Wall Street: scene of the first bank robbery ever

It happened way back in March 1831—and the theft wasn’t just the first bank heist in New York, but the very first in the country.

Details are sketchy, but the robbery took place on Wall Street, a financial hub since the 18th century.

An English immigrant named Edward Smith reportedly stole $245,000 from The City Bank of New York—an ancestor of today’s megabank Citibank—headquartered at 52 Wall Street.

Smith was quickly nabbed, tried, and sentenced to five years of hard labor at Sing Sing—which was only five years old at the time Smith became a inmate.

[Logo at right: a 19th century name of the original City Bank of New York, which eventually morphed into Citibank]

“Flatbush Avenue and Nevins Street,” 1918

Early 20th century Brooklyn offered lots of ways to get around: elevated trains, trolley cars, and automobiles, as this postcard, stamped 1918, shows.

Is this another view of the same intersection circa 1925? It’s from the Brooklyn Historical Society’s wonderful blog.

The century-old wishbones hanging in McSorley’s

So many incredible relics of old New York are taped to and hanging from the walls of McSorley’s Old Ale House, it’s hard to notice the row of dusty wishbones over the crowded bar.

But Sunday’s New York Post mentioned these artifacts and a fascinating story behind them. Were they really placed there by soldiers going off to World War I?

According to several city guidebooks, yes. “Those are the wishbones from going-away dinners of doughboys who never returned from the Great War,” writes Jef Klein in 2006′s The History and Stories of the Best Bars in New York.

“Never dusted, never touched, the wishbones ensure that a part of these soldiers’ lives will be remembered and their sacrifice appreciated, even while their bones may lie in forgotten graves.”

But Joseph Mitchell’s McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, from 1940, doesn’t mention soldiers, just that the owner had a thing for wishbones:

“[Owner] Old John had a remarkable passion for memorabilia. For years he saved the wishbones of Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys and strung them on a rod connecting the pair of gas lamps over the bar, the dusty bones invariably the first thing a new customer gets inquisitive about.”

However they originated, the city health department made the current owner take them down and clean them off this past April.

[Above, Berenice Abbott's 1937 photo of inside McSorley's. The wishbones should be off to the left]

The celebrated chimp that ruled the Bronx Zoo

I don’t think New York has ever had an official animal mascot. But between 1907 and 1914, a top contender would have been Baldy the chimp.

Caught wild in the Congo at age four, clever and cheeky Baldy was a star attraction at the Monkey House in the then eight-year-old Bronx Zoo.

[Baldy and his keeper, copyright the Wildlife Conservation Society]

Though all of this would be totally frowned on by today’s standards, newspapers at the time reported that he adopted human habits, such as washing his face and hands, eating with a knife and fork at a table, and learning to rollerskate at the behest of his keepers.

Baldy was so famous, he shook hands with President Taft, who visited the zoo in 1911 and specifically asked to meet him, reported The New York Times.

Behind the scenes and the Monkey House, however, Baldy may not have been as friendly as everyone thought.

A zoo publication noted in 1914 that he “is now quite matured and so savage at times that it is difficult to enter his cage.”

Later that year, his death by tuberculosis was reported by The Times.

[Baldy in a promotional zoo postcard]

“Quarter of Nine” on a busy New York street

Here’s another lovely Martin Lewis etching, this one entitled “Quarter of Nine, Saturday’s Children,” from the pivotal year of 1929.

I tried to research what block this is but came up empty. That looks like an armory on the right—could it be the demolished armory that once stood at Park Avenue and 34th Street?

Check out another Martin Lewis street scene with a now-solved mystery location in Queens.

Bob Dylan’s “muffled and mysterious” 1960s city

“New York City was cold, muffled, and mysterious, the capital of the world,” recalled Bob Dylan in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One.

It’s the New York he encountered upon moving here in 1961 at age 20.

Broke but hungry for success and experiences, his observations of the winter he arrived—”the cold was brutal and every artery of the city was snowpacked”—will resonate with anyone who remembers their first magical months in New York.

“The city was like some uncarved block without any name or shape and it showed no favoritism. Everything was always new, always changing. It was never the same old crowd upon the streets,” wrote Dylan.

“I crossed over from Hudson to Spring, passed a garbage can loaded with bricks and stopped into a coffee shop. The waitress at the lunch counter wore a close-fitting suede blouse. It outlined the well-rounded lines of her body. She had blue-black hair covered with a kerchief and piercing blue eyes, clear stenciled eyebrows. I was wishing she’d pin a rose on me.”

“She poured the steaming coffee and I turned back towards the street window. The whole city was dangling in front of my nose. I had a vivid idea of where everything was. the future was nothing to worry about. It was awfully close.”

The secret tragedies of a defunct midtown hotel

Ever hear of the Hotel Chesterfield? Probably not; it was a massive, unspectacular midcentury tourist and show folk favorite at 130 West 49th Street.

Built in the 1920s, it outlived its heyday and was demolished after the early 1960s. A sparkling office tower occupies its old location.

What major and minor tragedies occurred in each of the Chesterfield’s 900 rooms over the decades? A quick search through newspaper archives offers a glimpse.

First, a deadly fall out a window. In 1929, a young actress was sitting on her seventh floor window sill, waiting for her husband to come home so she could tell him about a job she’d landed.

When he arrived, she jumped up, only to lose her balance and plunge to an awning below.

A couple of French opera singers had their room robbed in 1947. While out at the theater one night, they returned to find the place ransacked. Items missing included a silver fox cape, jewelry, a portable radio, and two bottles of anti-seasickness pills.

And of course, suicide. In 1933 a 68-year-old retired salesman from Scranton shot and killed himself in his 10th-floor room. He had come to  New York, a brief article says, to visit his son.