Dutch farmhouses still standing in New York

It’s a bizarre sight: a Dutch farmhouse, built in the 17th or 18th century, near a post-war apartment house or high-rise. On a busy city street, no less.

But this juxtaposition can be found in a handful of places in New York City, like on Broadway at 204th Street in Inwood.

Here you’ll find the Dyckman Farmhouse, above, built in the 1780s. It has the lovely sloping eaves and front porch that make these homes so charming.

As does the Lefferts house, also dating to the 1780s. Bought by the city in 1917 and moved just inside Prospect Park off Flatbush Avenue, it was the home of generations of Lefferts, who farmed in Flatbush.

The Historic House Trust has more info and a map of colonial-era structures throughout the five boroughs.

The “moving sidewalks” the city never built

It probably sounded like a civilized solution to the increasingly congested New York City of the 19th century: to ease crowded streets, “moving sidewalks” or “moving platforms” would be built underground.

The idea was first proposed in 1871, then more seriously in 1902 for the Brooklyn Bridge.

Widely debated in newspapers at the time, it went no where: Mayor Seth Low killed the project.

But it popped back up again around 1910, this time as a network of moving sidewalks at a top speed of about 10 miles per hour that would replace the new subway system.

So why didn’t the idea fly? Perhaps the subway companies had too much political clout to let it happen. Or maybe subterranean roller coaster cars didn’t move people as efficiently as a subway car could. 

In the end, the idea kind of lives on—inside city airport terminals.

The pugs of East Seventh Street

I’ve seen New York tenement stoops flanked by carvings of lions, dragons, grotesques, even topless women.

But I haven’t seen many dogs—like this little pug (and his buddy on the left side of the stairs, not pictured), both in repose outside a tenement in the East Village.

Someone give him a new coat of paint….

“Why Not Use the El?”

Painter Reginald Marsh depicts a grungy East Side elevated train and its isolated, Depression-era passengers in carnivalesque color in 1930.

The sign above the sleeping man’s head reads something like: ”The subway is fast . . . but the elevated gets you there quickly. Why not use the ‘L’”? I never thought of the El and the subway as competitors.

Marsh had a thing for the seedy side of New York, like this Times Square theater scene he painted in 1936.

A mob hit gone wrong on East 79th Street

On April 7, 1972, Colombo crime family racketeer Joseph “Crazy Joe” Gallo (below) was gunned down in Little Italy—celebrating his 43rd birthday at Umberto’s Clam House, no less.

His murder had to be avenged. So on August 11, a hit man was hired to take out the four Colombo loyalists behind Gallo’s slaying.

The hit man was told to go to Neapolitan Noodle, at 320 East 79th Street, and that his four targets were sitting at the bar.

The Colombo mobsters had been at the bar—but they got up and went to a table. Four kosher meat sellers who had nothing to do with the mafia took their places, each having a drink while waiting for their wives.

But the hit man didn’t realize this and gunned down the four meat sellers. Two died and two were wounded. No one was ever charged for these accidental, gruesome slayings.

Kitschy yellow store signs of the 1970s

Yellow with black, yellow with red, yellow with blue—there’s just something about yellow that screams New York City in the 1970s.

I almost picture Walter Matthau walking out of one of these stores.

The American Stamp Manufacturing Company is downtown on Fulton Street.

I love the simplicity of the Swan Piano Co. sign, on Greenpoint Avenue in Queens.

Who doesn’t love a shoetrician? Also Fulton Street (you can go across the street and browse rubber stamps while u wait for your repairs).

Beauty queens of the New York City subway

Today’s subway ads are a depressing lot: medical malpractice law firms, Dr. Zizmor, MTA warnings about the dangers of traveling between cars. 

Not so from 1941 to 1976. Back then, one young New York woman per month was crowned “Miss Subways,” her name and face plastered above the seats on thousands of subway cars for millions of commuters to see.

An ad agency, not the MTA, nominated the winners; residents then voted for a top candidate over the phone. The winners came from all backgrounds and boroughs and comprised a surprisingly diverse group over the years.

All had a few things in common: they were wholesome, had aspirations . . . and rode the subway, of course. Some information on what became of some winners can be found here.

Perhaps a revival of Miss Subways should duke it out with a new version of Miss Rheingold, the beauty pageant that gripped New Yorkers in the 1940s and 1950s.

When NYU was (mostly) in the Bronx

New York University isn’t exactly popular among East and West Villagers—mainly due to its obnoxiously large dorms and obnoxiously loud students.

In fact, most residents probably wouldn’t mind if the school relocated to an outer borough.

That’s exactly what NYU did in 1894, when overcrowding at its Washington Square digs compelled the school to find a spacious campus.

Its new home was just over the Harlem River in the Bronx. The neighborhood, renamed University Heights, housed most academic programs and operations—including the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, pictured below—for decades.

So what brought the school back downtown? Financial problems. In 1973, NYU sold its Bronx campus to CUNY, which established Bronx Community College there.

And NYU embarked on a plan to establish itself as a world-class institution in the Village once again.

The giant Picasso on Bleecker Street

Some New Yorkers love it; others loathe it. But the 36-foot “Bust of Sylvette” has greeted passersby in a plaza on the Village-SoHo border since 1968.

Sylvette has been around long enough to get landmark status—which it achieved in 2008, along with the three I.M. Pei-designed Silver Towers apartment buildings it fronts between Bleecker and Houston Streets.

Technically it’s not even a Picasso sculpture but a “reinterpretation” of his much smaller “Portrait of Sylvette,” completed in 1934.

Pei asked Picasso to design a monument for him, so he had a collaborator recreate Sylvette by sandblasting her into 60 tons of concrete. 

The sweet story behind Brooklyn’s Love Lane

Today’s Love Lane is a cute one-block mews stretching from Henry Street to Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights. 

But back in pre-Colonial times, it was an Indian trail leading to the nearby East River. And when the Dutch arrived in Brooklyn, it became a popular path for romantic walks.

An 1894 New York Times article states:

“The oldest residents can remember a time when there was a cool and shady path leading down “Lover’s Lane,” where plump, rosy-cheeked Dutch maidens, with their sweethearts, meandered on summer evenings out through the turnstile and down the grassy bank to the water’s edge.” 

I wonder if the name may have been reinforced by the presence of the Brooklyn Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies, an early 19th century finishing school located on what is now called College Place, a tiny lane that intersects Love Lane.

Perhaps eligible Brooklyn bachelors took romantic walks with some of the students here, making the Love Lane name really stick.