By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Bogart Gets Street, "Brass on a Wall" For Childhood Home on Upper West Side
I hate missing events like this, but I guess it was on the Upper West Side, and God knows why anyone goes there, even when some ambitious video store owner ropes the city into renaming a block of West 103rd Street after the stretch’s most famous native son, Humphrey Bogart.
Manny Fernandez had the pleasantly anecdotal story yesterday in The Times:
This city usually greets the naming of a street with a collective yawn. But the official unveiling of Humphrey Bogart Place was something else entirely, part block party, part film symposium, part history lesson.
About 150 people gathered for the ceremony, and a hush of nervous excitement fell over the crowd when, at 11:56 a.m., the chairman of the city’s Housing Authority, Tino Hernandez, politely asked the people standing behind him to make room for the woman walking up the sidewalk.
She was the event’s special guest, Bogart’s widow, Lauren Bacall. A cheer rose from the audience. She looked elegant in a black suit, elegant and dry, with their son, Stephen Humphrey Bogart, by her side.
“It certainly was surprising,” she told the crowd of the honor, standing in front of her husband’s boyhood home. “Bogie would never have believed it.” …
Ms. Bacall had tears in her eyes. “It’s emotional for me because I loved Bogie very much,” she said. “I was married to him and we had a very lovely life together. It was much too short. It’s emotional.”
“And we love New York,” her son added.
“But,” she replied, “we love Bogart more.”
The Associated Press, meanwhile, notes that Movie Place owner and fellow uptowner Gary Dennis lobbied the City Council after logging 1,000 signatures on a petition, finally succeeding in scoring “a piece of brass on a wall” (as Bacall described it) for Bogart’s childhood brownstone that is now a public housing site. Good on him, I say; at least this city film enterprise did not require mass car removal.