The Brooklyn Bridge casts a mesmerizing magic spell over the city in this early 1900s painting

November 25, 2024

Since opening in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge has been captured in paintings, photographs, and illustrations by scores of artists, each rendering the Bridge’s beauty and power in their own way.

But it’s the poetic, enchanting Brooklyn Bridge depicted by Johann Berthelsen, which he titled “New York Skyline From the Brooklyn Navy Yard,” that I find most mesmerizing.

Born in Denmark the same year as the Bridge was completed, Berthelsen moved to the Midwest in 1890. He studied voice and became an opera singer, but after relocating to New York in the 1920s he decided to pursue painting. By the 1930s, he’d sold several works and was building a reputation as a powerful Impressionist painter.

I’m not sure when Berthelsen painted this nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge. Considering the heights of the Manhattan-side buildings and the electric lights almost twinkling from their many windows, I would guess the 1920s.

It’s a transfixing collage of color and light, just like New York at street level. I can’t take my eyes off the graceful, flowing bridge span that bisects the painting, separating the towering buildings, piers, and ship traffic from the heavens above.

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Posted in art, Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan | 8 Comments »

A Thanksgiving dinner menu from 1899, and the rise and fall of a legendary Downtown hotel

November 25, 2024

What was on the minds of the well-heeled New Yorkers who chose to celebrate Thanksgiving 1899 at the Broadway Central Hotel—a French Empire–style beauty on Broadway between West Third and Bond Streets?

Most likely the dinner menu, for one, which was loaded with French-inflected options worthy of a gluttonous holiday feast. Numerous starter courses included oysters, two soup options (cream of artichoke, mmm), and stuffed olives.

After the starters, it was time to order an entree. Which one to choose—the classic “Vermont” turkey with chestnut stuffing and cranberry sauce? Or perhaps something less Thanksgiving-ish, like the stewed terrapin, Baltimore style; Boston gosling and apple sauce; or broiled quail on toast with watercress.

Salads, cold meats (“home-made hog’s head cheese,” yum!), and vegetables would be served next, followed by the dessert and cheese courses. It stands to reason that no one staggered out of the dining room (one of three in the Broadway Central) at the end of the meal without a full stomach.

What else would diners be thinking that night? Many might have reflected on the hotel itself. An eight-story, 600-room hotel opened in 1870, the Broadway Central—known as the Grand Central until 1892—was long an opulent resort for Gilded Age New York’s political and business elite.

Diamond Jim Brady and theater stars were regulars as well, according to Village Preservation’s Off the Grid blog.

Some Thanksgiving guests may have recalled the spectacular crime that took place there 27 years earlier, a murder fueled by lust and greed in full view of the public.

“On Jan. 6, 1872, James Fisk Jr., a playboy financier who had helped milk the Erie Railroad into bankruptcy, was shot to death on the hotel’s staircase by Edward Stiles Stokes, his former partner,” recalled the New York Times in 2015. “The two men had fought in a bitter lawsuit, and Mr. Stokes had fallen in love with Mr. Fisk’s mistress, Josie Mansfield.”

What the 1899 Thanksgiving customers probably weren’t considering was how the hotel would fare in the 20th century—when the city’s power brokers followed the flow of commerce to Midtown, and the Broadway Central would begin its slow decline.

As the 1900s progressed, “the hotel was the scene of many weddings, and a few murders and suicides,” wrote the New York Times in the 2015 article. “As the years passed, it went through a series of owners and financial difficulties.”

“By the late 1960s, it had become one of the city’s largest welfare hotels. Six theaters, called the Mercer Arts Center, were built inside in hopes of perking up the place, and it was renamed the University Hotel, but it had severe structural problems.”

By the early 1970s, the hotel was at the center of controversy. Locals didn’t appreciate having a welfare hotel in the neighborhood, and New York Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz deemed it a “den of rape, dope, and murder,” per a 1973 article in New York Newsday.

And then it was gone. Around 5 p.m. on August 3, 1973, residents inside the hotel began hearing rumbling noises. Plaster fell from the ceiling, and the noises escalated. “It sounded like a rifle shot,” one resident told Newsday, “and then the whole structure collapsed.”

After years of neglect and structural damages, the center of this formerly fashionable hotel was reduced to a pile of rubble. Four residents died in the collapse, and about 300 others, many elderly and impoverished, lost their home. No one was ever charged criminally.

In its place now stands a New York University dormitory for law students. If that dorm is open this Thanksgiving, I doubt the dining hall will serve a meal quite as impressive as the Broadway Central did 125 years ago.

[Top image: via Reddit; second image: NYPL Digital Collections; third image: lawbookexchange.com; fourth image: AP via Staten Island Advance; fifth image: MCNY, x2011.34.239]

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Posted in Bars and restaurants, Disasters and crimes, Lower Manhattan, Politics | 20 Comments »

In praise of a Midtown Italian restaurant founded in 1944 and its wonderful old-school neon sign

November 18, 2024

There’s a lot to love about Patsy’s, the three-generation family-run restaurant celebrating its 80th year on the far off-Broadway, low-rise block of West 56th Street off Eighth Avenue.

This old-school Italian spot offers highly rated red sauce classics, old-school ambiance, and a connection to Frank Sinatra, who considered Patsy’s one of his favorite New York haunts (and in the early 1950s had the staff open one Thanksgiving, just because he wanted to have his holiday meal there).

Still, there’s one more thing that makes Patsy’s special, at least to me: its vintage neon signs.

Not only does “Patsy’s” light up in pink and “restaurant” glows green, but a vertical sign—also becoming a rarity in contemporary New York City—illuminates the night as well.

Oddly, this mini-restaurant row has a few other vertical signs, though no restaurant here is named D’Angelo. Which makes that one behind Patsy’s in the second photo something of a ghost sign—another fun find.

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Posted in Bars and restaurants, Hell's Kitchen, Midtown, Random signage | 12 Comments »

Fifth Avenue officially opened 200 years ago—here’s what it was like in its early, country road days

November 18, 2024

Roughly seven miles long and running from Greenwich Village to Harlem, Fifth Avenue is arguably New York’s best-known avenue.

It begins at the triumphant arch at Washington Square Park, passes through elegant residential and museum districts as well as pricey retail blocks (and some traffic-choked ones as well), then dead ends at 143rd Street and the Harlem River.

But before Fifth Avenue became synonymous with luxury, style, and architectural beauty, it was just another sparsely populated country road flanked by unspoiled countryside miles from the main city. (Below, the Spingler farmhouse at Fifth Avenue and 14th Street)

This month marks the official opening of the Avenue in 1824, when its first seven blocks went from being a line on the 1811 city street grid originally called Middle Road to an actual (though unpaved) street.

Fifth Avenue’s birthday serves as an appropriate time to look back on its modest beginning. The avenue’s development coincided with Washington Square’s transformation from a potters field to a parade ground (fourth image). The mansions, monuments, and elite shops Fifth Avenue became known for were decades away.

So what was Fifth Avenue like just before the street was laid out? A passage from a 1918 book about Fifth Avenue by newspaper writer and editor Arthur Bartlett Maurice creates a picture of sandy hills, trout-filled waters, and farmland.

“Beginning at the Potter’s Field, the line of what is now Fifth Avenue left the ‘Road Over the Sandhills” or ‘Zantberg’ of the Dutch, later known as Art Street, long since gone from the map, and crossed the Robert Richard Randall Estate.”

For reference, Art Street was the former name of Waverly Place. Robert Richard Randall was a sea captain who owned a 24-acre tract of land north and east of today’s Washington Square. He died in 1801, and his will stipulated that a “sailors’ snug harbor” for aged seamen be built on his property—but ultimately Snug Harbor ended up on Staten Island.

“Thence it ran through the Henry Brevoort Farm, which originally extended from Ninth to 18th Streets. . . .Crossing the tributary stream at 12th Street, it passed a small pond between 13th and 14th Streets, and then ran on, over low and level ground, to 21st Street, then called ‘Love’s Lane.’ To the right was the swamp and marsh that afterwards became Union Square.”

(The map image above notes the Brevoort Farm at about 10th Street, as well as Minetta brook crossing the avenue.)

“Following the trail further, the hardy voyager wandered over ‘hills and valleys, dales and fields’ through a countryside where trout, mink, otter, and muskrat swam in the brooks and pools; brant, black duck, and yellow-leg splashed in the marshes and fox, rabbit, woodcock, and partridge found covert in the thicket.”

Admittedly, Maurice makes the area sound like a paradise of animal life. Yet other early accounts paint an image of colonial Manhattan as rich with all kinds of creatures normally found in woodland regions.

“Here and there was a farm, but the city, then numbered 100,000 persons, was far away,” continues Maurice. “Then, in 1824, the first stretch of the Avenue, from Waverly Place to 13th Street, was opened, and the northward march of the great thoroughfare began.”

That northward march helped turn Washington Square into a park and brought Fifth Avenue its earliest residences. One of the first was a stately Greek Revival home (above image) at the corner of Ninth Street, the site of balls and dinners with well-heeled guests.

This lovely home was occupied by Henry Brevoort, the son of the the farmer whose 84-acre farm was bisected by the new avenue.

“The Brevoorts and other farm owners began building houses that would serve as anchors for other houses to be built and sold on the vacant lots laid out along the avenue and radiating down the adjoining side streets,” wrote Charles V. Bagli in recent New York Times piece on Fifth Avenue’s anniversary.

In the 1840s and 1850s, elite New Yorkers relocated to Fifth Avenue from the posh enclaves of Bond Street and Stuyvesant Square, moving into new and fashionable brownstones. One still extant is the brownstone at Number 47 owned by the Salmagundi Club (above photo), built in 1853 and home to this arts club since 1917.

As more stretches of Fifth Avenue were laid out, more houses were built. Churches came too, including the Church of the Ascension on Tenth Street and Marble Collegiate Church on 29th Street. Farmhouses held out; the above sketch shows one in the 1830s at 23rd Street.

Empty parcels remained as well. One New Yorker who recalled them was Edith Wharton.

Born in Manhattan in 1862, Wharton charted the manners and morals of Gilded Age New Yorkers in fiction and then published her autobiography, A Backward Glance, in 1934.

In her autobiography, she remembers walking up Fifth Avenue as a young child with her father in the 1860s. Possibly she was departing from her family’s home, then on 23rd Street just off Fifth Avenue. Her walk ended at the distributing reservoir (above, in 1845) at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, where the New York Public Library stands today.

“The little girl and her father walked up Fifth Avenue: the old Fifth Avenue with its double line of low brown-stone houses, of a desperate uniformity of style, broken only—and surprisingly—by two equally unexpected features: the fenced-in plot of ground where the old Miss Kennedy’s cows were pastured, and the truncated Egyptian pyramid which so strangely served as a reservoir for New York’s water supply.”

“The Fifth Avenue of that day was a placid and uneventful thoroughfare, along which genteel landaus, broughams, and victorias, and more countrified vehicles of the “carry-all” and “surrey” type moved up and down at decent intervals and a decorous pace.”

Once the Gilded Age began, however, Fifth Avenue’s days as a small town, slow-poke road came to an end. From now on, it would be Gotham’s millionaire mile. (Above photo, Fifth Avenue looking north from 21st and 22nd Street in 1855)

“The directory of 1851 includes a large number of vacant lots between Washington and Madison Squares,” noted Henry Collins Brown, president of the Fifth Avenue Association in 1924 and author of a book honoring the avenue’s centennial, Fifth Avenue Then and Now.

“But after the Civil War, progress was immediate and on a scale of elaborate grandeur never before witnessed in this city, or in the country at large.”

By the early 1900s, you know the rest of the story. This avenue once surrounded by woods, streams, and the occasional farmhouse cemented its place as an iconic New York City address.

[Top image: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, via geographicguide.com; second image: Fifth Avenue Old and New; third image: The Greatest Grid/MCNY; fourth image: Metmuseum.org; fifth image: NYPL Digital Collections; sixth image: Fifth Avenue Old and New; seventh image: NYPL Digital Collections; eighth image: Fifth Avenue Old and New; ninth image: New York Historical; tenth image: geographicguide.com]

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Posted in Maps, Midtown | 29 Comments »

What John Sloan saw one Saturday night outside a butcher shop on Bleecker Street

November 11, 2024

Maybe it’s a holiday evening, or perhaps the bright corner street lamp makes late-day shopping easier for these mostly faceless residents of Greenwich Village.

Whatever the reason, there’s a line outside this corner meat market, with customers eyeing the goods while others gather outside a dry goods shop, its entrance also illuminated in the night.

“Bleecker Street, Saturday Night” is a 1918 painting by John Sloan. Born in Pennsylvania, Sloan by this time was a Village denizen who famously depicted the ordinary street life of his new neighborhood—from the flower vendors on Sixth Avenue to the rush of the elevated train and crowds of commuters scurrying under the track.

There’s a lot going on in this highly detailed image. Sloan introduces us to a cross-section of people, from young children to older adults, all going about their lives amid the Belgian block pavement and wood and brick buildings of a corner I wish I could identify. The rooftops get higher from right to left, shifting the perspective. The open basement doors add more drama.

“Bleecker Street, Saturday Night” is part of the collection at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which has this to say about it:

“When Sloan painted this scene, the city was undergoing rapid change. Residents navigated the streets and shops late into the evening hours thanks to the recent introduction of electric lighting. New construction projects led to buildings, such as the white one pictured here, getting partially or fully demolished. The painting represents both what once was and the inevitable change that comes with industrial development.”

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Posted in art, West Village | 13 Comments »

A dramatic Victorian building with an understated bronze tablet honoring World War II veterans

November 11, 2024

At the corner of Pitt and Stanton Streets is a magnificent Victorian building—dark red brick, a slate roof, and a statue of the Virgin Mary holding her child high on the Pitt Street side.

The former school building for Our Lady of Sorrows Church next door, it’s a curious (and rather spooky) architectural relic. But much less showy is this tablet placed beside a first floor window on the facade.

Probably bronze when it was created and now green with time, it consists of about 200 names—all from the parish and community—who served the U.S. during World War II.

Though Our Lady of Sorrows was founded in 1867 when this swath of the Lower East Side was a German community, the names reveal a different ethnic mix—primarily Italian, many Jewish. Several of the last names are the same, suggesting that some are related.

This kind of neighborhood war memorial exists in communities all over New York City, often affixed to churches or schools. They’re not as commanding as many of the city’s great sculptures and monuments that honor veterans.

But on Veterans Day, there’s an understated power to seeing each individual name and wondering about the fate of these men and women—where they fought, and if they returned to families and neighbors who stayed behind on Lower East Side.

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Posted in Lower East Side, War memorials | 4 Comments »

This might be the most beautiful and historic fraternity house in New York City

November 11, 2024

It looks similar to any other elegant, well-tended Beaux-Arts townhouse on Riverside Drive.

The lovely house has a brick and limestone facade, copper-topped dormer windows, iron-railing balconies, and an arched window framed in stone. The unusual roof is a hipped roof, meaning all sides slope downward.

But the cartouche at the top embossed with Greek letters reveals that this residence near West 116th Street joined the cityscape with a special purpose in mind.

Completed in 1899, it’s the longtime home of Delta Psi—a fraternity at Columbia University, whose campus is centered a few blocks east on Broadway.

Also known as Saint Anthony Hall, it was the first fraternity to build a chapter house after Columbia’s 1897 move from today’s Rockefeller Center to its current Morningside Heights location.

The designers of the building had Columbia connections: Henry Hornbostel was an 1891 grad, and George Palmer, a Delta Psi member. (Above, the house in 1906)

A fraternity that owns a house as beautiful as this one must have a deep history at Columbia. “Saint Anthony Hall, founded in 1847 as a literary society to promote a love of literature among its members, is Columbia University’s oldest and most distinguished fraternal organization,” states the fraternity website.

“Saint Anthony Hall” comes from the day the organization was founded, January 17, which is the feast day of St. Anthony the Great.

The fraternity’s first house was an 1879 stunner at 29 East 28th Street (above). Designed by James Renwick (also a Columbia grad), this red and yellow Renaissance-style holdout still stands. It has a curious resemblance to the Riverside Drive house, perhaps serving as architectural inspiration.

In 1903, the presence of the Riverside Drive fraternity house met with praise from the New York Times, describing it as “one of the handsomest college society houses in the country.”

Though Delta Psi/Saint Anthony Hall is a fraternal organization, it’s clearly not the Animal House kind.

Coed since 1969, the chapter house, according to the fraternity website, “serves as a haven from the bustle of its urban environs, providing members with a secluded space to pursue academic and extracurricular endeavors.”

[Third photo: Wikipedia]

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Posted in Flatiron District, Schools, Upper West Side/Morningside Hts | 7 Comments »

A remnant of the late 19th century city at the corner of First and First in the East Village

November 4, 2024

On the northwest corner of First Avenue at First Street, on the border of the East Village and the Lower East Side, is a handsome red-brick tenement.

Five stories high (with a two-story, beach house–like penthouse on the roof, but that’s a subject for another post), it’s a typical, well-kept building likely on this corner since the early 20th century.

But look up—what’s that two-sided panel affixed to the second-floor corner? It’s an address plate giving the corner’s cross streets, a not uncommon feature of tenement buildings in New York City.

What was the purpose of these cross street markers? I’m not sure. But a clue might be found in how high up the sign is.

From 1878 to its demolition in 1942 (above photo, looking south from 13th Street and First Avenue), the Second Avenue El would have traveled up First Avenue until it veered over to Second Avenue at 23rd Street.

Perhaps it was put there to let riders know exactly where they were as the train roared its way up the avenue?

[Photo: LOC via Wikipedia]

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Posted in East Village, Lower East Side, Random signage, Transit | 6 Comments »

This crude wood hut is a surviving relic from the Revolutionary War years in Upper Manhattan

November 4, 2024

In the summer of 1776, with the Revolutionary War underway, British warships sailed into New York Harbor. Soon, Gotham was a city under siege.

A string of bruising defeats by British forces from late August to early November forced George Washington and his Continental Army to flee Fort Washington, in Upper Manhattan, to New Jersey.

The departure of the Americans allowed the British to take over the northern tip of the island. They set up an encampment in today’s Inwood neighborhood and used it as a base of operations as they occupied the city for the next seven years.

In an effort to shelter themselves from the elements in the encampment, members of the British Army built hundreds of short rudimentary huts made out of wood and stone. Each hut housed eight men, according to New York City Parks.

Almost 250 years after the Revolutionary War years came to an end, one of these huts still exists in Upper Manhattan.

This “Hessian Hut”—so named because the huts were occupied by some of the 30,000 German soldiers who (reluctantly) fought alongside the British—sits in the backyard of a colonial-era farmhouse museum on Broadway and 204th Street.

The story of how the hut became part of the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, built in the early 1780s by descendants of 17th century Dutch immigrant Jan Dyckman, starts in the early 20th century. That’s when an engineer, historian, and amateur archeologist named Reginald Pelham Bolton developed a passion for exploring Manhattan’s early traditions and culture.

“During Bolton’s time, the fascination of the excavations in Egypt and the soon-to-be subway line extending into the Inwood area sparked the excitement of digging through Inwood to preserve its history,” states the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum website.

Bolton uncovered all kinds of relics from the lands surrounding the Dyckman Farmhouse, which had been sold off by the family in the 1850s and was now threatened with demolition. (Fifth photo: The farmhouse in disrepair in 1897)

While excavating the area adjacent to 204th Street and Prescott (now Payson) Avenue, Bolton came across the remains of a “hut camp” that contained about 60 Hessian huts.

Realizing its historical value, Bolton “dismantled this hut and rebuilt its foundation here in 1915,” according to the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum website. He transferred the wood and stone pieces to recreate the barracks and explore the lives of the men who occupied them—men who were compelled to fight in a war in a country far from their homeland.

“Most of the soldiers camped in Northern Manhattan were Hessians, from the German principality Hesse-Cassel,” states NYC Parks. “They had been forced into the army by their prince, Frederick II, who had sold their services to the British without their consent. Many were weak and old, and few had any desire to come to America to fight another country’s war.”

The rebuilt hut became part of the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum after two Dyckman descendants bought the farmhouse and then gave it to the city in 1916 to serve as a historic museum. The rest of the huts Bolton unearthed “were demolished to make way for apartment houses,” per NYC Parks, which now runs the museum.

This crude shelter brings into focus Upper Manhattan’s crucial role in the Revolutionary War. Viewing the dirt floor and low ceiling, it’s not hard to imagine how difficult it would be to reside here through all seasons. It’s something the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum invites visitors to do.

“As you look around, try to imagine what it would be like to live here: huddling close to the small fireplace in the dead of winter, swatting away flies on sweltering summer days, or even sharing this room with multiple people,” states a sign outside this remnant of the 18th century city.

In 1783, the British and Hessians abandoned their huts and departed by ship for good. George Washington and his Continental Army triumphantly returned to a grateful New York City—where a Union Jack flag was taken down and the Stars and Stripes raised over the Battery.

[Third image: “The Hut Camp on the Dyckman Farm,” 1915, by John Ward Dunsmore; fifth photo: New-York Historical Society]

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Posted in Uncategorized, Upper Manhattan, War memorials | 15 Comments »

The cliffside subway entrance that cuts through the rockface of Upper Manhattan

November 4, 2024

Building the subway system’s 472 stations meant contending with the unique geology of New York City.

This geology is starkly evident at the Bennett Avenue entrance of the 190th Street stop on the A train. Here, six doors are framed by an arch of stone blocks nestled in a dramatic ridge of bedrock that extends high above the street.

It’s a breathtaking sight, especially if you’re used to subway entrances on gray sidewalk corners or inside brightly lit transfer stations. And it’s a reminder of the task engineers faced when they set out to put Gotham’s mass transit underground.

“Builders of New York’s first subway faced a severe challenge in Manhattan’s geology,” wrote Clifton Hood in a City Journal article on subway construction pioneers. “Although the island has a total of only 23 square miles, it harbors an unrivaled range of forbidding features.”

“Above 103rd Street, Manhattan is dominated by a line of ridges along its western shore rising 268 feet above sea level. It is also bisected by two major faults that were important barriers to transportation at the turn of the century.”

The 190th Street station was part of the Independent Subway System, which followed Manhattan’s Eighth Avenue and opened in 1932. That was two decades after an IRT stop opened nearby, which helped launch the transformation of Upper Manhattan from farmland to urban cityscape.

New York’s 665 miles of track and network of underground tunnels serve as examples of how transportation engineers tamed the city’s unruly topography. But on this stretch of Hudson Heights, Gotham’s natural rocks and ridges make themselves known.

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Posted in Transit, Upper Manhattan | 19 Comments »

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