Notorious criminal “Marm” Mandelbaum

When you think of the criminal element in New York City in the late 1800s, portly immigrant ladies rarely come to mind.

But 250-pound Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum, who arrived in Manhattan from Prussia in 1849, became one of the city’s most infamous thieves, a kind of mother hen to organized crime in post–Civil War New York.

After moving to the U.S., Marm and her husband opened a dry goods store at 79 Clinton Street, which quickly became a front for her various illegal activities. Marm fenced stolen goods, financed gangs, assisted con men and blackmailers, and even taught pickpocketing to kids on Grand Street.

This godmother also had a ladylike side. She gave lavish dinner parties mixing New York’s elite with crooks. Supposedly she tried to improve the manners of her criminal cohorts, and she was a queen bee to other female swindlers of the time.

Finally arrested in 1884, she took off for Canada with a million bucks. She died there in 1894.

A War of 1812 fort in Central Park

The Revolutionary War left a deep mark on New York City. But the War of 1812? This skirmish with the British hasn’t had a lasting impact here, save for a tiny stone structure tucked away in the northwest corner of Central Park called Blockhouse #1.

The Blockhouse was built in 1814, one of many constructed in Upper Manhattan to protect the area from the British should they invade the city from the north.

It’s in a part of Central Park that is still rugged, high, and hard to reach—the perfect place for some canons.

Luckily the British never attacked, and the war was over in 1815. The Blockhouse was later used to store ammunition as well as a place to celebrate patriotic holidays.

When Central Park was expanded in the 1860s to include the undeveloped, rocky land between 106th and 110th Street, the Blockhouse came with it. The old structure was considered a romantic, picturesque reminder of another era. 

It’s now empty, serene, and mostly lifeless, except for a tall American flag soaring into the sky from the flagpole in the center of the fort. 

Manhattan’s other Washington Bridge

It predates the George Washington Bridge by 43 years and has a simple beauty all its own.

Still, the tiny Washington Bridge—connecting 181st Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Washington Heights to University Avenue in the Bronx—is like a neglected kid brother to the enormous and iconic GWB.

This is the Washington Bridge circa 1907. The Harlem River looks like a country brook. The “Speedway” referred to in the postcard was the Harlem River Speedway, a three-mile road for racing horses and carriages. It eventually became today’s Harlem River Drive.

Here’s another view of the Speedway.

A New York cop shot by the Mafia in Italy

Born in Salerno, Italy, in 1860, Giuseppe “Joseph” Petrosino joined the New York Police Department in 1883. He is the only New York cop killed in the line of duty on foreign soil.

Petrosino grew up in Little Italy. Fluent in many Italian dialects, he rose through the NYPD ranks quickly, earning a promotion to detective in 1895 and then founding the NYPD bomb squad to thwart Mafia bombings. 

After another promotion, to lieutenant, in 1908, Petrosino was put in charge of the Italian Squad, an elite group of detectives who handled mob-related crimes. On his watch, thousands of arrests were made, and crimes against Italians dropped by half.

In March 1909 he went to Palermo, Sicily, on a top-secret investigation. Mobsters in the U.S. would not kill a policeman. But in Palermo, things were different. Lured into a meeting with a supposed informant, Petrosino was shot dead.

Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers attended his funeral; the procession went from Little Italy to Calvary Cemetery in Queens. In 1987, Kenmare Square, on Lafayette Street, was renamed Joseph Petrosino Square. 

The camels who lived and died in Central Park

This little camel appears to be roaming the park freely. Perhaps he was an attraction and gave rides to kids. Or he may have been one of the resident camels of the menagerie in Central Park in the late 1800s. 

Camels were popular at the menagerie, and they got lots of attention in the press; newspapers updated New Yorkers on when new camels came to the park, when a baby camel was born, and when a beloved camel died—like Volstead, who perished in 1930 at age 14.

“Volstead, who was born in the zoo here, was the last of the male camels of the Central Park herd,” a New York Times article stated. “He is survived by his mate, Jeanette, and his 11-months-old offspring, Jeannette 2nd. The grief of the survivors was described by head keeper Robert Hurton as acute.”

1970s New York flashback: The Magic Garden

Were you a little New Yorker in the 1970s with access to a television between one and three o’clock on weekday afternoons? Then odds are you were captivated by The Magic Garden.

It was low-budget local TV at its best. Broadcast on channel 11, the show’s hosts, Carole Demas and Paula Janis (Carole had the dirty blond hair; Paula was the brunette), sang songs, read jokes from the Chuckle Patch, and talked to Sherlock the squirrel puppet. Very trippy, but very entertaining.

Former New York City teachers, Carole and Paula originally met at Brooklyn’s Midwood High School. They still perform together, and DVDs of the original show are now available. 

Where Macy’s got its modest start

$11.06. That amount was reportedly what Rowland Hussey Macy earned on the first day his new dry-goods store opened for business in a small building on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street in 1858.

But after that slow start, the R.H. Macy store began grossing tens of thousands of dollars a year. It became a full-fledged department store in 1877 and eventually occupied many storefronts along West 14th Street (like the one in the photo at left).

Fourteenth Street was a more upscale shopping district at the end of the 19th century. But even then, department store moguls could see that the future of retail was farther uptown. 

So in 1902, Macy’s packed it up and relocated to a colossal new store at Herald Square on 34th Street—its current quarters today.

This weekend, Macy’s is sponsoring its 33rd annual Fireworks Spectacular, this time over the Hudson River. Macy’s pledged the first show as a tribute to America’s Bicentennial, and it quickly morphed into an Independence Day tradition.