The real first New York City subway

It must have been a good idea in the 1860s. That’s when inventor Alfred Ely Beach decided to construct an underground rail system powered by compressed air—think of those little pneumatic tubes that offices used to exchange memos in pre-email days.

The pneumatic subway was plagued by problems. Beach couldn’t get a permit to build it because Tammany Hall politicians had plans for a subway of their own. But he managed to get it going in secret.

Fifty-eight days later he had a tunnel running from Warren Street across Broadway to Murray Street, a distance of about 300 feet. He opened it to the public on February 26, 1870.

Passengers traveled in the line’s one deluxe car, and the station under Warren Street featured carpeting, paintings, and a grand piano. The cost of a ride: 25 cents (all of it donated to charity).

“Such as expected to find a dismal, cavernous retreat under Broadway, opened their eyes at the elegant reception room, the light, airy tunnel and the general appearance of taste and comfort in all the apartments….” commented The New York Times.

Of course, the pneumatic subway didn’t work out. Beach never got the financing to extend the line to Harlem as he had hoped. And advances in engineering made the air-powered subway obsolete.

Beach’s subway closed in 1873. The tunnel was used as a shooting gallery and then shut off for good by 1900, damaged by a fire in the building above it.

In 1912 workers excavating a tunnel for the N and R trains came upon the old tunnel and wooden subway car (at right). So where is the tunnel now? The consensus seems to be that it was destroyed during construction of other downtown stations.

The rats of the Graybar Building

New York City buildings are decorated with images of horses, goats, elephants, birds, even squirrels. But only on the Graybar Building, an office tower next to Grand Central Terminal, will you find rats.

Yep, three cast-metal rats are depicted climbing above the building’s entrance at 420 Lexington Avenue.

So why rats? It’s not clear, but the architects who built the tower in the 1920s seem to be depicting the cone-shaped objects attached to mooring lines of ships that deterred rats from getting on board.

Or maybe it’s some kind of commentary on the rat race of professionals who ply their trades in office buildings like the Graybar every day.

What happened to a Bed-Stuy dress form factory?

The Ellanam Adjustable Form Company made a name for itself with its “adjustable” dress form—a three-dimensional headless, limbless female mannequin used for sewing.

The breakthrough adjustable model, heavily advertised to housewives in the early 20th century, could be easily altered to accommodate clothes of any shape or size.

They must have been pretty novel; several of these dress forms command a decent amount of cash on online auction sites.

 But what happened to Ellanam? They seem to have vanished, and their former home at 378 Throop Avenue near Tompkins Park looks residential. Another reminder of Brooklyn’s days as a manufacturing hub.

A snapshot of tenement life

An unknown photographer captured this New York mother and her two babies in an old-law tenement apartment in 1916. 

Like most flats in old-law tenements (so named because they predate “new” turn-of-the-century laws mandating better living conditions per apartment), it’s dark, squalid, and unventilated.

That window probably looks out onto a narrow courtyard, if not just another room in the same apartment.

New York City: a separate sovereign nation?

Sound crazy? Maybe, but secession has been proposed several times over the years.

In 1969, when writer Norman Mailer and columnist Jimmy Breslin ran for mayor and city council president on the Independent Party ticket, one of their ideas was to make New York City the 51st State. 

And in 2003, City Council member Peter Vallone introduced a bill that would allow the city to cut the state loose—because upstaters were sucking out too much of the city’s revenue.

But perhaps the closest New York City came to actually becoming sovereign was in 1861. The Civil War was pretty unpopular here because the city stood to lose so much money, since New York manufacturers wouldn’t be able to continue importing cotton from the South.

So Mayor Fernando Wood (looking dapper at left) proposed that the city form a city-state called Tri-Insula—that’s Latin for “three islands”—composed of Manhattan, Long Island, and Staten Island.

With Tri-Insula its own entity separate from the Union and the Confederacy, the Southern cotton trade wouldn’t have to stop.

In the end, it was just too radical an idea even for New Yorkers to accept.

New York’s disappearing Hallmark stores

These stationery stores, with their telltale throwback lettering, used to be in every neighborhood all over the city. In need of school supplies, Hello Kitty paraphernalia, and last-minute birthday cards? The Hallmark store was your solution.

These days, their numbers are dwindling, and the stores aren’t looking so spiffy. I guess Duane Reade and Rite-Aid have begun displacing them.

Sam’s Hallmark, above, is in East Harlem.

Serena’s continues to hang in there on East 23rd Street.

Sunnyside still has one too.

Thanksgiving dinner at the Plaza Hotel, 1899

From the two types of turtle soup to the to the turkey stuffed with chestnuts to the 18 varieties of game offered, the Plaza’s Thanksgiving menu was clearly a feast for the well-to-do New Yorkers who could afford to dine there.

Note the little crow mocking the turkey in the menu cartoon—who knew the Plaza at the time had such a sarcastic edge?

 This menu comes from the New York Public Library’s incredible collection of 40,000-plus menus.

Strivers’ Row: a glimpse of genteel old Harlem

“Walk Your Horses” say the inscriptions on the entry gates that lead to the alleys of Strivers’ Row, a two-block time capsule back into Harlem history.

Like a lot of the neighborhood, these aristocratic townhouses, spanning 138th and 139th Streets between Frederick Douglass Boulevard and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, were built in the 1890s for wealthy whites.

But when white New Yorkers deserted Harlem just a decade later, middle- and upper-class black families moved in—hence the striver reference. Each house had modern plumbing, detailed woodwork, and shared back courtyards. Plus stables for horses, of course.

Strivers’ Row mixes a couple of different architectural styles. (Stanford White had his hand in designing some). The result is a harmonious couple of blocks as lovely as any in the Village or brownstone Brooklyn—but lesser-known, practically a neighborhood secret.

The NYPD’s infamous “Clubber” Williams

Alexander “Clubber” Williams was an NYPD inspector in post–Civil War New York City; as captain of the precinct on 35th Street, he’s credited with breaking up the fearsome Gas House Gang that lorded over the East 30s, then known as the Gas House District.

In 1876 he was transferred to a precinct on West 13th Street, where he’d have jurisdiction over a high-crime area centered around Broadway from the 20s to about 42nd Street thick with theaters, gambling dens, and prostitutes.

Remarking on his new assignment, he supposedly told a friend, referring to the protection money he was likely to receive from gambling operators and madams, “I have had chuck for a long time, and now I’m going to eat tenderloin.”

The name Tenderloin stuck for this seedy neighborhood. Formerly known by the fantastically colorful moniker Satan’s Circus, it was one of the city’s worst. Williams earned the title “Czar of the Tenderloin” for his rough and ready crime-prevention tactics.

Brought up on corruption charges several times over the years, Williams always beat the rap. And when accused of using excessive force, he replied, “There is more law at the end of a policeman’s nightstick than in a decision of the Supreme Court.”

In 1895, Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt had him retire. Williams insisted until his death in 1917 that he’d never clubbed anyone “that did not deserve it.”

Turn of the century Cooper Square

A web of elevated train tracks is flanked by sloped-roof buildings on the right and lovely Cooper Union—described in this postcard as “the Cooper Institute”—on the left.

Looks like some really sweet buildings have long since disappeared.