Esther Crain's Blog, page 81

The “Croton bug” infests 19th century New York

They began appearing in New York City in large numbers in the 1840s, and newspapers described them as “miserable pests,” the products of “slovenly housekeepers,” and “filthy and destructive insects.”

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“Never in all New York’s history has such a plague of vermin visited us,” wrote an anonymous “apartment dweller” in The New York Times in 1921.

[image error]What was this hated creature?

The common house cockroach, which was dubbed the “Croton bug” and known by that misnomer throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The name comes from the Croton Aqueduct, which opened in 1842 (above, a celebration in City Hall Park) and brought fresh water from upstate to New York City residents.

The appearance of  these roaches (technically known as German cockroaches) in the city coincided with the advent of the Croton water system—leading New Yorkers to associate the bugs with Croton and blame the system for infesting Gotham.

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The Croton aqueduct itself wasn’t to blame, but the water pipes installed in many homes to access the water was.

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“The new water system not only supplied New York with cheap and abundant water, it also provided the cockroach with warm water pipes that were dank, dark conduits from apartment kitchen to apartment kitchen,” wrote John Leland in Aliens in the Backyard.

With Croton bugs popping up in kitchens across the city, efforts to get rid of them were introduced. Ads for poisons and powders filled newspapers. One doctor even advised that “stale beer” could kill them, as it’s “the cockroach’s favorite drink.”

[image error]Guides for housekeepers were also published. “Use pulverized borax, which they do not like,” one 1903 manual for servants advised. “Sprinkle it into their haunts, especially under and around sinks and stationary washstands.”

This manual went on to describe them “like Noah’s weary dove, seeking human companionship, or perhaps, still more like another scriptural type, going to and fro and walking up and down seeking something to devour….They do not leave town for the heated term.”

[image error]No, roaches don’t leave for the heated term, aka summer…in fact they apparently don’t leave New York at all, considering how many city residents still deal with them.

Perhaps changing their name back to “Croton bugs” will make them more endearing?

[Top image: science text 1915; second image: New York Daily Herald, 1852; third image: MCNY 0.13.4.154; fourth image: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1908; fifth image: Evening World]

The mystery manhole cover on Central Park West

The most interesting manhole covers are the ones that tell us who made it and when it was put in place: the name of an ironworks company, the initials of a city department, a date.

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This cover, on Central Park West south of 86th Street, doesn’t offer much in the way of clues.

The two decorative stars feel very 19th century. “Water Supply” could certainly mean it was part of the Croton Aqueduct system; its location outside Central Park could be evidence that it had something to do with the receiving reservoir that existed in the park.

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It looks like no other manhole cover I’ve encountered in Manhattan. But there is an identical one in Brooklyn (above). It’s on Eastern Parkway near Prospect Park.

An 1897 building and a changing West 57th Street

When Lee’s Art Shop closed in 2016, New Yorkers lost an interesting and unusual place to buy art supplies and crafts.

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What was also lost? An excuse to visit interesting and unusual 220 West 57th Street.

Lee’s occupied the four-story building since 1975. Completed in 1897, the building reflects the rise and fall of this stretch of 57th Street as both a cultural hub and a point along Manhattan’s “Automobile Row.”

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It’s not easy to recognize now, as 57th Street is undergoing luxurification with new offices and residential towers. But in the late 19th century, the street first took shape as an artistic center.

[image error]Early apartment residences that catered to artists and musicians went up, such as The Osborne across the street.

Studio buildings were also built, joined by the Art Student League (also across the street), Carnegie Hall (a half-block east), and numerous galleries and music showrooms.

So it made sense when the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), which included architects, decided to build their headquarters in the late 1890s on West 57th Street, a budding center of the arts and creativity.

[image error]The ASCE clubhouse, complete with reading rooms, a library, and an auditorium, opened its doors in November 1897. (Above left, in 1897, and at right, in 1903.) Reviews lauded the building as interesting, artistic, and harmonious.

One reviewer called it “a beautiful example of French Renaissance in Indiana limestone richly carved,” per the Landmarks Preservation Commission report in 2008.

In 1917, after an annex had been added, the ASCE moved to West 39th Street and began leasing 220 West 57th Street.

[image error]The businesses that rented and altered the space in 1918 were also a reflection of the industry that encompassed Broadway and West 57th Street: cars.

Early in the century, Broadway between roughly Times Square and West 66th Street was the city’s “automobile row.”

“By 1910, there were dozens of automobile-related businesses, including many small automobile or body manufacturers, lining Broadway particularly between West 48th Street and Columbus Circle,” stated the LPC report.

Ajax Rubber Company, which made tires, moved into 220. The ground floor was renovated with big showroom windows, and then the ground floor was subleased to Stearns-Knight Automobiles, a luxury car maker based in Cleveland.

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Automobile Row lasted into the 1980s. But by the late 1920s, 220 West 57th changed hands again.

[image error]It became a Schrafft’s, the casual lunchroom-restaurant chain with franchises all over the city (and such a storied New York business in the 1940s and 1950s, it even made it into a J.D. Salinger story).

Schrafft’s served its much-loved sandwiches, ice cream, and even alcohol (after Prohibition was lifted) for almost 50 years here, catering to shoppers and theater-goers until the chain’s better days had passed and stores shut down in the 1970s.

[image error]Lee’s took the space in 1975, later expanding to all four floors. Remnants of the previous tenants remained, according to Christopher Gray, who visited the space in 2000.

“But all around there are tattered fragments of the 1897 building: delicate plaster friezes of floral ornament, wooden trim and gilt decoration,” wrote Gray in The New York Times. “And a Schrafft’s devotee could recognize the restaurant’s 1928 brass and iron staircase, and the marble trim around the second-floor elevator.”

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Twenty years after Gray’s visit, Lee’s is gone, and the building sits empty. What’s to become of the delicate limestone structure designed to fit into West 57th’s artistic and then automobile ethos? There’s been talk of new development, but it remains to be seen.

[Third image: American Architect and Building News via Landmarks Preservation Committee Report; fourth image: Landmarks Preservation Committee Report; sixth image: Alamy; seventh image: LOC]

What did this old NYC phone exchange stand for?

You see these two-letter old phone exchanges around occasionally—often on old signs off the beaten path, even though New York City phased out the letter exchanges in the 1960s.

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In the East 80s of Yorkville, I spotted a mysterious one: a parking garage sign with a phone number that begins with “TW.”

TW? It’s one I’d never seen before, and I can’t figure out what local landmark or old neighborhood lent its name to a phone exchange that could be as old as the 1920s.

Of course, the garage door company that used the number might have been located in any part of New York City. If anyone knows or wants to throw out a guess as to what TW stands for, I’d love to hear it!

A Downtown plaque for a soldier who died at sea

It’s a simple marker inside the dog run at Stuyvesant Square, the leafy park on either side of Second Avenue between 15th and 17th Streets.

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“In honor and memory of Pvt. Moses Miller, who died at sea January 26, 1944.” The plaque was dedicated in 1946, it says.

The dog run is currently closed, unfortunately, but a photo of the plaque, taken by Larry Gertner, is on the Historical Markers Database—a site that keeps track of markers and memorials across the country.

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Who was Moses Miller? His exact fate remains a mystery, but the Brooklyn Eagle in March 1944 included him on a list of men from Brooklyn and Queens who were deemed missing in action by the War Department.

Private Miller’s address was listed as 417 South Fifth Street, making him a Williamsburg resident. He was lost at sea in the Mediterranean, according to the Eagle.

New York City has many elaborate war memorials. But sometimes it’s the simple plaques in out-of-the-way spots that really hit home what it means to die for your country.

[Photos: Larry Gertner/Historical Markers Database]

 

The most famous summer house in Manhattan

You might not immediately recognize this elegant, two-story wood mansion, with its large windows and wide porches—perfect for capturing cool East River breezes.

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But in the post-colonial New York of the early 19th century, the house stood out among the other posh summer estates built in the bucolic countryside of today’s Yorkville.

[image error]This was the summer home of Archibald Gracie. Born in Scotland in 1755, Gracie (at left) arrived in New York in 1784 with a cargo of goods that netted him enough money to invest in a mercantile.

By the 1790s, he was a very rich merchant and shipowner. His regular residence was a State Street townhouse so impressive it was known as “The Pillars,” according to a 1973 New York Daily News article.

But like other wealthy city residents, he wanted a summer house, too.

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For $3,700, “he bought 11 acres of rolling land at Horn’s Hook, facing the Hell Gate,” a 1981 Daily News explained, referring to the treacherous section of the East River between Astoria and Randall’s Island that claimed hundreds of ships by the late 19th century.

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The house, built on a high bluff facing the East River next to a towering cottonwood tree used as a landmark for sailors, was designed for the enjoyment of his family, elite friends, and notable guests.

[image error]“In 1799, Gracie began construction of his mansion, a sumptuous building of 14 rooms and eight bathrooms, replete with hand-carved fireplaces and priceless furniture,” wrote the Daily News. “There was a large dining room and a broad, white pillared porch that overlooked the East River—in all ways, an ideal site for holding large receptions.”

At the time, it took an entire day to sail from the Battery to reach his house at today’s East 88th Street.

But Gracie and his family made the trip often, entertaining political and literary figures such as Alexander Hamilton (a business partner of Gracie’s and the owner of a lovely summer estate in Harlem), James Fenimore Cooper, John Quincy Adams, and Washington Irving.

Irving, in particular, was struck by the beauty of the house and Gracie’s hospitality.

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“I cannot tell you how sweet and delightful I found this retreat, pure air, agreeable scenery, profound quiet,” Irving (below left) wrote in 1813 in his diary, according to the Daily News.

[image error]Of the Gracies, he wrote, “Their country seat was one of my strongholds last summer, as I lived in its vicinity. It is a charming, warm-hearted family, and the old gentleman has the soul of a prince.”

The summer house wouldn’t stay in the Gracie family. Gracie lost much of his fortune by 1819. “The craggy-faced Scot,” as the Daily News called him, died at age 94 in 1829.

Through the mid- to late-19th century, the house changed owners at least twice. As the area’s summer estates were sold off and parceled out and Yorkville became more urbanized, the house fell into disrepair.

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In 1894, the city took possession of Gracie’s house and built East End Park—now Carl Schurz Park—around it. The dwelling was home to the Museum of the City of New York from 1923 to 1936, when the museum decamped to its current location on Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street.

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It was Parks Commissioner Robert Moses who suggested revamping the house and turning it into the official residence of New York City’s mayors.

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Gracie Mansion, as it’s known to New Yorkers, is probably the city’s best-known summer house. Once a country retreat for one of New York’s richest men, it now serves as the designated home for city mayors since Fiorello LaGuardia was in office…and sadly is hard to see behind an ugly tall fence.

[Top photo: New-York Historical Society, 1923; second image: Wikipedia; third image: New-York Historical Society, 1923; fourth image NYPL, late 19th century; fifth image: New-York Historical Society, 1914; sixth image: New-York Historical Society, 1923; seventh image: Wikipedia; eighth image: New-York Historical Society, 1923]

The factories of Queens sparking to life in 1910

Born in Dublin and educated in Paris, Aloysius C. O’Kelly was a turn of the century painter whose body of work reflects time spent in Europe, Ireland, and England.

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But he spent time in New York, too, where he captured the congestion and manufacturing happening on the Queens side of the new Queensboro Bridge in “Tugboats in the East River, New York.”

“The East River, circa 1910, stands apart as one of O’Kelly’s few industrial New York landscapes,” writes Heritage Auctions, where the painting is up for sale.

“Shaping the composition is the dramatic cantilever Queensboro Bridge connecting Manhattan and Long Island, considered an engineering marvel at its completion in 1909. Here, the viewer looks north from the East River toward Queens, with its dense cluster of factories and warehouses sparking to life in the early morning haze.”

The stunning first white brick apartment house

New York City has about 140 white brick apartment houses. (Seems like the number should be higher, right?)

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But these residences dating back to the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—with their glazed facades that tend to look gray and grimy—don’t always get a lot of love.

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The exception to the rule is magnificent Manhattan House, considered to be New York’s first white brick building.

[image error]Spanning East 66th Street from Second to Third Avenues, Manhattan House opened in 1951 in a city undergoing a building boom to meet the housing needs of its 7.8 million residents.

Its 21 stories quickly filled with renters who eschewed the limestone and red brick buildings of old in favor of sleek, European Modernist-inspired design—which included “large windows and projecting balconies, as well as landscaped driveways and a block-long rear garden,” stated the Guide to New York City Landmarks.

From its earliest days, Manhattan House has had an aura of luxury. But its origins were more humble.

[image error]It was built in the shadow of the Third Avenue El (above, in 1952) by the New York Life Insurance Company, replacing a former car barn.

Because insurance companies at the time were “only allowed to invest in limited-revenue rentals,” according to 2015 article in Observer, Manhattan House wasn’t built with all of the trappings of a luxury building. 

“The complex had a wing of maid’s rooms, but no central air,” stated The Observer, adding that the ceilings were only nine and half feet high, as opposed to the 10-foot ceilings in more posh residences.

Of course, many of the amenities designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft (who liked his creation so much, he moved in) were pretty sweet, like wood-burning fireplaces and air pressure in the halls that made it less likely cooking odors would waft into another apartment.

[image error]“A private garden spanned the property’s length (the second-largest private garden in the city after Gramercy Park) and the complex’s layout—five towers arranged in a cruciform shape along a shared central lobby—provided a sense of airy continuity while ensuring that the interiors never felt cold or cavernous,” wrote Observer.

Rather than middle class residents, Observer noted that “Manhattan House attracted eminent architects, designers, ad execs, prominent journalists, musicians, and assorted culturati.” Grace Kelly was an early resident, as were Benny Goodman, Jackie Robinson, and Frank Hardart—of Horn & Hardart Automat fame.

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Making Manhattan House even more of a showstopper is the strip of land with a stone wall in the middle of 66th Street. It’s something of a moat, a demarcation line separating the building from the rest of the cityscape.

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Throughout the decades, Manhattan House has preserved its pedigree. One major change happened in 2005: a condo conversion that took 10 years to complete.

Perhaps the fact that the building was landmarked in 2007 adds to its appeal, and price tag. This airy and lovely apartment is going for $12 million.

[Top image: MCNY 2010.7.1.9773; third image: MCNY 2013.3.2.2344; fourth image: MCNY X2010.7.1.9812; sixth image: X2010.7.1.10115]

The 1955 plan to get rid of Central Park’s Ramble

Since Central Park opened in 1859, city officials have occasionally tried to tinker with its original intent—which was to replicate the woods and pastures of nature for industry-choked New Yorkers in need of R&R.

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Among the plans that luckily never came to pass: a racetrack, a cemetery for the city’s “distinguished dead,” a 1,000-seat theater, building lots from parcels of park space, even pavement replacing the grass at the lower end of the park. And these are just the ideas proposed before 1920!

[image error]But one of the weirdest plans in Central Park’s history hit the headlines in 1955: bulldozing part of Central Park’s Ramble (below, in 1900) and turning it into an indoor/outdoor senior citizens center.

The proposal meant fencing off 14 of the Ramble’s 33 acres, putting up a building with a parking lot, and also constructing an outdoor activities area, which would include croquet and shuffleboard courts behind a fence.

[image error]Who came up with this one? Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, aka the “master builder” of the 20th century city, who took charge of the parks in 1933.

In his 27 years as parks czar, Mose fundamentally changed Central Park. In the 1930s, he built 20 playgrounds and created baseball fields—going against co-designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s original prohibition of play areas, which they felt interfered with the natural landscape their Greensward plan called for.

[image error]Moses also restored and preserved sections of the park, including the zoo, and his overall stewardship of the “lungs of New York” and other city agencies is still being debated.

But back to the Ramble. The idea of destroying “the dense maze of meandering paths through rocky outcrops and lush vegetation” that was one of the earliest parts of the park caused an outcry, recalled The New York Preservation Archive Project (NYPAP).

One group of critics: birdwatchers, among them “Robert Cushman Murphy, former curator at the American Museum of Natural History’s Department of Birds,” stated NYPAP. “The Ramble, he argued, was ‘one of the park’s most important bird sanctuaries,’ which the new facility threatened to destroy.”

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Moses countered that the new facility wouldn’t impede bird watching, and in fact it would be safer to have a senior center there due to the growing threat of being mugged or assaulted in the Ramble, according to one newspaper columnist.

[image error]New Yorkers voiced their opinions in the papers. “In a Moses park, everybody must do something—row a boat, ride a horse, play shuffleboard or checkers,” commented one East Side resident. “The Ramble is a place to just sit quietly and look at the trees, but Moses doesn’t understand that.”

Contemporary historians detect anti-gay bias in Moses’ plan.

“In the 1920s they called the open lawn at the northern end of the Ramble the ‘fruited plain,'” wrote Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar in The Park and the People. The proposal may have been driven in part because “the Ramble was considered a gathering place for ‘anti-social’ persons,” the stated.

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Because of the uproar, Moses backed down. The shuffleboard and croquet courts were never built, and the Ramble remains just the way Olmsted wanted it: a “wild garden” for getting lost in the restorative powers of the natural world (above, 1865).

[Second image: Medium; third image: MCNY X2010.11.1419; third image: New York Times headline, 1955; sixth image: MCNY 94.64.14]

A vintage neon garage sign lights East 76th Street

Fellow fans of New York City in gorgeous neon: feast your eyes on this vertical vintage beauty on quiet East 76th Street between First and Second Avenues.

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The glowing sign tells us that the blond-brick garage is open to “transients.” That must mean short-term parkers, but it’s a word you don’t see on city garages anymore.

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I don’t know how old the sign is. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s almost as old as the garage, which dates to 1930.

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This might be part of the garage, in a 1940 tax photo. It’s on 76th Street but the building number is slightly off…possibly a typo? The smaller sign is to tiny to read.

[Third photo: Department of Records and Information Services]