Esther Crain's Blog, page 21

This forgotten Uptown apartment house is amost as as old as the Dakota

You’re forgiven if you’ve walked down East 106th Street and missed this seen-better-days former apartment residence on the unlovely corner of Third Avenue.

Stained and grimy, the facade is the color of cardboard with mustard trim. What might have been a grand picture window on Third Avenue has long since been blocked up and is now above the wraparound awning of a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

On the 106th Street side, another entrance is filled in and marred by graffiti. The only remaining door is marked “176” near the building’s red brick, non-adjacent tenement neighbor.

Now imagine how lovely this slender structure must have been when it was finished in 1887, three years after the Dakota on West 72nd Street and in the height of the Gilded Age.

Five stories high, the building features bay windows, Romanesque arches, caryatids, grotesque faces, floral motifs, geometric designs, and one top-floor balcony window framed by columns looking out high above the corner.

All of the design motifs and ornamentation on such a stately building give it some playfulness. (Or turn it into a hot mess, depending on your architectural tastes.) It makes me wonder who built it, who lived there in its glory days, and what else is known about 1922 Third Avenue’s backstory.

The story begins in November 1886. That’s when the Real Estate Record & Guide announced that architect F.A. Minuth, whose work focused mostly on residences and lofts, has completed plans for a “five-story and basement yellow brick and terra cotta with stone trimmings” apartment house and store.

The basement, first floor, and second story “will be reserved for stores and business purposes, the upper part will be arranged for three families on each floor and have private halls and all improvements.” The cost was estimated at $22,000.

The builder was a man named Martin Disken—hence the building’s name carved into the center top, “The Disken.”

An Irish immigrant turned Brooklyn (Rutland Road) resident, Disken is described in his 1924 Brooklyn Eagle obituary as a building contractor. When he filed for bankruptcy in 1899, however, the notice in the New York Times called him a “builder and plasterer” residing on 129th Street “with known liabilities and no assets.”

It’s probably safe to say that by 1899, Disken no long owned his eponymous apartment house. It might also be assumed that by that time, the building’s fortunes were turning.

By the turn of the century, the rapid development of uptown Manhattan was not quite the sure thing real estate investors and speculators thought when they rushed to put up houses on Harlem streets that were open fields just a decade earlier.

Sure enough, a real estate crash in the early 1900s kept middle- and upper-class families away from Harlem’s many new brownstones and apartment residences.

Also preventing The Disken from being the next Dakota or Osborne was the constant rumble of the Third Avenue Elevated. East 106th Street was a crosstown street, so the El stopped outside that second-floor window. Families would not accept that kind of intrusion if they could help it.

The next owner of 1922 Third Avenue, Isaac Fiedenheit, who bought it in 1891 per the New York Herald, likely saw the Disken’s upper class families move to better neighborhoods—as the area transformed into a working class shopping neighborhood on the border of Italian Harlem.

In 1921, Jesse Adler, the owner of a shoe store chain that occupied the ground floor space since 1906 bought the building. The Herald reported that it was now worth $100,000 and “above the ground floor are four lofts.”

How long Adler’s remained opened isn’t clear (photo above is from 1940), but by the 1980s the commercial space was taken over by The Wiz.

Is the Disken an apartment building again? It’s hard to know what’s happening on those upper floors. The facade is dingy and forlorn; the windows free of curtains or other homey touches.

But for a brief time more than a century ago, this unusual building (and its earliest residents) gave the corner a sense of Gilded Age elegance.

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

The eclectic Riverside Drive houses inspired by Elizabethan England

Is that the crenellated crown of a faux Medieval castle looming five stories above Riverside Drive and 83rd Street—flanked by European-inspired row houses with dormer windows and tiled roofs?

The separate dwellings that compose this delightful design mashup are quite a sight among the Drive’s mostly uniform prewar apartment houses. Who built these eclectic residences and what inspired him is worth delving into.

Let’s go back to the New York City of the 1890s. Upscale residences were going up in the part of the city known as the West End, especially on West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. But buyers were tired of brownstones—unbroken row upon row of which filled Midtown and the East Side.

Once considered elegant, brownstones were now derided as gloomy cookie-cutter homes for speculators to sell to the city’s nouveau riche. Edith Wharton reportedly proclaimed brownstone as the “most hideous” stone ever quarried.

Architect-developer Clarence True also disliked brownstones. Born in Massachusetts in 1860, True came to New York at age 20 and trained with Richard Upjohn before establishing his own design concern in 1889.

True called brownstones “bad copies of the Farnese palace [that] ought all to be torn down,” according to “The Magnate-Messiah of the Upper West Side” by architectural site Urban Omnibus.

Instead of mud-brown facades and high stoops, True favored an entirely different kind of residential design—one that contained elements of Romanesque and Renaissance Revival, explains a 1991 report from the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC).

True called it “Elizabethan Revival,” according to the LPC report. This pastiche is best expressed at 107-109 Riverside Drive. With its castle-like battlement, it anchors the cluster of houses True constructed at the 83rd Street corner (above in 1910).

True built this group of idiosyncratic dwellings in 1898-1899 on speculation. He was especially drawn to Riverside Drive, which opened in 1880 and was supposed to overtake Fifth Avenue as New York’s “millionaire colony.” True called the Drive “the most ideal home site in the Western Hemisphere.”

“True designed several hundred hundreds, primarily in groups, on the Upper West Side in the years between 1890 and 1901, and was largely responsible for promoting the development and establishing the character of lower Riverside Drive,” states the LPC report.

True certainly was bold. He designed the townhouse group from 102-109 Riverside Drive to have extended stoops and bays that went beyond the property lines. The Department of Buildings protested, but True didn’t back down—until the owner of a neighboring property took him to court claiming that “his sprawling row houses devalued her property by obstructing her view, light, and air,” explained Urban Omnibus.

The neighbor won the case, and the buyers of the houses fronting Riverside Drive “were forced to hire new architects to trim their façades, erasing True’s undulations.”

Even with the less fanciful facades (above in 1940), True’s Elizabethan Revival row still stuns more than 120 years later. Over the 20th century, changes hit the group of houses—several (if not all) have been carved up into apartments, and Number 102 was demolished before 1932.

But what a treat it is that this collection of confection-like houses remains on Riverside Drive, charming passersby with design bells and whistles created as antidotes to plain, restrained brownstones.

True’s Elizabethan Revival townhouses are part of Ephemeral New York’s Gilded Age Riverside Drive Walking Tour! To join the tour scheduled for Sunday May 12, click this link. More upcoming tour dates will be announced soon.

[Fourth photo: NYPL Digital Collections; sixth photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

A spooky remnant of the Third Avenue El still stands on East 99th Street

Officially, the era of the elevated train in Manhattan ended in 1955. (Not subways that go above ground at certain points but actual elevated train lines.)

That’s when miles of track and trestles were removed from the borough’s Third Avenue El, the last of the mighty above-ground railroads that roared up and down four major avenues starting in the late 1860s and helped reshape Gotham northward.

But even though the infrastructure of the elevated trains has vanished from the streetscape—along with the grime they attracted and the ear-splitting noise they produced—some remains of their existence can still be found in the modern city.

One of these remainders stands at Third Avenue and East 99th Street. This stately granite and brick building, partially dug into the side of a hill on an East Harlem tenement block, has the bureaucratic-sounding name of Substation 7.

Opened in 1901, its function was to produce the electricity needed to power the Third Avenue El—which like the elevated lines on Second Avenue, Sixth Avenue, and Ninth Avenue switched from steam power to electricity by 1903, according to Under the Sidewalks of New York: The Story of the Greatest Subway System in the World, by Brian J. Cudahy.

The operator of all the elevated lines at the time was the Manhattan Railway Company—and the company name is still (faintly) visible on the front of the substation. (Click the second photo to enlarge it and view the name.)

Other substations can still be found in New York City. But Substation 7 “is the only Manhattan substation that dates from the electrification of the pre-subway elevated system and also retains its original appearance,” stated engineering historian and New York City electricity systems expert Joseph J. Cunningham, in a 2013 article about the substation in the New York Times.

That original appearance gives it a spooky vibe, with bricked-in windows and a carriage house-style front entrance blocked from the public via a metal security shutter and iron fence.

Yet even once the Third Avenue El was supplanted by the underground subway, Substation 7 continued its role as a power station (above, in 1901, almost complete and surrounded by elevated tracks).

“No. 7 was the primary supply of power for the upper portion of the Lexington Avenue subway from 1918 into at least the late 1970s, when other substations were constructed underground,” states the New York Times piece.

Despite its abandoned feel, the substation now serves as the MTA’s “fire extinguisher shop.” Thanks to its long use from the late Gilded Age through much of the 20th century, it was never converted to commercial use and remains a part of the Manhattan’s transit present—and a ghost of its turn of the century past.

[Second image: NYPL Digital Collections; fourth image: MCNY, F2012.53.103C]

A dynamic scene at a rooftop theater reveals changes in Gilded Age society

Going to the theater has always been a beloved New York City pastime. But theater became even more thrilling with the advent of open-air rooftop gardens—which hit the scene in the late 1880s with the opening of the rooftop theater at the Casino on Broadway and 39th Street.

It wasn’t just the cool breezes that appealed to New Yorkers. “Only at the turn of the century did amusements of this sort become acceptable places for respectable women,” explains the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has this painting, by William Glackens, in its collection.

“Hammerstein’s Roof Garden,” from 1901, depicts theater magnate Oscar Hammerstein’s semi-outdoor Palace Roof Garden at Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street. While men and women sit side by side at tables configured to encourage socializing, performers entertain the well-heeled crowd.

As an Ashcan artist, Glackens wasn’t just interested in capturing a lively scene. “The arena into which they gaze is lit by a filigreed tangle of electric lights, a recent invention that had made nighttime theater possible,” states the Whitney.

“In this painting, Glackens portrays not simply a night at the theater, but the changing mores of post-Victorian society and the impact of new technology on everyday life.”

An elegy for a surreal East Village dive bar that welcomed those in the shadows

There’s something about legendary East Village bars that leave New Yorkers mourning them even decades after they close their doors.

The tenth anniversary of the shuttering of Mars Bar in 2011, the gritty dive on Second Avenue and East First Street, merited tribute posts recalling its eclectic mix of regulars. Brownie’s, on Avenue A, pulled the plug in 2002, but Gen X fans are still reminiscing about the bands they saw there.

So it seems unusual that one old-school East Village haunt has no Facebook fan group posting photos and videos, no articles bemoaning the reasons behind its closure.

That haunt would be Eileen’s Reno Bar, a hole in the wall at 175 Second Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets. Aside from the circa-1989 photo above, posted in 2015 by Tumblr account noirbynight, and the 1973 photo by Eugene Gordon below with the bar’s neon sign in the background, very little about Eileen’s remains.

The lack of tributes is unusual for a place described by one East Villager who visited in the late 1980s as “a dimly lit, unintentionally surreal bar on the edge of oblivion.” The vibe was “subtle debauchery, in the twilight between the waking life and dreams.”

In other words, Eileen’s was no Irish tavern, or college-crowd sports bar, or glittery nightspot luring stylish young people.

“When you walked in, the first thing you noticed was the leopard skin wallpaper,” said the visitor, who recalls a traditional long bar. Above it, plastic plants hung from the ceiling. “It felt more like a relic of a 1950s lounge, populated by people we think of as living in the shadows in society.”

Writer Gary Indiana included a description of Eileen’s in his 2004 New York article, “One Brief, Scuzzy Moment.” The article focused on the East Village art scene in the mid-1980s, of which Eileen’s played a part.

“A narrow pocket of surrealism on Second Avenue between 11th and 12th, its ceiling surfaced in plastic jade plant—brown plastic jade plant—Eileen’s had its flaccid nights of dead-room tone,” wrote Indiana.

He added that most nights brought in “a steady influx of pre-op transsexuals, clueless walk-ins, bisexual drug dealers, garrulous drunks with a schizophrenic flair . . . and a few black-humored fags like myself, who much preferred the Reno Bar’s nightly Halloween party to clocking the aging process in some drippy gay bar.”

In the article, Indiana recalled one regular, a “laconic and melancholy” man named Joel who drank gin and drove a pickup truck. Later, Indiana learned that Joel was Joel Rifkin—the serial killer from Long Island who preyed on New York City prostitutes.

Who was Eileen? More about her identity isn’t known. Exactly when her Reno Bar opened and closed is also a mystery: I haven’t found a newspaper or website that chronicled its debut or shuttering. (Above photo, about 1940; the space that housed Eileen’s would be the second storefront to the left of the theater, and it doesn’t look like a bar exists there yet.)

In our current era where everything is chronicled via post or image, it’s hard to remember that in the pre-social media world, the closing of a dive bar wouldn’t make the news.

These days, 175 Second Avenue is home to Bar Veloce, a wine bar established in 1999 with several other locations around New York. It fits in to a much different East Village than the one where Eileen’s Reno Bar found its home.

[Top photo: noirbynight; second photo: Eugene Gordon/New-York Historical Society; fouth photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

A 1950s congressman’s faded re-election ad still remains on a Bronx tenement

It’s been more than 70 years since Paul A. Fino began serving as a U.S. Congressional rep for the Bronx, where he was born and raised.

Fino, a leader in the Bronx’s Republican party, won a seat in the 83rd Congress in 1952, then was reelected for seven more terms—resigning in 1968 to become a judge on the New York State Supreme Court.

He sounds like the kind of colorful, promotional politician who understood his constituents in the borough’s 25th District. In postwar New York City, that district—from Riverdale to Woodlawn to Parkchester to Throgs Neck—was primarily Italian, Irish, German, and Jewish, per a New York Times article on Fino’s battle to keep his Congressional seat in 1956.

It’s hard to know where he would land in today’s political climate. Fino, who earned a law degree in 1937, was described in one article as a “pragmatic moderate.” He was opposed to busing and abortion rights, but he voted for the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. He supported Medicare, as well as “bigger and earlier” Social Security benefits.

His battles with liberal Mayor John Lindsay were legendary. “Mr. Fino had a hard time swallowing what he considered the Manhattan-style elitism of Mr. Lindsay, who was mayor from 1966 through 1973,” the New York Times stated in Fino’s obituary.

Fino retreated from political life after the 1970s; he died in 2009 at age 95. I wonder what this long-serving politician would think if he knew that a re-election ad painted on the side of a tenement in the 1950s or 1960s would still be legible in 2024?

The faded sign, at Crotona Avenue and 183rd Street, preserves him as “your fighting congressman” on a tenement located roughly between two Bronx landmarks: Arthur Avenue and the Bronx Zoo.

[Shoutout to Justine V. for spotting this ad and taking the photo. Second photo: New York Times]

The “great white hurricane” that changed life in New York City

Teetering telephone poles, trains navigating (or stuck on) snowy tracks, a lone figure on the walkway of an empty bridge—this spooky image of the Brooklyn Bridge in the aftermath of the Blizzard of 1888 is a captivating reminder of how a freak March snowstorm killed more than 200 New Yorkers and brought the city to its knees.

The “great white hurricane,” as it was called, began on March 11. The day before was balmy with a forecast of rain; by midnight temperatures plunged to the single digits. Wind gusts of 85 miles per hour gripped the city, and heavy snowfall (22 inches total) created whiteout conditions.

When the storm was over and the city began digging out, it became clear things had to change. Downed cables cut off communication with the outside world; stuck elevated trains left thousands of riders stranded in the cold. New York was compelled to bury its wires underground and take the first steps toward creating a subway.

The Blizzard of 1888 was a terrible tragedy, leaving many residents temporarily without food, coal, milk, and other necessities. But it also pushed the city to upgrade its infrastructure. More than 130 years later, it’s the city we live in today.

[Image: Wikipedia/LIFE photo archive]

What remains of an 1880s apartment house holding out on West 58th Street

It’s on the eastern end of a small row of 19th century holdout buildings—three survivors huddled together amid a stretch of boxy hotels and office towers near Billionaire’s Row.

On its left is a French Renaissance-style carriage house commissioned by the oldest daughter of unscrupulous Gilded Age financier Jay Gould. On the other side of the carriage house is a Beaux-Arts firehouse, built around 1905 for one of the city’s oldest engine companies.

Next to its stunning neighbors, 211 West 58th Street doesn’t seem so impressive: a five-story red brick walkup with commercial space on the ground floor. It’s about the width of a tenement house, could use a power wash, and the blueberry-colored fire escape hides much of the facade.

But look past the building’s unassuming traits and see the Gothic arches over the second floor windows, the slender classical columns at its edges, the carvings in the lintels, and the fanciful parapet crowning the top.

These details are clues that Number 211 isn’t just your typical low-rise. It’s actually one of West Midtown’s early apartment buildings—built in the mid-1880s, just after the Dakota was completed on Central Park West and the Osborne on West 57th Street began filling up with tenants willing to try out the novel concept of apartment living.

Known today as the Sire Building (hence the name SIRE above the fifth floor windows), “this five-story flats building was constructed in 1884-85 to the designs of William Graul for owner Benjamin Sire,” explains the Historic Districts Council (HDC). “It was built to house 10 residential units and a ground floor store.”

Flats buildings like this one “had been constructed since the 1870s on the Upper East Side, however, the area in the West 50s and West 60s was largely undeveloped in the early 1870s, making this an early multiple dwelling from the first phase of residential development in this area,” continued the HDC.

The Sire Building wouldn’t be an outlier for long. This area west of Columbus Circle would soon be joined by other flats buildings like the Wyoming at Seventh Avenue and 55th Street and the short-lived Navarro Flats, a spectacular set of buildings on Seventh Avenue and Central Park South.

At the time the Sire Building was completed, the area wasn’t the hotel and office corridor it is today. Thanks to Carnegie Hall, the streets centered around West 57th Street gained an artsy reputation, with galleries, studios for artists, and art schools popping up. Close proximity to the theater district also meant the flats might be attractive to actors and stage workers.

Indeed, the Sire Building was home to an actress named Rose Beckett. In her 50s by now, she was described as “once a noted stage beauty” who had a role in the 1860s theatrical sensation, The Black Crook. Sadly, she was found dead in the apartment she shared with her husband, per a 1904 newspaper. (Despite bruises on her face, her death was deemed to be due to “natural causes.”)

The Sire Building’s evolution from early apartment house to a regular Manhattan walkup might start with the fact that it went into foreclosure in 1901.

A variety of tenants took over the commercial space, including a Studebaker car dealer in the 1910s, a pet shop in the 1930s (as seen in the fourth photo, from 1940), and the Museum of the American Piano in the 1980s, per a document from Community Board 5 concerning landmarking the building.

Today, a piano dealer occupies the ground floor. As for the tenants of these historic, under-the-radar flats, they get to enter and exit their building using the original ornately wood-carved doors with lion heads and beveled glass, as seen above.

[Fourth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

The story of the ghost street inside a Lower Manhattan park

Just like the city itself, the New York City street map is always in flux.

Alleys and lanes that were well established in Gotham’s early years have disappeared without fanfare; roads that once had a solid presence in a neighborhood get chipped away until nothing remained thanks to the shifting contours of the cityscape. (RIP Thirteenth Avenue.)

But the ever-changing street grid has left something mysterious in a Lower Manhattan park: a ghost street sign, but no trace of the street it marks.

This ghost sign is for Temple Street. It’s mounted at the edge of Zuccotti Park, a small patch of green in the commercial canyons of Lower Manhattan. But there’s no road, no driveway, no asphalt at all pointing to remnants of the street—just concrete benches and neatly spaced trees.

Zuccotti Park forms a rectangle between Broadway, Liberty Street, Trinity Place, and Cedar Street. These streets were all on the map by New York’s post-colonial era. So what happened to Temple Street, and where did it lead to in pre-20th century Manhattan?

The story begins more than 300 years ago, when New York City was a colonial outpost under British rule. Temple Street was on the map by 1695, according to the book about the city’s origins. Just two blocks long, it ran parallel to Broadway and a now-vanished Lombard Street from Cedar Street.

Why is the street named for a temple? The origin isn’t clear. But Sanna Feirstein, author of Naming New York, suggests it stems from the street’s proximity to Trinity Church. (The first Trinity Church was in the works in the late 1690s, so perhaps the street name reflected the plans for a house of worship a block over on Broadway.)

The name might also be derived from Sir John Temple, the first British consulate-general to the United States, adds Feirstein.

Whatever its origin, two-block Temple Street continued to exist on street maps in the early and mid-19th century, still running alongside Broadway but now between Liberty Street and Cedar Street and ending at Thames Street. Based on advertisements for a “fire-proof ware-room” and shops, this was likely a commercial stretch of the bustling city.

Temple Street at this time would have been hemmed in behind the City Hotel on Broadway (above in 1831), one of New York’s first luxury hotels and bounded by Cedar, Temple, and Thames Streets. Later in the 19th century, the street was home to taverns, like “Old Tom’s” and “Old Reynold’s Beer House” (below), according to a 1902 New York Times article.

In the early 1900s, with lower Broadway becoming a mini-city of bank and insurance towers, Temple Street was reduced to one block, “the southernly half was wiped out by consent of the city when the United States Realty Building was erected,” wrote the New York Times in 1912.

The little one-block road held out until the early 1970s, when Liberty Plaza (later renamed Zuccotti) Park got the green light. “When developers demolished the buildings in 1972 to make way for the park, they demolished the street as well,” stated the Times in a 1995 F.Y.I. column. “The sign was remounted after the development was complete.”

Okay, but why remount a street sign for a street that no longer exists? I like to think someone at the DOT decided that a little road which served no major purpose yet hung on for 300 years should be properly memorialized with a sign.

Thanks to Justine V. for letting me know about this sign!

[Third photo: NYPL Digital Collections; fourth photo: Wikipedia; fifth photo: NYPL Digital Collections]

An 1895 photo shows one of the last “squatter shacks” on Riverside Drive

Wen Riverside Drive opened in 1880, the expectation was that this winding avenue opposite the new Riverside Park would attract well-off folks looking for a choice spot to build a stand-alone mansion or Beaux-Arts row house with riverfront views.

But as upper-class families began moving to what was then known as Riverside Avenue, poor New Yorkers and their flimsy shanties were right down the block.

These New Yorkers came to the area around the Drive before an avenue officially opened—when the smoke from the Hudson River railroad, lack of public transportation, and sparse population of the area kept well-to-do New Yorkers away and attracted some who lived on the margins.

The photo, from 1895, shows one of these shacks on Riverside Drive and 80th Street. Looking north, fine houses and are in view—a stark contrast to this hard-luck shelter.

The caption notes that the photo is “showing the transitional aspects” of the Drive, calling the shack in the foreground “one of the last” on the street. Maybe the caption is referring to 80th Street, because it’s likely not the last squatter shack on Riverside.

Others still existed at about the same time above 96th Street, like these in this previous post. In the early years of the 20th century, with new apartment houses joining the mansions and row houses on the drive, the shacks vanished. Where the occupants went is a mystery.

Curious about the backstory of Riverside Drive? Join Ephemeral New York on a fun and insightful walking tour of the Drive. A handful of tickets remain for tour dates on Sunday, March 24 and Sunday, April 14—sign up here!

[Photo: NYPL Digital Collections]