A different New York comes alive at night than the daytime city, one with its own magic and enchantment.
Whoever wrote the caption on the back of this 1940s postcard understood this well.
“Spectacular sight as this is typical of all New York which is truly a fairyland when night begins to descend,” the caption reads.
“The Empire State Building, guardian of the skyscrapers, keeps faithful watch over her charges throughout the night.”
I love this ad for Gnome Bakers, especially the tagline. How unusual could their bread and rolls have been? It comes from a 1973 New York Mets program.
The best part is the old RE phone exchange, assigned to phone numbers from a part of the Upper East Side starting in 1930. It stood for Regent—perhaps the name of a landmark hotel or theater nearby?
A good place to look for old phone exchange signs around the city is near service elevators. This one was spotted in east midtown around 35th Street.
JU is either for Judson, in Manhattan, or Juniper, given to a stretch of Queens.
If we knew the name of the elevator company, we could figure out which one. But alas, no trace of the name could be found.
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!
If you’ve seen the movie, you might remember this tragic side story. But on the 101st anniversary of the demise of the unsinkable liner in the Atlantic, it bears another telling.
Germany-born Isidor Straus came to the U.S. in 1854. He got started in the dry-goods business, and by 1902, he and his brother co-owned Abraham & Straus and Macy’s, opening the famous Herald Square store that year.
Isidor and his wife, Ida, also a German immigrant, married in 1871. Successful and wealthy thanks to Isidore’s business efforts, they became generous philanthropists.
In 1912, after a trip to Germany, they were booked to return to New York on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. In the early morning hours of April 15, with the fate of the ship sealed and women and children getting into lifeboats, Ida Straus refused to leave Isidor.
“Mrs. Straus almost entered lifeboat 8 but changed her mind, turned back, and rejoined her husband. Fellow passengers and friends failed to persuade her otherwise,” states Stuart Robinson in Amazing and Extraordinary Facts: the Titanic.
“She is reputed to have told Isidore: ‘We have lived together for many years. Where you go, I go.’”
Passengers reported seeing the couple “standing alongside the rail, holding each other and weeping silently,” according to a 2012 New York Post article.
Isidor’s body was recovered, but Ida’s was never found. A memorial service for the two held at Carnegie Hall a month later drew thousands, including Mayor Gaynor, Andrew Carnegie, and other notable New Yorkers.
In 1912, the city renamed a park at 106th Street and Broadway Straus Park in honor of the couple, who had lived on 105th Street.
A monument dedicated three years later featured the biblical inscription, “lovely and pleasant they were in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.”
Why is this man standing on his head on a skyscraper being fed donuts?
It’s a publicity stunt, of course. That’s Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly, famous in the 1920s for his flagpole-sitting feats (his record is 49 days).
By 1939, when this photo was taken, the flagpole-sitting fad was over, and Kelly was reduced to doing gimmicks for events such as National Donut Dunking Week—which is the reason he’s upside-down on the roof of the Chanin Building on East 42nd Street.
He gained notoriety for his daredevil feats in life, and then for the way he died near his apartment on West 51st Street. “Broke and on welfare, Kelly dropped dead in 1952 while walking between two parked cars in New York City,” states yourememberthat.com.
“Clutched tightly in one arm was a scrapbook containing clippings and mementos from his glory days as King of the Flagpole Sitters.”
[Photo: New York Daily News]
As Times Square’s fortunes rose and fell over the last century, so did the opulent hotels created to accommodate its visitors.
Take the Hotel Woodstock. Built in 1903 on West 43rd Street a half-block east of Times Square, this Beaux-Arts luxury hotel boasted of 400 rooms, plus restaurants and a ballroom.
It opened right in time to catch the area’s transformation into a theater district, nightlife hub, and of course, the crossroads of the world. Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell (below photo) were regulars.
By the early 1970s, it was carved up into a seedy SRO for low-income tenants.
“As late as about three years ago, the police would not venture into the lobby of the Woodstock Hotel on West 43rd Street in Manhattan without a backup team outside,” states a 1978 New York Times article.
“Prostitutes loitered in the hallways. Alcoholics and panhandlers gathered outside. Fires and break-ins were common.”
Thirty-plus years later, Times Square is a tourist mecca again, and the hotel, with a darker facade and unglamorous lobby, is across from the chic Conde Nast building.
But the Woodstock isn’t opening its doors to jet setters. It is now owned by Project FIND, a nonprofit that houses elderly New Yorkers.
The soaring temple of commerce at 11 West 42nd Street has been casting a shadow over Bryant Park since 1927.
Now home to NYU’s Midtown campus, the building features 32 floors and an ornate lobby (shown off in this slideshow).
Yet perhaps its quirkiest detail is on the facade: the 12 very detailed zodiac signs carved into the stone entrance, with the corresponding months listed beneath each one.
Eleven West 42nd Street has a few other distinctions. Above the zodiac signs are carved figures representing various professions—a likely nod to the building’s use as a modern office tower.
And on a more bittersweet note, the ground floor was the last home of Coliseum Books, one of New York’s premier independent bookstores until it went out of business in 2007.
Opened in 1914, the Republic Restaurant had the garish interior of a real old-school New York Chinese restaurant, based on these images on this vintage postcard.
The ad below—it comes from a 1915 guide for sailors in the U.S. Navy—sheds a little light on the menu. Chop suey and tea? Sounds like the kind of faux-authentic Cantonese cuisine New Yorkers at the time were accustomed to.
What happened to the Republic? After 50 years in the heart of Times Square, it was damaged in a fire in 1970 . . . but apparently held on at least a little longer.
A Cue magazine ad from 1973 suggests the shrimp toast and homemade egg rolls, plus the “roast pork won ton soup.”
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.
“You should have seen this Automat,” reminisced the elderly man who sold me this postcard. “You could sit for hours with a cup of coffee and look out onto Times Square through those huge picture windows.”
It must have been something. At their peak of popularity, New York had at least 50 Automats, filled with little slots containing sandwiches, mac and cheese, pie, and other foods, each to be had for just a coin or two. The one below was at Broadway between 46th and 47th Streets.
William Grimes sums up the appeal of the Automat in his entertaining 2009 book Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York.
“As the Automat worked itself into the fabric of the city, it came to represent a particular kind of American experience,” writes Grimes. “It was ostentatiously democratic, for one thing. Lacking the gatekeepers associated with traditional restaurants, it attracted diners from every social level.”
“A bit of verse in the Sun, printed in the Depression year of 1933, caught the spirit precisely:
‘Said the technocrat
To the Plutocrat
To the autocrat
And the Democrat—
Let’s all go eat at the Automat!’”
Here’s a similar postcard, and a memory from Patti Smith, about getting hit on by Allen Ginsberg at a downtown Automat in the 1970s.
