An 1880s shooting gallery on St. Mark’s Place

No, not that kind—an actual shooting gallery.

It’s a remnant of Kleindeutschland, the “Little Germany” that encompassed the East Village from the 1840s through the early 1900s.

The shooting gallery was at 12 St. Mark’s Place, east of Third Avenue. A bas relief carved into the facade gives away the building’s original purpose: it depicts an eagle, crossed guns, and a symbolic target, with the words Einigkeit Macht Stark (“unity is strength”) carved above.

This was the home of the Deutsch-Amerikanische Schuetzen Gesellschaft, or German American Shooting Society.

Built in 1888, it housed a saloon, lodge rooms, bowling alley, and a small shooting range in the basement (club members did most of the actual shooting in Queens).

“By the 1880s, shooting became a middle class pastime, and most halls had moved to the suburbs along with many residents of Kleindeutschland,” states a Landmarks Preservation Committee report.

“However, the German-American Shooting Society Clubhouse remained an important link to the old neighborhood despite the migration.”

“It served as a headquarters for meetings of twenty-four such groups, and was the site of fund-raisers for the construction of rifle ranges and travel to Germany for international shooting contests.”

The Shooting Society owned it until 1920, and in subsequent decades, it served as a Ukrainian Culture Center and St. Mark’s Bookshop.

Today it’s a yoga studio . . . of course!

[Top photo: King's Handbook of New York City, 1890s]

Manhattan’s 19th century temperance fountains

Just as abortion and the death penalty are hot-button issues today, temperance divided Americans in the 19th century.

The millions of members of the American Temperance Society, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and other groups believed that banning alcohol could eliminate major social problems like poverty and crime.

These organizations were pretty powerful. But it was hard to persuade people to give up booze when alcoholic beverages were often safer to drink than water.

That’s where the temperance fountain comes in.

“The premise behind the fountains was that the availability of cool drinking water would make alcohol less tempting,” wrote Therese Loeb Kreuzer in a 2012 article in The Villager.

“In the 19th century, temperance fountains could be found in cities and towns from coast to coast. Now few of them remain.”

Two still stand in Manhattan. One is in Tompkins Square Park, a strange place for a temperance fountain considering that the area was packed with beer-loving Germans at the time.

Donated by a wealthy temperance crusader who had it cast in 1888, it features a bronze figure of the Greek Goddess Hebe, cupbearer to the Gods, on top of a pedestal supported by four columns.

Blocks away on the west side of Union Square is New York’s second remaining temperance fountain. Paid for by another rich temperance convert and dating to 1881, it’s a figure of Charity that really works the innocent mother and children angle.

“Bronze dragonflies and butterflies frolic above the lions,” wrote Kreuzer in The Villager. “Then comes a richly sculpted band of acanthus leaves and birds. The ensemble is topped by a figure of a mother dressed like the Virgin Mary in a Renaissance painting. She holds a child in her right arm, while dispensing water from a jug to another child who looks at her adoringly.”

Both statues are the legacies of the movement that gave us Prohibition—and speakeasies—in the 1920s.

[Top two photos: Wikipedia]

Downtown’s secret and secluded church gardens

New York doesn’t get enough credit for its abundant pocket parks and green spaces.

And some of the loveliest places to enjoy the warm weather are in the gardens and backyards of the city’s oldest churches.

The full name of St. Luke’s Episcopal church, on Hudson Street in the West Village, is the Church of St. Luke in the Fields (at left).

It’s a fitting moniker for this parish, founded in 1820 and named for St. Luke, the “physician evangelist” (makes sense, as the city was in the grip of a yellow fever epidemic at the time).

Behind brick churchyard walls lies a two-acre garden, a labyrinth of walkways, benches, and blooming tulips, cornflowers, lilies, birch trees, cherry trees, and other lush vegetation.

The garden is well-hidden from the street save for an iron entrance gate—which may be why so few people know that it’s open to the public.

St. Marks-Church-in-the-Bowery, on Second Avenue and 10th Street, also has a walled-off backyard garden.

Called the Healing Garden, it’s on the west side of the church grounds, a secluded spot away from Second Avenue traffic and the tombs of 18th and 19th century prominent New Yorkers (including that of Peter Stuyvesant, whose farm the church was built on).

The garden sits behind an old-school cast iron fence, and in the late spring and summer, the canopy of trees provide welcome shade.

It’s not exactly the bucolic tranquility Stuyvesant may have enjoyed 300 years ago when he walked these same grounds, but it’s a sweet place for contemplation and relaxation in the contemporary city.

[Painting above: St. Marks in Bowery the Early Forties by Edward Lamson Henry]

How little Union Square has changed since 1910

What I love most about this vintage postcard is that so many of the buildings on the 17th Street side of Union Square going up Broadway still exist.

The Tammany Hall building on Park Avenue South and 17th Street hasn’t gone up yet. Nor has the W Hotel building across the street.

But there’s the brand-new Everett Building on the opposite corner, and the 1881 Queen Anne-style Century Building next door, the current home of Barnes & Noble. On the corner is 860 Broadway. It’s now a Petco, but once housed the last incarnation of Andy Warhol’s Factory as well as a basement club.

Union Square changed a lot in its first century of existence, as this post reveals.

A 1996 East Village murder remains unsolved

Abe Lebewohl had a routine, his employees later told police.

Every morning around nine, the 64-year-old owner of the Second Avenue Deli would take the previous day’s earnings from the 10th Street restaurant, then drive to a bank on Fourth Street and make a deposit.

On March 4, 1996, he got to the bank, but never made it inside. According to a 2010 New York Post story, “at least two thugs approached him as he sat in his van and pumped three bullets into him.

“The monsters dragged Lebewohl into the back of van and drove one block before fleeing the vehicle with his black shoulder bag that held the $8,000 deposit and his wallet containing another $2,000.” Lebewohl lay mortally wounded.

The cold-blooded killing was all the more stunning because Lebewohl was so well-liked and embraced by the community.

Born in the Ukraine, he came to New York with his family in 1950 after years in a refugee camp in Italy.

He worked as a waiter at a coffee shop on Second Avenue and 10th Street, then bought the property, turning it into a Jewish culinary institution that served locals and celebrities.

His generosity was legendary. “[Sic] he often provided free food to homeless people, striking workers, and neighborhood events,” states the web page for Abe Lebewohl Park, a small space across Second Avenue dedicated in his honor (above).

At first, cops had a solid clue. Soon after the slaying, they found the murder weapon, a handgun, in Central Park.

But after chasing false leads and circulating thousands of witness sketches of the suspects, the case went cold.

Seventeen years later—after the Second Avenue Deli moved to midtown and the Upper East Side and the old location has become another bank branch—the men behind the murder remain at large.

[Top photo: 2ndavedeli.com; middle: NYC Parks Department; bottom: Forbes.com]

An old delicatessen sign hidden on First Avenue

First Avenue in the teens is lined with non-franchise, mom-and-pop stores that look like they’ve been there for decades. That makes it a good stretch to scout out vintage signage.

There’s a nice one underneath this awning between 15th and 16th Streets, advertising an organic dry cleaner. That’s the kind of business the neighborhood supports today.

But at some point in the past, a delicatessen-restaurant occupied this spot, probably a casualty of changing tastes and an influx of new residents.

But I bet the place did a nice business for years thanks to the residents of Stuyvesant Town across the street.

A punk rock shrine in the 1980s East Village

“This is where the hard-core kids come to outfit themselves,” states a 1987 New York write-up about Trash & Vaudeville, the punk rock clothing mecca launched in 1975 that’s responsible for the Ramones’ leather jackets and introducing Doc Martens to the U.S.

Their early 1980s ads are great. This one comes from the September 1984 issue of the East Village Eye, and based on the guys’ suits, it looks like the store is trying to cater to a less hardcore crowd.

The best-sellers today? Kid-size leather jackets and a top hat a la Slash.

What did NYU frat boys look like in the 1890s?

Meet the bros from Psi Upsilon fraternity, posing in their house at the college’s University Heights campus in the Bronx in 1897.

The photo comes from a fascinating historical timeline on New York University’s website.

A bong (or a hookah pipe?), goofy hats, experiments in facial hair—they don’t look that different from the NYU students flocking to downtown pubs and dive bars today!

The upside-down ship’s hull in St. Brigid’s Church

After a four-year restoration set in motion by community groups and an anonymous $20 million donation, St. Brigid’s Church, built in 1848 on Avenue B and Eighth Street, has reopened.

EV Grieve done a great job chronicling the process and progress.

It’s a magnificent restoration, and the most inspiring part might be the vaulted ceiling above the nave, which suggests “an inverted ship’s hull—no accident, since it was built by shipwrights, who are remembered in sculpted faces in the roof-supporting corbels,” as this Bloomberg article explains.

These shipwrights were Irish immigrants who came to New York in coffin ships fleeing the Irish Potato Famine.

They settled in today’s far East Village, once the Dry Dock district, laboring in shipyards on the East River from Houston Street to East 12th Street.

St. Brigid is a fitting name for a house of worship called the “famine church”—she’s the patron saint of boatmen.

Too bad the original steeples couldn’t be restored, seen here in a 1928 NYPL photo.

What a downtown or Brooklyn rental cost in 1983

A 1200 square foot Soho studio for $1350 a month?

An impossible find in 2013—but available 30 years ago (perhaps even without a fee!), according to this ad from the May 1983 issue of arts and entertainment monthly the East Village Eye.

It’s not the only rental that sounds absurdly inexpensive to New Yorkers conditioned to pay an average of up to $3,973 a month for a Manhattan apartment these days.

If you were willing to give “historic” South Williamsburg a try, you could score a two bedroom “modern” rental for $330 a month. Broadway and Marcy Avenue was probably a pretty rough place though.

An East Village subhed in the three digits per month? That was the going rate for this three-room place on Second Avenue and 10th Street, according to this East Village Eye ad from September 1984.