West 122nd Street, starting at Marcus Garvey/Mt. Morris Park, is lined on both sides with gorgeous, well-preserved brownstones.
If you can look past the parked cars, walking down the street is almost like going into a Gilded Age time warp.
Built at the turn of the century, the street was known as “Doctors’ Row” because so many professionals chose to reside there.
Another Doctors’ Row—well, at least the love row houses, if not the doctors—still exists in the South Bronx.
Every borough has at least a few subway stations that feature stained glass. But the Bronx seems to have more than any other, especially in the little stations at local stops for the 2 and 5 trains.
From “Latin American Stories” by George Crespo at the Jackson Avenue station:
One of several panels from the Prospect Street’s “Bronx, Four Seasons,” by Marina Tsesarskaya:
Part of Daniel Hauben’s The El, at the Freeman Street stop:
No one who tuned in to watch the Yankees on August 3, 1979 will ever forget the emotional pre-game ceremony honor of Thurman Munson. The team captain and catcher died two days earlier after the Cessna he was piloting lost altitude and crashed in his home city of Canton, Ohio.
Photo: Anthony Casale/Daily News
Only eight Yankees took the field, leaving the catcher’s box empty. Terence Cardinal Cooke, Archbishop of New York at the time, gave the invocation, and fans cheered for a full 10 minutes after Munson’s picture appeared on the scoreboard.
North Brother Island is a 13-acre spit of land in the East River, between the Bronx and Riker’s Island. Unlike bigger Roosevelt Island nearby, it’s never been developed.
But it has been inhabited by people—sick people. Acquired by the city in 1885, officials built Riverside Hospital (at right) there, a place to quarantine New Yorkers who suffered from potentially deadly and easily communicable diseases such as typhus and smallpox. It also housed drug addicts until the 1960s.
North Brother’s most famous resident? Mary Mallon, aka Typhoid Mary. The Irish immigrant cook, a carrier of typhus, was committed there in 1908 and died 30 years later.
The island has another connection to a tragic New York event: the General Slocum disaster. After this steamship caught fire near the island in 1904, hundreds of passengers—mostly German immigrant women and children enjoying an annual church boat trip—jumped into the East River to escape the flames.
The General Slocum finally beached on North Brother, and many passenger bodies washed up on its shore. All told, an estimated 1,021 people perished—the greatest loss of life in New York City until the September 11th terrorist attacks.
Today North Brother is inhabited mainly by birds; it’s a protected bird sanctuary. The latest episode of the web-only PBS show The City Concealed can take you there.
It predates the George Washington Bridge by 43 years and has a simple beauty all its own.
Still, the tiny Washington Bridge—connecting 181st Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Washington Heights to University Avenue in the Bronx—is like a neglected kid brother to the enormous and iconic GWB.
This is the Washington Bridge circa 1907. The Harlem River looks like a country brook. The “Speedway” referred to in the postcard was the Harlem River Speedway, a three-mile road for racing horses and carriages. It eventually became today’s Harlem River Drive.
Here’s another view of the Speedway.
Like egg creams and nickel subway rides, stickball is one of those long-gone cultural touchstones that New York City old-timers often wax nostalgic about. But you know, the game sure looks like a lot of fun.
No coaches. No expensive gear. No adults. All you needed was a car-free side street (not hard to find before the 1950s, when few city residents had cars), a broom handle, and a “spaldeen”—a small pink rubber ball made by the Spalding sporting goods company—and you were good to go. Chalk to outline bases or the strike zone was optional.
This photo, by Arthur Leipzig, was taken in Brooklyn in 1950. Bed-Stuy? Brownsville? East New York? The black and white players as well as the kosher market tell us it was an ethnically mixed neighborhood.
Stickball is still played by kids in some neighborhoods; there’s also an adult league, the New York Emperors Stickball League. To commemorate the game, a Bronx street was given the moniker Stickball Boulevard.
Andrew Freedman appears to have been your run-of-the-mill Gilded-Age millionaire. He made his cash in real estate and subway construction; he later owned the New York Giants baseball team and had close ties to Tammany Hall politicians.
After he died in 1915, his will revealed that he wanted his money to go toward establishing a retirement home. A retirement home not just for anyone: It was for millionaires who had fallen on hard times and needed a place to live that afforded the luxury they were used to in their younger years.
The Andrew Freedman Home, opened in 1924, still stands on the Grand Concourse and 166th Street in the Bronx. And grand is the right word. The four-story structure, set back amid a well-tended lawn and partially hidden by a tall iron fence, featured sumptuous parlors, dining areas, and bedrooms. All residents had servants. And everything was free.
It seems like an elitist idea today. But people then thought there was a need for a poorhouse for rich folks. At the dedication ceremony, the president of the board said:
“It will be a veritable home for ‘gentlefolk’—husbands and wives who, by reason of reverses in the professional and business lives of the husbands, accompanied by advancing age and infirmities, have lost their ability to maintain themselves in the station of life to which they have been accustomed.”
By the 1960s the endowment had run out, and residents were asked to pay rent. In 1982 it was sold to a Bronx senior citizen organization, which began letting older people move in regardless of whether they were ever wealthy.
I’m not sure if anyone actually lives there today. When these photos were taken, the home and grounds were ghostly quiet.
Yankee great Lou Gehrig was born in Yorkville on June 19, 1903. But exactly where isn’t clear.
According to this plaque put up in 1990 by the New York Yankees organization, his first home—probably a typical city tenement building—was at or about 309 East 94th Street. Located there now is a branch of Mount Sinai Medical Center.
But other sources identify Gehrig’s childhood home at 1994 Second Avenue, near 103rd Street.
Apparently there was a plaque set up in memory of the Iron Horse here too, but the business that occupied the site, a garden store, moved out, and no plaque remains.
Wherever he spent his early years, Gehrig is definitely a son of New York City. He and his German immigrant parents moved to Washington Heights when he was a boy; Gehrig later attended Commerce High School, on the Upper West Side.
Then he was off to Columbia—where his mother happened to work as a cook in a fraternity house—to play football and baseball.
That’s where a couple of Yankee scouts discovered him, and the rest is baseball history.
The Hell Gate and Triborough Bridges—spanking-new and gleaming in this technical postcard—connect Astoria to Ward’s and Randall’s Islands. The islands are two separate entities here, but they’ve long since been united into one island via landfill.
It’s a strange view: Manhattan and the Bronx look like pastoral, barely populated villages. Astoria, on the other hand, comes off as an industrial wasteland.
The Triborough Bridge was renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge in 2008. I hope they don’t rename the Hell Gate; it’s too colorful a name to lose.
In September 1906, a Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga—who had been living in the Museum of Natural History after a stint at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair—was moved into the Bronx Zoo’s Monkey House. Given a bow and arrow, he was free to come and go on zoo grounds.
He wasn’t an employee, however, but an exhibit—one that was met with a fair amount of outrage. African-American leaders protested immediately. And though crowds came to laugh and jeer at Ota Benga, many visitors also found the situation shameful.
Ota Benga, supposedly at the Bronx Zoo
The New York Times said this about zoo-goers on September 9, 1906: “Even those who laughed the most turned away with an expression on their faces such as one sees after a play with a sad ending or a book in which the hero or heroine is poorly rewarded. ‘Something about it that I don’t like’ was the way one man put it.”
The Bronx Zoo entrance in 1910, 11 years after the zoo opened
Within a few weeks, the zoo took Ota Benga off display, and by the end of the month he came under the guardianship of an African-American clergyman who moved him to the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn.
The zoo’s human exhibit was over; Ota Benga met his end a decade later. In 1910 he relocated to a Baptist seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he later found work at a tobacco factory. In 1916, he shot himself in the heart with a stolen pistol.
