From a 1930s New Yorker comes this advertisement for liverwurst hors d’oeuvres. Mmm, sounds like a tasty Depression-era finger food. The ad is pretty snazzy though.
Stahl-Meyer was Brooklyn’s biggest manufacturer of ready-to-eat meat products, according to a 1965 New York Times article. Even cooler: Their hot dogs were sold at Ebbets Field.
Swimmers, sensational high divers, log rollers, and others—brought to you by Barnum & Bailey, of course. The sideshow and circus folks sure produced some beautiful posters around the turn of the last century.
See what’s going on this summer at Coney Island.
Well, maybe it used to be. Original Maxl’s served up old-fashioned heavy-on-the-beer-and-schnitzel fare on East 86th Street, when this was the main drag of German Yorkville.
I’m not sure when it opened and can’t find anything pinpointing when it closed, but I don’t recall ever seeing a cabin-like facade on 86th Street. I’m pretty sure it’s a high-rise now.
A restaurant guide published in 1931, Dining in New York, has this account:
“Don’t even think of missing Maxl’s. It is a restaurant, a night club, an experience all rolled up in one and seasoned with frequent renditions of ‘Schnitzelbank.’ From the outside, Maxl’s is a peaceful German cottage, vine-hung, cozy, and inviting. The inside is something else again.
“There is a stringy three-piece orchestra, which stops every other moment to drink and sing a toast to each newcomer—an orchestra with a temperamental leader, who insists on grinding out well-known German ditties and resents all verbal college-boy intrusions. . . .
“. . . and there is ‘Happy,’ a 300-pound play-boy who, dressed up in knee pads and alpine hat reminiscent of a Swiss yodeler, knows all the words of all the songs.”
This one was spotted in a building on Park Place where some city agencies have offices. SW might stand for Swinburne—but why? The only Swinburne reference I’m aware of is Swinburne Island in New York Harbor.
On East First Street, a reminder of the East Village’s working class past, and the neighborhood’s proximity to GRamercy Park:
It must have been pretty hot out on this day at the Fulton Fish Market—so hot that these kids stripped off their clothes and dove in to the East River to cool off, disregarded the fact that it was illegal to swim in the river. For obvious reasons.
Meanwhile, fishmongers and others go about their day.
This photo is part of the New-York Historical Society.
The Pierre, on Fifth Avenue and 61st Street, has always been at the top of the New York city luxury hotel heap. And after a major two-year makeover, it just reopened this week.
Built in 1930 at a cost of $15 million (no small change in the Depression), it has some pretty enchanting touches—such as the castle-like uppermost floors modeled after the Chapel of Versailles.
But The Pierre has its infamous side; it was the location of a major heist in the early morning hours of January 2, 1972. While ultra-rich guests were sleeping off New Years’ partying from the night before, tuxedo-clad mob associates held up the hotel.
Gaining access by pulling up in a limo and pretending to be friends of a guest, some of the robbers took 19 staffers and security guards hostage while the others jacked open safe deposit boxes, making off with guests’ jewels and other valuables.
The heist went smoothly, and the robbers netted $11 million in goods. Of course, in the end, crime didn’t pay—at least for some of the crooks. The masterminds were eventually caught and sent to Attica.
The above ad appeared in a 1935 issue of The New Yorker.
Looming over an empty lot on 46th Street is a two-fer: an ad for a a cheap hotel (hot & cold water!) superimposed over a cigar advertisement.
Vanishing New York and Fading Ad Blog spotted this one months back, but it’s in such a wonderful bit of old New York, it deserves more exposure.
Meanwhile, a pre-war apartment building near Carnegie Hall obscured by a post-war yellow residence of some kind features the kind of cigarette ad never seen anymore. This suave man smoking Barclays looks very 1980s.
The pleasure is back! Actually, do they even sell this brand anymore?
If you notice lots of school-age kids roaming the streets on Thursday, chalk it up to the day off all city students get on the first Thursday in June.
Why the holiday? It’s a relic that originated way back in the 1820s as Anniversary Day (or Rally Day), which commemorated the formation of the Brooklyn Sunday School Union. Hey, Brooklyn didn’t earn its nickname, City of Churches, for being secular.
Campfire girls in middy blouses march down Bedford Avenue in honor of Brooklyn Day, around 1920.
For decades, the holiday was celebrated in Brooklyn, officially becoming Brooklyn Day in 1905. Tens of thousands of Brooklynites paraded all over the borough every year, carrying banners and listening to politicians expound on the importance of God, religion, and freedom.
By 1959, the holiday was broadened to Brooklyn-Queens Day; Queens Sunday Schools had been having parades of their own all along. In 2006 it became a day off for students in all five boroughs.
When you see letters carved into the top of a tenement building, they usually spell out the name of the guy who developed or owned it. Or it’ll just give the year the building was completed.
But then there’s Sunny Side, spotted on a tenement the south side of 110th Street around Second Avenue:
I guess the owner wanted to do whatever he could to make his apartments seem more desirable than the tenements across the street?
Splatter T-shirts! Tank tops! Skirts with geometrical patterns! Flip was early-80s cool clothing headquarters. And the late great Postermat was on the same Village block.
This ad appeared in the August 1984 issue of the East Village Eye.
