Esther Crain's Blog, page 10

The delightful 1960s-era sign above an old-school pastry shop in Kips Bay

Without La Delice Pastry Shop’s swinging 1960s store sign—a visual feast of blue and red, curlycue cursive, and capital letters—the southwest corner of Third Avenue and 27th Street would be just another stretch of Kips Bay.

Though the sign looks very midcentury, La Delice (which translates from French as “the delight”) has actually been around since 1935, according to the bakery’s website, meaning its 90th birthday is upon us.

Was the shop always on this corner? Considering that it occupies the ground floor of a white-brick postwar apartment building, you wouldn’t think so.

But take a look at this photo of the same corner from about 1940. It’s hard to make out, but the sign hanging off the tenement that stood here before the white brick building appears to read “pastry shop,” and maybe “La Delice” as well.

Click in to enlarge the photo, which comes from the indispensable New York City Department of Records & Information Services. Note the awning that reads “French Chocolates” on the 27th Street side, and “pies, cakes, pastries” facing Third Avenue.

La Delice has been under the radar as a New York City bakery destination, but it did make it into Dorothy Kilgallen’s Voice of Broadway column in 1945. A letter writer bemoaning the possibility of having to leave the city, calls out “the delightful odor that sweeps around the corner at Third Avenue and 27th Street from La Delice Pastry Shoppe.”

On a recent visit I didn’t detect that delicious bakery scent the letter writer noted. But what a visual treat of seeing piles of fresh cookies and pastries arranged on baking sheets in brightly lit windows!

[Photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

From horse stables to art studios to university housing, the changing face of Washington Mews

The Greek Revival row houses built on Washington Square North between 1829 and 1833, with their graceful stoops and elegant ionic columns, offered everything a wealthy New York family could want.

What would that be? Think spacious living quarters, backyard gardens, proximity to the theater, church, and fine shops, and assurance by the builders, who leased the land from Sailors’ Snug Harbor, that no factories would encroach on this residential enclave.

Elite residents also craved some distance from the filth overtaking lower city. And across the street was a lovely new park—the former potter’s field turned military parade ground, Washington Square. Access to the park was definitely a plus.

But for any New Yorker to live comfortably in the antebellum city, they needed a place to keep their horses and carriage, and possibly living space for the servants who tended to them.

So began the early years of Washington Mews, perhaps Greenwich Village’s most famous and photographed historic private lane.

Shortly after the row houses fronting Washington Square were completed, planning began for this back alley—an unusual concession in a city that was intentionally mapped out without alleys, as real estate was too precious to waste on horses and garbage.

Cutting a slender path between Washington Square North and Eighth Street, the Mews followed what had been a Lenape trail connecting the Hudson and East Rivers, according to James and Michelle Nevius’ Inside the Apple.

Once the Belgian block paving was in place, a row of two-story carriage houses were built—but only on the north side of the Mews (third photo). That kept the sound and stench of horses from intruding on the “deep rear gardens and extensions” of the Washington Square North houses, according to the Greenwich Village Historic District report.

Who were the well-heeled residents who parked their equipages here? Bankers and merchants, according to Village Preservation. The Row, as Washington Square North became known, enjoyed decades of status as one of the most desirable places to live.

But change was coming. In the 1850s, six new stables were built on the south side, freeing up space on the north side for the carriage owners living on Eighth Street, per the Greenwich Village Historic District report. No longer was it the exclusive lane of residents of The Row.

In 1881, city officials mandated that gates be built at the entrances of the Mews, clarifying its status as a private lane, wrote Christopher Gray in a 1988 New York Times Streetscapes column. (Fourth photo shows a gate on the University Place side.)

By now, artists were arriving; “the house and stable at 3 Washington Square North was demolished for a studio building in 1884,” stated Gray. Coinciding with the coming of the artists was the end of the horse and carriage era.

In 1916, Sailors’ Snug Harbor, which still owned the land, announced that “the little stables of the mews, whose usefulness has long since passed away,” will be converted into artists’ live-work studios, per Gray. ( Fifth image: 1917, looking toward University Place)

Artists like Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Edward Hopper, and Paul Manship did occupy the stables-turned-studios. More dwellings were constructed on the south side, and a renovation did away with many of the original brick facades in favor of stucco and the occasional ornamental tile.

Washington Mews’ next chapter began in 1949, when New York University purchased the alley—or the lease from Sailors Snug Harbor, as some sources state. Since then, school administrators have gradually transformed the cottages into faculty housing and facilities space.

Even though it’s a private street, the gates tend to be open during the day, so tourists and curious New Yorkers can wander through and imagine living inside this “charming little village,” as the Greenwich Village Historical District report describes it, isolated from city traffic.

If you stand still and concentrate, you might even sense the ghosts of the original horses clip-clopping on those Belgian blocks.

[Fourth image: between 1890-1919, New York Historical; fifth image, MCNY X2010.7.1.5302]

How these fairy-tale gates in Central Park connect to an 1860s hospital for the “ruptured and crippled”

Walk up Fifth Avenue to about East 85th Street, and something enchanting will catch your eye. Just inside Central Park are two granite pillars flanking cast-iron gates decorated with animal sculptures.

Bears, deer, mice, squirrels, a frog, a fox, a wold, a crane, and a crow—these playful sculptures set against a backdrop of tree branches are inspired by the stories in Aesop’s Fables.

It’s an appropriate theme, as the gates open to the Ancient Playground, one of the Central Park’s 21 play areas for kids.

But the pillars have a curious inscription. One carries a dedication to the memory of a William Church Osborn, while the other pillar calls out his accomplishments: president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1941 to 1947; president of the Children’s Aid Society from 1901 to 1949.

The pillar also notes that from 1910 and 1957 he was president of a group called the New York Society for the Relief of the Ruptured and Crippled.

The ruptured and crippled? Like institution and lunatic asylum, these Dickens-ish terms have been long abandoned by the medical establishment. But it made me wonder about the Society and to try to trace its origins.

That took me back to the New York City of 1863. With the Civil War in the backdrop, the newly formed Society founded a hospital led by an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. James Knight, in Knight’s own home on Second Avenue and Sixth Street.

In a city population of about 800,000, many people suffered from orthopedic problems and “ruptured” organs. That first year, more than 800 people sought help, including many children.

“Persons afflicted with ruptures, ulcerated legs [and] poor families having crippled children, suffering from spinal and paralytic affections, thronged our streets, dwellings and places of business, making revolting displays of their infirmities and misfortunes,” wrote Dr. Knight, according to this NYC Mayor’s Office page.

By 1875, the Society raised enough funds to open a much larger hospital on 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, below. (Above, the third image shows the play area for children living at the hospital.)

William Church Osborn, a lawyer and philanthropist from a wealthy New York family, got involved with the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled around this time.

Under his leadership, he helped negotiate the selling of the second hospital and the 1912 construction of a new, more modern facility on East 42nd Street and Second Avenue.

In 1940, the hospital was renamed the Hospital for Special Surgery, which exists today on 70th Street east of York Avenue.

So what’s the connection between Osborn and the animal gates?

After Osborn’s death in 1951 at age 88, city officials decided to honor his long history of supporting children’s causes by commissioning the gates, which would grace a new playground to be built north of the Museum this avid art collector once led.

In 1953, the “Osborne Gates” were dedicated. They are the work of 20th century sculptor Paul Manship, whose animal and mythological figures in bronze can be found throughout Central Park.

In the 1970s, the gates were relocated to the Ancient Playground; the previous playground was demolished to make room for an expanded Met museum building.

The kids scampering around the playground these days may not be able to read Osborn’s name inscribed in the pillar. But they meet eye to eye with the animals on the gates—which I imagine would charm the man they’re named for.

[Third image: NYPL Digital Collections; fourth image: NYPL Digital Collections; fifth image: Alamy]

A winter scene on Christopher Street in the 1930s that looks eerily similar today

The chalet-style elevated train station is long gone; the Ninth Avenue El, which ran along Greenwich Avenue, was demolished in 1940. (Though Berenice Abbott keeps it alive just as the painting does in this 1936 photo.)

The cigar shop in the little Federal-style house on the left has also bit the dust. The land is part of the churchyard of St. Luke’s, and the sidewalk is occupied by a row of Citibikes.

But otherwise, so much of Beulah R. Bettersworth’s 1934 depiction of Christopher Street looking down toward Greenwich Avenue is strangely unchanged more than 90 years later.

The three-story yellow building on the northwest corner of Greenwich is still there and still yellow. The two red-brick taller buildings to the north exist as well. The curvy awning at the entrance to the Hudson Tubes—aka, the PATH train—remains in place.

Beyond Greenwich Street, the Gothic steeples of St. Veronica’s enchant and delight. Far in the background, a sliver of the Hudson River lets us know we’re at the small-scaleend of this historic street in Greenwich Village.

I tried to capture the same view today, but my camera work is no match for Bettersworth’s eye. This was her neighborhood—she lived in an Art Deco high-rise on the corner of Bleecker Street—and she depicts her neighborhood with tenderness.

I’m not the only one so taken with this streetscape. “A wintry corner of Greenwich Village lives in this painting as Beulah Bettersworth knew it when she and her husband inhabited 95 Christopher Street, a block away,” explains the Smithsonian, which has the painting in its collection. (Before that, FDR had it hanging in the White House.)

“Closely observed details draw the viewer into the painting to join Bettersworth’s neighbors hurrying through the slushy snow, catching a whiff of tobacco from the cigar store in the foreground. Snow melts from the roof of St. Veronica’s Catholic Church, whose towers are visible behind the Ninth Avenue ‘L’ station. The elevated train station had been an elegant adaptation of a Swiss chalet when it was built in 1867, but by Bettersworth’s time it was an aging relic soon to be torn down.”

More about Christopher Street is known than about Bettersworth. Born in St. Louis, she studied at the Art Students League and became a WPA painter during the Depression. She exhibited portraits and still lifes; she painted a mural for the Columbus Ohio post office that by today’s sensibilities has been considered controversial.

She died in Tucson in 1968, and I like to think she’d be quite charmed to know that the contours of this part of Christopher Street are almost frozen in time.

How 19th century New York City fell in love with brownstones—a love story that endures today

The first signs of it emerged in the 1830s cityscape: brown porous sandstone began appearing around entrances and as window lintels on New York’s stylish Federal-style brick houses.

By the 1860s, brownstone-clad row houses were everywhere, going up across Manhattan and then Brooklyn (above, a brownstone row in Bedford-Stuyvesant) as fast as the Gilded Age’s upper classes could buy them.

Some rose four stories with grand proportions, including a tall stoop and elaborately carved doorway, such as the brownstone below, built in 1853 at 47 Fifth Avenue and long occupied by the Salmagundi Club. Others stopped at three floors and cut a more slender, less ornate appearance.

But what was it about this iconic house type that made it a symbol of New York City elegance and charm—and is still sought after today?

Before getting into the backstory of the brownstone, it might be helpful to define what one is. New Yorkers often consider any attached row of houses to be brownstones whether the facade is brick, marble, or limestone.

But a brownstone is a specific type of row house constructed between the 1830s and the 1890s cloaked in brown sandstone.

“Originally referred to as ‘brownstone fronts’ in the nineteenth century, the brick buildings acquired their name from the four-to-six-inch-thick stone veneer that covered the front side,” wrote Suleiman Osman, author of The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn.

This stone, much of it mined from a quarry in Portland, Connecticut, was actually pink when it was cut and shipped to stone yards along the East and Hudson Rivers.

But once placed on the exterior of a brick house and then exposed to the elements, it turned brown, stated Osman. That brown could be a reddish rust, or dark mud, or a brown that made the house appear “chocolate-colored,” as Edith Wharton, who was born in a brownstone at 14 West 23rd Street, disparaged it.

As Wharton’s comment reveals, brownstones have always had their detractors. In an 1840s dispatch, Edgar Allan Poe contemplated the destruction of Manhattan by predicting that “in some 30 years every noble cliff will be a pier, and the whole island will be densely desecrated by buildings of brick, with portentous of brownstone, or brown-stonn, as the Gothamites have it.”

Still, when the stone first appeared as trim on new row houses in today’s downtown neighborhoods—like on the entrance and base of the Isaac Hopper House, above, built in the Greek Revival style at 1838 at 110 Second Avenue—it made a fashionable impression.

It’s unclear where the first true brownstone residences were built. But a 1926 New York Times article that prematurely eulogized brownstones gave the honor to a group of row houses on an unnamed block in Chelsea constructed in the late 1830s.

Soon, brownstone fever hit Gotham. With the city’s population booming in the 1840s and 1850s, brownstone rows made their debuts in other upper middle class neighborhoods, such as Greenwich Village, Madison Square, and Murray Hill.

The elegant look of brownstone was part of the attraction. “Brownstones were an architectural trompe l’oeil designed to give a faux sense of historic glamour,” wrote Osman. “In an era when stone was seen as more monumental than brick or wood, builders used sandstone as a cheap substitute for marble.”

“The facing was carefully designed to give the illusion that the entire building was constructed of stone,” continued Osman. “Builders cut large slabs of stone to minimize any visible seams, giving the townhouse a solid brown and austere look.”

Builders found that brownstone had a practical appeal as well. The industrial revolution made it possible to quarry lots of it and mass produce design motifs that made each uniform row of new brownstones look slightly different than other rows in development.

Brownstones also reflected “the mid-19th-century popularity of Romantic Classicism, which glorified picturesque nature,” states an article on Brownstoner. “Brownstone echoed the dark browns, grays, and greens of the romanticized landscape.”

As the 19th century went on, different design styles supplanted the Greek Revival look of pre-Civil War brownstones. In the 1860s, Italianate architecture flourished, which brought more ornamentation and curvy lines (exemplified in the above West Village brownstone), according to Stefanie Waldek in Architectural Digest.

Queen Anne and Renaissance Revival brownstones began to appear in the 1880s and 1890s. These fanciful, quirky homes often incorporated other types of building material as well as brownstone, like limestone and granite, per Architectural Digest.

Parts of New York City that were not developed until the late 19th century, like today’s Upper West Side (below photo) and Harlem, tend to feature brownstones that reflect these later design styles.

All this brownstone love suddenly came to a halt as the 20th century began.

Brownstones were now derided as gloomy, their interiors hopelessly dark and outdated. The typical brownstone layout had a formal parlor in the front and a more relaxed parlor in the back, then a kitchen and dining room on the lower garden level and bedrooms on the upper floors.

The stone itself wasn’t always in great shape after decades of rain and snow, especially on the many smaller, more narrow brownstones rushed into development by 19th century speculators eager to sell to middle class families (like these below, in Bedford-Stuyvesant).

The New York brownstone, once so prized, was now regarded as a relic. Rows were bulldozed to make way for lighter-colored limestone or marble Beaux-Arts townhouses. In the 1920s, others were razed in favor of handsome luxury apartment buildings. (Below, a row condemned to make way for Tudor City in the 1920s)

Those that didn’t meet the bulldozer were carved up into small apartments, their tall stoops removed and replaced by a street-level front door. Those that escaped demolition often stood alone, random remnants of the era of silk hats and showy equipages. Few mourned their passing.

“The age of the brownstone front draws to a close,” proclaimed the 1926 New York Times article. “In almost every cross street of central Manhattan, from river to river, the dignity of brownstone gives way to shining new structures that rise higher. A hundred families come to live where but two or three have dwelt as the panorama of New York moves on.”

The Times’ obituary for brownstones turned out to be wrong, of course. By the 1960s, a new generation of urban dwellers were eager to take advantage of the space and historical cred of these dwellings.

Trailblazers restored them to single-family use. Historic Districts came into existence, protecting brownstones within their borders from destruction. Wide swaths of Manhattan and Brooklyn owe their revitalization—or gentrification, depending on your point of view—to their newfound popularity.

The brownstone era wasn’t over; it simply entered a new phase of its love story with New Yorkers. Even the Times, in its 1926 eulogy, was wistful about the passing of a house type that was, and once again is, an emblem of the city. (Below, a lovely row in Yorkville)

“The brownstone front was peculiarly and essentially the citadel of the home, the stronghold of an old-fashioned era before New York became such a vast hive,” the Times concluded. “In no other city did the brownstone front achieve greatness. It was respectable, prosperous, frock-coated New York at the best.”

[Ninth photo: unknown]

You can practically feel the biting wind and snow in this raw 1911 New York winter street scene

There’s a lot of white in this depiction of a blustery winter day in the New York City of 1911: white snow on the street, stoops, and light poles; white-gray skies filling with factory smoke (or smoke from ship smokestacks?) across a grayish river.

Then there’s the violent white brushstrokes of howling wind against the red brick buildings. The wind is painted so viscerally, you can almost feel the icy snow and biting cold (and sympathize with the woman shielding her face in her coat, holding on to her hat).

“City Snow Scene” is an early work of Stuart Davis, a Pennsylvania native born in 1892 who is much better known as a Modernist painter. As a 17-year-old launching a career in New York, he fell under the thrall of early 20th century Ashcan artists and their gritty depictions of urban life.

The painting was auctioned by in 2012 by Christie’s, which had this to say about it: “Through bravura brushwork and a simplified muted palette, Davis succeeds in rendering a dreary winter’s day in lower Manhattan.”

“With a generous application of whites, Davis works up the surfaces to portray the texture of the snow which is juxtaposed with the more carefully applied reds he employs to develop the architecture in the background,” per Christie’s website.

“Broad, heavily applied strokes of black are the only device Davis employs to represent the pedestrians with the exception of a few simple touches of orange that delineate the faces of the primary figures in the foreground.”

It’s how a New York City winter used to be—and is once again in winter 2025.

What a photo of a scruffy boy says about desolate, industrial East 79th Street in the 1890s

Sometimes you come across an old photo that commands your attention. That’s what happened when I found myself studying this 1898 image of East 79th Street between between York Avenue and the East River.

The caption actually states that we’re on East 79th Street between Avenues A and B—a reminder that both avenues originally extended all the way through the Upper East Side. Avenue A is York, and Avenue B is East End Avenue, which starts at 79th Street.

What’s this little boy doing on the rock-strewn ground of a stoneworks business beside the East River—close enough to what was then called Blackwell’s Island that the octagon tower of the lunatic asylum is within view? The caption says he’s drinking water from a spring.

An actual spring on the north side of East 79th Street? It’s hard to believe, but in fact Manhattan used to have plenty of springs. Some remain buried underground, only appearing during building construction, per this New York Times article. Today, you can still find springs in Central Park.

It should be noted that the photographer, James Reuel Smith, made a name for himself at the turn of the last century taking photos of springs and wells in northern Manhattan and the Bronx, documenting these vanishing waterways and the people who still drank from them. A book of his photos was published posthumously in 1935.

Who is this boy, with his heavy cap and delicate lace-up boots? I’m guessing he’s part of a family that moved uptown to the new tenement rows of Yorkville, where working-class and poor parents, mostly immigrants, toiled in factories, breweries, and on the waterfront.

The East Side Settlement House would be built on East 76th Street in 1903, offering activities and educational support for kids as well as their parents. But for now, an undeveloped stretch of land near the East River apparently made do as a play space, at least for this boy.

East 79th Street looks pretty rough in this photo. But within a decade or so, undeveloped areas like this would soon be cleaned up and turned into housing lots. What would become of this boy? With no way to know for sure, we’ll have to assume that he grew up and made his way.

[Photo: New York Historical]

The mysterious hole in the wall inside a beautiful 19th century Stuyvesant Square church

Since the 1850s, St. George’s Episcopal Church has stood majestically over Stuyvesant Square, a welcoming Romanesque castle in a pretty enclave defined by its namesake park—which was developed only a decade before the church arrived.

Now part of the Parish of Calvary-St. George, the church has a storied history going back to the 1750s. It got its start as a chapel on Beekman and Cliff Streets serving East Side residents who couldn’t make the trip to Broadway to Trinity Church, the city’s main Episcopalian church, per a 1975 report from the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

After separating from Trinity Church, the congregation grew, and in 1856 the current church was completed. Old-money New Yorkers made up the congregation in its early decades. But after the interior and roof were rebuilt following a devastating 1865 fire, an increasing number of German immigrants made it their parish into the 20th century.

The stained-glass windows, wooden pews, cavernous nave, and elegant carved wood pulpit make the interior feel commanding and sacred. But there’s something else inside the church worth calling out, and it can be found on a wall toward the back.

It’s a tiny hole—a bullet hole. But why would a bullet hole be inside St. George’s?

The answer has to do with one of the church’s most prominent parishioners, J. P. Morgan. The financier worshipped at St. George’s for decades; he served as a wardsman of the church and was instrumental in supporting social programs for the local immigrant community.

When Morgan died in 1913, his funeral, held at St. George’s, packed the church pews and attracted a huge crowd of onlookers outside Stuyvesant Square, according to the New York Times.

Though Morgan (at right, in 1890) gave generously to St. George’s and his philanthropy benefited many other organizations and causes, he had many detractors. One was a man named Thomas W. Simpkin.

There’s no evidence that Simpkin, a London-born printer described in another New York Times article as “a lunatic, recently escaped from an asylum,” had ever met Morgan. But that didn’t stop him from showing up at St. George’s on April 18, 1920 with a gun and plans to shoot Morgan—even though Morgan had been dead for seven years.

During services that morning, Simpkin “fired several shots,” according to Susie J. Pak, author of Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J.P. Morgan, killing “Dr. James Markoe, a close friend of the Morgan family.” Markoe had been passing a collection basket just before he was hit.

Markoe was brought to the Lying-In Hospital on Rutherford Place (which Morgan had funded two decades earlier), where he died. Simpkin, quickly apprehended, admitted that he “came to get Morgan,” per the New York Tribune on May 4, and that he did not know Morgan was already dead.

The New York Times article from April 19 states that Simpkin “drew a revolver and shot Dr. Markoe in the eye. He then fired another shot which lodged somewhere in the walls of the church.”

Accounts of the bullet still lodged in the wall have circulated online for some time. I wanted to see if it existed, and a friendly person affiliated with the church pointed the hole out to me. No bullet, just a bullet hole.

There’s a lot more to St. George’s besides a tragic murder in the middle of a Sunday service a century ago. And there’s a lot more to J.P. Morgan besides his detractors.

On Thursday, January 23, American Ancestors fine art curator Curt DiCamillo will be giving an afternoon talk at the Colony Club on Park Avenue titled “J.P. Morgan: Banker, Collector, Renaissance Prince” with a focus on Morgan as a collector of exquisite art and artifacts. Visit this link for more information and registration info to attend.

[Third image: Wikipedia; fourth image: NYPL Digital Collections]

This 1958 residence is the only house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in New York City

The most famous architect of the 20th century, Frank Lloyd Wright designed 1,114 houses, offices, and other structures during a prominent professional life that spanned seven decades.

Of these, 532 architectural works were actually completed, according to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

New York State has several Wright-designed dwellings. The Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue is Manhattan’s lone Wright building, ever since an auto showroom on Park Avenue and 56th Street designed by Wright in the 1950s was demolished in 2013.

But only one Wright residence was ever built in New York City. That would be a low, long house with cream walls and a crimson roof built into a dramatic hillside in the Lighthouse Hill neighborhood of Staten Island.

“The Crimson Beech,” a.k.a. the William Cass House (top photo from 2014) opens in an L shape hinged by a middle square of brick. Small windows on the front facade let light reach the longer wing, which has horizontal lines exaggerating its length.

Brick entry posts flank a circular driveway, and lush greenery enhance the house’s natural setting. Perched on a dead-end street with a stunning overlook (sixth photo) and complemented right now by tasteful holiday ornaments (second photo), it’s one house you can’t keep your eyes off.

The story of The Crimson Beech begins in September 1957. That’s when a Corona, Queens couple, William and Catherine Cass, turned on their TV and saw Mike Wallace interviewing Wright.

The couple owned property on Staten Island, and they decided to compose a letter to Wright asking if he would design a house on the site for them for $35,000.

The Casses were not strangers to Wright’s style.

“Mr. Cass, who worked for an employment agency, had been a fan of Wright’s work, and the Casses had visited a number of Wright’s buildings during their travels,” states the Landmark Preservation Commission (LPC) report on the house from 1990—the year The Crimson Beech earned official landmark status.

Wright replied, referring the couple to his colleague, Marshall Erdman, who suggested the Casses go with one of Wright’s prefabricated houses.

Living in a prefab house doesn’t sound particularly appealing. But Wright and Erdman came up with a system that made them affordable and beautiful, with no two prefabs appearing exactly alike.

“The Erdman prefabs were Wright’s last major attempt in his long career to address the problem of well-designed moderate-cost houses, and despite the lesser cost, he achieved a design quality consistent with his previous residential work,” states the LPC report.

The Casses went with Wright’s “Prefab Number One” house. Once the components of the home were trucked to Staten Island, it took four months to complete. They held an open house for the public, and Erdman attended an opening ceremony in 1958.

Wright (above) never visited; he died a year later. An associate, Morton H. Delson, remained an advisor for the couple. Delson is the architect who in 1970 designed the pool in the rear of the house unseen from the street.

Since its completion, Crimson Beech has been extraordinarily well maintained; it even retains its original exterior paint schemes, per the LPC report.

As for the interior, the long wing “contains four bedrooms, a gallery, a slightly sunken living room, and a basement level, while the other shorter wing has a kitchen-family room and a carport (with a storage room on the north end),” states the report—which is 35 years old, so perhaps some interior changes have since been made.

The back of the house is out of view from the street, but the LPC report describes “continuous double rows of windows, and sets of varnished mahogany and glass doors which lead onto red concrete terraces on both levels.”

The original copper beech tree that inspired the house’s name is long gone, as are the Casses. Mrs. Cass did talk to the New York Times in 1988 about the house, branding Wright a “tyrant” who chose the furnishings, fabric, and paint colors. She eventually forgave him because “the house required almost no repairs,” as the Times wrote.

Another couple who moved into the house in 2004 gave a wonderful interview to the New York Post for a 2017 article. The article features some rare interior photos, and it makes it clear these owners have a true appreciation for this one-of-a-kind dwelling.

[Top image: Alamy; fourth image: Brittanica; fifth image: Landmarks Preservation Commission Designation Report; seventh image: Wikipedia]

Deciphering the meaning behind a 1918 Financial District subway mosaic

If the walls of the Whitehall Street/South Ferry subway station were a little less grimy, it would be easier to see the terra cotta image decorating the walls across from the platform.

Surrounded by colorful tiles is a house: a three-story, colonial-style residence with dormer windows projecting out of the gambrel roof. Ships sail on the body of water behind the home, which has views of hilly land beyond the water.

It’s a lovely bucolic scene, a pretty and pristine vision of pre-Revolutionary War Manhattan. But whose house is it, and why are the walls of the subway station decorated with this image?

Whitehall Street takes its name from The Whitehall—the grand white stone home built in 1655 (or 1658, according to some sources) by New Netherland’s legendary director-general, Peter Stuyvesant.

From this governor’s mansion that jutted out on a small peninsula at State Street and the Battery, Stuyvesant presided over the colony and its budding, unruly island outpost, New Amsterdam.

New Amsterdam was established in 1625, and at the time The Whitehall was completed, Stuyvesant (at right) was several years into his 17-year reign. That ended when the British ousted the Dutch in 1664, renaming the outpost New York.

After being displaced by the British, Stuyvesant spent the rest of his life at his 62-acre bouwerie, a few miles north of his former mansion in today’s East Village. According to several sources, it was the British who nicknamed the mansion Whitehall after the Whitehall section of London, the seat of the UK government.

With the British in charge, the mansion eventually fell into the hands of the English-appointed New York governor Thomas Dongan and for a short time became the province’s custom house, according to the 1899 book Historic New York.

More than 200 years later, the street gave the subway station its name. The designers of this station, which opened in 1918, apparently thought that an image of Stuyvesant’s Whitehall would pay homage to New York’s historical beginnings.

The terra cotta image as history lesson is one of many still in existence in various subway stations. The beavers at the Astor Place stop, for example, are a nod to John Jacob Astor’s dominance in the beaver fur trade, while the sailing ships at the Columbus Circle station harken back to the ships that brought Columbus to the New World.

It’s always a treat to come across them, especially with the subway system in disarray these days. Interestingly, mosaics like these weren’t just decorative—reportedly they helped illiterate or non-English speaking New Yorkers get around underground.

[Second image: Palisades Interstate Park Commission via New York Heritage; third image: Wikipedia; fourth image: NYPL Digital Collections]