Last Thursday, the New York Times ran one of its “At Home With . . . ” features on Tony Hiss, son of the late Communist spy Alger Hiss and author of a new memoir. It would be churlish to fault Mr. Hiss’s wife Lois Metzger for comparing Alger Hiss to her own grandmother, who survived the Nazi concentration camps; this, after all, is not a news article but a puff piece in the paper’s “House & Home” section.
The story, which includes the jump-headline “A Son’s Debt of Honor” (what debt? what honor?), describes the Hiss apartment as something of a time-capsule, largely unchanged since Alger and Priscilla Hiss moved into it in 1947. The implication is that Tony Hiss has kept the apartment as a shrine to his martyred dad, rather than decamp for more luxurious surroundings, out of a deep sense of filial piety.
But THE SCRAPBOOK couldn’t help noticing that 1947 saw the very dawn of New York’s notorious rent-control policies. And we find out midway through the article that this is actually a gorgeous Greenwich village apartment overlooking a rare crabapple orchard in one of the toniest (no pun intended) downtown Manhattan neighborhoods. In other words, it’s an apartment that any CEO or publishing magnate or mergers-and-acquisitions specialist would give his right arm for. And what are the Hisses paying for it? (Probably $ 67.85 a month, though the Times didn’t tell.)
It’s not that we wouldn’t want that apartment ourselves. But we wouldn’t consider hanging onto it a sign of our special virtue.
