Esther Crain's Blog, page 11

All that remains of an old-school Gramercy pawn shop is its wonderful two-sided sign

Coming across a vintage store sign tucked away in the modern cityscape is always a treat. And when that sign is actually two distinct old-school signs showing their age in different ways? It’s a find to celebrate.

That’s the kind of sign I found myself charmed by at 318 Third Avenue near East 24th Street. “Gramercy Pawnbrokers, Inc.” states the Third Avenue-facing sign in rather plain red and blue lettering on a white background. It feels very DIY (and obscured by the barber shop sign, which used to be part of the pawnshop).

Turn the corner, however, and there’s a maroon and yellow sign advertising “loans” in 1960s-style letters, adorned with the ancient three-ball symbol for pawn shops and the name of the company in cursive with letters missing.

According to one site, Gramercy Pawnbrokers began operating here in 1967. I like to think of the business as a survivor. First, it stayed afloat as Facebook Marketplace and eBay began replacing brick and mortar buy-sell shops, and ATMs provided the quick cash pawn shops once did.

Then in the 2000s, Gramercy Pawnbrokers held out after neighboring tenements were demolished and a 21-story luxury co-op-turned-NYU dorm began literally looming over its roof.

But at some point recently, the “dusty violins, outdated calculators, and unpolished jewelry”—as Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York put it in a 2013 post—have disappeared.

Inside the ground floor room is now a “co-working and event space” that’s been spiffed up with sleek work tables, a coffee counter, and a dust-free interior. Sigh. At least the original signs weren’t trashed.

[Thanks to Charles for the tip]

The lonely Italian cheesemaker on East 29th Street immortalized in a 1949 painting

I don’t know if it was ever officially considered a Little Italy. But in the 1930s and 1940s, East 29th Street between Second and Third Avenues was an Italian food store stronghold.

V. DiPollito’s meat market; Peter Rossi’s salami, olive oil, and baccala; a fruits and vegetables grocery; and a delicatessen/bakery are just some of the ground floor tenement stores with untidy cloth sidewalk awnings crowding the south side of the block.

In the middle of these shops is the latticini at 226 East 29th Street. Latticini translates into “dairy products,” as many New Yorkers know from the days when this word was routinely found on Little Italy store signs. (RIP, Joe’s Dairy off Houston Street!) This kind of shop made and sold fresh diary foods, mainly cheese.

What makes the latticini on East 29th Street unusual is that it was immortalized in a painting, “226 E. 29th St.,” featuring the store’s owner (top image).

In 1949, an artist named Jacob Arkush painted this portrait of Mazzeo Giuseppi Latticini Freschi, which was described as “a brisk little study of a tenement facade” by The New Yorker in 1950.

This poetic portrait gives us a man standing outside the store, black-clad except for a white apron; he’s presumably Mazzeo Giuseppi. Behind the windows hang big balls of mozzarella and a stack of cans, perhaps olive oil. A sign on the window reads “ravioli,” and a scale waits on a bare counter.

It’s a curious look at a working-class tenement shop in Kips Bay, especially with the small family peering out the window on the second floor longingly. Whatever they’re watching, it hasn’t caught the attention of Mazzeo Giuseppi on the sidewalk below them, whose eyes are downcast and his shop empty of customers.

But what happens to a dairy products store like Mazzeo Giuseppi’s as neighborhoods change and immigrants disperse? I’ve tried to trace the lifespan of this little business, but I’ve turned up nothing on its appearance or demise.

I didn’t dig up much information about Jacob Arkush either, and why he chose to paint this sidewalk scene remains a mystery. (The second image shows the store around 1940, and the third image, from 1930, gives a sense of the block’s bustling street life and activity.)

Today, the ground floor commercial spaces of the tenement at 220-226 East 29th Street have been converted into residential units. Giuseppe’s latticini would have been to the right of the building entrance beside the stairs to the basement, above.

Arkush captures a moment in time on a midcentury Manhattan street featuring a specialty shop that appears to have come and gone without any recognition—except for his rich portrait of what might be the latticini’s waning days on the block.

[Top image: Invaluable; second image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; third image: NYPL Digital Collections]

One New York painter’s luminous vision of nighttime Central Park in the snow

Some of the most beautifully haunting images of New York City in snow are by Robert Henri. In 1902, this Ohio-born social realist painter and founder of the Ashcan School captured 57th Street in snowy twilight as well as an East 55th Street brownstone row hemmed in by snowfall.

But this is the only Gotham snow scene I know of by Henri that takes us away from twilight streets and sidewalks and into Central Park under a rich blanket of snow after nightfall.

Henri painted this one, “Snow in Central Park,” in 1902 as well. It’s hard to know where in the park this is. Henri lived on East 58th Street at the time, so I imagine it’s on the east side of the park—Cedar Hill, perhaps, or Pilgrim Hill?

Ultimately the exact location doesn’t matter. The blue and reddish brown colors, along with the shadows on the snow and the contrasting radiance of the reflected moonlight, create depth and a visceral texture. It’s a stark scene on one hand yet quietly luminous the more you look at it, with a subtle warmth that brings it to life.

The old-school dive bar on St. Marks Place hiding a vintage wood phone booth

There’s a lot to love about Holiday Cocktail Lounge, a comfortable and cavernous East Village space with lots of wood, a horseshoe bar, and very little light.

Aside from the old-school ambiance and lack of pretense (and the fact that it’s fairly quiet on weekend afternoons), Holiday’s other draw is its long presence on an illustrious street.

Opened in 1950 on the site of a former speakeasy hidden inside a beauty shop, bartenders here have served generations of locals as well as icons from Frank Sinatra to W.H. Auden to Allen Ginsberg, according to James T. and Carla L. Murray in their new book covering the city’s most historic taverns, Great Bars of New York City.

But there’s another feature about the place that makes it distinctive. Tucked to the side is a wood phone booth—complete with a folding door, small stool, and a telephone. It’s Holiday’s actual original phone booth that “retains its original phone number,” per the book.

Phone booth relics like the one can still be found in random libraries, private clubs, and the occasional hotel. But the city’s oldest bars and taverns—Farrell’s in Park Slope, for example, or P.J. Clarke’s on East 55th Street—seem to be good places to find at least the wood booth, if not an actual phone inside.

The dark barroom at Holiday makes it a perfect place to hide away, but it also created some difficulties taking detailed photos. The Murrays’ gorgeous book has many shots that might give you a better idea of the phone booth and interior—and spark some serious vibes for a visit.

This East Village tenement is all that’s left of a row of colorful shops made famous by a 1937 photo

What caught my eye first during a recent walk down Third Avenue in the East Village was the ghost building outline with the peaked roof.

The outline is imprinted on the north side of a circa-1886 five-story tenement—all that remains after the six other buildings between 10th and 11th Streets were reduced to rubble earlier this year.

But as often happens when New York City buildings meet the bulldozer, what’s left behind sparks curiosity. The unusual roofline outline sent me into photo archives searching for a previous building that would match it—a Federal-style early 1800s dwelling, perhaps, or a church.

I didn’t turn up anything about the roofline; the building next door, constructed before 1850, had been flattened and modernized, with no trace of an original photo to compare.

But I did find that the corner tenement at 48 Third Avenue marked the beginning of a row of noteworthy shops built mostly in the later 19th century and made famous as the subject of one of the modern era’s most accomplished photographers.

“Pawn Shop, 48 Third Avenue” (above) was taken in 1937 by Berenice Abbott, that wonderful documentarian of a changing midcentury New York City. It’s a vivacious image of an ordinary commercial district (under the Third Avenue El, as seen from the below photo not by Abbott) of what was then considered part of the Lower East Side.

The Stuyvesant Curiosity Shop, bursting at the seams to the point where some merchandise (shotguns, rifles, telescopes) is placed in outside display cases, occupies the corner tenement, number 48 (aka, 95 East 10th Street).

A pawn shop is next at 50 Third Avenue, followed by Sigmund Klein’s Fat Men’s Shop. As offensive as the sign might be by today’s standards, it might have helped Klein stay in business as long as he did—from 1895 until the 1970s, per a Village Preservation post.

Beyond the Fat Men’s Shop I see a barber pole (later replaced or obscured by the restaurants in the above photo from 1940), and then a sign for an art supplies shop—an early hint that this corner would become ground zero of an artistic movement known as the New York School, which emerged in the 1940s and 1950s.

“If you read about the heroic age of the New York School in painting, the 1940s and 1950s, you will repeatedly see mention of the ‘Tenth Street artists,’ the ‘Tenth Street galleries,’ and the ‘Tenth Street scene,'” stated Village Preservation in a 2020 post.

“Though the Tenth Street in question was but a short block between Third and Fourth Avenues, it was the epicenter of the New York art world for a decade.” The March Gallery opened at 48 Third Avenue and featured the work of Elaine de Kooning, per Village Preservation.

Amazingly, that art supply shop—New York Central Art Supply—stayed in business for more than a century after its 1905 founding, giving up the ghost at 62 Third Avenue in 2016.

48 Third Avenue served as a grocery store in the early 1900s run by a John Hoops, but by the Depression had transformed into the kind of second-hand curiosity shop that could be seen all along down and out areas of Manhattan, like the Bowery, and by extension Third Avenue.

Abbott captured images of other curiosity shops and pawn shops across Manhattan, and what she saw in them is a mystery—maybe the jumble of signs peddling odd and unusual merchandise, plus the human desperation that usually surrounds these low-rent forms of commerce.

Though the rest of this historic row is gone, the tenement at Number 48, with its lacy terra cotta designs under the cornice and Romanesque top floor windows, is still with us, a totem of a New York that keeps changing into the 21st century.

[Second image: Artsy; third image: NYPL Digital Collections; fourth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; fifth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

What boarding an airplane at LaGuardia Airport looked like in 1945

First of all, it wasn’t LaGuardia Airport yet—it was LaGuardia Field. The current name didn’t become official until 1947 after Fiorello LaGuardia, the former mayor and big booster of air travel, passed away.

When it came time to board your plane, you and your fellow passengers walked out to the tarmac and waited to ascend the stairs of the parked plane—in the case of this vintage postcard, a United Airlines Mainliner.

I wonder if some of these people aren’t even passengers but loved ones saying goodbye?

The postcard, sent from New York City and stamped April 1945, reveals in one image the enormous change since the 1940s in the way we travel by air. But what I like about it most is the message on the other side.

It’s addressed to a Mrs. Gordon Walter in St. Michael’s Hospital in Newark, and the message—from John and Lydia—captures the thrill of air travel at the dawn of the jet age. “Most of these planes we see, flying to and from LaGuardia Airport, on a sunny day the silver planes are beautiful.”

The mystery of a missing 19th century monument that marked New York’s devastating fire of 1835

It started on the frigid, ferociously windy night of December 16, 1835. At 9 p.m., a watchman on patrol in Lower Manhattan’s commercial warehouse district—where imported goods arriving by ship were stored before ending up on the shelves of fancy shops—smelled smoke.

“As he came to the intersection of Exchange and Pearl Streets, he discovered the source of the smoke: a large warehouse, located dangerously close to some of New York City’s most prominent commercial buildings, was engulfed in flames,” stated CUNY Graduate Center’s Virtual New York website.

The fire raged across cramped and crooked streets through the next morning, consuming block after block roughly south of Wall Street and east of Broad Street.

Witnessing the destruction were merchants trying to save their goods, looters eager to make off with them, and volunteer firefighters hamstrung by water that froze in their hoses, among other problems.

City officials finally came up with a plan to stop the fire by dynamiting buildings in its path. What became known as the Great Fire of 1835 was ultimately contained when rubble from the dynamited buildings formed a firewall that prevented flames from spreading.

Only two people died in the blaze. But the damage was staggering, with 674 buildings destroyed and insurance companies put out of business. The source of the catastrophe? A burst gas pipe ignited by a coal stove, according to the Hudson River Maritime Museum.

After New Yorkers got over the shock of the destruction, the city set about rebuilding. New, supposedly fireproof buildings went up, streets were widened, and the need for an aqueduct that would bring water to hydrants was realized with the opening of the Croton Aqueduct in 1842.

After downtown was rebuilt, a monument (above) was placed on a new building at 90 Pearl Street—formerly the site of the Pearl Street House and Ohio Hotel, which burned in the fire—to commemorate the tragedy.

The monument presents a solemn image: a Classical female figure with an arm extended sits on top of a marble slab summing up the fire’s wrath. “Destroyed 1835/in the conflagration 16-17 December/650 buildings containing merchandise were consumed in one night.”

The monument states that 90 Pearl Street was rebuilt in 1836 “on foundations of large stone for John R. Peters.” Further down, it notes the building went up in flames on August 23, 1853 but was “rebuilt by William Chauncey.”

New York is filled with monuments—with statues, obelisks, and plaques honoring government officials, fallen soldiers, leaders in the arts and culture, and important events that rocked the city. And while a monument to the Great Fire of 1835 would have been deeply meaningful to those who lived through it, its relevance appears to have faded as the 19th century winded down.

This was acknowledged by a writer in The World in 1897, which included an illustration of the monument (above). “Probably very few of the present generation know of the sculptured figure which is to be seen at Nos. 88 and 90 Pearl Street,” the writer stated on June 10 of that year, adding that the monument sits “over the doorway of George F. Kohler’s United States bonded warehouse.”

The neglect of the fire monument was set in motion when the Third Avenue Elevated made its debut in the 1870s. The southern end of the line obscured 90 Pearl Street, stated James Scully, historian and creator of the audio series Burning Gotham, which chronicles New York in 1835.

It’s also worth mentioning that by this time, Pearl Street was far from the fashionable sections of the city. Relatively few residents would be strolling by the monument and taking the time to appreciate its meaning—as opposed to newer monuments on Fifth Avenue and in Central Park.

In the first half of the 20th century, 90 Pearl Street remained part of the cityscape. By the early 1950s, the building met the wrecking ball. In the demolition, the fire monument was damaged, according to Kenneth Holcomb Dunshee in his 1952 book, As You Pass By.

“It is now in the hands of the H.V. Smith Museum, where it is being restored,” wrote Dunshee.

The what museum? Research reveals that the H.V. Smith Museum, named for the president of the Home Insurance Company, once existed on Maiden Lane. Apparently it housed an extensive collection of fire-related relics.

But the museum is no more, and it’s unclear where the fire monument is today. Was it ever restored? Has it been forgotten in a municipal archive somewhere in Manhattan? The disappearance remains a mystery.

If this Classical figure and marble slab are ever found, I’d love to see them back on display in public—a somber reminder of a terrible tragedy that forced New York to prove its resilience.

[Top image: by Nicolino Calyo via araderlive.com; second image: Nicolino Calyo via The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; third image: from As You Go By, by Kenneth Holcomb Dunshee; fourth image: The World; fifth image: geographicguide.com]

The bulldozer comes for a Brooklyn mansion built in 1902 for a prosperous provisions dealer

At the end of a lovely brownstone row in Bedford-Stuyvesant is an empty space. Enclosed by a chain-link fence, the patchy ground here has been cleared of debris, save for some litter and a pile of wood remnants from a 2022 demolition.

When these remnants are finally carted off, it’ll mark the demise of the last traces of a magnificent mansion at 441 Willoughby Street built in the late Gilded Age. And a multigenerational Brooklyn family who made their mark within these walls as philanthropic citizens fades into history.

The story of the house that stood at this corner of Willoughby Street and Nostrand Avenue for 120 years begins with Jacob Dangler. Hailing from Alsace-Lorraine when this region was part of Germany, Dangler was born around 1851 and came to America by the 1870s, per census records.

He went into the grocery business first, then learned how to process meat. Now living in Williamsburg (which had a large German immigrant population), he opened his own meat and provisions company on Myrtle Avenue, according to a biography by BKgeni on Find a Grave.

Dangler married another German immigrant, had children, and enlarged his business through the 1880s and 1890s, moving to another store and relocating to a second Myrtle Avenue home close to the new shop.

His meat and provisions business made him rich. And like the beer barons who built mansions in Bushwick around the same time, Dangler commissioned a showcase of a house that would make an architectural statement—and perhaps announce that he’d found success in America.

In 1897, he purchased the corner lot at Nostrand Avenue and Willoughby Street from the Boerum family in the fashionable residential neighborhood soon known as Bedford-Stuyvesant. While single-family brownstones were going up in tidy unified rows, Dangler wanted something different.

He brought in architect Theobald Engelhardt, a prolific designer of many late 19th century Brooklyn homes and businesses. The house he completed in 1902 (second image) for Dangler has been described as French Gothic or Chateauesque.

Either way, it’s stunning: three stories with charming dormers and turrets, plus a front porch overlooking Willoughby Street. The mansion had 17 rooms, three bathrooms, and its own bowling alley, per an ad from the Brooklyn Eagle in 1940.

In this mansion lived Dangler and his wife, Louisa; their son George, who went into the meat and provisions business with his father; George’s wife Louise, and George and Louise’s two children, Ruth and Ralph. Two female servants also joined them, both described as Austrian and German in the 1910 U.S. census. (Another grandson, Donald, lived with the family per the 1930 census.)

What was life like in the Dangler mansion (above, in 1975) as the 20th century went on? It sounds rather typical. In addition to running his business, Jacob Dangler and his wife were involved in many community and philanthropic endeavors.

Dangler had been elected a trustee at Fulton Savings Bank in 1903, then was made vice president. He was active in his church, St. Peter’s Lutheran, on Bedford and DeKalb Avenues, and was instrumental in funding a new building at the now-defunct Williamsburg Hospital. His wife also raised money for the hospital by holding music events in their home.

Grandchildren Ruth (fourth image) and Ralph also generated headlines. Ruth attended Packer Collegiate and then Wellesley University, earning a reputation as an actress. In October 1925 she sailed to Europe to study at the Sorbonne. Ralph went with his sister, but this Brooklyn Eagle piece stated that Ralph planned to return in January to resume his studies at the University of Virginia.

In 1927, Ruth held her wedding at the Willoughby Street mansion. Ralph, meanwhile, made headlines in 1928 for wrecking his car on the Long Island Motor Parkway and injuring his female passenger, who worked in the fur shop at Bergdorf Goodman.

Life began to change for the Danglers in 1929. That year, Jacob’s wife Louisa died in the house at age 79. Ten years later, Jacob Dangler passed away in his home as well. In January 1940, an ad appeared in the Brooklyn Eagle (above) offering the house for sale—but not as a family home.

“Suitable for a clubhouse, for entertainments, weddings, parties, or a sanitarium or small private hospital,” the ad read. No sale price was given.

The days of the mansion serving as a family home were over. In the 1940s, 441 Willoughby transformed into Willow Temple. A Masonic organization composed of black women, the United Grand Chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star, later purchased the house. Local residents recalled Cub Scout and Girl Scout meetings, among other community events, held in the mansion, according to a 2022 New York Times article.

Time took its toll on the Dangler mansion, and the Masonic organization, now in debt, sold the house to a developer. Protests were staged and petitions circulated, but the planned demolition of the house proceeded.

“According to Mayor Eric Adams’s office, the developer received a permit to tear down the house through the Department of Buildings,” wrote the New York Times. “Because of a technological glitch, the Landmarks Preservation Commission was not flagged about the permit in time to consider designating the mansion as historic.”

In July 2022, Jacob Dangler’s castle met the wrecking ball, another lost piece of Brooklyn history and beauty. Exactly what will go up in its place, and when? Only time will tell.

[Second image: Brooklyn Life; third image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; fourth image: Brooklyn Eagle; fifth image: MCNY 2013.3.2.1591; sixth image: Brooklyn Eagle; seventh image: LPC Report, 2022; eighth image: CBS News screen grab]

A painter’s strange vision of the “hard life of the streets and teeming crowds” of 1920s Union Square

A carnival of humanity is on display in Clifford Addams’ “Union Square,” painted around 1928, after New Jersey-born Addams moved back to the U.S. from London and made Greenwich Village his home for the rest of his life.

Figures jostle on sidewalks, an office tower looms over a church and rooftop water tanks, and a department store sign (Ohrbach’s, which got its start on 14th Street in 1923) all reveal that this is not a park landscape of placid lawns but a vibrant depiction of New York’s nexus of business, theater, and commerce—which perfectly describes 1920s Union Square.

Born in 1876, Addams is a hard artist to categorize. He studied art in the United States and then went to Europe, where he apprenticed with (and became close to) James McNeill Whistler.

In the early decades of the 20th century, Addams earned notoriety for his detailed etchings, many of street scenes and a 1927 self-portrait (posted below). Supposedly he “only does paint for the fun of it,” per a Brooklyn Eagle review of a 1923 exhibition at New York’s Arlington Galleries.

Addams “distinctly does not belong to the host of Whistler imitators,” stated the Eagle. “His work is a strange mixture of the most subtle nuances of color with a violent dramatic massing of light and dark.”

“Union Square” takes a physical place in Manhattan and depicts it as theater. David Adams Cleveland, art historian and author of A History of Amerian Tonalism, put it this way in an essay on Artsy.net from 2015:

“There is a deep affection for the hard life of the streets and the teeming crowds. The packed sidewalk along 14th Street where the sign for Ohrbachs, the famous department store, hangs prominently fairly seethes with rambling shoppers and sidewalk vendors. This is not a tourist view but a non-sentimental evocations of a city electric with felt life. The paint marks are as alive as the fabric of the city they depict, full of febrile otherworldliness as twilight descends and the neon signs of the city begin an eerie glow.”

[Painting: Artsy.net; etching: Wikipedia]

How to eat at a New York City automat, according to the directions on a 1940s postcard

I was born too late to experience a Horn & Hardart Automat firsthand. But if I was around during the automat era—which peaked Midcentury and ended with the closure of the last Manhattan automat in 1991—I think I could get the hang of how to purchase food.

Still, maybe the Automat concept was a little puzzling to some people, especially out-of-towners visiting automats in Times Square, Herald Square, and other touristy hotspots.

Newcomers and transplants might also have found the automat strange, though the low prices and tasty offerings were their best bet for affordable meals on a student or artist budget.

To help them understand the self-service aspect of these fabled Art Deco-style eateries, this 1940s postcard offers some direction.

I appreciate the back of the postcard, which lets us know that the little glass compartments that held cups of coffee, salisbury steak, slices of pie, and other “delicious” food items were known by the company as “show cases.”

I’ve posted many automat postcards over the years, but this one is my favorite. The instructions, the view of the clean and tidy interior, and the plug from Horn & Hardart about the quality and popularity of the food they sold make me nostalgic for something I never experienced.