Cooling off at a city pool in Bed-Stuy, 1974

An Ephemeral reader sent me this link to Business Insider, which has some incredible photos of Brooklyn in the summer of 1974. They were taken by award-winning photographer Danny Lyon (and are now part of the National Archives).

The collection, making the rounds on different blogs, features beautiful and tender shots of burned out brownstones (now worth millions) and teens hanging out in the park.

But my favorites are the four photos that capture one July day at Kosciusko Pool on Marcy Avenue.

Opened in 1971, the pool must have been the place for neighborhood kids to keep cool, meet friends, and goof off—as 1970s New York sweltered and sputtered.

Scenes like these probably played out every day at dozens of city public pools, some built during the Depression with WPA labor.

Interestingly, Kosciusko Pool was designed by Bed-Stuy native Morris Lapidus, who also designed the Fountainbleu Hotel in Miami Beach.

A Brooklyn wife’s life ends in the electric chair

Three men had already been executed by the state of New York by the time it was Martha Place’s turn in March 1899.

As the first woman to be sentenced to death via electrocution, she received lots of media attention.

Place, 44, was living at 598 Hancock Street in Brooklyn with her husband, William, a widower who had a 17-year-old daughter, Ida.

When William came home one night in 1898, he was met by an ax-wielding Martha. Upstairs lay Ida’s body, with her eyes burned out. Later it was determined that Martha suffocated her after throwing acid in her face.

Martha was put on trial; every day she wore the same black dress. Convicted of Ida’s murder, she was sentenced to be electrocuted at Sing Sing within six weeks, reported The New York Times in July 1898.

“The indifferent, rather cynical look which was on her face throughout the trial had entirely disappeared,” the Times stated.

“She was pale, and wept as she entered the room. She trembled as she faced Judge Hurd, and seemed for the first time to realize the position in which her crime had placed her.”

Appeals for a new trial, plus a request by Governor Teddy Roosevelt to spare her life, didn’t work out.

On March 20, 1899, Place was strapped into the wooden chair; out of deference to her sex, electrodes were put on her ankles rather than a more intrusive spot on her body. She was buried in New Jersey.

The cat and bird carving in Prospect Park

It’s hiding in plain sight in the middle of the park. But it’s lovely and worth looking out for.

At Concert Grove there is a long low wall—built in 1874 as a place where carriages could be fastened.

(Today it’s known as Harry’s Wall, after Harry Murphy, a co-founder of the Prospect Park Track Club—which designated the wall as a starting or ending point for races.)

At the end of the wall is a stone entryway carved with images of leaves, branches, and flowers—as well as a couple of birds, one who is currently in the sights of a cat, ready to pounce.

(Is that a cat? Not the kind prowling the park these days, at least)

It’s a lot like the stone carvings of Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace. No wonder: Both parks were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.

Central Park came first, but supposedly Olmsted and Vaux considered Prospect Park the better one.

A summer scene at Battery Park in 1917

The straw hats the men are wearing give the season away. They’re strolling through Battery Park beside what was once Castle Garden Fort, now the home of the New York Aquarium, according to the back of the postcard.

The card continues: “Here can be seen in large glass tanks the most valuable and complete collection of fish, seals, turtles, and other deep sea inhabitants in existence.

“At the entrance of the harbor is the Statue of Liberty and a little further up is Ellis Island, through which all immigrants landing in New York City must pass.”

The aquarium relocated to Coney Island in 1957.

What horses left behind in the 19th century city

Without the estimated 170,000 horses pulling street cars and delivery wagons at any given time in the late 1800s, the city would never have become an economic powerhouse.

But all those equines created a filthy mess. Each horse produced several pounds of manure and more than a quart of urine a day—much of it deposited on city streets and sidewalks.

“Despite the presence of animals, the city had no systematic street-cleaning efforts,” wrote Columbia University professor David Rosner in an article called Portrait of an Unhealthy City: New York in the 1800s.

“During winter, neighborhoods sometimes rose between two and six feet in height because of the accumulation of waste and snow.”

“Dirt carters” would pick up the manure from the streets and haul it to specially designated “manure blocks,” where the waste attracted massive numbers of disease-transmitting flies.

Then there was the problem of working horses dropping dead in the street. “When a horse died, its carcass would be left to rot until it had disintegrated enough for someone to pick up the pieces,” wrote Rosner. “Children would play with dead horses lying in the street.” (As seen above, in an uncredited photo from 1900.)

In 1880, the city picked up 15,000 abandoned horse carcasses off the streets. With that in mind, the noise and pollution from vehicular traffic doesn’t seem so bad.

[photo at right: the last horsecar run in the city, July 1917, on Bleecker Street at Mercer]

Two more old Manhattan phone exchanges

This first one was spotted on a building off Lafayette Street near Bond Street.

Strangely, it has the EM for Empire that indicated a Brooklyn or Queens phone number.

I guess the alarm company was located in one of these boroughs (kind of scary if you were stuck in the elevator, having to wait for someone to come rescue you from across the East River).

The Little Wolf Cabinet shop, launched in 1956, is still located in the East 80s, one of the last of German Yorkville’s old-school businesses.

RE is for Rector or Regent.

The oldest street sign in Brooklyn

Maybe it is—it’s hard to tell how long ago this rusted old sign at the corner of Marlborough and Albemarle Roads went up.

And since it’s located in Prospect Park South, a planned suburban community developed around 1900, it may not be an official city street sign but a decorative one meant to mark the beginning of the neighborhood.

Hidden among the thick leaves of a tree and behind contemporary street signs attached to a Bishop’s Crook lamppost, the Marlborough Road sign has probably seen many decades of Victorian Flatbush history.

Here’s another old-school Brooklyn Street sign still standing tall in Fort Greene as of 2009.

Three ways of looking at Varick Street

Varick Street between West Houston and Clarkson Streets comes across as a sleepy little stretch of the city in this 1921 photo.

A row of early 19th century Federal-style houses cover the entire west side of the block. And a corner cigar store and carpenter/cabinet maker are the only businesses—aside from the horse-drawn ice cream delivery wagon.

Notice the horsecar tracks? “[They're] those of the Sixth Avenue Ferry line, which ran from the Desbrosses Street Ferry via Varick and Carmine Streets to Sixth Avenue,” states the wonderful New York Then and Now, which published the photo.

“On the extreme left is the entrance to the IRT Broadway-Seventh Avenue line subway, opened beneath Varick Street on July 1, 1918.”

The street didn’t look like this for much longer. In 1924 the 10 houses were demolished, a 12-story light-industry loft structure put in its place, as seen in the 1974 photo above, also from New York Then and Now.

The loft building casts a dark shadow over the block to this day (at right). It’s part of the no man’s land south of the West Village but a little too West for Soho that I believe is called Hudson Square.

Is this the city’s first vegetarian restaurant?

Before every city neighborhood featured a vegan bistro or bakery, before 1970s Manhattan became dotted with “health food” stores and macrobiotic restaurants, there was a local mini-chain called Farmfood.

At three midtown locations, Farmfood served meat-free meals as far back as the 1930s to city residents who considered themselves vegetarians.

I found Farmfood’s appealing ad on the back of a vintage matchbook, interestingly enough.

Vegetarian eateries today would lose all credibility if they did anything that seemed to endorse smoking. But hey, it was the 1930s.

“East Side Night, Williamsburg Bridge”

Martin Lewis’ 1928 etching illuminates some of the city’s mysterious layers, levels, and corners. This piece belongs to the Brooklyn Museum . . . which for some reason doesn’t have it on view, according to the website.

Memo to New York museum curators: An exhibit of Lewis’ etchings is long overdue!