Danish schoolkids in the 1950s helped raise money to fund this bronze statue of Hans Christian Anderson reading to a duckling in Central Park.
The statue was a gift from a Danish-American organization commemorating the Ugly Ducking writer’s 150th birthday in 1955.
It’s been a kid magnet ever since, especially with the Alice and Wonderland playground right nearby.
Bob Gruen took this photo of Times Square in April 1972. Everything in it is now gone.
The campy “Follies Burlesk,” which had taken over the circa-1917 Orpheum Dance Palace a few years earlier, didn’t last long. It was replaced in 1976 by the Gaiety Male Burlesk, advertising “six boys five times a day.”
The Gaiety had staying power, shutting down in 2005, just as the Howard Johnson’s right below it did when the entire building was sold.
HoJo’s was an orange and blue mainstay offering cheapo drinks. food, and old signage since 1955.
Peace marchers, here protesting bombings in Vietnam, are also few and far in between. Times Square isn’t much of a place of protest anymore—especially now that it’s a blocks-long pedestrian mall.
It’s a little unnerving that the who-to-call signs for elevator maintenance issues in many buildings are so old, their phone number starts with a two-letter exchange officially dropped in the 1960s.
Like this one, with SU for Susquehanna. I wonder why that name was assigned to the Upper West Side?
Hopefully they’ve done more recent elevator inspections. . . .
This real estate company ad in midtown helpfully provides the full name of the exchange, ORegon.
If you look really hard, you can make out the exchange on this barely hanging on commercial real estate ad near Canal Street.
JU for Judson, the name of the 19th century church still standing on Washington Square South.
Churchgoers pour out of what might be a church in the lower left corner of this photo.
Fifth Avenue looks so genteel here. It had yet to be turned into a shopping strip with massive office buildings; at the turn of the last century, it was a ritzy stretch of single-family mansions.
Check out the horse and carriage traffic. In just a few years, cars will be king.
When he died in 1876, department-store magnate Alexander Turney Stewart was one of the wealthiest men in New York City.
He opened a succession of dry-goods stores in Lower Manhattan beginning in the 1820s.
But it was his “iron palace” at Broadway and 10th Street (in photo), the first store to have dozens of departments, that made him rich and renowned.
Which must be why greedy thieves decided to dig up his body two years after he was interred in a family vault at St. Marks in the Bouwerie and hold it for ransom.
This couldn’t have been easy. The vault, covered by a stone slab, was several feet in the ground.
Once the robbers removed another slab and entered the 15 foot–long vault, they still had to open the casket carry out the decomposed body.
The ghoulish crime netted the corpse-nappers $20,000 from Stewart’s widow, who then reburied her husband on Long Island.
The A.T. Stewart store was taken over by Wanamaker’s in the 1890s. Today, it’s the site of a massive apartment building called Stewart House.
Hiding in plain sight are signs and logos of companies that bit the dust long ago. Either no one bothered to take them down—or they’re part of the building and can’t be removed.
Bickford’s is the old-school “lunchroom” chain that used to be all over New York from the 1920s to the 1960s. This one on Eighth Avenue in the 40s has been empty for years.
One of my favorites is this logo for the Fischer & Co. Pure Pork Products headquarters, a two-story building on Second Avenue at 118th Street.
I couldn’t find a trace of this company anywhere. The 2-story building now houses a dry cleaner.
“Tree-Mark Shoes” is carved into the facade of the building that now houses Bowery Ballroom, on Delancey Street.
The company moved in after World War II and spent the next three decades there, according to The Lower East Side Remembered and Revisited.
