The angry chicks of Brooklyn Heights

These baby birds, carved into the entryway of a Henry Street apartment house, seem mighty pissed off as they stare at the sidewalk.

Come on little hatchlings, it’s almost Spring!

A 1940s view outside the Public Library

This postcard was mailed in 1943. But a typical day at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street doesn’t look much different in 2010.

Here’s a look at what occupied this corner before 1911, when the building opened.

A public execution in the East Village, 1824

In the early 19th century, the East Village of today had a country feel. The city had just adopted the street grid, and large portions of Peter Stuyvesant’s Bouwerie (in the sketch below) had yet to be parceled out and developed.

 Which made it the perfect site for a public execution in April 1824. Second Avenue and 13th Street is considered the actual corner where a man was hanged in front of 50,000 spectators.

The story is simple: John Johnson ran a boarding house at 65 Front Street. In 1823, he invited a sailor named James Murray to stay at his home. 

Murray had money on him—which Johnson wanted. So in the middle of the night, he bludgeoned Murray in his bed and tossed his body in a nearby alley.

Eventually Johnson confessed to the murder. After a quick trial, he was sentenced to die. On April 2nd, he was brought to an open field near where the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary is today and hanged.

Vintage ads fading fast on East 17th Street

Considering how open to the elements this building overlooking Union Square is, the ads painted on the side are doing a decent job holding their own against the effects of time and harsh weather.

The Crown Coatfront Company (“civilian and military coat fronts”) ad is still pretty readable.

Too bad the one below it—I can only make out “H. Got”—is almost gone. In the upper right corner is the remnant of a Carl Fischer music ad. 

And on the lower right is something about “Importers of Japanese Goods.” Or Japanese Foods?

Brooks has more info plus older photos of these ads.

What happened to Manhattan’s “Piggery District”

Mid-19th century New York City had its genteel side, but mostly it was a collection of rough edges. One long-forgotten hardscrabble neighborhood was the Piggery District, between Sixth and Eighth Avenues in the West 50s.

It was a dirty, smelly, rocky area of hog yards and shanties housing the poor Irish and Dutch families who eked out a living raising and slaughtering pigs.

No one seemed to care about the Piggery District until Central Park opened in 1859. With the city accelerating northward, the neighborhood was deemed a filthy nuisance, and the Department of Health wanted it gone.

That year, the city sent dozens of armed men into the Piggery District to forcibly shut down the offal-boiling places and round up the pigs. 

On at least one occasion, they also ended up ripping apart residents’ homes. A Times article from July 27, 1859 about the raid quoted one woman whose shanty was demolished:

“Very poor revenge,” said she, “to tear down people’s buildings after the pigs is all sent away entirely.”

Here’s another West Side neighborhood that once thrived, then disappeared around the turn of the century.

This Lincoln Center–area neighborhood held out a little longer, but it too is dead and gone.

Hidden-away homes on New York City rooftops

Often charming yet sometimes hideous, these high-up houses built above the tree line on top of tenements, walkups, and lofts make up a secret city of their own.

I’ve always gotten a kick out of this pink box of a home overlooking Eighth Avenue in Chelsea, with its sliding doors and table and chairs.

This cute two-story number is on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I’m sure the view is fab, but even better, it sits on top of the old Ex-Lax factory building, now a residence. 

Perched precariously on a Delancey Street tenement is this McMansion-esque three-story house. No, it’s not exactly hidden. But it is quite a sight. Who? Why?

The “birth control agitators” of Union Square

Talking about birth control in public was pretty radical stuff in 1916.

But that’s what anarchist, free love advocate, and all-around rule-breaker Emma Goldman (in photo below) and a handful of other “birth control agitators,” as a next-day New York Times article called them, did on May 20 of that year in Union Square. 

A crowd of about 500 came to hear them speak.

In the years following this rally, Margaret Sanger became the marquee name associated with the birth control movement. But it was Goldman, who lived on East 13th Street, who was an early pioneer.

She’d already been arrested for violating the 1873 Comstock Law, which prohibited distributing information on contraception. 

After an outcry that prompted the Manhattan DA at the time to promise he wouldn’t arrest activists who spoke in a “properly regulated forum,” Goldman and her cohorts set up the Union Square rally.

The East River island you’re not allowed to visit

That would be U Thant Island (officially known as Belmont Island), a rocky spit of land just south of Roosevelt Island in the East River. It ranks as the tiniest of New York City’s dozens of little islets.

Doesn’t look like a bad place to catch some sun, right? Unfortunately, people aren’t allowed there. This half-acre is maintained by the parks department as a bird sanctuary.

So what’s with the odd and unofficial name? Originally called Man ‘O War reef, it was created with landfill from trolley tunnels dug under the East River. Augustus Belmont Jr., of Belmont Park and subway financier fame, completed the job and got naming rights.

In the 1970s, mostly forgotten, it was unofficially renamed U Thant Island (after the former U.N. Secretary General from Burma) by a group of U.N. employees who followed a mystic in Queens.

Female fashion flashback: Spring in the 1890s

Here’s what trendy urban ladies on the cusp of the 20th century were frolicking around in.

Butterick was a leading dress pattern company; The Delineator a general-interest and fashion magazine they put out for women. Think of it as the Vogue of its day.

The Mohawk Indians who put up the city skyline

The Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building, the George Washington Bridge—the most iconic structures of New York’s skyline were built in part by Mohawk ironworkers.

They arrived in the city from upstate and Canada in the late 1800s to take on some of the most dangerous jobs in construction, working hundreds of feet in the air putting up frames for skyscrapers and bridges. 

They kept coming as the city grew vertically, with about 800 settling off Flatbush Avenue in downtown Brooklyn and Bay Ridge, according to a 1957 New York Times article.

Mohawk ironworkers continued to work the skyline. They helped build (and cart away) the World Trade Center; more recently they moved steel at the Time Warner Center.

As for the myth that they they had no fear of heights, the Indians interviewed in the Times piece shot that down.

In the mid-1880s, they explained, their fathers and grandfathers were hired to build a steel bridge near a reservation upstate. They earned a rep as skilled workers, then came to New York to ply their trade during the 20th century building boom.

The above photo, from 1971, comes from a recent Smithsonian exhibit.