On this day in New York · December 25, 1899
Humphrey Bogart Is Born on West 103rd Street
Before he was Rick Blaine or Sam Spade, he was just the surgeon's kid on the Upper West Side, and his family didn't even hand out kisses on his birthday.
The facts
- Born
- December 25, 1899, in Manhattan
- Father
- Belmont DeForest Bogart, a cardiopulmonary surgeon
- Mother
- Maud Humphrey, a commercial illustrator and art director at The Delineator
- Childhood home
- 245 West 103rd Street, between Broadway and West End Avenue, where he lived until age 23
Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born on Christmas Day 1899 in Manhattan, the eldest child of Belmont DeForest Bogart, a cardiopulmonary surgeon, and Maud Humphrey, a commercial illustrator who ran the art department at the fashion magazine The Delineator. The family lived at 245 West 103rd Street between Broadway and West End Avenue, where Belmont kept his medical office on the ground floor, and Bogart stayed in that house until he was 23. Maud was the bigger earner of the two and a militant suffragette, which made the Bogart household an odd mix of Upper West Side respectability and quiet rebellion. It was a formal, undemonstrative house, not the kind of place you'd expect to produce the guy who made hard-boiled cool.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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I was brought up very unsentimentally but very straightforwardly. A kiss, in our family, was an event. Our mother and father didn't glug over my two sisters and me.
Humphrey Bogart, recalling his upbringing
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The block of West 103rd Street where he grew up was renamed Humphrey Bogart Place in 2006, one more small proof that this city claims its own no matter how far Hollywood takes them.
Sources
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