Esther Crain's Blog, page 112

An East Side sign with an old New York address

Outside a pretty walkup building at 242 East 60th Street is a postwar-style sign for an apartment building called Ambassador Terrace, a white-brick highrise in the East 40s.

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I’m sure the interiors and lobby at the Ambassador have undergone upgrades over the years. But you wouldn’t know it from the sign, with its wonderful two-letter prefix on the management office’s phone number.

[image error]LO for Longacre, a reminder that Times Square was Longacre Square until 1904.

What’s also great is the two-digit zip code: 18.

These short postal codes were instituted in the 1940s to help speed mail delivery. They were replaced by the 5-number zip codes we use today in the 1960s.

Here’s more examples of old phone exchanges found around the modern city. And postal codes too: this one was hiding on East 10th Street.

Shadows and light under the El in Yorkville, 1947

No one depicts New York’s shadows and light like Martin Lewis, who made numerous drypoint etchings of city streets and the people inhabiting them from the 1920s to the 1940s.

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“Yorkville Night” reveals a corner of the city under an unnamed elevated train in the postwar city. There’s darkness, but the streetcar tracks and pavement and station stairwells are brightly illuminated, giving us a peek into a fleeting moment in this Upper East Side neighborhood.

The only thing we can’t see are the faces of the people.

See more of Martin Lewis’ work here.

The view from the last shot tower in Manhattan

[image error]Nineteenth century New York was a very low-rise city.

At 281 feet, Trinity Church’s spire dominated the skies above Manhattan, with other church steeples and fire watchtowers aiming toward the heavens as well.

Shot towers were part of the skyline too. These were built to manufacture shot balls; lead was heated and then dropped through a sieve down a thin tower, and as it cooled, round pieces of ammunition formed.

In the mid-1800s, manufacturers put up shot towers on Centre Street, Water Street, Beekman Street, East 15th Street, and East 53rd Street beside the East River.

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But the East 53rd Street tower held out the longest and became an early 20th century icon.

Originally built in the early 1820s as Youle’s shot tower, it was “partially destroyed by an explosion and fire,” in 1857, explains stuffnobodycaresabout.com. “It was rebuilt with imported Holland brick with walls that were seven feet thick.”

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Perhaps because of its bucolic location miles from the center of the city, or maybe due to its lighthouse-like design, the 53rd Street shot tower was a frequent subject for painters and illustrators.

[image error]Landscape painter Jasper Cropsey painted it in 1845, at the top left, showing the small inlet where boats ferried people to the institutions of Blackwell’s Island.

The second illustration was done in 1831 and included this caption: “It is about four miles and a quarter from the city, and rises to the height of one hundred and fifty feet in one of the pleasantest spots on the island.”

Landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church took a stab at it in this 1846 oil painting, showing the shot tower peeking through thick trees. (And look, cows!)

The last two photos show the shot tower in 1905 and 1906, long after the cows and trees had been cleared and manufacturing took over East 53rd Street.

[image error]In 1920, Youle’s tower—almost a century old—met the wrecking ball. The New York Herald published a fitting elegy.

“What sights of municipal history it has viewed. What scenes of lovemaking it has witnessed on the nearby Kissing Bridge. What changes it has seen on Blackwell’s Island and on the island of Manhattan in its vicinity.”

“The fields which once comprised the Spring Valley Farm are now a wilderness of gas works, breweries, stone yards, and tenement houses….How these bluffs would be tended and beautified if they existed in the heart of certain European capitals is a thought that accentuates the present ugliness.”

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These days we don’t have shot towers or manufacturing in the East 50s. Apartment towers loom on 53rd Street down to the river, and on the Queens side too.

[Fourth photo: MCNY x2010.11.5519; fifth photo: x2010.11.5523]

This parking garage was once a silent film studio

[image error]I’ve always loved the bright neon 20th Century Garage sign at 318 East 48th Street.

But I had no idea that the garage behind the sign was once a movie studio—where famous silent screen stars churned out the comedies and melodramas early 20th century audiences couldn’t get enough of.

[image error]On the first floor was the Norma Talmadge Film Corporation, opened around 1916.

Her name might not be well-known today, but Norma Talmadge (left) was an A-list actress in the teens and early 1920s.

Talmadge was a plucky young woman who often played the lead in dramas and romantic comedies; she got her start doing bit parts at the Vitograph studio in Flatbush while still a student at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn.

On the second floor, Norma’s sister Constance made her films.

[image error]Constance Talmadge, also a bit player at Vitograph, was a star in her own right. She played “Mountain Girl” in D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance and became a popular comedic actress.

Also in the same building was the Comique Film Corporation, where Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton made slapstick films like The Butcher Boy.

The thread uniting all these stars was Norma’s much older husband, Joseph Schenck—a producer who brought his different movie concerns under one roof for a brief time until 1921, according to Hollywood on the Hudson.

After that, Schenck and his stars decamped to Hollywood. New York’s brief run as the movie-making capital of the country was coming to an end.

[image error]Norma and Constance’s careers didn’t last much longer either. Once talkies hit the scene, the two were edged out and mostly retired from screen roles. Reportedly they made lots of cash from their movie days, getting a cut of the box office.

It’s been a century since the garage was a film studio—but imagine the glamour in that warehouse all those years ago!

[Fourth photo: The Real Deal]

Past and present collide on Blackwell’s Island

We know it as . But until the 1920s, it was Blackwell’s Island—the two-mile spit of land in the East River.

Here, the 19th century city put its poor, quarantined, and convicted in penitentiaries, a lunatic asylum, and a smallpox hospital, among other institutions.

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Edward Hopper’s 1928 painting, Blackwell’s Island, contrasts the cobalt blue waters of the East River (so lovely a speedboat is whizzing along) with the island’s haunting past as a broken-down dumping ground for so-called undesirables.

There’s almost no one in the painting—but you can feel the humanity emanating from those buildings.

Hopper “painted this work at the height of his powers and it exemplifies some of the best of Hopper’s style: a complex architectural composition with a full range of light and shadow, few people and the drama of the past colliding with the present in the form of historic architecture meeting modern,” says Don Bacigalupi, president of Crystal Bridges, which owns the painting.

The bishop’s crook lamppost on Beekman Place

[image error]The bishop’s crook isn’t the only old-school style New York lamppost. But it might be the most beloved.

Named for the fanciful staff bishops carried, cast-iron bishop’s crook lampposts first hit the streets around 1900, according to a Landmarks Preservation Commission report.

“Made from a single iron casting up to the arc, or ‘crook,’ it incorporates a garland motif that wraps around the shaft,” states The Landmarks of New York.

Because bishop’s crooks are so charming, the city began putting up reproductions of cast-iron originals in 1980.

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But the one on the southeast corner of East 51st Street and Beekman Place is an authentic oldie.

Beekman Place is a quiet two-block stretch in Turtle Bay lined with townhouses and stately apartment buildings. The street features bishop crook reproductions, but this one is an original, according to the LPC report, The Landmarks of New York, and The New York Times.

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Amid steel and aluminum modern lampposts this old New York streetlight and dozens of others through the city continue to illuminate dark corners.

This gas lamp at the end of West Village alley Patchin Place might be the oldest in New York.

Emptying the ash barrels on a tenement block

It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it. Sidewalks in late 19th century New York were lined with ash barrels—where people dumped the ashes from their furnaces as well as rotting food and household refuse. (And very sadly, infants too.)

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Similar to the sanitation workers of today who empty trash cans into hulking vehicles, the ash men came by to empty the barrel’s filthy contents into a horse-drawn cart. The ashes would then be transferred to a dump—like Queens’ infamous “Valley of Ashes” in Corona.

Louis Maurer’s painting shows what the job was like. In “View of Forty-Third Street West of Ninth Avenue,” you can practically hear the roar of rowdy kids and the Ninth Avenue El screeching overhead.

This was Longacre Square in 1883, the center of the city’s horse and carriage trade—an area that earned the nickname “Thieves Lair” for its sketchy reputation.

The lives of a former Chambers Street firehouse

New York is all about repurposed buildings. And the slender, restrained brick building at 160 Chambers Street perfectly exemplifies this.

For almost 200 years, as this stretch of today’s Tribeca has changed, it’s served as a private home, police station, charity hospital, firehouse, commercial space, and then back to residences once more.

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160 Chambers began as the three-story brick home of a builder named Samuel Thomson. Completed in 1833, it would have been a half-block from Stuart’s candy and sugar refinery at Chambers and Greenwich Streets—a place of industry it what was still a mostly residential section of the city.

The house changed hands three years later, according to a Landmarks Preservation Committee report. A prominent lawyer named David Ogden moved in; he made it his home until 1848.

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Who lived in it after that is unclear. But an ad for the residence ran in the New York Times in 1853 described it as “built in the most substantial manner.”

[image error]By 1863, as the neighborhood lost its luster as a residential enclave, 160 Chambers was purchased by the city and turned into a police station for the Third Precinct. At the time, a professional police department had only existed in Manhattan for 18 years.

During its years as a precinct house, two more stories were added, and it underwent a redesign in the Second Empire style, reflected in the mansard roof.

“The Third Police Precinct Station House was located here until 1875,” states the LPC report. “The building then housed the House of Relief (left), a hospital under the charge of New York Hospital, from 1875 until 1894.”

After the House of Relief left, city officials decided to make 160 Chambers Street a firehouse for Engine Company 29, altering the first floor to make room for a fire engine. Firefighters were based here until 1947.

Until the 1960s, it was home to the Uniformed Fire Officers Association.

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Subsequently sold by the city and put back in private hands, “[160 Chambers] was converted to commercial use in 1967, and since the mid-1980s the building has had commercial use at the ground story with residential units above.” StreetEasy gives us a peek inside some of these million-dollar apartments.

The current commercial tenant is a beauty spa. But isn’t it wonderful that the word “engine” flanked by two 29s still exists above what was once a fire engine exit?

[Third image: New York Times 1853; fourth photo: Medical Center Archives of NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell via Tribeca Trib]

A mysterious store sign reappears in Flatiron

The upside of new construction is that old bits and pieces of the city come back into view.

At 1165 Broadway, a landmarked 1867 building (below, in 1900) currently being transformed into coop, a shadowy color sign has reappeared.

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“Smith’s” the sign says. The logo next to it reads “Guaranteed never to rip” and includes an image of the biblical Samson and a lion. A smaller tagline reads “wear like Samsons . . . made?” That fourth word is hard to figure out.

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So what was Smith’s selling? The phrase “guaranteed never to rip” was used in ads for cheap suits decades ago. But the mention of Samson, known not for cheap suits but his ability to rip a lion in half, makes this ad a mystery.

[Second image: NYPL]

Faces in the shadow of the Third Avenue El

New Yorkers no longer plow through the sky on hulking elevated trains. But the great crowds of commuters and the traffic below the steel rails feels very familiar.

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John Sloan’s Six O’Clock, Winter gives us the scene under the Third Avenue El in 1912. (Not the Sixth Avenue El, the subject of some of his other paintings.)

“The shop girls, clerks, and working men and women who are massed in the lower part of the canvas seem absorbed in their own actions, rushing to their various destinations, generally unaware of the huge elevated railway looming high above them,” states the website of the Phillips Collection.

“The figures are illuminated by the glow of the train’s electric lights from above and from the shops at street level, with those in the lower left of the composition cast in strong light. Loosely brushed in, the faces have a masklike appearance, while those on the right are almost hidden in shadow, obscuring their features.”