The Irving Place “bachelors” host Sunday salons

A plaque outside the three-story brick house on the southwest corner of Irving Place (right) and 17th Street identifies it as the one-time home of Washington Irving.

Though it’s debatable whether Irving actually lived there, a bohemian power couple of late 19th century did.

Actress-turned-interior designer Elsie de Wolfe (left, in 1880) and Elisabeth Marbury, a literary agent, met in Paris.

There they lived openly as a couple before returning to New York in 1892 and renting the Irving Place house.

The two cheekily called themselves “the bachelors” and hosted Sunday afternoon salons with an eclectic array of celebrities of the day.

Among the guests were Oscar Wilde, Ethel Barrymore, Stanford White, and Sarah Bernhardt, all sipping tea and mingling with New York’s old money society.

“From 1897 to 1907, Bessie and Elsie’s house was a salon famed for its fascinating artists, writers, and performers,” writes Cherie Fehrman in Interior Design Innovators 1900-1960.

“People came because, in the words of millionaire William C. Whitney, ‘you never know whom you are going to meet at Bessie and Elsie’s but you can always be sure that whoever they are will be interesting and you will have a good time.’”

The salons ended, perhaps because de Wolfe’s decorating career had taken off.

She’s credited as being the first interior designer ever, transforming dark Victorian interiors into lighter, airy living spaces and publishing the pioneering book A House in Good Taste in 1913.

In 1926, de Wolfe shocked society by marrying a British diplomat. She became known as Lady Mendl; a tea parlor currently operating on Irving Place called Lady Mendl is a nod to her salon-hostess past.

[Photo above: Irving Place and 17th Street in 1905. Right: Elsie and Bessie in later years]

Girl, roses, and butterfly in a Brooklyn garden

There’s an enormous amount of beauty in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, opened in 1910.

But the bronze statue of a girl holding roses in her right hand and a butterfly sundial in her left is an especially captivating sight.

Called “Roses of Yesterday” and created in 1923 by Harriet W. Frishmuth, the five-foot statue fittingly welcomes visitors into the rose garden pavilion.

Frishmuth was a Philadelphia native who came to New York to create art. She had a studio on Sniffen Court, the loveliest alley in Murray Hill.

Madison Square before the Met Life Tower

Before the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower went up in 1909, Met Life had a smaller headquarters at East 23rd Street and Madison Avenue.

It’s the stately building on the corner in this October 1906 postcard, which notes the “New and Old Parkhurst Churches” next door.

Charles Henry Parkhurst was a Presbyterian minister and social reformer who gained fame in 1892 when he railed against corruption at Tammany Hall from his pulpit. His efforts led to housecleaning and reform inside the Democratic political machine.

The churches, the then-brand new one at the far left and the old Gothic-style church next to it, long ago got the heave ho.

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.

Grotesque readers at a Gramercy public school

I love the Gothic entrance to P.S. 47, a city school on East 23rd Street that serves both deaf and hearing students and also goes by the name The American Sign Language and English Secondary School.

The facade features gargoyles and vaguely Medieval-looking figures in hoods and cloaks. It’s all a little Harry Potter-esque, which should charm the students who attend.

But my favorites are the two figures flanking a doorway to the left of the main entrance, each figure holding open books in spindly hands.

 

The figures don’t resemble kids, but I’m not sure who they are supposed to be or represent.

They appear to be reading aloud, yet they’re a little too creepy-looking to be teachers!

Here’s another literature-loving grotesque, from a building at the City College campus in the 130s.

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 Gramercy beer garden inspired by a castle

New York doesn’t have many German Renaissance-style buildings inspired by castles in the Alps.

But there’s one at 190 Third Avenue, and it’s an unusual, curious reminder of the area’s once-thriving German immigrant neighborhood.

Plus, it has a literary reputation, and rumors swirl that it served as a spy hangout too.

The back story begins in 1896, when the original building, near 17th Street, was bought by a German-American intent on turning it into a beer garden.

Remodeled to resemble Heidelberg Castle in Germany, Scheffel Hall (the name comes from a German balladeer) catered to German natives living in the upper reaches of Kleindeutschland, then centered in the East Village.

After changing hands in 1904, Scheffel Hall became Allaire’s, a full-fledged restaurant, then a German-American music hall, a rathskeller, and later the jazz club Fat Tuesday’s until 1995.

“Its patrons have included a number of leading politicians and writers, notably O. Henry who used Scheffel Hall as the setting for a short story in 1909,” states a Landmarks Preservation Committee Report from 1997.

H.L. Mencken also hung out there, as did other literary figures in Gramercy.

And then there’s the espionage angle: Allaire’s was reportedly a gathering place for German American spies during World War I, reports New York Architecture.

Today it’s a Pilates studio, but that’s okay. The owners haven’t touched the facade, and the dark woodwork and detailing in the interior remains.

Bellevue Hospital’s Victorian beauty and glory

It’s the oldest public hospital in the country, opening in 1736 first as a six-bed infirmary in the almshouse in today’s City Hall Park.

Soon after, thanks to a yellow fever epidemic, it moved to what was then considered way uptown, to the former Belle Vue Farm overlooking the East River near Kips Bay in 1794.

This wonderful postcard view of one of Bellevue’s buildings at First Avenue and 26th Street is undated, unfortunately.

I’d place it at about 1900, after the hospital had already racked up an impressive number of firsts: the first maternity ward, the first emergency pavilion and ambulance service, the first appendectomy, the first hospital with a building devoted to the insane and a unit specifically for alcoholics.

Spooky outlines of long-gone Manhattan buildings

New and old New York collide on the sides of buildings all over the city. Sometimes the faded pattern of a dormer window or chimney is visible for years, other times just a days before developers cover these remnants forever.

The building that once stood here on the corner of Greenwich and Vestry Streets in Tribeca, below, doesn’t look fancy. It was probably just a regular walk-up with six or eight apartments in what had been a neighborhood of light industry for most of the 20th century.

But it sure left a formidable impression.

I love the sloping roof on this long-gone building on Washington Place in the Meatpacking District, below. Was it a garage? Warehouse? Meat packager?

I have no idea when it went down, but it’s being obliterated forever in favor of another restaurant or boutique or luxury hotel.

On 31st Street near Fifth Avenue is the imprint of a sturdy chimney and a roof on a slight incline. A coat of paint almost covers most of it up, but a sliver remains of what was once someone’s home.

The best thing about this bulldozed building on East 29th Street? The phantom smoke coming out of the pattern of a chimney!

A Beaux-Arts facade on 31st Street has a secret

Once-fashionable 31st Street is a good place to hunt for hidden architectural gems. And number 19, just west of Fifth Avenue, is a striking example.

Look past the Herald Square Hotel sign, and its Beaux-Arts beauty comes to light: a limestone and red brick building with enormous arched front windows.

They frame a cherub holding a pen, surrounded by symbols of the arts: musical instruments, paintbrushes, and a pad. The words “wit” and “humor” appear on a banner.

So what’s it all about? The clue lies under the third-floor front windows. Beneath each window is the word “Life”—for the magazine that once was headquartered here.

When Life moved into the building, designed in 1895 by architects Carrere and Hastings (the same guys who designed the New York Public Library), it was a different publication from the 20th century version.

Life was a general-interest humor magazine, similar to rivals Puck and the New Yorker, and they published a fairly impressive group of literary and artistic talents, including Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the Gibson Girl illustrations that debuted in the 1890s.

The cherub was sculpted by Philip Martiny. “Winged Life” is its name, and it symbolized a magazine that in the 1930s was turned into a photo weekly and then shut down in 2000.