Publicly and Spectacularly Crazy

JAMIE: This episode discusses disordered eating. Please take care while listening.

DARALYSE:  

 I walked into my first treatment center for eating disorders when I was 17 or 18. I’d been struggling with food and body image since I was about 8.

And I wanted to go to treatment because, well, I needed to go to treatment. I don’t know that I wanted to be there, um, but I knew that I was on a path of self destruction and that if I didn’t go, I was going to spend the rest of my life, as short as it might have been, um, destroying myself.

And so I arrived at my first treatment center and I walked into the ward and the door shut and locked behind me. And there was a woman. Pacing up and down the hallway, going up and down and up and down, and saying numbers to herself and words. Apple, 80. Yogurt, 140. And I was like, what is she doing? Well, turns out she was counting calories.

Like, tallying what she had eaten. There was another girl in the hallway, on a feeding tube, that terrified me. Never seen anyone on a feeding tube before.

And that was my first treatment center.

My name is Dara Lise Lyons and I’m a journalist by trade. And I’ve been in a jagged upward line of eating disorder recovery for at least the last 14 years, maybe a little longer.

 That first locked ward was a center where people were really, really ill, much sicker than any of the places I’d go to subsequently. You couldn’t go to the bathroom alone or hang out in your room // so everyone lived in this one hallway during the day.

That first experience was dehumanizing. I stayed for, I think, four weeks or so, left. relapsed and found another treatment center. Frankly, the old me used to love institutions. I wished I could spend the rest of my life in one because it almost felt like being bubble wrapped.   It was so painful to be in the disease that by the time I went into a treatment facility, I was like, oh, thank God, a break from myself.

I grew up in Connecticut, but as a result of frequenting all these different treatment centers, I’ve lived at various places in the country. I went into treatment first once and then twice, and then three times, and then 10 times . And every time it would work for a while, but then I’d relapse.

I’d come out and I’d be sort of manic.  One time I stole food on the way out the door of a treatment center and was binging and purging by the time I got home. They always tell you not to make any major changes in the first year of recovery, but I’d come out and I’d quit my job or end a relationship or fixate on finding the man or woman of my dreams or buy a house. I did that twice. I remember everything being very magnified. But it felt real.

So one day in my mid twenties, I went to New York City. Um, to see a soul astrologer. I was pretty desperate and I didn’t know if it would help me, but I knew that I needed to seek some sort of different solution. The only information that I gave her was the date, time, and location of my birth.  And I have no idea what she did. She had a computer program and she typed in some things.

Maybe I was just in a vulnerable place, but in that moment on that day, I thought, yes, I’m going to turn my life over to this woman because I’m a complete mess.  And actually, I felt like I could have turned my life over to a doorknob, and it would have done a better job of navigating than me.

 And then she looked at me and she said, why are you working in finance? That’s the wrong job for you. And if you don’t give up your eating disorder, you’re going to die.

And I was like, what? At the time, I was a fairly normal body size, and I mean, maybe she could have just looked at me and known, but I don’t think so, because no one else had ever confronted me before.

 But then This woman, her name was Margot, she said, I think you’re going to end up in Philly.

 Now, I had already been to the Renfrew Center twice before, and I thought, I’m not going back there again. They’re not going to help me. I’ve already been there. But I sat with her for a while, and she helped me find a treatment center in Chicago, which I ended up going to for a month.

It was my 16th institutionalization. And then I was transferred from there. To center in Florida for a month, my 17th, I went back to Connecticut very, very briefly. But I needed the bubble wrap of an institution again, and it turns out that the Renfrew Center in Philadelphia was one of the only long term transitional living programs in the country at that moment. I thought, Oh God, Margo was right. I’m going to have to go back to Philly.

THEME MUSIC IN

JAMIE: From WHYY, You’re listening to Philadelphia Revealed

I’m your host, Jamie J, executive director of First Person Arts, a nonprofit organization that believes everyone has a story to tell.

Across 10 episodes you’re going to get a tour of the Atwater Kent collection, sometimes called Philadelphia’s attic.

It’s a collection that’s grown over the decades, acquiring Philly’s material culture from individuals, families, and institutions. Sometimes literally from the trash.

In every episode of this podcast, you’ll learn about an object in the Atwater Kent collection and hear a story inspired by it from a First Person Arts storyteller. We think every Philadelphian will be able to see themselves in this collection, and that learning about Philadelphia’s many histories can help us understand its present — and future.

THEME MUSIC OUT

This is Episode Ten: Publicly and Spectacularly Crazy

With storyteller Daralyse Lyons. Daralyse is a journalist, actor, and activist who is passionate about exposing the painful side of history and standing for a more integrated world.

She was inspired by an oil painting in the collection. It’s from 1865 and it’s a portrait of a woman on a Philadelphia street… titled “Crazy Nora…”

DARALYSE:  It’s a picture of a woman standing on a brick sidewalk at a street corner in front of a hotel

She’s sort of dressed in, I would say, kind of like, um, androgynous clothing and wearing a top hat.

I think if someone just came and looked at this, they wouldn’t necessarily know the gender of the individual in the portrait.

And I’m really curious about this painting because it’s a depiction of a woman in Philadelphia, either in the midst of madness or, post having some sort of mental health crisis or mental breakdown.

And it reminds me, actually, a lot of myself. I moved to Philadelphia after being institutionalized and the Fact that this painting is referred to as Crazy Nora makes me think a lot about myself and how others might have perceived me from the outside and how I perceive myself.

I guess it was sort of against my will that I came to Philly, now I love it but I didn’t expect to come here or to stay here at all.

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JEN ZARRO: I’ve sort of fallen in love with this painting and gotten very granular as to exactly where she is standing in the city.

 I’m Jen Zarro, and I’ve been studying this painting since about 1999.

It’s a portrait of a tall woman standing next to a street lamp on the corner of 9th and Chestnut Street. With a serious expression on her face, wearing a plaid cloak, black boots, and a black hat.

JEN ZARRO: Those would have been her quote unquote, man’s hat and man’s boots that she always wore.

She’s looking off into the distance. Her left hand is resting on a wooden crate
The streets are cobbled and paved. // The gas lamp is in place. A beautiful hotel is in the background. Fashionable people are strolling the streets. And Nora is kind of just this iconic, tall, stately figure right there in the middle of the urban landscape.

Jen Zarro is an art historian who teaches at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. And…

JEN ZARRO: My great, great, great grandfather is William E. Winner, the painter. And often growing up my grandmother would speak about the figure of Crazy Nora or the artist. So this painting kind of had its own lore in my own childhood.

Willam E. Winner was a professional artist in 19th century Philadelphia. He exhibited his work every year at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. And was very successful for his religious paintings and portraits. But there’s one particular work that fascinates Jen as an art historian. It started with the stories her grandmother used to tell.

JEN ZARRO: What she said and what most people said about Crazy Nora is often repeated that she was a quote unquote bag lady or a homeless person who roamed the streets of the city and who was… sort of a crazy celebrity of the city.

She certainly was very famous in her day, so everyone in the city would have known her. And I think the painting kind of captured her as this iconic figure.

Kind of just fascinated me for such a long time. Who is she? What is her story? Why did he paint her? Why was she famous? Why was she called crazy?

Daralyse had questions too

DARALYSE: I’m less curious about the observer’s perspective of Nora and more curious about Nora’s perspective of herself // What her take on her own, like, quote unquote, insanity was and how happy she was with herself and with her life and whether she had hopes or dreams that she achieved or didn’t. // Like, if she had a voice, what would she say and how would she have wanted to be depicted, um, and I don’t know that there will ever be an answer to that, but that’s what I’m curious about.

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JEN ZARRO: Most of the accounts of Nora come through what was written about her after her death. But there are first hand accounts of her life told by folks of the time.

She was born sometime in 1788, 1790 in Limerick, Ireland. And her family was wealthy, but her parents died when she was quite young.

She wasn’t known as Crazy Nora then — her given name was Honora Power. Nora’s parents left her and her older sister an annual sum — 50 pounds a year — that should have kept them comfortable even as orphans. Nora went to live with her sister. But her sister’s husband stole the money.

JEN ZARRO: The family — Nora, her sister, and this husband are put out into the street. Their home is taken, their money is gone. // So she experiences this real like perfidy by this family member, this man who harms them in this way, and it’s one of these early tragedies of her life.

After that, she comes to Philadelphia.

Nora arrived in Philadelphia around 1820, when she was in her 20s or early 30s. An Irish immigrant, before the potato famine wave.

JEN ZARRO: She’s young and she’s alone. She is industrious, she’s hardworking, she’s Catholic, she’s pious, she is reliable, and she’s known for these things. She is a boarder, works as a nanny, maybe a housekeeper.

She finds a job working at a boarding school.

She is happy to work at an all girls school run by a woman after experiencing this upheaval by her brother in law, this man in her life.

JEN ZARRO: At the same time in Philadelphia, there was a new Catholic priest at St. Mary’s Church by the name of William Hogan. And he is a bit of a charlatan. His actions in the Catholic history of Philadelphia lead to a great schism in the Catholic Church. But Nora is kind of under his spell.

This is early in the history of the Catholic Church in America. The Vatican was far, and local trustees of each church — lay people in the congregation — held more sway than they do now.

At Nora’s church, St. Mary’s, there was a new priest, William Hogan, who the trustees and the congregants really liked. He was charismatic, a great talker, very social… Maybe too social. He was known for taking an interest in church ladies, who loved him. Articles of the time describe Hogan as “superficial” and “shallow.”

Nora supported him. But the bishop disapproved of Hogan. He tried to rein him in, and ultimately, excommunicated him. This led to a full blown schism in the church — one that Nora was deeply impacted by — and may have witnessed, or participated in.

JEN ZARRO: So there’s a big riot and a big fight, a very bloody fight from the accounts and the reports. Actual street riot. Bats, bricks, the church is kind of desecrated in this riot. People are fighting.

Reports sort of point to this as another really major moment in Nora’s life that lead to some kind of break, some kind of real uncertainty and stress that lead her to, the next day going to the roof of where she was living and start throwing bricks and stones and pebbles down and talking about saints and the devil

So most accounts point to that moment as the break that she experiences that really leads to her becoming called Crazy Nora

MUSIC

If you’re wondering about those “accounts” of Nora… why we know so much about this one particular Irish immigrant from the early 1800s… it’s because from this moment on, there’s a striking amount of documentation of Nora and her life — newspaper articles, poems, this painting…

JEN ZARRO: she begins to become a well known street character, as they were known at the time.

We know that Nora moved around the city pretty much day by day. // She was known to always have a very large bag or box with her full of her books, her salves, her trinkets.

She was known for trying to teach kids to pray the Lord’s Prayer and the Catholic Creed. And if they did, they would get a little bauble from the bags or boxes she would carry around with her every day.

She also had a little lending library in her bag. She would find books on the lives of the saints or, You know, romance novels of the day and things like that. And she would lend the books out to people for money.

I found, in my research, a bank account that Nora held. // So she always had a place to live. She had a bank account, and she had friends.

And she would interact with people and some of these interactions made her become very famous.

One recorded incident: when Nora walked into a Quaker meetinghouse and sat, not on the women’s side, but on the men’s.

JEN ZARRO:​​ There’s so much about Nora that is pushing against the norms, expectations And scripts and codes of the day // A Woman who was not wearing gendered clothing, and in the 19th century, that alone, right, would have had you been called crazy.

Nora also became infamous for one of her many jobs — as a debt collector.

JEN ZARRO: She was, to use the 19th century word, a dunne.

A dunne gets people to pay their debts, one way or another

JEN ZARRO: Stories say that she was put on the hardest cases // And she was very successful. One of her strategies for getting these debts repaid was to hover around the person’s house, or their place of business or wherever they were in the city and to kind of air their dirty laundry. To say like, well, I saw you walking with so and so, or to begin one of her religious stories like stories about the devil and how the devil was going to show up at your doorstep.

She would call on people’s deceased grandmothers, or her own deceased grandmother // and eventually she would wear these folks down where they would repay the debt in full

There are also reports that she would have to defend herself on the streets. // There are stories of boys taunting her, physically abusing her, often while grown men looked on, urging on this kind of play of these boys. // It is also said that she could throw a brick for two blocks.

All of this turned Nora into something of a celebrity. And not just in Philadelphia…

JEN ZARRO: One very interesting one comes from an early travel writing about traveling in London. The writer is in a park and says, // Oh, the women are wearing hats just like crazy Nora of Philadelphia.

Papers in other cities are writing about who is the new crazy Nora of our town // And so there’s reference to her continually for some period.

Jen still doesn’t know why exactly her great great great grandfather William E. Winner chose to paint Nora in particular.

He was known for “genre paintings” – a style popular in his day. Portraits of everyday people in everyday street scenes — like the Pie Man or the Street Urchin.

In Winner’s painting, Nora looks strong, tough. But what would Nora have thought of it? Or any of the accounts about her? Jen Zarro says in all her research she hasn’t found anything written in Nora’s own words.

JEN ZARRO: We don’t have a record of her saying, I am, or I want, or, you know, This happened to me, and this is how I feel about it, but I think we do have a record of somebody who unabashedly shaped herself and her life creatively, even within the stressors and limitations and codes // classism and anti immigration and nativist sentiment at the time.

She had so much pushing against her and she had so many stressors, not just personal, but vastly social, national, you know, and still she has this determined integrity that she sticks to throughout her life.

Nora died in a home at 16th and Lombard, which we know from an account published in the Catholic Chronicles. She was feeling ill and knocked at the home of a family she knew. Nora had pneumonia. The family called a priest to give her last rights.

JEN ZARRO: This is a person who cared about people and who had people who cared about her to her dying moments.

MUSIC

DARALYSE: I think that Nora was a person with a whole lot of dimensions.  It seems like there might have been some different communities that had different reactions to, to Nora, because she’s like a bill collector, right? and so I would imagine that there were those who feared her and there were those who idolized her and… just sort of, she wore a lot of hats, pun intended

 I think Nora in many ways was a product of her times, but I also think we could, you know, give her a different hat and a different outfit and, you know, she could fit in, you know, right here in Philadelphia in the year 2024.

MUSIC

In the painting Nora is standing in front of a hotel. And back when I was released from my 17th hospitalization in Florida and decided to give Renfrew another go, I drove all the way to Philadelphia and and was supposed to transfer to the new treatment center right away, But when I got here they said oh, we don’t have a bed for you and your insurance won’t approve you even though you were pre-approved before you came….

So I left but I had already left my family’s home in Connecticut, not on the best of terms, because they were pretty sick of me being sick, and so I went and I booked myself into a nearby hotel and I just spent like the next three days binging and purging in that hotel room. After a few days, the Renfrew center called me and said like, Oh, like, you know, we do have a bed. Like, so can you come tomorrow? And I was like, no, like tomorrow’s my mom’s birthday and I’m back in Connecticut. I lied, I was right there in Philly, just destroying myself probably two miles away.

But they said if you don’t come tomorrow, you can’t come at all. And so, the next day, I did go and check myself in. And I felt shaky, and like, what am I doing? And should I even be here and very ambivalent about recovery. I always feel ambivalent about my recovery in the midst of a relapse.

But a woman came up to me and asked what are you in for? She asked my name. I was like, who is this person? Why is this person trying to be friendly to me? When I’m not in a great place, I think everyone is out to get me and I think people are horrible. I think no one is kind or loving or gentle or generous. I assume the worst of people, which goes back to Crazy Nora, there was, like, a violence in her, and I have in the past when I’m not in a good place.

But there I was in this treatment center, my last one hopefully. I told this woman my name and then we talked about exercise. We probably had the most dysfunctional, like eating disordered conversation that ever there was. But we became friends. She broke my shell.

I was there for about three months. And I still ended up relapsing like not too long after that and calling my mom and being like, I need to go back and she was just like, what are they gonna do? You’ve been to treatment 18 times you’ve spent 9 months out of the last year in treatment centers, like you’re gonna have to figure it out, how to like be in the world. And she was right.

Somehow, I don’t know, I crawled my way out of that relapse and got into recovery in a real way. So here I was, in Philly, thinking I’d only stay for a year, but that I needed to develop roots. So I got an apartment and a job. And I don’t know. Philly took a hold of me. I started to make some friends, including my friend from the treatment center.

I got to know my neighbors. I don’t know, It was like some of my hardness melted away a bit, and I felt like I could be myself here. I didn’t know it yet, but that would be the last time I ever went into treatment for my eating disorder. I mean, I want to knock wood and say that it’s the last,

I don’t want to say I did figure it out. I think I just found really good supports and I managed to, I don’t know, hit a reset button.

I think that Nora was publicly and spectacularly crazy, but then again, we’re all crazy in some ways. Or maybe I should say that we all have a relationship with mental health that can be activated or not activated depending on some external circumstances or life circumstances, but one of the things that I most valued about Nora was How much value she gave back to her community

And I like to think that that’s also true of myself, that somehow my own struggles have made me more willing to engage and to fight hard for the things and the people that I believe in. And I don’t know, I admire Nora and if she were alive today, I would like to know her.

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Selections from the Atwater Kent collection are on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from July 18 to December 1 2024.

And that’s just one way to explore the collection. Coming soon — small exhibits will be traveling to public community venues, like libraries and schools; and there are regular additions to the Online Collection at philadelphiahistory.org.

Drexel plans to carefully add to the Collection, mindful that history is made every day, and significant portions of the past have yet to be included. The collection welcomes members of the public to help determine what’s missing.

Philadelphia history is still being told, and everyone has a story to tell. Philadelphia Revealed aims to find out what these objects mean to all of us, and how they add up to our collective history. So, come share your own story with us.

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