The Williamsburg Bridge’s inferiority complex

When the Williamsburg Bridge opened on December 19, 1903, Scientific American (by way of nycroads.com) had this to say about a structure critics conceded wasn’t nearly as breathtaking as its neighbor, the Brooklyn Bridge:

“Considered from the aesthetic standpoint, the (Williamsburg) Bridge is destined always to suffer by comparison with its neighbor, the (Brooklyn) Bridge,” the magazine wrote.

“It is possible that, were it not in existence, we would not hear so many strictures upon the manifest want of beauty in the later and larger (Williamsburg) Bridge, which is destined to be popular more on account of its size and usefulness than its graceful lines.

“As a matter of fact, the (Williamsburg) Bridge is an engineer’s bridge pure and simple. The eye may range from anchorage to anchorage, and from pier to finial of the tower without finding a single detail that suggests controlling motive, either in its design or fashioning other than bald utility.”

The “horse walks” hiding in Greenwich Village

Anyone who has strolled down a Greenwich Village side street has probably seen a horse walk door—an unadorned, mysterious entrance without a stoop that opens to the sidewalk.

The horse walk door is the brown one to the left at this house at 7 Leroy Street, a Federal-style beauty built in 1831.

Behind this door is the horse walk, a narrow passageway through which a homeowner’s horse was led from the street to a separate carriage house or stable behind the main house.

Of course, it’s been a good century or so since anyone has used a horse walk for their own equine. Those back carriage houses are now sought-after private residences.

Here’s a listing for the carriage house behind 7 Leroy Street—yours for $16,000 a month.

This horse walk door to the right of the main entrance is part of another lovely Federal-style house built in 1819 at 83 Sullivan Street near Spring Street.

You can just imagine a horse being led to and from the door every day to what was probably a very muddy street, so his owner can use him as transportation to get around the growing city.

The Lantern: an 1890s downtown writers club

The Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s. The Bohemian crowd at Pfaff’s in the 1850s.

New York writers have always organized formal and informal clubs where they could share their wit and their work—over alcohol, of course.

The Lantern Club was one of these. Now just a footnote in the city’s literary history, the Lantern (sometimes called the Lanthorn) was founded in 1893. Its headquarters, an old house on William Street near the newspaper offices of Park Row, was fashioned to resemble a ship cabin.

Prominent members included Stephen Crane (left, in 1899), the young, struggling author of Bowery tale Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt occasionally dropped by.

Crane and his cohorts didn’t just sit around and booze. They actually shared their work during regular literary banquets held every Saturday evening.

“Each week at the banquet, one of the members read a short story he had written,” writes Stanley Wertheim in A Stephan Crane Encyclopedia.

“Only negative criticism was permitted, and ‘the highest tribute that a story could receive was complete silence.’”

Stephen Crane died in 1900 of tuberculosis at age 29. When the Lantern bit the dust, however, is a mystery.

A fresh blanket of snow on a New York block

Robert Henri painted “Snow in New York” in 1902. Writes the National Gallery of Art, where the painting hangs:

“Henri’s Snow in New York depicts ordinary brownstone apartments hemmed in by city blocks of humdrum office buildings. This calm, stable geometry adds to the hush of new-fallen snow.

“The exact date inscribed—March 5, 1902—implies the canvas was painted in a single session. Its on-the-spot observations and spontaneous sketchiness reveal gray slush in the traffic ruts and yellow mud on the horsecart’s wheels.”

More manhole mysteries on city sidewalks

If you’ve never looked down and noticed them before, you’ll be surprised by the huge variety of manhole covers out there on city streets.

They’re clues to the industries and ironworks that built the modern city.

The one above, spotted in Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, was made by Howell and Saxtan, a foundry on Adams Street. James Howell served two terms as Brooklyn’s mayor.

An 1885 guide called New York’s Great Industries described E. McGuinness & Co. as “a leading house engaged in the manufacture of iron railings, etc.,” established in 1878. This cover was found in the East 70s, not far from where McGuinness’s factory was.

Fassler Iron Works made it at least until 1970, where a Google search turned up some legal documents. A tenement is at the 10th Street address, between Avenues C and D.

This cover comes from the West Village. H. Richter was Herman Richter, an immigrant from Saxony who founded Centennial Iron Works at 190 Elm Street. His son Albert was his partner.

Elm Street—where is it? Apparently it’s been de-mapped. It was the original name for Lafayette Street south of Houston Street, but the name was changed in 1905.

The 1826 country resort still there on 61st Street

When this Georgian-style stone carriage house—built in 1799 on today’s 61st Street off of York Avenue—became the Mount Vernon Hotel in 1826, it must have been a beautiful place for a country vacation.

“The Hotel advertised itself as ‘free from the noise and dust of the public roads, and fitted up and intended for only the most genteel and respectable’ clientele,” reports the Colonial Dames of America.

“In those days, one could take the stagecoach or steamboat up to 61st street and spend the day at the hotel sipping lemonade in the ladies parlor or playing cards in the gentlemen’s tavern.”

The hotel, complete with a one-mile racetrack, didn’t exist very long.

In 1833, it was sold and made into a country house for the Towle family (left; below, 61st Street and the East River).

Family members occupied it into the 1900s, by which time the area had become crowded and industrial, in the shadow of the new Queensboro Bridge.

Today it’s a historic site called the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum and Gardens—formerly the Abigail Adams Smith Museum, named after President John Adams’ daughter, who with her husband built the carriage house before the 19th century.

[Middle and bottom photos: from the Colonial Dames of America, which runs the museum]

The vintage store signs of the far East Side

Some of those Manhattan neighborhoods lining the East River—Turtle Bay, Kips Bay, East Midtown—are kind of in a store sign time warp.

Seems like First, Second, and Third Avenues have more old-school signage than trendier blocks closer to Midtown or in other areas.

This is far from a complaint though. Seeing a decent number of vintage signs still hanging on is so charming, like this one with “Corby” in 1960s-style cursive. It’s on First Avenue between 54th and 55th Streets.

The Sutton Place Frame Shop is another example, on First Avenue and 55th Street. It’s such a posh name for a no-frills kind of establishment.

Farther south on Second Avenue and 34th Street is Kips Bay Optical, with this lovely sign laid it on script as well.

The famous bullfighter who came from Park Slope

Plenty of A-list actors, comics, and ball players hail from Brooklyn. But a matador?

His given name was Sidney Frumkin, born in 1903 to Jewish immigrant parents who lived on tiny Jackson Place off 16th Street near Seventh Avenue.

After a fight with his tough police officer father, 19-year-old Sidney, a dropout from Brooklyn Commercial High School, took off for Mexico.

There, on more or less a whim, he sought out a star matador and asked him to teach him to fight.

He renamed himself Sidney Franklin and impressed the crowd at his first fight, in Mexico City in 1923. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was one of the world’s top matadors.

He counted bullfighting fan Ernest Hemingway as a friend. ”Sidney Franklin is brave, with a cold, serene and intelligent valor,” Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon, according to this 1999 New York Times piece.

”No history of bullfighting that is ever written can be complete unless it gives him the space he is entitled to.”

After decades of winning (and getting pretty seriously gored), Franklin retired in 1959 and returned to the U.S.

Franklin died in obscurity in the Village Nursing Home on Hudson Street at 72.

[Above, the cover of his autobiography, published in 1952]

Fashionable women at a Chop Suey restaurant

Edward Hopper’s 1929 painting Chop Suey is a reminder of a much older New York, when this dish was advertised in neon outside Chinese restaurants around the city.

“These fashionable women are dining at a modest Chinese restaurant not unlike one the Hoppers frequented,” writes the National Gallery of Art.

“Characteristically, Hopper depicts a moment before or after the main event—here, the meal—takes place. Also typical is the isolation and ambiguous relationship between the figures: it is not clear whether the dining companions are even looking at or conversing with one another.”

Before Hollywood, Brooklyn made movies

Midwood, Brooklyn was a quiet, neighborhood with lots of open space back at the turn of the 20th century.

So in 1905, the American Vitagraph Company, then on Nassau Street in Manhattan, picked East 15th Street and Avenue M as the site for a vast movie studio described as “the model and forerunner of the studio system.”

“Vitagraph boasted the first glass-enclosed studio, a studio tank for battle and sea scenes, costume and set design shops, vast editing and processing rooms and lavish sets,” writes Kevin Lewis in Editors Guild Magazine.

More elaborate facilities meant more films were made, keeping up with the demand from a movie-loving public.

Stars were groomed: John Bunny, Norma Talmadge, and Florence Turner. Local residents rented their homes and furniture when the studio needed extra props.

Brooklyn’s movie-making era didn’t last long, thanks to World War I and the relocation of the industry to Los Angeles.

In 1925, Vitagraph was sold to Warner Brothers, who used the building to film shorts into the 1930s.

In fact, this clip from a 1933 Fatty Arbuckle short, Buzzin’ Around, was filmed right outside the studio, with the elevated B and Q line behind them—looking the same as it does today.

Today the Vitagraph building is an Orthodox Jewish school. The old smokestack, however, remains.