The Civil War prison in New York Harbor

New York isn’t exactly known as a center for Civil War history. But just a half-mile from Battery Park lies the remains of a POW camp that once housed hundreds of Confederate soldiers.

It’s called Castle Williams (left, in a 1860s photo by Mathew Brady), on Governors Island. Built in 1811 as a fort to guard the harbor, the castle welcomed its first group of POWs on September 4, 1861. 

High-ranking officers were taken to Fort Jay, on the island’s other end, where they enjoyed more comfortable quarters.

Regular troops, however, went to Castle Williams—nicknamed the “Cheesebox” because of its circular design. Confined to small casemates, Southern soldiers passed the time playing games and reading secondhand newspapers and bibles, according to Governors Island: The Jewel of New York Harbor, by Ann Buttenwieser.

Castle Williams in an early 1900s postcard

Conditions weren’t good. Within weeks, all three tiers of the castle were packed with more than 700 men, whose meager provisions included little more than a dirty blanket and one set of clothes. A measles outbreak killed at least 12 of them, Buttenwieser writes.

As prisoners left Governors Island—shipped off to other Union prisons—new captured soldiers arrived. Over the course of the war, 47 men died in Castle Williams. Eleven were buried on Governors Island.

A glimpse into Soho’s manufacturing past

This remarkably well-preserved three-story faded ad was put up by a box company on Spring and Wooster Streets—a nice reminder that Soho was once a manufacturing neighborhood with many small factories. Note the great old phone exchange CA 6-7390.

What happened to the box factory? Probably turned into condos. A little research shows that there was a box company at 73 Wooster Street. Shut down in the mid ’90s, it was renovated into multimillion-dollar loft condos within a few years.

New York City’s little cigarette rollers

In turn-of-the-century New York City, even young kids did their share to help the family finances. If a poor immigrant family worked a trade at home, small hands were there to assist. 

Above, photographer Lewis Wicks Hine captures an immigrant widow and her son rolling cigarettes in 1909. I love his brother in the dirty garment, his ears rather Spock-like, staring with suspicion at the camera.

The picture comes from Historic Photos of New York State, a just-published collection with lots of wonderful shots of city life over the years.

Jacob Riis also photographed an immigrant family from Eastern Europe plying their trade, cigar rolling. The undated photo above is part of the Jacob A. Riis Collection at the Museum of the City of New York.

I imagine these families were replaced by machines not long after the photos were taken.

Hunter College’s infamous “Axis Sally”

Small-town girl Mildred Gillars came to New York City to make it as an actress. But she wound up a household name for an entirely different line of work: Nazi radio propagandist. 

Born in 1900, she moved to the city in the 1920s, earning small parts in vaudeville shows and musical comedies. 

At some point she enrolled in Hunter College, then a single-sex school. There, the story goes, she began an affair with a professor-turned-Nazi who she followed to Berlin in the 1930s.

After World War II broke out in 1941, he convinced her to broadcast a regular show for Radio Berlin. Each broadcast attempted to demoralize U.S. soldiers stationed in Europe by implying that their families and government didn’t care about them.

Mildred was one of several “Axis Sallys,” the name given to women who spread propaganda for Germany, Italy, or Japan. Another Axis Sally was the daughter of midtown restauranteur Louis Zucca.

Once the war ended, Mildred was captured and brought back to the states for trial in 1948. Convicted of treason, she lived behind bars in West Virginia until being paroled in 1961. She died, with little fanfare, at 87.

A stained-glass surprise on West 14th Street

The ground floor of the dingy walkup at 203 West 14th Street, off of Seventh Avenue, houses a neighborhood donut joint. A nail salon is on the second floor.

The remaining storefronts on the northwest corner of the block are pretty ugly—they help give West 14th its grimy, discount-store vibe.

But this colorful window on the second-floor fire escape at 203 must have been beautiful at one time. It’s one of those hidden gems New York is famous for; you could walk by it a million times and not realize it was there.

And then one day, you finally see it. Too bad the glass panels are falling in and the window is so dirty, it’s hard to tell what it depicts.

The stenciled address above it is a nice touch. Whoever lived here then seemed to take some pride in the building.

A march on Washington Square

On May 10, 1933, 100,000 New Yorkers marched from Madison Square Park to Battery Park to protest Nazi policies and denounce anti-Semitism. This photo shows the marchers making their way down Fifth Avenue and through Washington Square Park.

A New York Times article reported that the participants were Jews “with many Christian sympathizers.”

“While the demonstration was in progress, the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of New York, at its one hundred and fiftieth convention at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, adopted a resolution expressing sympathy for the sufferers in Germany and calling upon Christians everywhere to voice disapproval of anti-Semitism,” the Times reported.

Astor Place: rocked by a deadly riot

A riot sparked by dueling performances of Macbeth? Hard to believe, but it happened 160 years ago in Astor Place. Today, skate rats are the most menacing crowd you’ll find there.

But in 1849, things were different. Top U.K. actor William Charles Macready, a favorite of New York City’s upper crust, was booked to perform Macbeth at the refined Astor Place Opera House on May 10. 

That same night, American-born Edwin Forrest (at left, a daguerreotype by Mathew Brady), who started his career in theaters on the nearby Bowery for working-class crowds, was also scheduled to play Macbeth a few blocks away. Once friendly, the actors were now rivals.

On May 7, Forrest’s fans—whipped up by newspaper stories and anti-English sentiment—arrived at Macready’s opening performance and proceeded to bombard the stage with eggs and shoes. 

Macready wanted to go back to Britain, but prominent New Yorkers, like Herman Melville and Washington Irving, persuaded him to stay.

Before the May 10 performance, Forrest’s fans went into riot mode. About 20,000 men amassed outside the opera house, tossing rocks through windows and attempting to set it on fire. While police tried to quell the crowd outside, Macready finished the show and took off.

The rioters did not. National Guardsmen were called in to restore order. They fired on rioters as well as innocent bystanders. After it was finally brought under control, the riot had claimed 22 lives.

Cross streets carved into tenement corners

Before reliable metal street signs were put up on every corner of the city letting you know exactly where you were, it was probably pretty helpful to have the cross street names chiseled into the corner of a tenement or warehouse.

Now, of course, the cross street carvings have outlived their usefulness. They’re worn down by the elements, but it’s always a treat to look up and see one.

Like this sign on Market and Madison Streets, on a rundown tenement:

The carving at Third Avenue is missing its counterpart—it should read 110th Street:

This one at Fifth Street and First Avenue isn’t carved into the corner. The numbers look old, but not that old—perhaps the original corner blocks were replaced and new street numbers put up:

The loveliest street corner sign, of course, is in Tribeca, on Hudson and Beach Streets.

The second-worst fire in New York City history

You know what the worst is. Next on the list—in terms of loss of firefighter life, that is—comes the 23rd Street Fire in 1966, which killed 12 firefighters.

It started in a brownstone at 7 East 22rd Street at 9:30 p.m. on October 17. An art dealer stored paint in the cellar, which fueled heavy smoke and a raging basement fire.

Unable to make their way to the source of the flames, firefighters went around the block to 23rd Street to try to enter through a building that shared the cellar.

Firefighters didn’t know that after a renovation, a wall in the shared cellar had been moved, weakening the floor. The entire first floor soon collapsed into the basement inferno, killing 10 firefighters. Two more died in another part of the building.

The city was astounded and distraught. Days later, 10,000 firefighters flanked Fifth Avenue as fire trucks carried coffins to St. Thomas Episcopal Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (Above photo: FDNY. Below: The New York Times)

The site is now home to a high-rise apartment house, just across from Madison Square Park. A small plaque honors the men who lost their lives there 43 years ago.

A guide to narcotics in the East Village, 1982

The Soho News, a weekly paper that covered downtown from 1973 to 1982, ran some news briefs about East Village smack shops and drug dealing titled “Alphabet City Soup” in their March 16, 1982 issue.

It included this informative guide to the most popular brands of cocaine and heroin available between Avenues A and D at the time.