Esther Crain's Blog, page 125

Riding an elephant at Coney Island’s Luna Park

If rides like Helter Skelter, Shoot the Chutes, and the Witching Waves weren’t enough excitement for you, you could always take advantage of another thrill offered at Luna Park: elephant rides.

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Opened in 1903, Luna Park was the Surf Avenue pleasure pavilion that entertained millions of Coney Island fun-seekers every summer with the kinds of rides and spectacles no amusement park could get away with today.

This postcard dates to 1906—those women don’t look like they’re enjoying Brooklyn on an elephant, do they?

What remains of a Gansevoort Street restaurant

In 1938, the short, unremarkable building at 69 Gansevoort Street was home to R & L Lunch—a luncheonette that I imagine primarily fed the men who worked in the Meatpacking District (but hey, ladies invited, per the sign!).

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Forty-seven years later, Florent Morellet turned what became R & L Restaurant into Florent, the legendary 24-hour haunt of late nighters, club kids, sex workers, and New Yorkers who enjoyed eating brunch in a place that often felt like a party.

Below, Florent in the mid to late 1980s; note the pink neon Florent sign in the window.

Florent closed in 2008. The space housed a couple of short-lived restaurants, if I remember correctly, and now this time capsule of a storefront has recently transformed into a branch of a national fashion chain.

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At least they kept that wonderful aluminum sign, which these days is one of the last authentic pieces of the days when the Meatpacking District actually was home to meatpacking plants.

[Top photo: Sol Libsohn via Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York; second photo:

Manhattan’s new skyscrapers flicker in the night

While the men who built them remained in the shadows, New York’s new skyscrapers lit the nighttime sky like Roman candles in the 1930s, as seen in this 1935 photo.

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The Empire State Building was completed in 1931; the Chrysler building opened in 1930. The buildings of Rockefeller Center—where I believe this intrepid worker is enjoying a smoke on a steel beam—opened in the 1930s.

It’s hard to believe that not 50 years earlier, Trinity Church, with its spire reaching 284 feet toward the heavens, was the tallest structure in Manhattan.

[Photo: Library of Congress]

Going back in time at the Village’s Corner Bistro

[image error]The wooden table tops with generations of names scratched into them have been replaced, and signs posted on the back brick wall remind patrons that smoking is forbidden.

But the two little rooms of the Corner Bistro maintain that time-traveling Village taverny feel.

Maybe it’s the pressed tin ceiling that could date back to 1875, when the tiny space on the first floor of 331 West Fourth Street was a saloon run by a man named John Ebers (the site of an interesting crime, below).

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Or perhaps it’s the old-timey clock in the corner or the long carved mahogany bar, which could have been installed in the early 20th century, when the Corner Bistro says they began serving customers (above, in 1933).

[image error]But the Corner Bistro resounds with what I imagine as the feel of the Village of the 1950s and 1960s, when locals and poets and artists and the men who worked the Hudson River docks went there for alcohol and camaraderie in a neighborhood that hosted lots of corner bars with the same mix, like the Lion’s Head and the White Horse.

[image error]To get a sense of what the place must have been like back then, read what the former longtime owner, Bill O’Donnell, had to say about the heyday of the Bistro, as regulars called it.

O’Donnell gave this interview to WestView News in 2012. After college and time spent at sea on board a ship, O’Donnell became a bartender at a place on Greenwich Avenue called Jack Barry’s.

“A few years later, one of the two owners of the Corner Bistro—his name was Curtis—wanted to sell his interest,” he told WestView.

[image error]“I scrambled together some money from my brothers and me and that’s how I began at the Corner Bistro. I took over 50 percent interest in February 1967 and ten years later bought the other 50 percent.”

The Bistro back then was “a mixed clientele and an eclectic crowd. You had neighborhood people, beatniks, some longshoremen, and tourists. You also had aspiring actors, writers, poets and the intellectual types. So it was a collision of cultures and sometimes it didn’t mix so well!”

“There seemed to be a lot more drinking then. Today you can’t do anything in a bar because, as soon as someone belches too loudly, people are on their cell phones!”

[image error]O’Donnell created the iconic Bistro burger, which Mimi Sheraton gave a rave review in the New York Times in 1978.

“The Bistro still represents something of the past and people like that,” he said. “It’s reminiscent of old New York and it’s maintained its integrity.”

[Second photo: 1933, NYPL; third image: 1875, New York Times]

A Little Italy sign reveals an old phone exchange

They’re hiding in plain sight all over New York: faded ads and signs with the old-school two-letter phone prefixes phased out in the 1960s in favor of 7-digit phone numbers.

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Usually they stand for something in the neighborhood, if not the neighborhood itself, such as MU for Murray Hill; RA for Ravenswood, once a separate Village in Queens but now absorbed by Astoria.

But what to make of this sign high above a restaurant on Mott Street in Little Italy, noting a BA prefix? The guide I usually consult to find out where BA is and what it means is no longer online. The elevator company could have been located anywhere in the city.

ENY has many posts on old-school prefix sightings, but no BA, unfortunately.

Do you recognize this 1920s corner speakeasy?

Few artists depict New York’s lights and shadows like Martin Lewis. In the 1920s and 1930s, he created haunting, enchanting drypoint prints showcasing day-to-day street life—from factory workers to gangs of young boys to lone men and women exiting subways and hanging around bars.

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This drypoint above, from 1929, is titled “Relics (Speakeasy Corner).” Considering that New York during Prohibition hosted an estimate 20,000 to 100,ooo speakeasies, it’s hard to know where this is.

[image error]The Old Print Shop on Lexington Avenue (which has priced this drypoint at $70,000!) solves the mystery.

“The location is Charles Street and West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village which was near Lewis’ house at the time on Bedford Street,” a page on their website tells us.

Google street view shows that this corner is almost exactly the same as it was 89 years ago, except the speakeasy has been replaced by Sevilla, one of the Village’s old-school Spanish restaurants.

More Martin Lewis prints can be found here. [Print: Metropolitan Museum of Art]

The roof sunbathers of New York’s tar beaches

Laying out to work on your tan just isn’t fashionable anymore. But sunbathers glistening with baby oil were once a ubiquitous summer sight on the city’s tar beaches.

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Tar beaches? That was the nickname New Yorkers gave the tarry black tenement or apartment house rooftop. Tenants would drag up a chair or blanket, maybe a book, radio or Walkman, and a cold drink, then pick a spot in the sun and happily bake themselves while taking a break from the crowds and noise many stories below.

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Up on a usually empty roof, there was the illusion of privacy. Of course anyone living above you could see you. But in an era before smartphone cameras and social media, it hardly mattered if curious neighbors stared.

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“As long as there have been sun worshipers in search of the perfect tan in the city, there has been the tar beach,” stated a New York Times article from 2007, mourning the passing of rooftop sunbathing as a popular alternative to a day at the shore.

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“Roofs have long been the urbanites’ slightly hotter, slightly gooier answer to the backyard pools and lawns of the suburbs—like private little plots without bothersome trees to throw shade.”

It’s a summer day pastime with fewer and fewer fans. Maybe roofs are barred because landlords don’t want to be liable for an accident, or perhaps New Yorkers have more cash these days to enjoy the sun on vacation out of the city.

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“This time-honored summer escape is a diminished, perhaps even dying habit. This has been noted by those who have a bird’s-eye access to the city: helicopter pilots, water tank repairmen and occupants of tall buildings in otherwise low-lying neighborhoods,” concluded the Times.

[Top photo: Getty Images, 1966, Hell’s Kitchen; second photo: Tudor City, MCNY, 1943; x2010.7.2.9662; third photo: via Flying VIPs; fourth photo: Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos, 1983; fifth photo: Brooklyn, Ed Clark/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images via the Daily Mail]

The woman in Edward Hopper’s “Summertime”

She’s young and attractive, wearing a summer straw hat and see-through dress that doesn’t blow quite as much as the curtains in the window to her left do.

Stepping out of her tenement entrance and standing at the sidewalk during the summer of 1943, she appears to be waiting—for what?

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The writer behind Edwardhopper.net has this take on her, one of the many isolated souls Hopper depicted in New York in the first half of the 20th century. “The outfit, obviously new, refers to the increased prosperity of the nation, which at last had been able to put aside many of the difficulties of the Depression,” states the site.

“She is part of the large group of young American females who had to survive the war years as best they could, years marked by a dearth of eligible young men and an abundance of money accrued from the jobs the war effort engendered.” Perhaps she’s waiting for the war to end, and the life she wants to begin.

A Dutch sailor’s photos of the New York of 1979

In 1979, Peter van Wijk was a radio officer in the Dutch Merchant Marine. That summer, his ship docked a couple of times in New York Harbor, giving him the opportunity to visit Manhattan and wander the streets.

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Like all curious newcomers to New York, he brought a camera along with him, and he took photos of iconic tourist spots like the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, and Times Square.

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But he also captured the seemingly ordinary street scenes that offer fleeting glimpses into the heart and soul of the late 1970s city: shoppers going in and out of mom and pop stores, musicians and vendors drawing crowds, and taxis navigating traffic-choked streets.

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Thirty-eight years later, van Wijk decided to share his previously unseen images, and Ephemeral New York has the wonderful privilege of posting them.

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It goes without saying that the Gotham of 1979 was a vastly different place. These days, everyone wants to live in New York; in the 1970s, residents couldn’t get out fast enough. The city’s population dipped an incredible 10 percent from 1970 to 1980, to just over 7 million.

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Ed Koch had been elected mayor a year earlier on a law and order platform. The city’s nickname, Fear City (or ), was a nod to rising crime and rampant graffiti.

Cuts in city services left garbage on the streets, and shells of buildings sat empty in the South Bronx, East Village, and the Lower East Side, among other neighborhoods.

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You wouldn’t know any of this from looking at these photos. The city in this collection of images is animated and colorful, with life and energy.

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It’s a New York that feels almost small scale compared to the contemporary city—more a collection of neighborhoods rather than an island of cookie-cutter stores and development.

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The gritty, street-smart New York of the 1970s is often hailed as a more authentic version of the city. How true that is has been up for debate lately.

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These photos don’t take a side. They’re simply fascinating portals into the past that bring memories back of the city in the late 1970s, before crowded subways, a critical mass of Starbucks and Duane Reade stores, and an army of residents wearing white earbuds as they go about their day.

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[All photos:copyright Peter van Wijk]

A happy Fourth of July card, 1911 style

Uncle Sam, drums, bugles, a pistol, flags, and lots of fireworks—that’s Independence Day as seen by card manufacturers in 1911.

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This card, from the New York Public Library Digital Gallery, was sent from a son in San Francisco to his father, a Mr. Charles Anderson, who lived at 44 West 125th Street. This is 1911, so no ZIP code needed.