Outdated subway signs that still point the way

There are regular subway signs, and then there are the ones that give clear directions—in these cases, using names no longer widely used.

The Port Authority Building, the Art Deco structure built in 1932 that stretches from 14th to 15th Streets on Eighth Avenue, must have been important; it scored its own sign in the station at that corner.

Google bought it in 2010, and it now serves as their famous New York City headquarters. I wonder what old-school Port Authority employees would think of the trick doors in the library and Lego play area.

Here’s a peek inside, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal.

I’d never heard of the B and D trains referred to as “concourse trains.”

But they made up a branch of the IND called the Concourse Line, opened in 1933 and running from 145th Street (where the photo was located) and 205th Street in the Bronx, under the Grand Concourse.

Penn Railroad sounds quaint, but it’s easy enough to decipher. I wonder how many tourists and new New Yorkers know what BMT and H&M mean—and no, it certainly has nothing to do with the store!

A Bronx road inspired by the Champs Elysées?

Paris’ Champs Elysées is one of the most famous streets in the world, a multilane thoroughfare running about a mile.

And according to articles, books, and the Bronx Historical Society, the Champs Elysées was the inspiration behind the Grand Concourse, the five-mile avenue stretching from Mott Haven to Van Cortlandt Park that opened in 1909.

It’s easy to see a resemblance. Both feature wide sidewalks and many trees, and both are framed by beautiful architecture—block after block of circa-1930s Art Deco and Art Moderne residences in the Bronx.

Also, the Grand Concourse was designed by Alsatian-born civil engineer Louis Risse. It’s conceivable that Risse modeled his creation after a French thoroughfare he would likely be familiar with.

But was the Champs Elysées his inspiration? Despite the legend, no one really knows, according to Boulevard of Dreams, a book about the Grand Concourse by Constance Rosenbloom.

“Louis Risse does not mention the Champs Elysées, even in passing, in his detailed description of the thoroughfare he envisioned in the West Bronx,” writes Rosenbloom.

“Beyond the fact that Risse was a Frenchman who knew the Champs Elysées well from his youth, and beyond the superficial resemblance between the two streets, with their sweeps of roadway and sidewalk demarcated by seemingly endless rows of trees, no evidence exists that the grand Parisian boulevard was in Risse’s mind as he set about creating his own masterwork.”

“Yet, whatever the engineer’s intentions, the two streets share a great deal beyond mere beauty, namely, a more ineffable quality that has to do with their singularly urban environs. Like precious gems enclosed within fine settings, both streets were enhanced by the grand buildings that flank them.”

Secret signage of defunct New York hospitals

Ever found yourself on the FDR Drive near the South Street Seaport staring at this kind of spooky structure?

It’s set amid 1970s-era apartment buildings and housing projects, making its rounded wings and red brick exterior stand out considerably.

There’s an interesting history behind it. This is the back of Gouverneur Hospital, founded in the late 19th century to serve the crowded immigrant communities of the Lower East Side.

This particular building was constructed in 1897, and it’s marked by a lovely terra cotta sign and ornate carved front entrance at 621 Water Street.

As for its curious rounded design, it served a health purpose. “[It] was believed that tuberculosis bacilli hid in corners, so the shape was an early attempt at preventive medicine,” explains this New York Times piece.

Gouverneur Hospital still exists in a more modern facility nearby on Madison Street. The 1897 building, though, now provides housing for New Yorkers living with HIV and mental illness.

I love the lettering on this sign for Union Hospital of the Bronx, opened here in 1922. It’s not easy to see beneath the contemporary signage for Union Community Health Care, a facility that took over this space on 188th Street in the Bronx.

Here are a few more old city hospitals that have been repurposed into—what else?—high-end apartments.

The long-gone ironworks of an older Manhattan

You don’t always notice them underfoot as you walk down New York’s sidewalks. But these old manhole and coal chute covers—the ones with the name and address of the ironworks company that created it—provide clues about an older, vanished city.

Take this one above, made by the homey-sounding I. Claman Stove Repairs company. It was spotted on Washington Place in the West Village.

I. Claman was located at 94 Orchard Street, an address now occupied by a craft brewery that caters to a young, social, moneyed crowd.

B. Masor & Co. used to make manhole covers like this one, found off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, at 721-31 East 133rd Street.

I’m not sure if the address is for Manhattan or for the Bronx. Either way, the business is kaput.

Abbott Hardware, once at Columbus Avenue in the West 90s, created this coal hole cover. It’s still part of the sidewalk on St. Luke’s Place off Seventh Avenue South.

But the days of upper Columbus Avenue housing an ironworks company are long over. The old tenements there were razed decades ago to make way for big-box apartments—strangely all in the same shade of beige.

An unlikely mosaic on a Little Italy store floor

Arthur Avenue at 187th Street is the Bronx’s Little Italy—once a thriving enclave of 100,000 but now a much smaller oasis of restaurants, delis, pastry shops, and markets in the borough’s Belmont section.

By all accounts, it was and is a heavily Roman Catholic neighborhood. Which makes it all the more surprising to come across this Star of David mosaic at the entrance to an Italian specialty food shop.

But the shop is called Teitel Brothers, and it all starts to make sense. Opened in 1915 by two Italian-speaking Austrian brothers, Teitel Brothers imported cheese, olive oil, and other items from Italy.

Almost 100 years later, Teitel Brothers still packs in loyal customers; part of 186th Street off Arthur Avenue was even renamed Teitel Brothers Way.

And the weathered Star of David remains cemented to the ground.

Faded phone exchange signs on dingy tenements

Lots of old tenements have them—metal signs advertising the name of the electrician or roofer or plumber who helped maintain the building.

These two were spotted in low-income Bronx neighborhoods. The sign above comes from a tenement near the Fordham Road D train stop. The ME is for the Melrose neighborhood in the South Bronx.

WY for Wyandotte on this sign, found near Third Avenue in Melrose. It’s also a Bronx exchange—but why Wyandotte, which connotes the Native American tribe Wyandot, who live in Canada?

The only reference I could find comes from a 1975 New York Times article bemoaning the disappearance of the more poetic and descriptive phone exchange names:

“ALgonquin was nice, too, suggesting Indians, as did LAckawanna and WYandotte,” writes John Corry. “WYandotte seemed to be used almost exclusively by the Irish who lived around Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Those Irish are vanishing; so is WYandotte.”

Once the Bronx Opera House, soon a luxury hotel

“When first opened in August 1913, the Bronx Opera House was considered the most beautiful theater in the borough,” states the wonderful theater history site Cinema Treasures.

Part of the “subway circuit” for vaudeville shows and first stop when Broadway plays hit the road, this Beaux-Arts jewel on Third Avenue and 149th Street hosted performers like Eddie Cantor, John Barrymore, and Harry Houdini, reports Bill Twomey’s The Bronx: In Bits and Pieces.

“The auditorium had two separate balconies, and was dominated by a huge crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling,” writes Cinema Treasures.

It sounds lovely—but its glory days didn’t last. By World War II, the German-Americans who patronized the opera house had moved away, replaced by Spanish-speaking immigrants.

The opera house became a movie theater, then various Latin-themed dance clubs, and by the 1980s was housing a church.

Today, it looks like an empty shell. But listen to this: a high-end boutique hotel is set to open here this year. The newly christened Bronx Opera House Hotel plans to charge $125 to $145 per night!

[Photo: Cinema Treasures]

A Bronx park memorializes three dead presidents

Is this a scene from the South Bronx, or a small town in middle America in this circa-1910 postcard? It’s the former, of course—a view of a pocket park called McKinley Square, at 169th Street and Boston Road.

Hard to believe how old-timey the Bronx looked then. Just one automobile can be seen in the distance. Telephone poles dot the sidewalks, a liberty flag post stands tall, and there’s an ad for Zeman chocolates (bon-bons!) on the side of a row of tenements.

Just after the turn of the century, the square was named for President William McKinley, cut down by an anarchist’s bullet in Buffalo in 1901.

But he’s not the only president memorialized here. Three oak trees (they must be the ones in the postcard) planted during a dedication ceremony were named Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, “after the three martyred presidents,” a 1903 New York Times article tells us.

Postcard via Bronx history site ouroldneighborhood.com

Three little elephants at the Bronx Zoo

Cute, no? Pachyderms were a big hit when the Bronx Zoo (full former name: New York Zoological Park) built their original dome-capped elephant house in 1908.

More than 100 years later, zoo officials decided to follow the Central Park Zoo and Prospect Park Zoo and phase out their elephant exhibit.

The elephants currently lounging around the central Bronx will be the last ones to live in New York City.

Bridges and barracks in an East River postcard

This 1940s technicolor postcard shows the sturdy Triborough (aka the Robert F. Kennedy) Bridge in the foreground and the stunning Hell Gate Bridge, which carries rail traffic, behind it.

It’s only one leg of the Triborough though; the bridge connects the Bronx to Manhattan to Queens—leapfrogging over the joined-via-landfill Randall’s and Ward’s Islands.

I’m curious about the barracks-like white and red buildings in the background on what looks like Randall’s and Ward’s Islands. In the 1930s, the island became home to a psychiatric hospital that still operates today; it replaced an older insane asylum.

Are these barracks part of the psych hospital—or used as housing for some other group of people the city didn’t want in Manhattan or the the other boroughs?