Esther Crain's Blog, page 62

The 200-year history of a Bleecker Street house

Every house in New York City has a story. And the story of the Federal-style, Flemish bond brick residence at 58 Bleecker Street begins in the early 19th century with a Roosevelt.

58 Bleecker Street in 2021

Jacobus “James” Roosevelt III—Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s great-grandfather—had the house at Bleecker and Crosby Streets built for himself and his family in 1823. It was once part of a row; a two-story carriage house was constructed a few years later that still survives next door on Crosby Street.

James Roosevelt was a patrician citizen of the growing metropolis. Born in 1760, he was the fifth generation of Roosevelts in New York City since his ancestor, Claes Maartenszen van Rosenvelt, immigrated from Holland to New Amsterdam in the 17th century, according to Shannon Butler’s Roosevelt Homes of the Hudson Valley.

Roosevelt followed his father into the sugar refining and banking businesses, and he also had a farm in Harlem, wrote Butler. He dabbled a bit in politics, serving in the New York State Assembly and as an alderman on the City Council. But business and a little philanthropy were his main occupations.

When the neighborhood near his South Street primary residence became undesirable, Roosevelt relocated to newly fashionable Bleecker Street—where other prominent New Yorkers were building houses as well.

During his two decades or so living in the house, Roosevelt watched his neighborhood become one of the most elite in the 1830s and 1840s city. Still, his life was marked by tragedy. Roosevelt’s first two wives died, and he received visitors at the house in 1827 after his 19-year-old son Walker lost his life, according the Evening Post.

Jacobus “James” Roosevelt, the elite New Yorker who built the house

Roosevelt died in 1847. His widow, Harriet Howland Roosevelt, stayed in the home for several years. By 1856, however, she likely passed away or moved on; an ad in the New York Times noted that an estate sale was being held in the house and all furniture was to be sold, including the “elegant rosewood parlor furniture, covered with damask,” “mahogany bedroom furniture,” and a large carriage.

In 1857, the house entered a wildly different phase. Elizabeth Blackwell—the first female physician not just in New York City but the entire country—rented the house and opened the New York Infirmary for Women and Children there on May 12.

Blackwell, along with her doctor sister, outfitted Roosevelt’s old home with a maternity center and surgical suite. The doors opened the doors to the increasing number of poor families in the once-posh neighborhood. The infirmary, which treated women at no cost, also trained female doctors.

“Forty-six indoor patients, each remaining on an average of three weeks in the house, have been treated, comprising 30 cases of general disease, 13 midwifery cases, and 3 surgical operations,” wrote the New York Times in December 1857, summing up the first six months of the infirmary.

The Roosevelt house, 1939-1941

By the 1860s, however, Roosevelt’s house was serving an entirely different function. It was home to a dressmaker, who placed an ad in the New York Daily Herald in 1863 to inform “the ladies of New York and environs that she will have her grand opening day” on March 26 and “she respectfully invites them to give her a visit.”

Through much of the 19th century, this eastern end of Bleecker Street held steady as a retail area. A furniture store occupied the ground floor in the 1870s, and a feather shop took the space in 1891, according to the LPC report.

The main house in 1975, with the carriage house behind it

Manufacturing arrived in the 20th century; the upper floors were converted to manufacturing lofts. The ground floor became a restaurant. “The house continued in that usage into the mid-20th century,” the LPC report states.

By the 1990s, things changed once again for Roosevelt’s former residence. Bleecker Street between the East Village and the soon to be named Nolita was once again a destination neighborhood. By the mid-1990s, Bleecker Street Bar held court on the ground floor. Today, the bar is gone.

58 Bleecker Street in 2011

Alterations over the last 200 years include changes to the roofline. The Dutch-style stepped gables still extant in 2011 (see above) are gone, and today it’s perfectly pitched with both chimneys rising high. Perhaps this third floor facade was rebuilt, and the coat of red paint removed.

Scaffolding currently outside the Bleecker Street side tells us that Roosevelt’s house is getting ready for its next incarnation in an ever-changing New York City.

[Third image: Wikipedia; fourth image: New York Times 1856; fifth image: New York City Department of Records and Information Services; sixth image: MCNY/Edmund Vincent Gillon 2013.3.1.68; seventh image: Wikipedia]

Does this Riverside Drive mansion really have a tunnel to the Hudson River?

In the early 1900s, Riverside Drive almost eclipsed Fifth Avenue as New York City’s most opulent millionaire’s row. Many free-standing mansions were built along this breezy, leafy road for Gilded Age business barons and titans of industry, with unspoiled views of Riverside Park and the Hudson River.

More than a century later, only two of those free-standing mansions still stand. One is at West 107th Street. Stand might not be the right word; its pristine white marble facade glistens like a jewel.

This is the Schinasi mansion at 351 Riverside Drive. A French Renaissance mini-palace, it was built in 1909 for Morris Schinasi, an immigrant from Turkey who made a fortune importing Turkish cigarettes with his brother, Solomon.

(Solomon also moved into a palatial mansion on Riverside Drive and 89th Street, which was originally built for the Rice family. Coincidentally, Solomon’s house is the second surviving free-standing mansion on Riverside.)

The exterior of the Morris Schinasi mansion was and is stunning. Designed by William B. Tuthill, the architect behind Carnegie Hall, the house features fancy dormer windows, a green tiled roof, and bronze balcony grills, according to Landmarks of New York, Fifth Edition.

The Schinasi mansion in 1909, just completed

But there’s one feature inside the house that’s truly unique, even for a Gilded Age millionaire’s mansion: a tunnel from the basement that supposedly leads to the Hudson River.

The tunnel isn’t mentioned in newspaper articles or in the Landmark Preservation Commission report designing the mansion as a historic landmark. But apparently, it really does exist.

Morris Schinasi, Turkish tobacco baron

In 2007, the New York Times mentioned the tunnel in a writeup about the mansion, which at the time was put on the market for $20 million by a Columbia University professor. (The professor bought it for an astounding $325K in 1979.)

“Its three floors included an Egyptian marble hall inlaid with Turkish glass, a Louis XVI drawing room, a library, a smoking room and a reception hall,” wrote Lily Koppel in the Times piece. “The pineapple, a traditional symbol of hospitality, is found throughout the house, set into the moldings in gold and bronze. Among the house’s unusual features is an underground passage to the Hudson River, now sealed.”

A second Times story in 2012 by Constance Rosenblum even featured a photo of what might be the tunnel or perhaps a basement passageway leading to it.

Schinasi mansion in 1932

When the tunnel was built, however is puzzling—as is the tunnel’s purpose. The Times wondered as well.

“The mansion’s most beguiling feature is a tunnel in the basement that was thought to have extended west to the Hudson River,” wrote Rosenblum. “But exactly what had the tunnel been used for? To smuggle in Turkish tobacco, or perhaps alcohol or hashish? Or as a conduit for ladies of the evening?”

Every house in New York has its mysteries.

Curious about the Gilded Age mansions that once lined Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side? Join Ephemeral New York on a walking tour Sunday, August 29 that explores the history of Riverside Drive and the short period of time when Riverside rivaled Fifth Avenue as New York City’s millionaire colony. Click the link for more details.

[Third image: MCNY, 1909; x2010.28.118; fourth image: Wikipedia; fifth image: NYPL]

The castles and villages of 1914 Lower Manhattan

For a painting with such a perfunctory name, “Municipal and Woolworth Buildings, Lower Manhattan,” by Lionel S. Reiss, gives us a stunning look at a two-tiered city.

In the distance is the New York of concrete canyons and tall buildings reaching toward the heavens, ethereal and dreamlike. In the foreground are the the tenements of the people, in hearty earth tones that reflect the life and activity happening inside them.

Born in 1894 in Jaroslaw Poland, Reiss grew up on the Lower East Side; he would have had a front-row seat to the changing landscape around City Hall and the Financial District in the early 1900s. After working as a commercial artist in the 1920s, he traveled through Europe and North Africa, returning to New York City before World War II.

“One of the central themes of Reiss’ art was that of every day street life, replete with its class distinctions and social strata,” stated one source, a Jewish research archive that includes his work. In this 1914 painting, Reiss seems to be depicting class distinction by painting two skyscrapers as Medieval castles and the tenements as the village surrounding them.

6 photos show the dramatic transformation of an 1884 Harlem bank building

When the Mount Morris Bank Building was completed in 1884, it was an early showstopper in rapidly developing Harlem, which was starting its makeover from uptown suburb to part of the urban cityscape.

The Mount Morris Bank Building in the 1880s

Some Romanesque Revival, mostly Queen Anne, this six-story beauty at 125th Street and Park Avenue boasted red sandstone blocks, bold arched doorways, and terra cotta ornament on the ground floor and half-basement exterior.

The upper floor apartments looked over the railroad tracks that brought new residents and businesses to the neighborhood. These fashionable flats featured balconies, bay windows, and storybook-like stepped gables.

Now the Corn Exchange Bank, in 1934

The building underwent changes over the years: an 1890 addition doubled its size along Park Avenue, the apartments were renovated into office space at the turn of the century, and the Mount Morris bank became a branch of the Corn Exchange Bank in the 1900s (and the building took on this new name).

A building this delightful should have been celebrated and maintained through the decades.

The building in the 1980s

Instead, this brick and mortar piece of Harlem history was eventually abandoned and sealed off in the 1970s. Landmark status arrived in 1993, with the Landmarks Preservation Commission noting that the building “retains its architectural integrity to a surprisingly high degree.”

With the top floors demolished in 2011

The LPC also made light of Mount Morris Bank’s “historic role as the financial hub of Harlem during the 1900s building boom there,” wrote Newsday.

Unfortunately, a fire on the roof and upper floors in 1997 made the deteriorating structure unsafe. The city bulldozed it down to its ground floor a decade ago, a final insult for a piece of Harlem history. “The Corn Exchange’s signature masonry is at risk of falling, especially since the railroad rumbles only a few feet away,” stated the New York Times in 2009.

Rebuilt and reborn, 2021

This story of deterioration and demolition has an uplifting ending. In the early 2010s, a developer bought the bank building, renovated the ground floor, and rebuilt the upper floors with red brick.

“The building is an entirely new steel-frame structure set within and rising over the 19th-century masonry base, which is all that remains of the original after years of troubles, fire, decay, and gravity,” wrote David Dunlop in the New York Times in 2014.

In 2015, when the new building was completed, East 125th Street and Park Avenue got its showstopper back—a harmonious structure that evokes Harlem’s architectural heritage.

[Top photo: Cornell University Library via Wikipedia; second photo: NYPL; third photo: NYC Department of Records and Information Services; fourth photo: Wikipedia]

This country clapboard house was a 19th century Harlem holdout

Back in May, Ephemeral New York published a post about Manhattan’s most charming holdout buildings—the small 19th century walkups that managed to evade the wrecking ball and remain part of the contemporary cityscape.

In the comments section, a reader sent in a link to a photo of another holdout I’d never seen before. It’s a little relic of mid-19th century New York, a clapboard two-story dwelling with a rustic porch, wood shutters, and picket fence with a gate at 109 West 124th Street in Harlem (above, in 1932).

It doesn’t exist anymore; the storybook-like house between Lenox Avenue and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard disappeared in the mid-20th century (below, 1939-1941).

Exactly when it met its end is a mystery, as is how the house successfully hung on for so long. For the century or so that it existed, Harlem went from a bucolic village to a middle class suburb and by the 1920s was the center of Black New York—a magnet for people seeking better opportunities and an incubator of music, art, writing, and culture.

Luckily, some information about the people who lived there gives us something of a narrative. Though it’s unclear when it was built (I’m estimating the 1850s, as it resembles these East Side 1850s houses), by 1876 it was occupied by a Theodore van Houten, according to a New York City directory. “Agent” was listed after van Houten’s name, a clue to his occupation.

In 1887, the Real Estate Record and Building Guide wrote that an Eliza van Houten—likely Theodore’s widow by that time—sold number 109 to a Charles Rilling. The selling price? $10,000. (Above, in an undated photo.)

After the turn of the century, a man named Stanley Lewinsky Corwin resided at the home. Corwin is listed as a delegate to the Second New York City Conference of Charities and Correction in 1911. Perhaps he was a solidly middle class civil servant.

Interestingly, the house spent some time as an art school called the Lenox Art Academy. Several newspaper references in the early 1900s note the classes the school offered and gallery exhibitions.

The trail for number 109 gets cold after that. A tax photo of the house was taken by the city between 1939-1941—the last dated reference I found. It’s a shame this little piece of pre-Civil War Harlem, slipped away from the cityscape. What a story about Harlem’s evolution (above, Lenox Avenue and 124th Street) it could tell!

[Top photo: MCNY 33.173.458; second photo: NYC Department of Records and Information Services; third photo: NYPL; fourth photo: New-York Historical Society]

Departing the ferry across the monolith of Lower Manhattan

Born in Michigan in 1865, William Samuel Horton was a prolific Impressionist painter of many landscapes and water scenes, especially in Europe and his adopted country of France, where he died in 1936.

But Horton did spend some time in New York City. He studied at the Art Students League and National Academy of Design, left for Europe, and returned to New York for an unknown period of time in 1924, according to Cincinnati Art Galleries, Inc.

It was during his return in the mid-1920s when he likely painted “Departing the Ferry, New York,” depicting the urban landscape of Lower Manhattan and the hordes of mostly men in straw hats with obscured faces as they empty out of a commuter from the gangplank.

By the 1920s, New York had built several steel bridges crossing the East River. But ferries were still plying the waters, especially to Staten Island and New Jersey. These massive vessels delivered people to and from an office tower city that looks like a monolith. It’s tough to know where we are along New York’s waterways…perhaps Horton didn’t think the exact location mattered.

The wooden phone booths inside a private Midtown clubhouse

This week has turned out to be themed around vintage phone booths on Ephemeral New York. First came four glass beauties still extant along West End Avenue, the last remaining outdoor booths in New York City.

Next up is another old-school telephone discovery: a row of wooden phone booths—with restored wood chairs, small tables, accordion doors, and amazingly, actual phones—along a wall inside the Harvard Club, at 27 West 44th Street.

Did these booths once have pay phones? I’m not sure; perhaps part of being a club member meant the house picked up the charges. Members today, of course, would only duck into one to hold a private cell phone conversation.

These old wood phone booths are a rare find in the contemporary city, but discovering and documenting them allows us to time travel back to a much different New York City.

Until the 1980s and 1990s, every hotel and public building, as well as most restaurants, bars, and drugstores, had at least one public telephone booth along with a bulky paper phone directory for customers, clients, and locals who didn’t have a phone of their own. (And many people didn’t, often by choice. Imagine!)

The Harvard Club itself has its own historical cred. Designed by Charles McKim and opened in 1894, the clubhouse featured a “grill room,” offices, a library, and a couple of card and billiard rooms. McKim, a Harvard man and club member who took no fee for his work, modeled the Georgian-style brick and limestone exterior to resemble those in Harvard Yard, according to the Harvard Club website.

The club was expanded and renovated over the years, sometimes to create more space but also to keep up with social changes.

In 1973, the ladies’ entrance to the club was removed and women were admitted as full members. Though some Harvard graduate programs admitted women, Harvard and its sister school, Radcliffe College, didn’t merge their admissions until 1975.

[Top and second photos: Susan Schwartz; third photo: Wikipedia]

What a hot night looked like on an East Side tenement block in 1899

First of all, almost everyone is outside—on the street, the sidewalk, fire escapes. If you’ve ever lived in a tenement apartment without an air conditioner, you know how stifling those rooms can get, and they force you to seek relief outdoors.

The other thing is, people don’t look as miserable as you’d expect for a street scene in the summer heat. Kids are playing; groups of adults are talking. Lone men and women sit on the sidewalk or stoops and watch. Tempers don’t seem to be flaring; no one appears to be looking for a fight.

The moon is bright. What looks like an arc light in the background illuminates the street. People gather at tables by torchlight. As the caption says, it’s one of hundreds of similar scenes enacted at the same time all over the city.

[NYPL]

A bizarre August tradition along old New York City’s waterfronts

The lazy dog days of summer along the waterfronts of late 19th century New York could could also be dangerous, thanks in part to a strange old tradition called “launching day.”

Boys at Rutgers Slip in 1908

On either August 1 or the first Friday in August (sources differ on exactly when it was held and how long it lasted), boys (and some men) along the city’s rivers would pick up another boy or man and launch them into the water.

“Yesterday was what the boys along the water front call ‘Launching Day,'” wrote the New York World on August 3, 1897. “They throw each other into the river, clothes and all, saying, ‘Now swim and give yourself a bath.'”

“Splinter Beach” by George Bellows, 1916

The origins of launching day aren’t clear, but one Brooklyn newspaper stated in 1902 that it “has been a summer event ever since Robert Fulton launched the first steamboat into the Hudson in 1807.”

Launching Day was apparently held in Brooklyn as well. “Tomorrow will also be a fine day for the little boys along the river front who will observe ‘Launching Day,'” reported the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on July 31, 1897, a Saturday. “This juvenile holiday will, in all probability, last for three days, as some little boys do not like to be thrown overboard in their Sunday togs.”

Boys on a Brooklyn pier

It all sounds pretty innocent. On hot summer days boys all over the city without access to swimming pools or beaches cooled off by wading into the East and Hudson Rivers. Near South Street they dove off the docks at Market and Dover Streets; in Yorkville and East Harlem they swam into the water near treacherous Hell Gate.

The problem with Launching Day, though, was that many people didn’t know how to swim in the 19th century city. Inevitably, newspapers carried tragic stories the next day about people who ended up in the water and never resurfaced.

1911 New York Evening World headline

“August 1 has been known about the waterfront for many years as ‘Launching Day,'” wrote the New-York Herald on August 2, 1900. “Anybody who ventures on a pier is in danger of being thrown into the water….John Kriete, 21 years old, an iceman of 312 East 84th Street, pushed a workman, George Krause, of the same address, overboard at East 100th Street yesterday and fell in afterward himself. Kriete was drowned.”

“In Brooklyn the drowned body of Thomas McGullen, the 10-year-old son of John McGullen of No. 70 Hicks Street, was taken from the water at Henry Street,” wrote the New-York Tribune on August 2, 1903. “He was pushed off the pier by his playmates, who were celebrating ‘launching.’ They thought he could swim.”

The action along an East River dock

Exactly when launching day died out I’m not sure. But by the 1930s, newspapers interviewed people who recalled the tradition.

In the Daily News in 1934, a police reporter wrote: “I’ve known how to swim for 30 years because I was one of the West Side kids who used the Hudson River. We don’t have it now but then we had an annual ‘Launching Day’….Everybody near the water got thrown in, clothes and all. You had to swim or else.”

[Top photo: George Bain Collection/LOC; second image: George Bellows; Third photo: New-York Historical Society; Fourth image: New York Evening World; Fifth image: NYPL]

The last sidewalk phone booths in New York City

Once upon a time, public phone booths were ubiquitous on the sidewalks of New York City. “Outdoor phone booths made their first entrance in the early 1900s, and became commonplace in the 1950s when glass and aluminum replaced difficult-to-maintain wood as the building material of choice,” explained Time magazine in 2016.

But the invention of the cell phone sealed the fate of the phone booth, with its folding door and often a small seat as well, where you could drop your shopping bags while you fished around your pocket or purse for coins to make a call. (Or used a calling card, or called collect.)

Now, New York City has only four outside public phone booths. Interestingly, they’re all on the Upper West Side on quiet stretches of West End Avenue.

The first one is at 66th Street (top photo), then 91st Street (second photo), 100th Street, and 101st Street (bottom).

If these icons of another New York appear to be in surprisingly good shape, that’s because they aren’t the original phone booths that existed on each corner. Each is a relatively recent replacement of an older booth that was battered or marked by graffiti, according to a 2016 New York Times article.

Though these phone booths lack doors, they’re reminiscent of the iconic phone booths that were utilitarian and functional but also had an air of romance, mystery, even danger.

New York phone booths often played pivotal roles in movies—remember in Rosemary’s Baby, when a very pregnant Rosemary Woodhouse goes into the privacy of a phone booth to dial Dr. Hill so he could deliver her baby instead of her doctor and neighbors, all of them witches?

Residents of West End Avenue are charmed by their phone booths, so charmed that in 2010 one author even published a children’s book about one specific booth.

The book’s title is still fitting: The Lonely Phone Booth.