The exuberant entrance of a 32nd Street hotel

Even in lit-up-in-neon Koreatown, this turn-of-the-century building is a show stopper, with one of the city’s most striking and ornate facades.

Originally built as the Aberdeen, an apartment hotel, in 1904, this Beaux-Arts beauty on East 32nd Street has got all the trappings: garlands, columns, lion heads, flowers, various curlicues, a portico, and two god-like male figures guarding the doorway.

When it opened, the Aberdeen was in the center of everything, like Broadway theaters and Ladies’ Mile shopping.

But quickly the city moved northward, leaving the Aberdeen and other former luxe hotels, such as the Wolcott and the Martinique, behind.

In the 1920s, it made a name for itself as one of the first hotels to admit unaccompanied women.

It’s now part of the La Quinta hotel chain—probably the most voluptuous hotel building they own!

New York’s Gilded Age flower vendors

“Flower vendor’s display” this postcard states in the lower left corner.

Could this be Sixth Avenue in the 20s, then—and now—the site of the city’s flower district?

The flower district is dwindling fast; it’s mostly confined to 28th Street between Seventh Avenue and Broadway these days.

The “black and tan” clubs of Minetta Street

Minetta Street and Minetta Lane, two tiny paths off Sixth Avenue in the Village, were named in the 1820s for the brook that still runs underground.

Charming, right? But from the Civil War to Prohibition, the Minettas actually had a morally reprehensible reputation.

That’s because the Minettas and the surrounding streets were home to “black and tan” clubs, bars were blacks and whites mingled freely.

The clubs were there because this is where New York’s black residents lived. The neighborhood had been settled by freed slaves, and by the Civil War, it was known as Little Africa, a poor area inhabited by thousands.

“In Minetta Street and Minetta Lane the last of the Cornelia Street colored colony remains entrenched. The crooked, narrow streets are lined with wooden rookeries, amply provided with rear tenements, accessible only through cramped alleys,” states a New York Times article dated February 13, 1910.

Within a decade, black New Yorkers relocated to Harlem, and Italian immigrants moved into the Minettas. Lined with speakeasies during the Depression, it’s now quiet and residential.

[Photo of Minetta Street and Minetta Lane in 1925: NYPL digital collection]

The East Fifth Street Boys are coming home

East Village photographer James Maher has a stash of old black and whites taken by his grandparents, residents in the 1930s and 1940s.

That’s before anyone had ever heard of the East Village, and the neighborhood was just a part of the vast cramped area known as the Lower East Side.

This one, of a parade honoring the Fifth Street Boys taken between Avenues A and B, is pretty poignant.

The war is over or coming to a close, but the neighborhood boys—Germans, Poles, Italians—sent to fight aren’t home yet.

Check out more vintage East Village photos from Maher’s collection.

Genteel and peaceful Prospect Park, 1886

Nineteenth-century artist William Merritt Chase frequently painted serene scenes of Gilded Age Prospect Park, Von King’s (Tompkins) Park, and other Brooklyn landscapes.

No wonder—this teacher at the Art Students League reportedly lived for a time on Marcy Avenue.

The Brooklyn Museum has an extensive collection of his work.

The great New York to Paris auto race of 1908

Inspired by a 1907 race that took drivers from Peking to Paris, car-crazy thrill-seekers came up with an even bigger challenge: a round-the-world race from Manhattan to Paris.

So at about 11 a.m. on February 12, 1908, six cars representing the U.S., Italy, France, and Germany lined up at the starting point in Times Square, which was packed with 250,000 onlookers.

Then they were off—up Broadway and onto primitive roads through the Midwest to San Francisco. There, they hopped a ship to Valdez, Alaska, then a freighter to Siberia.

In Siberia, only three cars were left: teams representing the U.S., Italy, and Germany. The race resumed across Asia, Eastern Europe, and then to Paris.

So who got first prize? The official winner was the U.S. team, driving a 1907 Thomas Flyer. They reached Paris on July 30, 1908.

The Germans actually arrived in Paris four days before the Americans—but they were given a 30-day penalty because they shipped their car part of the way by rail, among other shortcuts.

[Bain Collection/Library of Congress photos]

Evil eagles of 10th Street and University Place

These are some devilish-looking eagles—or turkeys, or griffins?—carved into the corner of Devonshire House, a 1928 Emery Roth building dripping with Gothic details and family crests.

Devonshire House underwent condo conversion in 2008. Hard to believe that for 60 years, this pre-war gem in prime Greenwich Village was a rental.

A Times Square postcard from the late 1940s

An Ephemeral reader sent in this supercool postcard.

The once-glam Hotel Astor is on the left. A vertical sign on its facade seems to say “Roof Astor,” a reference to the glorious roof garden that was once the place for city high rollers to see and be seen.

Great naked statues flanking the Bond store sign, right? And look closely; that’s a Woolworth’s on the ground floor.

The only Brooklyn town founded by a woman

Of 17th century Brooklyn’s original six towns, five (anglicized as Brooklyn, Bushwick, Flatbush, Flatlands, and New Utrecht), were settled by Dutch men.

And then there’s Gravesend—founded in the 1640s by Lady Deborah Moody, a wealthy English widow who crossed the Atlantic to freely practice Anabaptism, a protestant sect that opposed infant baptism (they were  the forerunners to Quakers).

She must have been tough: Lady Moody was the only woman known to launch a settlement in colonial North America.

Tolerant Dutch leaders in New Amsterdam gave her a land grant “beginning at the mouth of a creek adjacent to Coneyne Island” and let her divide the new town into parcels.

What’s amazing is that today’s Gravesend still has a very off-the-grid quality. Village Road North and Village Road South cut through the neighborhood.

Two 17th century cemeteries, Gravesend and Van Sicklen, sit on one side of Gravesend Neck Road. On the other side is the little sloping house where Lady Moody supposedly (but probably didn’t) live.

Rumor has it the house served as a hospital during the Battle of Brooklyn in 1776.

The Beat poet born and raised on Bleecker Street

Unlike Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and other Beat Generation writers centered in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, poet Gregory Corso was actually from the Village.

Born at St. Vincent’s Hospital in 1930 to poor immigrants living at 190 Bleecker Street (where one-bedroom apartments now fetch $2500 per month), Corso’s upbringing was rough:

He sums his bio up in a letter dated September 7, 1957 from The Accidental Autobiography: The Selected Letters of Gregory Corso:

“…mother year after me left not-too-bright-father and went back to Italy, thus I entered life of orphanage and four foster parents and at 11 father remarried and took me back….”

“…two years later I ran away and caught sent away to boys home for two years and let out and went back home and ran away again and sent to Bellevue for observation where I spent three frightening sad months with mad old men who peed in other sad old men’s mouths….”

“…from 13 to 17 I lived with Irish on 99th and Lexington, with Italians on 105th and 3rd, with two runaway Texans on 43rd etc. until 17th year when did steal and get three years in Clinton Prison where an old man handed me [The Brothers] Karamozov, Les Miserables, Red and the Black, and thus I learned, and was free to think and feel and write….”

In 1950, he met Ginsberg and Kerouac, who were impressed with Corso’s street smarts and talent. And the New York Beat scene took off.

[Photo above: Ginsberg and Corso read with publisher Barney Rosset in Washington Square Park]