Where have you gone, Bloodgood Cutter?

Part of what makes NYC so great (besides, you know, everything) is that this is a city full of "characters" -- real life people who almost seem to have sprung from fiction. Teddy Roosevelt,  Jimmy Breslin, Woody Allen, Howard Stern, Ed Koch, John Gotti, Al Goldstein -- these are just some of the past and present "characters" who have defined the NYC sensibility (for better or worse).

But none of them were named Bloodgood Cutter -- and, if his name wasn't enough, he was a New York City character both in real life and fiction.   

Born in 1817, Bloodgood was something unimaginable in NYC today -- a "poet farmer". He came from a family of farmers on Long Island and eventually cultivated farmland in what today is Little Neck, the easternmost part of Queens. Very religious, he spent a lot of time in Queens, particularly in Flushing, where he would preach about living a virtuous life. And he loved poetry -- particularly his own -- and even self-published his own, apparently very bad, 500 page book of poems called "The Long Island Farmer's Poems." He was also ahead of his time -- apparently, he was very against smoking long before it was fashionable.

I'm sure if he was alive today, Bloodgood would have a lively social media presence.

But Bloodgood did have a "rendezvous with destiny" -- in 1876, he took a trip to the Middle East and one of his shipmates was a certain well-known writer named Mark Twain. The scribe of Huckleberry Finn became quite fond of Mr. Cutter and decided to base a character on him in his subsequent novel Innocents Abroad. And so the eccentric farmer-poet from Queens was enshrined in history.

Talking about being enshrined, Bloodgood Cutter's grave is quite a site to behold -- buried in Zion Episcopal Church in Douglaston, it's a fitting resting place for an NYC character in NYC.



By the way, talking about New York characters, there's currently a new documentary about the two great NYC reporters Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill now on HBO called "Deadline Artists."