Esther Crain's Blog, page 14

The “tenement synagogues” that filled in the streetscape of New York’s Jewish neighborhoods

Though Manhattan’s earliest Jewish residents arrived in New Amsterdam 1654 (and were initially denied entry, but that’s an entirely different story), the first synagogue wasn’t consecrated until April 8, 1730.

Shearith Israel, as it was called, was a one-story stone structure built on what was then Mill Street, now South William Street in the Financial District, according to the downtown newspaper The Broadsheet Daily. (Shearith Israel still exists, with a synagogue on Central Park West.)

Fast-forward to the 1890s and early 1900s, when thousands of Eastern European Jews fled the Old World and crowded into the Lower East Side. The narrow streets in the Jewish “ghetto,” as it was called then, were already packed with apartment walkups, factories, storefronts, and stables.

With land and space at a premium, where would these newcomers from various communities and countries build houses of worship? In between the existing tenements, of course—hence the development of hundreds of small, lot-size synagogues known as “tenement synagogues.”

Village Preservation’s Off the Grid blog traced their appearance in New York City. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “depending on their means, societies and associated congregations sometimes rented spaces as small as single rooms in tenement apartments or in wedding halls,” states Off the Grid in a 2012 post. 

“They worshipped wherever they could, and often, single houses of worship were home to multiple societies. Occasionally, larger congregations were able to purchase entire tenement buildings for conversion into synagogues, which gave rise to a Lower East Side phenomenon known as the ‘tenement synagogue.'”

Though the Jewish community of today’s Lower East Side and East Village has certainly dwindled since the early decades of the 20th century, many blocks in these neighborhood still feature surviving tenement synagogues—like this one at 415 East 6th Street, seen in the top photo.

Described as a “delightful little jewel” by Gerard R. Wolfe in his 2012 book, The Synagogues of New York’s Lower East Side, this 1910 building is flanked by two circa-1890s tenements. It’s not a synagogue anymore. Today, the lovely gem is chopped into condo units.

The second photo is the Stanton Street Shul, whose original congregation “created their place of worship from an existing structure on the site in 1913,” states the Shul’s website. It remains one of a handful of active synagogues in the area since a high of about 700 in 1918, per the website.

The tenement that once stood to the east of 638 East Sixth Street is gone (third photo), but this former tenement synagogue survives as the Sixth Street Community Center. Its twin next door is now the Church of God.

Not all tenement synagogues were founded on the Lower East Side. As Jewish populations settled in different parts of Manhattan, houses of worship went up across the city as well.

The fourth photo shows the Old Broadway Synagogue, built on a small lane off West 125th Street called Old Broadway. The building dates to 1923, but the congregation—made up of Eastern European Jews who settled in Manhattanville in West Harlem—was founded in 1911, per the synagogue’s website.

A midcentury painter’s rich, reflective portrait of a Manhattan tenement hallway

Most New Yorkers probably don’t think too much about their apartment hallway. It’s a typically narrow, empty space closed off by shut doors that we only pass through to get to the elevator or stairwell.

Artist Charles L. Goeller decided to use a hallway as the inspiration of this undated painting. “Tenement Hallway,” as Goeller titled it, may seem flat and one-dimensional at first glance. But the more you look at it, the more it comes alive.

The bright light, rich paint, and gold in the carpet give the hallway a vibrant, lively feel. It feels open as well, with the angled door of the apartment in the distance and the curved wood of the banister leading downstairs.

Born in 1901, Goeller found success in the early and middle decades of the 20th century as a Precisionist painter of colorful, geometric still lifes, portraits (see his self-portrait, below), and landscapes. His early education, however, was in architecture. His approach here is to give dimension and emotion to flat surfaces.

I have no idea exactly where this tenement hallway is located. Goeller lived most of his life in New Jersey, though he did reside in New York City in the 1930s, exhibiting his work at galleries.

One of his paintings depicts the Third Avenue El and part of a city streetscape around East 19th Street. The Smithsonian Institute states that he “lived just a few doors east of this corner.” So perhaps this tenement hallway was likely in Gramercy.

[Top image: Schoelkopf Gallery; second Image: Smithsonian Institute]

An elegy for a long-gone, cobweb-covered bar opened in a downtown alley before the Civil War

New York has always had its legendary bars—from the rough-and-tumble roadhouses of the colonial era like Cato’s to the late 20th century Blarney Stone pubs, which served as retreats for working-class Irish men (and any other stragglers) fond of ale and corned beef.

The passings of these notorious watering holes became milestones in city history. And so it was with Cobweb Hall—a decrepit Manhattan saloon that got its start on Duane Street before the Civil War and met its end by 1920, at the dawn of Prohibition.

It’s been over a century since the proprietors of Cobweb Hall poured the last drink. But it’s never too late to honor a tavern that for decades was a place of rendezvous for businessmen, politicians, intellectuals, bohemians, and “other celebrities,” as the New York Herald put it.

The Cobweb operated at an ancient house at 80 Duane Street, just east of Broadway and behind a long-defunct street called Manhattan Place.

Who was the original owner? It might be lost to history. One story has it that it was started in 1848 by someone named F. Ramel, a former saloonkeeper on lower Broadway whose reputation for serving “good whiskey,” according to an 1898 World article, brought in politicos like Boss Tweed and presidents Grant and Arthur.

Most news stories, however, credit an “eccentric Scotsman” named David Patullo as the founder, opening in 1840. “The whiskies he imported from Scotland and Ireland were the best to be obtained in the city, and whoever was desirous of sipping a genuine ‘hot scotch’ resorted to his place,” wrote the Brooklyn Daily Times in an 1886 story on Gotham’s infamous taverns.

Patullo reportedly was superstitious about killing spiders—and the name of the bar spoke to the many cobwebs that “hung in festoons from the barrels and clung in dusty masses to the bottles on the shelves,” stated the Brooklyn newspaper.

Patullo died in 1868, and newspapers reported that a fight ensued over his estate, as he had no heirs. Other reports stated that Patullo sold Cobwell Hall in 1864 to an Irish immigrant named Hugh Ferrigan, who “made it a resort for politicians,” reported the Sun in 1890.

Its proximity to City Hall made it a favorite of a secession of city mayors. “Mayor Hugh Grant and Mayor Gilroy used to drop in, as did many other men prominent in the city’s affairs,” noted a later Sun article.

Women, of course, were not welcome; bars were the preserve of men only in the 19th century city.

There was nothing fancy about Cobweb Hall, even as more hospitable bars and clubs opened through the late 19th century. “It is a primitive sort of saloon, the barroom is a little cobwebby place 9 feet by 12,” stated the World. “The same little old coal stove that warmed the place in 1848, with its crooked, smoky pipe, warms it today.”

Cobweb Hall’s end began after the turn of the century. A 1902 fire damaged the bar, a mortgage dispute threatened its closure in 1912, and by 1920 it had been sold at auction and slated for a tear-down—a victim of many fators, including Prohibition.

City newspapers penned emotional elegies to this fabled bar, and then it was forgotten…until this post dredged up its story and the famous and notorious New Yorkers who made it such a legend.

[Top photo: George Ritter/MCNY; X2010.11.1876; second image: New York Tribune; third image: Brooklyn Daily Times; fourth image: New York Times; fifth image: NYPL Digital Collections;]

A forgotten plaque in Brooklyn puts a spotlight on the city’s first official street cleaners

On an unmarked brick building in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn is a metal plaque. Weathered from age and neglect, the words “City of New York” and “Department of Street Cleaning” stand out in bold letters.

This easy-to-miss plaque, just shy of the Brooklyn Bridge, dates back to at least 1921, when Brooklyn resident Alfred Taylor became the longtime head of the Department of Street Cleaning, and John Hylan was the city’s mayor.

The department, headquartered in Manhattan, had branches in each borough. Presumably this brick building was the Brooklyn outpost—an ideal place to store machinery, shovels, brooms, and vehicles, as the area was a gritty waterside manufacturing enclave with few residential neighbors.

The plaque doesn’t provide any information about the Department of Street Cleaning. But in 1881, when the department was officially created, it filled a desperate need.

Up until then, the city’s Street Cleaning Bureau worked under the auspices of the Police Department. The men in this crew (below illustration) were tasked with keeping ashes, garbage, horse manure, snow, ice, and other “light refuse and rubbish” from mucking up New York’s notoriously trashy thoroughfares.

Bureau workers were not particularly successful, and city residents continued to be disgusted. The need for street cleaning was also increasingly seen as a health issue, as scientific advances demonstrated how unsanitary conditions could spread disease.

So the men employed by the new Department of Street Cleaning hit the streets. They were now part of city government, which gave them a sense of professionalism as they cleaned up after tenement dwellers who hurled household trash out windows and drivers who left horse carcasses in gutters rather than pay to have them properly removed.

That professionalism was heightened once George Waring, an engineer and Civil War colonel, took over the department in 1895. Waring instilled a military-like structure that mandated crisp white uniforms—hence the new nickname for department employees, the White Wings.

Waring also halted the practice of dumping waste into waterways and launched New York’s first recycling system, noted a report from Weill Cornell Medicine.

Brooklyn, an independent city at the time, may have handled street cleaning differently through the 19th century. But with the 1898 unification of New York City, the Department of Street Cleaning served all five boroughs.

What were workers paid? A 1901 Brooklyn Eagle article states that the superintendent took home $3,000 per year. Dump inspectors pocketed $1,200 annually, while sweepers and drivers earned $720. (By comparison, the average laborer in 1900 made $300 a year, according to one source.)

Roughly a decade after the plaque was in place, the department came to an end. In 1933, the Department of Sanitation was created, which took over the task of street cleaning and is still in charge today.

But I like that this plaque remains—a reminder of the men who day after day tackled (and continue to tackle) a thankless and often unseen responsibility: keeping New York City’s streets clean.

[Second photo: Alice Austen via NYPL Digital Collections; third illustraion: NYPL Digital Collections; fourth and fifth photos: Bain Collection/LOC]

Two 1970s-era store signs still going strong in Brooklyn and the South Bronx

It’s not easy to find an old-school store sign in Manhattan anymore. Sans serif typeface, glorious neon, a phone number without an area code—they’re a vanishing breed.

But the hunt is easier in the outer boroughs. Here, development in many areas isn’t as furious, and neighborhood shops don’t face the kind of competition that forces them to refresh their look and logo so often.

Case in point is the signage for Kramer’s Pharmacy, on St. Ann’s Avenue in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx. The pharmacy has been at this spot at least since 1973, according to an ad I found from the New York Daily News.

The somewhat rundown letters have a very 1970s feel. But mostly I love the Rx symbol and the partially lit neon vertical sign on the facade of the building that reads “drugs,” plain and simple.

Over on 18th Avenue and 84th Street in Brooklyn is another curious surviving sign: Pride Formica Kitchens.

Though Formica has been around for more than a century, something about this durable material screams 1970s to me—as does the store sign, which looks hand-painted.

Growing up in the Gilded Age: the remarkable memoir of a prosperous girl in 1880s New York

When Ethel Nathalie Dana (née Smith) was born in June 1878 in a brownstone on East 71st Street, her Lenox Hill neighborhood was so sparsely populated, “the only building west of it was a bright blue farmhouse opposite Central Park,” wrote Nathalie, as she was known.

The Steinway piano factory and Ruppert’s Brewery sat on the outskirts of Lenox Hill, she wrote, and new brownstone rows with their “heavy stoops” “stood starkly among vacant lots where squatters had built themselves shanties, since room no longer existed downtown for the thousands of immigrants who landed at the Battery each year.”

So begins the first pages of Nathalie’s beautifully written book, Young in New York: A Memoir of a Victorian Girlhood. Published in the early 1960s, it’s the story of a girl (above with her siblings, second from left) navigating childhood during the transformative years at the end of the 19th century, in a society “which was sure that it had found the answers.”

The day-to-day personal details Nathalie recalls offer a descriptive peek into life for well-off children during the Gilded Age.

Nathalie’s family—educated and comfortable, but not rich—settled in Lenox Hill (above, in 1880) after her Episcopalian minister father, Cornelius B. Smith, became the rector of St. James Church. At the time, St. James was located on a hill between 68th and 69th Street at today’s Lexington Avenue.

The congregation grew so large, a new church was constructed in 1884 on Madison Avenue, which still stands today (below).

As a small child, Nathalie’s earliest recollections include living near smoky, gritty Fourth Avenue, now Park Avenue, where the trains of the New York Central ran overground. “When a train was approaching, warning was given by an Irishman who stepped out and waved a flag” to let pedestrians know to stay on the sidewalk until the train passed.

She remembers the activity on the street outside her window, watching delivery wagons in the morning and hearing the clip-clopping of horse hoofs on the cobblestone pavement.

“Later in the day the cry, ‘rags and bottles’ accompanied by the sound of bells and the rattle of wheels, announced the arrival of a cart,” she wrote. “From time to time the organ grinder appeared, with a monkey dressed in a red jacket and a little cap with a feather.” German bands also entertained the block, playing popular songs in the evening.

As was the custom at the time, Nathalie was born in her mother’s “dark carved oak” bed and slept in her mother’s room in a crib until she was old enough to have a room of her own. Extended family members visited often and helped take care of Nathalie and her siblings, while Irish servants were employed to cook and tend to the home.

Her older siblings walked to school, greeting other school kids and shopkeepers during the mile and a half walk. “In the afternoons the boys played baseball in the vacant lots of the neighborhoods with their friends, or sailed a series of boats on the pond at Central Park.” Watching the fireworks at the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 was a special adventure.

In 1884, the family home on East 71st Street burned down, thanks to a gust of wind that blew an open window’s lace curtains into a gas jet. The Smiths’ new residence stood on the corner of Park Avenue and East 69th Street (fourth photo). The brick house had stained-glass windows and a cast iron mansard roof—much more stylish than the brownstone.

Life for young Nathalie (above, age 3) revolved around her family and her parish. The women in her family did not work, because “in the 1880s a woman who earned money lost her status as a lady.”

Her parents entertained members of the parish and other clergymen and their wives with dinners at their home. Summers were spent in Connecticut and Maine, which kept her family away from the stifling city heat.

This was the fabled era of Gilded Age society, but the social swirl of old money or the new rich seemed to have little meaning in her household. Nathalie and her friends, however, couldn’t help ogle the stunning mansions lining Fifth Avenue. After school, she and a friend would walk down Fifth Avenue until they got to 17th Street, where they stopped at Huyler’s (below, in 1905) for ice cream sodas.

Walking was the preferred way to get around the city. “In the age of walking and horseback riding the pace was slow,” she recalls. “Men walked to their offices even when they were several miles away, and only occasionally did women take the long trip to the shops in a horsecar. Most activities were local and life was leisurely.”

Nathalie made a bold move when she was 12. Curious and intelligent, she’d heard about a new school, Brearley, which was founded to give girls the same level of education boys received. “There was a revolution in education, as the belief that women could think without injuring their brains was only partially accepted,” she explained.

Nathalie asked her parents if she could leave her current school and apply. They were hesitant, but she was accepted. At Brearley, her education truly began. “I felt that I had found the life of the mind in the Brearley….When I was 16, the field of music and art was opened to me by my music teacher….To be young in a growing world which was full of new ideas was stimulating and exciting.”

During her years at Brearley, she studied music. After graduating, she turned a European tour with her mother and father (above) into a solo adventure, visiting Germany and Italy to study music and art. Back in New York, Nathalie pursued the arts and befriended other artistic young adults.

After she was introduced to a young architect named Richard Dana, the two married in 1911. She had a son and a daughter and for the rest of her life remained involved in the arts, serving on the board of the Whitney Foundation and the Municipal Art Society.

Two chapters of what became this remarkable memoir were published in a journal put out by the New-York Historical Society in 1962. The jacket copy of her book states that in her sixties, Nathalie enrolled at Columbia to study the history of New York City, which led her to write her book.

Nathalie passed away in 1972 at 93 years old. Her memoir offers an incredible perspective not just on the changing mores and habits of children in New York City but also of a bygone era of a slower-paced city steeped in religiosity.

“We lived by a code, based on religion, which told us what was right and what was wrong,” she wrote. “Today we decide on our own ethics and, when something goes wrong, we try to discover whether circumstances, society, or ourselves are to blame instead of asking what immutable law, as interpreted by the church, we have broken.”

“To one who has not lived through the change it is hard to realize how great is the shift in orientation.”

Nathalie’s memoir of her Gilded Age girlhood is a topic on the latest episode of The Gilded Gentleman podcast, “Children of the Gilded Age: Seen and Not Heard (Until Now).” This link will take you to the episode, available starting October 1. Visit The Gilded Gentleman home page for more information on this very insightful and entertaining episode featuring myself and the excellent Carl Raymond!

[Top photo: Napoleon Sarony via Young in New York; second photo: Young in New York; fourth photo: Young in New York; fifth photo: Young in New York; sixth photo: MCNY, 93.1.1.18028; seventh photo: Century Association Archives Foundation; eighth photo: Cover, Young in New York]

Home life and school days: the memoir of a prosperous girl growing up in Gilded Age New York

When Ethel Nathalie Dana (née Smith) was born in June 1878 in a brownstone on East 71st Street, her Lenox Hill neighborhood was so sparsely populated, “the only building west of it was a bright blue farmhouse opposite Central Park,” wrote Nathalie, as she was known.

The Steinway piano factory and Ruppert’s Brewery sat on the outskirts of Lenox Hill, she wrote, and new brownstone rows with their “heavy stoops” “stood starkly among vacant lots where squatters had built themselves shanties, since room no longer existed downtown for the thousands of immigrants who landed at the Battery each year.”

So begins the first pages of Nathalie’s beautifully written book, Young in New York: A Memoir of a Victorian Girlhood. Published in the early 1960s, it’s the story of a girl (above with her siblings, second from left) navigating childhood during the transformative years at the end of the 19th century, in a society “which was sure that it had found the answers.”

The day-to-day personal details Nathalie recalls offer a descriptive peek into life for well-off children during the Gilded Age.

Nathalie’s family—educated and comfortable, but not rich—settled in Lenox Hill (above, in 1880) after her Episcopalian minister father, Cornelius B. Smith, became the rector of St. James Church. At the time, St. James was located on a hill between 68th and 69th Street at today’s Lexington Avenue.

The congregation grew so large, a new church was constructed in 1884 on Madison Avenue, which still stands today (below).

As a small child, Nathalie’s earliest recollections include living near smoky, gritty Fourth Avenue, now Park Avenue, where the trains of the New York Central ran overground. “When a train was approaching, warning was given by an Irishman who stepped out and waved a flag” to let pedestrians know to stay on the sidewalk until the train passed.

She remembers the activity on the street outside her window, watching delivery wagons in the morning and hearing the clip-clopping of horse hoofs on the cobblestone pavement.

“Later in the day the cry, ‘rags and bottles’ accompanied by the sound of bells and the rattle of wheels, announced the arrival of a cart,” she wrote. “From time to time the organ grinder appeared, with a monkey dressed in a red jacket and a little cap with a feather.” German bands also entertained the block, playing popular songs in the evening.

As was the custom at the time, Nathalie was born in her mother’s “dark carved oak” bed and slept in her mother’s room in a crib until she was old enough to have a room of her own. Extended family members visited often and helped take care of Nathalie and her siblings, while Irish servants were employed to cook and tend to the home.

Her older siblings walked to school, greeting other school kids and shopkeepers during the mile and a half walk. “In the afternoons the boys played baseball in the vacant lots of the neighborhoods with their friends, or sailed a series of boats on the pond at Central Park.” Watching the fireworks at the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 was a special adventure.

In 1884, the family home on East 71st Street burned down, thanks to a gust of wind that blew an open window’s lace curtains into a gas jet. The Smiths’ new residence stood on the corner of Park Avenue and East 69th Street (fourth photo). The brick house had stained-glass windows and a cast iron mansard roof—much more stylish than the brownstone.

Life for young Nathalie (above, age 3) revolved around her family and her parish. The women in her family did not work, because “in the 1880s a woman who earned money lost her status as a lady.”

Her parents entertained members of the parish and other clergymen and their wives with dinners at their home. Summers were spent in Connecticut and Maine, which kept her family away from the stifling city heat.

This was the fabled era of Gilded Age society, but the social swirl of old money or the new rich seemed to have little meaning in her household. Nathalie and her friends, however, couldn’t help ogle the stunning mansions lining Fifth Avenue. After school, she and a friend would walk down Fifth Avenue until they got to 17th Street, where they stopped at Huyler’s (below, in 1905) for ice cream sodas.

Walking was the preferred way to get around the city. “In the age of walking and horseback riding the pace was slow,” she recalls. “Men walked to their offices even when they were several miles away, and only occasionally did women take the long trip to the shops in a horsecar. Most activities were local and life was leisurely.”

Nathalie made a bold move when she was 12. Curious and intelligent, she’d heard about a new school, Brearley, which was founded to give girls the same level of education boys received. “There was a revolution in education, as the belief that women could think without injuring their brains was only partially accepted,” she explained.

Nathalie asked her parents if she could leave her current school and apply. They were hesitant, but she was accepted. At Brearley, her education truly began. “I felt that I had found the life of the mind in the Brearley….When I was 16, the field of music and art was opened to me by my music teacher….To be young in a growing world which was full of new ideas was stimulating and exciting.”

During her years at Brearley, she studied music. After graduating, she turned a European tour with her mother and father (above) into a solo adventure, visiting Germany and Italy to study music and art. Back in New York, Nathalie pursued the arts and befriended other artistic young adults.

After she was introduced to a young architect named Richard Dana, the two married in 1911. She had a son and a daughter and for the rest of her life remained involved in the arts, serving on the board of the Whitney Foundation and the Municipal Art Society.

Two chapters of what became this remarkable memoir were published in a journal put out by the New-York Historical Society in 1962. The jacket copy of her book states that in her sixties, Nathalie enrolled at Columbia to study the history of New York City, which led her to write her book.

Nathalie passed away in 1972 at 93 years old. Her memoir offers an incredible perspective not just on the changing mores and habits of children in New York City but also of a bygone era of a slower-paced city steeped in religiosity.

“We lived by a code, based on religion, which told us what was right and what was wrong,” she wrote. “Today we decide on our own ethics and, when something goes wrong, we try to discover whether circumstances, society, or ourselves are to blame instead of asking what immutable law, as interpreted by the church, we have broken.”

“To one who has not lived through the change it is hard to realize how great is the shift in orientation.”

Nathalie’s memoir of her Gilded Age girlhood is a topic on the latest episode of The Gilded Gentleman podcast, “Children of the Gilded Age: Seen and Not Heard (Until Now).” The episode will be available on October 1. Visit The Gilded Gentleman home page for more information, or return to this post on October 1 where I’ll include a link to this very insightful and entertaining episode featuring myself and the excellent Carl Raymond!

[Top photo: Napoleon Sarony via Young in New York; second photo: Young in New York; fourth photo: Young in New York; fifth photo: Young in New York; sixth photo: MCNY, 93.1.1.18028; seventh photo: Century Association Archives Foundation; eighth photo: Cover, Young in New York]

A rich display of humanity on the grass and benches of Depression-era Tompkins Square Park

Gossipers, nappers, confidantes, playmates—Morris Shulman’s 1938 painting “Tompkins Square Park” is a stylized portrait of dozens of neighborhood characters congregating at this East Village park on a lush night in Depression-era Manhattan.

The vibrant palette and expressive faces are captivating. Mothers chat while tending to an unseen baby in a bassinet. A little girl in a yellow dress holds an ice cream pop. A fellow in forgotten-man garb sits with his chin tucked into his chest, seemingly asleep.

Born in 1912, Shulman came to New York in the 1930s to study at the National Academy of Design, the Art Students League, and Hans Hofmann School of Art, according to incollect.com. Perhaps best known for his postwar works of Abstract Expressionism, he taught at many schools around the city, including the Brooklyn Museum School and the School of Visual Art.

Much about Shulman’s life and work is unknown to me. But at some point, this visual storyteller made his way to Tompkins Square Park and created an almost folk art–like tapestry of humanity sharing the grass and benches of one of New York’s oldest green spaces.

It’s part of the collection at the Jewish Museum.

A Third Avenue holdout tenement subsumed and swallowed up by modern luxury condo towers

Once upon a time, probably in the early 1900s, a row of tenements went up on Third Avenue between 74th and 75th Street.

Five stories high and with small shops occupying the ground floor spaces, the row had a certain utilitarian symmetry, with its aligned cornices and matching fire escapes.

On this Lenox Hill block once blighted by elevated train tracks, the row looked like so many other tenements that housed the working-class families of the neighborhood.

But the city always changes; buildings fall into disrepair or are sold for demolition, and new structures rise.

That seems to be what happened to 1301 Third Avenue’s northern neighbors. Just a few years ago, three tenements closer to 75th Street on the row were bought and torn down.

Now only 1301 Third Avenue remains. I don’t know why this holdout survivor has resisted the wrecking ball, but the developers of the new 33-story neighboring condo residences on both sides aren’t letting that halt their plans.

1301 Third Avenue appears to be subsumed by the new buildings on all sides, a preserved specimen of how New Yorkers used to live before luxury condo towers took over the east side of the Upper East Side.

I’ve been watching this tenement for more than a year now as it became swallowed up. It doesn’t appear as if anyone is still living in it, but if so, it can’t be easy.

[Second photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

The beautiful widowed heiress who may have been the model for the Statue of Liberty

When the Statue of Liberty was unveiled in New York Harbor on the rain-soaked afternoon of October 28, 1886, enormous crowds of New Yorkers attending the ceremony on Bedloe’s (now Liberty) Island or watching from the Battery cheered with delight.

But soon after the French flag covering Lady Liberty’s face was removed and her features revealed to the world, New Yorkers began wondering: who was the inspiration behind the statue’s face?

The general consensus is that French sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi—who had spent two decades creating and completing the statue he described as “the dream of my life”—modeled the sturdy jawline and determined expression after that of his mother (above).

Bartholdi (above, in 1886) apparently revealed this in 1876 to a colleague in France, according to The Statue of Liberty Encyclopedia, by Barry Moreno.

But other ideas abound: the face is that of the Roman goddess Libertas, an Egyptian peasant, even an unnamed man.

But one intriguing theory has it that Bartholdi based the statue’s face on that of a French-English widowed heiress, Isabella Boyer, who was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world in the late 19th century.

Boyer, born in 1841 in Paris, relocated to New York in 1863 when she was 22 to marry Isaac Merritt Singer, the founder of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Singer, 52 years old at the time, gained fortune and fame after he improved the functionality and accessibility of home sewing machines.

For 12 years, Boyer lived in New York as Singer’s wife and the mother of six of his children. (Singer had 24 children by five women during his lifetime, so he was quite a player.) In 1875, Singer died. Her share of his estate made her rich in her own right.

Boyer (below) moved to England with her children after Singer’s death. But apparently she returned to Paris at some point, as this is where she met Bartholdi, according to Christopher Winn, author of I Never Knew That About New York.

What was their romance like, and how long did it last? The details are a mystery. And based on the only authentic photo of Boyer I could find, it’s not exactly obvious that she really was the inspiration for the statue’s strong, almost stern facial features.

But it’s a romantic idea—and the possibility that Lady Liberty’s face was based on that of a woman the sculptor loved broadens the backstory of this icon of freedom.

[Top and second photos: Musee Bartholdi; third photo: Edward Moran via Wikipedia; fourth image: unknown; fifth photo: Wikipedia]