Federico García Lorca and La Nacional
The poet lived at the Spanish Benevolent Society on West 14th Street, and the film closes with him.
Federico García Lorca spent a year in New York at the end of the 1920s, the stay that produced Poeta en Nueva York. Part of it was passed on West 14th Street: he lived at La Nacional for between two and five months.
He was not the only artist the Society housed. According to sources of La Nacional, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel were among those who stayed there at some point across its more than a century and a half. The painter Joaquín Sorolla donated a portrait to the Society, of which only a trace now remains.
The neighbourhood Lorca walked into
The 14th Street of the late 1920s was at its most Spanish. Casa Moneo opened at number 210 in 1929. The restaurants — La Bilbaína, Trocadero Valencia, Bar Coruña, Café Madrid, Mesón Flamenco — were running. The church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe was saying mass in Spanish, and the procession of Santiago Apóstol came out each July.
A private bank on the street had collapsed in 1928, a catastrophe for the Spanish colony. El Despertar, the anarchist paper, had been published from the same world. This was the Spanish-speaking city Lorca was living inside.
The epilogue
The final episode of the documentary is a surrealist epilogue in homage to Lorca, with a reading from Poeta en Nueva York — the book written out of the year he spent in this city, part of it in the building on 14th Street.