henry Chung's Hunan Style Chinese Cookbook."
Although the Baltimore article is done, Mr. Hiss anticipates coming back for more visits. "I think the nice thing about Baltimore is that you always leave town wishing you had had time to do more," he says. "There's a lot still I want to see."
THE HISS FILE
Born: Aug. 5, 1941; Washington, D.C.
Education: B.A. in history and literature, Harvard, 1963.
Family: Wife Lois Metzger, a novelist and former fiction reader at the New Yorker; first child due in June.
First signed New Yorker article: "It was a collaboration with Edward Koren on the Alexander Hamilton, the last of the old paddle-wheelers that went up the Hudson, that continued until the late 1960s. This was after five, six years of doing 'Talk of the Town.' I was in no hurry to do long, signed pieces. It was an apprenticeship I relished."
On working at the New Yorker: f,tem "I always thought it was amazing that here was this institution geared to giving so much thought to making something as good as it could be. Not only the fact-checkers, of course, which is something every writer here thanks God for, but a grammarian, an editor, a series of readers and then the editor in chief."