You can practically feel the biting wind and snow in this raw 1911 New York winter street scene

January 20, 2025

There’s a lot of white in this depiction of a blustery winter day in the New York City of 1911: white snow on the street, stoops, and light poles; white-gray skies filling with factory smoke (or smoke from ship smokestacks?) across a grayish river.

Then there’s the violent white brushstrokes of howling wind against the red brick buildings. The wind is painted so viscerally, you can almost feel the icy snow and biting cold (and sympathize with the woman shielding her face in her coat, holding on to her hat).

“City Snow Scene” is an early work of Stuart Davis, a Pennsylvania native born in 1892 who is much better known as a Modernist painter. As a 17-year-old launching a career in New York, he fell under the thrall of early 20th century Ashcan artists and their gritty depictions of urban life.

The painting was auctioned by in 2012 by Christie’s, which had this to say about it: “Through bravura brushwork and a simplified muted palette, Davis succeeds in rendering a dreary winter’s day in lower Manhattan.”

“With a generous application of whites, Davis works up the surfaces to portray the texture of the snow which is juxtaposed with the more carefully applied reds he employs to develop the architecture in the background,” per Christie’s website.

“Broad, heavily applied strokes of black are the only device Davis employs to represent the pedestrians with the exception of a few simple touches of orange that delineate the faces of the primary figures in the foreground.”

It’s how a New York City winter used to be—and is once again in winter 2025.

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Posted in art, Music, art, theater | 3 Comments »

What a photo of a scruffy boy says about desolate, industrial East 79th Street in the 1890s

January 20, 2025

Sometimes you come across an old photo that commands your attention. That’s what happened when I found myself studying this 1898 image of East 79th Street between between York Avenue and the East River.

The caption actually states that we’re on East 79th Street between Avenues A and B—a reminder that both avenues originally extended all the way through the Upper East Side. Avenue A is York, and Avenue B is East End Avenue, which starts at 79th Street.

What’s this little boy doing on the rock-strewn ground of a stoneworks business beside the East River—close enough to what was then called Blackwell’s Island that the octagon tower of the lunatic asylum is within view? The caption says he’s drinking water from a spring.

An actual spring on the north side of East 79th Street? It’s hard to believe, but in fact Manhattan used to have plenty of springs. Some remain buried underground, only appearing during building construction, per this New York Times article. Today, you can still find springs in Central Park.

It should be noted that the photographer, James Reuel Smith, made a name for himself at the turn of the last century taking photos of springs and wells in northern Manhattan and the Bronx, documenting these vanishing waterways and the people who still drank from them. A book of his photos was published posthumously in 1935.

Who is this boy, with his heavy cap and delicate lace-up boots? I’m guessing he’s part of a family that moved uptown to the new tenement rows of Yorkville, where working-class and poor parents, mostly immigrants, toiled in factories, breweries, and on the waterfront.

The East Side Settlement House would be built on East 76th Street in 1903, offering activities and educational support for kids as well as their parents. But for now, an undeveloped stretch of land near the East River apparently made do as a play space, at least for this boy.

East 79th Street looks pretty rough in this photo. But within a decade or so, undeveloped areas like this would soon be cleaned up and turned into housing lots. What would become of this boy? With no way to know for sure, we’ll have to assume that he grew up and made his way.

[Photo: New York Historical]

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Posted in Upper East Side | 6 Comments »

The mysterious hole in the wall inside a beautiful 19th century Stuyvesant Square church

January 20, 2025

Since the 1850s, St. George’s Episcopal Church has stood majestically over Stuyvesant Square, a welcoming Romanesque castle in a pretty enclave defined by its namesake park—which was developed only a decade before the church arrived.

Now part of the Parish of Calvary-St. George, the church has a storied history going back to the 1750s. It got its start as a chapel on Beekman and Cliff Streets serving East Side residents who couldn’t make the trip to Broadway to Trinity Church, the city’s main Episcopalian church, per a 1975 report from the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

After separating from Trinity Church, the congregation grew, and in 1856 the current church was completed. Old-money New Yorkers made up the congregation in its early decades. But after the interior and roof were rebuilt following a devastating 1865 fire, an increasing number of German immigrants made it their parish into the 20th century.

The stained-glass windows, wooden pews, cavernous nave, and elegant carved wood pulpit make the interior feel commanding and sacred. But there’s something else inside the church worth calling out, and it can be found on a wall toward the back.

It’s a tiny hole—a bullet hole. But why would a bullet hole be inside St. George’s?

The answer has to do with one of the church’s most prominent parishioners, J. P. Morgan. The financier worshipped at St. George’s for decades; he served as a wardsman of the church and was instrumental in supporting social programs for the local immigrant community.

When Morgan died in 1913, his funeral, held at St. George’s, packed the church pews and attracted a huge crowd of onlookers outside Stuyvesant Square, according to the New York Times.

Though Morgan (at right, in 1890) gave generously to St. George’s and his philanthropy benefited many other organizations and causes, he had many detractors. One was a man named Thomas W. Simpkin.

There’s no evidence that Simpkin, a London-born printer described in another New York Times article as “a lunatic, recently escaped from an asylum,” had ever met Morgan. But that didn’t stop him from showing up at St. George’s on April 18, 1920 with a gun and plans to shoot Morgan—even though Morgan had been dead for seven years.

During services that morning, Simpkin “fired several shots,” according to Susie J. Pak, author of Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J.P. Morgan, killing “Dr. James Markoe, a close friend of the Morgan family.” Markoe had been passing a collection basket just before he was hit.

Markoe was brought to the Lying-In Hospital on Rutherford Place (which Morgan had funded two decades earlier), where he died. Simpkin, quickly apprehended, admitted that he “came to get Morgan,” per the New York Tribune on May 4, and that he did not know Morgan was already dead.

The New York Times article from April 19 states that Simpkin “drew a revolver and shot Dr. Markoe in the eye. He then fired another shot which lodged somewhere in the walls of the church.”

Accounts of the bullet still lodged in the wall have circulated online for some time. I wanted to see if it existed, and a friendly person affiliated with the church pointed the hole out to me. No bullet, just a bullet hole.

There’s a lot more to St. George’s besides a tragic murder in the middle of a Sunday service a century ago. And there’s a lot more to J.P. Morgan besides his detractors.

On Thursday, January 23, American Ancestors fine art curator Curt DiCamillo will be giving an afternoon talk at the Colony Club on Park Avenue titled “J.P. Morgan: Banker, Collector, Renaissance Prince” with a focus on Morgan as a collector of exquisite art and artifacts. Visit this link for more information and registration info to attend.

[Third image: Wikipedia; fourth image: NYPL Digital Collections]

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Posted in Disasters and crimes, Gramercy/Murray Hill, Houses of worship | 10 Comments »

This 1958 residence is the only house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in New York City

January 13, 2025

The most famous architect of the 20th century, Frank Lloyd Wright designed 1,114 houses, offices, and other structures during a prominent professional life that spanned seven decades.

Of these, 532 architectural works were actually completed, according to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

New York State has several Wright-designed dwellings. The Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue is Manhattan’s lone Wright building, ever since an auto showroom on Park Avenue and 56th Street designed by Wright in the 1950s was demolished in 2013.

But only one Wright residence was ever built in New York City. That would be a low, long house with cream walls and a crimson roof built into a dramatic hillside in the Lighthouse Hill neighborhood of Staten Island.

“The Crimson Beech,” a.k.a. the William Cass House (top photo from 2014) opens in an L shape hinged by a middle square of brick. Small windows on the front facade let light reach the longer wing, which has horizontal lines exaggerating its length.

Brick entry posts flank a circular driveway, and lush greenery enhance the house’s natural setting. Perched on a dead-end street with a stunning overlook (sixth photo) and complemented right now by tasteful holiday ornaments (second photo), it’s one house you can’t keep your eyes off.

The story of The Crimson Beech begins in September 1957. That’s when a Corona, Queens couple, William and Catherine Cass, turned on their TV and saw Mike Wallace interviewing Wright.

The couple owned property on Staten Island, and they decided to compose a letter to Wright asking if he would design a house on the site for them for $35,000.

The Casses were not strangers to Wright’s style.

“Mr. Cass, who worked for an employment agency, had been a fan of Wright’s work, and the Casses had visited a number of Wright’s buildings during their travels,” states the Landmark Preservation Commission (LPC) report on the house from 1990—the year The Crimson Beech earned official landmark status.

Wright replied, referring the couple to his colleague, Marshall Erdman, who suggested the Casses go with one of Wright’s prefabricated houses.

Living in a prefab house doesn’t sound particularly appealing. But Wright and Erdman came up with a system that made them affordable and beautiful, with no two prefabs appearing exactly alike.

“The Erdman prefabs were Wright’s last major attempt in his long career to address the problem of well-designed moderate-cost houses, and despite the lesser cost, he achieved a design quality consistent with his previous residential work,” states the LPC report.

The Casses went with Wright’s “Prefab Number One” house. Once the components of the home were trucked to Staten Island, it took four months to complete. They held an open house for the public, and Erdman attended an opening ceremony in 1958.

Wright (above) never visited; he died a year later. An associate, Morton H. Delson, remained an advisor for the couple. Delson is the architect who in 1970 designed the pool in the rear of the house unseen from the street.

Since its completion, Crimson Beech has been extraordinarily well maintained; it even retains its original exterior paint schemes, per the LPC report.

As for the interior, the long wing “contains four bedrooms, a gallery, a slightly sunken living room, and a basement level, while the other shorter wing has a kitchen-family room and a carport (with a storage room on the north end),” states the report—which is 35 years old, so perhaps some interior changes have since been made.

The back of the house is out of view from the street, but the LPC report describes “continuous double rows of windows, and sets of varnished mahogany and glass doors which lead onto red concrete terraces on both levels.”

The original copper beech tree that inspired the house’s name is long gone, as are the Casses. Mrs. Cass did talk to the New York Times in 1988 about the house, branding Wright a “tyrant” who chose the furnishings, fabric, and paint colors. She eventually forgave him because “the house required almost no repairs,” as the Times wrote.

Another couple who moved into the house in 2004 gave a wonderful interview to the New York Post for a 2017 article. The article features some rare interior photos, and it makes it clear these owners have a true appreciation for this one-of-a-kind dwelling.

[Top image: Alamy; fourth image: Brittanica; fifth image: Landmarks Preservation Commission Designation Report; seventh image: Wikipedia]

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Posted in Music, art, theater, Staten Island | 15 Comments »

Deciphering the meaning behind a 1918 Financial District subway mosaic

January 13, 2025

If the walls of the Whitehall Street/South Ferry subway station were a little less grimy, it would be easier to see the terra cotta image decorating the walls across from the platform.

Surrounded by colorful tiles is a house: a three-story, colonial-style residence with dormer windows projecting out of the gambrel roof. Ships sail on the body of water behind the home, which has views of hilly land beyond the water.

It’s a lovely bucolic scene, a pretty and pristine vision of pre-Revolutionary War Manhattan. But whose house is it, and why are the walls of the subway station decorated with this image?

Whitehall Street takes its name from The Whitehall—the grand white stone home built in 1655 (or 1658, according to some sources) by New Netherland’s legendary director-general, Peter Stuyvesant.

From this governor’s mansion that jutted out on a small peninsula at State Street and the Battery, Stuyvesant presided over the colony and its budding, unruly island outpost, New Amsterdam.

New Amsterdam was established in 1625, and at the time The Whitehall was completed, Stuyvesant (at right) was several years into his 17-year reign. That ended when the British ousted the Dutch in 1664, renaming the outpost New York.

After being displaced by the British, Stuyvesant spent the rest of his life at his 62-acre bouwerie, a few miles north of his former mansion in today’s East Village. According to several sources, it was the British who nicknamed the mansion Whitehall after the Whitehall section of London, the seat of the UK government.

With the British in charge, the mansion eventually fell into the hands of the English-appointed New York governor Thomas Dongan and for a short time became the province’s custom house, according to the 1899 book Historic New York.

More than 200 years later, the street gave the subway station its name. The designers of this station, which opened in 1918, apparently thought that an image of Stuyvesant’s Whitehall would pay homage to New York’s historical beginnings.

The terra cotta image as history lesson is one of many still in existence in various subway stations. The beavers at the Astor Place stop, for example, are a nod to John Jacob Astor’s dominance in the beaver fur trade, while the sailing ships at the Columbus Circle station harken back to the ships that brought Columbus to the New World.

It’s always a treat to come across them, especially with the subway system in disarray these days. Interestingly, mosaics like these weren’t just decorative—reportedly they helped illiterate or non-English speaking New Yorkers get around underground.

[Second image: Palisades Interstate Park Commission via New York Heritage; third image: Wikipedia; fourth image: NYPL Digital Collections]

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Posted in art, Lower Manhattan, Transit | 5 Comments »

All that remains of an old-school Gramercy pawn shop is its wonderful two-sided sign

January 6, 2025

Coming across a vintage store sign tucked away in the modern cityscape is always a treat. And when that sign is actually two distinct old-school signs showing their age in different ways? It’s a find to celebrate.

That’s the kind of sign I found myself charmed by at 318 Third Avenue near East 24th Street. “Gramercy Pawnbrokers, Inc.” states the Third Avenue-facing sign in rather plain red and blue lettering on a white background. It feels very DIY (and obscured by the barber shop sign, which used to be part of the pawnshop).

Turn the corner, however, and there’s a maroon and yellow sign advertising “loans” in 1960s-style letters, adorned with the ancient three-ball symbol for pawn shops and the name of the company in cursive with letters missing.

According to one site, Gramercy Pawnbrokers began operating here in 1967. I like to think of the business as a survivor. First, it stayed afloat as Facebook Marketplace and eBay began replacing brick and mortar buy-sell shops, and ATMs provided the quick cash pawn shops once did.

Then in the 2000s, Gramercy Pawnbrokers held out after neighboring tenements were demolished and a 21-story luxury co-op-turned-NYU dorm began literally looming over its roof.

But at some point recently, the “dusty violins, outdated calculators, and unpolished jewelry”—as Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York put it in a 2013 post—have disappeared.

Inside the ground floor room is now a “co-working and event space” that’s been spiffed up with sleek work tables, a coffee counter, and a dust-free interior. Sigh. At least the original signs weren’t trashed.

[Thanks to Charles for the tip]

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Posted in Gramercy/Murray Hill, Random signage | 8 Comments »

The lonely Italian cheesemaker on East 29th Street immortalized in a 1949 painting

January 6, 2025

I don’t know if it was ever officially considered a Little Italy. But in the 1930s and 1940s, East 29th Street between Second and Third Avenues was an Italian food store stronghold.

V. DiPollito’s meat market; Peter Rossi’s salami, olive oil, and baccala; a fruits and vegetables grocery; and a delicatessen/bakery are just some of the ground floor tenement stores with untidy cloth sidewalk awnings crowding the south side of the block.

In the middle of these shops is the latticini at 226 East 29th Street. Latticini translates into “dairy products,” as many New Yorkers know from the days when this word was routinely found on Little Italy store signs. (RIP, Joe’s Dairy off Houston Street!) This kind of shop made and sold fresh diary foods, mainly cheese.

What makes the latticini on East 29th Street unusual is that it was immortalized in a painting, “226 E. 29th St.,” featuring the store’s owner (top image).

In 1949, an artist named Jacob Arkush painted this portrait of Mazzeo Giuseppi Latticini Freschi, which was described as “a brisk little study of a tenement facade” by The New Yorker in 1950.

This poetic portrait gives us a man standing outside the store, black-clad except for a white apron; he’s presumably Mazzeo Giuseppi. Behind the windows hang big balls of mozzarella and a stack of cans, perhaps olive oil. A sign on the window reads “ravioli,” and a scale waits on a bare counter.

It’s a curious look at a working-class tenement shop in Kips Bay, especially with the small family peering out the window on the second floor longingly. Whatever they’re watching, it hasn’t caught the attention of Mazzeo Giuseppi on the sidewalk below them, whose eyes are downcast and his shop empty of customers.

But what happens to a dairy products store like Mazzeo Giuseppi’s as neighborhoods change and immigrants disperse? I’ve tried to trace the lifespan of this little business, but I’ve turned up nothing on its appearance or demise.

I didn’t dig up much information about Jacob Arkush either, and why he chose to paint this sidewalk scene remains a mystery. (The second image shows the store around 1940, and the third image, from 1930, gives a sense of the block’s bustling street life and activity.)

Today, the ground floor commercial spaces of the tenement at 220-226 East 29th Street have been converted into residential units. Giuseppe’s latticini would have been to the right of the building entrance beside the stairs to the basement, above.

Arkush captures a moment in time on a midcentury Manhattan street featuring a specialty shop that appears to have come and gone without any recognition—except for his rich portrait of what might be the latticini’s waning days on the block.

[Top image: Invaluable; second image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; third image: NYPL Digital Collections]

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Posted in art, Fashion and shopping, Gramercy/Murray Hill, Random signage | 18 Comments »

One New York painter’s luminous vision of nighttime Central Park in the snow

December 30, 2024

Some of the most beautifully haunting images of New York City in snow are by Robert Henri. In 1902, this Ohio-born social realist painter and founder of the Ashcan School captured 57th Street in snowy twilight as well as an East 55th Street brownstone row hemmed in by snowfall.

But this is the only Gotham snow scene I know of by Henri that takes us away from twilight streets and sidewalks and into Central Park under a rich blanket of snow after nightfall.

Henri painted this one, “Snow in Central Park,” in 1902 as well. It’s hard to know where in the park this is. Henri lived on East 58th Street at the time, so I imagine it’s on the east side of the park—Cedar Hill, perhaps, or Pilgrim Hill?

Ultimately the exact location doesn’t matter. The blue and reddish brown colors, along with the shadows on the snow and the contrasting radiance of the reflected moonlight, create depth and a visceral texture. It’s a stark scene on one hand yet quietly luminous the more you look at it, with a subtle warmth that brings it to life.

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Posted in art, central park | 9 Comments »

The old-school dive bar on St. Marks Place hiding a vintage wood phone booth

December 30, 2024

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.

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Posted in Bars and restaurants, East Village | 6 Comments »

This East Village tenement is all that’s left of a row of colorful shops made famous by a 1937 photo

December 30, 2024

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]

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Posted in art, Bars and restaurants, East Village, Fashion and shopping, Random signage | 14 Comments »

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