New York City’s tobacco-producing past

Tobacco has a rep as a crop grown only in the South. But tobacco farming was big business in the 17th and 18th centuries in a nascent New York City.

Dutch colonists grew it in New Amsterdam, and settlers occupying farms from Greenwich Village to the village of Bloomingdale (today’s Morningside Heights, roughly) produced it as well.

In fact, the native name for Greenwich Village, Sapokanikan, supposedly translates into “tobacco fields. Hey, who knows?

The fields and farms eventually disappeared—replaced by tobacco manufacturers like Goodwin & Company, headquartered in Manhattan, who created this seductive late 19th–century ad (from the NYPL digital collection).

Ocean Parkway’s last 19th century mile marker

South of Avenue P on Brooklyn’s lovely, leafy Ocean Parkway is a foot-high rectangle of granite sticking out of the ground, with a mysterious “3M” etched into its traffic-facing side.

This curious artifact is Ocean Parkway’s last remaining mile marker.

Before the 20th century, mile markers dotted major roads, letting coachmen and riders know how many miles they had traveled—and how many more they needed to go.

This mile marker was likely one of 11 placed at every half-mile from the Prospect Park Circle to Ocean Parkway’s end at Coney Island.

It probably dates back to the 1870s, when Ocean Parkway, inspired by the great boulevards of Paris and Berlin, was built.

Sheepshead Bites has more on the history of the mile marker—as well as the mysterious disappearance of another back in June.

The 1980s “art junkies” of Avenue B

“East Village galleries are multiplying like white rats,” states an article in the October 1983 edition of the East Village Eye.

That’s just a slight exaggeration. Roughly between 1980 and 1987, hundreds of galleries opened in the neighborhood, making Second Avenue to Avenue B the center of an art scene that drew inspiration from punk, graffiti, and performance art.

This party pic from the East Village Eye suggests that much emphasis was placed on the scene as well as the art itself.

The end of the East Village as a gallery mecca has been attributed to many things: the 1987 stock market crash; AIDS; the death of Andy Warhol in 1987 and protege Jean-Michel Basquiat a year later; and of course, rising rents.

It’s been memorialized in books and museum retrospectives, like this one at the New Museum in 2004.