Defunct city hospitals turned into homes

If St. Vincent’s Medical Center really does get made over into apartments, it won’t be the first time a city hospital was turned into residences.

That’s what happened to the old French Hospital, on 30th Street beween Eighth and Ninth Avenues.

Built in 1928 by the Societe Francaise de Bienfaisance, it replaced the original French Hospital on West 14th Street, then the city’s French section.

The hospital closed in the 1960s, and in 1981 became rentals. Section 8 rentals, according to the management company website.

But hey, how cool is it to live beside a door that says “clinic entrance?”

Probably not as cool as living in the former New-York Cancer Hospital, on Central Park West and 106th Street.

King’s Handbook of New York, published in 1892, says the hospital “. . . was founded in 1884, for the treatment of all sufferers from cancer, whose condition promises any hope of cure of relief.”

Those circular wards are lovely, but they had a medical purpose: Without room corners, doctors believed that there would be fewer germs hanging around making cancer patients sick.

The hospital, which eventually became Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, moved out in the 1930s. It sat vacant for decades before becoming luxury co-ops a few years ago.

Interested in a 5-bedroom home? Check out this Corcoran listing.

New York’s iconic neon bar signs

I’m not much of a drinker, but the incandescent glow from those three little letters can really cast a spell, especially on a quiet dark night.

At right is the rosy-glow sign at Campanile, an old-school Italian restaurant on 29th Street between Madison and Park Avenues.

Smith’s, on 44th Street and Eighth Avenue, emphasizes their bar, not the grill. 

I wish the Fedora sign, on West Fourth Street for the past 60-plus years, had its lights on.

But that might be asking too much of this West Village survivor still hanging in there, not yet Marc Jacobs-ized or turned into a cupcake shop.

 Jeremiah can you fill you in.

“A Letter for Sweetheart,” 1910

That’s the English translation of “A Brivele der Kale,” a popular Yiddish song from 1910.

The sheet music cover illustration is intriguing. An immigrant leaving his wife for the America? Or did he find a new love here?

Composer J.M. Rumshisky—who later changed his name to Rumskinsky—was a bigwig of Yiddish theater.

He wrote hundreds of operettas and songs for stars like Molly Picon during the theater’s heyday.

A little bit of England on the Upper West Side

How did a gated collection of tiny Tudor homes end up amid the colossal apartment buildings of the Upper West Side?

This Alice in Wonderland–like enclave was built in 1921 by an Ireland-born nightclub baron.

He wanted the street to look like the set of a popular romantic comedy, Pomander Walk, which was set in 1805 London.

Called Pomander Walk, naturally, the private alley features 20 tiny homes facing each other across a walkway running from 94th to 95th Street and bounded by West End Avenue and Broadway.

A thick iron gate makes it difficult to get a photo of the homes inside, which are fronted by lovely gardens. 

But nyc-architecture.com managed to get a few.

Grisly murders rock 19th century Staten Island

Polly Bodine, in her 30s, was a suspicious character in 1843 Staten Island, a rural enclave with just 10,000 or so residents.

A “fallen” woman, she lived with her parents in Graniteville after separating from her husband. She had a lover, a druggist in Manhattan.

So on Christmas Day, when the bodies of her brother’s wife and baby daughter were found bludgeoned and burned in their home across the street from the Bodine’s, suspicion fell on Polly.

On one hand, she was known to be very close to her sister-in-law.

But at her murder trial that summer in Richmondtown, witnesses claimed to have seen her hawking Emeline’s things at a pawn shop.

That trial ended in a hung jury. A second trial, in Manhattan, returned a guilty verdict, which was later invalidated. Perhaps the jury was biased by a P.T. Barnum wax figure of Polly kicking Emeline to death displayed near the courthouse.

At her third trial, held upstate—the only place they could find an “unbiased” jury—Polly was found not guilty and set free. She died in 1902.

When heat waves cut down city residents

New York is no stranger to brutal heat waves. But thanks to air conditioning, newspapers no longer have to print a daily list of “heat prostrations,” which included dozens of citizens overcome by hot weather.

A check of The New York Times archive drew story after story on a specific heat spell, plus a list of people felled by heatstroke.

["On the Docks After a Hot Day," an 1868 illustration from the NYPL]

An article about an 89-degree day in June 1899 listed these casualties: 

“Isaac Shapiro, fifty-eight years old, of 292 Division Street, was overcome in front of his home. He was removed to Gouverneur Hospital.

“James O’Mara, twenty years old, living in a lodging house at Broome Street and the Bowery, was driving a truck at 117 Spring Street when he was overcome by the heat. He was removed to St. Vincent’s Hospital.

“An unknown woman, poorly dressed and about sixty years old, was found unconscious last night at Locust Avenue and  133rd Street by Policeman McGrath of the East 138th Street Station. The woman seemed to have been overcome by heat. She was taken to Harlem Hospital.”

The owls that adorn New York City

It makes sense that many old city school buildings are decorated with carved owls; owls symbolize wisdom.

But owls—some spooky, some goofy—adorn all kinds of buildings and structures in New York City.

At right, one of many huge owls guarding a (NYU-owned, maybe?) building on Broadway and East Fourth Street.

This funny little owl on the tree limb at left is part of a gate at Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace.

I’ve always been partial to this terra cotta owl carved into the ornate Stuyvesant Polyclinic building on Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place. He looks menacing.

At left, big peepers on a midtown Lexington Avenue building.

461-463 West 18th Street: then and now

In 1938, Berenice Abbott took this photo of two circa-1880s stables on far West 18th Street.

“In Abbott’s day, the bar-restaurant at 463 West 18th Street was attached to a corner liquor store at 130 Tenth Avenue,” explains Abbott’s Changing New York.

“These businesses and the junk shop at 461 served the seamen and dockworkers of the still active West Side waterfront.” 

Today, the lovely old stables look very much the same. albeit cleaned up and restored. French restaurant La Luncheonette is located on the ground floor of 463, while 461 is a private residence.

And the West Side waterfront? Anchored by Chelsea Piers, it’s the site of lots of leisurely jogging/biking/strolling.

When “Lobster Palaces” ruled Times Square

Massive restaurants offering pig-out portions of food are a Times Square tradition going back to 1900.

That’s about when the theater district relocated to what was then Long Acre Square.

Crowds were looking to be fed and entertained. So a dining establishment called Rector’s, at Broadway and 44th Street, ushered in the “lobster palace” craze. 

It wasn’t just about the sudden popularity of fresh lobster. Rector’s (left), as well as Murray’s Roman Gardens (below), Cafe Martin, and others made eating vast quantities of high society–sounding foods trendy among the middle class and tourists.

 

“Rector’s deliberately imitated the decor and menus of Fifth Avenue hotels and society places like Sherry’s and Delmonico’s, but it abandoned their exclusive atmosphere in favor of ostentation and Broadway theatricality,” writes Darcy Tell in Times Square Spectacular.

Of course, real members of New York society wouldn’t be caught dead in a lobster palace. The craze died down once cabaret became a big fad in the teens.

Lower Manhattan on an enchanting night

“Looking east from the Woolworth Tower at Night” states the back of this penny postcard.

“The Municipal building looms up large in the foreground, while the rest of the city looks insignificant when seen from this height, and one can only see myriads of lights, throwing their reflection on the water.”

Hmm, so why does the postcard depict the Brooklyn Bridge as abruptly stopping, with no way to get on or off, at City Hall park?