TYPEWRITER CITY COFFEE
A WRITTEN PLACE
Stories from Syracuse
Every place has a story. Some are hiding in plain sight.
Missives from the Archive:
Real buildings. Real lives. Unexpected chapters in Syracuse's history.
Story No. 1:
"The Place Where Toni Morrison Worked"
An editor arrives in Syracuse to work on literature textbooks. Her name is Chloe A. Morrison. The year is 1965. What happened here? And what can an ordinary address tell us about the beginnings of an extraordinary life?
A WRITTEN PLACE - STORY NO. 1 - "The Place Where Toni Morrison Worked"
249–259 West Erie Boulevard · Syracuse · New York · 1965–1968There is no plaque here. No bronze marker. No famous writer's name carved into the wall. Just brick, old windows, faded paint—and the traces of the businesses that came before.But this is where Chloe A. Morrison came to work.She was thirty-four years old. Recently divorced. The mother of two young sons.Living with her mother in Lorain, Ohio, she saw an advertisement for an editor in Syracuse. She read the qualifications and recognized herself in them.“Ah, that sounds like me.”She drove to Syracuse with her sister in her father's Oldsmobile. She got the job. At The L. W. Singer Company, she worked on literature textbooks—the books through which American students encountered poems, stories, authors and ideas. And outside those walls, the country was changing.The Civil Rights Movement was forcing publishers to confront what belonged in American textbooks, what had been left out, and whose stories were allowed into the classroom. Then there is the book. Open a 1967 Singer publication and her name appears quietly among the contributing editors to the Singer / Random House Literature Series.Chloe A. Morrison. Not Toni Morrison. Not yet.Somewhere in this city, while she was editing other people's words, Morrison was working on her own.
The story became The Bluest Eye. She would leave Syracuse for Random House in New York. The rest of the story is better known. But history has a strange habit of hiding its beginnings in ordinary places.The building doesn't tell us she was here. The photograph doesn't tell us. Even the book only whispers her name.Chloe A. Morrison.For a few years, she was simply an editor in Syracuse. And then she wasn't. Look closerThe story can be followed through objects that survived.