Esther Crain's Blog, page 97

Urban Harlem surrounds a 19th century mansion

When the Watt-Pinkney mansion was built on a small hill in early 19th century Harlem, this white beauty with the mansard roof and two-story columns was part of a vast colonial-era farm owned by John De Lancey.

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This was the countryside, of course. The city of New York barely extended past Houston Street at the time.

The farm grew corn and potatoes, and the little hill sloped down to a pasture, which bordered the salt marshes of the Harlem River.

[image error]Changes came as the 19th century went on. The house was moved to the bottom of the hill so the city could lay out Seventh Avenue and 139th Street.

Elevated trains were extended to Harlem, bringing new residents, commerce, and industry. Parts of the “ancient manor,” as it was called by one newspaper, were carved up and sold off.

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The salt marshes were filled in. By the early 1900s, apartment buildings began encircling the estate, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and 139th and 140th Streets.

[image error]This was no abandoned mansion, though. The sole remaining occupant of the house was Mary Goodwin Pinkney, who was in her 90s.

Pinkney was the stepdaughter of Archibald Watt, a Scottish immigrant who came to New York in the 1820s. He married Pinkney’s widowed mother, whose deceased husband came from a wealthy Maryland family.

Watt believed that one day, the entire city would span the island of Manhattan. So he bought as much property as he could, including the De Lancey farm and its mansion.

When the Panic of 1837 hit, the ambitious Watt ran into financial trouble.

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To help, Pinkney loaned him money from her inheritance, and in turn, “Watt taught her how to manage the estate,” the Times wrote in a 1908, “and at his death left her the whole of it, on condition that she would share it liberally with the other heirs.”

Watt died in 1843; Pinkey’s mother died in 1883. They and other Watts were buried in the family plot near the house.

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Pinkney herself never married. By 1900, she was the only immediate family member left.

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“In the old ‘White House’ she has spent her summers for half a century, growing vegetables for her own table on land so valuable that the price of a head of lettuce would probably amount to $5 or more if the interest on the investment were figured out,” wrote the New York Times in 1907.

[image error]When Pinkney died in 1908 in her late 90s, her death made headlines.

“For a number of years, Miss Pinkney was well known in the real estate business, having managed the large estate of her stepfather, Archibald Watt, after his death, and she became a noted figure in New York’s real estate development by her shrewd financing of her vast holdings.”

Within a few years, the heirs she was asked to share her fortune with put the property up for sale. The remains of family members buried in the Watt burial ground dug up and reinterred in Woodlawn Cemetery, where Pinkney was laid to rest as well.

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The estate sold fast to developers, and the house itself was gone in the 1920s—one of the last remnants of the remote village of Harlem before it was subsumed by New York City.

[Top photo: MCNY, 1910, x2010.11.6379; second image: painting of the Watt-Pinkney mansion, undated; third photo: MCNY, 1900, x2010.11.6380; fourth photo: MCNY, 1910, x2010.11.6359; fifth photo: MCNY, 1910, x2010.11.6358; sixth photo: MCNY, 1910, x2010.11.6383; seventh image: Los Angeles Times, 1908; sixth photo: MCNY, 1910, x2010.11.6361; eighth photo: MCNY, 1910, x2010.11.6377]

What’s left of a Greenwich Street boarding stable

The remains of New York’s horse and wagon past are all over Gotham’s side streets and outer edges, where delivery companies often owned stables to house their working horses.

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The far West Village still has many of the carriage houses and stables built in the neighborhood in the late 19th century, when the area was rougher and more working class.

[image error]One lovely example is this red brick and stone stable, built in 1893 at 704-706 Greenwich Street. It was used by various delivery firms who relied on horses and wagons (and later trucks) to pick up and drop off goods.

The “Boarding Stables” signs have faired pretty well over the decades.

It’s right at eye level for riders of the Ninth Avenue elevated, which used to run up Greenwich Street (below on the left side of the photo, in 1940).

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But the letters across the facade of the building (now apartments) are too faded for me to make sense of. Is “Greenwich” the word on the left?

[Second image: NYC Department of Records 1940 Tax Photo]

When “play streets” let New York kids run free

It’s unusual to see groups of kids playing in the streets of New York City anymore. (At least without an adult supervising.)

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But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with parents at work and tenements too crowded for game-playing anyway, kids were free to roam the cityscape—running around sidewalks, playing ball in the middle of the road, or just sitting on the curb, horsing around.

[image error]The street wasn’t a safe place to play, of course. Newspapers headlines of the era tell the stories of countless children being injured or killed by cars or horses.

A public playground movement was underway. But by the 1910s, only 30 had been opened, and not always in the poor neighborhoods that needed them most.

So park officials and the Police Athletic League came up with a novel alternative so popular, they still exist today: play streets.

[image error]“Every afternoon (except on Sundays), New York City’s play streets were closed to traffic so children without easy access to parks or playgrounds could have a safe space to run, play games and practice sports,” explains Thirteen.org, the website for Channel 13.

The first play street opened in July 1914 on Eldridge Street between Rivington and Delancey Streets. Signs were posted so motorists knew to drive elsewhere; vendors were shooed away.

[image error]“The Parks Department brought in two of their street pianos, and the Eldridge Street Settlement organized a folk dance festival—turning a block that normally bustled with commerce into a place for music, sport and recreation,” stated Thirteen.org.

Soon, play streets began popping up everywhere, with 29 more opening in Manhattan that year. In 1924, play streets came to the outer boroughs, too.

Clearly play streets were a lot of fun for kids. What could be better than running free across the block with your friends, without worrying if you’ll be crushed by horse hoofs or run over by a car?

But parks officials had different motives for opening play streets. One was to prevent kids from becoming criminals.

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“What would these children be doing if they were not playing in the street? Many of them would be learning to become criminals,” stated a 1915 New-York Tribune article, quoting a committee of officials.

“A boy must play, so must a girl. If it is made illegal for him to play the natural and pleasant games of childhood, he will substitute something else.”

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Another play streets goal was to solve what the Tribune called the “dance-hall problem.”

“Let boys and girls become accustomed to each other. Let them think of each other as playmates and not mysterious creatures whom they may not know until they grow older, and foolish and sentimental, and much of [the] vice problem will be solved,” the newspaper quoted Charles Liebler, the organizer of the original play streets.

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Whether the “vice problem” was solved or not, play streets and the street games kids played are memorialized in this plaque on a Mulberry Street fence.

[Top photo: The Atlantic; second photo: MCNY, 1900, 90.13.2.250; third photo: MCNY, 1908, 93.1.1.3171; fourth photo: MCNY 96.184.197; fifth image: NYPL 1936; sixth photo: MCNY, 1935, 43.131.11.183]

The man in a concrete wall in the tenement city

Edward Hopper spent four decades chronicling the isolation of modern urban life: people unconnected to each other in a cafe, a lone person on an elevated train, and building facades almost empty of humanity.

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Yet perhaps none of his paintings are as haunting as “Office in a Small City,” from 1953. Here, Hopper gives us a symbolic everyman with his shirtsleeves rolled up—sitting at a desk inside an office with windows so large it almost resembles a zoo exhibit.

He’s gazing past the tenement tops across the street, ostensibly imagining a bigger life for himself, one not confined by the low-rise cityscape he’s part of right now.

“Reprising one of his signature subjects—a solitary figure, physically and emotionally detached from his surroundings and other people—it was described by the artist’s wife as ‘the man in concrete wall,'” explains the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has the painting in its collection.

The ruins of an 1848 church on East 12th Street

You can see it from Fourth Avenue as you approach East 12th Street: a weathered gray stone facade with enormous arched stained glass windows topped by a tower.

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It all feels right out of the Middle Ages. But when you get closer, something’s amiss—the rest of the church is missing.

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Instead, there’s a 26-story dorm built by New York University, with a couple of benches on the other side of the thin facade, where the sanctuary of the church should be.

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The story of this shell of a church on a tidy East Village block begins in 1848, when the original church, the Twelfth Street Baptist Church, was constructed, according to David W. Dunlop’s 2004 book, From Abyssinian to Zion.

[image error]The church changed hands quickly. By 1854 it was Temple Emanu-El, which soon moved uptown. In the 1860s, it became the new home of St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church.

Congregants at St. Ann’s razed the original church building except for the facade and tower. They commissioned architect Napoleon Le Brun to construct a Gothic church sanctuary stretching all the way to 11th Street, which was dedicated in 1871, wrote Dunlop.

For decades, St. Ann’s remained a Roman Catholic church and school. (At left, in 1914; Below, in 1975)

[image error]But the parish began dwindling in the second half of the 20th century. In 1983, St. Ann’s became St. Ann’s Armenian Catholic Cathedral.

Twenty years later, the Archdiocese of New York announced that St. Ann’s was closing for good. A developer then bought the building with plans to bulldoze it and put up a dorm.

Despite an outcry from preservationists and neighborhood residents who didn’t want to see the lovely church turned into a pile of rocks, St. Ann’s was torn down in 2005 (along with an 1840s rectory building next door).

In something of a victory for the city, the developer left the slender 1848 facade and tower.

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They stand disembodied from their sanctuary and strangely unconnected to the dorm behind it…and the street they’ve called home for 171 years.

[Fourth photo: MCNY X2010.11.5283; Fifth Photo: MCNY 2013.3.2.1560]

A mystery phone exchange on an East Village sign

How long has Abetta Boiler & Welding Service been building and repairing the infrastructure of New York City?

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At least since 1957, according to a listing in the Greater New York Industrial Directory.

[image error]And that makes sense, based on the old two-letter phone exchange that’s still on the company sign over a garage on East First Street in the East Village.

GR for Gramercy? Greenwich? It’s hard to know, as it’s been more than 50 years since the two-letter exchanges were phased out in favor of digits.

It’s getting harder to spot some of these old exchanges on signs and storefronts, but the Abetta sign stands as a reminder of what phone numbers used to look like in New York.

The artwork on the garage door is an appropriate ode to an old-school Manhattan business, too.

The best old-school butcher sign on Ninth Avenue

You don’t have to be a meat eater to appreciate the old-style store signs at Esposito, a meat market at Ninth Avenue and 38th Street that’s been making sausage and selling cold cuts since 1932.

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Yet there’s something a little unusual on the wholesale “Giovanni Esposito & Sons” sign down a bit on 38th Street.

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I’ve seen similar store signs at other Italian specialty food shops that advertise “Italian” and “American.” But I’ve never seen one that added “French” to it!

A walk down the longest true alley in Manhattan

[image error]New York was never the kind of city that built alleyways behind its buildings.

As Manhattan grew in the 18th century, real estate was deemed too valuable to waste on alleys. Why not stack buildings behind each other and make more money, right?

That’s likely why new alleys were generally excluded from the Commissioners’ Plan, the 1811 street grid that mapped out the future city plan of the entire island.

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Alleys that already existed on city maps were clustered downtown. Some of these still survive, like Exchange Alley, a sliver connecting Trinity Place and Broadway. There’s also Mechanics Alley, running two blocks alongside the Manhattan Bridge approach.

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But one new alley was fully laid out and named six years after the street grid plan: Cortlandt Alley.

Today, this shadowy and atmospheric lane runs three blocks from Franklin Street to Canal Street, earning the title of the longest true alley in Manhattan.

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“In 1817. John Jay, Peter Jay Munro, and Gordon S. Mumford laid out the alley through their property between White and Canal Streets,” states the 1992 report designating the east side of Tribeca a historic district. The men named it after Jacubus Van Cortlandt, a descendant of the landowning Dutch colonial family.

It’s hard to see it on this 1828 map, but you can just make out “Cortlandt” or “Cortlandt’s” on the slender lane between Broadway and Elm Streets.

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The part of Cortlandt Alley south of White Street, “was laid out separately and is 25 feet closer to Broadway,” according to the report. “Both parts of the alley were paved in the early 1820s.”

Cortlandt Alley almost extends four blocks—if you count one-block Benson Place, which lies just to the east on Franklin Street going south to Leonard Street.

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A walk down Cortlandt Alley feels like entering a portal into a much earlier New York.

Nothing survives from the post-colonial city, unfortunately. This grimy lane with garbage bags on the sidewalks is lined with turn of the 20th century dry goods warehouses that feature enormous windows, elaborate fire escapes, and impressive shutters.

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Bricked over windows and doorways are face the alley, too, as well as old-school graffiti. No wonder Cortlandt Alley is so popular for film shoots.

A ping pong club has a door here, as does the Mmuseumm, the smallest museum in the city and located in a converted elevator shaft. Cortlandt Alley at White Street was once home to the 1970s-era Mudd Club.

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“No dwelling house shall be erected thereon fronting on Cortlandt Alley,” a real estate article from The New York Times in 1859 read. That decree apparently changed, as luxury condos opened at number six.

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A lot has changed in New York since the alley came into existence 202 years ago. But you can still imagine it as it was in the early 1800s: paved with stones, surrounded by new dwellings built on the landfill covering Collect Pond, and used as a shortcut by merchants, workers, servants, sailors, immigrants, and other New Yorkers in the 19th century city.

A 1910 packing plant subsumed by Hudson Yards

For more than a century, the two-story building at 527-531 West 36th Street held its own with its neighbors in this once-industrial part of Manhattan—away from more traditional retail stores and apartment buildings in the far west 30s.

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It’s an usual survivor that looks a lot older than records reveal.

Apparently constructed by 1910 (though one 1902 newspaper article said it was supposed to have five stories), the brick building has large arched windows and ornamental trim on the second floor.

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One of its earliest occupants was a fruit packing plant; another business was Rohe and Brothers, a wholesale beef and pork provisions company.

It makes sense that Rohe operated here; West 36th Street is three blocks from what used to be known as Abattoir Place because of all the slaughterhouses that turned cattle brought to the West Side via rail or ferry into beef.

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A milk distributor and pasteurization company operated here in the 1940s. Soon the food packers and distributors were replaced by auto body businesses, like Steven and Francine’s, whose sign hangs on the building’s boarded-up second floor.

[image error]Recently, this humble holdout in the shadow of Hudson Yards’ steel and glass luxury towers was sold to Tishman Speyer for $20 million. The real estate developer plans to turn the site into a park in exchange for air rights for another office tower going up next door.

It’s one of the last remaining vestiges of the far west 30s (at the recently named “Hudson Boulevard”) on the fringes of Manhattan. But it won’t be here much longer.

[Second image: 1940 Tax Photo NYC Department of Records]

Desolation and isolation on the East River in 1909

Social realist painter George Bellows completed “Bridge, Blackwell’s Island,” in 1909, which is also the year of the opening of the Queensboro Bridge, as this span over the East River was called at the time.

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Like the East River waterfront, Blackwell’s Island (today’s Roosevelt Island) was to Bellows a place on the margin—where refuse, industry, and those who were edged out by 20th century urban life were relegated.

This look at the bridge almost devoid of people seems to say something about the desolation and isolation of the contemporary city.

Smokestacks belch, a tugboat speeds through the choppy river, a lone man not much bigger than a speck is tending to something on the dock—and four children shrouded in darkness peer across the water—perhaps contemplating the modern metropolis they’re part of.