"He patted me on the back..."

In the fall of 1901 Ima was beginning music studies in New York City. She was no stranger to the city, having visited there with her father in 1894. But since then it had more than doubled in population, with over 3,500,000 people. On her 1894 visit she had seen the sights--the Brooklyn Bridge (1883), the Statue of Liberty (1886), and the tallest building, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World Building, at 20 stories, completed in 1890. By 1901 a taller landmark, the Flatiron Building at the intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 23^rd Street was under construction. It would be finished in 1902. This triangular architectural oddity, shaped like a flatiron, was 21 stories tall.

Ima boarded at Mrs. Greene’s School for Young Ladies, just off Riverside Drive at 311 West 82^nd Street, but she attended the National Conservatory of Music on East 17^th Street, just off Union Square. That was about 60 blocks from Mrs. Greene’s, so Ima would most likely have taken a trolley car across Manhattan. With numerous stops, the trip would have taken half an hour or more. New York had no subways until 1904.

The nineteen-year-old from Texas found Manhattan a cultural wonderland: Plays and musical comedies and operettas flourished on Broadway (though electric lights on marquees did not make it the “Great White Way” until 1906).  Operas and concerts (the Metropolitan Opera had been there since 1883) beckoned.

As for her studies at the National Conservatory of Music, she met with disappointment at first: 

My teachers in Austin had greatly exaggerated my talent and status as a performer. I was advised to play for the great master pianist and teacher, Rafael Joseffy. When he heard me play he patted me on the back and suggested another preparatory teacher. . . .

Ima’s audition was evidently a disaster. She told Vivian Breziger, her best friend in Austin, and word spread. Another friend wrote to Ima, consoling her for her “complete failure , improvising, etc., etc., and of his [Joseffy’s] refusing to accept you as a pupil.”

But all was not lost, as Ima wrote later:

Soon after that I heard Adele Margulies [another pianist/teacher at the Conservatory] play with her trio and I knew at once she had what I wanted. She was an amazing pedagogue who knew how to impart what she knew to others. . . . Under her I felt transformed and for two or more years with intervals in between for a long time I progressed rapidly.

         And she enjoyed herself immensely, as we shall see.