"Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay!": A Look at Cornell Woolrich's Mexican Connection

Cornell George Hopley Woolrich was born in New York City on December 4, 1903, almost exactly eleven months after his parents Genaro and Claire had wed at the Church of the Archangel in Harlem. In the type of foreboding calamity that occurred all to frequently in Cornell's books, the church burned down to the ground into cinders and ashes shortly before Cornell was born. Call it Black Archangel, if you will.For around four years after Cornell's birth the little family of father, mother and son lived together with Claire's five unmarried siblings--Estelle, Lillian, Olga, George and Irving--at the New York home of her wealthy widowed importer/exporter father, George Tarler, but in 1907 Genaro--a civil and metallurgical engineer who had received his advanced degree from San Francisco's Heald's Business College in 1895 and come to New York to work on the city's nascent subway system, upon which constructed had started in 1900--decided that the family trio should return to Mexico, basically…