Esther Crain's Blog, page 23

A faded ad holding on in a shrunken Manhattan business district

It’s a slender ad that reads vertically, found on East 62nd Street in that mouse trap of approach roads on the Manhattan side of the Queensboro Bridge.

“Decorators Center” it says, with an address number above it: “315.”

Sure enough, 315 East 62nd Street, the building the ad is painted on, was known since the 1960s as the Decorators Center Building, a “headquarters for interior decorators and furniture concerns,” noted the New York Times in a 1961 article reporting that the new structure was 90 percent leased.

Today, 315 East 62nd Street seems to be empty, perhaps a symbol of the business enclave known as Manhattan’s design district. Its borders used to run from Third to First Avenue in the East 50s and 60s.

East 58th Street between Second and Third Avenues bears a street sign that calls it “Designers Way,” and the same stretch of East 59th Street has the honorary title of “Decorators Way.” Both blocks are lined with appealing little shops and showrooms for furniture, fixtures, and other interior design staples.

But like so many of Manhattan’s once-bustling commercial districts—the garment district, the flower district, the novelty district, radio row, and so on—the design district seems to be a shrunken version of what it was decades ago.

The great Upper Manhattan sleigh races that thrilled the wintertime city

For most of the city’s existence, winter in New York meant snowstorms. And the first snowfall of the year called for bringing out the sleighs for the season.

Many of the sleighs plying icy, snow-packed city streets were streetcars on rails. Others were luxury vehicles driven by a chauffeur so a wealthy family could get around town in style, with jingling bells on their horses and a fur blanket draped across their laps.

And then there were the “cutters,” or small, lightweight sleighs. Cutters were used for sleigh racing—a thrilling activity for New York sports fans and sportsmen, who sailed, or slid, at dangerous speeds through Manhattan’s not-yet-urbanized upper reaches.

“One of the most attractive and commendable forms of winter sport are the trotting races to sleighs, which have been held for some time past in the Gentleman’s Driving Park above the Harlem River,” noted the Sun in January 1888, which called sleigh racing “prime fun.”

Harlem seems to have been Gilded Age New York’s sleigh race central. “Harlem Lane was, of course, the great center of excitement,” reported the New York Herald in December 1869 after a surprise snowstorm. “Whole squadrons of sleighs, like Roman chariots, dashed along the road at breakneck pace, and kept up a continual cloud of fine snow dust that glistened like spray in the sunlight.”

“Of course there was the usual desperate rivalry between the fast trotters and high flyers, and a great many of the old frequenters of Harlem Lane, with their cutters polished up and their horses sharpened for the road, went in like crazy ones for neck or nothing running,” continued the Herald.

A sleigh race of another kind was held every year by McGowan’s Pass Tavern, a large establishment that opened in the late 19th century at about 104th Street just inside Central Park at Fifth Avenue on the site of the former Mount Saint Vincent’s convent school.

This race wasn’t just open to sportsmen; any New Yorker with a sleigh had a chance to win.

“For most of the latter half of the 19th century, right up until its demolition in 1915, the McGown’s Pass Tavern awarded a magnum of champagne to the first sleigh that reached it each season,” stated Centralpark.org.

The New-York Tribune covered this racing tradition in January 1900, when the first snowfall of the year commenced.

“While the snow was sifting down in dry, small flakes yesterday morning, just as if an old-fashioned snowstorm had begun, John J. Quinn hooked his black trotting mare Lutegard to a speeding sleigh and started down Seventh Avenue from 124th Street, in the direction of Central Park,” reported the Tribune.

“He sent the speedy mare over the road so fast that some persons mistook him for a man in search of a doctor, but the object of Mr. Quinn’s haste was a magnum of champagne which is annually given…to the first sleigh rider who reaches McGowan’s Pass Tavern.”

Quinn, a stable owner who’d won the sleigh race many times before, arrived at the tavern first. But he didn’t score the champagne because the snowfall had stopped by the time he showed up—tavern rules.

[Top image: MCNY, 57.300.503; second image: NYPL Digital Collections; third image: Metmuseum.org; fourth, fifth, and sixth images: NYPL Digital Collections]

This hidden rustic shelter in the Ramble dates back to Central Park’s earliest days

Part of Central Park’s wonderfulness lies in just how much the current park remains true to the genius 1850s vision of its two designers.

The Lake, the arches, the drives, the mall: Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s 1853 Greensward Plan lay the foundation for the Central Park New Yorkers enjoy today.

Their vision included many smaller features scattered across the park’s 843 acres, including rustic architecture—bridges, benches, and open-air shelters with seats that offered visitors a place to rest, relax, and catch cool breezes as they traversed the natural beauty around them.

More than a hundred of these rustic structures existed in the park’s early years. By the 1950s, battered by the elements (and possibly neglect), most disappeared, according to the Central Park Conservatory.

Amazingly, one rustic shelter remains that contains original elements. It’s one of four that were built in the Ramble—the “wild garden” of the park, as Olmsted and Vaux deemed it.

“Rustic structures require constant upkeep and restoration,” states the Conservatory. “For this reason, most of the Park’s original structures disappeared by the 1950s, though visitors can still see evidence of these original rustic designs at the Ramble shelter.”

“The shelter has been renovated with new materials over the years, but its original posts are still standing. The posts are thought to be made with hearty red cedar, which would explain their decades-long endurance.”

About the renovation: a plaque on a nearby boulder from 1982 notes that an “interested citizen” had a hand in restoring it, along with the Central Park Conservatory and NYC Parks.

The Ramble shelter, also called the Summerhouse, isn’t the easiest feature to find; it lies about even with 75th Street in the park center. But those wood posts are imaginative marvels right out of a fairy tale.

They were likely created by Hungarian woodworkers and artisans Anton Gerster and Alexander Asboth “out of unfinished, twisted, and bent red cedar” to reflect the “romantic naturalism” of Olmsted and Vaux’s design, states Cynthia S. Brenwall and Martin Filler in their 2019 book, The Central Park: Original Designs for New York’s Greatest Treasure.

That romantic naturalism endures, even though the Ramble shelter isn’t in the best shape. View it from one of the footpaths or sit inside it—a simple structure that offers so much beauty and wonder.

[Third photo: NYPL Digital Collections; fifth photo: eBay]

What it was like walking under the Ninth Avenue El

Not many New Yorkers today have memories of the city’s elevated trains, which shook tenement windows and roared above the streetscape from the 1860s to the 1950s—when the final line, the Third Avenue El, was dismantled.

Let Bernard Gussow, a Russia-born artist who studied, taught, painted, and created lithographs in New York City in the first half of the 20th century, give you a glimpse of New Yorkers walking under the Ninth Avenue El. This line was the first to open in 1868, and most of the tracks met their demise in 1940.

“Late Afternoon, Columbus Avenue, New York,” was completed in the 1920s or 1930s; the date is unclear. In this view, an unnamed Upper West Side side street, with charming brownstone steps and little traffic, is framed by rusted steel tracks and support beams. Faceless men and women go about their day.

Gussow certainly isn’t the first artist to paint New York’s networks of elevated tracks. But he seemed to have an interest in depicting humanity amid the machinery of urban transit. These midcentury paintings capture the anonymity and intimacy of riding the New York City subway.

[Image: 1stdibs.com]

Why an 18th century church bell sits just steps from Fifth Avenue

There’s a lot of beauty at Marble Collegiate Church, with its original mahogany pews, Tiffany stained-glass windows, and soaring steeple that appears both Gothic and like that of a simple country chapel.

But what caught my eye while walking by is the magnificent bell placed outside the church doors near Fifth Avenue and 29th Street, where Marble Collegiate has been located since 1854—back when this area was mostly countryside outside the main city.

The bell is weathered by age, and “North Church Bell” is embossed across the front. It certainly feels like a link to New York’s past, as Marble Collegiate itself is. Founded in 1628 four years after New Amsterdam was established, Marble Collegiate is the oldest Protestant congregation in America.

What is the bell’s significance? See it as a symbol of the flourishing of houses of worship in colonial New York, as the settlement went from Dutch to British control and then became an independent city.

Cast in Amsterdam in 1768, according to a 1967 Landmarks Preservation Commission report, this bell rang in the bell tower of the North Church (above illustration)—a Protestant church built on William Street between Fulton and Ann Streets in 1769.

Known as the “fourth church” in the colonial-era city, the North Church “was of stone, with a handsome and lofty spire, about 200 feet in height, in which is a gallery that commands one of the finest views of the city,” stated the 1909 book Cradle Days of New York.

The North Church was demolished in 1875, according to the Library of Congress.

I don’t know how long Marble Collegiate has displayed the bell in their Fifth Avenue churchyard; it was noted in the 1967 LPC report.

It’s a little scuffed and easy to miss, but imagine the occasions this bell marked: the ending of wars, deaths of national figures, weddings and funerals of local residents, and the ordinary calling of worshippers to Sunday service.

[Second image: NYPL; third image: Wikipedia]

Ghost addresses of 19th century Williamsburg found on tenement walls

Walk through any New York City neighborhood that still has tenements anchoring street corners, and you’ll probably see them: the names of the tenement’s cross streets carved into a terra cotta band on the building’s exterior.

Not every tenement had them back around the turn of the 20th century, when builders lined the urbanscape with thousands of these squat flats buildings across the city. Time and the elements have worn away many others.

But it’s always a treat to spot these subtle relics of a pre-GPS era when not all city streets—especially tenement blocks, populated by poor and working-class families—had official street signs. Seeing the street names etched into a corner building helped newcomers navigate confusing street grids.

On blocks darkened by elevated trains, they also made it easier for riders to track where they were. The street names typically aligned with the second or third floor, roughly at eye level with the train.

Charming as they are, sometimes you come across carved street names that spark a mystery. Case in point is this one, found on a corner tenement along Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. (Top two photos above)

On the red-brick tenement that now houses a fragrance store, the carved sign reads “North 4th Street” and then “Fourth Street” on the Bedford Avenue side.

Fourth Street? A little research solves the mystery: until the end of the Civil War, this main drag of Williamsburg was known by that numerical name.

First, a little history recap. Today’s Williamsburg was part of Bushwick until the end of the 18th century. In 1802, real-estate developer Richard Woodhull bought 13 acres here along the East River and asked engineer Jonathan Williams to survey the land and lay out streets.

Woodhull called the new enclave “Williamsburgh” after Williams. “In Williams’s original layout, today’s Bedford Avenue was known as Fourth Street, an appellation which persisted until around 1865,” wrote James Nevius in a 2014 article for Curbed.

“Indeed, all the named avenues in Williamsburg (Kent, Berry, Driggs, etc.) were originally numbered streets,” continued Nevius. After 1865, Fourth Street from North 15th Street to Division Street was renamed Bedford, so it connected to the preexisting Bedford Avenue that snaked through many Brooklyn neighborhoods, he added.

A walk over to Berry Street confirmed this. On the exterior corner of a tenement at Berry Street and Grand Street reads “Third Street” where Berry should be (third and fourth photos).

Geoff Cobb, , explains that the name changes actually happened in the late 19th century in an effort to get rid of the logistical mess of having so many numbered streets in one bustling urban neighborhood.

The 1845 map above gives you an idea of how confusing it all was, with only Grand Street getting a name rather than a number.

“The north-south named streets were similarly originally designated with numbers 1st, 2nd. etc.,” wrote Cobb. “In 1885, the north-south numbered streets were renamed to avoid confusion. (1st Street is now Kent, 2nd Street is now Wythe Avenue, and so on).”

Williamsburg’s north-south streets had their new names firmly in place by the early 1900s, when the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge resulted in a mass population boom of tenement-dwelling families.

The renaming process wasn’t all smooth, however. An was supposed to be renamed Cleveland Avenue. Residents came out overwhelmingly in favor of Bedford Avenue, which ultimately got the nod by Brooklyn mayor Seth Low.

[Map: NYPL]

The boy in red lobbing snowballs on a desolate tenement street

By 1905, nine playgrounds had been built in Lower Manhattan—products of a social movement started in the late 19th century that called for safe, supervised places for city boys and girls to play.

But nine playgrounds couldn’t possibly serve all the tenement-district kids who dwelled in downtown neighborhoods at the time. For most of them, the streets remained their playgrounds.

And snowbanks surrounding a block of rundown red brick storefronts made the perfect launching spot for a snowball fight.

George Luks painted “Children Throwing Snowballs” in 1905. The thick brushstrokes suggest action, almost chaos. Is it kids vs. kids, with two adults watching from a shop awning…or a group of kids lobbing snowballs at the adults, a shopkeeper in a smock and female customer dressed in black?

The boy in the red coat is in the center of the image, and our eyes are drawn to his warrior stance. At this moment, the boy might be imagining that he isn’t on a gritty snowbank but on top of a parapet. He’s a knight defending his kingdom, or a soldier leading his backup troops to victory—not just another poor city kid making mischief on a winter afternoon.

A night at Mrs. Astor’s January ball, the crowning event of the Gilded Age social season

Right now, if we could flip back the calendar to January in the Gilded Age, we would find ourselves in the middle of the exhilarating swirl of balls, parties, and charity events that made up elite society’s winter social season.

It was an annual ritual for decades. The season kicked off in November with the horse show and the opening of the opera series. (Though some of the select box seat holders tended to arrive late and leave early, more interested in gossip than opera.)

December was reserved for the weekly Patriarchs Balls held at Delmonico’s. And in January, the most anticipated gathering of old-money New Yorkers would commence: Caroline Astor’s annual ball.

Caroline Astor, of course, was Gilded Age Gotham’s society doyenne, a plump, plain-looking woman with a black pompadour (later a black wig) and a penchant for diamonds.

With her Knickerbocker heritage and 1853 marriage to John Jacob Astor’s grandson (who preferred sailing his yacht and carousing with other women over playing second fiddle at his wife’s social events), Mrs. Astor was able to propel herself into the role of society queen bee from the 1870s into the early 20th century.

Mrs. Astor reigned with help from her sidekick, Ward McAllister. The Southern-born McAllister was the inventor of the Patriarch Balls as well as the “Astor 400″—a list of the most socially prominent New Yorkers. At some point “the four hundred” were thought to be the number of people who could fit comfortably in the Astor ballroom, but the origin of this is in question.

In any event, Mrs. Astor’s mansion was certainly roomy enough to hold hundreds of people. But who would receive an invitation? According to Gilded Age socialite and memoirist Elizabeth Wharton Drexel, Mrs. Astor would carefully scan the Social Register, winnowing down potential invitees.

“Failure to be invited signified that, whatever your pretensions, you were a goat and not a sheep,” wrote Lloyd Morris, author of 1951’s Incredible New York.

Once a guest list was finalized, each hand-written invitation would be sent out. This “coveted slip of cardboard,” as Drexel described it, began with “Mrs. Astor requests the pleasure….”

What would these chosen guests—the “graded ranks of her hierarchy,” according to Morris—expect as they alighted from their carriages in front of Mrs. Astor’s rather staid mansion (second image) on Fifth Avenue and 34th Street?

On that night, “her mansion was ablaze with lights, and all its splendid rooms were banked with masses of flowers,” described Morris. “Through a wide hall, guests proceeded to the first of three connected drawing rooms, where their hostess received them, standing before the life-size portrait which she had recently commissioned from [portrait artist] Carolus-Duran.” (Top image, from 1890)

As she greeted her invitees, Mrs. Astor glittered in her Gilded Age finery, purchased during her annual trip to Paris.

“A tall, commanding woman of formidable dignity, she was magnificently gowned by Worth,” continued Morris. “Precious antique lace draped her shoulders, edged her huge puffed sleeves. Her pointed bodice and long train were of rich dark velvet, her skirt was of satin, embroidered with pearls and silver and gold.” A diamond tiara rested on her pompadour.

After greeting Mrs. Astor, guests made their way through the drawing rooms to the mansion’s art gallery (above photo), which functioned as a ballroom. While the orchestra played, a supper catered by prominent French chef J.A. Pinard was served in Mrs. Astor’s dining room where “the delicately embalmed bodies of terrapin and fowl reposed on ornate silver.”

In 1896, Mrs. Astor departed her Murray Hill mansion and moved into a sumptuous new palace on Fifth Avenue and 65th Street (below, in 1926). This French Renaissance double mansion was shared with her son John Jacob Astor IV and his young family.

After the move uptown, Mrs. Astor resumed holding her January ball, receiving 600 guests. “It was the largest and most elaborate ball given this season,” the New York Times noted.

The atmosphere was more luxurious than ever. On January 8, 1901, The New York Times covered the festivities once again, noting that this year’s ball had a record attendance of “the most representative men and women in society.”

“It was fully midnight before the last guest had arrived,” the Times wrote. “The entrance of the house was banked on either side by boxwood trees and masses of Southern smilax, in which were placed crimson poinsettias.”

“Mrs. Astor received alone in the drawing room, which was decorated with mauve orchids in golden vases, to the left of the main hall,” continued the Times. “She wore a superb gown of black velvet pailletted in silver, and all her famous diamonds.” (Below, in black with her tiara)

Supper was catered by Sherry, the restaurateur who operated his eponymous French eatery on Fifth Avenue and 44th Street frequented by old money and nouveau riche New Yorkers. The menu consisted of several dishes, including terrapin (clearly a Knickerbocker New York favorite), canard canvasback, foie gras, bonbons, and pommes surprises.

After supper, the cotillion began. Ninety couples danced to a live band. After the dancing ended around 3:30 a.m., many stayed for a second supper, the Times reported, along with a list describing some of the gowns female guests wore.

Mrs. Astor died in 1908; when she held her final ball isn’t clear. According to her obituary, she had suffered a nervous breakdown in 1906, living mostly in seclusion until her passing from heart disease two years later at age 78.

Her timing was impeccable. Lavish balls like hers were falling out of fashion, old money and new money had long intermingled, and society as she understood it was about to be lost to the ages.

[Mrs. Astor portrait: Metmuseum.org; second image: MCNY X2010.11.4466; third image: Wikipedia; fourth image: Wikipedia; fifth image: MCNY X2010.11.4462; sixth image: NYPL; seventh image: Wikipedia; eighth image: Wikipedia]

The wrecking ball comes for a Gilded Age relic mansion on Riverside Drive

The house stood for 42 years: a French-style chateau surrounded by beautiful terraced gardens. Completed in 1906, it spanned the once wide-open block of fashionable Riverside Drive between 73rd and 74th Streets.

By 1948, it had been abandoned for almost a decade following the deaths of the husband and wife who built it and made it their home. That year, the chateau was reduced to dust by a two-ton wrecking ball.

Such a house—one of the largest residences in New York City, a leftover relic of Gilded Age excess that remarkably stuck around until the post-World War II era—deserves an elegy.

The builder was Charles M. Schwab, the affable, big-spending president of U.S. Steel and then Bethlehem Steel. Schwab, who hailed from a small Pennsylvania town and began his career as a teenage stake driver, rose to become a steel magnate on par with Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick.

Unlike Carnegie and Frick, who created large yet restrained mansions on Fifth Avenue, Schwab decided to construct his dream home on Riverside Drive—which was supposed to overtake Fifth Avenue as the city’s premier “millionaire colony.”

“Carnegie and Frick have more money than I have, but I’m getting more value for my dollars than they are,” Schwab said, according to author Andrew Tully in Era of Elegance.

After arriving in New York, Schwab purchased the land in 1901, formerly the site of an orphanage. Five years and an estimated $10 million later, Schwab, his wife Eurana, and an army of servants moved in.

This palace on the Hudson featured 75 rooms, 50,000 square feet of living space, a power plant, a chapel, “a gym, a bowling alley, a pool, three elevators, and interiors in the styles of Henry IV, Louis XIII, Louis XV and Louis XVI,” wrote Christopher Gray in a 2010 New York Times Streetscapes column. Eurana happily took the job of overseeing the design of each and every room.

Schwab had the business smarts and optimistic personality of a successful industry leader, but he also had some potentially wallet-busting habits. He entertained lavishly, won and lost money at his weekly poker game, and played the casinos in Monte Carlo. He bought a 1,000-acre country estate in Pennsylvania and owned a villa in France.

Though he professed his love for his wife, he had a roving eye. At some point he launched an affair with the nurse of his sister-in-law that produced his only child, a daughter (who he supported and visited a few times a year, according to a Pittsburgh Quarterly article).

The Schwabs hosted parties in their chateau, but they didn’t strive to be part of the old money or nouveau riche elite. Schwab loved music; the couple held weekly concerts and salons, inviting musicians to play the pipe organ in their mansion.

Eurana, or “Rana” as she was known, “was a gardening enthusiast, and eschewed the numerous afternoon teas and other daylight functions for the verdant pleasures of her own backyard, which she transformed into an orderly jungle of blooms,” wrote Tully.

The Schwab mansion was also the site of charity efforts. In 1917 the couple opened their home to 200 Red Cross workers who needed a space to knit clothes and make bandages for World War I. In the 1930s, they hosted a carnival for 300 kids who lived in the rundown Gas House District of the West 60s.

After years of massive spending, the Depression hit the Schwabs hard. And their palatial dwelling was now an outlier surrounded by row houses and apartment residences. In the Gilded Age, single-family mansions, particularly in the chateau style, were in vogue. By the 1930s, most had been demolished.

A 1930 New York Times article announced the sale of the mansion to make way for an apartment building, but nothing came of it. (Below, the chateau in 1933)

In 1936, Schwab offered his mansion to the city as an official mayor’s residence. The offer was turned down. Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor at the time, reportedly said, “what me—in that?”

Three years later, Rana died at the age of 79. Schwab moved into an apartment hotel at 290 Park Avenue soon after, leaving the chateau, which he could no longer afford, for good. At 77 years old, he passed away later that year—in debt, per Tully.

The mansion lingered, empty and forlorn. Chase took title to it after Schwab’s death. But the bank couldn’t find any buyers for this white elephant of a house that came with massive expenses.

In 1947, the chateau was purchased by Prudential for a reported $1.25 million, according to Tully. The insurance giant’s plan was to invite buyers to pick over the interiors, then tear it down and replace it with a contemporary apartment house.

The wrecking ball came on March 31, 1948.

“Exactly at noon Fred Hoffman, operator of the crane that swings the giant ball unsentimentally into the sides of doomed buildings, worked a series of hand levers that smashed it with great force against the northwest tower,” stated a 1948 New York Times piece.

“A second blow knocked a hole up the 100-foot-high structure about 20 feet from the top. The hole widened as the ball struck twice more and then, on the fifth attempt, the whole top of the tower, weighing five tons, slowly started to sag in the north.”

“As a score of children watched eagerly and some old-timers a little sadly, the top suddenly plunged to the ground with a roar and a cloud of white dust,” per the Times.

It would take six more weeks to finish the job, razing to the ground this emblem Gilded Age excess and the life of a couple lost to the ages.

In 1950 a new apartment tower, Schwab House, opened in its place—with none of the bells and whistles of the magnificent mansion that preceded it.

[Top photo: Pinterest; second image: MCNY 26908.1E; third image: LOC; fourth image: Carmel of St. Therese of Lisieux; fifth image: New-York Historical Society Robert L. Bracklow Collection; sixth image: unknown; seventh image: MCNY X2010.18.314; eighth image: MCNY X2010.11.3076; ninth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

The “footsore and hungry” men waiting on the coffee line at Madison Square

There’s a civility among the men waiting in line for a free cup of coffee on a snow-covered night in Madison Square Park.

Shrouded in wintertime darkness, the long mass of men portrayed in John Sloan’s “The Coffee Line” stand with a sense of order. It’s not a horde jostling and grabbing; the men seem to form a single file queued up at the back of the coffee wagon, waiting for a cup.

Sloan, a Philadelphia transplant living on West 23rd Street at the time, apparently came upon this scene one night in 1905. He described it some years later:

“Winter night, Fifth Avenue at Madison Square, and a long line of cold and hungry men waiting their turn for a cup of coffee. This gratuity was a kindly gesture on the part of one of the newspapers,” quoted Michael Lobel in his book John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration.

The coffee wagons were part of a charity effort from William Randolph Hearst: wagons filled with coffee and rolls would stop in city parks at night to distribute their wares to “the footsore and hungry who have tramped the streets all day in the biting wind in search of work or food,” per a New York newspaper in 1906.

(Hearst was also running for mayor in 1905, so perhaps the charity coffee wagon was an attempt to refine his image.)

In 1905, Sloan (above, in an 1890 self-portrait) wasn’t the renowned Ashcan artist of tragic and comic moments in urban life; recognition by the art world came a few years later. When it did, “The Coffee Line” served as an example of Sloan’s ”relentless truthfulness,” as one California newspaper put it in 1909.

The darkness in “The Coffee Line” makes it hard to see the men; they’re the faceless and unseen New Yorkers lined up inside a park few New Yorkers would visit at this hour. Sloan makes us work to see them, squinting and staring until a figure or two appears—with help from the weak glow of streetlights reflected off the snow.

[“The Coffee Line”: Carnegie Museum of Art; self-portrait: Wikipedia]