Esther Crain's Blog, page 120

A child’s casket emerges in a Hudson Street park

The dead who dwell in New York’s burial grounds have a strange way of making themselves known.

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One example of this happened in 1939. Workmen renovating James J. Walker Park (second to last photo) on Hudson and Clarkson Streets in the West Village came upon an underground vault—and found a child-size cast iron casket inside.

[image error]The casket was “made to look like a shrouded Egyptian mummy,” states the Trinity Church website.

“The New York World-Telegram reported on the discovery, noting, ‘The girl’s cast iron casket…had a glass window in the top. Her white silk dress still looked fresh and dainty.'” The paper noted that she was “a pretty yellow haired child.”

What was a casket doing there—and who was the girl inside it?

Until the city seized this green space to make into a park, the land was Old St. John’s Burying Ground (above and at right), run by Trinity Church for the worshipers at nearby St. John’s Chapel, since demolished, according to the New York Cemetery Project.

[image error]“It’s estimated that 10,000 people were buried in St. John’s Burying Ground in the years before 1860, when burials stopped—and very few bodies were removed and re-interred during park construction,” states Trinity’s website.

The unusual casket itself revealed the girl’s identity.

“The silver coffin plate gave the child’s basic information: Mary Elizabeth Tisdall, 6 years and 8 months old, died April 14, 1850,” according to Trinity Church.

[image error]Church archives discovered that Mary’s cause of death was listed as “brain congestion—probably encephalemia,” and she lived at “219 East Ninth Street in Manhattan, just off of Astor Place.”

Mary’s parents had married at St. John’s. Her father was a British-born coal merchant who became a Mason and wrote poetry; he died in 1878.

Her brother, Fitz Gerald Tisdall, became a professor of Greek at City College.

Yet no record exists of who Mary was—if she liked school, played with dolls, or had a favorite type of candy.

All we know about her is that she was one of untold numbers of children who didn’t make it to adulthood in New York at the time, when little was known about sanitation and hygiene and no medicine existed to fight deadly diseases.

[image error]Her casket didn’t go back underground, of course. “She rests in peace in the catacombs under Trinity Church,” according to the church website.

The only marked grave in the entire park is an 1834 sarcophagus dedicated to three young firemen who perished in a blaze on Pearl Street.

[Top photo: NYPL; second photo: MCNY; fourth photo: NYC Parks Department; Fifth Photo: Wikipedia]

“Chiller Theatre” used to scare a lot of city kids

Wonderama was for the Sunday morning cartoon crowd. The PIX video game came on after school. The Yule Log ran on Christmas Day, as millions of presents were being torn open in New York City homes from the 1960s to the 1980s.

And for anyone excited about Halloween or horror flicks in general, there was Chiller Theater, WPIX/channel 11’s homegrown Saturday night scary movie show from the 1960s to 1982.

Every week, low-budget films about aliens and monsters thrilled anyone old enough to stay up late and watch. Even the opening montage, which you can relive here, could give kids nightmares.

All the ways to get to Columbus Circle in 1910

The makers of this postcard may not have realized it at the time. But they selected an image that gives contemporary viewers a glimpse at all the different transportation options available to New Yorkers in 1910.

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Trolley cars would continue at least through the 1930s. Horse-drawn wagons had another decade before they were banished to quiet side streets or out of the way neighborhoods. The automobile would soon dominate city streets.

Pedestrians walk on what looks like a new sidewalk. And on the left, one of the original subway kiosks hint at the mass transit option of choice for city residents through the 20th century.

[Postcard: MCNY]

Edgar Allan Poe on New York’s “inevitable doom”

[image error]New Yorkers tend to agree on one thing: any change in the look and feel of the city is never good.

Modernization, development, improvement—all are buzzwords for the end of Gotham as we know it.

In the 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe felt this way too.

Poe may have died in Baltimore, but in the 1830s and 1840s he hopscotched around New York, living on Greenwich Street, West Third Street, today’s West 84th Street and then a cottage in the the Bronx, where his young wife died of tuberculosis.

[image error]Like many residents, he eased his mind with long walks and wanderings.

His outings gave him a unique view of New York’s charm (and its noise, grime, Sunday alcohol laws, and the ugliness of Brooklyn houses, but lets save that for another post).

In an 1844 letter, he bemoaned the way the city was urbanizing before his eyes—which he saw after he rowed out to Blackwell’s Island and was able to see New York from the water. [Above right, the Beekman Estate in the East 50s]

[image error]“The chief interest of the adventure lay in the scenery of the Manhattan shore, which is here particularly picturesque.”

“The houses without exception are frame and antique. Nothing very modern has been attempted—a necessary result of the subdivision of the whole island into streets and town-lots.” [Above left, the David Provoost Mansion at East 57th Street]

[image error]“I could not look on the magnificent cliffs, and stately trees, which at every moment met my view, without a sigh for their inevitable doom—inevitable and swift.”

“In twenty years, or thirty at farthest, we shall see here nothing more romantic than shipping, warehouses, and wharves.”

[image error]In another letter that same year, he described the villas along the East River. [Above right, the Riker estate at East 75th Street]

“These localities are neglected—unimproved. The old mansions upon them (principally wooden) are suffered to remain unrepaired, and present a melancholy spectacle of decrepitude.

“In fact, these magnificent places are doomed. The spirit of Improvement has withered them with its acrid breath. Streets are already ‘mapped’ through them, and they are no longer suburban residences but ‘town-lots.'” [Above left, the Rutgers mansion in Yorkville]

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The pretty peafowl on a Madison Avenue building

The Alexander Wilson Building has been at 274 Madison Avenue since 1928, blending in with the neighboring 1920s-era gray-beige office towers in this stretch of Midtown.

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But on a walk past the lobby, some unusual detailing above and around the entrance catches your eye and sets the structure apart from the rest.

Wow—peafowl! Two lovely regal birds face each other on an Art Nouveau–esque frieze of leaves, grapes, and two peachicks behind them.

[image error]I’m not sure what these birds symbolize, but it’s an enchanting ode to the natural world amid Madison Avenue’s concrete sidewalks and cathedrals of commerce.

Of course, New York building facades are decorated with images to all kinds of animals, from squirrels to lions to elephants to rats.

And then there are the real peafowl—peacocks roaming around the grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on West 112th Street.

The gritty appeal of a 14th Street liquors sign

The low-rise, rundown buildings on the south side of 14th Street at Eighth Avenue have slowly emptied out—the liquor store moved down the block a few years back, a restaurant closed and nothing reopened, and now a candy store and corner deli are gone as well.

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What will become of this wonderful discount liquors sign—bumblebee yellow, two stories tall!—when the building it’s attached to inevitably falls to the developers?

The beauty of 10th Street’s English Terrace Row

Shared balconies stretching across several buildings in a row aren’t the norm in New York City.

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But a graceful cast-iron communal balcony ties together the brownstones at numbers 20 to 38 West 10th Street. It’s one of the many features that make what used to be called “English Terrace Row” on this Greenwich Village block so harmoniously beautiful.

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English Terrace Row, known these days as Renwick Row, was built between 1856 and 1858 by James Renwick Jr., the architect behind circa-1846 Grace Church three blocks east down 10th Street.

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Renwick left his stamp all over the mid–19th century the city; he designed banks and brownstones, charity hospitals on East River islands, and other Gothic-style churches, like St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

[image error]While he brought Gothic-style architecture back into vogue, he was also forward-thinking.

The houses of English Terrace Row are the first brownstones built without the customary high Dutch-style stoop, “placing the entry floor only two to three steps up from the street in the English manner,” states the AIA Guide to New York City.

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“Terrace” is also borrowed from the British.”Terrace does not refer to the handsome balcony that runs the length of these houses; it is the English term for rows of houses, such as found in the Kensington and Paddington districts of London in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s.”

[image error]“New Yorkers who visited England were impressed with this style and saw good reason to adopt it upon their return.”

Apparently one of those New Yorkers was a banker named James F.D. Lanier, who commissioned Renwick to build the row at a time when spacious brownstones with winding inside staircases and enormous windows were all the rage among well-to-do city residents.

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[image error]Wide and elegant, and shrouded by trees and swathed in amber light in the evening, they stand 159 years later and make this stretch of 10th Street one of the most spectacular in the city.

The photo archive at the GVSHP site has some interior shots as well. For more on the Gilded Age city’s brownstone craze and James Renwick’s architectural gems, take a look through The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910.

One of the last remnants of the old Penn Station

[image error]Looking at old photos of Penn Station can make any New Yorker weep.

The 1963 bulldozing of this pink granite emblem of the city has been described as a “monumental act of vandalism.”

The Doric columns fronting Seventh Avenue dismantled, the Roman Baths–inspired waiting room demolished, and interior touches from handrails to ticket booths mostly carted away to landfills.

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Remnants do remain, though (like the Eagle statues outside the current station), with one critical piece of Penn Station still located across 31st Street, where it sits anonymous and forlorn.

[image error]It’s the Penn Station Service Building (above), which housed the power plant that fed electricity to the train engines that navigated the tunnels to and from the city.

In the top photo of Penn Station’s exterior, you can see it behind the building, belching smoke closer to the Eighth Avenue side.

[image error]“Research by the industrial archaeologist Thomas Flagg indicates that it was also used to supply heat, light, elevator hydraulics and refrigeration for the station as well as compressed air for braking and signaling,” wrote Christopher Gray in a 1989 New York Times article.

“It even incinerated the station’s garbage.” The smokestack, however, have been removed.

Constructed two years before Penn Station opened and designed by station architects McKim, Mead, and White, it has the same granite facade as Penn Station did, now gray with grime and soot in the shadow of Madison Square Garden.

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It’s simple structure that’s still in use—but a ghost of its former glory. (That waiting room, sigh.)

[Top photo: Wikipedia; second and third photos: Ephemeral New York; fourth photo: LOC; fifth photo: Getty Images]

A view of New York’s oldest and loveliest bridge

The Brooklyn Bridge is a beauty, yes, but for architectural grace and beauty (and as a place for long late-night walks, as Edgar Allan Poe discovered), you just can’t beat High Bridge—the 1848 span built to bring fresh water from the Croton Reservoir upstate to city sinks.

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Standing 84 feet above the Harlem River, the High Bridge’s 15 arches were an elegant sight for people on ships below or on the Bronx or Manhattan side above.

A pedestrian walkway was added in the 1860s—and it’s open again after being closed to the public for 40 years.

Skyscrapers are the “Soul of the Soulless City”

We’re used to artists coming to New York and being inspired. That’s not exactly the case with Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson.

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Nevinson was a celebrated British painter and lithographer noted for his landscapes and depictions of soldiers during World War I.

In 1919, he made his first trip to New York, where his war prints were on display to great acclaim. “He was immediately impressed by the city’s architecture, declaring to one New York journalist that the city was ‘built for me,'” states the Tate in the UK.

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Back in London, Nevinson painted the futuristic work at the top of the page, which he titled “New York – An Abstraction.”

[image error]But when his second exhibit in Manhattan later that year didn’t get the same positive reception as his first, the experience “may have accelerated Nevinson’s disaffection with the city,” according to the Tate.

In 1925, when “New York – An Abstraction” went on display in London, it had a new, harsh title: “The Soul of a Soulless City.”

Nevinson painted other images of New York, like the more traditional river view of “New York, Night” (1920). But none had quite the “hard, metallic, unhuman” feel as “the  Soul of the Soulless City,” as one critic described it.