Alcove 1 at the City College of New York is surely the most famous lunch table in American intellectual history. No Ivy League dining hall can compete. In the 1930s, a remarkable coterie of students gathered there. (The neighboring alcove, Alcove 2, was a meeting place for students who hewed closer to the party line in Moscow, for the “Stalinists” as they would have been called in Alcove 1.) By now many books and documentaries have been made and written about Alcove 1 and its legacy, which in miniature is the saga of the “New York intellectuals.” They were mostly Jewish, uniformly gifted, and fabulously influential at midcentury. Their history can have the aura of myth.
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