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.

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]

A priest, a maid, and a Second Avenue murder

Ordained in his native Germany in 1904, Roman Catholic priest Hans Schmidt was assigned to St. Boniface Church, at Second Avenue and 47th Street, in 1908.

There he met Anna Aumuller, a beautiful 21-year-old housekeeper for the church rectory. Aumuller was an immigrant too; she came to New York from Austria five years earlier.

They started an affair. Schmidt even obtained a wedding license and performed a secret but obviously illegal marriage ritual.

In early September, Aumuller found out she was pregnant. Terrified that his affair would be exposed, Schmidt slit Aumuller’s throat, cut up her body, and dumped it in the Hudson River.

Unfortunately for Schmidt, a pillowcase containing some of Aumuller’s body parts washed up on the Hoboken side of the river later that month.

Police quickly traced the pillowcase back to an apartment Schmidt and Aumuller shared in Harlem.

Schmidt confessed, and officials realized that in addition to being a murder suspect, he was also running a counterfeiting ring.

At his trial, he claimed God ordered him to kill Anna. Nonsense, prosecutors replied; he was simply faking insanity to escape execution.

The jury gave him the chair in February 1914. Several months later, Schmidt changed his story: He now claimed that he accidentally killed Aumuller during a botched abortion, and should only be penalized for manslaughter.

He went to the electric chair anyway on February 19, 1916—still the only priest in U.S. history ever executed for murder.

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.

When New Yorkers pitched in for “Bundle Day”

The idea came from a businessman in St. Louis. In 1911, a banker named Ben Altheimer launched that city’s first Bundle Day—a day set aside to collect and give out clothes to the poor and unemployed.

Bundle Day spread to New York in 1915. A Bundle Day committee, part of the Mayor’s Committee on Unemployment, was formed, headed by women with last names like Vanderbilt, Astor, and Hewitt.

They convinced pastors to mention Bundle Day in their sermons, and they printed tags to be handed out to parishioners that requested they donate “bundles” of garments for men, women, and children.

Railroad stations, department stores, and express companies agreed to transport the bundles. Police stations and schools were serving as drop-off locations, wrote The New York Times on January 31, 1915.

“[Sic] no coat or wrap could be so ragged that it would not be welcome, and [sic] no pair of shoes so hopelessly worn that it should be omitted from a bundle,” the committee announced. They had recruited teams of unemployed cobblers and other tradesmen to transform old garments, paying them 15 cents an hour, so nothing would go to waste.

Bundle Day was scheduled for February 4, and based on newspaper articles, it seemed to have lasted at least a week—and served lots of New Yorkers. The unemployment rate then was an estimated 16.2 percent.

“More than 100 women, shivering from the sharp, biting wind, stood in line yesterday morning at Bundle Day headquarters, 208 and 210 Fifth Avenue, waiting to receive the warm clothing that were being passed out as rapidly as possible by scores of attendants,” wrote the Times on February 10.

“Scores of other applicants, several of them invalid old men, were without coats, and stood shivering in lightweight tattered summer clothing. When possible these were provided for first.”

So what happened to Bundle Day? It appeared to have been held in the city for several years, then died out at some point; the last newspaper articles about it date to the early 1920s.

[Photos: George Bain Collection, Library of Congress]

A mystery chapel in a Canal Street subway station

The only thing that makes waiting for the subway less aggravating is spotting one of these colorful mosaics lining the platform.

They’re mini history lessons depicting some hallmark of the area from when the station was built, say a noteworthy building, like City Hall.

But the Canal Street 1 train platform, with mosaics of a chapel and spire, poses a mystery.

In the vicinity of the Varick Street station, no church exists.

It did at one time—and it was a beauty. The lovely St. John’s Chapel was built in 1807 (predating the street grid!) as a parish of Trinity Church, and it became the centerpiece of a luxurious residential enclave called St. John’s Park.

Well-to-do families built Georgian row houses around a small genteel park, and the neighborhood remained fashionable through the 1840s (below, in a 1905 painting by Edward Lamson Henry).

St. John’s Park began losing its appeal in the 1850s, when wealthy New Yorkers chose to relocate uptown. Then a railway terminal replaced the park in 1868, turning the enclave into one of factories and tenements.

Lovely St. John’s Chapel, with its sandstone portico and columns and 200-foot oak spire and clock dominating the skyline for over 100 years, was torn down in 1918.

All that remains today is the subway mosaic, a small patch of green at the Holland Tunnel entrance—and a forgotten lane in Tribeca bearing the St. John’s name.

Stay at the Hotel Arlington in Madison Square

According to this century-old postcard, $2 at the Hotel Arlington in genteel Madison Square gets you a room and a bath. Looking for a suite? That’ll run you at least $4.

Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and 25th Street hasn’t changed excessively since the early 1900s. Madison Square Park is just as pretty, but it’s no longer all that centrally located.

The Arlington Hotel building still stands and it’s still a hotel—a Comfort Inn. A low-rise holdout building that could be the one in the postcard (though remodeled) sits on its right.

The Gothic Revival church across the street remains. Built in 1868 by Richard Upjohn, it was once Trinity Chapel and is now home to a Serbian Orthodox congregation.

Genteel Fifth Avenue at the turn of the century

Could this really be Fifth Avenue in the 50s, today one of the most expensive stretches of retail in the world?

The street sign appears to read 52nd Street. That means the two mansions on the left belong to the Vanderbilt family, as does the French chateau-like mansion next door.

That’s the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church at 55th Street rising in the center of the postcard.

The remains of a grand Upper Manhattan theater

Decayed, dingy, and partly obscured by a bodega sign, it’s easy to walk right by the former Hamilton Theatre and not have any idea of its hidden grandeur.

Built in 1913 by renowned theater architect Thomas W. Lamb, the Hamilton opened as a vaudeville house, entertaining residents of the rapidly booming upper Manhattan neighborhood now known as Hamilton Heights.

It was a startling beauty. “At the time, vaudeville was the most popular form of theater in the United States,” states the 2000 Landmarks Preservation Commission report designating it a city landmark.

“The Hamilton’s two neo-Renaissance style facades, facing Broadway and West 146th Street, are dominated by large, round-arched windows with centered oculi.”

“The upper stories feature cast-iron and terra cotta details including caryatids, brackets, and Corinthian engaged columns.”

By the 1920s, motion pictures nudged out vaudeville, and the Hamilton became an RKO movie theater in 1928.

It projected its last film in 1958, after which the building served as a sports arena, church, and disco.

Today the lobby of this stately palace has been carved up into retail outlets. Its grand theater, however, lies empty, as this ghostly photo from Cinema Treasures reveals.

Harlem Bespoke has recent news that one of the stores leasing retail space at the Hamilton is vacating the building. Maybe it’s time to restore the entire theater to its original loveliness?

[Top photo: Museum of the City of New York]

When Avenue B was the “German Broadway”

A lot has been written about the East Village’s late–19th century incarnation as an enclave called Kleindeutschland, aka Little Germany.

Tompkins Square Park was the center of this vibrant neighborhood.

And while “Avenue A was the street for beer halls, oyster saloons, and groceries,” Avenue B was the neighborhood’s commercial artery, known as the “German Broadway.”

“Each basement was a workshop, every first floor was a store, and the partially roofed sidewalks were markets for goods of all sorts,” states  All the Nations Under Heaven: an Ethnic and Racial History of New York City.

I wish some trace of Avenue B’s German past still existed.

Instead, I’ll just imagine the shops that probably occupied the lower level of 45-47 Avenue B, built in 1880.

And I’ll imagine that the Evangelical Lutheran Trinity Church of the Unaltered Augsburg Confession in the City of New York still worshiped at this church on Avenue B and 9th Street, built in 1847 and home to the Lutherans since 1863.

The photo, from the NYPL Digital Collection, dates to the 1930s, but the church was torn down in 1975.