Holiday toy shopping at Gimbels in 1934

In the thick of the Depression, I wonder how many lucky New York kids got one of these cool toys for Christmas.

That police car with the electric lights would be worth a lot more than $1.31 today. As for the cowboy suit, it comes with a gun and bullets. Can you even buy a slightly realistic looking toy gun these days?

This ad comes from a December 1934 edition of the Daily News. Gimbels was huge then, as anyone who has ever seen Miracle on 34th Street knows.

The department store giant started  held on until the mid-1980s. A faded Gimbels ad on 30th Street is all that’s left.

Looking into Edward Hopper’s “Night Windows”

Most of us have found ourselves on either end of this kind of scenario—painted in 1928 by Greenwich Village resident Hopper.

The Whitney has an exhibition of Edward Hopper paintings and prints, as well as those of his contemporaries like Martin Lewis and Reginald Marsh. It runs through April 2011.

The wildly ornate lobby inside a budget hotel

From the outside, the Hotel Wolcott, at 4 East 31st Street, isn’t anything extraordinary.

Sure, this discount hotel has a lovely Beaux-Arts exterior, mostly obscured by scaffolding these days. But so do many other buildings nearby.

Still, if you head past the no-frills entrance and look up at the lobby ceiling . . . wow!

It’s a Louis XVI–style time machine, with an ornate high ceiling, mirrored panels, stained glass, marble pillars, and incredible chandeliers.

All this ornamentation reflects the Hotel Wolcott’s early days as a luxurious residence for the rich in Gilded Age New York.

Built in 1904, guests included Edith Wharton, and the hotel is frequently mentioned in society columns of the era.

It’s not everyone’s style, but the ceiling is incredibly preserved. A copy of the hotel’s brochure from 1904 is available on its website.

A midtown bookstore’s 1930s censorship fight

“Wise Men Fish Here” stated the longtime sign at the entrance to the Gotham Book Mart, on 47th Street in the Diamond District.

From 1920 to 2007, literature-loving New Yorkers could get lost in this book heaven, perhaps the most independent of independent bookstores in pre-Barnes & Noble New York City.

That’s because its founder, Frances Steloff, had real courage facing down censors in the 1920s and 1930s.

She defiantly sold copies of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer after these books were declared obscene and banned from U.S. stores.

Steloff was even sued by an outfit called The Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1936 for selling copies of French writer Andre Gide’s biography.

That suit was tossed. And for the next seven decades, the store reigned as a reader’s paradise, with obscure and out-of-print books cluttered under black-and-white photos of famous authors visiting the premises.

How the Honeymoon Gang terrorized 29th Street

In 1853, few city street gangs were as brutal as the Honeymoon Gang.

“Every evening the gang would place their men at each corner of Madison Avenue and 29th Street and attack every well-dressed citizen who came along,” writes Carl Sifakis in The Encyclopedia of American Crime.

“At midnight the Honeymooners’ ‘basher patrol’ would adjourn to a drinking establishment to spend a portion of the night’s ill-gotten gains.”

[Madison Cottage, right, in an 1852 sketch. It stood at Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street, near where the Honeymooners were bashing New Yorkers.]

These lowlifes were so violent, even Tammany politicians, who aided other gangs in the crime-riddled 1800s, refused to protect them.

Their downfall was New York police captain George W. Walling, who organized the first Strong Arm Squad—tough cops who basically beat gang members senseless.

After two weeks of vicious beatings, the Honeymooners disbanded.

When tenements were named for U.S. presidents

I wonder if New Yorkers respected their presidents more around the turn of the 20th century, when all of these residences went up.

Or perhaps developers gave their buildings presidential monikers because they were all constructed in poor neighborhoods.

Maybe having the name of a leader above the front entrance lent a low-rent tenement a more aspirational air.

Whatever the reason, there sure are a lot of presidentially named buildings. Lincoln (on West 51st Street) is understandable, and Roosevelt (East 14th Street) was New York’s former governor.

But McKinley’s (East Village) connection to New York? I’m not aware of one. His may be a sympathy choice; he was assassinated in 1901, right around when the building named for him appeared.