Esther Crain's Blog, page 115

The dreams of the pigeon trainer on a city roof

Raising pigeons on tenement roofs doesn’t seem to be a popular thing in contemporary New York. But years ago it was a not-uncommon hobby, and John Sloan makes it the subject of this painting—done from his West 23rd Street studio in 1910.

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Sloan loved watching what transpired on rooftops. His roof paintings “convey a sense of the freedom and escape the roofs provided from the suffocating confines of New York tenement living,” states Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which has “Pigeons” in its collection.

“Here Sloan depicts the then popular pastime of raising pigeons, which were let loose daily to fly for exercise. Witnessed by their trainer and a young boy perched on the tenement wall, the birds circling above seem to give visual expression to the men’s dreams of a flight of fancy high above the city,” states the MFA.

The terra cotta beauty of the German Dispensary

If you walk by it on a weekly basis, as I usually do, you might start to take the red brick loveliness at 137 Second Avenue for granted.

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But stop one day and behold its beauty: the rich detailing, the bas relief sculptures, and the arched portico entrance that in 1884 welcomed sick residents of what was then Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany.

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This is the former German Dispensary, kind of a walk-in clinic for neighborhood folks who didn’t have the means to see a private doctor. Dispensaries not quite as striking as this one served the poor all over New York until after the 20th century.

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The German Dispensary building was a gift from Anna and Oswald Ottendorfer, immigrant publishers of Staats-Zeitung, the leading German newspaper in the 19th century city (it still exists today).

[image error]The Ottendorfers were heavily into philanthropy in the city. They funded a German school, a women’s wing of the German Hospital (renamed Lenox Hill in 1918 due to ), and a home for indigent German women in Astoria called the Isabella.

They hired German-born architect William Schickel to design the dispensary and a library next door, according to the Landmarks Preservation Committee report from 1976. (The photo above is from 1975.)

[image error]The library (at left) was the city’s first free public library, and Mr. Ottendorfer personally picked out the books, half in German and half in English.

Mrs. Ottendorfer didn’t live to see the dispensary or library completed. And the dispensary itself didn’t last very long; by 1905 it had decamped for another building closer to the hospital.

A dispensary run by the German Poliklinik took over 137 Second Avenue, and eventually that was bought by Cabrini Medical Center, the old hospital near Stuyvesant Square.

Little Germany is long gone. But if you stand in front of the fiery red building, with its busts of famous doctors and floral friezes, you can feel the ghosts of what was one a thriving, self-contained New York neighborhood.

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[Fourth photo: Edmund Vincent Gillon/MCNY, 1975: 2013.3.2.33; fifth photo: NYPL]

Mysterious “Mr. Zero” tends to the East Side poor

[image error]His real name was Urbain Ledoux. Born in Canada in 1874, he wanted to be a priest but pursued law instead, eventually taking a job as the United States consul in Prague.

By 1910, he quit diplomatic service and decided to help humanity in a different way: drawing attention to hunger and homelessness in cities.

Ledoux went to Boston first. An advocate of the Baha’i faith, he called himself “Mr. Zero” and set about securing beds for homeless men. He also built a shelter dubbed the “Poor Men’s Club.”

Unconventional and confrontational, he held a “slave auctions” at Boston Common, where he auctioned off the services of jobless men to employers.

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Ledoux earned a reputation as an agitator, and he wasn’t exactly welcomed by city officials when he made his way to Manhattan after World War I, where he took up the cause of poor veterans.

[image error]“Will the police interfere? I do not know,” Ledoux told the New-York Tribune in September 1921, after he’d announced that he was holding a similar “slave auction” on the steps of the New York Public Library.

“All of those who will be sold, with the exception of one woman, are ex-servicemen. They marched away to war amid the cheers of thousands and with banners and stands there on the Public Library steps paid for by the people’s money.”

Ledoux focused on down and out veterans, but he worked on behalf of all who needed help. His first New York breadline, the Stepping Stone, opened at 203 East Ninth Street in 1919 (above).

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He then launched a soup kitchen called The Tub. Sources vary, but it was either at 12 St. Marks Place or in the basement of 33 St. Marks Place (above right and center). Ledoux himself lived on St. Marks as well.

[image error]“The Tub is one of the cleanest little restaurants in New York, where you can get meals for 5 cents—all you can eat,” he told the New York Times in 1925.

The Tub also served as an employment agency, and the place cooked up holiday turkey dinners for the poor that regularly made newspaper headlines.

Ledoux, who was widely assumed to be a rich philanthropist, was an unusual anti-poverty and peace activist.

On one hand, some of his actions—the slave auctions (left), for example, and rallying for tickets to President Harding’s inaugural ball so he could bring a contingent of poor people—were seen by some as publicity stunts.

But they were stunts that brought the spotlight on the thousands of people sleeping in parks and scrounging for food in the modern New York of the 1920s.

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“It may be that Mr. Ledoux’s plans for dealing with unemployment are fantastic,” wrote the New Republic in 1921 in an interview with Ledoux. “They call for the assumption of the burden by the public and the state. They make an immense draft, an overdraft, on the bank of human kindness.”

“‘Yes,’ says Mr. Ledoux, ‘but the nation is in danger, and society is poisoning itself with its waste of human life.'” He died in 1941, and much of his work has been forgotten.

[Photos 1 and 2: Wikipedia; photos 4 and 6: Getty Images; photo 5: Bain Collection/LOC]

Old New York and the contemporary city collide

Looming skyscrapers and small buildings come together in this painting of a snowy city under pink-gray skies and thick chimney smoke by Everett Longley Warner.

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The painting is undated, but Longley lived in New York between 1903 and 1924, according to one biography.

An epidemic gave rise to a beloved Village church

Disease can shape a city—and that’s what drove the huge population boom in the country resort of Greenwich Village in the first half of the 19th century.

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In the 1700s, Greenwich was a bucolic suburb dotted with estates. by the 1790s and early 1800s, this part of Manhattan, with its cool breezes and healthy air, was overrun with residents fleeing lethal outbreaks of yellow fever in the downtown city center.

[image error]“Those marvelously healthy qualities as to location and air, that fine, sandy soil, made it a haven, indeed, to people who were afraid of sickness,” wrote Anna Alice Chapin in her 1920 book, Greenwich Village.

How fast did Greenwich grow? “From daybreak to night one line of carts, merchandise, and effects were seen moving toward Greenwich Village and the upper parts of the city. . . . persons with anxiety strongly marked on their countenances, and with hurried gait, were hustling through the streets.”

[image error]With so many new homes going up, churches needed to be built as well. So Trinity Church decided to build a parish on Hudson Street.

In 1820, with an assist from Clement Clarke Moore (a theology professor not yet famous for his Christmas poem whose Chelsea estate was just north of Greenwich Village), a new church was born: Saint Luke in the Fields.

The evocative name was a reference to Greenwich Village as a countryside enclave. And Saint Luke? He’s the physician evangelist, patron saint of physicians and surgeons.

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His name is a nod to “Greenwich’s role as a haven for the multitudes fleeing disease in the city,” wrote Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace in Gotham.

The fields aren’t totally gone—St. Luke’s has one of the prettiest secret gardens of any church in New York City.

[Top photo: MCNY; 1895; 93.1.1.17296; Second and Third Images: NYPL]

The Bronx is the land of faded old movie houses

New York City has many grand old theaters and movie houses. These hearty survivors have been typically rebranded as a drugstore, Starbucks, or some other store that has none of that show biz grandeur or charm.

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But it seems like the Bronx has more than its share of old theaters than other boroughs. Two recycled movie houses are on Southern Boulevard, a busy shopping stretch in the South Bronx.

[image error] Behold the Spooner Theatre, above and at right, which opened in 1910. Seating 1800, the Spooner would soon be purchased by Loews and renamed the Loews Spooner Theatre, according to Cinematic Treasures.

(below) was an actress and director who built the theater so her stock company could have a place to perform.

[image error]Spooner and her players give “performances twice a day to audiences which fill the house,” wrote the New York Times in 1913.

Interestingly, later that year Spooner was arrested for staging what was called a “vice” play—a dramatization of a novel called “The House of Bondage.”

The audience rose in protest when the cops came in. (The novel was about the then-hot topic of white slavery.)

At some point the Loews Spooner got a marquee . . . and then became a furniture store, per this photo below from Cinema Treasures.

[image error]Today the theater is weathered but still holding up. It’s occupied by a couple of cell phone stores, a Burger King, and a Children’s Place.

Not far from the majestic Spooner is the shell of the Boulevard Theatre, which opened in 1913, reports Cinematic Treasures. This Beaux-Arts beauty started out as a vaudeville house seating 2,200 people.

[image error]“When [the Boulevard] is finished this block . . . will be an amusement and business center second to none in the Bronx,” wrote the New York Times.

It soon opened as the Loews Boulevard and featured “‘small time’ vaudeville and moving pictures,” according to another Times article.

Like the Spooner, the Boulevard has since been repurposed into a shopping strip with a cell phone store and gym. Its Beaux-Arts touches are still faring well after more than a century fronting a busy Bronx street.

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[Third photo: Cinema Treasures]

A winter twilight in the snow on 57th Street

This is 57th Street in 1902, painted by Robert Henri, whose Ashcan School work depicted a moody New York in all of its grit and glory.

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Could the cross street with the elevated train be Sixth Avenue? It would have been close to the Art Students League, where Henri taught.

Decayed shells of two lovely Bronx train stations

It’s a strip mall that’s seen better days—a long, two-story shell of a building housing a chicken joint, a pizza and gyro shop, and a couple of other businesses in the shadow of the Bronx’s Bruckner Expressway.

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But a closer look reveals some curious details—like the pointed dormer windows set inside a barn-like sloping roof. This stretch of retail had to start out as something more majestic.

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Turns out it did: It was the Hunt’s Point Avenue railroad station, built in 1909 by the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad—which anticipated a huge demand for train service in the once-bucolic Bronx, thanks to subway development and a population boom.

[image error]An even biggest surprise than seeing the remains of such a lovely station is the name of the architect behind it: Cass Gilbert, better known for the Woolworth Building and the Custom House at the foot of Broadway, among other architectural beauties.

The station is one of nine train stations Gilbert designed in the Bronx, and he  seemed to have a lot of fun with this one.

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The Hunts Point station was French Renaissance in design,” states this Lehman College site. “It had a wide overhanging hipped roof with pointed lacy dormer windows, spires, tiling and crenellations.”

[image error]The station connected commuters to Grand Central until the 1930s, when a lack of passengers made it financially impossible to keep open. At some point, it was repurposed for retail, it’s ornaments stripped off or obscured beneath 1970s-style roll-down gates and a hulking freeway.

Another of Gilbert’s Bronx railroad station also pretty much lies in ruin: the Westchester Avenue station.

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This terra cotta jewel was built in 1908 by the same railroad and it too shut down in the 1930s. Today it remains under the Bronx’s Sheridan Expressway and besides Concrete Plant Park, abandoned.

[Second photo: MCNY/Wurtz Bros., x2010.7.1.1841; fourth photo: Architectural Record, 1908; fifth photo: MCNY/Wurtz Bros., x2010.7.1.1842; sixth photo: Wikipedia]

The bizarre 1916 plan to fill in the East River

“At first glance, a project to reclaim 50 square miles of land from New York Bay, to add 100 miles of new waterfront for docks, to fill in the East River, and to prepare New York for a population of 20 million seems somewhat stupendous, does it not?”

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That’s the lead sentence in a fascinating article published in Popular Science in 1916, written with great enthusiasm by an engineer, Dr. T. Kennard Thomson.

Thomson had big dreams for New York City, and he laid them out in this article—his vision of making Greater New York a “Really Greater New York.”

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The craziest idea? To turn the East River into a landfill extension of Manhattan, so “it would not be much harder to get to Brooklyn than to cross Broadway.” A new East River from Flushing Bay to Jamaica Bay would then be built.

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Also nuts is the plan to lengthen Lower Manhattan so it just about touches Staten Island, and rework the Harlem River so it extends in a straight line from Hell Gate to the Hudson.

[image error]The point of his Really Greater New York? To rake in more money.

“Imagine the value of this new land for docks, warehouses, and business blocks! The tax assessments alone would make a fortune!” Thomson writes.

But like moving sidewalks, a West Side airport, and 100-story housing developments in Harlem, and an even weirder 1934 plan to fill in the Hudson River, this is another bizarre plan for the city that never came to pass.

[Images: Popular Science]

In 1912, everyone was doing the Subway Glide

How long have New Yorkers been complaining about cramped subways and speeding, lurching trains? (And the violation of personal space that happens when too many people are crammed in car?)

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At least since 1912, eight years after the subway opened—when lyricist Arthur Gillespie and musician Theodore Norman put together this zippy little song, the “Subway Glide.”

With lyrics like “rush in, crush in, reach for a handle strap, then turn right around and flop in a lady’s lap,” it may offend the sensibilities of modern subway riders.

Give it a listen here and consider adding it to your commute playlist.

[Image: NYPL]