Which of New York City’s 15 daily newspapers ran this illustration referencing the General Slocum disaster isn’t clear. And exactly when it was published is unknown to me as well.
But it might have appeared after the completion of a federal investigation pinpointing the cause of the tragedy, which happened on the morning of June 15,1904 when a steamship taking parishioners from a German Lutheran church in the East Village to a Long Island picnic ground caught fire in the East River.
An estimated 1,021 people died in the disaster, mostly women and children from the city’s Little Germany neighborhood who belonged to the church on East 6th Street. Later that month, President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned the investigation.
The report, released in October 1904, pointed the finger mainly at the Slocum’s owners and crew.
“Although there were many revelations of corruption and graft tied to the administrators of the company, the inspectors who cleared the Slocum for service, and the manufacturers of the faulty lifejackets on board, only Captain William Van Schaick was found guilty of criminal negligence and manslaughter,” noted a 2016 post from The New York Historical.
The report contained many pages. But the newspaper that published the illustration distilled the cause of the disaster and the deaths of hundreds of kids to one overriding drive: greed.
Like so many New York neighborhoods of densely packed tenement streets, the blocks that make up the East Village contain secrets.
Hidden from sidewalk view behind walls of brick and masonry are private gardens, residents-only patios, early burial grounds, and backhouses—a second house (or rear house, as they were known in the 19th century) built behind a street-facing dwelling.
Discovering these backhouses isn’t easy, as they typically aren’t visible from the sidewalk. Occasionally a horsewalk behind a gate tips you off, but backhouses built before the mid-19th century typically don’t have these narrow walkways designed to lead to a rear stable.
But sometimes you notice hints. On a recent walk down East 12th Street between First Avenue and Avenue A, I came across a tenement with an intercom marked “423 Rear”—in other words, the entrance to the rear house.
A slender passageway beside the front house at 423 East 12th Street took me to the backhouse. This tenement-style dwelling was separated from the front building by a patio with tables and chairs, a landscaped circle of greenery, and artwork that gave the space a very East Village vibe.
Next door stood a second tenement backhouse behind 425 East East 12th Street; the dwelling had ivy crawling up part of the facade and was blocked off by a stone wall.
What’s the backstory of these backhouses? First, let’s start with the front tenements they sit behind (above).
Both 423 and 425 East 12th Street were constructed around 1850 by a man named Hugh Cunningham, according to Village Preservation’s East Village Block Finder. The building of these houses coincided with the rapid development of today’s East Village from farmland to a hamlet called Bowery Village and into a full-fledged urban residential neighborhood.
The growth of the area was fueled by Irish and German immigrants, who moved into hastily built tenant houses and converted single-family row homes.
Shipbuilding and manufacturing along the East River needed workers, resulting in a population explosion from 18,000 in 1840 to 73,000 by 1860, according to East Village/Lower East Side Historic District Designation Report.
Nothing more is known about Hugh Cunningham. But at some point, he decided to build identical backhouses behind each of his front-facing tenements.
Why he did so is also a mystery, but the motive was almost certainly financial. Cramming two houses on a lot designed for one would have doubled his rent rolls.
The practice wasn’t legal, but that didn’t stop owners from putting up backhouses out of view of the street in the East Village, West Village, Gramercy, Chelsea, and other older Manhattan neighborhoods.
There were no shortage of people needing a place to live on the booming East Side. Those who lived in the front tenements at numbers 423 and 425 in the 19th century held working class jobs, according to newspaper archives, like factory worker, laborer, and varnisher. It can be assumed that the tenants in the backhouses took similar jobs.
The backhouse behind 423 East 12th Street gained lurid notoriety in 1892, when carpenter Philip Cunningham—perhaps related to Hugh, but it’s unclear—murdered his wife by stabbing her with a knife and striking her with a lamp during a drunken fight.
“On the second floor of a dreary tenement house in the rear of No. 423 East 12th Street lived Philip Cunningham and his wife, Elizabeth,” reported The World. The couple “spent the greater part of their time drinking and quarreling.”
Neighbors heard a commotion on the night of the murder but didn’t investigate. “‘The old man is beating the old woman again,’ said the tenants to each other,'” according to The World. Cunningham was found in a bar and arrested.
These days, the two backhouses don’t make it into the newspapers, and tenants seeking peace and privacy probably prefer it that way.
Not surprisingly, they aren’t the only backhouses inside the block. A Google map view (above) shows at least three more bounded by First Avenue, Avenue A, East 12th Street, and East 13th Street.
About the Google map view, what’s with the large yellow tenement close to First Avenue constructed at an angle? It’s not a backhouse, as it’s connected to 407 East 12th Street.
The building is angled that way to follow a road laid out in 1787, before the city street grid came into play. The angle followed Stuyvesant Street, “which formerly extended east from its present-day location and at a thirty-plus degree angle to the New York City grid,” states Village Preservation.
The first signs of it emerged in the 1830s cityscape: brown porous sandstone began appearing around entrances and as window lintels on New York’s stylish Federal-style brick houses.
By the 1860s, brownstone-clad row houses were everywhere, going up across Manhattan and then Brooklyn (above, a brownstone row in Bedford-Stuyvesant) as fast as the Gilded Age’s upper classes could buy them.
Some rose four stories with grand proportions, including a tall stoop and elaborately carved doorway, such as the brownstone below, built in 1853 at 47 Fifth Avenue and long occupied by the Salmagundi Club. Others stopped at three floors and cut a more slender, less ornate appearance.
But what was it about this iconic house type that made it a symbol of New York City elegance and charm—and is still sought after today?
Before getting into the backstory of the brownstone, it might be helpful to define what one is. New Yorkers often consider any attached row of houses to be brownstones whether the facade is brick, marble, or limestone.
But a brownstone is a specific type of row house constructed between the 1830s and the 1890s cloaked in brown sandstone.
“Originally referred to as ‘brownstone fronts’ in the nineteenth century, the brick buildings acquired their name from the four-to-six-inch-thick stone veneer that covered the front side,” wrote Suleiman Osman, author of The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn.
This stone, much of it mined from a quarry in Portland, Connecticut, was actually pink when it was cut and shipped to stone yards along the East and Hudson Rivers.
But once placed on the exterior of a brick house and then exposed to the elements, it turned brown, stated Osman. That brown could be a reddish rust, or dark mud, or a brown that made the house appear “chocolate-colored,” as Edith Wharton, who was born in a brownstone at 14 West 23rd Street, disparaged it.
As Wharton’s comment reveals, brownstones have always had their detractors. In an 1840s dispatch, Edgar Allan Poe contemplated the destruction of Manhattan by predicting that “in some 30 years every noble cliff will be a pier, and the whole island will be densely desecrated by buildings of brick, with portentous of brownstone, or brown-stonn, as the Gothamites have it.”
Still, when the stone first appeared as trim on new row houses in today’s downtown neighborhoods—like on the entrance and base of the Isaac Hopper House, above, built in the Greek Revival style at 1838 at 110 Second Avenue—it made a fashionable impression.
It’s unclear where the first true brownstone residences were built. But a 1926 New York Times article that prematurely eulogized brownstones gave the honor to a group of row houses on an unnamed block in Chelsea constructed in the late 1830s.
Soon, brownstone fever hit Gotham. With the city’s population booming in the 1840s and 1850s, brownstone rows made their debuts in other upper middle class neighborhoods, such as Greenwich Village, Madison Square, and Murray Hill.
The elegant look of brownstone was part of the attraction. “Brownstones were an architectural trompe l’oeil designed to give a faux sense of historic glamour,” wrote Osman. “In an era when stone was seen as more monumental than brick or wood, builders used sandstone as a cheap substitute for marble.”
“The facing was carefully designed to give the illusion that the entire building was constructed of stone,” continued Osman. “Builders cut large slabs of stone to minimize any visible seams, giving the townhouse a solid brown and austere look.”
Builders found that brownstone had a practical appeal as well. The industrial revolution made it possible to quarry lots of it and mass produce design motifs that made each uniform row of new brownstones look slightly different than other rows in development.
Brownstones also reflected “the mid-19th-century popularity of Romantic Classicism, which glorified picturesque nature,” states an article on Brownstoner. “Brownstone echoed the dark browns, grays, and greens of the romanticized landscape.”
As the 19th century went on, different design styles supplanted the Greek Revival look of pre-Civil War brownstones. In the 1860s, Italianate architecture flourished, which brought more ornamentation and curvy lines (exemplified in the above West Village brownstone), according to Stefanie Waldek in Architectural Digest.
Queen Anne and Renaissance Revival brownstones began to appear in the 1880s and 1890s. These fanciful, quirky homes often incorporated other types of building material as well as brownstone, like limestone and granite, per Architectural Digest.
Parts of New York City that were not developed until the late 19th century, like today’s Upper West Side (below photo) and Harlem, tend to feature brownstones that reflect these later design styles.
All this brownstone love suddenly came to a halt as the 20th century began.
Brownstones were now derided as gloomy, their interiors hopelessly dark and outdated. The typical brownstone layout had a formal parlor in the front and a more relaxed parlor in the back, then a kitchen and dining room on the lower garden level and bedrooms on the upper floors.
The stone itself wasn’t always in great shape after decades of rain and snow, especially on the many smaller, more narrow brownstones rushed into development by 19th century speculators eager to sell to middle class families (like these below, in Bedford-Stuyvesant).
The New York brownstone, once so prized, was now regarded as a relic. Rows were bulldozed to make way for lighter-colored limestone or marble Beaux-Arts townhouses. In the 1920s, others were razed in favor of handsome luxury apartment buildings. (Below, a row condemned to make way for Tudor City in the 1920s)
Those that didn’t meet the bulldozer were carved up into small apartments, their tall stoops removed and replaced by a street-level front door. Those that escaped demolition often stood alone, random remnants of the era of silk hats and showy equipages. Few mourned their passing.
“The age of the brownstone front draws to a close,” proclaimed the 1926 New York Times article. “In almost every cross street of central Manhattan, from river to river, the dignity of brownstone gives way to shining new structures that rise higher. A hundred families come to live where but two or three have dwelt as the panorama of New York moves on.”
The Times’ obituary for brownstones turned out to be wrong, of course. By the 1960s, a new generation of urban dwellers were eager to take advantage of the space and historical cred of these dwellings.
Trailblazers restored them to single-family use. Historic Districts came into existence, protecting brownstones within their borders from destruction. Wide swaths of Manhattan and Brooklyn owe their revitalization—or gentrification, depending on your point of view—to their newfound popularity.
The brownstone era wasn’t over; it simply entered a new phase of its love story with New Yorkers. Even the Times, in its 1926 eulogy, was wistful about the passing of a house type that was, and once again is, an emblem of the city. (Below, a lovely row in Yorkville)
“The brownstone front was peculiarly and essentially the citadel of the home, the stronghold of an old-fashioned era before New York became such a vast hive,” the Times concluded. “In no other city did the brownstone front achieve greatness. It was respectable, prosperous, frock-coated New York at the best.”
There’s a lot to love about Holiday Cocktail Lounge, a comfortable and cavernous East Village space with lots of wood, a horseshoe bar, and very little light.
Aside from the old-school ambiance and lack of pretense (and the fact that it’s fairly quiet on weekend afternoons), Holiday’s other draw is its long presence on an illustrious street.
Opened in 1950 on the site of a former speakeasy hidden inside a beauty shop, bartenders here have served generations of locals as well as icons from Frank Sinatra to W.H. Auden to Allen Ginsberg, according to James T. and Carla L. Murray in their new book covering the city’s most historic taverns, Great Bars of New York City.
But there’s another feature about the place that makes it distinctive. Tucked to the side is a wood phone booth—complete with a folding door, small stool, and a telephone. It’s Holiday’s actual original phone booth that “retains its original phone number,” per the book.
Phone booth relics like the one can still be found in random libraries, private clubs, and the occasional hotel. But the city’s oldest bars and taverns—Farrell’s in Park Slope, for example, or P.J. Clarke’s on East 55th Street—seem to be good places to find at least the wood booth, if not an actual phone inside.
The dark barroom at Holiday makes it a perfect place to hide away, but it also created some difficulties taking detailed photos. The Murrays’ gorgeous book has many shots that might give you a better idea of the phone booth and interior—and spark some serious vibes for a visit.
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.
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.
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?
It’s a stunning and surprising sight in the Melrose section of the South Bronx: a Second Empire-Italianate building that resembles a gingerbread house with icing decorating the mansard roof.
This delightful confection has stood at 614 Courtlandt Avenue since 1871. It was out of place back then, a spectacular beauty with design similarities to many of the buildings on the Bowery.
And it’s out of place now, spaced apart from the low-rise walkups and empty lots in the surrounding neighborhood.
How did this striking building find itself here, and why did it survive? The story begins with a German immigrant named Julius Ruppert, who noticed a migration of fellow German newcomers from Lower Manhattan to the countryside of today’s South Bronx—and saw an opportunity.
It’s not clear when Ruppert (no relation to Jacob Ruppert of brewery fame) first arrived in New York. But in 1859, he was running his own billiards hall at 50 Bowery. This main drag of Manhattan’s crowded German immigrant neighborhood, known as Kleindeutschland, was populated by thousands of Germans who settled in New York before the Civil War.
Four years later, with Kleindeutschland extending to today’s East Village, Ruppert opened a saloon at Avenue A and First Street. By the 1870s, German immigration had ramped up again following a pause during the Civil War. Ruppert turned his attention to the section of New York where many German immigrants were relocating.
“No doubt, Ruppert was aware of his countrymen’s migration to the Bronx and was motivated to follow his former customers and to offer them the same hospitality in their new neighborhood,” stated the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), of the Melrose area.
What drew Germans to Melrose and the other villages of today’s South Bronx? Fresh air and roomier quarters. The South Bronx—still part of Westchester until it was annexed by New York City in 1874—was farmland before the Civil War.
By the late 1860s, Courtlandt Avenue had transitioned into “the main shopping street, lined by beer halls and the scene of parades by German bands,” notes the LPC. Courtlandt Avenue had taken on such a deep German identity, it earned the nickname the “Dutch Broadway.”
Ruppert bought the land for his building from a German butcher, then commissioned a “builder-contractor,” per the LPC, likely a fellow German immigrant. Three stories with a mansard roof, long windows, decorative fan motifs, and portal windows, it housed a saloon on the ground floor, public rooms for German social and political clubs above the saloon, and a residential flat.
Interestingly, Ruppert himself never moved in. But his wife, Catharine, did reside there from 1880 to 1894. During her time, she leased the ground floor to a butcher and then to saloon keepers. She also made some structural changes.
“It was Catharine Ruppert who commissioned Hewlett S. Baker, architect, to renovate the building in 1882, dividing the second and third stories into two residential flats each,” noted the LPC. “Baker lowered the second story ceiling and, as a consequence, the height of the distinctive windows.”
Following Catharine and Julius’ deaths, their heirs sold the building in 1927. But after World War I, “the neighborhood lost its predominantly German character, and still later, in common with the rest of the South Bronx, had to fight for its very life,” wrote David Bady on a Lehman College website about Bronx architecture.
“As a result of those hard times, the building, always meant to stand out, today stands alone on its corner, next to a vacant lot,” added Bady.
Designated a New York City landmark in 1987, this fanciful building underwent major renovations in the early 2000s, with the upper floors converted to housing, according to a 2008 article in the New York Times.
What’s happening with 612 Courtlandt Avenue these days? A Google search discovered that it’s home to Bronx Documentary Center, a nonprofit gallery and educational center that showcases documentary photos and films that drive social change.
Whatever happens in its next act, this stunner remains “a monument to the first stage of urbanization within what had been the previously rural South Bronx,” stated the Historic District Council, adding that the building “has many of the stylistic features which characterized those along the Bowery in the area known as Kleindeutschland, where Julius Ruppert first established his business before following his fellow Germans to the Bronx.”
What would the beginning of First Avenue in the East Village be without the neon beauty of the Gringer & Sons Appliances sign glowing beneath a red-brick 19th century tenement?
This iconic blast of neon has fronted the shop at 29 First Avenue since 1953, when it was commissioned by late owner Philip Gringer, according to a 2020 New York Post article.
“Not only is the color yellow unusual for neon signs, but the twisty GE logos also required a master’s touch,” stated the Post of this carnival of light and color, crafted for the store that got its start in 1918.
It’s not just the kaleidoscopic colors that thrill neon-loving New Yorkers but the old-school Gringer Appliances sign affixed to the tenement facade. The fact that GE doesn’t even manufacture color TVs and air conditioners anymore makes this time capsule of a sign even more wonderful.
Though Manhattan’s earliest Jewish residents arrived in New Amsterdam 1654 (and were initially denied entry, but that’s an entirely different story), the first synagogue wasn’t consecrated until April 8, 1730.
Shearith Israel, as it was called, was a one-story stone structure built on what was then Mill Street, now South William Street in the Financial District, according to the downtown newspaper The Broadsheet Daily. (Shearith Israel still exists, with a synagogue on Central Park West.)
Fast-forward to the 1890s and early 1900s, when thousands of Eastern European Jews fled the Old World and crowded into the Lower East Side. The narrow streets in the Jewish “ghetto,” as it was called then, were already packed with apartment walkups, factories, storefronts, and stables.
With land and space at a premium, where would these newcomers from various communities and countries build houses of worship? In between the existing tenements, of course—hence the development of hundreds of small, lot-size synagogues known as “tenement synagogues.”
Village Preservation’s Off the Grid blog traced their appearance in New York City. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “depending on their means, societies and associated congregations sometimes rented spaces as small as single rooms in tenement apartments or in wedding halls,” states Off the Grid in a 2012 post.
“They worshipped wherever they could, and often, single houses of worship were home to multiple societies. Occasionally, larger congregations were able to purchase entire tenement buildings for conversion into synagogues, which gave rise to a Lower East Side phenomenon known as the ‘tenement synagogue.'”
Though the Jewish community of today’s Lower East Side and East Village has certainly dwindled since the early decades of the 20th century, many blocks in these neighborhood still feature surviving tenement synagogues—like this one at 415 East 6th Street, seen in the top photo.
Described as a “delightful little jewel” by Gerard R. Wolfe in his 2012 book, The Synagogues of New York’s Lower East Side, this 1910 building is flanked by two circa-1890s tenements. It’s not a synagogue anymore. Today, the lovely gem is chopped into condo units.
The second photo is the Stanton Street Shul, whose original congregation “created their place of worship from an existing structure on the site in 1913,” states the Shul’s website. It remains one of a handful of active synagogues in the area since a high of about 700 in 1918, per the website.
The tenement that once stood to the east of 638 East Sixth Street is gone (third photo), but this former tenement synagogue survives as the Sixth Street Community Center. Its twin next door is now the Church of God.
Not all tenement synagogues were founded on the Lower East Side. As Jewish populations settled in different parts of Manhattan, houses of worship went up across the city as well.
Gossipers, nappers, confidantes, playmates—Morris Shulman’s 1938 painting “Tompkins Square Park” is a stylized portrait of dozens of neighborhood characters congregating at this East Village park on a lush night in Depression-era Manhattan.
The vibrant palette and expressive faces are captivating. Mothers chat while tending to an unseen baby in a bassinet. A little girl in a yellow dress holds an ice cream pop. A fellow in forgotten-man garb sits with his chin tucked into his chest, seemingly asleep.
Born in 1912, Shulman came to New York in the 1930s to study at the National Academy of Design, the Art Students League, and Hans Hofmann School of Art, according to incollect.com. Perhaps best known for his postwar works of Abstract Expressionism, he taught at many schools around the city, including the Brooklyn Museum School and the School of Visual Art.
Much about Shulman’s life and work is unknown to me. But at some point, this visual storyteller made his way to Tompkins Square Park and created an almost folk art–like tapestry of humanity sharing the grass and benches of one of New York’s oldest green spaces.
Ephemeral New York 