Marquis de Lafayette visits New York City

New York has a couple of major roads, a high school, even a housing project named after Lafayette, the French military leader who became a Major General in the Continental Army and promoted democracy at home in France.

He was a big hero in post-Revolutionary War years. So to help celebrate America’s 50th birthday, Lafayette was invited back to the U.S. in 1824.

His arrival in August of that year put the city in the grip of Lafayette fever. 

A third of the population of New York at that time—50,000 people—greeted him on lower Broadway.

      Touring Manhattan, he attended parties, plays, and a spectacular ball at Castle Clinton in his honor before taking off to visit the rest of the country. 

A plaque in the West Village marks his visit. It’s on Hudson Street affixed to P.S. 3.

At the time, the school was run by the “Free School Society” and was considered a fine example of public education, worthy enough to show the Marquis.

The wisdom of the dead in Manhattan graveyards

Alexander Hamilton, Robert Fulton, and dozens of ordinary 18th- and 19th-century New Yorkers sleep for eternity in the cemetery behind Trinity Church, at Broadway and Wall Street. And a few blocks up Broadway, off Fulton Street, more early residents are buried in the graveyard of St. Paul’s Chapel.

Both are peaceful yet unsettling places; Trinity’s cemetery is older than the current church building itself. The jagged, weathered headstones mark the graves of men and women, Revolutionary War soldiers and seamen, and lots of young kids. It’s hard to read most of the headstones because the elements have erased the names and dates.

But many are legible. And to remind visitors of their own mortality, several of the headstones feature this eerie address:

“Behold and See as you Pass By
As You are Now so Once was I
As I am Now you Soon will Be
Prepare for Death and Follow Me”

Strange Days in Sniffen Court

Tucked away on quiet 36th Street between Lexington and Third Avenue lies Sniffen Court—one of the city’s sweetest private alleys. Ten two-story former carriage houses, built in the 1860s, now serve as private residences (one houses a theater) that collectively look like a toy village.

Unlike other alleys, like Patchin Place in the West Village, a locked gate prevents curious passersby from strolling in and time-traveling back to Civil War–era New York City. 

But it didn’t prevent The Doors from shooting the Strange Days album cover there in 1967. Inspired by the 1954 Fellini film La Strada, the photographer recruited carnival performers and average joes (reportedly one was a cabbie paid $5 for his time) to pose for the iconic photo.

Here’s the cover shot. Compare it to Sniffen Court today; this landmarked mews has barely changed in 30 years.

The back cover photo shows the left side of Sniffen Court. The white horse and rider reliefs on each side of the back wall still exist:

“A Winter Wedding—Washington Square”

Painter Fernand Lungren captures wedding guests, coachmen, and passersby at dusk in the snow on genteel Washington Square North in 1897.

Like so many other New York artists, Lungren supported himself doing illustrations for popular magazines—such as Century and McClure’s.

Hard to believe, but at the time he painted this scene, the marble Washington Arch was only five years old!

Almost-forgotten Manhattan phone exchanges

Tucked among the battered old store signs in Chinatown are a few faded but still readable gems like this one. It sports the old-school phone exchange WO—for nearby Worth Street:

An Ephemeral reader sent in this 1980s business card, featuring the old BR exchange for Bryant Park:

Modern Leather Goods has been in business since 1939, but a quick look at their website shows that they have a new phone number.

Central Park in a horse-drawn sleigh

Makes you wish snow was on the ground right now, doesn’t it? This turn-of-the-century postcard depicts winter in the park as even more magical and enchanting than it usually is.

Sleighing in the park was a popular pastime after a snowstorm. View a December 1898 clip of horse-drawn sleighs traveling through Central Park here.

Jack Kerouac at the Kettle of Fish in the Village

Opened in 1950, the Kettle of Fish—with its large neon “bar” sign outside the door—was already old-school by the time The New Inside Guide to Greenwich Village came out in 1965:

By then it had earned its cred as a hangout for the early-1960s folk music crowd, and before that as a haunt of beat writers, such as Jack Kerouac.

In Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, author and Kerouac girlfriend Joyce Johnson recalls a night in 1958 when Kerouac visited the Kettle of Fish with poet Gregory Corso:

“Shortly before he returned to Orlando to start packing, [Jack] went out one night with Gregory Corso to the Kettle of Fish, a bar on MacDougal Street that had a rough clientele and was frequented by moving men like Henri Cru. In the fall Jack and I had been photographed in front of its red neon sign by Jerry Yulsman.

“In the small hours of the morning, Jack and Gregory left the bar, followed outside by two men, who beat Jack up, banging his head repeatedly against the curb and breaking his nose and his arm. To his horror, he found he lacked the will to defend himself. . . .”

Kerouac and Joyce Johnson at the Kettle of Fish on MacDougal. The bar moved to the old Lion’s Head space on Christopher Street several years back, where it still is today—and strangely has become the epicenter of Green Bay Packers fandom, as the Daily News explains.

The Kettle of Fish in the 1950s, part neighborhood pub, part beat haunt

The other name for Sixth Avenue

Of course, no one calls Sixth Avenue by its official moniker: Avenue of the Americas. The street got this formal and cumbersome name in 1945. But why—and whose bright idea was it?

The blame starts with Sixth Avenue business owners. In the 1940s, they argued that the then-dingy avenue (the El had recently been dismantled above it) needed some sprucing up.

One way to do that would be to get Central and South American countries to build consulates and company HQs on the avenue. Real-estate bigwig Leonard Spear took credit for that idea.

In 1945, city council members were convinced, and Mayor La Guardia signed the name change into law. In the 1950s, signs representing different countries in the Americas went up all along the avenue.

The signs never helped the name catch on. Most were taken down for good in the early 1990s, when city lampposts were replaced. But a few rusted ones remain. One still hangs on at Sixth and Grand Street.