Luxury apartments named after old factories

The Toy Factory lofts, the Pencil Factory lofts—when New York’s manufacturing buildings get made over into condos or co-ops, they often take on the former name of the building in a bid for authentrification.

The developers of the Ex-Lax loft co-ops (above), on Atlantic Avenue between Nevins and Hoyt Streets, didn’t shy away from the building’s past as a laxative factory when they converted the circa-1920s plant into 57 residences in 1979.

According to a resident interviewed by The New York Times in 1997, “the stigma of living in one of those five units has mostly disappeared — within the neighborhood, that is.”

What’s left of that stigma can be yours today for over a million bucks.

Of course, the Hit Factory wasn’t a factory in the traditional sense.

But this mega recording studio (at left) on West 54th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues cranked out tons of hit records from the 1970s until it closed in 2005.

Now, the place where John Lennon reportedly spent his final hours mixing tracks before he was murdered is a 27-unit condo with residences going for over seven figures.

A street photographer’s tender, noble New York

Vivian Maier’s life and work are still being uncovered.

Born in the city in 1926, her story doesn’t sound remarkable: She lived in Europe until 1951, returning to New York City for four years, where she worked in a sweatshop before moving to Chicago.

There she spent the next 40 years as a nanny; reportedly she was homeless and broke later in life before the adult children she cared for years earlier rescued her from destitution. Intensely private, she died in 2009 at 83.

Now here’s the remarkable part. Throughout her life, she took pictures—at least 100,000 of them, the negatives of which were inside a storage locker that was auctioned off in 2007.

The new owner, amazed at his incredible find, has been working to bring attention to her art and give Maier her proper due. (Below is a self-portrait.)

“Most of Maier’s photos are black and white, and many feature unposed or casual shots of people caught in action—passing moments that nonetheless possess an underlying gravity and emotion,” explains a 2011 Chicago Magazine article.

Though many of her images were taken in Chicago, others document New York’s rougher edges in the 1950s—a tender collection of underdogs, not-quite-in-sync lovers, and lonely souls.

A portfolio of dozens of her New York photos can be accessed here.

The sidewalk clock embedded in Maiden Lane

New York City is filled with lovely decorative sidewalk clocks—some standing tall on the street, others hinged to a building.

But I don’t know of any others that are actually embedded in the sidewalk, like this Roman numeral beauty underfoot at the northeast corner of Broadway and Maiden Lane.

German immigrant William Barthman opened his first jewelry store nearby at 43 Maiden Lane, then moved it to 174 Broadway at this corner.

When the clock came along is still unclear. According to a 1994 New York Times item, the store manager says “some kind of clock has been there ‘a minimum of 80 to 90 years,’ including a wooden model, an electrical one and the current quartz version.”

The unsolved Chinatown trunk murder of 1909

In June 1909, 19-year-old Elsie Sigel’s well-to-do Bronx family thought she had gone to visit her grandmother in Washington DC.

Instead, she had been murdered—her decaying body stuffed in a trunk with a rope around her neck in an apartment at 782 Eighth Avenue.

Police at the scene quickly figured out Elsie’s identity based on the 35 or so desperate love letters strewn across the apartment floor.

They were addressed to the man who lived there, Chinese immigrant Leon Ling, who had apparently fled New York days earlier.

Investigators quickly pieced the story together: Sigel (granddaughter of Civil War hero Gen. Franz Sigel) did mission work in Chinatown, part of an effort to convert immigrants to Christianity.

There she met Ling, a dapper ladies’ man, as well as another Chinese immigrant. She became involved romantically with both of them.

When Ling found out about the other man, police theorized he killed Sigel in a rage.

The murder of a young white woman by a Chinese man made huge headlines in all the New York papers—especially since the supposed murderer had vanished.

Theories were proposed: Ling fled back to China. The couple ran off together and put another girl’s body in the trunk to throw off cops. Sigel killed herself, and Ling was smuggled out of the city by other Chinese.

Whatever the real story, the case remains officially unsolved 102 years later.

[Top right illustration from the New York Daily News; bottom left, the Mott Street mission where Sigel met her supposed killer]

What Bowling Green looked like in 1907

Or close to 1907; that’s the date stamped on the back of this penny postcard.

The red Queen Anne beauty on the left at One Broadway is the 1885 Washington Building; it was remodeled in 1921 in the Beaux-Arts fashion and still stands today.

Teardrop-shaped Bowling Green has a fascinating history. In the 17th century it was a Dutch colonial cattle market and parade ground before becoming the city’s first public park in 1733, leased to nearby landowners who promised to pretty it up for “one peppercorn a year.”

The landowners added trees, a fence, and of course, an eponymous bowling green for the then-popular sport of lawn bowling.

Two of the wickedist bars on Bleecker Street

No, not Kenny’s Castaways—the bar that occupied this spot more than 100 years earlier, as well as another down the block.

From the 1870s through the turn of the century, Bleecker Street from MacDougal Street to LaGuardia Place was home to the most sinful “resorts” the city had ever known.

“The Slide on Bleecker Street was probably the first—and until recent times the last—open and undisguised gay bar in New York,” wrote Luc Sante in Lowlife.

Sante quotes an 1890 guide describing the Slide, at 157 Bleecker (left), as “the lowest and most disgusting place. The place is filled nightly with from 100 to 300 people, most of whom are males . . . . They are addicted to vices which are inhumane and unnatural.”

Another den of sin was the Black Rabbit, at 183 Bleecker. Anti-vice activist Anthony Comstock had the police arrest several patrons of this “hang-out,” as a New York Times article called it, in an October 1900 article on the raid.

[183 Bleecker today is the 1849 Restaurant, photo from CitySearch.com]

“[Comstock] says also that he has never before raided a place so wicked, and that ‘Sodom and Gommorah would blush for shame at hearing to what depths of vice its habitues had descended,’” the Times stated.

Yikes! I wish they provided more details as to exactly what made it so evil.

If you have seven million dollars, you can own a piece of New York’s morally repugnant past; 157 Bleecker is up for sale.

How starlings got their start in Central Park

Recognize these birds? They’re European starlings, an iridescent, noisy species that thrives not just in New York but all over the U.S.

As the name makes clear, this breed isn’t native to North America. It owes its existence here to a super rich, quirky Bronx land owner named Edward Schieffelin—head of a group called the American Acclimatization Society.

“Schieffelin, a wealthy drug manufacturer and theatre aficionado, brought European starlings to New York City as part of his attempt to introduce every bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare to the United States,” explains a Parks Department web page.

None of the other winged critters Schieffelin brought over managed to survive. But the 120 starlings he set free in Central Park in 1890 and 1891 multiplied.

For 10 years, they remained in the New York area, but by 1930 were spotted in Tennessee and then finally made it to Alaska in 1970. Today their numbers are in the hundreds of millions.

Shakespeare’s one mention of the starling comes from King Henry IV: “Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer.”

It’s a reference to its mimicking ability, which is why the starling is sometimes called the poor man’s mynah.

A rainy day in Queens in 1931

Martin Lewis’ drypoint print, “Rainy Day, Queens,” captures light behind cloudy skies and in slick sidewalk puddles on a grim city day.

Does anyone have an idea where this is?

It’s moody and enchanting—and it sold at Christie’s for $23,750! I hope it’s not sitting in a closet somewhere.

Washington Square Park’s “Tramp’s Retreat”

“This image of a ragged fellow begging from a well-dressed woman in Washington Square . . . testifies to Washington Square’s split personality at the end of the 19th century,” writes Emily Kies Folpe in her terrific book, It Happened in Washington Square.

Folpe quotes an 1892 Century magazine article about the Square, which notes that one section was populated by homeless men and called “Tramp’s Retreat.”

This Harper‘s piece from 1900 identifies as on the southwest end.

While the northern, Fifth Avenue side of Washington Square was as elite and genteel as it was 50 years earlier, the southern side was now bordered by rooming houses . . . and filled with tramps.

“To the tramp, who is attracted hither in summer by the cool shade, the square serves several purposes. It serves him first in the capacity of a restaurant, where he may eat his luncheon unmolested,” states the Harper’s article.

Lastly it serves him as a lodging house, where he slumbers peacefully until the ‘sparrow cop’ comes around and awakens him.”

[Washington Square postcard from the NYPL Digital Collection]

Where is Fourth Avenue and 128th Street?

This mysterious address, chiseled into the corner of a red-brick tenement, doesn’t sound like it’s in Manhattan.

But it is; today we know it as Park Avenue and 128th Street. So what’s with the Fourth Avenue moniker?

Fourth was the original 1811 street grid name for the avenue. In the 1860s, a section of Fourth between 32nd and 42nd Streets was renamed the more pleasant-sounding Park.

By 1888, the city demapped Fourth in favor of Park from 32nd to the Harlem River. In 1959, with Park Avenue’s cache in full swing, Fourth Avenue from 32nd to 17th Streets was renamed Park Avenue South.

Let’s hope that what remains of chopped-up Fourth Avenue, from Union Square to the Bowery, doesn’t also fall victim to the Park Avenue moniker makeover.

More out-of-date Fourth Avenue signage still exists on the street today—like these examples here.