The Grandmaster by Brin-Jonathan Butler

Author:Brin-Jonathan Butler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

7

A PLACE THAT TIME FORGOT

During the championship off days, I’d been spending time in the New York Public Library’s rare-books section. I kept thinking of those tables in Washington Square Park. And not just those tables but the tables at parks all over the city: Union Square, Bryant Park, Columbus Park, Central Park’s Chess & Checkers House, Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem, City Hall Park downtown, Tompkins Square Park, even the scattered tables on islands dividing Broadway up in Hamilton Heights. How had New York and chess become so intertwined?

The best that I could determine, the story begins in the mid-nineteenth century with Paul Morphy. Morphy was born into wealth and was already a spooky child prodigy by the age of nine, beating almost any adult in New Orleans. In 1849, by the time he was twelve, he was even crushing visiting masters like Hungary’s Johann Löwenthal at the board. After receiving his law degree at age twenty, still too young to legally practice law, Morphy focused his attention back on chess and accepted an invitation from the First American Chess Congress to come to New York. There, he ended up becoming the United States’ first chess champion.

The following year Morphy traveled across Europe and toured royal courts and prestigious social gatherings, whereupon he destroyed nearly every challenger effortlessly. The American media eagerly grabbed onto the story—setting off what came to be described as “Morphy Mania”—and the popularity of the game soared on local soil. Chess clubs opened up everywhere from Philadelphia to St. Louis but especially in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The Book of the First American Chess Congress was published in 1857 by Daniel Willard Fiske, who dedicated the book to Paul Morphy, inscribing below his name, “The hero of that American tournament whose story is here told, and the conqueror upon the traditionary battle fields of Europe, I dedicate this book with every sentiment of esteem and friendship.” By 1857, several American cities were vying for the right to hold the first American Chess Congress. Philadelphia laid claim, with Ben Franklin having played the first game of chess ever recorded on the continent there nearly 125 years before (we know he played from at least 1733). The first chess book published in America, in 1802, came from a Philadelphia press. Chicago had the most organized and largest chess club in the country. Washington was the federal capital and the easiest place in which to gather amateurs from the South. Baltimore, Cincinnati, and New Orleans threw their hats into the ring. Finally, after a great deal of jockeying for position, “other cities peacefully and courteously yielded to the earnestly urged claims of New York, and it was finally determined that the first American Chess Congress should convene in that city, on the sixth day of October, 1857.”

Three decades later, the city also hosted the very first official World Chess Championships—the title for which Magnus and Sergey would eventually vie. This was in 1886, back when the American flag had

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