Esther Crain's Blog, page 4

An elegy for an 1850s mansion with no place in the rapidly urbanizing Upper West Side

The article ran in the New York Times on February 19, 1911. “Another Landmark Passing” read the wistful headline on the lower left side of the front page.

“The rapid passing away of New York’s famous landmarks was illustrated recently by the sale of the old Rudd mansion on the northeast corner of Riverside Drive and 114th Street.”

For context, the Times and other city newspapers had been running fairly frequent articles on the fast-paced development transforming what had been a country-like, sparsely populated part of the city known as Bloomingdale into the urbanizing Upper West Side.

Farmhouses, country estates, and roadside taverns that served as reminders of the rural character of 18th and 19th century Bloomingdale were going down in the early 1900s, replaced by the stately prewar apartment houses that line West End Avenue and Riverside Drive today.

The Rudd mansion (above, in an 1880s drawing), which the Times reported was built in 1854, was one of those nostalgia-inducing landmarks that seemed to have wider significance than just another old house.

The Corinthian-columned mansion with its entrance fronting stylish Riverside Drive was built by Andrew Carrigan, an Irish-born grocer and provisions dealer who made his fortune after arriving in America in the 1820s, according to Village Preservation’s Off the Grid blog.

After retiring in his 50s, Carrigan (at left) devoted the rest of his life to philanthropy, specifically in helping immigrants get a foothold in New York.

He founded Emigrant Savings Bank in 1850, and he worked to provide better safeguards at Castle Clinton so newcomers didn’t fall prey to swindlers.

Now his mansion, last occupied by members of the Rudd family, had a date with the wrecking ball.

“In a few months this fine old type of a comfortable colonial dwelling, with its artistic columns forming a semi-circular entrance, will give way to extensive building operations for another $1,000,000 apartment house similar in character to the large number that have been erected throughout the Upper West Side,” bemoaned the Times.

The Rudd mansion was erected, “in the days when Bloomingdale Road was the only thoroughfare on the West Side from the lower part of the city,” wrote the Times.

“It was lined by many handsome country homes of wealthy New Yorkers, but the rapid improvements of late years have placed them in the category of old-time reminiscences.”

As the Times predicted, the Rudd mansion met its fate later that year. In its place stands the Hamilton, at 420 Riverside Drive—a lovely building for sure, but with none of the uniqueness of that old family mansion with Corinthian columns!

Discover the stories behind Riverside Drive’s unique mansions and the Drive’s development into one of New York’s most beautiful streets! Join Ephemeral New York on a Gilded Age-themed walking tour of the Drive from 83rd to 107th Streets on Sunday, July 20 or Sunday, July 27. Click the dates to sign up.

[Top image: New York Historical; second image: Village Preservation/Off the Grid; third image: MCNY 39.371.16; fourth image: Harlem World]

The last remnants of a legendary Brooklyn department store born in the Gilded Age

You’ll notice them in Brooklyn’s Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station as you walk through the long passageway leading to the exits.

Interspersed between the white subway tiled walls are a series of dark blue and yellow panels. The panels have kind of a restrained, Art Deco style to them, with five stars and the letter L in a circle in the center.

This downtown Brooklyn stop is for the A, C, and G trains, not the L. So what’s with the letter, and why are these panels in this otherwise ordinary station?

The Ls stand for Loeser—as in Frederick Loeser & Co., the official name of what was once Brooklyn’s largest and most fabled Fulton Street department store (above, in 1910).

Launched as a trimmings shop in 1860 and co-owned by German immigrant Frederick Loeser, the store everyone eventually called Loeser’s transitioned into a full-on dry goods emporium a decade later.

Loeser’s timing was impeccable. In the later decades of the Gilded Age, the rise of consumerism and increased factory production created a mass market of ready-made fashions and home goods for the well-to-do Brooklynites populating the city’s new brownstone neighborhoods.

Just as legendary dry goods emporiums like Lord & Taylor, Arnold Constable, and B. Altman’s sprang up along Manhattan’s Ladies Mile shopping district between Broadway and Sixth Avenue and 14th Street to 23rd Street, Brooklyn’s version of a premier shopping enclave was centered on Fulton Street.

Here, enormous stores like Abraham & Straus, along with smaller millinery shops, shoe boutiques, and specialty concerns, dazzled shoppers.

As a posh importer, retailer, and maker of mostly women’s fashion and accessories, Loeser’s topped them all. When the business moved into its final location in March 1887, the new store at 484 Fulton—with electric lights, telephones, and elevators—was eagerly covered by newspapers.

The first floor of the five-story building held departments containing “silks, velvets, dress goods, white goods, embroideries, laces, fancy goods, gentlemen’s furnishing goods, gloves, hosiery, ladies’ merino underwear, handkerchiefs, collars, cuffs, jewelry, toilet sets, leather goods, parasols, ribbons, stationery, and perfumery,” wrote the Brooklyn Citizen.

The paper gushed about the large “show windows” on the Fulton Street side and noted that thanks to a more modern system, “no cash boys will be needed,” a reference to the messengers who ferried payments between customers and clerks in 19th century retail establishments.

Loeser’s reigned in downtown Brooklyn, putting up an extension building on Fulton Street and Elm Place in 1899 (third photo), states Suzanne Spellen at Brownstoner. But behind the scenes, the business was changing hands. Frederick Loeser died in 1903, and a partner took over the store.

The panels in the subway stop likely went up in the late 1930s, shortly after the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station opened and Loeser’s built a passageway leading into the store directly through the station.

By the 1940s, Loeser’s was sold to an investment syndicate. Sixty years after Frederick Loeser began his retail empire, his flagship store was in trouble. In the postwar era, families were moving out of Brooklyn, and demographic change led to financial difficulties.

In 1952, another Brooklyn department store baron, A.I. Namm, bought Loeser’s trademark and operated under the name Namm Loeser. Five years later, Namm Loeser closed its doors for good. In the ensuing decades, other department stores on Fulton Street would follow.

And the Loeser’s Gilded Age building? Incredibly, it still stands, remodeled and stripped of its original beauty and detail.

Meanwhile, the extension constructed in 1899 is swathed in construction netting and scaffolding. But if you squint you can still see the letter L inside the terra cotta ornamentation that decorates the facade (above).

These terra cotta Ls make a fitting counterpart to the subway panel Ls—one from the Gilded Age, the other just before World War II, bookending the golden era of department stores in New York City.

[Second image: MCNY, X2011.34.1934; third image: New York Historical; fourth image: Brooklyn Citizen; fifth image: Brooklyn Eagle]

A luminous Coney Island beach and sky you’ve never seen before

What would a visitor to the Coney Island of 1870 find at this seaside resort, just a decade before hordes of New Yorkers discovered its summertime pleasures and nicknamed it Sodom by the Sea?

A handful of pavilions and hotels catering to middle-class New Yorkers and reached mostly by steamship or stagecoach, for starters.

Close to the beach, vacationers would have encountered “refreshment saloons” for ice cream, plus pie wagons like the one run by a vendor named Charles Feltman—who started selling sausages wrapped in bread he called hot dogs, creating an iconic Coney beach eat.

But there’s something else visitors would see: a luminous sky and white sandy beach, unspoiled by the crowds, mega-hotels, amusement parks, and sideshow attractions that would arrive in the 1870s and 1880s.

The beach scene above, “Summer Promenade,” depicts this long-gone Coney Island at the dawn of the Gilded Age. (Click into it to see it up close in detail.)

Painter Francis Augustus Silva captured the light and sprawling beauty of a sparsely populated beach, with elegantly dressed ladies shaded by parasols as they wade ankle-deep into the ocean.

Silva is a painter few people would know of today. But in the late 19th century, this New York City native and former sign painter established himself as an artist who “focused his attention on reductive, horizontal compositions featuring quiet waterways and shorelines, seeking to evoke the underlying poetry of nature by means of a heightened realist style and a nuanced handling of light and atmosphere,” states Hirschl & Adler Galleries.

Silva was a member of the Hudson River School and was considered a Luminous painter, a style that uses slight gradations of light to draw out the natural world.

The second image in this post, “Early Moonrise, Coney Island” reveals the lustrous, iridescent colors of the end of a beach day, plus wood posts and what looks like rope cordoning off the surf.

It could be the Coney of 2025, if you imagined away the beachgoers, lifeguard stations, and piers jutting into the ocean today.

[First image: Questroyal Fine Art LLC; second image: Wikipedia; third image: Sotheby’s]

Delivering barrels of ice cream by horse and wagon in Central Park

The history of New York City’s street corner ice cream vendors goes back at least to the late 19th century, when a man with a pushcart would set himself up and wait for the kids to crowd around.

The driver of this wagon in an 1895 photo isn’t exactly the ice cream man. He’s the ice cream delivery man, a worker who appears to be bringing a haphazard load of barrels of this summertime sweet treat to an unknown location in the city via a Central Park transverse road.

His wagon reads “Kaufold’s Ice Cream.” According to a 1905 Sun article, Kaufold’s was located at 221 East Broadway. A Louis Kaufold, of 202 Clinton Street, is listed in a 1902 city directory under Ice Cream.

The photo caption, from the Museum of the City of New York, notes that “Kaufold’s was a favorite ice cream resort of the 1890s.”

After the early 1900s, the company seemed to have disappeared, replaced by a long list of brands and vendors satisfying New York’s long and deep need for ice cream—from Good Humor to Schrafft’s to Carvel, and of course, everyone’s favorite sing-songy truck, Mister Softee.

[Photo: MCNY, X2010.11.1488]

Was there ever a deli below this neon ghost delicatessen sign on West Fourth Street?

Coming across a ghost sign on a New York City street always sparks curiosity.

You know ghost signs—any kind of signage above a store entrance or affixed to the side of a building marking a business that no longer exists in that space.

But what a treat when the ghost sign is a rare vertical piece of gorgeous neon! Over the years I’d seen this double-sided delicatessen sign many times on the red-brick nexus where Jane and West Fourth Streets collide with Eighth Avenue.

Recently I walked past it and noticed an Italian restaurant has taken over the storefront below the sign. Come to think of it, I can’t recall an actual deli occupying the store space, which on Google maps corresponds to 40 Eighth Avenue.

A search through various photo archives didn’t turn up any evidence. But it did show that back in the 1940s, a similar vertical sign existed where the delicatessen sign hangs today.

This one was for the hardware store at 40 Eighth Avenue at the time. “Paints” nicely sums up the store’s main selling point.

As for the corner right now, there’s actually another neon sign with deep historical cred. That’s the one attached to the Corner Bistro, across the street at 331 West Fourth Street.

I don’t know how old the neon sign is, but the Bistro’s history as a saloon goes all the way back to 1875.

[Third image: NYPL Digital Collections]

Inside a glorious West Side church built with stones salvaged from 19th century city landmarks

When Father Isaac Hecker began planning a new Catholic church on Columbus Avenue and 60th Street, he imagined a “noble basilica” that would reflect “the artistic ideals of the past, with the American genius of his day,” states the website of that church, St. Paul the Apostle.

Born to German immigrant parents in 1819 and raised Methodist, Father Hecker (below) didn’t fit the typical description of a New York Catholic priest. In his youth he worked as a delivery boy at the bakery founded by his older brothers, which soon became the Hecker Flour Company.

After decades of study, travel, and reflection concerning his true purpose in life, he converted to Catholicism and was ordained into the priesthood in 1849.

He went on to found the Paulist Fathers, the first community of Catholic priests in the U.S.—known as an inclusive, evangelizing community that also took on the social issues of the day.

In the 1860s, Father Hecker and the Paulist Fathers had a small church they eventually outgrew on the site where the new church would be built.

Working with architect Jeremiah O’Rourke, Father Hecker shared his vision of a monumental edifice inspired by the 4th and 5th century Christian basilicas in Ravenna, Italy. He also drew inspiration from 13th century Gothic cathedrals in France and England.

The cornerstone was laid in 1876, just as the Ninth Avenue Elevated spurred a population boom in this developing West Side neighborhood (above).

Nine years later, the new Church of St. Paul the Apostle officially opened—but this rough and austere “spiritual fortress,” as one newspaper put it, was far from complete.

As the sanctuary filled with parishioners each week, Father Hecker—who would pass away from leukemia in 1888—put his visionary plans for the interior in place.

He called upon John LaFarge to craft beautiful stained-glass windows, Frederick MacMonnies to create gilded bronzes of angels, and Stanford White to design the gold and onyx high alter. All three artists finished their work by the close of the century.

Meanwhile, the exterior of St. Paul’s was also getting its finishing touches. For this, Father Hecker and his architectural overseers turned not to artistic geniuses but to salvage.

Though recycled materials from demolished structures likely helped lower costs, “the idea of transforming materials with prosaic origins into ones with a divine purpose parallels the congregation’s reputation for attracting converts to Catholicism,” states the 2013 Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report.

Where did the salvage come from? The Croton Aqueduct was one source—specifically from a dismantled part of a stone embankment that once carried Croton water from Harlem through an Upper West Side area called Clendening Valley to the receiving reservoir in Central Park.

Father Hecker and his architectural team actually acquired the Croton stonework in the mid-1870s and used the small, rough-cut pieces in a staggering pattern in the facade.

In 1899, the distributing reservoir at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue was decommissioned. St. Paul’s took stones from the demolished reservoir and used them to add several feet to the church’s two front towers, per the LPC Report.

Perhaps the most unusual example of architectural recycling was the salvaging of stone from a fabled Eighth Avenue and 23rd Street theater to build the staircases at the front of the church facing Columbus Avenue.

Booth’s Theater (at right), a grand and flamboyant palace constructed by actor Edwin Booth in 1869, closed its doors in 1883; the hulking structure was to be converted into a department store.

“As part of the renovation, some of the theater’s stonework was apparently removed by the contractor and sold to the church,” states the LPC report.

Like most churches, St. Paul the Apostle has open hours when visitors can wander through.

Take a walk through this art museum of a church, and as you gaze at the facade and ascend the staircases, know that you’re experiencing remnants of 19th century Gotham that could have easily been destroyed rather than recycled into the modern cityscape.

As for Father Hecker, he’s currently a candidate for canonization.

[Second image: Busted Halo; third image: Church of St. Paul the Apostle; fourth image: LOC]

A simple way New Yorkers kept apartments cool during summer days before air conditioning

How did New Yorkers get through sweltering summer days before the invention and widespread use of air conditioning? Well, a lot of it depended on your income bracket.

If you were wealthy, you likely waited out the summer at a seaside resort like Newport or on a country estate cooled by mountains or river breezes.

Middle-class residents could head to less pricey vacation sites like Brighton Beach, with its spacious ocean-fronting hotels, or Coney Island for day trips by railroad or ferry.

If escaping the sticky city wasn’t an option, you might have relied on canvas awnings to cover your windows—keeping the hot sun out and making room temperatures a little more bearable.

Cheap, easy, and requiring no energy to use, canvas awnings were one answer to keeping cool, whether you lived in a posh rowhouse or lowly brownstone (like these, the top image of a row of homes on West 89th Street in 1915 and the second image of a tenement in Bushwick).

They might not have been very attractive, but could canvas awnings be worse aesthetically than all the window AC units hanging off New York City buildings today?

[Top photo: NYPL Digital Collections; second photo: New-York Historical]

Step into this West 12th Street courtyard oasis behind a row of 1840s residences

Shrouded in the 19th century West Village streetscape are backyard gardens, former carriage houses, and residential walkups constructed in the pre-Civil War days when building lot regulations weren’t always enforced.

Usually these private spaces are walled off or locked behind fences. But on a recent walk through the Village, I noticed the wrought iron gate to the courtyard at 291 1/2 West 12th Street was open, beckoning me in.

This slender triangle of a courtyard, formed by the coming together of four buildings dating back to the 1840s, would be a lovely place at any time of the year. But on a late June evening, with the lush gardens and bluestone path illuminated by strings of light, it’s magical.

The cheerful and whimsical space, complete with summary blooms on a wood deck and a red brick wall crawling with ivy, comes almost to a point at two red doors, one at ground level and the other up a small staircase.

Presumably, some lucky New Yorkers live behind these red doors. They appear to be the back doors for two adjacent buildings that have addresses around the corner at 24 and 26 Eighth Avenue.

The rear of a neighboring building on the corner of Eighth Avenue and West 12th Street, No. 22 Eighth Avenue, forms a sliver of the courtyard but with doorway to the inside. The fourth building with the long ivy wall, also with no doorway, is at 291 West 12th Street next door.

It’s the kind of awkward, leftover space too small to build on that’s often found in the Village, with its twisty streets that refuse to conform to any kind of street grid.

Once an actual sparsely populated village miles from the main city, the Village underwent rapid urbanization after yellow-fever outbreaks in the late 18th and early 19th century sent residents fleeing to the countryside.

All four of the buildings that form the courtyard date back to the Village’s growth era in the first half of the 19th century. The walkups at 22 and 24 Eighth Avenue, were constructed by the same builder in 1840, according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s report on the Greenwich Village Historic District.

The third building, trapezoid-shaped 26 Eighth Avenue, is the product of another developer. The fourth building, at 291 West 12th Street, was put up by another builder in 1848, states the LPC report.

Presumably the courtyard has existed since the four abutting buildings went up, though it doesn’t seem to be noted in any historical record or archive.

The 1940s photo (fourth image, above) of West 12th Street reveals a slender opening where the courtyard is today, with a gated fence blocking passage. Could it be the same fence there now, unrecognizable without the greenery?

At some point in time after the photo was taken, a creative resident must have a vision—turning the courtyard into a charming oasis that feels far removed from the sidewalk action.

The courtyard has a name: Grenville Court. You won’t find it on any street map. But that makes this tiny space feel like even more of a secret.

[Fourth photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

The outline of an early 19th century church can be seen at this Greenwich Village movie theater

Before it was renamed the IFC Center two decades ago, the Waverly Theater had been a church of cinema since 1937.

An icon of Greenwich Village on Sixth Avenue and West Third Street, the Waverly’s old-school marquee displayed movie titles from postwar Di Sica and Fellini films to 1970s cult classics like The Rocky Horror Picture Show (below, in an undated photo)

But a century earlier, the theater was an actual church. One of the tipoffs that the building is a survivor of antebellum New York City is the peaked roof, which somehow wasn’t flattened through two centuries and several renovations.

Exactly when the church was constructed is something of a mystery, as different sources offer varying dates. But it may date back to 1807 when it started out as a Dutch Reformed Church, according to a 2003 New York Times article.

Other sources place its debut in the 1830s. During this decade, it was occupied by the Third Universalist Society, a newly formed congregation. The Society’s new church was located in the then-outlying district of the city known as Greenwich Village, recalled a writer in a 1926 edition of The Christian Leader.

Greenwich Village was growing in population in the 1830s, but it still retained the feel of a country outpost rather than the urbanized neighborhood it was destined to be.

Third Street was still known as Amity Street, for example, and a few blocks north, Jefferson Market was an actual market of low-slung merchant stalls with a wooden fire tower in the center.

As Greenwich Village filled up and became subsumed by the city, other congregations took ownership of the church. St. Jude’s Episcopal Free Church held services there in the 1840s.

Later, the Union Reformed Church moved in, giving the building a renovation in 1872 complete with refreshed upholstery, ceiling frescos, and stained glass windows.

In 1893 the building ceased to be a church. It now served as the home base of J & R Lamb Studios, a decorative arts business that specialized in stained glass. Another renovation, from house of worship to artistic studio, commenced. (A 20th century sketch of the studios with the Sixth Avenue Elevated now overhead, below)

“Its 1893 alteration turned the facade into a billboard for the firm’s offerings, but the church’s Gothic style windows and gabled roof were left intact,” reported David W. Dunlap in a 2005 New York Times story.

After Lamb Studios left in the 1930s, the Waverly Theater was born. (Below photo in 1936, before its transformation.) The building underwent yet another redesign, this time by architect Harrison Wiseman, “who gave it an Art Deco flair but could not shake that gabled rooftop,” wrote Dunlap. Wiseman also removed the ecclesiastical windows in favor of a mostly windowless facade.

That distinctive 19th century roofline made it through the theater’s 2005 transformation into the IFC Center, which continues the Waverly’s tradition of featuring international and under-the-radar cinema.

Many of New York’s 19th and early 20th century houses of worship have found new uses as congregations dwindled: as apartment houses, private homes, community centers, even a dance club. But this is the first church-turned-movie theater that I know of.

The transformation from church to movie house might seem like quite a leap. But in a way, churches and theaters share a similar mission. Churches have congregations in pews; theaters put audiences in upholstered seats. Churches use pulpits; theaters, stages.

Both spaces are designed for inspiration and reflection, and both help communicate ideas in sometimes astonishing language and visuals.

[Second image: Village Preservation; third image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; fourth image: LOC; fifth image: NYPL Digital Collections]

The strange and stunning renaissance-style villa that fronts a historic Bronx row house block

Not far from the Grand Concourse in the Morrisania neighborhood of the South Bronx is a blocklong stretch of harmonious early 20th century row houses.

These 28 Romanesque Revival dwellings—semi-attached two-family houses sporting bow fronts, dormers, gables, and stone trimmings—line both sides of the Avenue between East 165th and East 166th Streets.

Built as a cohesive group in 1901 by developer Ernest Wenigmann, the homes that make up what’s now the Clay Avenue Historic District resemble other row houses built in the Bronx at the time—like these on Manida Street in Hunts Point. (Perhaps semi-attached Romanesque row houses are to the Bronx what brownstones are to Brooklyn and Manhattan?)

Each house is a charming example of Gilded Age Bronx development, with the passing of the decades giving them more individual character and flavor. They’re not symmetrical museum pieces but authentic homes weathered by time.

But there’s another very different kind of house included in this historic district that’s the real stunner: the mysterious Renaissance-style mini-mansion at the corner of Clay Avenue and East 165th Street.

With its red brick facade, stone lintels, and two bay windows, it has a few features in common with its neighbors down the avenue. But its resemblance ends there.

While the row houses were the product of one architect creating houses for middle class families—each house has two bedrooms and a servant’s room, a typical setup at the time—the villa at 381 East 165th Street was designed by another architect for wealthy hardware merchant Francis Keil.

Born in Austria in 1841, Keil immigrated to America in 1867. By 1900 he “was a hardware manufacturer and senior partner in the firm of Francis Keil & Son,” states the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report on the Clay Avenue Historic District.

The Keils’ factory, which produced locks you can now buy on eBay, stood “along the railroad tracks at East 163rd Street east of Brook Avenue, just a few minutes walk from Clay Avenue,” per the LPC report.

Keil apparently wanted a prestigious house close to his business. He was already living in one of the Clay Avenue row houses in a household that consisted of his wife and sister. In 1905, Wenigmann sold Keil the land on this corner to build his own single-family dream dwelling.

A year later, Keil and his family moved in to the completed house, along with a 16-year-old servant, also an immigrant from Austria.

What was life like in this unusual dwelling, with its stained glass windows and what looks like an attic above the cornice? The Keils seemed to be quiet people whose social comings and goings don’t appear in any newspaper archive.

What is known is that Keil “turned over his Bronx home to his employee F. A. Wurzbach and moved to the stately 101 Central Park West in Manhattan, where he died at home in 1942,” according to a 2017 account by Benjamin Feldman, a historian who founded the blog The New York Wanderer.

Wurzbach retired as general manager of the Keil business “and lived in the home until his death in 1950, according to his obituary in The New York Times,” wrote Feldman. (Below, the house in 1940)

Whoever occupied the villa in subsequent decades seemed to allow it to decay. At some point it was almost completely covered in ivy, as the above photo and this image from the Historic Districts Council both show.

The ivy no longer hides the facade of this unique holdout house, which last sold for $710,000, according to Compass. But much of it seems battered by the elements. As part of a historic district, my understanding is that it can’t be torn down unless it’s fallen into such disrepair that it becomes a safety concern.

Let’s hope that doesn’t happen. Like its neighbors in the Clay Avenue Historic District, the villa doesn’t need to be a pristine showpiece to help tell the story of the newly urbanized Bronx, as well as the immigrant hardware magnate who made this his home 120 years ago.

[Sixth image: Compass; seventh photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]