Esther Crain's Blog, page 136

An ode to the original Second Avenue subway

[image error]True, it wasn’t actually a subway. The steel road bed of the Second Avenue Elevated put belching trains two stories in the air from Chatham Square downtown to 127th Street.

But this lurching, unglamorous el, as it was called, was Second Avenue’s very own rapid train from 1880 to 1942.

It was a latecomer as far as els go. The Ninth Avenue line opened in 1868, while the Sixth Avenue and Third Avenue els were up and running in the 1870s.

[image error]New Yorkers welcomed this el, which made the trip from City Hall to 59th Street in just 28 minutes, half the time it took via a horse-pulled, jam-packed streetcar.

But it had drawbacks. Loud and gritty, the train ran day and night, raining ash on pedestrians and blocking out the sun.

Still, the Second Avenue el helped colonize the northern reaches of Manhattan, transporting residents from crowded downtown slums to newer housing in areas such as Yorkville and Harlem.

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Unlike the Sixth Avenue El, which was memorialized by poets and depicted by painters, the Second Avenue line didn’t get much love.

[image error]It did earn a gritty, gangland rep: Under its tracks at Allen and Rivington Streets in September 1903, the Five Points Gang and Monk Eastman’s Gang drew their guns and duked it out in a deadly turf battle.

Through its 62 years, the Second Avenue el saw lots of changes. Powered by steam early on, the tracks were electrified around 1900. Ridership dropped when faster, more convenient subways arrived.

The city took the el over in 1940, and the end came in 1942. Miles of tracks were cleared away and the steel girders removed, making way for sunlight again.

Now, the first leg of the Second Avenue subway is opening January 1. Think about the old el and how it shaped the East Side of Manhattan when you take a ride from one of the sleek new stations.

[Top photo: Wikipedia; second photo: MCNY, 1939, X2010.7.1.1789; third image: The Third Rail; fourth image: NYPL; fifth image: YouTube]

Why 1970s New York was nicknamed “Fun City”

New York City has had some colorful nicknames over the years—from and the Empire City in the 19th century to the Big Apple in the 1920s jazz era.

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But the “Fun City” moniker of the 1960s and 1970s?

The term was supposed to be a joke, a take on a phrase used by Mayor John Lindsay during a 1966 interview with sports journalist Dick Schaap, who was then a metro columnist with the New York Herald Tribune.

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“Soon after the city was crippled by a transit strike on Mayor John V. Lindsay’s first day in office in 1966, Mr. Lindsay was asked if he was still happy to be the mayor,” wrote the New York Times in Schaap’s obituary in 2001, recounting how the nickname was coined.

[image error]Lindsay responded, “I still think it’s a fun city.”

Schaap put the term in his column, using it “as an affectionate, if snide, gibe at the overwhelmed city,” stated the Times.

The phrase caught on with New Yorkers, who were unimpressed with the new mayor’s upbeat tone in a metropolis that over the next four years would endure a sanitation strike, a teacher walkout, a crippling blackout, and increasing financial distress.

Soon, the nickname was emblazoned on Times Square strip club marquees, city bus ads, and even on Broadway, where a short-lived play starring Joan Rivers debuted in 1972 (and closed a week later).

The term has mostly disappeared today—though a few critics dubbed Mayor Bloomberg’s New York of the early 2000s the “no-fun city.”

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But we still have Fun City Tattooing on St. Marks Place near Avenue A, going strong since the height of the Fun City era in 1976!

[Second photo: Fun City Peep Shows circa 1988: Michael Horsley/Flickr; third photo: playbill.com; fourth photo: unknown source]

The bums and barflies on a 10th Avenue corner

“Well-bred people are no fun to paint,” Reginald Marsh once reportedly said.

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Known for his exaggerated, carnival-like paintings of crowds of showgirls, shoppers, and Coney Island beach-goers, Marsh was deeply taken by the forgotten men of 1930s New York—casualties of the Depression who gathered at bars and on breadlines.

[image error]His 1931 etching, “Tenth Avenue at 27th Street,” gives us a detailed look at a crowd of anonymous men lined up along the side of a shadowy saloon in a rough-edged neighborhood.

The men either look away, leaning against the bar like it’s a lifeboat, or leer at a lone woman.

Hmm . . . what would Marsh think of this same corner 86 years later, with the High Line and art galleries drawing the well-bred people who never made it into his sketchbook?

[Second image: Google]

Peek into a travel diary of colonial New York

[image error]New York in 1704 was barely a city at all.

Under British rule for only 40 years, about 5,000 people called it home. Not much existed past Maiden Lane. Industry focused on the harbor. The original Trinity Church had just been built. Yellow fever was epidemic.

And in autumn of that year a boardinghouse keeper named Sarah Kemble Knight (at left) set out on horseback from her hometown of Boston to journey to Manhattan and back, helping a friend handle legal issues.

Traveling via horse through colonial New England’s primitive roads and bunking in public houses would be rough for anyone, let alone a 38-year-old woman (she did have the help of a guide).

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But what makes the trip extraordinary is that Knight kept a journal, which was published as a book in 1825.

“The Cittie of New York is a pleasant well compacted place, situated on a Commodius River [which] is a fine harbor for shipping,” Knight wrote on her arrival in December 1704.

[image error]She only stayed in the city for a “fortnight”—two weeks. Yet some of her impressions of New York as a place of fashion, stately houses, flowing alcohol, and high-speed fun might sound familiar.

“[New Yorkers] are not strict in keeping the Sabbath as in Boston and other places where I had bin,” she writes. “They are sociable to one another and courteous and civill to strangers and fare well in their houses.”

“The English go very fasheonable in their dress. [But] the Dutch, especially the middling sort, differ from our women, in their habitt go loose. . . .” Knight says, explaining that the Dutch women wear a caplike headband that leaves their ears sticking out “which are sett out with jewels [with] jewells of a large size and many in number.”

[image error]Dutch women also have fingers “hoop’t with rings.”

New Yorkers are great entertainers, she says, and taverns “treat with good liquor liberally, and the customers drink as liberally and generally pay for’t as well….”

The 18th century city knew how to have a good time. “Their diversions in the winter is riding sleys about three or four miles out of town,” Knight writes, “where they have houses of entertainment at a place called the Bowery, and some go to friends houses who handsomely treat them.”

[image error]While out with friends, “I believe we mett 50 or 60 sleys that day—they fly with great swiftness and some are so furious that they’d turn out of the path for none except a loaden cart.”

Sounds like modern city traffic and bad taxi drivers!

[Top image: National Women’s History Museum; second image: New York in 1695; NYC Tourist; third image: NYC in 1700, Wikipedia; fourth image: Fraunces Tavern, built by Samuel DeLancey in 1719 on Pearl and Broad Streets; NYPL]

Times Square before it became Times Square

Here’s a look at Times Square in 1900, seven years before the neighborhood became famous for the annual New Year’s Eve ball drop—and in fact, before it was even called Times Square.

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At the time, the nexus of avenues that would soon be dubbed the Crossroads of the World was known as Longacre Square, the sleepy center of the city’s carriage industry.

By the turn of the 20th century, New York’s theater district had edged up against the area—see the burlesque house on the left. In four years, the New York Times would relocate to that spot in the center of the card.

And starting in 1907, New Year’s Eve in New York would never be the same.

[Photo: MCNY 93.1.1.17932]

New York kids, toy windows, and holiday dreams

Is there anything more wonderful for a kid than a holiday toy store window display? These kids—their eyes transfixed on dolls and blocks and drums and animal figurines—answer the question.

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Holiday-themed store windows apparently got their start in New York, of course. Macy’s pioneered them way back in 1874 when the store was located on 14th Street, and toys were among the merchandise on display.

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These photos were all taken around the city between 1910 and 1915 by George Bain. The names of the stores or addresses aren’t listed, unfortunately.

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But this last one below must be a big retailer. Look at all the adults crowded around, getting a close look!

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[Photos: Bain Collection/LOC]

A vintage pharmacy relic on University Place

[image error]Here’s something you won’t find at Duane Reade or Rite-Aid: an old-fashioned pharmacy scale.

This relic of old New York’s neighborhood drugstores can be found just inside the entrance of Whitney Chemists on University Place off Ninth Street.

It’s a packed-to-the-gills pharmacy time machine and one of the city’s rapidly disappearing independent drugstores.

And where was the scale—now weathered and a little beat up—manufactured? Brooklyn USA is stamped beside the 250 lb. mark.

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The Detecto Scale Company began producing medical scales in 1900 in Williamsburg, but how old this one is and how long it’s held court just inside the 50-year-old pharmacy entrance is a mystery.

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The one thing I forgot to check: if the scale actually works!

[Third photo: Yelp]

Shopping for Christmas dinner in the 1870s city

Most New Yorkers today get their holiday roasts and chops all nicely packaged from a refrigerated counter.

Not so in the 1870s. Hitting up one of the city’s huge (and typically filthy) outdoor markets so you could pick out a main course for your holiday meant looking Christmas dinner in the eye.

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“The neighborhood of Fulton Market, and all the passages of the market itself, were thronged yesterday with holiday buyers, who elbowed each other about in the snow and slush as if their lives depended upon the celerity with which they made their tour of the meat shops and poultry stands,” wrote the New York Times two days before Christmas in 1876.

Fulton Market—not just for fish but meat and game as well, as seen in the 1878 illustration above—was one of New York’s biggest. Washington Market on the West Side (below in 1879), also supplied New Yorkers with fresh game.

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A 1901 Harper’s Weekly article paid tribute to the “market men” who ran these venues and supplied the city with fare for holiday banquets.

“The city is awake and ravenous. In all the river streets the sidewalks are blockaded with great heaps of things to eat. Inside and outside the markets, as far as you can see, are butter and eggs, apples, pears, bananas, oranges, potatoes, cabbage, ducks and wild game, fat geese and chickens, grouse, quail, and woodcock, the staple meats in amazing quantity, fish, lobster, scallops,  and mussels, and turkeys, turkeys, turkeys, until one is convinced that the gobbler and not the eagle should be stamped on all the coin in the realm.”

[Illustrations: NYPL]

This street by the East River needs a better name

New York City’s street grid was laid out in the 1811, part of the Commissioners’ Plan that shaped the cityscape of contemporary Manhattan north of Houston Street.

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But changes are always made, and new roads crop up to accommodate new buildings, parks, and drives.

But couldn’t the New York City Department of Transportation come up with something more descriptive than this street name above, for a small road beside the FDR Drive in the East 20s?

Even if this street really is brand new—it’s not on Google maps, so it’s hard to tell—we can be more creative than this!

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A cast-iron jewel sits behind this glass facade

[image error]If only we could peel back the black reflective glass obscuring 15 West 15th Street and knock off some of the coffin-shaped boxes from the upper floors.

Because underneath what looks like another modern commercial building is the skeleton of Tiffany & Co.’s 1870 headquarters, a spectacular cast-iron building designed for New York’s legendary “palace of jewels” (below).

This is where the famed jeweler relocated after starting out on Broadway across from City Hall in 1837 before moving to Broadway and Prince Street in the mid-19th century.

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“To call John Kellum’s design for the 5-story building ornate would be an understatement; its decorative columns, cornices, and other projections attempted to render in cast iron a symbol of the ‘palace of jewels’ inside,” wrote John Hill in Guide to Contemporary New York Architecture.

[image error]Union Square was an ideal spot for the new Tiffany’s.

After the Civil War, Ladies Mile, New York’s premium shopping district, moved to the fashionable stretch between 9th Street and 23rd Street along Broadway.

Tiffany’s wanted to be part of the action. On Union Square East, the store occupied prime real estate betwen the best dry goods emporiums of the day, like Lord & Taylor, which also relocated “uptown” in 1870, to 20th Street.

Throughout the Gilded Age, Tiffany’s dazzled New Yorkers with its jewelry collection and what the New York Times in 1873 called its “spacious galleries” of home furnishings and objects of art.

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Imagine the store during holiday time in the late 19th century, with well-heeled wives perusing the display counters for gifts of gold and diamonds (above) . . . and thieves looking for a way to break in and rob the place, which happened all too often, according to newspaper accounts.

[image error]Tiffany’s stuck around Union Square until the 1900s before following other retailers to a new midtown spot at Fifth Avenue and 37th Street in 1905. In 1940, it moved to its present address up the avenue at 57th Street.

So how did the Union Square store end up swathed in black, as if it’s in mourning?

Amalgamated Bank took over the building in the early 1900s, then stripped it of its ornamental loveliness (a safety precaution, as a chunk fell off and killed a pedestrian) in the 1950s.

[image error]For five decades the featureless, white-brick building (right) housed various tenants. In the 2000s, it was redone as a pricey apartment residence.

The architects for the new residence removed the white brick. “With the brick and [much of the] cast iron gone, the new zinc-framed glass walls sit two feet in front of the remaining 1870 cast iron structure,” wrote Hill.

Apparently at night, if you look closely, you can see the original arched windows—a ghostly remnant of one of the city’s most famous emporiums.

[Second photo: MCNY, 1885, x2010.11.3352; third photo: NYPL, 1870; third image: NYPL, undated; fourth photo: NYPL, 1899; fifth photo: MCNY, 1953, 54.37.18]