The insects that adorn New York

Why would designers choose to decorate some of the city’s loveliest facades, fences, and clocks with bugs?

When it comes to the honeybees on this once-working bank clock on 14th Street and Eighth Avenue, it probably has something to do with what bees symbolize—industry.

The clock—affixed to the Roman Temple–like 1897 New York Savings Bank building—once featured a beehive, a symbol of thrift.

The moth-like critter on the right comes from one of the posts surrounding the entrance to Trinity Church Cemetery, the burial ground in the 150s off Riverside Drive that gently slopes down to the Hudson River.

The dragonfly and caterpillar mosaic, by Andrea Dezso, are part of the Bedford Park Boulevard subway stop in the Bronx.

Why two garden bugs? It must have something to do with the fact that this is the New York Botanical Garden stop.

Carved into the concrete of the Schwarzbock Building on Lexington Avenue and 32nd Street is this moth surrounded by mulberry leaves.

It makes sense: The building was once the headquarters of Schwarzbock looms. Another insect image, a silkworm adorns the building’s beautiful clock.

A lonely, long-gone West Village cocktail lounge

I have no idea when George Herdt’s bar and restaurant opened or closed.

And I can only guess at the clientele—perhaps the same mix of longshoremen, factory workers, and locals who frequented the White Horse a few blocks away back in the 1940s and 1950s, way before the far West Village became trendy.

This lovely, ghostly photo was taken in the early 1970s by author Katherine Towler. She lived in Chelsea then; luckily she documented some West Side haunts of the time—most, like this one, are no longer there.

Today 284 West 12th Street houses Cafe Cluny.

New York’s scary 1930s venereal disease posters

Think the Bloomberg administration is heavy-handed when it come to public health pronouncements? (Soda is bad, smoking is bad, fat is bad, etc.)

Then check out what New Yorkers were forced to stare at on subway cars and bus depots in the late 1930s when LaGuardia was mayor.

The steep decline in syphilis and gonorrhea cases after World War II in the U.S. is probably the result of antibiotics, not so much these finger-wagging warnings.

They were made by the Works Progress Commission’s Federal Art Project, and if you dig the cool design—or have an interest in the history of bacterial STDs—you can buy reproductions from www.vintagraph. com.

When dog vs. rat fights entertained the city

New York after the Civil War had a feral edge.

Amid the poverty, crime, and gangs that packed the Bowery, Five Points, and waterfront districts, a brutal pastime reached new heights in popularity: rat-baiting—pitting a terrier against a rat until they fought to the death.

And no dive was more famous for its rat-baiting than Kit Burns’ Sportsmen’s Hall at 273 Water Street (illustrated at right and below).

“The pits, at Kit Burns’ and elsewhere, were uscreened boxes, with zinc-lined wooden walls eight feet long and four and a half feet high,” wrote Luc Sante in his must-read account of 19th century Bowery, Low Life.

“Matches typically drew no fewer than one hundred betting spectators, from all walks of life, with purses starting at $125. A good rat dog could kill a hundred rats in half an hour to forty-five minutes….”

But not all New Yorkers considered rat-baiting morally okay.

A New York Times article about 273 Water Street (now luxury apartments, of course) quoted Edward Winslow Martin’s 1868 The Secrets of the Great City:

“Most of our readers have witnessed a dog fight in the streets. Let them imagine the animals surrounded by a crowd of brutal wretches whose conduct stamps them as beneath the struggling beasts, and they will have a fair idea of the scene at Kit Burns.”’

The sport died out by the 20th century, thanks to the new ASPCA.