El Coqui is a tiny tree frog native to Puerto Rico—and the name of a restaurant on First Avenue near 110th Street:
Lenox Lounge, with its lovely Art Deco sign, has been at its Lenox Avenue address since 1939:
Pizza Del Barrio and Carousel Ice Cream are East Harlem ghost signs. They remain, but both shops have been long replaced by other businesses:
An Italian immigrant family in the kitchen of their East Side apartment, date unknown, photographed by Jessie Tarbox Beals. That gas stove to the right looks awfully dangerous.
This must be an old-law tenement; the apartments in these buildings weren’t required to have ventilation in each room. The window facing the kitchen appears to look into a smaller room or closet.
The Hotel Manger proclaims itself “the wonder hotel of New York—a modern marble palace” in this late 1920s postcard. And with amenities such as “circulating ice water,” it must have been quite a luxe place to hang your hat.
It was also a luxe place to commit suicide via jumping from one of its 20 stories.
A 1927 New York Times article chronicles one suicide: “When the woman came to the hotel she was assigned to Room 1239. About 10 o’clock guests on the second floor heard a thud, and the woman’s body was seen on the top of an extension that runs over the main entrance to the hotel.”
It wasn’t just a suicide magnet; The Manger also got in trouble with the feds for reportedly serving alcohol during Prohibition. A raid resulted in the arrest of several bellboys, waiters, and two bootleggers, as well as the padlocking of the building.
Perhaps that’s why the hotel was sold in 1931 and reopened as the Hotel Taft. The Taft catered to a Broadway tourist crowd, fell on hard times in the 1970s, and shut down in 1985. It’s now the Michelangelo.
Founded in 1850 as just a shipping company, American Express had its headquarters as well as a warehouse with stables (for the horses that actually lugged the packages around, of course) on lower Hudson Street in the late 19th century.
Amex has long vacated the premises, but the name and watchdog logo remain several stories up on the brick facade.
That’s one tough-looking pup—check out the collar on him!
Rowing in Central Park’s lake and gathering on Bethesda Terrace appear to have been as popular 100 years ago as they are today.
The fountain, unveiled in 1873, is topped by a sculpture called “Angel of the Waters,” by Emma Stebbins. She was the first woman commissioned to create art in a city park.
General Tom Thumb, born Charles Sherwood Stratton, was already an international sensation even before his celebrated New York City marriage. Three-foot tall Tom had toured the world with P.T. Barnum, who taught him how to sing, dance, and perform when he was a kid.
On February 10, 1863, Tom, 25, married 20-year-old Lavinia Warren, also part of P.T. Barnum’s traveling sideshow. The wedding took place at Grace Church on Broadway and East 10th Street; the reception held at the Metropolitan Hotel, down Broadway on Prince Street.
Barnum milked the nuptials as best as he could. He sold tickets to the reception for $75 a head, displayed Lavinia’s hand-made wedding dress in a department store window, and hawked souvenir trinkets.
Thousands of New Yorkers crowded the streets outside the church while Vanderbilts and Astors watched inside. Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, who had a studio nearby, took photos. Newspapers ran stories about the “loving lilliputians” and their “fairy wedding.”
Tom and Lavinia continued to tour with Barnum. They had no kids (much to Barnum’s chagrin), and the marriage lasted until Tom died of a stroke in 1883.
Before wine bars, bank branches, and sushi restaurants took over the East Village, there were hole-in-the-wall clubs like 8BC, a gallery and performance space on Eighth Street between Avenues B and C. Opened in 1983, the place was over by the end of 1985.
The club is long-gone, but the tenement building still stands today. Of course, the art and graffiti has all been cleaned off and the facade spruced up and bricked over. And instead of empty lots, it’s flanked on both sides by gardens.
In 1914, 20-year-old Pennsylvania native Olive Thomas was working in a Harlem department store when she entered a beauty contest run by a popular photographer.
She won the contest, was crowned the most beautiful girl in New York City, and went on to become a model, magazine cover girl, and socialite.
Her next move: joining the Ziegfeld Follies. Thomas performed as part of the racy Midnight Frolic, an after-hours show on the roof of 42nd Street’s New Amsterdam Theatre.
Thomas hit the silent-film circuit, married the brother of actress Mary Pickford, and then died on vacation in France in 1920 after accidentally ingesting medicine containing mercury.
She’s buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Supposedly her ghost haunts the New Amsterdam Theater.
That’s Kip as in the Kips Bay Kips, the New Amsterdam family that acquired a land grant along the East River in the mid-17th century and called it Kips Bay Farm. Now the area is Kips Bay the neighborhood.
The Kip house, a landmark at a time when few homes existed north of lower Manhattan, stood at what is now the Eastern end of 34th Street from 1655 to 1851.
Dozens of Kip family members were interred in this vault from 1842 to 1895. It’s in The New York City Marble Cemetery, on Second Street between First and Second Avenues, along with the vaults of other old New York families.
Zucca’s appears to have been a popular Rockefeller Center–area restaurant in the 1930 and 1940s, at least popular enough to have its own postcard and very earnest slogan: “the quality of our food is always higher than the price.”
The Bryant 5511 (or 10122) on the back of the postcard phone number predates the two-letter, 5 digit exchanges that existed until the 1960s, when letters were phased out of phone numbers.
Zucca’s was owned by Louis Zucca, whose daughter Rita Louisa Zucca renounced her U.S. citizenship during World War II and became known as an “Axis Sally.” She was convicted of broadcasting Nazi radio propaganda to American troops stationed in Europe.
Tried by an Italian military tribunal, she was sentenced to four years in prison, according to a 1945 New York Times article.
