Told / Retrieval

Meet Zoe Anderson Norris, the "Nellie Bly You've Never Heard Of"

Norris, who dubbed herself the "Queen of Bohemia," exposed the injustices of post-Gilded Age New York City—by going undercover.

by Ann Lewinson via Hell Gate on February 28, 2023

...she claimed she didn't have. Could she volunteer instead, going from bar room to bar room, collecting contributions with a pail? An old woman laughed. They only wanted 16-, 17-year-olds girls, she told the newcomer, ones who were young enough to charm the pocket change out of drunken men.

"If you want to join the Salvation Army and get help from it," wrote Zoe Anderson Norris after she returned to her apartment on East 15th Street, "don't be penniless and footsore and weary of a Saturday afternoon. Wait until Monday."

Norris had gone undercover for the first issue of the East Side, her bimonthly magazine that took aim at the scoundrels of her time: the city's robber barons, sweatshop owners, and charities that lined their own pockets while the poor went hungry.

From 1909 to 1914, New Yorkers could pick up the East Side at bookstores like Brentano's, in department stores, and at subway newsstands. Its readers got undercover investigations, theater reviews, rants, poetry, and even restaurant recommendations, all penned by Norris, who gave herself every title on the masthead, including "Poo Bah," "Circulation Liar," and "The Whole Shebang." Now, the whole shebang, along with other artifacts from Norris's remarkable career, will be on display at the Grolier Club in the exhibit "To fight for the poor with my pen: Zoe Anderson Norris, Queen of Bohemia," running from March 2 through May 13.

"She's the Nellie Bly you've never heard of," said Eve M. Kahn, Norris's biographer and the curator of the new exhibit. Like Bly, the 19^th-century investigative journalist who once checked into an asylum for the New York World, Norris exposed injustice by going undercover, joining a lineage of muckraking reporters. "There was a whole 'stunt girls' thing, that George Plimpton thing where 'I'm going to go out and try to be a football player,'" said Kahn.

By the time Norris founded the East Side, she was a twice-divorced grandmother in her forties who routinely shaved a decade off her age. As a housewife in Wichita, the Kentucky-born Norris had dealt with her first husband's infidelities by churning out tales of hardworking and self-sufficient women led astray by handsome cads for women's magazines, stories that could have been prototypes for Lifetime movies. She also embarked on a career in journalism. Irked by the stereotype that Southerners were lazy, she hiked Pikes Peak wearing thin slippers, and sold an account of her adventure to the Philadelphia Inquirer. She soon became one of the most popular writers of what were then called “sketches” in American newspapers.