More old-school phone exchanges

This old-timey sign belongs to a store on Myrtle Avenue in Clinton Hill. the UL exchange stood for Ulster.

But what was Ulster? It’s a mystery. A New York Times article from February 1947 announced that 4,200 households in Flatbush “who have wanted telephone installations since the beginning of the war” would be getting UL numbers.

Strangely, Joe’s Superette, on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens, also has a UL number. That’s a bit of a hike from Myrtle Avenue.

Meanwhile, on a residential building in Harlem, the “In Case of Emergency” number above still stands next to an elevator shaft. LE for Lenox Avenue.

“20 Cent Movie” at a Times Square theater

In the 1920s and 1930s, painter Reginald Marsh depicted scenes from the seedy side of the city: burlesque-show floozies, Bowery bums, and life’s other bit players—including these characters hanging around the Lyric Theater on 42nd Street.

“20 Cent Movie” dates back to 1936. Marsh was also drawn to Coney Island; he painted a number of carnivalesque beach and boardwalk scenes similar to this one.

Harlem’s Mount Morris Park fire watchtower

One was at Ninth Avenue and 33rd Street. Another stood on Spring Street. In all, fire-prone 19th-century New York City was dotted with 11 fire watchtowers.

Made of cast iron, each tower contained a huge bell that a guard, positioned there at all hours, would ring whenever flames were spotted nearby.

The only fire watchtower still standing is in Mount Morris Park—aka Marcus Garvey Park. This unusual structure sits high on a hill known to Dutch colonists as “Slangberg,” or Snake Hill, in Harlem’s East 120s.

Completed in 1857, the watchtower was only used for a couple of decades, replaced by telegraph alarms.

But the cool old bell still rang regularly until 1905; residents asked the city to strike it twice a day to let locals know the time.

Soda and smack on Avenue D

Suburban drug-seeking kids of the 1980s: the cops from the East Village’s Ninth Precinct never believed your stories of randomly getting mugged on Avenue D on your way back to Great Neck.

Here’s what one detective had to say to The Soho News on March 16, 1982:

Later in the article, the reporter quotes another cop calling Avenue D “the world’s largest retail drug market.” 

New York’s other big November holiday

During the final week of this month, buck tradition and celebrate Evacuation Day, November 25—a huge holiday in old New York marking the day the last British troops sailed out of the city in 1783. 

For most of the Revolutionary War, New York was under British control. Hours after the Red Coats left, a Union flag was yanked down from a flagpole at Battery Park and replaced with the Stars and Stripes. George Washington returned to Manhattan, leading the Continental Army triumphantly down Broadway.

General George W., post-Colonial New York’s first celebrity

Evacuation Day used to be celebrated every November 25 with the raising of the U.S. flag at Battery Park. But once relations with England warmed up during World War I—and a certain other late-November holiday grew in popularity—Evacuation Day slipped into the dustbin of holiday history.

The squatters who lived in “Hardlucksville”

The 1930s were a pretty rough time. Unemployment hovered around 20 percent nationally, while the city’s poorest neighborhoods, like Harlem, had a 50 percent out-of-work rate.

Where did Depression-era New Yorkers go when they had no money to pay rent? Some moved into the city’s many squatter camps.

These makeshift villages, many with disturbingly accurate nicknames, sprang up citywide, according to a March 26, 1933 New York Times article.

One called “Hardlucksville” formed off 10th Street next to the East River (at left). Five men resided there, selling firewood culled from the river:

“The three of them saw up the wood into stove lengths. the two others peddle the product in the East Side streets, trundling it from door to door in baby carts reclaimed from the junk pile. Among the five they earn a half-dollar a day, and that supports them,” the Times reported.

Another squat, “Camp Thomas Paine,” was home to dozens of World War I veterans; they lived in shacks in the West 70s near the Hudson River. And “Packing Box City” (above) popped up on Houston Street.

Central Park had its own Hooverville as well. Read more about it here.

The horse heads left behind on old stables

Regal horse head statues like these still dot old buildings in every borough in the city, and it’s kind of a thrill to be out on a walk and discover new ones right in your own neighborhood.

They’re stately reminders that New York City was built on the backs of horses. Almost every block had stables where working horses were fed and allowed to rest.

This one above is affixed to an old stable on a side street in Clinton Hill.

An entirely different horse head watches over a building off Madison Street on the Lower East Side.

The punchiest Daily News headline ever

Okay, so it lacks the cadence of The Post‘s 1983 masterpiece “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” But this Daily News gem, from the October 30, 1975 edition of the paper, more than makes up for it in punch and bluntness.

Of course, Ford didn’t actually tell the city to drop dead. New York City in the 1970s was broke, and city lawmakers were desperate for Federal funds to keep services going. On October 29, Ford gave a speech denying the city a bailout.

It was more of a tough-love move to get the city to stop its out-of-control spending than an outright no. And a few months later, Ford did sign off on loans to keep New York from going bankrupt. 

But the immortal headline cast Ford as a villian. In an interview years later, he said that he felt it cost him the presidency in 1976.

The mysterious names on a midtown building

De Soto. Montcalm. Vespucci. La Salle. Marquette. The names of these men and others are inscribed above the second-floor windows of a building at 840 Eighth Avenue, a pretty typical early 20th century structure at 51st Street.

So who were these guys, and why are their names inscribed on the building?

They were Catholic explorers, missionaries, or war heros who helped settle and strengthen the New World. It makes sense that their names are here, considering that the building was put up in 1925 by the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic fraternal organization, as a hotel and clubhouse.

The Knights of Columbus didn’t have the building for long. It changed hands in 1933 and in the 1960s wound up as a YWCA. Today, it’s senior-citizen home . . . with some illustrious names giving it character.

Where Greta Garbo was left alone

In 1953, Swedish-born actress Greta Garbo purchased a 7-room apartment at The Campanile, a co-op at the eastern end of 52nd Street—a cul-de-sac beside the East River. 

She lived there for the next 37 years, until her death in 1990.

Reclusive and uninterested in giving interviews, she was often seen going on long walks through her midtown neighborhood dressed unassumingly like any other New Yorker.

“I want to be alone,” she had said in one of her most famous movies, Grand Hotel. 

And though paparazzi managed to get occasional shots of her strolling around the city, she mostly was.