Philip Reisman, born in 1904 to Polish immigrant parents, painted Ash Can School–inspired scenes of city life above and below ground.
I can’t find much background on this painting—like what station it depicts or when it was done. Judging by the woman on the platform at left in jeans, it must be the 1960s or 1970s.
The Museum of the City of New York has another example of his work and more biographical info.
With Presidents’ Day coming up, it’s a good time to look at how New York City honors Washington, Lincoln, and other past executives in chief.
There’s the usual way to memorialize these guys: by naming bridges, tunnels, and high schools in their honor.
But interestingly, the city also named two big housing developments after them.
The George Washington Houses—14 high-rise buildings between 97th and 104th Streets on the East Side—were built in 1957, smack in the middle of a great wave of public housing construction in major U.S. cities following World War II.
The Lincoln Houses, opened in 1948, are also made up of 14 high rises. They’re located in the East 130s between Fifth and Park Avenue.
They’re not the only examples of projects with a presidential last name: 8 developments in the city have presidential monikers.
The Grant houses are on the West Side off 125th Street; the Jefferson houses in East Harlem. The Bronx has projects named after John Adams, Andrew Jackson, James Monroe, and William McKinley.
I kind of understand McKinley—after all, he was the victim of an assassin’s bullet here in New York State. But Andrew Jackson?
Brooklyn has the Roosevelt houses, but these are named after first lady Eleanor, not Franklin or Teddy.
Reminders of the city’s horse-powered past are all over the place. Sometimes a horse head is mounted on the gate of a mews, a tribute to the creature who made his home there.
This one above is at the entrance to Sniffen Court—the pretty, circa-1860s mews-turned-private homes on 36th Street between Lexington and Third Avenue.
Or the head of an equine sticks out of the facade of an old stable. That’s where this Charles Street beauty keeps watch. Below the head is a faded sign featuring the name of the stable owner, H. Thalman.
Plenty of stable signage can still be found on old buildings, such as this Greenwich Street garage.
What would happen if a resident of Strivers’ Row in Central Harlem (above) decided to ride, not walk, his horse on the path behind the brownstone houses there?
A mess of boys get ready to sled down a hill in the park, circa 1915.
Nine old-fashioned wooden sleds lined up, ready to go. Nice to see a few kids piggybacking rides—that’s probably outlawed today.
And look—no parents are hovering over them!
Manhattan’s Clinton Street is going into its second decade as kind of the restaurant row of the Lower East Side.
But a hundred years ago, before its slide into a dingy drug bazaar, it courted a different industry: hat makers. Clinton Street of the early 20th century was known as “Millinery Row.”
As many as 16 stores were packed into each block from Houston to Grand Street, according to Valentine’s City of New York Guidebook, published in 1920.
“Every evening the East Side girl promenades with the throngs up and down Millinery Row, indulging in an orgy of window shopping, just like her sister on Fifth Avenue,” the book states.
“The millinery shops here are as thick as berries on a bush . . . so close to each other that it seems like a continuous show window.”
Photo: Millinery on the ground floor; hat and bonnet frames on the second level; Clinton and Broome Streets, 1914
A walk down pretty much any New York City street means encountering striking sculptures and reliefs on old buildings.
Some turn-of-the-century walkups are decorated with angels. Others are flanked by sculptures of women or dotted with plain female faces. Or Medusas.
Then there are the tough old guy faces on this Perry Street residence. Two together are carved out high on the corner facade, each watching out in a different direction.
It’s a city of islands, pulsing with color and motion. There’s the Triborough Bridge in the forefront; the 59th Street Bridge skip across Roosevelt Island in the background.
And the East River has never looked so magically blue:
Today, Bleecker Street near Mott Street is a pricey stretch of real estate.
But in 1883, Bleecker here featured “a row of houses of the lowest order” located “between the up-town feeders and the down-town cess-pools which they supply,” according to a New York Times article that year.
In other words, it was the perfect place for a home for fallen women: females who had given in to sin via sex, gambling, booze, or prostitution, or all of the above.
The Florence Night Mission, at 21 or 29 Bleecker (it’s listed at both addresses in separate source books), aimed to help these women. It was founded by Charles Crittenton in memory of his little daughter Florence.
The goal: “to reclaim the fallen women of the neighborhood, by providing them with lodging and food until they are strong enough to go out to work for themselves, and by Gospel meetings, which are held nightly at midnight,” states King’s Handbook of New York City, published in 1892.
I couldn’t find any information on how many women the mission helped or when it closed up shop.
But the Florence Night Mission wasn’t a one-home operation for long. By 1914, there 76 homes nationwide helping poor girls and women.
The organization, now called The National Crittenton Foundation, still serves women and their families today.
The menus: pages and pages long. The food: reliable and cheap but rarely great. The signs: cool and iconic, with a 1960s space-age kind of typeface.
And they typically spell “seafood” as two words, as the Washington Square diner sign states on Sixth Avenue and West Fourth, above.
The Washington Square also bills itself as a “Coffee Shop.” Very 1960s folk scene.
The Chelsea Square diner sign, on Ninth Avenue and 23rd Street, also has the sea food and chops thing going.
I’d say the Capitol Restaurant, on Upper Broadway in Inwood, qualifies as a diner because of the faux stone exterior.
Joe Jr’s is no longer at Sixth Avenue and 12th Street. It closed last July after 45 years and probably a million cheeseburger deluxes served.
EV Grieve has a post up today about the ghostly space Joe Jr left behind. I wonder where the sign went?
Medical care in the city’s poorest slums was pretty nonexistent in the late 1890s. So social reformer Lillian Wald—founder of the Henry Street Settlement and namesake of a housing project on Avenue D—established a visiting nurses service.
Her Nurses’ Settlement eventually had a staff of about 100 blue-uniformed nurses who went from tenement to tenement offering free or low-cost check-ups and treatment, mostly for immigrant mothers and kids.
Rather than climbing all those tenement stairs on their rounds, the nurses simply hopped from rooftop to rooftop, like this nurse is doing here.
