This East Village tenement is all that’s left of a row of colorful shops made famous by a 1937 photo
What caught my eye first during a recent walk down Third Avenue in the East Village was the ghost building outline with the peaked roof.
The outline is imprinted on the north side of a circa-1886 five-story tenement—all that remains after the six other buildings between 10th and 11th Streets were reduced to rubble earlier this year.
But as often happens when New York City buildings meet the bulldozer, what’s left behind sparks curiosity. The unusual roofline outline sent me into photo archives searching for a previous building that would match it—a Federal-style early 1800s dwelling, perhaps, or a church.
I didn’t turn up anything about the roofline; the building next door, constructed before 1850, had been flattened and modernized, with no trace of an original photo to compare.
But I did find that the corner tenement at 48 Third Avenue marked the beginning of a row of noteworthy shops built mostly in the later 19th century and made famous as the subject of one of the modern era’s most accomplished photographers.
“Pawn Shop, 48 Third Avenue” (above) was taken in 1937 by Berenice Abbott, that wonderful documentarian of a changing midcentury New York City. It’s a vivacious image of an ordinary commercial district (under the Third Avenue El, as seen from the below photo not by Abbott) of what was then considered part of the Lower East Side.
The Stuyvesant Curiosity Shop, bursting at the seams to the point where some merchandise (shotguns, rifles, telescopes) is placed in outside display cases, occupies the corner tenement, number 48 (aka, 95 East 10th Street).
A pawn shop is next at 50 Third Avenue, followed by Sigmund Klein’s Fat Men’s Shop. As offensive as the sign might be by today’s standards, it might have helped Klein stay in business as long as he did—from 1895 until the 1970s, per a Village Preservation post.
Beyond the Fat Men’s Shop I see a barber pole (later replaced or obscured by the restaurants in the above photo from 1940), and then a sign for an art supplies shop—an early hint that this corner would become ground zero of an artistic movement known as the New York School, which emerged in the 1940s and 1950s.
“If you read about the heroic age of the New York School in painting, the 1940s and 1950s, you will repeatedly see mention of the ‘Tenth Street artists,’ the ‘Tenth Street galleries,’ and the ‘Tenth Street scene,'” stated Village Preservation in a 2020 post.
“Though the Tenth Street in question was but a short block between Third and Fourth Avenues, it was the epicenter of the New York art world for a decade.” The March Gallery opened at 48 Third Avenue and featured the work of Elaine de Kooning, per Village Preservation.
Amazingly, that art supply shop—New York Central Art Supply—stayed in business for more than a century after its 1905 founding, giving up the ghost at 62 Third Avenue in 2016.
48 Third Avenue served as a grocery store in the early 1900s run by a John Hoops, but by the Depression had transformed into the kind of second-hand curiosity shop that could be seen all along down and out areas of Manhattan, like the Bowery, and by extension Third Avenue.
Abbott captured images of other curiosity shops and pawn shops across Manhattan, and what she saw in them is a mystery—maybe the jumble of signs peddling odd and unusual merchandise, plus the human desperation that usually surrounds these low-rent forms of commerce.
Though the rest of this historic row is gone, the tenement at Number 48, with its lacy terra cotta designs under the cornice and Romanesque top floor windows, is still with us, a totem of a New York that keeps changing into the 21st century.
[Second image: Artsy; third image: NYPL Digital Collections; fourth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; fifth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]
