Melville Memorial, 6 Pearl Street, Photo: Wally Gobetz

We missed the bicentennial of Herman Melville‘s birthday.  He was born just over 200 years ago on August 1, 1819, in a boarding house on 6 Pearl Street, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City.  In honor of the bicentennial here is an updated post from a few years ago on visiting Melville’s birthplace. 

The boarding house where Melville was born is long gone. A 42-story gleaming glass and metal skyscraper, 17 State Street, rises where the building once stood. One photographer referred to the building as a “great white whale” which is certainly evocative. While the boarding house is gone, there is a plaque and bronze bust of Melville roughly on the site of the original structure.

The memorial is easy to miss, particularly on a busy Manhattan morning when the entire world seems to be rushing by on the sidewalks of one of the world’s great financial centers. One might think of this as sadly fitting. Melville was, after all, a failure in his own time. Each of his books had been out of print for thirty years before his death. So, one might be saddened that the memorial of his birth is in an out-of-the-way spot in the side of a just another glass-walled skyscraper.

But, before you find yourself growing “grim about the mouth” or sinking into “a damp, drizzly November of [the] soul,” turn around.

Coffee House across the street from Melville’s birthplace

Across the street is a coffee shop, specifically a Starbucks, the company named after the mate of the whaleship, Pequod, from Melville’s greatest novel, Moby Dick. This is only one over 200 Starbucks in New York City and over 20,000 in 62 countries around the world. No doubt, most Starbuck patrons will not remember Melville’s 200th birthday. Nevertheless, I raise my cup of coffee to the immortal Herman Melville, the patron saint of failed writers, the author of Moby Dick, Billy Budd, White Jacket, Typee and Pierre, and as wholly integral to our culture as the first cup of coffee in the morning.

Update: This was originally posted in 2013 when there was indeed a Starbucks directly across the street from the Melville Memorial on Pearl Street. In New York real estate, as in life itself, change is constant. The coffee shop has moved further up Pearl Street. In fact, there are now two Starbucks a short walk up Pearl Street from the Memorial, the first at 110 Pearl and the second at 375 Pearl Street.