When Clinton Street was “Millinery Row”

Manhattan’s Clinton Street is going into its second decade as kind of the restaurant row of the Lower East Side. 

But a hundred years ago, before its slide into a dingy drug bazaar, it courted a different industry: hat makers. Clinton Street of the early 20th century was known as “Millinery Row.”

As many as 16 stores were packed into each block from Houston to Grand Street, according to Valentine’s City of New York Guidebook, published in 1920.

“Every evening the East Side girl promenades with the throngs up and down Millinery Row, indulging in an orgy of window shopping, just like her sister on Fifth Avenue,” the book states.

“The millinery shops here are as thick as berries on a bush . . . so close to each other that it seems like a continuous show window.”

Photo: Millinery on the ground floor; hat and bonnet frames on the second level; Clinton and Broome Streets, 1914

Two heads on a West Village tenement

A walk down pretty much any New York City street means encountering striking sculptures and reliefs on old buildings.

Some turn-of-the-century walkups are decorated with angels. Others are flanked by sculptures of women or dotted with plain female faces. Or Medusas.

Then there are the tough old guy faces on this Perry Street residence. Two together are carved out high on the corner facade, each watching out in a different direction.

An enchanting view of the East River

It’s a city of islands, pulsing with color and motion. There’s the Triborough Bridge in the forefront; the 59th Street Bridge skip across Roosevelt Island in the background.

And the East River has never looked so magically blue:

A Bleecker Street home for “fallen women”

Today, Bleecker Street near Mott Street is a pricey stretch of real estate.

But in 1883, Bleecker here featured “a row of houses of the lowest order” located “between the up-town feeders and the down-town cess-pools which they supply,” according to a New York Times article that year.

In other words, it was the perfect place for a home for fallen women: females who had given in to sin via sex, gambling, booze, or prostitution, or all of the above.

The Florence Night Mission, at 21 or 29 Bleecker (it’s listed at both addresses in separate source books), aimed to help these women. It was founded by Charles Crittenton in memory of his little daughter Florence. 

The goal: “to reclaim the fallen women of the neighborhood, by providing them with lodging and food until they are strong enough to go out to work for themselves, and by Gospel meetings, which are held nightly at midnight,” states King’s Handbook of New York City, published in 1892.

I couldn’t find any information on how many women the mission helped or when it closed up shop.

But the Florence Night Mission wasn’t a one-home operation for long. By 1914, there 76 homes nationwide helping poor girls and women.

The organization, now called The National Crittenton Foundation, still serves women and their families today.

New York’s iconic diner signs

The menus: pages and pages long. The food: reliable and cheap but rarely great. The signs: cool and iconic, with a 1960s space-age kind of typeface.

And they typically spell “seafood” as two words, as the Washington Square diner sign states on Sixth Avenue and West Fourth, above.

The Washington Square also bills itself as a “Coffee Shop.” Very 1960s folk scene.

The Chelsea Square diner sign, on Ninth Avenue and 23rd Street, also has the sea food and chops thing going.

I’d say the Capitol Restaurant, on Upper Broadway in Inwood, qualifies as a diner because of the faux stone exterior.

Joe Jr’s is no longer at Sixth Avenue and 12th Street. It closed last July after 45 years and probably a million cheeseburger deluxes served.

EV Grieve has a post up today about the ghostly space Joe Jr left behind. I wonder where the sign went?

Health care for poor New Yorkers, 1890s-style

Medical care in the city’s poorest slums was pretty nonexistent in the late 1890s. So social reformer Lillian Wald—founder of the Henry Street Settlement and namesake of a housing project on Avenue D—established a visiting nurses service.

Her Nurses’ Settlement eventually had a staff of about 100 blue-uniformed nurses who went from tenement to tenement offering free or low-cost check-ups and treatment, mostly for immigrant mothers and kids. 

Rather than climbing all those tenement stairs on their rounds, the nurses simply hopped from rooftop to rooftop, like this nurse is doing here.

Did Jack the Ripper kill a Bowery prostitute?

On April 23, 1891, Carrie Brown, a 60-year-old prostitute known as “Old Shakespeare” because of her penchant for quoting the Bard after a few drinks, took a customer to the East River Hotel.

The next morning, her body was found on the bed in room 31 of the hotel, on Catherine and Water Streets. She had been strangled and disemboweled. 

Her brutal murder riveted New Yorkers, and newspapers instantly raised the possibility that she could be the first U.S. victim of Jack the Ripper, who was killing prostitutes across the Atlantic in London around the same time.

Because of the fear Jack the Ripper whipped up in the city, New York cops felt a lot of pressure to solve the case.

So they arrested an Algerian, Ameer Ben Ali, who lived in an adjacent room at the East River Hotel.

Though the evidence against Ali was circumstantial, he was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Eleven years later, after police reformers presented the city with evidence that the cops framed Ali, he was set free. 

The real killer, like Jack the Ripper, remains a mystery.

The animaliers who brought nature to the city

This sculpture—a brutal depiction of a goat being carried away in the talons of two strong eagles—is the work of an animalier: a sculptor of animals.

Bronzes like these were popular in the second half of the 19th century, and they’re all over New York parks and zoos.

“The naturalistic and sometimes fierce imagery or this type of sculpture is meant to evoke the strength of nature, expanding on 18th century Romanticism,” the New York City Parks Department website explains.

 ”Eagles and Prey,” by Christophe Fratin, has another distinction: it’s the oldest sculpture in any city park, cast in Paris in 1850.

Not all the animalier statues were so harsh though; later works were much gentler—such as Lioness and Cubs, by Victor Peter, cast in 1899 and on display at the Prospect Park Zoo.