The original Stuyvesant Town

Before the 9,000-apartment, red-brick housing development across Fourteenth Street opened in 1947, a small walk-up tenement at 219 Avenue B had the Stuyvesant name on its far more humble facade.

“Stuyvesant Apartments” is serious faded and covered in grime, but it was constructed in 1910, predating Stuy Town by 37 years.

There’s a lot of Stuyvesant in the vicinity: Stuyvesant Street near St. Mark’s Church, the old Stuyvesant High School building on East 15th Street, and Stuyvesant Square off Second Avenue in the teens.

No wonder: Petrus Stuyvesant, the Dutch-born director-general of New Netherland, had his farm—or bouwerie—here in the 1600s.

The Bronx Zoo’s deplorable human exhibit

In September 1906, a Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga—who had been living in the Museum of Natural History after a stint at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair—was moved into the Bronx Zoo’s Monkey House. Given a bow and arrow, he was free to come and go on zoo grounds.

He wasn’t an employee, however, but an exhibit—one that was met with a fair amount of outrage. African-American leaders protested immediately. And though crowds came to laugh and jeer at Ota Benga, many visitors also found the situation shameful.

Ota Benga, supposedly at the Bronx Zoo

The New York Times said this about zoo-goers on September 9, 1906: “Even those who laughed the most turned away with an expression on their faces such as one sees after a play with a sad ending or a book in which the hero or heroine is poorly rewarded. ‘Something about it that I don’t like’ was the way one man put it.”

 The Bronx Zoo entrance in 1910, 11 years after the zoo opened 

Within a few weeks, the zoo took Ota Benga off display, and by the end of the month he came under the guardianship of an African-American clergyman who moved him to the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn. 

The zoo’s human exhibit was over; Ota Benga met his end a decade later. In 1910 he relocated to a Baptist seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he later found work at a tobacco factory. In 1916, he shot himself in the heart with a stolen pistol.

Dear MTA, please don’t take these signs down

Brooklyn’s narrow York Street subway station is home to a couple of vintage signs that deserve a little love.

“No Smoking, Spitting” is pretty rough around the edges; looks like it dates from the 1940s or 1950s—and probably hasn’t been enforced since then:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love that someone at the MTA at one time thought it necessary to put this next sign up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you climb the stairs out of the Financial District’s Nassau Street station, you’re greeted by these old-school directions. The barber shop is still there, but I didn’t see a beauty salon.

“Sailors and Floozies” in Riverside Park

In this 1938 painting, New York City native Paul Cadmus depicts sailors on shore leave—consorting with some disreputable babes beside the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Riverside Park at 89th Street, no less. It belongs to the Whitney Museum. 

“Some of these sailors are rather sympathetic, as well as one of the girls—the girl in the ridiculous hat,” Cadmus commented, according to background information provided by the Whitney. “I don’t know where I invented that hat, where it came from. No milliner that I knew.”

“Sailors and Floozies” was supposed to be exhibited in a San Francisco art show in 1940, but the Navy wanted it taken down. After the press made a fuss about it, the painting stayed in the show.

According to a 1940 Time article, Cadmus had this to say: “I  think the picture portrays an enjoyable side of Navy life. I think it would make a good recruiting poster.”

The last old-school street sign in Brooklyn?

The corner of Auburn and North Elliott in Fort Greene no longer officially exists; it appears to have been de-mapped when the city put up the Whitman and Ingersoll Houses across Myrtle Avenue near Fort Greene Park in the 1940s. 

Luckily, someone forgot to take down this wonderful relic of a street sign:

Here’s more on street sign design through the years.

Defunct department store: Russeks

Brooklyn’s Fulton Street used to be a department store mecca, home to one-time big-name retailers such as Abraham & Strauss, Loeser’s, and Russeks. The latter disappeared decades ago. Yet a ghostly reminder still exists on the side of a Fulton Street building.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Russeks started out specializing in furs, but the Brooklyn branch and its Fifth Avenue counterpart soon became known for their women’s collections. These ads appeared in The New York Times pre-World War II.

  Russeks has a celebrity connection: The founders were the grandparents of photographer Diane Arbus and her brother, poet Howard Nemerov.

1921′s hit musical review at the Winter Garden

“Passing Show of 1921″ was kind of the Shubert version of the popular Ziegfeld Follies, a big-budget musical review with lots of pretty girls, gaudy costumes, and novelty numbers at Broadway’s relatively new Winter Garden theatre.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have no idea what “In Little Old New York” sounds like, but judging from the lyrics supplied by the sheet music here, it’s probably appropriately sappy and sentimental:

The architect who helped design New York

The Frick Museum, Grand Army Plaza, the Forbes building—these are just some of the iconic structures credited to gilded age architectural firm Carrere and Hastings.

 In 1911, just two months before the opening of the firm’s biggest gig yet—the New York Public Library Building on 42nd Street—architect John Mervin Carrere (pictured at left) was killed in a Manhattan taxi accident.

The day after his funeral, his body lay in state in the rotunda of the almost-finished library, a tribute to a man who helped create and shape the look of 20th century New York City.

 

 

 

In 1916, the city dedicated this commemorative staircase in Riverside Park at 99th Street to Carrere. It’s not in the best condition, and the plaque bearing his name is quite modest for someone whose aesthetic vision is stamped all over the city to this day.

1985: “smarm, spandex, and narcissism”

Those are some harsh words from a columnist for the East Village Eye, who wasn’t too impressed by the music scene that year locally and nationally.

End-of-year wrap-ups like these generally sound dated and pompous immediately after they’re published. (Was Ed Meese truly one of the most overrated person of the year?)

Still, I think the columnist is dead-on with his view of David Bowie and Mick Jagger’s throwaway single “Dancing in the Streets.” It really was the worst video of 1985.

New Year’s Day angel babies

Sculptures of angels, cherubs, and babies adorn lots of New York City houses and buildings. These two decorate a mansion on Riverside Drive in the 100s:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two more little ones stand guard at the Stuyvesant Polyclinic—formerly the German Dispensary—on Second Avenue and Ninth Street. They’ve been there since 1884.

An angel in the South Bronx, offering comfort above a tenement doorway: