Ever wonder why our ancestors died at such an early age? Here's a discussion I found on an Canadian web site about 18th century England:
"Every visitor to 18th-century London was impressed by the noise and the throngs of people. But the city itself was neither quaint nor clean. Most residents lived in appalling conditions. After the Great Fire of 1666, which destroyed more than 85 percent of the city, London was rebuilt in a hasty and haphazard manner. Then rapid surge in population - from 675,000 in 1750 to 900,000 just 50 years later - caused enormous pressure on city planners to get buildings up quickly. Houses and tenements were thrown together in a slapdash manner, with little attention to plans or codes. Buildings were patched up, subdivided, and subdivided again to cram as many people into as little square footage as possible, which left a jumble of narrow, unlit passageways between residences and shops. Walking through one of these stinking, airless alleyways - especially after dark - was terribly risky, since the convoluted pattern of streets provided excellent cover for lurking criminals.
According to Richard B. Schwartz's Daily Life in Johnson's London, 'The city had become honeycombed with what were intended to be temporary dwellings but which grew to be permanent ones. The scarce available land was continually subdivided. Courts were built upon. Business establishments were cut up into tenements. Hovels and shacks were commonplace. Many of the poor crowded into deserted houses. A sizeable number of the city's inhabitants both lived and worked below ground level.'
Commercial streets were no less hazardous. Many London buildings were made with such shoddy materials - crumbling bricks and knotty timber - that it was not unusual for them to collapse. Heavy, pendulous shop signs projected out from storefronts on large iron bars. The signs, regularly whipped by the wind, could create such force that the entire façade of a building would come crashing down. Often this happened on top of passers-by. The din and danger from these creaking signs led the city to pass many ordinances restricting their use.
London was filled with the smell of wet horses and the waste materials associated with them. Sanitation was unheard of. Water was unpurified, and raw sewage ran down city streets in open drains. It was common practice for people to empty their chamber pots out of their windows, and to leave garbage out in the street to rot. C.P. Moritz wrote in 1782, "Nothing in London makes a more detestable sight than the butchers' stalls, especially in the neighborhood of the Tower. The guts and other refuse are all thrown on the street and set up an unbearable stink." (4)
An amazing variety of filth slopped down London's cobblestone streets. Along with dirt, dust and animal manure, there was the ever-falling London rain to add to the mess. Cesspools of human waste collected in puddles everywhere. Dead animals (dogs, cats, rodents, even horses) were left to decay in the streets. In darker corners of the city, an occasional human corpse might even be found. To add to all this, horse-drawn carriages with heavy metal wheels often splashed through puddles, slopping the street's putrid muck all over strolling pedestrians
With its overpopulation, bad sanitation, and out-of-control housing, English cities like London was a breeding ground for bacteria and disease, and death was common. Epidemics, infections and occasional food shortages led to an extraordinarily high mortality rate. Medicine was still quite primitive. In fact, in 1775, more than 800 deaths recorded in the Bills of Mortality were attributed simply to "Teeth." Lice and dirt were everywhere. Soot and grime covered overcrowded tenements. In these circumstances, unbridled disease ran rampant, and even the smallest wound could lead to death by infection.
The connection between personal hygiene and good health was not fully understood. Francis Place wrote that in the 1780s well-off women "wore petticoats of comblet, lined with dyed linen, stuffed with wool and horsehair and quilted...day by day till they were rotten."(7) Baths were extremely rare - in fact, many people considered them harmful. In all six editions of Sir John Flyer's Inquiry into the Right Use of Hot, Cold, and Temperate Baths in England, he never once mentions bathing simply for the sake of cleanliness.
There was also a grave fear of fresh air, in part because of airborne diseases like "consumption," so windows were kept tightly shut. And because entire buildings were taxed according to the number of windows they contained, many landlords sealed them off, with disastrous results for their tenants.
There was a seasonal pattern of death. In winter months, when thick, heavy, encrusted clothes were worn day and night, respiratory tuberculosis, influenza and typhus raged. Dysentery and diarrhea came around in the summer, when flies transmitted bacteria from filth to food and water was at its most foul.
Of every 1,000 children born in early 18th-century London, almost half died before the age of 2. Malnutrition, maternal ignorance, bad water, dirty food, poor hygiene and overcrowding all contributed to this extremely high mortality rate. And if an infant did survive, it then faced the perils of childhood - namely malnourishment and ongoing abuse. Many poor children were dispatched to crowded, backbreaking "workhouses" or were apprenticed to tradesmen who used them as unpaid laborers. A Parliamentary committee reported in 1767 that only seven in 100 workhouse infants survived for three years. Stephen Inwood notes in his book The History of London that "workhouse 'apprentices' swept London's chimneys, hawked milk and fruit round its streets, and labored unpaid in the worst branches of tailoring, shoemaking, stocking making, baking, river work and domestic service. Later in the century industrialization offered new outlets and London pauper children were packed off to work in the cotton-spinning mills of Lancashire and Cheshire."
Fascinating, right? Click here to read the whole account.
Friday, August 8, 2008
Widows and Orphans
Here's an interesting factoid from the ESRC (Economic & Social Research Council) website that I thought I'd include on the blog because so many of my male ancestors (and a few female ancestors) died at an young age:
In England, between 1650 and 1700, the average age of women at widowhood was 47, rising to 53 by the early 19th century. Early 18th century valuations of widows' property in three different parts of England suggest that the property was worth between 38 and 79 per cent of their husbands', meaning that they didn't inheirit the entire estate after their husband's death. Where there were adult children, husbands left only part of the property to their wives. And, property was often granted to widows only for the length of their life rather than outright.
In England, between 1650 and 1700, the average age of women at widowhood was 47, rising to 53 by the early 19th century. Early 18th century valuations of widows' property in three different parts of England suggest that the property was worth between 38 and 79 per cent of their husbands', meaning that they didn't inheirit the entire estate after their husband's death. Where there were adult children, husbands left only part of the property to their wives. And, property was often granted to widows only for the length of their life rather than outright.
Friday before the Friday
Today is the Friday before the Friday when I turn off my computer here at the Technology Division for the last time. I'm going to miss a lot of folks here, many that I've known for nearly two decades. And I'm surely going to miss this great Dell computer with the dual-monitor setup. If you haven't tried dual monitors, by the way, you should try it. It makes everything you do so much easier.
Last night I watched a documentary on the Plague years of 1347-1351, the infamous Black Death that consumed Europe and the Mediterranean region back then. Now that I'm a budding genealogist, the program got me to thinking just how lucky we descendents of the survivors are to be here. After all, whatever individual ancestors were present in the mid fourteenth century, by the time the effects of the Black Death had waned, anywhere from a third to a half of everyone was dead. In some cities the death toll was even higher. Venice, Italy suffered a 60% death rate, while in the Italian city of Florence as many as 75% of the population died.
So how come we're here? What stroke of incredible luck decreed that our ancestors from 650 some odd years ago survived while so many did not? Naturally I turned to the internet to answer the question. I found the following possible explanation which was taken from a 2008 International Tribune article by Nicholas Bakalar:
"Many historians have assumed that Europe's deadliest plague, the Black Death of 1347to 1351, killed indiscriminately, young and old, hardy and frail, healthy and sick alike. But two anthropologists were not so sure. They decided to take a closer look at the skeletons of people buried more than 650 years ago. Their findings, published on Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the plague selectively took the already ill, while many of the otherwise healthy survived the infection. Although it may not be surprising that healthy people would be more likely to survive an illness, it is not always the case. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed thousands of healthy people in their prime while sparing many children and the elderly, whose weaker immune systems did not overreact to the infection. Sexually transmitted infections like HIV disproportionately affect the strongest and healthiest, for the obvious reason that they are the most sexually active.
Plague is caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, and it is usually transmitted to humans by fleas; flea-infested rats caused the 14th-century epidemic. The bacteria invade the bloodstream, causing internal bleeding that leads to shock and death. In the new study, the researchers examined 490 skeletons exhumed from the East Smithfield cemetery in London. The site, like many other cemeteries, was set up to bury victims of the Black Death and was almost certainly used for no other purpose. The scientists determined the victims' state of health when they died by counting bone lesions, defects that suggest previous infections and other existing health problems. The researchers also estimated age at death by noting dental development and using other established methods. As a comparison, they analyzed the bones of 291 genetically and culturally similar people buried in a Danish cemetery shortly before the plague began.
The aim was to find out whether the Londoners, who all died of the plague, were frail when the epidemic struck. In the nonplague Danish cemeteries, bone lesions were strongly associated with earlier death. If the Black Death killed without discrimination, such skeletal defects would not be associated with an increased risk of death in East Smithfield. Many of the victims would have had healthy-looking bones when the plague killed them. But this was not the case. Among the East Smithfield plague victims, bone lesions were also associated with excess mortality. In other words, many of those people were already in poor health when the Black Death struck. Most of the bone defects that the researchers found can be caused by malnutrition, and the scientists suggest that the findings may show effects of starvation on immune function. It is known from contemporary chronicles that many survived the plague, and they, the authors write, were probably well fed and healthy enough to mount an effective immune response.
'Even something as clearly deadly as the Black Death is still selective,' said Sharon DeWitte, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor of anthropology at the State University at Albany. The Black Death, she continued, is comparable in some ways to various emerging diseases of today like Ebola or SARS, and studying it "gives us some insight into who might be at highest risk for these new diseases."
The authors acknowledge that their findings are not conclusive. The samples used were from two geographic areas, and similar lesions could have been caused by diseases of varying severity in the two areas. Still, the authors write, the fact that a pattern of excess mortality was associated with different kinds of lesions suggests that the plague more often killed the weak than the strong."
The above piece was very interesting. But since I suspected that there must be other reasons, I kept looking. Here's another piece I gleaned from the internet which is equally intriguing in its implications:
"While we commonly think of the rat acting as a host for fleas and the plague bacillus, it was certainly not the only animal that carried the disease. Besides humans and rats, most animals were susceptible to the bacillus and were infested with fleas. There was, however, one exception -- the horse. According to Robert S. Gottfried in his book, 'The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe,' however important black rats were in the dissemination of plague, it is essential to emphasize that they were not the only secondary carriers. Along with the rodents already mentioned, additional secondary vector hosts included virtually all household and barnyard animals save the horse, whose odor apparently repels even starving blocked fleas."
Wow! So now it seems our surviving ancestors may have been healthy horse owners. Seriously though, I suspect, as you probably do, there's a lot more to it than that. For instance, might there be a genetic reason? Following that tack, I found a piece by Dr. Barry Starr of Standford University in California, USA, who wrote:
"There may be. There are many stories where someone who was in constant contact with plague victims didn’t die. Maybe genetics is the explanation. For example, in 1665, the plague hit a small village in England called Eyam. The town quarantined itself to keep the Black Death from spreading into the rest of the country. A year later, the plague had burnt itself out but half of the townspeople were dead. Was there something special about the half that lived?
In 1996, researchers tracked down descendants of the people of Eyam and looked for any mutations they might have in common to explain this high survival rate. What they found was a mutation called CCR5-delta 32. The CCR5-delta 32 mutation was already known for a different reason—people with one copy of the CCR5-delta 32 mutation are resistant to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. People with 2 copies are virtually immune to HIV.
The CCR5-delta 32 mutation probably arose a few thousand years ago in Northeastern Europe. It stayed rare until around 700 years ago when it suddenly became more common. The plague started in Europe around 700 years ago.
So, does CCR5-delta 32 protect people from the plague bacteria? Probably not. Mice infected with the plague bacteria died at around the same rates whether or not they had the CCR5-delta 32 mutation.
Why then is this mutation so common in Europeans and even more common in people whose ancestors came from Eyam? Maybe smallpox is the reason. Smallpox killed 3 in 10infected people for thousands of years in Europe. Recent studies suggest that smallpox, like HIV, can’t infect someone with the CCR5-delta 32 mutation.
Of course this doesn’t explain Eyam (unless there was a lot of smallpox in the area). A more controversial theory is that an unknown virus, not the plague bacteria, caused the Black Death. Besides the evidence of the CCR5-delta 32 mutation itself, some people contend that the disease shouldn’t have been stopped by quarantine and that it spread too quickly for a flea borne illness.
Anyway, as you can see, while genetics were probably involved, there isn’t yet a solid answer as to what genes were involved."
Now, that makes sense. We all know how immunity works. As kids, we get shots all the time to build up our immunity to nasty diseases. If our ancient ancestors, those that came before the plague survivors, had contracted some disease that provided them some protection against the Black Death, it would make sense that they might survive, especially if their non-surviving neighbors did not possess that genetic protection.
Of course, there's no way to know at present. But with the speed at which scientific advances are being made in genetics, I'm sure we're going to know more on this subject in the very near future. Until then, click here to see more information on the study being done on CCR5 delta-32.
Last night I watched a documentary on the Plague years of 1347-1351, the infamous Black Death that consumed Europe and the Mediterranean region back then. Now that I'm a budding genealogist, the program got me to thinking just how lucky we descendents of the survivors are to be here. After all, whatever individual ancestors were present in the mid fourteenth century, by the time the effects of the Black Death had waned, anywhere from a third to a half of everyone was dead. In some cities the death toll was even higher. Venice, Italy suffered a 60% death rate, while in the Italian city of Florence as many as 75% of the population died.
So how come we're here? What stroke of incredible luck decreed that our ancestors from 650 some odd years ago survived while so many did not? Naturally I turned to the internet to answer the question. I found the following possible explanation which was taken from a 2008 International Tribune article by Nicholas Bakalar:
"Many historians have assumed that Europe's deadliest plague, the Black Death of 1347to 1351, killed indiscriminately, young and old, hardy and frail, healthy and sick alike. But two anthropologists were not so sure. They decided to take a closer look at the skeletons of people buried more than 650 years ago. Their findings, published on Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the plague selectively took the already ill, while many of the otherwise healthy survived the infection. Although it may not be surprising that healthy people would be more likely to survive an illness, it is not always the case. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed thousands of healthy people in their prime while sparing many children and the elderly, whose weaker immune systems did not overreact to the infection. Sexually transmitted infections like HIV disproportionately affect the strongest and healthiest, for the obvious reason that they are the most sexually active.Plague is caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, and it is usually transmitted to humans by fleas; flea-infested rats caused the 14th-century epidemic. The bacteria invade the bloodstream, causing internal bleeding that leads to shock and death. In the new study, the researchers examined 490 skeletons exhumed from the East Smithfield cemetery in London. The site, like many other cemeteries, was set up to bury victims of the Black Death and was almost certainly used for no other purpose. The scientists determined the victims' state of health when they died by counting bone lesions, defects that suggest previous infections and other existing health problems. The researchers also estimated age at death by noting dental development and using other established methods. As a comparison, they analyzed the bones of 291 genetically and culturally similar people buried in a Danish cemetery shortly before the plague began.
The aim was to find out whether the Londoners, who all died of the plague, were frail when the epidemic struck. In the nonplague Danish cemeteries, bone lesions were strongly associated with earlier death. If the Black Death killed without discrimination, such skeletal defects would not be associated with an increased risk of death in East Smithfield. Many of the victims would have had healthy-looking bones when the plague killed them. But this was not the case. Among the East Smithfield plague victims, bone lesions were also associated with excess mortality. In other words, many of those people were already in poor health when the Black Death struck. Most of the bone defects that the researchers found can be caused by malnutrition, and the scientists suggest that the findings may show effects of starvation on immune function. It is known from contemporary chronicles that many survived the plague, and they, the authors write, were probably well fed and healthy enough to mount an effective immune response.
'Even something as clearly deadly as the Black Death is still selective,' said Sharon DeWitte, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor of anthropology at the State University at Albany. The Black Death, she continued, is comparable in some ways to various emerging diseases of today like Ebola or SARS, and studying it "gives us some insight into who might be at highest risk for these new diseases."
The authors acknowledge that their findings are not conclusive. The samples used were from two geographic areas, and similar lesions could have been caused by diseases of varying severity in the two areas. Still, the authors write, the fact that a pattern of excess mortality was associated with different kinds of lesions suggests that the plague more often killed the weak than the strong."
The above piece was very interesting. But since I suspected that there must be other reasons, I kept looking. Here's another piece I gleaned from the internet which is equally intriguing in its implications:
"While we commonly think of the rat acting as a host for fleas and the plague bacillus, it was certainly not the only animal that carried the disease. Besides humans and rats, most animals were susceptible to the bacillus and were infested with fleas. There was, however, one exception -- the horse. According to Robert S. Gottfried in his book, 'The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe,' however important black rats were in the dissemination of plague, it is essential to emphasize that they were not the only secondary carriers. Along with the rodents already mentioned, additional secondary vector hosts included virtually all household and barnyard animals save the horse, whose odor apparently repels even starving blocked fleas."
Wow! So now it seems our surviving ancestors may have been healthy horse owners. Seriously though, I suspect, as you probably do, there's a lot more to it than that. For instance, might there be a genetic reason? Following that tack, I found a piece by Dr. Barry Starr of Standford University in California, USA, who wrote:
"There may be. There are many stories where someone who was in constant contact with plague victims didn’t die. Maybe genetics is the explanation. For example, in 1665, the plague hit a small village in England called Eyam. The town quarantined itself to keep the Black Death from spreading into the rest of the country. A year later, the plague had burnt itself out but half of the townspeople were dead. Was there something special about the half that lived?
In 1996, researchers tracked down descendants of the people of Eyam and looked for any mutations they might have in common to explain this high survival rate. What they found was a mutation called CCR5-delta 32. The CCR5-delta 32 mutation was already known for a different reason—people with one copy of the CCR5-delta 32 mutation are resistant to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. People with 2 copies are virtually immune to HIV.
The CCR5-delta 32 mutation probably arose a few thousand years ago in Northeastern Europe. It stayed rare until around 700 years ago when it suddenly became more common. The plague started in Europe around 700 years ago.
So, does CCR5-delta 32 protect people from the plague bacteria? Probably not. Mice infected with the plague bacteria died at around the same rates whether or not they had the CCR5-delta 32 mutation.
Why then is this mutation so common in Europeans and even more common in people whose ancestors came from Eyam? Maybe smallpox is the reason. Smallpox killed 3 in 10infected people for thousands of years in Europe. Recent studies suggest that smallpox, like HIV, can’t infect someone with the CCR5-delta 32 mutation.
Of course this doesn’t explain Eyam (unless there was a lot of smallpox in the area). A more controversial theory is that an unknown virus, not the plague bacteria, caused the Black Death. Besides the evidence of the CCR5-delta 32 mutation itself, some people contend that the disease shouldn’t have been stopped by quarantine and that it spread too quickly for a flea borne illness.
Anyway, as you can see, while genetics were probably involved, there isn’t yet a solid answer as to what genes were involved."
Now, that makes sense. We all know how immunity works. As kids, we get shots all the time to build up our immunity to nasty diseases. If our ancient ancestors, those that came before the plague survivors, had contracted some disease that provided them some protection against the Black Death, it would make sense that they might survive, especially if their non-surviving neighbors did not possess that genetic protection.
Of course, there's no way to know at present. But with the speed at which scientific advances are being made in genetics, I'm sure we're going to know more on this subject in the very near future. Until then, click here to see more information on the study being done on CCR5 delta-32.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
84 Charing Cross Road, London
Concetta and I have long been fans of the movie, 84 Charing Cross Road with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. It's a story of a relationship fostered by the love of books. Anne's character, Helene Hanff, is a writer and bibliophile in New York City and is having trouble finding the fine literature she craves. She begins to correspond with Frank Doel, played by Hopkins, who is a clerk in a bookshop in London. The time frame is post WWII. As the movie jacket details, "Their intimate, richly detailed letters draw us into their lives as Helen and Frank share their dreams, hopes, sorrows, and joys and in doing so, develop a lasting and extraordinary friendship."
We've watched the movie several times and each time we grow to love it more. Though we know there's probably no book shop at 84 Charing Cross Road, we certainly plan to navigate our way there when we visit London this fall just to satisfy our curiosity.
The book was actually written by the real Helene Hanff. Wikipedia says of her, "Helene Hanff (April 15, 1916–April 9, 1997) was an American writer. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she is best known as the author of the book 84 Charing Cross Road, which became the basis for a play, teleplay, and film of the same name.
Helene's career, which saw her move from writing unproduced plays to helping create some of the earliest television dramas to becoming a kind of professional New Yorker, goes far beyond the charm of that one book. She called her 1961 memoir Underfoot in Show Business, and it chronicled the struggle of an ambitious young playwright to make it in the world of New York theatre in the 1940s and 1950s. She worked in publicists' offices and spent summers on the "straw hat" circuit along the East Coast of the United States, writing plays that were admired by some of Broadway's leading producers but which somehow never saw the light of day.
She wrote and edited scripts for a variety of early television dramas produced out of New York, all the while continuing to try and move from being what she called "one of the 999 out of 1,000 who don't become Noel Coward." When the bulk of television production moved to California, her work slowly dried up, and she turned to writing for magazines and, eventually, to the books that made her reputation.
First published in 1970, the epistolary work 84 Charing Cross Road chronicles her 20 years of correspondence with Frank Doel, the chief buyer for Marks & Co., a London bookshop, on which she depended for the obscure classics and British literature titles around which her passion for self-education revolved. She became intimately involved in the lives of the shop's staff, sending them food parcels during England's post-war shortages and sharing with them details of her life in Manhattan.
Due to financial difficulties and an aversion to travel, she put off visiting her English friends until too late; Doel died in December 1968 from peritonitis from a burst appendix, and the bookshop eventually closed. Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty but still standing shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.
In the 1987 film adaptation, Hanff was played by Anne Bancroft, while Anthony Hopkins took the part of Frank Doel. Anne Jackson had earlier played Hanff in a 1975 adaptation of the book for British television. Ellen Burstyn recreated the role on Broadway in 1982 at the Nederlander Theater in New York City.
Hanff was never shy about her fondness for cigarettes and martinis, but nevertheless lived to be 80, dying of diabetes in 1997 in New York City. The apartment building where she lived at 305 E. 72nd Street has been named "Charing Cross House" in her honor. A bronze plaque next to the front door commemorates her residence and authorship of the book."
We've watched the movie several times and each time we grow to love it more. Though we know there's probably no book shop at 84 Charing Cross Road, we certainly plan to navigate our way there when we visit London this fall just to satisfy our curiosity.
The book was actually written by the real Helene Hanff. Wikipedia says of her, "Helene Hanff (April 15, 1916–April 9, 1997) was an American writer. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she is best known as the author of the book 84 Charing Cross Road, which became the basis for a play, teleplay, and film of the same name.
Helene's career, which saw her move from writing unproduced plays to helping create some of the earliest television dramas to becoming a kind of professional New Yorker, goes far beyond the charm of that one book. She called her 1961 memoir Underfoot in Show Business, and it chronicled the struggle of an ambitious young playwright to make it in the world of New York theatre in the 1940s and 1950s. She worked in publicists' offices and spent summers on the "straw hat" circuit along the East Coast of the United States, writing plays that were admired by some of Broadway's leading producers but which somehow never saw the light of day.
She wrote and edited scripts for a variety of early television dramas produced out of New York, all the while continuing to try and move from being what she called "one of the 999 out of 1,000 who don't become Noel Coward." When the bulk of television production moved to California, her work slowly dried up, and she turned to writing for magazines and, eventually, to the books that made her reputation.
First published in 1970, the epistolary work 84 Charing Cross Road chronicles her 20 years of correspondence with Frank Doel, the chief buyer for Marks & Co., a London bookshop, on which she depended for the obscure classics and British literature titles around which her passion for self-education revolved. She became intimately involved in the lives of the shop's staff, sending them food parcels during England's post-war shortages and sharing with them details of her life in Manhattan.
Due to financial difficulties and an aversion to travel, she put off visiting her English friends until too late; Doel died in December 1968 from peritonitis from a burst appendix, and the bookshop eventually closed. Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty but still standing shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.
In the 1987 film adaptation, Hanff was played by Anne Bancroft, while Anthony Hopkins took the part of Frank Doel. Anne Jackson had earlier played Hanff in a 1975 adaptation of the book for British television. Ellen Burstyn recreated the role on Broadway in 1982 at the Nederlander Theater in New York City.
Hanff was never shy about her fondness for cigarettes and martinis, but nevertheless lived to be 80, dying of diabetes in 1997 in New York City. The apartment building where she lived at 305 E. 72nd Street has been named "Charing Cross House" in her honor. A bronze plaque next to the front door commemorates her residence and authorship of the book."
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