New York City’s first-ever taxi crash victim

Poor Henry Bliss. The Upper West Side real estate man and a ladyfriend were getting off a trolley at West 74th Street and Central Park West on September 13, 1899.

Suddenly, he was hit by a vehicle described in a next-day New York Times article as an electric taxi. It may have looked something like this cab, from an 1896 New York Public Library photo.

Two wheels of the taxi crushed Bliss’ skull and chest. He was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, where he died.

This unfortunate incident marks the first time a pedestrian was fatally struck by an automobile. Not just in New York, but the entire country. 

“The place where the accident happened is known to the motormen on the trolley line as ‘dangerous stretch,’ on account of the many accidents which have occurred there this past summer,” the Times article adds.

The taxi driver was charged with manslaughter but acquitted.

First day of school in 1902: crowding and chaos

Think school crowding is bad now? “Almost half a million children registered on Manhattan Island,” reported the September 9, 1902 edition of The New York Times. ”Many applicants turned away.”

But the schools superintendent promised that all kids six and over would be enrolled.

“If this is done, it will be the first time in the modern history of New York’s schools that there will have been no ‘waiting list,’” stated the Times.

[Children on the roof of a public school on Clinton Street, 1906, from the Museum of the City of New York]

“This will probably necessitate the arranging of sufficient part-time classes to accommodate about 60,000 children.”

[A crossing guard does his job with a group of school kids on Seventh Avenue and 116th Street, 1899, from the New York Public Library digital collection] 

Another big issue of the day: parents trying to pass off younger kids as school-age. Complained the Times:

“A considerable number of mothers declared unhesitatingly that children not a day over four years old were more than six. Many mothers of foreign birth and with little realization of the purpose of public schools attempt every year to compel the schools to act as a sort of day nursery for them.”

Mystery messages on tenement buildings

New York City’s ubiquitous six-story walkups often have what I think of as mystery monikers: a name, initials, or word carved into the facade. 

But what’s the story behind them? Like these four letters above, strangely placed at the upper right of a Hell’s Kitchen tenement.

ELSW, shorthand for the name of the builder? Or a term whose meaning has been lost to the ages?

“Progress” proclaims the entrance to this walkup in Astoria. Compared to the kind of housing people lived in before this type of dumbbell tenement hit the scene, it definitely qualifies.

Women’s first names are all over city residences, like this one on St. Mark’s Place. Who was Juliette, the builder’s daughter? Or a lost love?

Frontier town—or Flatbush, Brooklyn?

This gorgeous postcard, stamped 1913, claims to be the “business section” of Flatbush.

The trolley tracks seem very Brooklyn, but otherwise, it could be any town or small city in the country circa 1900.

So what stretch of Flatbush is this? A search of the Brooklyn Eagle archives turned up a “to let” listing for a Kodaks (see store sign at left) at 202 Flatbush Avenue.

That would put this image at about Flatbush and Bergen Streets.

New York Post reports: “I just shot John Lennon”

So screamed the headline on the front page of the New York Post on December 9, 1980. A yearbook-like photo of a baby-faced Mark David Chapman ran next to it.

Everyone knows the story: 25-year-old Chapman shot and killed Lennon in front of the Dakota at around 11 p.m. as he and Yoko walked up to the building.

The Post covers the murder from every angle; it feels like the first example of the saturated celebrity death coverage we’re used to now.

Page after page tells us who Chapman is, what a neighbor saw, how Ringo came to comfort Yoko, what President Reagan said regarding handgun laws, and all the fans who gathered at the Dakota to mourn. 

There’s also a small piece on a sudden run on Beatles and Lennon solo records:

“Last night the Colony—which is open until 2 a.m.—was jammed with requests for Lennon tapes and records,” the Post reported.

“The only remaining copy of Lennon’s ‘Plastic Ono Band’—now out of print—went for $40 within minutes.”

The humble beginnings of two fashion giants

Luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman has been at its current location on Fifth Avenue and 58th Street for over 70 years.

Which is why it’s easy to forget that like most massive New York City retailers, the company started small much farther down Fifth Avenue.

On a grimy, neon-lit stretch of 32nd Street just east of Fifth Avenue stands the second Bergdorf building, constructed in 1906. Here, Herman Bergdorf, immigrant tailor from Alsace, ran a successful ladies tailoring shop until he outgrew the space in the 1920s.

The Lerner company also got its start in midtown with a small namesake building.

In 1907, this once-huge mass market fashion chain—does the label even exist anymore?—opened on Seventh Avenue in the 30s as a plus-size retailer.  

See the green and yellow emblems flanking the top of the facade? They’re quite a majestic touch!

Madame Restell: the abortionist of Fifth Avenue

In 1831, a young British woman named Ann Trow moved to New York City.

With no medical training at all, she rechristened herself “Madame Restell” and began placing newspapers ads selling her “female monthly pills” and “preventative powders.” 

These pills and powders weren’t just birth control. The labels coyly warned that the products might induce a miscarriage. And Madame Restell herself performed abortions on poor and rich women alike for decades in the mid-1800s.

She quickly became a very rich woman, with morality crusaders denouncing her while society watchers noted the elegant clothes she wore.

She made enough money to build herself a mansion on Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street. And she was so notorious that “Restellism” even became a euphemism for abortion.

Eventually Anthony Comstock, head of the very 19th century Society for the Suppresion of Vice, arrested her in 1878 (illustrated at right) after posing as a man who needed birth control for his mistress. 

She never went on trial though. Released on bail, a maid found her dead in her bathtub one morning. Adorned in diamonds, she committed suicide by slitting her throat.

While many women the city certainly used her services, she was mostly despised.

The day after her suicide, The New York Times wrote that she “made an attractive part of the finest avenue in the city odious by her constant presence,” according to Crimes of New York, edited by Clint Willis.

Downtown diners that have departed New York

A nightlife weekly called New York Talk ran a couple of tasty-looking diner ads in their May 8, 1984 issue. 

Both diners were on the rougher Western edges of Soho a little too far north to be part of the new arts neighborhood of Tribeca.
 

The Moondance started off as the Holland Tunnel diner in the 1930s. After it closed in 2007, the diner and its revolving moon sign were trucked out to Wyoming, where supposedly it’s doing bang-up business.

Could this ad for a Munson diner at the corner of Greenwich and Spring be related to the legendary Munson, on 11th Avenue and 49th Street until 2004?

“At one time, there were five or six Munson Diners in New York City, owned by the same family,” says New York Architectural Images’ Munson Diner page.

A 1987 issue of New York has that the downtown Munson closed before 1987. Today it’s Don Hill’s.

Astoria’s Irish potato famine cemetery

The real name of this tidy 19th century burial ground on 26th Avenue and 21st Street is “The Graveyard of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church.”

But it’s always been known by its nickname, because many of the people buried there immigrated from Ireland in the 1840s during the potato famine.

Back then, 21st Street was the heart of a small Irish enclave in Queens, populated by immigrants who worked as servants for Anglo and Dutch families and in local factories.

It’s a small cemetery wedged between residences. Peer through the iron fence and you see all Irish names on the stones: Donnelly, Kelly, Muldarry, Joyce.

Many of them list the deceased’s county of birth. And all the gravestones face East, toward Ireland.

The beavers of New York City

New Yorkers made a fortune off the fur of this water-loving rodent 400 years ago, and its image adorns the city’s official seal as well as public and private buildings.

This one at left decorates the Municipal Building at Centre Street.

The similar little guy on the right can be found on elevator doors inside 125 Worth Street, headquarters of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

But the coolest beaver image of all is this one, carved above a doorway at 16 West 32nd Street in the heart of Koreatown. I’d love to know what the building was once used for.

One more cute little beaver lives underground—in the Astor Place subway station, appropriately enough.