Esther Crain's Blog, page 34

This mostly forgotten war memorial to fallen Brooklyn transit workers is especially poignant

It might be the last place in the city you’d expect to find an artful and expressive monument to World War I heroes.

But not far from Brooklyn’s busy Broadway Junction subway stop, near the bus depot and behind a chain-link fence at Broadway and Herkimer Street in East New York, is a tall bronze plaque framed in granite.

The plaque presents a touching image: a bas relief of a robed figure deep in mourning. The figure is reclining on the ground, faceless under a head covering, holding what appears to be a palm branch in one hand.

Under the figure’s elbow is a realistically carved subway car—with the initials BRT inside a circular logo above the train.

Most contemporary New Yorkers probably wouldn’t recognize those initials. But BRT stood for Brooklyn Rapid Transit system—the public transit company formed in 1896 that consolidated several existing railroad lines in Brooklyn and Queens. The BRT operated surface trains and subway routes until it went bankrupt in 1919.

Before the BMT went under, the company built this monument. “Dedicated by the employees of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit System to the memory of their fallen HEROES in the world war, 1917-1918,” the plaque reads.

More than 50 names are emblazoned on the plaque, as well as each man’s job and the location where he worked.

The humanity of this monument makes its presence with the names. Pvt. Theodore P. Jensen was a motorman based out of the Ninth Avenue Depot. Pvt. August Hegel was a machinist at the repair shop at Fresh Pond. Sgt. Bernard F. Spaulding was a plumber’s helper in the Building Department.

Many decades after this memorial went up, transit workers added a small plaque on the cement base in memory of “World War II, Korean, and Vietnam War Veterans.” Beyond this additional plaque, there’s no signs of recent visitors, no wreaths or flowers. That seems to be the fate of many Great War monuments outside Manhattan, like this one in Hunts Point.

One intriguing mystery is the name of the sculptor: A. Zeitlin, it looks like. A Russian-born sculptor named Alexandre Zeitlin came to New York City in 1915 and became noted for his statuettes and portrait busts before his death in the 1940s. Could this be the artist behind this mostly forgotten monument to dozens of young transit workers cut down by war?

[Thanks to Jim S. for the photos and alerting me to this hiding-in-plain-sight memorial]

Take a time-traveling tour along Riverside Drive with Ephemeral New York!

I’m excited to let everyone know that Ephemeral New York has scheduled the first Riverside Drive Mansions and Monuments walking tour of the year! The date is Sunday, April 30, from 1-3 p.m.

The tour starts on Riverside Drive at 83rd Street and goes to 108th Street. In between, we’ll stroll the gentle curves of the Drive and delve into the history of this beautiful avenue—from its 18th century roots in the rural Manhattan enclave known as Bloomingdale to its Gilded Age heyday, when Riverside Drive rivaled Fifth Avenue as the city’s millionaire colony.

On what promises to be a warm spring Sunday, we’ll look at the incredible mansions that remain on Riverside Drive, the spectacular houses lost to history, the families and characters who once resided here, and the stories told by the glorious monuments on the Drive.

For the past two years, I’ve led this Riverside Drive tour, in conjunction with the New York Adventure Club. The tour is relaxing, information-packed, and lots of fun—a perfect way to experience a piece of New York City and enjoy lovely spring weather.

I hope to schedule more tour dates through the spring and summer. Join us for the inaugural tour of the season by signing up here!

[Postcard images: NYPL Digital Collections]

All that remains of a legendary Astor Place department store few New Yorkers remember

The letters are large and elegant, but they’re easy to miss—set against an off-white facade above a rusty garage door on Lafayette Street.

“Wanamaker,” the letters read. You’re forgiven if the name doesn’t ring a bell. This faint signage is just about all that remains of Wanamaker’s, a top department store that arrived in New York City in 1896 and became a leading retailer through the mid-1950s.

The story of Wanamaker’s echoes the story of so many of Gotham’s legendary dry goods emporiums, as they used to be known. These highly competitive stores made huge profits thanks to the riches of the Gilded Age and the introduction of modern consumerism.

Except Wanamaker’s got its start in Philadelphia, where namesake John Wanamaker opened his first men’s clothing shop in 1861. By the end of the century, Wanamaker began branching out into other cities as well as New York.

Wanamaker’s first occupied the former A.T. Stewart store on Broadway between 9th and 10th Streets (above, in 1901), then expanded its footprint by building a much larger store at 770 Broadway, between Eighth and Ninth Streets, in the early 1900s. A skybridge reportedly connected the two structures.

“Clad mostly in terra cotta, this grand shopping palace contained thirty-two acres of retail space, an auditorium with 1,300 seats, and a large restaurant to round out the shopping experience,” states Village Preservation’s Off the Grid blog. 

Unlike other major New York City department stores, Wanamaker’s never moved to Midtown. The store stuck it out on Astor Place until shutting its doors in the mid-1950s. A fire then consumed the empty older building. An apartment residence called Stewart House sits today.

The Wanamaker sign I found isn’t on the 770 Broadway building; you can view it on the Lafayette Street side of 730 Broadway, where the company had a warehouse, according to a 1982 New York Times article.

The only other remnant of this retail giant is on New York City maps—Ninth Street between Broadway and Lafayette is still called Wanamaker Place.

[Second image: NYPL Digital Collections; third image: NYPL Digital Collections]

A public bathhouse in Brooklyn built by the architect who designed the Lincoln Memorial

It’s hard to imagine today, when newer public buildings tend to be blocky and uninspiring—if not truly ugly.

But at the turn of the 20th century, schools, courthouses, parks, and other public structures were designed with a sense of architectural grandeur and vision. Examples of this “City Beautiful” movement, born in the early 1890s and adopted by cities across the country, are all over New York, from the Manhattan Municipal Building to Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.

Even public bathhouses were constructed with beauty in mind. You’ve probably spotted surviving bathhouses around the city, converted into new use and hiding among the cityscape.

Many of them went up in the early 1900s to give tenement dwellers who lacked bathrooms or access to pools a place to cool off and bathe—for basic hygiene purposes and to control the spread of disease.

Though it didn’t open until 1923 (on a corner space once occupied by an armory), one of the loveliest bathhouses intended for the “great unwashed” that had 66 showers and an enormous pool as its centerpiece still exists at the corner of Bedford and Metropolitan Avenues in Williamsburg.

True to the era of uplifting public buildings, this bathhouse wasn’t designed by just any old architect. The creative visionary behind its Neoclassical style was Henry Bacon, who also designed the Lincoln Memorial (below) in Washington, DC—which also takes its cues from City Beautiful philosophy.

The opening of the Municipal Public Baths, as the Brooklyn Eagle called the building, certainly wasn’t a national event like the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial a year earlier in 1922. It was just a community bathhouse for poorer people.

But for residents of Williamsburg—where the population had doubled since the Williamsburg Bridge went up—it was a day to celebrate. Three thousand people showed up on the front steps on the day it opened. Accompanied by a marching band, Brooklyn dignitaries like Borough President Edward Riegelmann roused the crowd with speeches.

“This bath will be opened 365 days of the year, and there will be mixed swimming here,” he told the crowd, per the Brooklyn Eagle on June 5, 1923, opening day. “By this I mean there will be swimming by the men and women. My one ambition now is to get enough money with which to put up six more similar bathhouses.”

Like Manhattan, Brooklyn already had several public bathhouses in its tenement neighborhoods. I’m not sure any more were built as Riegelmann pledged, and the era of public bathhouses was ending anyway. “By 1935, the structure was turned over to the Department of Parks to operate as a recreational facility,” according to NYC Parks.

Use of the pool declined through the decades, but a 1997 reconstruction brought it back to its prewar beauty—just in time for a population boom in the neighborhood. It’s now known as the Metropolitan Recreation Center. A handsome plaque on the wall memorializes its beginnings.

Considering that the same architect is responsible for both the bathhouse and the Lincoln memorial, you’d think the two would be more similar. I think the similarity shows in each structure’s gracefulness and accessibility. A century later, with the City Beautiful movement long passed, each remains inviting and inspiring.

[Second image: NYPL Digital Collections; third image: National Park Service; fourth image: Brooklyn Daily Eagle 1921]

An ironworker leaves his mark on a West Village street

His name was John P. Weldon. Since 1911 he occupied space at 34 and 38 Stone Street, where he operated an ironworks, making things out of metal and doing some repair work, as he told a courtroom in the 1910s when asked to testify in a trial. He described the premises as a “workshop.”

His father was an immigrant from Ireland, who arrived in New York City in the mid-1800s and founded the Weldon ironworks, according to research from Walter Grutchfield. Exactly when he was born and when he died isn’t clear, and how he spent his life outside of his ironworks business is also unknown.

But at some point in his life he created this manhole cover, found in the West Village on West 13th Street near the Whitney Museum. Simple yet elegant, it’s decorated with circles of raised squares (to keep horses, cars, and people from skidding). In the middle is one single star.

For at least a century, I’d guess, this manhole cover has been in place—an otherwise anonymous worker’s mark on the cityscape. Was he proud of his work, and therefore made sure his name was included? Perhaps he wanted to be remembered by future generations of New Yorkers.

Another John P. Weldon manhole cover exists in New York City, though the exact neighborhood remains in question.

The unusual beauty of a 1908 row house “oasis of tranquility” in the Bronx

When you think of the Bronx, districts of tidy single-family attached row houses probably don’t come to mind. And that makes sense, considering the late start this northernmost borough got in terms of urban development.

The Bronx still had a sizable number of rural areas (and large estates owned by the wealthy) within its borders when it was annexed to New York City in stages from 1872 to 1895. The borough was too spread out, and had too few people, to build the kinds of brownstone and townhouse rows that urbanized Manhattan and Brooklyn throughout the 19th century.

But after a population boom in the early 1900s, as well as the opening of the New York City subway, row house development did come to some parts of the Bronx—including Hunts Point, when 42 two-story dwellings lining the north and south sides of Manida Street hit the market.

Instead of the brownstone or limestone homes typical of large parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the row houses along this stretch of the newly developed South Bronx are semi-detached dwellings in the Renaissance Revival or Flemish Revival style with bow fronts, stepped parapets, and other whimsical architectural touches.

These houses, situated between Garrison and Lafayette Avenues, make up the Manida Street Historic District. Made official in 2020, the new historic district joins others in the Bronx like the Bertine Block in Mott Haven and a section of Morris Avenue near the Grand Concourse.

[Above, 839 and 841 Manida Street today; below, the two houses in 1939-1941]

“On both sides of Manida Street, the two-story and basement, semi-detached buildings feature mirror-image facades with rounded projecting bays, low stone stoops, simple cornices with steeply pitched parapets above, and ornamentation concentrated around the doors and windows,” states the Landmarks Preservation Commission Report.

Designed by architects James F. Meehan and Daube & Kreymborg in 1908-1909, the row houses were built on speculation and advertised to potential buyers in a 1909 ad that ran in the New York Times, per the LPC report.

“These two-family houses are situated in one of the prettiest and most accessible areas of the Bronx,” the ad read. “They are in the heart of a district built up with some of the finest homes in the greater city.”

Who decided to buy one of these two-family row houses, which included the appealing option of renting one half of the house to another family and making back a little cash?

The first crop of owners were mostly immigrants, primarily Russian Jews, according to the LPC report. “In addition, there were several German households along the block, with a few Irish and Italian residents as well,” the report added.

Like much of the rest of the Bronx, Manida Street maintained its middle-class status as the 20th century continued. Residents worked as “tailors, teachers, diamond dealers, and leather merchants,” states the report. Some worked at the nearby American Bank Note Company Printing Plant.

Demographics changed as the century continued, of course. While the Bronx’s fortunes turned, the row houses on Manida Street and the sense of a middle-class island in Hunts Point remained intact.

“In the 1970s, when the Hunts Point section of the Bronx became associated with drugs, crime, and prostitution, a group of bow-front row houses in the 800 block of Manida Street remained an oasis of tranquillity,” wrote the New York Times in 2010.

These days, the South Bronx is a place of redevelopment, and the Manida Street row houses are part of a protected historic district. Though many of the houses reflect the bad old days of the area—with bars over bay windows, metal fences, and ornamentation on the facades missing—there’s an unusual harmony and beauty to the quiet block.

Will it be the next Park Slope? Probably not—it’s just one slender street. But never say never.

[Third photo: NYC Department of Records and Information Services]

A midcentury artist captures the anonymity of the subway in 5 paintings

Bernard Gussow was born in Russia in 1881. But by 1900 he’d made it to the Lower East Side, where he was described as an “East Side artist” in a New York Times article about paintings he displayed at an art show at the Educational Alliance settlement house on East Broadway.

[“Subway Steps”]

Gussow would get his name in newspapers many times, mostly in the teens, 20s, and 30s. Usually grouped with other artists (like John Sloan) of his era, this Art Students League attendee would be described as “interpreting the spirit of East Side life.”

[“Crowded Subway Car”]

After the 1930s, his mentions in the papers drop precipitously. His life ended in 1957; additional biographical information on this midcentury painter is scant.

But his relative anonymity as a New York City artist seems strangely appropriate considering the anonymity of the people he captured in a series of subway images, all of which look to be from the 1930s and 1940s.

[“Seventh Avenue Local”]

Remember the subway? If you’re one of the millions of New Yorkers who haven’t returned underground since the pandemic, Gussow’s images will remind you of what riding the subway has always felt like—a solitary experience amid dozens of other people trudging up and down staircases and carving out breathing room on a packed train car.

[“Grand Central Station”]

I found one reference to a collection of subway images by Gussow in a 1934 newspaper piece. I don’t know if they include any of the ones here, which I find to be haunting in their anonymity and human isolation.

There appears to be only a few moments of fleeting interaction between people: a man seems to give the side-eye to a woman pressed against his coat in the second image; in the third, a woman seated on the train stares up at the man standing over her.

[“The Stairwell”]

“‘Subway Passages’ by Bernard Gussow is an extraordinarily vivid impression of being in a subway. The hurrying hordes of people, impersonal, detached, more like animals than human beings, have been adequately transcribed by the artist with the depiction of only 32 figures,” the article, from the Elmira Star Gazette, states.

The giant rock that helped end a bitter colonial-era dispute between Brooklyn and Queens

In some locations, the boundary line between Brooklyn and Queens is simple.

To the north, Newtown Creek separates Brooklyn’s Greenpoint from Queens’ Long Island City. At the southern end, Jamaica Bay serves as a divider. But the border between the two boroughs can get a little murky through the neighborhoods in between.

Colonial-era settlers found the boundary line confusing as well—so much so that a bitter battle to define the borders in the 17th and 18th centuries finally ended in 1769 thanks in part to a massive boulder appropriately named Arbitration Rock.

The boundary dispute began soon after the founding of two towns of farms and small houses in the 17th century, one settled by the Dutch and the other by English Puritans.

The Dutch town of Bushwick (above) formed in what would soon be called Kings County. Next to Bushwick was Newtown, the English town, soon to be part of the newly named Queens County.

For the next century, the residents of Bushwick and Newtown maintained a beef about the two towns’ border. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle recalled in 1916 that “sometimes the boundary line swung far into the depths of Newtown, sometimes it oscillated into the very midst of Bushwick.”

This was no gentlemanly dispute. In 1880, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote that the “boundary dispute between Bushwick and Newtown rose to a white heat, and resulted in the destruction of a great deal of property by fire and ax, on either side.”

The fight went to the highest levels of government, with comical results. Lord Cornbury, the corrupt governor of New York in the early 18th century, decided that the 1,200 acres between the disputed borders belonged to neither town but to himself, the 1916 Eagle article reported. (Cornbury was recalled back to England in 1709.)

Finally, seven years before the start of the Revolutionary War, the battle ended when a commission appointed by British leaders drew a border based on local creeks, ponds, hills, and a rock called Arbitration Rock (above), wrote Marc Ferris in a 2002 Newsday article.

With the dispute settled, Arbitration Rock became less important in the ensuing decades, especially after Brooklyn and Queens became part of the City of New York in 1898. In 1930, it was buried below Onderdonk Avenue during road reconstruction near the once-disputed border, according to a 2015 article in the Ridgewood Times, via qns.com.

“Toward the end of the 20th century, historians’ interest in the rock’s locations were piqued, and after a seven-year hunt, the boulder was located and unearthed from Onderdonk Avenue,” per the Ridgewood Times article.

Where is Arbitration Rock now? This historic boulder can be found surrounded by a white picket fence (below) on the grounds of The Vander Ende-Onderdonk House, a circa-1710 fieldstone treasure (above) that’s one of New York City’s oldest dwellings. The house is an excellent example of the kind of farmhouse one would encounter in rural Brooklyn and Queens in the 18th century.

The Vander Ende-Onderdonk House sits just inside the Queens border in Ridgewood—the neighborhood formerly known as Newtown. Considering how fraught the border fight was, I’m surprised the rock wasn’t split in half, with each borough getting a piece!

[Top image: 1750 map, NYPL Digital Collections; second image: Brooklyn Museum; third image: Eventbrite/Vander Ende-Onderdonk House]

Taking a leisurely drive in the peaceful, pastoral Central Park of 1900

By taking a drive, we’re not talking about automobiles. In 1900, the year this postcard dates back to, “driving” still meant driving a horse-pulled carriage…as these well-dressed and probably upper-crust New Yorkers demonstrate.

At the turn of the last century, Central Park still more closely resembled the pastoral retreat Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux envisioned when they completed the park in the early 1860s. Instead of ballfields and playgrounds, the park was a place of rolling hills, recreated nature, and drives.

Is that the Museum of Natural History in the background? It looks lonely out there on Central Park West, which had yet to become the beautiful avenue of elegant apartment houses as we know it today.

[Museum of the City of New York: X2011.34.1513]

Two mystery gargoyles on a West 29th Street building

One of the small pleasures of walking around New York City is noticing all the stone and terra cotta figures looking down at you from Gothic-style loft buildings.

Sometimes scary, often cheeky, these grotesques and gargoyles pose a mystery: who decided to add them to the building, and what’s their significance?

I’m asking this question specifically about the two figures carved into Two West 29th Street, a 16-story building opened in 1928 just west of Fifth Avenue.

Under a banner of carved grape vines, each gargoyle is telling us something. On the right, I see an older woman crouched on her feet clutching something precious—perhaps a bag of money. No wonder she has a greedy, self-satisfied expression.

The man on the left, however, puzzles me. In his right hand, he might be holding some kind of tool, and it looks like his left-hand fingers are keeping something steady. Or he might be pointing to what’s in his hand with his index finger, directing our eyes to letters or numbers.

One way to solve the mystery of these two is to do a little research on the building and find out if it was the headquarters of a specific type of business. But the backstory of this early 20th century loft structure across the street from the Little Church Around the Corner isn’t clear.

Meanwhile, on the other end of West 29th Street, two stone characters outside the entrance of a former fur manufacturer aren’t shy about what they’re doing: one is feeding a squirrel, the other examining a pelt.