Esther Crain's Blog, page 31

A snowy Village park by a midcentury painter of New York’s streets and squares

I don’t usually post winter scenes during summer months. But there’s heat in this 1930s painting of a snow-covered Jackson Square Park—a block-long triangle of green space in Greenwich Village at the awkward juncture of Greenwich and Eighth Avenues and Horatio Street.

Alfred Mira is the painter, and the heat comes from him, I think. Growing up in Greenwich Village in an Italian immigrant family, Mira studied at the Art Students League and National Academy of Design. But according to a biography from Christie’s, Mira found his artistic footing during a trip to Europe when he was a young man.

“Mira was particularly fascinated with the city streets and their frenetic energy,” the site states. “After traveling throughout Europe in 1928, Mira realized that the bustling avenues of New York afforded him the profound inspiration he was attempting to find in Europe. Returning to New York, Mira devoted himself to painting its streets, avenues and squares.”

If this really is Jackson Square in the 1930s, things seem a little askew. A 1920s apartment house should be on the right side of the painting between Greenwich and Horatio; Jackson Square itself seems way out of proportion. And shouldn’t there be cars on these roads?

But no matter. It’s a romantic depiction of a piece of Greenwich Village with passion and energy, from the rich colors of the tenements to the faceless people in motion to the neon store signs glowing like embers.

For more Alfred Mira paintings, click this link.

This tiny garage built over a century ago holds out between two East Side towers

Take a walk down East 38th Street, and you’ll see several buildings along this residential stretch of Murray Hill that look like former horse stables.

The most stunning might be the fanciful Dutch Revival-style carriage house at Number 149, owned in the early 1900s by a financier named George S. Bowdoin.

Keep heading toward the East River, and the carriage houses start to look less like whimsical one-offs and instead resemble functional commercial stables that housed many horses for various owners.

But there’s one unusual stunner at 305 East 38th Street, east of Second Avenue. Crammed between two tall residential towers is this one-story holdout (above) with a delightful blond brick facade and two arched entryways that appear to be horse doorways.

Despite its horse stable appearance, however, this little charmer (below, in 1940) was built for an automobile, not an equine.

Considering that this holdout got its start in the 1910s, that makes sense; cars had already outnumbered horses and carriages by this time. According to the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide from April 1917, plans were completed for a “one-story brick garage, 25 x 100, at 305 East 38th Street.”

The cost of the garage: $5,000.

Who was the garage for? A fellow named Henry Hof, of 567 Third Avenue. Hof appears to have been a real estate man; his name shows up in early 20th century newspaper archives covering the leasing of new commercial buildings in prime areas.

How long Hof parked here isn’t known. But like so many of the horse stables on East 38th Street, this little garage was renovated into a residence at some point in the 20th century.

As the other buildings on this former low-rise block were topped and tall towers went up in their place, the garage became a holdout—a remnant of the New York of more than a century ago, with old-school ornamental brickwork and a curlycue ribbon of brick around the facade.

One contemporary touch to note: the ornamental iron window grills!

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

This Lower Broadway boot scraper may have been used by a US President

When St. Paul’s Chapel opened at Broadway and Vesey Street in 1766, it was conceived as a “chapel-of-ease” for New Yorkers who lived on the outskirts of the city (at the time, roughly Chambers Street) and weren’t keen on traversing the unpaved streets to Trinity Church, the city’s Anglican house of worship.

A decade later, however, Trinity Church was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1776. St. Paul’s had been saved by a bucket brigade, so it became the main church until Trinity was rebuilt in 1790.

Among the elite, well-heeled worshippers at St. Paul’s was George Washington.

The first American president prayed at St. Paul’s following his inauguration at Federal Hall on April 30, 1789—and he continued to attend services there for the brief period when the Presidential residence was in Lower Manhattan and New York was the nation’s short-lived capital city.

The very pew where President Washington prayed has been preserved inside the chapel as a historical site. But what about another historical artifact Washington may have used when he arrived to attend services: the iron boot scraper just outside the front entrance?

Readers of this site know all about boot scrapers. These always functional, sometimes fanciful metal devices were located by the main door of any fine residence or building. Visitors would use them to scrape off the dirt and debris from their shoes before entering a home, business, school, or church.

They seem odd today, but boot scrapers were necessities in muddy, garbage-strewn, manure-filled Gotham through the 19th century.

Of course, it’s impossible to know if President Washington actually used this boot scraper (or the one on the southern side of the entrance). In his diary he includes several mentions of going to St. Paul’s “in the forenoon,” but he didn’t record anything about scraping his boots there.

Still, it’s certainly possible he ran his heels across the blade. Boot scrapers were made of iron, so durable that many of them still exist today, especially outside residences. And the boot scrapers at St. Paul’s are in as good a shape as the black iron fence around Bowling Green Park, which dates back to the 1770s.

St. Paul’s Chapel (above, in 1812) underwent a restoration in 2016, which included landscaping, steeple repair, and repainting. But the church website chronicling the restorative measures doesn’t mention anything about replacing the boot scrapers.

President Washington departed New York City for good in August 1790. The boot scrapers outside St. Paul’s Chapel remain. And even if they came after Washington’s era, these relics are still delightful reminders of a vastly different (and filthier) post-colonial city.

[Third image: Wikipedia; fourth image: NYPL Digital Collections]

What a 1935 Edward Hopper painting says about the “transitory nature of modern life”

You can be forgiven if you don’t recognize the bridge Edward Hopper depicted in this 1935 painting. It’s the Macombs Dam Bridge, linking 155th Street in Harlem to the South Bronx. (Today, this view of the bridge would include Yankee Stadium just across the Harlem River on the Bronx side.)

Opened in 1895, this swing bridge was once traversed by horse-drawn carriages; it was also a popular spot fo catch the cool breezes coming off the Harlem River on sweltering summer days.

Hopper didn’t see the bridge as a connector of humanity though. His vision of the bridge is cool and sterile—absent of people and isolated from the neighborhoods it links.

“For some, modernity resulted in an increasing feeling of alienation, as people began moving through spaces at a faster pace,” states the Brooklyn Museum, which has the painting in its collection. “Edward Hopper captured this transitory nature of modern life in paintings infused with a sense of isolation and estrangement.”

It’s classic Hopper, exposing the contradictions of the modern machine age, with engineering and communications advances designed to bring people together yet actually leaving them more disconnected. “There are no signs of life in the city. Instead, an eerie stillness pervades the scene, resulting in a disquieting mood,” continues the museum caption.

I’m not aware of other works by Hopper that depict Upper Manhattan. But he has captured the city’s bridges before—like this view from the Williamsburg Bridge.

The mystery back houses behind East 26th Street

East 26th Street between Second and Third Avenues is within the borders of Kips Bay or part of the Gramercy neighborhood, depending on the source you consult.

Either way, it’s an old street—likely developed in the first half of the 19th century as an enclave of row houses and then tenements for middle class and working-class New Yorkers.

Recently I was walking down this quiet Manhattan block when I spotted something unusual: it appeared to be a back house. This three-story white walkup wasn’t hidden from view as back houses normally are but was clearly visible from the side behind a taller main house that faced the street.

If you walk New York’s older neighborhoods—Greenwich Village, the East Village, Chelsea, Brooklyn Heights—then you’ve probably peeked between fence posts and spotted a back house or two. In the 19th century, owners often built them behind their main house to function as a carriage house for horses.

More unscrupulous landlords, however, ignored building codes and put them up to cram in extra tenants and squeeze more rent out of their property.

Typically only accessed through the front building, back houses have a romantic aura around them. Each is a secret piece of old New York that made it into the modern era.

This one, on the north side of the street, didn’t necessarily seem romantic. It wasn’t in great shape, and it’s unclear if anyone was living there.

The case was different with two other back houses blocked mostly from view on the south side of the street. The front buildings, at 206-210 East 26th Street, are separated by a locked gate (above photo).

Inside the gate is a courtyard that leads to two distinct buildings largely hidden behind the front houses, each four stories high and with mid-19th century features.

These appear to be old-school back houses recycled into charming contemporary apartments. It’s hard to know for sure; I didn’t uncover any clues about their construction. But the block was developed in an era when landlords were happy to skirt the law in order to maximize their building lots and profits.

Other back houses include this former carriage house behind a tenement on Avenue B in the East Village, and a West Village back house from the 18th century that returned to view during construction but is once again buried behind brick and mortar.

A warning about fireworks from a 1930s New York public health poster

Fireworks have been a Fourth of July tradition in New York since at least the 1840s, when an annual display of patriotic pyrotechnics was staged over Castle Garden at the foot of the Battery. Across the East River, the city of Brooklyn celebrated Independence Day with a fireworks show in Fort Greene.

Another Fourth of July tradition was for individual New Yorkers to set off firecrackers of their own. Beginning in the 1800s, this holiday ritual continued into the 20th century—leading to the inevitable roundup of next-day newspaper articles covering all the people injured or killed by sparklers and rockets.

“2,600 in City Hurt by Fireworks,” a New York Times headline announced on July 5, 1934. That was “1,500 more than last year injured here despite police drive on bootleg noisemakers,” the article continued. Fireworks injuries included fingers and hands burned or blown off, and eye trauma.

Selling fireworks was already illegal in Gotham; the ban went on the books in 1909. To stem the rise in casualties, the New York City Department of Health publicized the dangers.

With the artistic and printmaking help of the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA), the department circulated this red, white, and blue graphic poster (top image) warning people, especially kids, to stay away from firecrackers. (The two boys in the second image, bandaged up at Bellevue Hospital in 1938, apparently didn’t heed the call of the poster.)

Were the posters effective? It seems so. On July 5, 1938, the New York Times noted that unsanctioned fireworks set off throughout the city injured 846 people, mostly kids, down from 1,180 a year earlier.

The firecracker poster is one of many Depression-era posters themed around public health campaigns against everything from syphilis to unsanitary tenements. Click on the links to see examples of these Art Deco-style posters—created by the WPA to address the health problems plaguing midcentury Gotham.

[Top image: Library of Congress; second image, MCNY, X2011.4.11027]

A Croton Water jewel of a manhole cover found on Riverside Drive

Riverside Drive never ceases to surprise me. While walking on the Drive in the vicinity of Claremont Avenue, this jewel of a manhole cover caught my eye.

“Croton Water,” it reads, letting me know that the cover once led to the piping system that brought fresh water to New York City from upstate reservoirs beginning in 1842. Without a ready supply of fresh water, Gotham never could have become the powerhouse metropolis it grew into and remains today.

The lettering underneath it—DPW for Department of Public Works—feels old-fashioned, as do the two stars decorating the lid. It’s rusty and cracked, but still a wonderful remnant of the late 19th century city hiding in the ground year after year to be discovered by walkers who keep their eyes on the ground.

Speaking of Riverside Drive, there’s still a few spots left for Ephemeral New York’s Riverside Drive Mansions and Monuments Walking Tour on Sunday, June 25 at 1 p.m.! More information and signup information can be found by clicking this link.

The story of an alley almost nobody knowns near Grand Central Terminal

The streets around Grand Central Terminal enjoy high profiles: 42nd Street, Park Avenue, Vanderbilt Avenue, the Park Avenue Viaduct. Because they surround a train terminal that sees 750,000 visitors every day, they’re almost always crowded with foot and car traffic.

So what to make of lonely Depew Place, a spit of roadway starting at the dark and dingy back of Grand Central on East 45th Street, and then running alongside Park Avenue next to the terminal before unceremoniously ending in a loading dock a block later?

I’ve often wondered about this slender, little-known street. It seems to have been de-mapped, but the street sign looks new. Was this ever an actual city street before the current Grand Central Terminal opened in 1913—and if so, where did it lead to, and why was it almost entirely eliminated?

Depew Place did begin life as a New York City street, laid out in 1884 on the east side of the old Grand Central Depot (below), according to oldstreets.com. Grand Central Depot opened in 1871 and was demolished in 1899.

According to the above photo, from the New-York Historical Society, Depew Street extended all the way to 42nd Street and was a regular commercial strip. (The photo is undated, but it looks to be in the late 19th century.)

But when plans for the current Beaux-Arts Grand Central Terminal were made in 1905, officials decided that Depew Place would have to close, at least while construction was commencing.

After the new Grand Central Terminal was completed and began serving passengers eight years later, Depew Place’s fate was revealed. (Below, still existing alongside the new Grand Central)

“Under a 1925 perpetual easement to the city, its upper level is now occupied in part by the northbound ramp carrying Park Avenue around the terminal,” states oldstreets.com. “A part also remains as an alley to the post office loading docks on the south side of 45th Street.”

So Depew Place remains, mostly unknown and forgotten, a century later. Oh, and who was Depew?

Chauncey Depew was a U.S. Senator from New York as well as the president of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York Central Railroad. Vanderbilt built the original Grand Central Depot, and Depew was apparently an important enough figure to have his name grace an adjacent street.

[Second photo: New-York Historical Society; third and fourth photos: NYPL]

The modest East Side park inspired by a 15th century church in Rome

Walk through the spiked iron gates of St. Catherine’s Park in Lenox Hill, and you’ll feel like you’re entering almost any bustling New York City pocket park.

Spread across this leafy, one-acre green space on First Avenue between 67th and 68th Streets are picnic tables, a playground, and ball courts. On a warm June afternoon, a sprinkler shaped like an elephant sprays water over gleeful kids, and weary parents occupy the many wood benches.

But St. Catherine’s, which opened as a city park in 1917 and takes its name from the Church of St. Catherine of Siena across First Avenue on East 68th Street, has something to it that’s unique among Gotham’s many community parks.

The design of the park didn’t come out of the cookie-cutter city park template but was inspired by the interior of a church from the Middle Ages halfway around the world: Santa Maria Sopra Minerva Church in Rome (exterior below).

Consecrated in 1470, this church—perhaps best known for the Bernini elephant statue on the piazza, as well as countless other artistic treasures inside—contains the remains of the real-life St. Catherine, a Tuscan-born visionary who ministered to the poor and sick in the 14th century.

Now, the planners of St. Catherine’s Park didn’t make the similarities obvious; it’s unlikely you’d see the elephant-shaped sprinkler and think of Bernini’s elephant. But the NYC Parks website has a helpful way of understanding just how the layout of the park takes its cues from the layout of the church.

“The spray shower area stands in for the center aisle, leading to what would be the altar where the flagpole stands,” explains the NYC Parks website. “The play areas to each side represent the pews, and the paving pattern throughout the park resembles the actual floor of the church in Rome.”

The elephant spray shower “makes reference to Bernini’s sculpture of an elephant that supports a 6th-century Egyptian obelisk and stands outside the church.”

Depictions of St. Catherine often have her holding a lily, a symbol of purity. Because of this, lilies have been planted in St. Catherine’s Park, adds the NYC Parks website.

St. Catherine’s Park was one of dozens of local parks built in the early 1900s. The photo above, from 1902, shows the space before it became a park and reveals the original 1897 church building, replaced by another structure in the 1930s).

Influenced by progressive-era ideals, city officials believed that neighborhood parks would help make a dent in the poverty and crime endemic to dense tenement districts, as the blocks in the East 60s and 70s were at the time.

Their goal wasn’t to make the park an ecclesiastical space but to pay homage to the influence of St. Catherine’s Church across the street—and maybe to the real St. Catherine as well. It’s worth noting that she’s the patron saint of those who heal the sick, and the church named in her honor is appropriately near major hospitals and medical centers.

[Third photo: Wikipedia; fifth photo: NYPL]

Before it was the Limelight, this Chelsea church appeared in an 1890 painting

“A Spring Morning” is Impressionist loveliness by Childe Hassam—the New York City-based painter who created enchanting street scenes out of loose brushstrokes and plays on darkness and light.

Hassam’s work is also a time machine back to an earlier New York. This one takes us to 1890, just after Hassam settled in Gotham and began painting out of a studio on Fifth Avenue and 17th Street.

He didn’t go far to capture this scene. On West 20th Street looking toward Sixth Avenue, two women of wealth are about to alight a carriage; two more trail behind on the brownstone steps. A well-dressed male pedestrian walks behind another pedestrian, a woman, who shields herself and her children from the warm spring sun with an umbrella.

This stretch of Chelsea has long since lost its cache as an elite brownstone row; it was already going out of fashion when Hassam painted it, thanks to the increasing presence of commerce in the neighborhood and the elevated train traveling up and down Sixth Avenue, which Hassam obscures.

But unlike the rest of this former residential block, two of the buildings in the painting remain with us.

First, the gold-domed tower in the center of the painting: It was part of the block-long Hugh O’Neill Dry Goods Emporium, one of the legendary retail establishments on the Sixth Avenue part of the Ladies Mile shopping district. Today, it’s the O’Neill Building, a luxury condo residence.

Next to the domed tower is another tall structure, part of a Gothic-style church (above, in 1876; below, in 1907) that looks like it belongs in the country. This was the Church of the Holy Communion, completed in 1845 by Richard Upjohn. In its day, this Episcopalian church was one of the most elite in New York City.

Those of us born in the 20th century, however, might know it better as the Limelight—the infamous dance club that opened in the 1980s and finished its run as a nightclub haunt in the early 2000s. Today, I believe it’s been divided into retail spaces.

Childe Hassam couldn’t have imagined how the church, whose parish disbanded in the 1970s, would be repurposed a century after he painted this serene scene of privileged Gilded Age New Yorkers.

[First image: Wikiart; second image: Miller’s New York as It Is, 1876; third image: MCNY, 1907, x2010.11.8720]