Gilded Age New York’s lovely mermaid clock

Lots of New York buildings feature a clock on the facade.

But one of the most unique is this clock, supported by two mermaids, at the top of Gilsey House—an 1871 cast-iron beauty with a mansard roof and all kinds of ornamental touches.

In the late 19th century, the popular Gilsey Hotel, on the northeast corner of Broadway and 29th Street, was smack in the city’s theater district. 

But as the theater district moved uptown, the fortunes of this stretch of Broadway faded, and the hotel became a loft building.

Since the late 1970s, it’s been a co-op residence in a no-man’s-land best known for its knockoff jewelry and perfume wholesalers. But the neighborhood is primed for a comeback; the hipster Ace Hotel recently opened across the street.

“Central Park, New York,” 1901

Maurice Prendergast’s mosaic-like watercolor captures a lovely, leisurely day of carriage riding and strolling. And huge, puffy turn-of-the-century hats.

 
Canadian-born Prendergast was a member of The Eight, a group of artists who opposed the rigidity of the American art world at the time.

The Hooks of Upper Manhattan

Downtown has Corlears Hook. Brooklyn has Red Hook (and once had Yellow Hook). 

Upper Manhattan also had some Hooks—like Tubby Hook, sometimes called Tubby’s Hook. It was the 18th and 19th century name for a section of Inwood between Fort Tryon Park and Inwood Hill Park.

An 1894 New York Times article describes it like this:

["View, Tubby Hook and Spuyten Duyvel Creek," from the NYPL in the 1860s or 1870s]

“A little below Riverdale, at a point near Inwood, there is a projection known as Tubby’s Hook, where the water is deep enough to allow large steamers to pass quite close to it. Tubby’s Hook is also a resort for fishermen.”

It’s a funny name that’s probably a bastardization of the last name of Peter Ubrecht, a wealthy 18th century resident.

Jeffrey’s Hook is another precipice jutting into the Hudson. It’s under the George Washington Bridge and now known as the location of the Little Red Lighthouse, Manhattan’s only lighthouse.

But Jeffrey’s Hook played a big role in colonial history: It’s where Washington and his troops traveled back and forth to Fort Lee during the Revolutionary War.

Bellboy murders guest at the Iroquois Hotel

It was a senseless slaying that holds a place in crime history: The teen convicted of it ended up as the longest serving U.S. prisoner who eventually was released.

On July 26, 1911, Paul Geidel, a slight kid raised partly in orphanages, was a 17-year-old bellboy at the Iroquois Hotel on 44th Street off Fifth Avenue.

He decided to rob and kill a wealthy financier, William H. Jackson, who lived at the Iroquois. Jackson was old and deaf and didn’t hear Geidel creep into his apartment around 8:45 p.m.

Geidel suffocated Jackson with chloroform rag, then made off with a small amount of money and a few items.

It didn’t take long for the NYPD to consider him a suspect. Charged with second-degree murder, Geidel was sentenced to 20 years in Sing Sing.

Found insane in 1926 as he was nearing release, Geidel was moved to an upstate hospital for the criminally insane.

In 1980 he finally left the prison hospital a free man, having served 68 years. He died seven years later.

1980s East Village cafes still packing crowds

Restaurants have always had a short shelf life in New York.

But even in today’s frat bar-happy, quasi-Bridge and Tunnel East Village, some old-school eateries are still drawing crowds.

From the January 1986 issue of local arts newspaper the East Village Eye comes this ad for Life Cafe—once a refuge for the bloody and battered who were caught up in the Tompkins Square Park riots of the late 1980s.

I never knew Yaffa Cafe had a slogan. But here it is in their ad from the same newspaper.

The highway that almost destroyed downtown

Soho? Never would have happened. Little Italy would be turned into a pile of bricks. And block after block along Delancey, Broome, Kenmare, and Spring Street would have met the wrecking ball as well.

But luckily, none of this happened, because the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway was met with relentless community opposition.

First proposed in 1928, LOMAX, as it was known, would have been an 8-lane elevated highway connecting the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges via Broome Street.

The point was to link New Jersey to Long Island faster and more efficiently. “Master builder” Robert Moses pushed hard for it the early 1960s, claiming it would create much-needed city jobs.

But residents, led by urban activist Jane Jacobs, argued that it would displace thousands of families and signal the demise of entire historic neighborhoods.

Finally, in 1969, the city officially killed the plan.

Sad and silly carvings on a Madison Avenue facade

The AIA Guide to New York City describes 285 Madison Avenue, an office building at the corner of 40th Street built in 1926, as “an unremarkable block of brick.”

Well, except for the funny little stone figures that surround the street-level store windows. 

Dozens of them adorn the facade, such as a blind man and a boy who looks like he’s about to spit something out of his mouth.

There’s also a man holding an instrument of some kind, and a woman gazing into a mirror.

So who are they? The best answer I could find is in a 1970 New York Times article on city buildings adorned with stone ornamental carvings:

“A building for a tabloid newspaper constructed in 1925 at 285 Madison Avenue showed figures of people in the news—a boy with a beanshooter, a fisherman, a man with a bandaged face holding his aching tooth, ballplayers, prizefighters, and a sad girl with a broken doll.” 

When city sanitation workers went on strike

This foul situation has happened over the years, most recently in 2006. But a weeks-long walkout in November 1911 was particularly nasty.

“In one block in 49th Street the reporter counted 84 cans, every one piled high with garbage and other refuse, while near the avenue corners were big piles of garbage, mostly of rotting perishables, which, like those in 47th street, were surrounded by playing children and scavenging cats and dogs,” reported the New York Times four days after the strike began.

[A horseload of trash being deposited on 72nd Street and First Avenue]

Another  garbage strike lasted nine days in February 1968. The Times reported:

“With many once-clean sections of New York looking like a vast slum as mounds of refuse grew higher and strong winds whirled the filth through the streets, Mayor Lindsay made a brief inspection tour and reported grimly that, “the situation is getting very serious.”

[Here's a grim Mayor Lindsay touring a Harlem street with aides.]

The late 1960s were rough on the city. Not only did sanitation men walk off the job, but so did teachers and transit workers.

The Wall Street station’s wooden token booth

Before MetroCards debuted in 1997, and tokens hit the scene in 1953, subway riders paid the fare the old-fashioned way.

That meant purchasing a ticket at a manned wooden booth, then handing the paper ticket to an employee at a ticket chopper box.

The Wall Street station still has an original wooden booth (below) and ticket chopper (right), beautifully restored.

The cost of a ride in 1904, when the ticket system (and the subway itself) started: five cents.

Turnstiles that accepted coins were installed in the 1920s, to save money and prevent theft.

In 1953, token-taking turnstiles arrived on platforms. And not long behind, as crime worsened, came the bullet-proof glass, fortress-like token booth we know today.