These two grim-looking ladies decorate a fortress-like apartment building called Halidon Court at Broadway and 153rd Street.
Halidon Court hides a literary secret: It was the home of J.D. Salinger for the first nine years of his life, reports Harlem Bespoke.
A tightly laced corset wasn’t the only gut-busting garment worn by fashionable women in the Gilded Age.
If you really wanted to achieve a chic silhouette, you topped your outfit off with this contraption: the Diamond Dee Skirt Grip, as seen in this ad from the NYPL digital collection.
From its earliest days, New York has never lacked for places to drink. One of the city’s most famous bars was the Shakespeare Tavern, at the corner of Nassau and Fulton Streets.
In the early 19th century, the Shakespeare—”distinguished for the superior character of its refreshments” according to one source—hit its stride as a gathering place for poets, writers, and actors . . . as well as the politicians, merchants, and wannabes who like to hang around them.
These would be all men of course; no woman would venture into a tavern then, and if she tried, she’d be barred at the door.
“The building was erected many year before the Revolution, but in 1822 a modern extension on Fulton Street, three stories high, was added . . . it soon became and long continued a great resort for the wits of the day,” states The Memorial History of the City of New-York, published in 1893.
“The ‘Shakespeare Tavern,’ in fact, was to New-York what the ‘Mermaid’ was to London in the days of Shakespeare.”
[Photo: New York Public Library digital collection]
Urchins, gamins, Street Arabs—these were the tens of thousands of kids, mostly boys, who fended for themselves in the vast slums of post–Civil War New York City.
They slept in alleys and parks and made a living hawking newspapers and shining boots, congregating along Park Row, according to social reformer Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives:
“Whence this army of homeless boys? is a question often asked. The answer is supplied by the procession of mothers that go out and in at Police Headquarters the year round, inquiring for missing boys, often not until they have been gone for weeks and months, and then sometimes rather as a matter of decent form than from any real interest in the lad’s fate.”
Says one Street Arab Riis quotes:
“‘We wuz six,’ said an urchin of twelve or thirteen I came across in the Newsboys’ Lodging House, “and we ain’t got no father. Some on us had to go.’ And so he went, to make a living by blacking boots.”
[Photos by Jacob Riis, taken in the 1890s]
In April 1953, a New York engineering group set out to create a list of the city’s version of the seven wonders of the world.
Number one was the George Washington Bridge, followed by the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, and the subway.
Rounding out the final three were the city water system, the Holland Tunnel, and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel (partly built in 1944 at left).
The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel? I don’t think that would make a 2010 list.
In 1929, a merchants’ organization tried to compile a list of seven wonders. According to the then–Manhattan borough president, they are:
The subway, the Hudson River tunnels, the East River Bridges, the Woolworth Building, the Statue of Liberty, the “Great White Way,” and Coney Island.
I don’t know how long B. & H. Electric has been in Prospect Heights, but the NE phone exchange came into use in 1930, when the New York Telephone Company greatly expanded its dialing system.
SA also came into existence in 1930; it covered West Harlem. This rusty relic, advertising another electric company, is still hanging on outside an apartment building in the West 150s.
SA stood for Sacramento. But why Sacramento?
For those perplexed by these and other mysteries of old letter phone prefixes, here’s an exhaustive website that can shed a little light.
