Esther Crain's Blog, page 28

Three eras in New York City history, three vastly different subway sign styles

How boring would the New York City subway system be if every station was built at the same time, resulting in a uniform look for the signs outside every subway entrance?

Luckily, that didn’t happen. As stations opened across the boroughs in the decades after the 1904 debut of the first stretch of the IRT, the signage at each stop reflected the design ethos of its era.

This Gilded Age gaslight-style subway sign (above) can be seen outside the Museum of Natural History subway stop. It’s a reproduction, sure, but also an homage to the museum’s move to this site on Central Park West in 1877, shortly before electric street lights arrived and put gas lamplighters out of business.

This rocket-shaped metallic sign outside the Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street station in Brooklyn feels very Art Deco, with its vertical and geometric features.

Turns out the Fourth Avenue portion of this now-combined station opened in 1933, when Art Deco reigned in Gotham. Hence, an Art Deco sign.

For years I was puzzled by these blue M signs at some subway entrances, like this one outside the Lexington Avenue and 68th Street station.

Apparently the M signs were an effort in 1960s rebranding, an attempt to give the New York City subway system—a combination of lines from three separate private companies—a unified look and logo.

“The New York City Transit Authority tried some out, and a blue M was introduced in the late 1960s when the Transit Authority was acquired by the statewide Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), but it never really caught on,” explains an informative site called The Beauty of Transport.

More than 50 years later, some of these ill-fated M signs remain.

The short, forgotten life of New York City’s first skyscraper

In 1889, a slender building was unveiled on a commercial stretch of Lower Broadway, snugly situated between two older structures.

Rising 11 stories, it wasn’t the tallest tower in the city. Nor did it win praise for how it made the most of its 21.5-foot frontage with a graceful Gothic arched entrance. And it wasn’t financed by a Gilded Age business that planned to move in and make it company headquarters.

But the Tower Building, steps away from Bowling Green at 50 Broadway, has a singular distinction: it’s considered by many historians to be New York’s first skyscraper—defined as a building of 10 or more stories supported not by exterior masonry walls but by a steel frame or skeleton of columns and beams, according to the Skyscraper Museum.

Technically, the Tower Building’s steel skeleton went up only seven stories; the top four floors were constructed out of the more traditional masonry, which was used to build almost all of the city’s buildings up until the 1880s.

But the city was growing not just northward but skyward as well, with the addition of the Brooklyn Bridge and elevated trains rumbling up and down major avenues. The new technology of steel-cage construction, which was strong enough to support many floors while also being fireproof, made sense, particularly to architect Bradford Lee Gilbert.

Gilbert (above, in 1904) made a noteworthy career for himself building railroad depots, houses, stables, and office buildings. In New York City, his work included the still-standing YMCA building at 222 Bowery, completed in 1885, and a remodeling of the original 1871 Grand Central Terminal, which lasted until 1913.

In 1887, he was tapped to design an office building for a silk importer, but the importer was only able to purchase the 21.5-foot lot at 50 Broadway. Gilbert struggled to figure out how he could create a structure wide enough for office space, plus room for elevators and staircases.

His experience working on rail depots gave him the answer.

“In 1905, [Gilbert] told The New York Times that after he wrestled with the problem for months, the solution came to him ‘like a flash’: He could support both the floors and the exterior walls on a concealed iron skeleton, like an iron bridge standing on end,” wrote Christopher Gray in the New York Times in 1996.

“The skeleton principle meant that the exterior walls, which were supported independently at each floor, did not have to increase in width in relation to the building’s height. The exterior walls thus became mere curtains, resting on the beams of each floor.” The steel skeleton allowed for more floor space and windows.

As the Tower Building joined the cityscape, skeptical New Yorkers predicted it wouldn’t stand.

“When high winds blew during construction, crowds of onlookers gathered (at a safe distance) waiting for the radical new structure to fall over,” according to a PBS/American Experience article.

“It was only when the architect himself climbed to the peak of the building and declared it perfectly safe that they were convinced otherwise.”

Though steel-frame construction had been used to construct Chicago’s Home Insurance Building in 1885, Bradford brought the technology to New York, paving the way for the first generation of skyscrapers: “It was this small beginning that made possible such giants as the Woolworth, Singer, and Metropolitan Towers and the coming Pan Am building,” wrote The Sun in January 1914.

The Sun article took a wistful look at the Tower Building (headline above), which was being dismantled the day the article appeared. Part of the Lower Broadway commerce canyon for a mere 25 years, it was replaced by a 37-story 1920s office tower (above in 2017).

“The story of the old Tower Building is one of the best illustrations that can be given of the rapidity with which New York City has moved during the last quarter century,” stated The Sun. “It came as an experiment, gained success in spite of general ridicule, and finally formed a beginning for all high buildings of recent times.”

“Now it has outlived its usefulness. It cannot compete with the giants of its own family and, like all ancestors, it is to be laid away in its grave, which in this case is the second hand material man’s yard.”

[First image: New-York Historical Society; second image: New-York Historical Society Robert L. Bracklow Photograph Collection; third image: Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections via New York Times; fourth image: New York Sun, 1914; fifth image: Commercial Property Executive; sixth image: New-York Historical Society]

The story of a magnificent 1850s house dubbed the Blue Belle of Brooklyn

It’s the blue belle of Brooklyn; a former country villa that stands alone at 271 Ninth Street, between walkup flats and a featureless one-story Post Office.

Passing this dowager beauty, which has stood on the block between Fourth and Fifth Avenues since the Antebellum era, is like being in a time machine. Everything about it is a wonderful anachronism: the mansard roof, the lacy ironwork over the bay windows, the front yard with rosebushes and lavender.

How did such a spectacular house come to be—and then manage to stick around for more than a century and a half? The story begins in the middle of the 19th century.

Imagine today’s Park Slope in the decades prior to 1850. Before elegant brownstone rows sprang up, the area was mostly pasture or bucolic countryside in the farming town of Flatbush—not yet part of the city of Brooklyn.

But the 1850s were transformative, and what we now call Brooklyn began growing into its new role as an accessible-by-ferry suburb of Manhattan. A farmer descended from the Adriance family—whose holdings stretched from present-day Third Avenue into Prospect Park—sold off lots for development.

One buyer in 1854 was a successful Wall Street merchant named William Cronyn (some references spell it Croynyn). Between 1856 and 1857, Cronyn built his suburban villa far from urban ills: a French Second Empire delight “reflecting the prosperity of the original owner,” as the Landmarks Preservation Commission put it in a report on the house in 1978.

“Of frame and brick construction covered with stucco, the three-story house features a central half-story cupola with a clerestory [windows above eye level] which lights the interior staircase,” noted the LPC report. “Below the cupola is a slate mansard roof with end pavilions and ornamental iron cresting” typical of this fanciful style, popular in the 1850s-1870s.

The Cronyns only stayed until 1862. As the house switched hands and residential development accelerated after the Civil War, neighbors arrived. “During the late 1860s, other sites on this block along Fifth Avenue, Eighth Street, and then Ninth Street began to be developed,” states the LPC report.

Apparently the neighborhood had something of a crime problem as well. On August 11, 1871, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported the story of a diamond merchant who was a houseguest of the Shanks family—the occupants of the house at the time. One afternoon, the merchant was beaten, robbed, and found moaning on the curb at Ninth Street and Fourth Avenue.

“This is the latest and boldest assault of a series that have been made in Gowanus during the past two or three months,” the reporter stated.

In 1879, Daniel H. Gray, who worked in sulpher refining, bought the blue belle. In 1885, he transferred ownership of the house to his daughter, Mary Gray Cone, who lived in this dwelling until 1896, as South Brooklyn became an enclave of brownstones for white collar residents and later, flats and tenements for working-class folks.

At the turn of the 20th century, the house entered a new era. “Charles M. Higgins acquired the property in 1898 as the headquarters for his India ink company, which occupied the building until the mid-20th century,” per the LPC report.

“The ink factory was located to the rear of the house facing Eighth Street. This change in use for the building reflected the change in the area to include commercial uses as well as residential ones.”

Higgins was an interesting character, at least based on all of the letters he wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle over the years. He signed his letters using a different title depending on the issue: as part of the Brooklyn Ethical Association, or the South Brooklyn Board of Trade, or the Anti-Vaccination League of America.

Born in Ireland but raised in Brooklyn, Higgins died in 1929. In his last decade, he left the borough a fitting legacy. “Higgins was responsible for the Minerva statue in Green-Wood Cemetery, and is buried behind her, on the hill,” wrote Suzanne Spellen of Brownstoner.

In 1981, Charles Sibirsky, a jazz pianist, and his wife bought the blue belle and opened a music school, according to Spellen. “Slope Music” is embossed on a half-moon window above the slender front door. I imagine this is when the yellow flowers arrived on the roof, making the house even more whimsical.

Some people might see the blue belle and think of the Addams family. Others might feel as I do, that this stunning survivor is a charming ghost from the borough’s past—a witness to all the changes as the area went from Flatbush farmland to residential Gowanus, South Brooklyn, and now Park Slope.

And luckily, it’s been landmarked since 1978.

[Fourth photo: 1940, NYPL Digital Collections; Sixth image: Brooklyn Daily Eagle; Seventh photo: LPC Report, likely 1978]

A faded sign with a mystery two-letter phone exchange beside a Bronx highway

Discovering faded ads for city businesses is always a delight. And an ad that includes one of those old two-letter phone exchanges officially phased out in the 1960s? Bring it on.

This one above, beside the Bruckner Expressway between 140th and 141st Streets in the South Bronx, is for a shipper and mover called La Flor de Mayo Express. Weathered by the elements, the ad itself isn’t very old—but the business is.

“Serving the Hispanic Community since 1934,” the sign tells us, adding four locations: New York, Puerto Rico, Santa Domingo, and Florida. Still in business almost 90 years later, the company likely helped fuel the growth of the Puerto Rican and Dominican communities in the city in the decades after World War II.

Now, the two-letter phone exchange: LU. That’s something of a mystery. It could signify a geographical location in the neighborhood or well-known attraction.

Maybe Longwood, after the nearby neighborhood? Or Lorillard, for the tobacco company that got its start along the Bronx River in the 18th century? These past posts share more old-school New York City phone numbers.

[Thanks to Justine for discovering this one!]

Two very different scenes painted from an 1889 artists studio building on Eighth Avenue

The Romanesque top windows, the light-colored bricks, the classical columns between window panes: Even behind a tarp and scaffolding, sometimes you just know a building has a noteworthy past.

Turns out 939 Eighth Avenue, on a gridlock-prone stretch of Columbus Circle between 55th and 56th Streets, was one of the first studio buildings in New York City intended as work and living space for artists.

Opened around 1889 and named after Baroque painter Anthony van Dyck, the Van Dyck Studios became an early anchor of the arts district that sprang up at the turn of the century along 57th Street.

The Van Dyck Studios “housed the Grand Opera Society of New York and the American School of Miniature Painting, along with studios for forty to fifty artists—primarily painters but also sculptors, musicians, and dancers,” explains the New-York Historical Society.

“It stood around the corner from Carnegie Hall, which included 180 artists’ studios in its towers. Together, these two buildings formed one of the main art communities in late-nineteenth-century New York City.”

The Van Dyck “set the stage for the development of such purpose-built artist residences as the West Sixty-seventh Street artists’ studios—home at various points to Gifford Beal, Ludwig Bemelmans, Norman Rockwell, and LeRoy Neiman—as well as the Rodin Studios (200 West 57th Street), the Studio Building, and the Gainsborough Studios (222 Central Park South),” the New-York Historical Society continues.

I’ve not been able to find any interior shots of the Van Dyck Building. But perhaps that’s not as important as what some of the resident artists saw—and painted—outside those enormous windows.

“View From the Van Dyck Studios” (above) by Eliot Candee Clark, “presents rear brownstone exteriors as seen from 939 Eighth Avenue, where Clark shared a studio with his father and then kept one of his own from 1906 to 1922,” notes the New-York Historical Society.

It’s a moody winter scene from the back of the building, but from the security of his studio, Clark isn’t suffering from cold and snow exposure.

“Dusk reduces the background buildings into shadowy silhouettes of gray barely visible against the pale gray sky. Icicles hang from the ventilation shaft, and snow blankets the rooftops and fire escape,” per the New-York Historical Society. “Yet the painting hints at warmth and homeyness: several windows glow yellow against the winter, suggesting refuge from the elements.”

A generation later, Minnesota-born painter Lucile Blanch had a studio in the Van Dyck. Back in March, I posted a painting by Blanch, “Eighth Avenue and 56th Street,” depicting a street scene from 1930, when the neighborhood was becoming an automobile showroom district and less of an arts district.

A reader, Bob, commented that the vantage point was likely from the Van Dyck, as Blanch and her then-husband shared space there.

Unlike Clark, who faced the back, Blanch looked out the front of the building—giving us this wonderfully rich street scene of small, anonymous people dwarfed by the enormous modern city.

[Third image: New-York Historical Society]

The fantastical 1886 plan to turn the Brooklyn Bridge towers into glass observatories

Changes came to the Brooklyn Bridge not long after this “eighth wonder of the world” linking the cities of New York and Brooklyn opened to enormous fanfare on May 24, 1883.

The toll to cross the bridge (one cent for pedestrians, a nickel for a horse and rider, and 10 cents for a horse and wagon, per history.com) ended in 1891. Eight years later, tracks were added to the bridge’s roadways so trolleys could carry people across the bridge in both directions.

But before that, in 1886, a high-profile New York welfare worker came up with a more fantastical idea: building an “ornamental palace of glass,” as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper described it, on the top of each of the bridge’s two towers (sketch above).

These glass enclosures would serve as “grand observatories” for visitors who wanted to view the cities of Brooklyn and New York from “lofty heights,” the article continued.

How would people reach these glass enclosures? They would be whisked to the top of the towers and into the observatories by elevators, which would be enclosed in new steel framework to be added alongside each tower.

It might rank as the boldest, most unusual idea to alter the bridge ever put before city officials. But then Linda Gilbert (above), the woman who suggested it, was a bold and unusual New Yorker.

Born in Rochester in 1847, Gilbert (above in 1876) had been dubbed “the prisoner’s friend” because of her dedication to improving prisons and the lives of people residing in them. As a young woman, she used inherited family money to create penitentiary libraries, eventually building libraries at Sing Sing, , the Ludlow Street Jail, and the New York House of Detention.

After her own funds dried up, she launched the Gilbert Library & Prisoners Aid Fund in 1876. Her need for more money to put toward her prison reform work appears to have been the reason behind her glass observatory idea.

“Gilbert proposed a modest fee for visitors, three-quarters of which would serve as direct revenue for the bridge, while the rest would fund Gilbert’s charitable and reformatory work,” wrote Richard Haw, author of Art of the Brooklyn Bridge: a Visual History.

“I am constantly hampered in my work for lack of funds,” Gilbert stated to Frank Leslie’s newspaper, bolstering her idea by adding that one of her cousins, Rufus H. Gilbert, was the inventor of the city’s first elevated railway.

She described the bridge towers as “not very ornamental.” Instead, she advocated for adding on top “two of the grandest points of elevation in the world” as long as she could be assured of getting a quarter of the receipts to put toward her prison reform work.

“The scheme will certainly attract general attention,” the Frank Leslie article concluded. In the end, of course, the glass observatories idea was DOA.

“The bridge’s trustees considered the proposal, but it went no further,” wrote Haw.

[Top image: NYPL Digital Collection; second image: Wikipedia; third image: The Life and Work of Linda Gilbert; fourth image: Currier & Ives, 1883, 1stdibs.com]

How fate and coincidence brought a firefighter statue honoring 9/11 to East 43rd Street

New York City is home to dozens of monuments marking the terrorist attacks and commemorating the thousands of lives lost on September 11, 2001.

Some are official, like the reflecting pools situated in the footprints of the Twin Towers. Others are less grand but equally powerful—street murals of American flags, an inconspicuous bronze plaque put up by a First Avenue hospital, and a Central Park memorial to children who lost parents on that terrible day.

Then there’s the statue of a firefighter on East 43rd Street, half a block from Bryant Park. Here, a nine-foot bronze figure of a fireman kneels on a granite base, one hand on his helmet and the other on his forehead in anguish, distress, and maybe prayer.

“The Kneeling Firefighter,” as it’s called, is not an exquisite piece of art, but it’s poignant and moving. It’s also something of a surprise to come across outside the headquarters of Emigrant Bank on an unglamorous stretch of Midtown that doesn’t seem a likely place for any kind of memorial.

What the statue does have, however, is an unusual backstory involving coincidence and perhaps fate.

The story of The Kneeling Firefighter begins in Missouri in 2000, when the Fire Fighters Association of Missouri commissioned the statue to honor those who have fallen in the line of duty.

Designed by Pittsburgh-based Matthews Bronze and cast in Parma, Italy, the statue was shipped back to the United States, landing at Kennedy Airport on September 9 and then bound for Missouri, according to fireengineering.com.

The Kneeling Firefighter was in customs at JFK on September 11—which became a horrific day of terror and mass casualties that paralyzed the city and put a stop to all air travel.

With hundreds of firefighters lost or missing at what remained of the World Trade Center, Matthews Bronze decided the statue, still detained in customs, should stay in New York City, and they would create another one for the Missouri group.

“It was fate that the 2,700-pound statue arrived in the United States on September 9 at Kennedy Airport,” a post on the Matthews Bronze website states.

“The statue, which was originally intended to be shipped by ocean freight to the United States for a mid-October delivery to the Missouri Firefighters Association, was air freighted to the United States at the direction of Matthews product manager to ensure the October delivery.”

An executive at the company “drove from Pittsburgh to the airport and put the statue on the back of a flatbed truck,” explained the New York Post on September 20, 2001. “Then he drove the statue to Midtown, where it was parked Tuesday in front of the Milford Plaza Hotel on Eighth Avenue at West 44th Street.” (Third photo, via Matthews Bronze)

The Kneeling Firefighter remained at this site, placed on a temporary granite foundation by the Milstein family, which owned the Milford Plaza. The Milford Plaza was a fitting site for the statue, as the hotel donated money for supplies as well as hundreds of rooms for search and rescue workers.

The statue went into storage at some point until 2011, when the Milstein family found its permanent home on East 43rd Street outside the Milstein-owned Emigrant Bank, according to fireengineering.com.

It’s hardly New York’s only firefighter memorial. Every September 11, the Fireman’s Memorial on Riverside Drive and 100th Street, built in 1913, attracts many mourners. City firehouses themselves also serve as makeshift memorials.

But The Kneeling Firefighter was actually in New York City as 9/11 unfolded—and it’s the first commemorative statue honoring the 343 members of the FDNY who perished while trying to save lives at the World Trade Center.

[Third photo: Matthews Bronze]

A little old house surrounded by tall apartment buildings on a changing Riverside Drive

It’s a crisp, startling photo that perfectly captures a New York City neighborhood in transition.

We’re at Riverside Drive and 111th Street, as the street sign (can we bring these charming posts back, please?) makes clear. Taken in 1909 by Robert Bracklow, the photo shows two couples strolling north on Riverside in what would be considered part of Morningside Heights.

The contrast between old and new is startling. The couples, dressed in stylish clothes, are walking beside a shabby wood picket fence that would have been quite fitting a generation earlier, when Riverside Drive and the rest of what used to be known as Manhattan’s “West End” was still a sparsely populated area of estate homes and farmhouses.

Tall apartment buildings encircle the little set-back colonial-style home on two sides. The small dwelling could have been an estate house or a farmhouse. Now it’s a relic, turned into a cafe—perhaps for people enjoying Riverside Park across the street or bicycle riders careening up and down Riverside, looking for a bite.

Soon the little house will be gone—subsumed by the encroaching urbanscape. Learn more about Riverside Drive’s transition from countryside to cityscape by joining Ephemeral New York on a walking tour of the Drive! Space is still available for the tour on Sunday, September 10 and another tour on Sunday, September 24. 

[New-York Historical Society: Robert L. Bracklow Photograph Collection]

Two glimpses of life in Prohibition-era New York, one in sunlight and the other in shadows

Born in Austria, Samuel Brecher immigrated to New York City with his family in 1910. He studied at Cooper Union and then the National Academy of Design before establishing himself as a painter of rural coastal scenes and small towns—and later, of clowns.

But New York City is where Brecher spent the majority of his life (he died in 1980), working out of a studio on 23rd Street in Chelsea, according to 200 Main Art & Wine Gallery.

Based on two paintings that feature disconnected figures at different times of day and points on the streetscape, Brecher has something to say about the smallness and internal isolation of city life.

“The Speak Easy,” (above) from 1926-1930, depicts a tenement lane or alley in gritty earth tones. People appear small on opposite sides of the sidewalk, almost like they’re on a stage.

A backlit woman in a pink skirt has her hands at her hips. Is she the disgruntled wife of one of the men under the streetlamp, ordering him to home after a drunken night at an unseen speakeasy? Perhaps the speakeasy is the building behind her, and she, the proprietor, has kicked the men out.

Then again, she may not even be addressing the men at all; her expression seems angled away from them, possibly directed at another figure out of view. It’s hard to tell, but these people may be under elevated train tracks, their dramas made even smaller by the overarching bigness of the modern city.

The second painting, “West Eighth Street,” gives us low-rise West Eighth and Sixth Avenue in bright color. Again, Brecher depicts several disconnected figures, also from a vantage point that emphasizes their insignificance. (And could the rough brushstrokes underscore their rough, turbulent lives?)

Similar to the people in “The Speak Easy,” these New Yorkers seem isolated from one another, despite their physical closeness. Like all of us moving around the city, they’re likely caught up in the challenges of their relatively small yet meaningful lives—internal lives that strangers have no access to.

They’re together on the street, yet miles away from one another.

[The Speak Easy: 200 Main Art & Wine Gallery; West Eighth Street: New-York Historical Society]

Discarded wood planks from the 1920s Coney Island Boardwalk inside a seaside bar

The closest thing Brooklyn has to a honky tonk is Ruby’s Bar and Grill, a boardwalk-facing joint with raucous summertime crowds of locals and day-trippers enjoying cold beer, greasy clams and corndogs, and lots of unusual relics representing Coney Island’s rich history lining the walls.

But some of the relics aren’t on the walls—they are the walls.

Get out of the sun and head inside, and you’ll see strips of shabby wood planks on the floor, the ceiling (above photo), the tables, and even across the long and crowded bar.

These planks are authentic pieces of the Coney Island Boardwalk. The wood was salvaged by Ruby’s owner, Michael Sarrel, at no cost when NYC Parks began reconstructing and replacing the worn-out Riegelmann Boardwalk at the entrance of the bar roughly a decade ago.

“Sarrel is spending $10,000 to rebuild Ruby’s bar with wood from the walkway,” according to a Brooklyn Paper article from 2012, before the planks became part of the bar’s decor.

So exactly how old is the boardwalk wood at Ruby’s, which opened as Hebrew National Deli and Bar in 1934 but became Ruby’s when Coney Island native and former bathhouse owner Ruby Jacobs took it over in 1972?

According to a post on Ruby’s Facebook page, it’s “original 1920s Coney Island Boardwalk wood.”

Riegelmann Boardwalk officially opened in 1923, making the planks a century old. And they look it, with the wood frayed and discolored in some places and dotted with nail holes.

Coney Island these days has once again tried to reinvent itself, attracting a younger crowd with the annual Mermaid Parade and families with reopened amusement park rides and games.

Ruby’s caters to the new and the old—and it has the beat-up boardwalk wood traversed by earlier generations of Coney Island visitors to show for it.