Vintage store signs under Eighth Avenue awnings

Hidden pieces of an older New York are peeking through a couple of contemporary storefronts on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea.

This generic deli awning on the corner at 21st Street doesn’t conceal the previous tenant, the perfectly straightforward Chelsea Wine & Liquor Company.

A little further up the same side of the street is this old-school signage for Chelsea Merit Florists (minus the final two letters).

Another sign tells us they’ve been in business since 1930—but these days, the Merit is gone from the name.

Funeral Designs—interesting service to advertise on a storefront!

Cool old-school store signs found all over the city

You don’t see too many delis with a Te-Amo Imported Cigars sign anymore. This one was spotted above a bodega on Graham Avenue in East Williamsburg.

Did neighborhood delis used to offer shoeshines, as the other end of the sign implies?

I don’t know what was covering up this Manhattan Flower Shop sign, on Manhattan Avenue in Morningside Heights. But I’m glad it’s visible again. The hand-drawn lettering is so charming.

Is this Joe Junior diner, on Third Avenue in the teens, owned by the same people who ran the late, great Joe Junior on Sixth Avenue and 11th Street? I love a restaurant that spells seafood with two words.

“Factory Methods Used” may have been great advertising in the 1970s. But in today’s artisanal, DIY world, John’s Shoe Repair, on Irving Place, would have to instead boast that they rebuilt shoes by hand.

Salerno Surgical Supplies is also on Graham Avenue in East Williamsburg. Its presence here might shed some light on the average age of neighborhood residents.

The “counting houses” of Schermerhorn Row

At the very end of Fulton Street, just steps from where trading vessels departed and docked 200 years ago, stand these handsome Flemish bond brick and slate-roof buildings.

You wouldn’t know it from the retailers occupying the ground-floor storefront space, but they make up a slice of early New York history called Schermerhorn Row.

The land beneath them isn’t much older than the buildings themselves.

Constructed on fill between 1811 and 1812 (predating the steam-powered Fulton Ferry!) by merchant Peter Schermerhorn, they served as “counting houses,” or commercial offices, for the new shipping companies that powered the city’s 19th century economy.

“Built as a group like residential row houses, counting houses represent an early phase in the development of commercial architecture in New York when buildings had not yet acquired architectural individuality based on their function,” explains New York Architectural Images.

Like so much of old New York, they’ve changed significantly over the years. ”Dormer windows were added later and project from steeply pitched roofs,” the site adds. “Chimneys and party walls were built high to prevent the spread of fire across rooftops.”

After the Civil War, storefronts were carved out of the counting houses and businesses moved in, followed by hotels, then boarding houses.

Rescued from redevelopment by preservation-minded New Yorkers in the 1960s, Schermerhorn Row is now a centerpiece of the South Street Seaport and home to the South Street Seaport Museum.

I love that the chimneys of each building line up a little like smokestacks on an ocean liner.

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 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.”

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.

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.

Gentrification comes to the east side’s Dutch Hill

Mid-19th century Manhattan was dotted by lots of small villages. But few were as poor and wretched as Dutch Hill, centered around 42nd Street near the East River.

“Shantytown, this was called, a dismal collection of shacks and hovels inhabited by day-laborers, their families, and their pigs,” wrote Lloyd Morris in Incredible New York.

Adds Kenneth Jackson in The Encyclopedia of New York City: “Like most squatter settlements of the time, it was situated north of the built-up area of the city. The inhabitants were predominantly German and Irish immigrants. Many worked at the nearby Voorhis and Mott quarries.”

But it wouldn’t exist much longer. The city was moving north, and genteel residents—like the couple and little boy strolling up Second Avenue in this 1861 illustration—were moving to this area of scattered home and rock piles.

“By the end of the Civil War the growth and northward movement of population made real estate in the area valuable, and the squatters were displaced,” writes Jackson.

Three centuries and three views of the Bowery

“In pre-Colonial days, the Bowery was a country lane, running between the ‘bouweries’ (farms) of the Dutch burghers,” the caption to this 1888 photo reminds us. It’s part of the fascinating photo collection New York Then and Now, published by Dover in 1976.

The 19th century history of the Bowery is well known: it went from premier entertainment district to a skid row of cheap theaters, flophouses, and eponymous bums.

What’s interesting in the above photo of Bowery at Canal Street is that the tracks of the Third Avenue El, constructed in 1878, are on each side of the street.

“In 1915 the structure and stations were rebuilt, with the addition of an express track, and were moved to the center of the street, providing more light for pedestrians and stores,” the book explains.

Here is the same intersection in 1975. No more elevated; no more horses and wagons. Chinatown has edged in, yet most of the tenements that existed 87 years earlier are still there.

And so is the faded ad for “Carriage Materials” on the east side of the street!

The carriage materials ad has been painted over by 2013, and some of the old tenements and the big wooden water tower on the far right are gone too.

The intersection of Bowery and Canal Streets looks like one more bustling traffic-choked corner.

A faded subway sign under the Chrysler Building

The Chrysler Building is one of those iconic city structures with its own subway entrance—like the New York Life building on 23rd Street and the KMart (formerly Wanamaker’s) at Astor Place.

Which means that once you get off the 4, 5, or 6 train at Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street, you can follow a passageway that takes you through a basement arcade containing a handful of stores, to a staircase for the lobby.

There’s still a barber shop in that sub-lobby arcade, and a locksmith, and the Lexler Deli (a wonderful hybrid name!). But I’m sorry to say that the efficiently titled Chrysler Beauty Salon is no longer.

It was probably replaced by the Duane Reade down there. . . .