Esther Crain's Blog, page 26

The 1886 Chelsea church that grew a condo tower on top of it

First there was a little church. Opened in 1886, it was home to a congregation of French Evangelicals who since 1849 hopscotched around the city—holding services in temporary spaces before raising the funds to buy a house of worship of their own.

The French Evangelical Church, as it became known, was almost entirely reconstructed around an older chapel that had been at the site, 126-128 West 16th Street, since 1835, per an 1886 New York Times article.

“The architect redid the interiors and updated the façade in the German version of Romanesque Revival called Rundbogenstil,” states analogartistdigitalworld.com. “The result was a chunky mass with a central arch outlined in dentil brickwork.” 

“Well above the sidewalk, arched entrance doors on either side carried on the rhythm of the collection of arches in the main structure,” the site continued. Chelsea residents over the years appreciated this unusual red-brick sanctuary with the twin side staircases, sandwiched on a low-rise block of row houses and unobtrusive apartment buildings.

For a century and a quarter, the congregation continued (above, in 1940), though it wasn’t as robust as it was in the early 20th century. At that time, Chelsea from 23rd Street to 30th Street was something of a French Quarter, anchored by the French Hospital, the Jeanne D’Arc residence, and the Church of St. Vincent de Paul. In the late 19th century, the French section of Manhattan centered around today’s Soho.

As church attendance declined and maintenance costs piled up, the congregation in 2010 did what so many other houses of worship feel compelled to do: survive by seeking proposals from developers who would be interested in air rights.

Almost a decade ago, those rights were sold. To raise money for much-needed repairs, “the congregation sold its air rights in 2014 to a condo developer, who is nearing completion on an 11-story glass, steel and concrete structure that cantilevers above the old church,” stated The West Side Spirit in a 2019 article. “Neighbors protested but were unable to stop the project.”

These days, the French Evangelical Church remains part of the 16th Street cityscape—encased inside a glass and bluestone condo tower. Does a congregation still meet there, and is the church itself still a space for worship? I’m not sure.

What I see is a lovely holdout building whose late 19th century ecclesiastic detailing is still on display—its power vastly diminished without the heavens overhead.

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

This 1911 map is a wishlist of bridges and tunnels New York City would never build

A burial ground and parking lot in Central Park, an airport spanning dozens of blocks on Manhattan’s West Side, filling in the East River to create more land—the list of ideas for “improving” the city’s infrastructure and transit system includes some truly weird proposals.

But as this 1911 map shows, some of the most ambitious plans focused on bridge and tunnel building. The image comes from the New-York Tribune, which ran a front page article On January 1 of that year outlining all of the bridges and tunnels the city should build to make it easier to traverse the boroughs.

Of course, some of these bridges and tunnels already existed: the Queensboro, Manhattan, and Brooklyn Bridges across the East River, for example. And others made the jump from proposal to reality in the ensuing years, like the Hell Gate Bridge (completed in 1916) and the 179th Street bridge across the Hudson—opened in 1931 as the George Washington Bridge.

But others were merely wishful thinking—like the 57th Street and 110th Street bridges to New Jersey, and a fourth East River crossing between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. The Tribune noted that “borings have been made for this proposed bridge” and it was to be named after Brooklyn Democratic leader and politician Pat McCarren. (His name ended up gracing a park instead.)

The Tribune predicted all kinds of chaos if these bridges and tunnels weren’t built to accommodate the “tide of humanity” that needed them. But the reality of raising funds for construction likely sounded the death knell, if they were ever taken seriously in the first place.

And what would we do with all these crossings in the age of remote work? That’s one development the Tribune of more than a century ago could not possibly have predicted.

A captivating photo of a marketplace, a fire tower, and the Greenwich Village of the 1860s

It’s easy to become absorbed in a panorama view of New York City—to find yourself enthralled by the details of streets and buildings and enchanted by the mysterious towers and steeples of the expansive cityscape in the distance.

And when that panorama dates back to the 1860s—a time when landscape photography was certainly in use but not quite as widespread as it would be a decade later—you might as well cancel all your plans for the day; you’ll be entranced for hours.

That’s my experience looking at this 1864 image of Jefferson Market, at Sixth and Greenwich Avenues and 10th Street in Greenwich Village. While the Victorian Gothic Jefferson Market Courthouse that replaced it in 1877 (and still stands today) is a magnificent sight to behold, this low-rise warren of market stalls and the fire watchtower beside it offer insight into the Civil War-era Village.

The first Jefferson Market, at the northwest corner of Sixth and Greenwich Avenues, got its start in 1833; it was a one- and two-story collection of stalls with a wooden cupola on top that served as a fire watchtower (above).

That original watchtower actually burned down in 1851. The eight-story watchtower in the photo at the top of this post and in the below illustration is its replacement—one of the tallest structures in the city at the time.

At the market, butchers, fishmongers, poultry vendors, and hucksters sold their wares, according to NYC Parks. A “country market” of vegetable sellers joined the complex, all serving the food and grocery needs of an increasingly industrialized Greenwich Village.

The fire watchtower—one of eight in the city in the mid-19th century—was manned by a watcher who sounded a bell that summoned volunteer firefighters to the site of smoke or flames. No longer needed after 1878 thanks to the invention of the telegraph and the creation of a professional fire department, the watchtower at Jefferson Market became obsolete.

What’s beyond the market and fire watchtower captivates me. I believe we’re looking north in the panorama photo at top; there’s a stretch of two-story buildings with an ad for “C.H. Howe, Painter” on the side. On the next block, a row of three-story buildings can be seen. I think this row still exists—one building might be Barney’s Hardware, at 467 Sixth Avenue.

The area near the market has a gritty feel, with wagons backed into the market sheds and barrels piled on the sidewalk. A streetcar running on hard-to-see steel rails is the only vehicle on a rough-looking Sixth Avenue; perhaps the photo was taken early in the morning, before the workday commenced.

While the fire tower dominates the photo, church steeples loom in the distance. The spire to the right of the tower might belong to the Church of the Annunciation (above), a Gothic-style church on 14th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues from 1846 until it was demolished in 1895, according to David W. Dunlap’s From Abyssinian to Zion : a Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship.

Spires and towers, wooden and cloth canopies covering storefronts, wagons and a streetcar, and a somewhat shabby marketplace crowned by a strangely lovely watchtower—it’s not the charming Greenwich Village of winding cowpaths and precious shops but a bustling part of the urbanized city.

In the 1860s, the neighborhood had already been left behind by the fashionable set in favor of newer enclaves beyond 14th Street.

[Top photo: New York Then and Now; second image: dlibopenlib.org; third image: NYPL Digital Collections; fourth image: NYPL Digital Collections]

The most sorrowful doughboy statue is in this Hell’s Kitchen park

He’s a slight soldier, with the strap of his rifle slung over his shoulder and a contemplative expression meant to engage us.

And unlike most statues depicting military men, he’s offering flowers. In this case, he’s holding poppies—a flower that signifies loss and remembrance.

The doughboy of De Witt Clinton Park has stood inside the Eleventh Avenue and 52nd Street entrance to this Hell’s Kitchen green space since 1930. Officially the monument is known as “Clinton War Memorial,” per NYC Parks.

It’s one of nine doughboy statue erected in city parks after World War I, when neighborhoods across New York sought to honor local residents who lost their lives on the battlefields of Europe. I’ve seen the doughboy statues in Chelsea, the West Village, Red Hook, and Washington Heights.

But what distinguishes this doughboy is that he’s standing on a granite pedestal inscribed with verse from “In Flanders Field”—the poem written by Canadian physician and lieutenant colonel John McCrae, who penned it after a fellow soldier perished during battle in 1915 in Belgium.

On the other side of the pedestal is an inscription from “comrades and friends” explaining that the monument is a memorial “to the young folk of the neighborhood/who gave their all in the World War.”

Though I couldn’t find an account of it, this statue was likely dedicated in a ceremony attended by thousands. “The doughboys were erected when parks and monuments were more important in the life of a neighborhood,” stated Jonathan Kuhn, curator of monuments for the Parks Department, in a New York Daily News article on the doughboys from 1993. “Also, there was a feeling that this was the last war, and Americans wanted to honor the ordinary heroes who fought the war that would end all wars.”

I can’t help but wonder if the De Witt Clinton Park doughboy was modeled on an actual local kid who went to war and never came back. If so, his identity is likely lost to the ages—and he speaks to us only through bronze and granite.

A Gothic Gilded Age asylum built for “respectable, aged, and indigent” women

Gothic-inspired architecture from the 19th century abounds in Manhattan. But the red-brick harmony of gables, dormers, and turrets in this block-long building on Amsterdam Avenue between 103rd and 104th Streets is a stunning sight to behold.

Who built it, and for what purpose? What was once New York City’s most spectacular old-age home got its start more than 200 years ago thanks to some charity-minded women, funds raised from deep-pocketed Gotham residents, an architect of mansions for the elite, and the benevolence culture that blossomed during the Gilded Age.

The story of this very 19th century “asylum,” as old age homes, hospitals, and similar institutions were called, begins in 1813. That’s when a group of socially prominent wives and daughters set up a charity they named the Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females.

One of the first charities to be established in the city, this dramatically named organization aided once-wealthy widows who lost their husbands—and their financial status, which could leave them candidates for the city almshouse at today’s City Hall Park—during the Revolutionary War or the War of 1812.

“The aid initially took the form of money, food, and clothing ‘to relieve and to comfort those aged females, who once enjoyed a good degree of affluence, but now reduced to poverty by the vicissitudes of Providence,'” according to the Association’s annual report from 1815, via the 1983 Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report on the building.

Early on, the widows were provided for in their own homes. But in 1833, the decision was made to construct a facility that would house most of the widows in one place.

With donations from wealthy New Yorkers like John Jacob Astor and descendants of Peter Stuyvesant, a handsome residence opened in 1837 at 226 East 20th Street (above), not far from the new Gramercy Park. “The asylum was intended as an alternative to ‘the common almshouse, filled as it usually is with the dregs of society, [which] is not a place of comfort to persons of refined sensibilities,'” per the LPC report.

A decade later, however, the residence on East 20th Street was deemed too small. By the 1860s, the Association made their plight known in The New York Times, stating: “the asylum is always full, there being now 93 pensioners beneath its roof. Vacancies made by death are at once filled from the list of candidates for admission.”

Plans were made to erect a new building on Fourth Avenue (today’s Park Avenue) and 78th Street, miles away from the city center—then abandoned when upper Fourth Avenue became the site of “the invasion of three lines of public steam travel.”

The Association looked for a site farther uptown, buying 20 lots on Amsterdam Avenue in 1881. The new planned facility would join several other charity homes on Amsterdam Avenue and other streets in today’s Upper West Side, which were still relatively undeveloped with large parcels of available land.

The Home for the Relief of the Destitute Blind on Amsterdam and 104th Street, the Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum on Amsterdam and 112th Street, and the Hebrew Orphan Asylum farther up on Amsterdam and 138th Street are examples of the benevolent facilities that tried to fill the needs of the Gilded Age city—which was grappling with social issues brought on by a ballooning population and the deep chasm between the rich and the poor.

Architect Richard Morris Hunt was a curious choice for the new residence. In the 1870s, this French-trained architect designed one of New York City’s first apartment houses; he also became the go-to designer of several Vanderbilt mansions and summer homes in Newport.

In the 1890s, he was commissioned to design the double mansion on Fifth Avenue and 65th Street for Caroline Astor and her son, John Jacob Astor IV, cementing his legacy as the architect for the Gilded Age elite—yet one who also had time to lend his genius to charities.

In December 1883, the asylum officially began accepting “inmates.” Per the LPC report: “The residence was open to any respectable non-Roman Catholic gentlewoman over 60 of age, on payment of $150 and the surrender of any property she possessed.”

The first floor held a “bright, airy chapel,” as the New York Times described it; there was also a “committee room, a large, cheerful dining room, and several of the old ladies’ rooms.” More residents’ rooms were found on the second and third floor, while the top floor was home to an infirmary. A female matron kept watch over the women, who no longer had to be widows to move in.

The “degree of comfort, almost amounting to luxury, which is manifest in every detail of the establishment, elicited from many visitors yesterday the remark that they would ‘like to be old women,” the Times continued. The newspaper also noted that the oldest resident, “Auntie Osborn,” was 98 and “attired in a smart, brand-new cap elaborately trimmed with gay ribbons…every faculty is keenly alive.”

King’s Handbook of 1892 had some interesting words to describe the feel of the place: “decayed gentlewomen find a pleasant and congenial home, as their faces turn toward the setting sun.”

Following an expansion of the building in 1908—which added Tiffany stained glass windows—the residence continued to house roughly 150 elderly women in a rapidly changing Upper West Side. A 1925 New York Times story stated, “The home still stands there, quaint and quiet and remote, though buildings pack closely around it and automobiles honk and backfire on nearby streets.”

In 1968, the home lost its early 19th century name and became The Association Residence Nursing Home. Six years later, the remaining residents were moved to another facility while the building was to undergo much-needed repairs. A fire that destroyed the roof put those plans on hold, according to a 1990 New York Daily News piece.

By the late 1970s, the city took over the home. Abandoned and turned into a “burned out cavern used by drug dealers and derelicts,” per a 1988 New York Times article, this once-elegant, even luxurious residence found a new purpose as a youth hostel.

Restored to its Gilded Age loveliness on the outside, the home continues to function as a hostel. But just imagine the ladies who lived there in the late 19th century and the stories the narrow wooden corridors leading from room to room could tell!

[Third and fourth images: NYPL Digital Collections; fifth photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

How long this peaked-roof ghost building has haunted Jane Street

Ghost buildings abound all over New York City. This site has delved into the backstory of many of these phantom dwellings—homes, stables, and warehouses that left their imprint on the cityscape long after they were reduced to a pile of bricks.

Yet this ghost building of Jane Street remains a mystery. Just a few stories high and with a simple peaked roof, its outline follows the contours of one of the modest Federal-style homes that were popular in the early 19th century and can still be found in downtown neighborhoods.

Hoping to find a photo of the original house, I’ve been searching archives. But what I found in the New York Public Library Digital Collection surprised me.

This is a 1933 photo of this stretch of Jane Street—and there’s the faded outline of the same mystery house behind a one-story building that may have started out in the 19th century as a carriage house.

It’s been a ghost for at least 90 years, its peaked roof and humble dimensions strangely preserved on a tenement-style building that was once the newcomer on the block.

[Photo: NYPL Digital Collection]

Why this Upper Manhattan home perched on a cliff is called the “Pumpkin House”

There’s a lot to say about this gravity-defying dwelling in Hudson Heights: it’s a three-story residence perched atop a steel and concrete foundation 265 feet above the Henry Hudson Parkway.

Built in 1925 by an engineer named Cleveland Walcott on land purchased from New York Herald publisher James Bennett Jr., the cantilevered house on 186th Street and Chittenden Avenue affords a spectacular panorama of the Palisades across the Hudson.

It also offers a stunning view of the George Washington Bridge, which the house predates by six years.

Why would anyone commission a rectangular-shaped house that looks like it could slide off its foundation? A widower with four sons, Walcott was described as eccentric and ”really sort of a dreamer” by one of his sons, per a 1999 New York Times FYI column by Christopher Gray.

His eccentricity might explain his idea for the house, which showed “a peculiar arrangement of rooms,” wrote Gray: “The second floor had six bedrooms, of which the largest was 11 feet, 6 inches by 10 feet, 10 inches; the others were about 8 by 10 feet. Plans show that four of these smaller bedrooms had no doors, and that the two bathrooms on that floor had showers only, no tubs.”

When Walcott was building his single-family house, Upper Manhattan remained a sparsely populated and undeveloped part of the city. Thanks to the opening of the George Washington Bridge, Inwood, Hudson Heights, and Washington Heights transitioned from neighborhoods of farms and summer estates to middle-class slices of Gotham.

Apartment buildings soon surrounded Walcott’s residence, which was no longer his, having lost it due to foreclosure in 1927 (below in the 1930s).

Over the next century, the house had only a handful of owners. It most recently traded hands in 2019. (Sotheby’s has some incredible photos of the boxy yet lovely interior rooms.)

What else makes this residence so unusual? Like many mysterious buildings, it’s known by a nickname: the Pumpkin House. Why pumpkin? The answer lies in the house’s appearance from below.

“The light of the setting sun combined with the glow from the windows makes it look like a jack-o’-lantern from passing tour boats or people strolling by on a path by the river,” wrote Josh Barbanel in The Wall Street Journal in 2010 (above, 1930s).

When it earned its nickname isn’t clear. But catch a glimpse of the house from the Henry Hudson Parkway one evening and see the formation of the windows: “two on top, a center pane and a wide window on the bottom,” states Steven Kurutz in a 2008 New York Times piece.

Even without the right light (above in 2014), it really does resemble the spooky face of a jack-o’-lantern.

[Top photo: copyright/photographer unknown; fourth photo: New York Public Library Digital Collections; fifth photo: New York Public Library Digital Collections; sixth photo: Wikipedia]

The West Village sconce lights inspired by tendrils and tentacles

The lights that illuminate New York at night tend to go unnoticed. But sometimes you come across some strangely unique examples that make you do a double-take.

That’s what happened as I passed 33 Bank Street one weekend. Like so many other low-rise apartment houses, this six-story residence has two sconce lights flanking the front entrance.

Nothing unusual about that at first glance. Except these twin light fixtures, with their grooves and curlicues, seemed to be inspired by the natural world. they’re shaped like seahorses, or jellyfish tentacles, or plant tendrils, perhaps even an elephant trunk.

Inspiration from flora or fauna along the cityscape would hardly be unusual, especially in 1913. That’s the year 33 Bank Street was constructed—coinciding with the tail end of the Art Nouveau movement that featured architecture and decorative objects graced with the sinuous lines and organic curves of nature.

Of course, the sconces might look the way they do by accident or due to decades of buildup from rust and paint. I like to think the designer who chose them got a kick out of putting up light fixtures modeled after plants and animals in the middle of the urban jungle that is New York City.

A midcentury painter’s spooky and foreboding view of the Octagon on Blackwell’s Island

By the time Hell’s Kitchen–born George Picken painted this image of darkness and isolation over the Octagon on Roosevelt Island around 1940, the island’s name had been formally changed to Welfare Island.

Picken must have known this. Perhaps he’s setting his painting in the 19th century, when this spit of land known as Blackwell’s Island served as a dumping ground for the city’s poor, criminal, insane, incurably ill, abandoned, and others deemed to be cast-offs from proper society.

The Octagon, built in 1834 by architect Alexander Jackson Davis, became the main entrance of the Lunatic Asylum from 1837 into the early 1900s. This is the same deplorable “madhouse” Nellie Bly exposed in a sensational article series published in the New York World in 1887, which led to reform and ultimately the shutting down of the facility.

Picken captured a piece of Blackwell’s Island backlit with an ominous vibe. He casts light on the rocks by the East River shore, and there’s a yellow glow from the windows of the building behind the Octagon.

The light gives the scene a haunted feel. A red lighthouse in the foreground adds depth and dimension to the painting. It’s almost like a boundary line between the viewer and the dangers of Blackwell’s Island—or between sanity and madness, between being part of society or one of the discarded.

Hmmm, what would Picken think if he knew that the Octagon would become part of a new high-end “apartment community” on what would be renamed Roosevelt Island?

A Riverside Drive sewer cover from 1872 predates the Drive by eight years

Does this sewer cover on Riverside Drive and West 77th Street—placed there under the supervision of the Department of Public Works, created by the new City Charter in 1870—actually date back to 1872?

If the cover isn’t a reproduction, then it’s eight years older than the Drive itself—which officially opened as Riverside Avenue in 1880.

But the Drive, along with Riverside Park, was already in the planning stages. It was conceived by Frederick Law Olmsted, the co-designer of Central Park, as “a winding drive that would be comfortable for horses and pleasure driving, provide shaded walks for pedestrians, and yet would give easy access to real estate bordering it on the east,” states the 1980 Landmarks Preservation Commission report.

Explore more about the backstory of Riverside Drive by joining Ephemeral New York on a walking tour of the Drive! Signups for an upcoming tour on Sunday, October 29 can be found here, and a link to signing up for the next tour on November 12 can be accessed here.