When Audubon settled in Upper Manhattan

After Birds of America earned him success and money, ornithologist and painter John James Audubon bought an estate for himself and his family in 1842 roughly around today’s West 150s.

Nine miles north of the city center, he called it Minniesland, after his wife.

“Audubon’s original purchase was a fourteen-acre right triangle that began on the flat land at the crest of the Heights just north of Carmansville and slightly west of the Kingsbridge Road, at a point in the center of the intersection of present-day Amsterdam Avenue and 155th Street,” states the Audubon Park Historic District website.

It sounds like paradise, which makes it all the more unfortunate that after Audubon’s death in 1851, his widow was forced to sell the land.

In the 1850s, Minniesland (above, in 1864, from the Audubon Park Historic District website), was carved up into Audubon Park, a neighborhood of villas. At the turn of the century, row houses and apartment buildings came in. The Audubon house disappeared by the 1930s.

Today, the neighborhood “bears no resemblance to the wooded vale that John James Audubon bought in 1841 and deeded to his wife, Lucy,” reports the Audubon Park Historic District website.

“The ancient elms and oaks that towered above dogwood and tulip trees on the hillside and the tall pines nearer the water, the streams that flowed through ponds and over a waterfall before joining the river, the enclosures where deer and elk mingled with domestic animals are long gone, displaced in stages of development and progress that culminated in the cityscape that exists today.”

Upper Manhattan hasn’t forgotten its famous resident (at left). Audubon Avenue and Audubon Terrace memorialize him, and Audubon himself is buried in Trinity Cemetery at 155th Street.

Paying $4 to see the Mets beat the Reds in 1973

Mets fans left Shea Stadium happy on August 19, 1973, with New York squeaking past Cincinnati 2-1 that Sunday afternoon.

The official program and scorecard for the series lists ticket prices that year: general admission seats went for $1.30 each, with box seats running an astounding $4. That’s equivalent to $20 today, adjusted for inflation.

The program also explains how fans could get to and from Shea by taking the “IRT Main Street Flushing Train” (better known as the 7 today) or the “GG” from Jackson Heights.

This wasn’t the last time the Mets met up with the Reds in 1973. They duked it out again in the playoffs—a series notorious for an all-out brawl that started with Pete Rose and Bud Harrelson and ended with a team pile-on.

New York won the NLCS, but lost to Oakland in the World Series.

The majestic pool at Chelsea’s London Terrace

When London Terrace went up in 1930, its developer claimed it to be the biggest apartment complex in the world.

We’re talking 4,110 rooms carved into 1,670 units among 14 buildings—all spread out between Ninth and Tenth Avenues and 23rd and 24th Streets.

And there was one other selling point that made it unique among the other massive apartment towers that had the misfortune of opening just as the Depression hit: a half-Olympic size, lovely 1920s-style indoor pool.

Management at London Terrace still refer to it as “the best pool in New York.” Back in the 1930s, it apparently was enough of a crown jewel to the 3,000 residents, they put it on postcards.

Watch a clip of 1930s residents diving and swimming and having a swell time in their wool bathing suits here, courtesy of the London Terrace website.

I wonder if current residents use it as much as previous tenants seemed to?

Broadway at West 42nd Street: 1898 to 2011

“Even before the New York entertainment center moved up from Herald Square, the northwest corner of Broadway and 42nd Street featured a giant billboard advertising theatrical attractions,” states the caption for this photo from the fascinating 1976 book New York Then and Now.

I love the street cleaner pushing his barrel over Belgian block streets crisscrossed with streetcar tracks.

Later that year, the nine-story Hotel Pabst went up on the site, and nearby buildings torn down in 1902 to make way for the IRT subway. Theaters were moving in; check out the minstrel show signs at the far left in the 1903 photo above.

The corner kept changing fast. By 1905 The New York Times (at left) building replaced the hotel, and the plot of land, Longacre Square, was renamed Times Square.

The Times didn’t stay long. They moved to another building on West 43rd in 1913. The Times Tower and Square become New York icons of advertising and entertainment—the wholesome and the sleezy variety.

Fast-forward to 2011. Nothing from 1898 remains; the corner is a sea of neon, featuring monuments to commerce—like the big Chase bank.

Bleecker Street: “headquarters of Bohemianism”

“He who does not know Bleecker Street does not know New York,” wrote James D. McCabe in his 1872 guidebook Lights and Shadows of New York Life. “It is of all the localities of the metropolis one of the best worth studying.”

Why did McCabe single out Bleecker? In post–Civil War New York, it was a perfect example of how quickly a thoroughfare can go from fancy to shabby chic.

“It was once the abode of wealth and fashion, as its fine old mansion testify,” states McCabe, referring to the grand detached houses that lined Bleecker from the Bowery to Sixth Avenue.

“Twenty-five years ago they were homes of wealth and refinement . . . the old mansions are [now] put to the viler uses of third-rate boarding houses and restaurants.”

Bleecker’s rep sank thanks to the bordellos that began lining nearby Greene and Mercer Streets. Soon it became the center of Bohemianism—a label that applied into the 1960s, when Bleecker hosted Beat writers, folk musicians, and edgy comedians.

“You may dress as you please, live as you please, do as you please in all things, and no comments will be made. There is no ‘society’ here to worry your life with its claims and laws. Life here is based on principles which differ from those which prevail in other parts of the city.”

[Van Nest mansion drawing: courtesy of the NYPL Digital Collection]

“Spring Night, Harlem River”

In 1899, Ernest Lawson, a member of “The Eight” along with John Sloan, Everett Shin, and other New York City painters, moved to Upper Manhattan.

Which is why his work often depicts the landscape of today’s Washington Heights and Inwood. In this 1913 painting, he gives the Washington Bridge linking Manhattan and the Bronx at 181st Street a dramatic and romantic moonlit glow.

The cost of leasing a house in Brooklyn in 1908

Unfortunately, 544 Marcy Avenue is the address of a building that’s part of the Marcy Houses housing development, constructed in 1949 in Bed-Stuy.

So it’s tough to know what the house for rent at that address—as detailed in the “house agreement” from 1908 excerpted here—looked like around the time it was leased.

Was it a three-story brownstone like the one across the way at Marcy and Floyd Street? Or a charming wood-frame home, the kind still standing in Clinton Hill and Brooklyn Heights?

Whatever kind of house it was, a woman named Agnes D. Davies apparently agreed to lease it to one Ellen McLaughlin from May 1908 to May 1909 for the grand total of $30 per month.

It may not have been a princely sum—inflation calculators claim $30 in 1908 is equal to $718 today.

This part of Marcy Avenue once was rather distinguished. An 1888 Brooklyn Eagle obituary details the death of the man who lived there at the time, Henry Grasser, describing him as a “prominent member” of several lodges and societies.

[Thanks to J. Warren for making this lease available]

Downtown’s now-defunct indie record stores

Everyone mourns the passing of an independent bookstore. But fewer tears seem to be shed for the rapid demise of many of New York’s indie record stores—tiny nooks that often had as much coolness cred as the music they sold.

Some are still around—but not these long-gone haunts in Chelsea, the East Village, and the West Village.

In July 1982, 110 St. Marks Place was the location of Saint Mark’s Music Exchange. Today it’s Paprika, an Italian restaurant.

According to a 1991 New York Times rundown of record stores, Vinylmania had three stores. “They say vinyl’s on the way out, but not here,” the article quotes the store owner.

Opened in 1978, the store closed in 2007.

The same New York Times piece says Midnight Records “combines collectors’ items from the 1950s to the present with newer releases from bands like Dimentia 13; it also has magazines like Psychotronic and Bucketfull of Brains.”

Looks like they closed up the store in the 2004, according to this list. Cool Runnin is in the closed category as well, though it doesn’t give the year of its demise. They were in the Reggae music business since 1984.

All ads come from early to mid-1980s issues of the monthly East Village Eye.