Esther Crain's Blog, page 82

This Upper East Side school still has boot scrapers

It’s hard not to be charmed by New York’s turn of the century schoolhouses—those handsome buildings with oversize windows and proud entryways.

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One of my favorites is PS 158 in Yorkville on 77th Street (above in 1920). The cross streets on the school’s facade still say “Avenue A,” the old name for York Avenue. It’s a wonderful anachronism.

But there’s another old New York relic at the school’s side entrances: boot scrapers.

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Boot scrapers were a sanitary necessity in the muddy city without paved streets. How else could you remove from your boots the dirt, manure, and garbage found all over New York roads until late in the 19th century?

[image error]You can still find boot scrapers on the iron railings on front stoops of 19th century brownstones and townhouses. (At left, a boot scraper on a Morton Street walkup.)

Some are plain and functional, others decorative and unique, like the boot scrapers below on West 67th Street, at a former home for Swiss immigrants.

[image error]Though houses and public buildings like churches had (and some still have) boot scrapers, I’ve never seen them at the doors of a city schoolhouse. I don’t know if these boot scrapers as old as the school itself, but it’s hard to imagine administrators installing them in the last half century or so.

If the kids at what’s now called PS 158 Bayard Taylor Elementary School actually use them, it must be the most hygienic school in Manhattan.

[Top photo: NYPL Digital Collection]

A 1929 luxury residence displays 2020’s best sign

When the luxury apartment building at 325 East 57th was completed in 1929, I wonder if any of the original tenants ever thought a handmade sign and two American flags would be hanging off the elegant canopy entrance.

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But in the era of COVID-19, the people living in this building decided they had something to say. Think of it as the silent version of the nightly 7 p.m. cheer for all the New Yorkers working through the pandemic.

Ghost buildings standing out in the desolate city

There’s something about New York right now, with its (mostly) emptied streets and deserted sidewalks, that makes the phantom buildings of an earlier Gotham come out of hiding.

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You know these phantom tenements and walkups—their faded outlines tend to reappear at construction sites, giving us a glimpse of the low-rise city of another era.

Sometimes they’re a longtime ghostly imprint overlooking the empty lot left behind when the building was torn down—like the one above on East 45th Street, with its distinctive chimney.

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This one above, on Lafayette Street, is another unusual one, perhaps it’s the ghost of a Federal-style house from the first half of the 19th century, when many of these little homes were built (and still survive) in Lower Manhattan.

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Here’s another stubby building at the corner of Lafayette and Bleecker, its chimney just visible against the lovely and much taller Bayard-Condict Building, constructed in 1899.

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What will take the place of this low-rise walkup on York Avenue and 86th Street, old enough to have been dwarfed by century-old tenements?

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This phantom building down at Hudson Yards might be gone by now. The building it left its outline on may have met the bulldozer, or a shiny new tower is obscuring it once again.

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The slight slope to the top floor of this outline makes me think it was once a stylish brownstone or rowhouse, probably one in a group built in the late 19th century on a block in Midtown East.

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Finally, on East 57th Street is this little guy, likely a 19th century apparition clinging to a more modern apartment building while haunting the bright busy Whole Foods at street level.

The walled-in settlement house by the East River

You can see one side of it from the FDR Drive at 76th Street. High above the roadway overlooking the East River is a Georgian-style red brick building and what must have been an entrance with a faded plaque above it.

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Squint and you can make out what it says: East Side House Settlement.

Settlement Houses began popping up in New York City in the 1890s and early 1900s. Born out of the benevolence movement of the Gilded Age, they were built by social reformers who “settled” into a poor or working-class community, launching a home base where the community could go take advantage of classes, recreational activities, and cultural offerings.

[image error]Many of New York’s settlement houses were built in Lower Manhattan. The East Side Settlement House (as it was known early on) got its start in 1891, founded by a lawyer, Everett Wheeler, according to the house’s web page.

Perhaps Wheeler saw the need for a settlement house in Yorkville, which was becoming a dense tenement neighborhood for a new wave of German immigrants, along with newcomers from Hungary and today’s Czech Republic.

The first house for the East Side Settlement House was an old clapboard house (below).

[image error]The one still standing today opened in 1903, privately funded by wealthy New Yorkers who hoped the facility would become a “contagion of good morals,” according to a New-York Tribune article covering the opening day ceremony. (Below, in 1903)

To spread those good morals, the house had separate “clubrooms” for boys and girls, an assembly room, a cooking skill with gas ranges, two gyms (one for men and one for boys), a billiards room, and various other rooms for events.

It must have been an inspiring place in the first half of the 20th century, with John Jay Park opening next door, along with a public bathhouse and then an outdoor public swimming pool in the 1940s.

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But as the century went on, the house’s days were numbered, especially as Yorkville changed and the East Side (FDR) Drive and industry (below, in 1926) obstructed river access. In 1963, the East Side Settlement House relocated to the South Bronx, where it remains today.

“Its genteel Georgian building, perched on a river-lapped greensward, had been battered and bruised by decades of hard use and imprisoned by the East River Drive, later F. D. R. Drive, which gobbled up Exterior Street in the 1940s,” wrote Christopher Gray in the New York Times in 2012.

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The Town School took it over, and in the 1980s a towering apartment building hemmed the former settlement house in, blocking its facade.

“Now part of the old south-facing Georgian facade survives within a Town School hallway, and part of an old factory is visible in the auditorium,” explained Gray. What remains of the facade faces east, between the apartment tower and a new Town School wing to the north.”

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But you can still catch a glimpse of part of the settlement house, with 1891 and 1903 carved into the side (above)—a remnant of the city’s progressive movement and a very different Yorkville.

[Third image: East Side House Settlement; fourth image: New-York Tribune; fifth image: NYPL Digital Collection]

A yellow fever outbreak made Greenwich Village

Epidemics can shape the way a city develops. And it was an outbreak of a lethal disease that helped create the Greenwich Village that’s been part of the larger city since the 1820s.

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In the 17th century, the village of Greenwich was a mostly rural suburb of farms and estates (below, Aaron Burr’s home, Richmond Hill) along the Hudson River a few miles from the city center. (Seen here in a 1766 map, use link to zoom in.)

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Periodic outbreaks of yellow fever (among other deadly illnesses) in the lower city—in many spots a filthy place of sewage, stagnant water, and garbage-eating hogs—would cause residents with means to leave, at least for the summer.

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“Successive waves of yellow fever drove many New Yorkers to summertime residences in the countryside,” wrote John Strausbaugh in The Village: A History of Greenwich Village. (Another fine home, above, and the oldest house in the Village, at left, from 1799.) Many decamped to Greenwich, “a refuge from pestilence with its former swampland drained and its air fresh.”

[image error]But it was the especially pernicious yellow fever epidemic of 1822 that forced thousands to flee the city center for good and recreate their lives in Greenwich permanently, which only five years earlier had installed water mains and sewers.

“Many New Yorkers who had not evacuated during the previous epidemics did so during this final rampant pandemic, states a writer at creatingdigitalhistory.

[image error]“As residents moved to Greenwich Village, they built homes and businesses in attempt to replicate their downtown lifestyles. In essence, they created a makeshift city center that has since evolved into the Greenwich Village of today.”

The hurry to leave the main city was noted by Greenwich residents. “Our city presented the appearance of a town besieged,” wrote the former secretary of the city’s Board of Health in 1822, according to Anna Alice Chapin in Greenwich Village. “From daybreak till night one line of carts, containing boxes, merchandise, and effects were seen moving towards ‘Greenwich Village’ and the upper parts of the city.”

[image error]Another resident recalled the mass exodus and influx like this: “The town fairly exploded…and went flying beyond its bond as though the pestilence had been a burning mine.” (Above right, a house on Bedford Street, circa 1820s.)

Buildings went up in Greenwich fast. “Temporary stores and offices were erecting, and on the (ensuing day) Sunday, carts were in motion, and the saw and hammer busily at work,” according to Chapin.

A post office, customs house, and newspaper offices sprang up in the formerly sleepy village. “Bank Street got its name in this way, the city banks transferring their business tither literally overnight, ready to do business in the morning,” wrote Chapin.

[image error]“Stores of rough boards were constructed in a day,” recalled Charles Haynes Haswell in Reminisces of an Octogenarian of the City of New York. With the lower city all but deserted, ferries from Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Hoboken began docking up the Hudson at Greenwich, wrote Haswell.

A growing neighborhood needs a church, and St. Luke’s, still on Hudson Street, also went up at about this time. St. Luke’s was not by accident named for Saint Luke—the patron saint of physicians and surgeons. (Above left, in 1828)

In total, 388 people died in the yellow fever outbreak, according to Haswell. Many of those victims from the lower city were buried beneath Washington Square, which was the far-away potter’s field of New York in the early 1820s.

By the end of 1825, Greenwich Village now was filled with handsome wood and brick houses. (Above right, on Van Dam Street.) “Between 1825 and 1825, the population of the Village doubled,” wrote Strausburgh. By 1850, it had doubled again.

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“Shrewd speculators subdivided farms, leveled hills, rerouted and buried Minetta Brook, and undertook landfill projects,” according to the Greenwich Village Society of Historical Preservation. “Blocks of neat row houses built in the prevailing Federal style soon accommodated middle-class merchants and tradesmen.

This sleepy hamlet (which thankfully kept some of its own original street grid) was no longer separate from the city—it became a part of the city. (Above in an 1831 map). Would it have been subsumed by the city if the yellow fever epidemic never happened? Almost certainly. But the outbreak rushed it into joining Gotham, going from countryside to urbanized in a hurry.

[First through third images: NYPL Digital Collection; fifth and sixth images: NYPL Digital Collection; Eighth image: NYPL Digital Collection]

The pioneering clinic of NYC’s first ‘lady doctor’

[image error]Elizabeth Blackwell wasn’t just New York City’s first female medical doctor—she was the first woman to practice medicine in the entire country.

But mid-19th century Gotham is where she decided to open a pioneering dispensary and then an infirmary, and the growing city benefited enormously.

Born in England in 1821 and raised in Cincinnati, Blackwell first became a teacher. She felt a strong calling toward medicine, however, especially after she watched a female friend die of a cancer of the reproductive organs.

“If I could have been treated by a lady doctor, my worst sufferings would have been spared me,” the friend told her, an anecdote Blackwell included in her 1895 autobiography.

[image error]In 1847, she applied to 20 medical colleges, all of which denied her admission.

Of course, the idea of a “lady doctor” was ridiculous at the time. A woman couldn’t be a doctor because studying anatomy—specifically of the reproductive system—could upset her morals, wrote Leo Trachtenburg in an article about Blackwell in City Journal in 2000.

Finally, one school did agree to take her: Geneva Medical College in upstate New York. (At left, an illustration of Blackwell in anatomy class.)

After postgraduate studies in Paris, she settled in New York City—which was then a city of elites, a merchant class, and an ever-growing population of poor people, including many who came to the city during the first wave of Irish and German immigration.

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Blackwell opened an office at 44 University Place and put an ad in the New-York Tribune (above), but she had few patients, as people were not interested in receiving medical care from a woman, with some being hostile. “My pecuniary situation was a constant source of anxiety,” she recalled in her autobiography. She also admitted to being deeply lonely.

[image error]The 1850s proved to be a turning point for Blackwell.

“Her career instead took the direction it was to have for the rest of her life: the promotion of hygiene and preventive medicine among both lay persons and professionals and the promotion of medical education and opportunities for women physicians,” states a National Institutes of Medicine page.

Reaching out to wealthy and notable New Yorkers for financial backing, she opened a dispensary on East Seventh Street near Tompkins Square Park in 1853.

Unlike other dispensaries in the city that served all poor residents in a given ward, this one exclusively treated the women and children of the 11th Ward.

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Back then, the ward was populated by German immigrants, many hungry and desperately ill. “The design of this institution is to give to poor women an opportunity of consulting physicians of their own sex,” she wrote.

[image error]In 1856, Blackwell—along with her newly minted physician sister, Emily Blackwell, and another female doctor opened The New York Infirmary for Women and Children at 64 Bleecker Street. (A plaque, below left, marks the site today.)

It would be the first female-run hospital in the city. A house once occupied by members of the Roosevelt family was renovated and outfitted with a maternity center and surgical ward.

“In addition to the usual departments of hospital and dispensary practice, which included the visiting of poor patients at their own homes, we established a sanitary visitor,” wrote Blackwell. This would be “one of our assistant physicians, whose special duty it was to give simple, practical instruction to poor mothers on the management of infants and the preservation of the health of their families.”

[image error]Considering the conditions many families lived in—shut off in dark, unventilated tenements where disease easily spread and infants didn’t often make it to their first birthday—this information was vital.

“Blackwell aimed to use the Infirmary not only to treat needy patients but also to train women doctors and nurses, so that other women could follow in her path more easily,” wrote Trachtenberg. “The Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary officially opened at 126 Second Avenue in November 1868.”

[image error]While Blackwell’s infirmary continued to operate and fulfill its mission of treating women and children and training women for medical professions, Blackwell herself left New York in the 1860s. She spent the rest of her life in England, famous for her medical lectures and books.

She died in 1910. The infirmary she launched before the Civil War moved to Stuyvesant Square (above right), where it remained for 90 years, according to Town & Village, before moving into a new building in the 1950s. After a series of mergers it became part of today’s New York Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital.

[First image: Biography.com; second image: New-York Presbyterian; third image: New-York Tribune; fourth image: NYPL digital collection; fifth image: New-York Presbyterian; sixth image: King’s Handbook of New York City 1892 via Wikipedia; seventh image: readtheplaque.com; eighth image, Wikipedia]

What life was like in a Manhattan “fever nest”

New Yorkers in the 19th century came up with some very descriptive slang names for poor, crowded neighborhoods where disease outbreaks tended to happen.

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One is a “lung block,” or an entire street with a high number of residents living with the “white plague”—aka tuberculosis.

Another is a “fever nest,” seen in the image above. It’s unclear if the illustration depicts East 32nd Street, possibly near the shantytown called Dutch Hill, or West 32nd Street, which could have been the upper end of the Tenderloin, Gilded Age New York’s vice district.

When was this illustration of a fever nest done? Based on the wide skirts the women are wearing, the unpaved road, and the scavenging pig in the foreground, I’d guess it depicts the 1860s—a decade racked by outbreaks of cholera and other illnesses spread via unsanitary conditions.

[Image: CUNY Graduate Center]

Cholera’s grim warning for tenement landlords

When New York’s first cholera epidemic hit in 1832 and killed 3,515 people (out of a population of 250,000), the poor took the blame.

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“Many city officials implicated the residents of the poorest neighborhoods for contracting cholera, blaming their weak character, instead of viewing the epidemic as a public health problem,” stated Anne Garner, in an online article from the New York Academy of Medicine in 2015.

Cholera struck again in 1849, but by the time the next outbreak happened in 1866, cholera was better understood to be a contagious disease transmitted via contaminated water and other unsanitary conditions.

This 1866 illustration from Harper’s Weekly pins the blame on a different target: the landlords of New York’s tenements—substandard buildings that in the absence of strong housing laws often lacked ventilation and running water and were perfect breeding grounds for cholera.

A smallpox victim’s mummified body resurfaces

Construction workers operating a backhoe found her first. The workers were in Elmhurst, Queens, in an excavation pit building a new apartment complex.

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They “assumed they had hit a pipe,” explained the New York Post. “But when the claws of the backhoe emerged from the ground, it was dragging a body clothed in a white gown and knee-high socks.”

Because the body, determined to be that of an African-American woman, was so well preserved, a forensic medical examiner assumed she was a recent homicide victim.

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But as Scott Warnasch, a forensic archeologist from the city medical examiner’s office, investigated what was deemed a crime scene, he noticed dozens of metal fragments in the ground.

The fragments were identified as part of an iron coffin (above ad, from the Brooklyn Eagle) that had housed the woman’s remains and kept them eerily preserved in airtight conditions…until the backhoe smashed it open, according to Live Science.

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Who was this woman, and how did she die? Her burial clothes held clues, appearing to be from the 19th century. The iron coffin also helped narrow things down; these were only produced in the mid-19th century, wrote LiveScience in 2018.

And there was something else: investigators found what looked like smallpox marks on her forehead and chest. Nineteenth century New York was no stranger to smallpox outbreaks. Though a vaccine had been developed, the virus killed a quarter of its victims and left survivors pockmarked or blind, wrote The New York Times in 2003.

[image error]The disease was so feared, a Smallpox Hospital was opened on Blackwell’s Island in 1856 (above).

How the woman died became clear…but still, who was she? Tests determined she was between 25 and 35 years old. She was buried in a section of Queens that had a free black community at the time, so Warnasch turned to the 1850 census.

The name Martha Peterson seemed to fit. “She would have been 26 in 1850, probably died around 1851 and lived in the household of William Raymond, a partner in the iron-coffin maker Fisk & Raymond,” Warnasch told the New York Post in 2018.

The discovery of Martha Peterson and the effort that went into identifying her was captured in a PBS show: “Secrets of the Dead: The Woman in the Iron Coffin.“

She was given a new burial at Flushing Cemetery by congregants of the Saint Mark African Methodist Episcopal Church in Jackson Heights in 2011—a fitting end to the story of a resurfaced body that served as a reminder of New York’s deadly disease outbreaks of the past.

[Top image: From the preview for Secrets of the Dead: The Woman in the Iron Coffin”; second image: Brooklyn Eagle; third image: NYPL; fourth image: Brooklyn Star, 1858]

New York in 2020 feels like Edward Hopper’s city

The exterior city is what unsettles you first. Streets and sidewalks are quiet, lifeless. You see other people going in and out of shops or walking the dog, yet whenever you decide to get some air, six feet away from the occasional passerby, you feel like you’re the only person in all of New York.

(“Morning Sun,” 1952)

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Then there’s the interior isolation. So much time spent in your own home (or newly transformed home office) kicks up a sense of alienation from the city that always energized you.

(“Office in a Small City,” 1953)

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Who understood more about the disconnection and dehumanization bred by modern life in New York City than Edward Hopper?

(“Approaching a City,” 1946)

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It’s the theme of so many of his urbanscapes: the lone man in his office, walled in behind glass and concrete; a train tunnel looking like a abyss. Depictions of roads and trains feel frozen and dehumanized.

(“From Williamsburg Bridge,” 1928)

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Okay, maybe it’s not quite that eerie and still in New York City right now, at least not every moment. We have the other members of our households to break the isolation, and time with screens can make us feel connected again.

But in these days of social distancing and self-isolation, it’s pretty normal feel in your bones what Edward Hopper captured—especially in these four paintings.