Esther Crain's Blog, page 43

The hidden beauty of these blocked-off fanlight windows in Chinatown

New York’s intact 19th century residences—especially the Federal-style, early 1800s row houses that still survive in Lower Manhattan, but also early tenement buildings—often have a fanlight window above the front door.

The name comes from the shape of the glass panes, which resemble a hand-held fan. It’s a design feature that allows light to flood a front room, which might be why it’s also referred to sometimes as a sunburst window.

The 1820s house at 105 Mercer Street offers an example of a fanlight window, in all its early 19th century beauty.

Whatever you want to call them, it’s disheartening to spot these windows over the entrances of some of Manhattan’s oldest tenements on densely packed residential streets…and see that the glass has been painted over or replaced by wood or another solid material, allowing no light to get through.

These blocked-off fanlight windows were found on a Chinatown block. I wouldn’t expect landlords to spend time and money scraping away paint from windows or replacing the glass when a building might have bigger issues to contend with. But what a shame these windows meant to let sunlight through are instead cutting it off.

The visiting British royal who dazzled 19th century New York City

During Queen Elizabeth II’s astounding 70-year reign over the United Kingdom, she made official visits to New York City only three times: a day-long trip involving a ticker-tape parade in 1957, a longer stay for the Bicentennial in 1976, and then a five-hour drop-in in 2010 to the United Nations and Ground Zero, per a New York Times article published last week.

Excited New Yorkers waiting for the Prince’s procession to make it Broadway

Elizabeth’s visits to Gotham were certainly eventful. But they were nothing like the sojourn to New York City made by one member of the British royal family in 1860. On the cusp of the election of President Lincoln and the start of the Civil War, this 19-year-old prince was welcomed to Manhattan with a spectacular procession up Broadway, escorted to leading Manhattan landmarks, and feted at a ball so raucous, the floor of the venue actually broke.

The royal was the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, the first son of Queen Victoria and the future King of England (above, in the 1860s). His trip across the Atlantic in the summer of 1860 was at first to be limited to Canada. “Queen Victoria’s original intention was to dispatch her son simply to visit England’s western possessions in Canada and inaugurate the opening of the Victoria Bridge in Montreal,” states an article by Claire A. Faulkner on Whitehousehistory.org.

But President Buchanan then invited the Prince to Washington, and other American cities were added to his itinerary, such as Richmond, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York.

The Prince’s journey abroad wasn’t unlike the dispatches young royals take today. “As a young man…the Prince of Wales could have been likened to most other teenagers—independent, rebellious, and strong willed,” wrote Faulkner. “It was hoped that the trip to North America would mark the beginning of his formal indoctrination into the responsibilities and duties of a member of the British royal family.”

In Canada and then America, “Bertie” was treated with the respect, if not celebrity. But few cities rolled out the red carpet like New York—the nation’s undisputed capital of commerce and culture, with eager daily newspapers ginning up excitement and glamour. “The most splendid and glamorous of the American events in his honor, however, took place in New York, where the crowds were also the most admiring and enthusiastic,” wrote Faulkner.

The Prince of Wales and his entourage, photographed by Mathew Brady

After the Prince landed at the Battery with his entourage on October 11, fresh from Philadelphia, he entered his carriage and became the center of a grand procession going up Broadway. An estimated 200,000 New Yorkers lined the thoroughfare to watch the slow procession, which didn’t make it past City Hall and to Canal Street until sundown, according to a New York Times piece published the next day.

Bands played “God Save the Queen” and other British songs; Mayor Fernando Wood accompanied the Prince, who “raised his hat and rose repeatedly in acknowledgement of this warm reception,” observed the Times. American and British flags were on display all along the route.

The procession continued past Grace Church, Union Square, and then to the new luxurious Fifth Avenue Hotel, where the Prince would be staying—with an army of policemen stationed in and outside the hotel for security. Of course, not everyone was thrilled by the royal visit, particularly the city’s Irish residents. People of Irish descent amounted to about a quarter of the total population and viewed the government the Prince represented as the oppressor of their homeland.

Fifth Avenue Hotel, 23rd Street in 1860

The Prince had a jam-packed schedule for the next few days, breathlessly covered by the press. He and his entourage toured noteworthy landmarks like New York University, the Astor Library, and Cooper Union; he visited Central Park and planted an English oak. On the last day of his visit, thousands of firemen from Manhattan and Brooklyn marched past the Fifth Avenue Hotel in a magnificent torch-lit parade, stated House Divided, from Dickinson College. 

But perhaps the pinnacle of the Prince’s New York trip was the ball held in his honor. What was originally supposed to be a simple dinner quickly evolved into a spectacular event at the Academy of Music on 14th Street. Four hundred elite New Yorkers paid $100 each to host and attend the ball; up to 2,000 guests showed.

Guests dressed in “black coats, shimmering silks, and elegant velvets” began arriving around 7:30, but the Prince and his entourage, plus members of city government like Mayor Wood, didn’t arrive until after 10 p.m., according to a Leslie‘s Weekly article in 1901. Distinguished guests included Hamilton Fish and George Templeton Strong, the lawyer and diarist who characteristically poked fun at the whole spectacle, according to Ian Walter Radforth’s book, Royal Spectacle.

The rush of excitement and thunderous applause actually broke the floor. “A few people fell through, but no one was seriously injured,” stated the Leslie’s article. The Prince was ushered into the supper room—run by Delmonico’s—for his own safety. Newspapers gleefully published the next morning all the details: the flowers, the Union Jack flags, and the ladies the Prince danced with.

Admit one to the Prince’s Ball

On Monday, October 14, the Prince bid farewell to New York City, heading up to West Point before a visit to Albany and then Boston, and then the trip back home across the Atlantic. Newspaper writers expounded on the royal visit; Bertie resumed life in England and took the throne upon the death of his mother in 1901.

What did the Prince of Wales think of his trip to New York? I haven’t found anything relaying his thoughts. But based on the recollections of the visit in newspapers and other first-hand accounts, a starry-eyed Gotham pulled out all the stops to impress this future king.

[First, second, and third images: LOC; fourth image: Getty Museum; fifth image: NYPL; sixth image: LOC; seventh image: MCNY, X2014.12.158]

The little-known 9/11 memorial to kids in Central Park

Some 9/11 memorials around New York City are enormous monuments to the horrors of that early September day. Others are quiet and inconspicuous, occupying such small pockets of the cityscape that they tend to go overlooked (like this bronze tablet affixed to the VA Hospital at East 23rd Street).

The plaque just steps away from the Hans Christian Andersen statue in Central Park belongs in the latter category. Embedded into the pavement, the simple bronze plaque honors the nearly 3,000 children who lost a parent in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

It’s a fitting spot to honor these 9/11 kids. The statue of the beloved Danish fairy tale author has been at 74th Street off of East Drive since 1955, when it was gifted to New York by the Danish American Women’s Association to commemorate Anderson’s 150th birthday, according to NYC Parks.

The climbable statue of Andersen reading The Ugly Ducking has always attracted kids, as does the model boat pond right nearby. One of the two Alice in Wonderland-themed statues in Central Park is steps away. So is Pilgrim Hill—a legendary sledding spot in the park from which the shouts of happy children can be heard after a snowfall. It’s a child-centered area close to the zoo and playgrounds.

“In Honor of the Children Who Lost Their Parents on 9/11,” reads the plaque, funded by the Stuart Frankel family. Stuart Frankel is the name of what’s described as “New York’s oldest independent brokerage firm on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.” A more personal connection between the company (or the family behind it) and the kids of 9/11 seems to be left a mystery.

This Gothic building near Avenue C was an “industrial school” for poor and homeless kids

In the 1880s and 1890s, the East Village of today became a magnet for lodging houses and training schools designed to help impoverished children from becoming casualties of the harsh life of New York’s streets.

The Sixth Street industrial School, 630 East Sixth Street

It was an era of great support for private social services. The Tompkins Square Lodging House for Boys and Industrial School on Eighth Street and Avenue B opened in 1887. The Elizabeth Home for Girls, on 12th Street between First and Second Avenues, took in its first residents in 1892.

In 1890, the Sixth Street Industrial School (above) opened its doors just west of Avenue C, in what was then called the Dry Dock District. Like the other buildings, it’s a stunning Gothic beauty with a stepped roof, dormer windows, and resplendent red brick. Also like the others, Calvert Vaux—the co-designer of Central Park—is the architect (with a partner, George K. Radford).

CAS: Children’s Aid Society

Each facility—which taught some academic classes along with lessons in specific trades and the life skills a young person would need to eventually live independently—was overseen by the Children’s Aid Society. The CAS got its start in 1853, when a young minister named Charles Loring Brace sought to help the estimated 10,000 street children, or “street rats” as police called them, living on their own and often working dangerous jobs or forced into criminal activity to survive.

At least a dozen lodging houses and industrial schools were built by the CAS and designed by Vaux and Radford all over Manhattan, including the 14th Ward Industrial School on Mott Street and the Sullivan Street Industrial School in today’s Soho. (Both buildings still grace the cityscape.)

The Sixth Street Industrial School in 1939-1941

“Vaux sought to develop buildings that stood out from the city’s tenements, which defined poor and immigrant life in the area with generally grim living conditions,” stated an Off the Grid post from Village Preservation. “His buildings, often free-standing, displaying varied rooflines, and characterized by ornamental features that recalled Dutch architecture, attempted to evoke the feeling and image of a ‘snug country inn.’”

The CAS was a popular charitable organization in the benevolent Gilded Age city, garnering financial support from society families like the Astors. Funding for the Sixth Street Industrial School came from Mrs. William Douglas Sloane—aka Emily Vanderbilt, daughter of William Henry Vanderbilt and granddaughter of Commodore Vanderbilt.

“The Sixth Street School, under the generous support of Mrs. William D. Sloane, continues its good work among the poor of the East Side,” stated the CAS annual report from 1892. “The primary and industrial classes are most successful, and the children receive a training which is of value to them all through their life.”

Industrial schools and lodging houses for poor or homeless kids disappeared during the 20th century. The CAS still exists though, rebranded recently as Children’s Aid. And while the breathtaking building at 630 East Sixth Street is no longer a school, it continues to serve as a nonprofit called Pencer House, “an apartment building for limited-income and formerly homeless New Yorkers,” according to the organization’s website.

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

The Lower East Side’s Division Street: What exactly did it divide?

The Dutch burghers who settled in New Amsterdam and the British colonists who ruled after them had one thing in common: they gave straightforward names to Gotham’s earliest streets.

Wall Street was named for the defensive wall put up by the worried residents of New Amsterdam, who feared their settlement would be attacked by the English. Piles of glistening oyster shells found beside the 17th century waterfront gave way to Pearl Street. A drainage ditch dug from river to river in the early 1800s became Canal Street once it was filled.

And then there’s Division Street—an east-west road in that traffic-choked Lower East Side near the Manhattan Bridge approach. Division runs from the Bowery to Canal Street, where it makes a sharp upward turn and becomes Ludlow Street, which runs north-south.

The Delancey estate in 1776, with Division Street marking the boundary of the Rutgers farm.

Clearly Division Street served as a dividing line of sorts in the colonial city. But for what, exactly?

The answer lies in the bucolic New York of the 18th century, when much of British-controlled Manhattan was carved up into farms and estates. To the north of Division Street was the Delancey estate, and to the south stood the Rutgers farm.

The Rutgers mansion on the Rutgers farm

“The space occupied by the street was a kind of no-man’s-land used for a rope walk, i.e., a place where hemp was twisted into rope,” explains Henry Mosco’s The Street Book: An Encyclopedia of Manhattan’s Street Names and Their Origins.

An 18th century map of the Delancey estate street grid, with the Rutgers farm below.

Delancey was James De Lancey, whose 339-acre estate encompassed land east of the Bowery and north to Houston Street, according to oldstreets.com. He’s also the namesake of today’s Delancey Street, not far to the north. His family, French Huguenots whose presence in the city began in the late 17th century, were rich merchants.

Delancey was a Loyalist during the Revolutionary War. After the defeat of the British he fled the city, leaving behind his estate, which he had already been laid out into streets. The streets mostly stayed, but the former estate was sold in lots, per oldstreets.com.

Henry Rutgers, early 19th century

Rutgers was Henry Rutgers, a descendant of prominent Dutch families who came to New Amsterdam in the 17th century and made their money as brewers. The farm he inherited spanned southeastern Manhattan from about Chatham Square to the East River. He’s the Rutgers of Rutgers University and also Rutgers Street, on his former estate.

Rutgers also divided his farm into separate lots as early as 1755, according to an article by David J. Fowler in a Rutgers University publication, “Benevolent Patriot: Henry Rutgers, 1745-1830.” For decades, the land “maintained a rural character of hills, fields, gardens, woods, and marshes,” the article states.

The Rutgers farm, already laid out and divided into streets in 1784.

Unlike his neighbor, Rutgers supported American independence and served as an army captain and colonel. A bachelor, he remained in New York City for the rest of his life, giving away some of his land for charitable causes. By the end of the 19th century, the once beautiful Rutgers farm had almost fully transformed into blocks of tenements, according to a New York Times article from 1913.

With the farms gone, Division Street isn’t the boundary line for anything. But like Rutgers Street, Delancey Street, and numerous other thoroughfares named for the estates and estate holders of the colonial era, it’s a street name reminder of a New York that’s slipped into history.

[Second image: Norman B. Levanthal Map Center Collection/Boston Public Library; third, fourth, and sixth images: NYPL Digital Collections; fifth image: Oil painting by Henry Inman/Wikipedia]

A 1905 Brooklyn school building so lovely, it’s on a postcard

New York City was once so proud of the new schools that went up across all five boroughs during the school-building frenzy at the turn of the 20th century, several schools made it onto postcards.

That pride extended to trade schools as well. This red brick French Renaissance beauty on Park Slope’s Seventh Avenue between Fourth and Fifth Streets opened in 1905 as Brooklyn Manual Training, or Manual Training High School. (Note the streetcar tracks!)

That first year, 1,900 boys and girls took academic courses as well as classes in dressmaking, mechanical drawing, printing, joinery, blacksmithing, or other trades. Night classes were offered for working students; 900 enrolled in night school in 1905.

I’m not sure when Manual Training ceased to exist. But the handsome building is still at its original site—renamed the John Jay Educational Campus, which seems to be subdivided into several schools.

[Image: NYPL Digital Collections]

The tabloid drama after a rich Riverside Drive businessman goes missing

On March 30, 1903, Adolphe Openhym exited his posh row house at 352 Riverside Drive (below, right) and took his usual morning horseback ride along the Riverside Park bridle path.

Adolphe Openhym’s Beaux-Arts townhouse at 352 Riverside Drive, right

Afterward, the successful silk merchant at William Openhym & Sons and real estate investor returned to the home he shared with his wife and two sons, had breakfast, and then left the house again in “usual good health and spirits,” wrote The Sun on April 2. Reportedly he was clad in a top hat and frock coat and carried a cane or umbrella.

But instead of going to his office downtown on Mercer Street, 49-year-old Openhym was seen taking an uptown streetcar on Amsterdam Avenue, according to the Eagle. Around 11 a.m., a man matching his description was spotted by a “bridge tender” walking to the middle of the High Bridge—the 1848 bridge connecting Upper Manhattan to the Bronx across the Harlem River.

Adolphe Openhym

On the High Bridge, Openhym put down his hat, climbed a guardrail, and then leaped into the river, the bridge tender said, his body disappearing into the murky depths.

New York City’s rapacious tabloid dailies couldn’t resist the story—the apparent suicide of a wealthy business leader who possessed all the trappings of a charmed Gilded Age life. Reporters jumped into action, first seeking insight from Openhym’s family. They reported nothing amiss.

The High Bridge, 1900

“I do not believe that my father has committed suicide,” one of Openhym’s sons told a reporter at the Evening World on April 1. “He has not been ill or suffering any kind of mental trouble. His home life was perfectly happy.” Reporters also visited his business partners, who were similarly puzzled and described their colleague as having “good mental health.”

Two days later, however, the Evening World changed the narrative. A front page story on April 3 claimed that the day Openhym went missing, there was a “tremendous row in the family.” Family servants who were interviewed described him as “cross” and that “nothing could be done to please him.” An unidentified business partner said that for two weeks, Openhym complained of “pains in his head.”

Nothing lurid came from these accounts, so newspapers focused on the search for Openhym’s corpse. For the next few weeks, the missing man’s family chartered boats and hired searchers to look for the body. Other searchers came to the Harlem River on their own with grappling hooks, anxious to gain the $5,000 reward the family offered for his remains.

Days passed. Without a body to confirm his death, rumors hit the news cycle: that Openhym didn’t really jump off the bridge, that he was spotted in restaurants in Yonkers, Mount Vernon, and Newburgh. “Is Adolph Openhym alive?” asked the Brooklyn Standard Union on April 8, spelling his name without the e at the end. “Since the offering of a big reward for information on his whereabouts, many persons have come forward to declare they have seen him since the day he disappeared.”

An AP story stated that detectives learned Openhym “had several hundred thousand dollars in cash where he could get it at a moment’s notice.” The story described him as “a man who has a keen appreciation of the good things of the world….He is a frank advocate of the luxurious life, and knows how to spend money royally.”

On April 22, even without a body, Openhym’s family accepted that he killed himself by leaping from High Bridge, a lawyer representing the family told the Evening World. Reporters asked the representative about the possibly that Openhym faked his death. “My God!” the lawyer replied angrily. “They will be charging the unfortunate man with murder next! They have already accused him of every crime in the calendar.”

Finally on April 27, Openhym’s body was found floating in the river. His pockets contained some bills and change, business letters, the photo of a child, a gold watch, a scarf with a pearl stick pin, gold cuff links, and a gold penknife, among other unsuspicious objects reported by various newspapers.

“The body was in a remarkably good state of preservation for one that had been in the water so long,” the New York Times stated. “It was completely dressed, even to the gloves, and the only mark upon it was a bruise across the face, which was believed to have been caused by striking the water as the man leapt from the bridge.”

His family held funeral services at their Riverside Drive home. About 300 people attended, but “the widow was to ill to be there,” the New-York Tribune reported. The contents of his will were also published. His estate was valued between $500,000 and $1 million, depending on the newspaper reporting on it, and he bequeathed money to the Society for Ethical Culture and Mount Sinai Hospital, among other charities.

The final stories about this tragedy focused on the coroner’s conclusion: that Openhym killed himself because his mind was “temporarily imbalanced.” According to the Brooklyn Times Union on May 1, “Openhym committed suicide while temporarily insane,” per the coroner’s official report. After that, the reporters moved on.

New York’s newspapers did their job—investigating leads, suggesting scandal, then following up with the dollar amount of the dead man’s estate and where his money would be going. What reporters couldn’t do is explain why such a fortunate man ended his life. Only Openhym could answer that, and he took his reasons to his grave.

[Third image: New-York Historical Society]

All the different business districts of Manhattan, according to a 1939 magazine

The center of finance is still firmly in Lower Manhattan, and the Theater District continues to surround Broadway in the West 40s.

But these two commercial districts are all that remain in 2022 of the many business and industry centers that used to thrive in different sections of Manhattan. The commercial districts and map were outlined in a July 1939 issue of Fortune, published to coincide with the World’s Fair that summer in New York City.

Fresh fish is still an industry in today’s New York. But the wholesale markets are no longer centered at South Street; a new Fulton Fish Market was relocated to Hunts Point in the Bronx in 2005. I’m sure you can still find fresh produce on what was once called the Lower West Side, but today’s Tribeca is no longer the produce market neighborhood it used to be.

Selling fish on South Street, photographed by Rolf Tietgens for Fortune

The Flower District, on Sixth Avenue in the West 20s, still has a few holdout wholesalers. Garments continue to be manufactured in the Garment District, but the output is nothing like it was in the 1930s, when this area from Sixth to Ninth Avenues between 34th and 40th Streets was home to the largest concentration of clothing manufacturers in the world, per the Gotham Center for New York City History.

A nursery in the Flower District, by Rolf Tietgens for Fortune magazine

Automobile showrooms have long left West 57th Street near Columbus Circle. The arrow that says “meat” pointing to Midtown East (where the United Nations headquarters is today) referred to the former Abattoir Center—one of two slaughterhouse districts designated by the city in 1898, according to Tudor City Confidential. (The other slaughterhouse district was on West 14th Street.)

The East Side Abattoir Center, by Alexander Alland for Fortune magazine

A leather district on the Lower East Side? That’s news to me. “Art” and “style” just below Central Park seem to refer to the luxury department stores and fashion boutiques, as well as the art galleries and art-related showrooms, on 57th-59th Streets.

[Images: Fortune, July 1939]

A squatter’s shanty and the creeping 20th century city around it

In the late 19th and early 20th century, Impressionist Childe Hassam painted rich, atmospheric scenes of New York City life by glorious daylight and the enchanting glow of nighttime.

This undated image of a Manhattan shanty reveals Hassam’s signature command of light and shadow. But it’s something of a departure from his typical streetscape-inspired subject matter.

Where is this shanty? It could be almost anywhere in Manhattan, say above 23rd Street. New Yorkers without means built similar shacks in the 19th century, often without regard for the street grid because actual streets had yet to be laid out. Even into the Gilded Age, goats and chickens were not unusual sights outside these ramshackle houses. It likely met the wrecking ball not long after Hassam immortalized it.

An squatter’s shanty and the creeping 20th century city around it

In the late 19th and early 20th century, Impressionist Childe Hassam painted rich, atmospheric scenes of New York City life by glorious daylight and the enchanting glow of nighttime.

This undated image of a Manhattan shanty reveals Hassam’s signature command of light and shadow. But it’s something of a departure from his typical streetscape-inspired subject matter.

Where is this shanty? It could be almost anywhere in Manhattan, say above 23rd Street. New Yorkers without means built similar shacks in the 19th century, often without regard for the street grid because actual streets had yet to be laid out. Even into the Gilded Age, goats and chickens were not unusual sights outside these ramshackle houses. It likely met the wrecking ball not long after Hassam immortalized it.