Rhinelander Gardens: then and now

Designed by James Renwick—architect of Grace Church on Tenth Street and Broadway and St. Patrick’s Cathedral—these “three-decker” row houses stood at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 11th Street since 1855.

I’m not sure what connection they have to the Rhinelanders—an old New York family—but the family probably owned the land they were built on, hence the name.

Another Rhinelander real estate site is just around the corner on Seventh Avenue.

Berenice Abbott took the photo in 1937. Rhinelander Gardens only lasted another 20 years. Amazingly, the city tore them down (and their lovely front lawns and cast-iron balconies!) to build P.S. 41.

The school is very 1950s. The tenement apartment building on the far right, the Unadilla, still exists.

Lost New York, by  Nathan Silver, published in 1967, has this to say:

“The setback fronts of the houses were the result of the imperfect match of the old Greenwich Village street pattern with the upper Manhattan grid. Some deep fronts can still be seen on 11th Street, but the Rhinelander row was demolished in the late 1950s.”

The elephants of Lexington Avenue

Above the entrance to the W Hotel at 49th and Lexington are four elephant heads—each with a trunk that wraps around a metal flagpole.

Even though they’re grimy and their tusks could use some whitening, they make for a triumphant sight.

Here are more pachyderms in New York City.

The W Hotel went through a bunch of name changes: It used to be the Hotel Montclair, then the Hotel Belmont Plaza—Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin got their start in the Glass Hat club there—and finally the Doral Inn.

P.T. Barnum’s “Living Curiosities”

Think of them as the cast of a reality show—so real they were actually on display 365 days a year at P.T. Barnum’s American Museum.

One of the most popular tourist attractions on the city, the museum was located on Ann Street and Broadway from 1841 to 1868.

The “curiosities” were a revolving cast. In this undated photo are two albinos, three giants, two little people, and two “circassian beauties”—women from the Northern Caucasus. 

The “beauties” have the blown-out hair on the left. In the 19th century, women from this part of the world were believed to be unusually attractive and widely desired for Middle Eastern harems. Reportedly Barnum claimed that these two had escaped a Turkish harem.

How New York invented Santa Claus

It’s not really a stretch for New Yorkers to claim the jolly, red-suited dude as one of our own. “Sinte Klaas” was the nickname Dutch settlers gave St. Nicholas, a serious figure depicted in bishop’s robes celebrated every December 6.

Legend had it that St. Nicholas gave gifts to the poor, and he also rewarded children who had behaved all year.

St. Nicholas evolved closer to the Santa we know now in Chelsea resident Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas.”

Here he’s depicted with a white beard and a sack on his back, climbing down the chimney to fill stockings.

Rather than a big guy in red, St. Nick is elfin, a “little old driver” in a “miniature sleigh” decked all in fur.

He finally became today’s large, red-suited hero thanks to Thomas Nast, the 19th century cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly. In 1863, Nast drew a plump character in a fur-trimmed coat with a stocking cap giving out presents to soldiers.

An 1865 Santa illustration by Nash for Harper’s Weekly has him holding a pipe, that familiar twinkle in his eye.

Christmas with a Ziegfeld Girl

The Ziegfeld Follies—the popular part-vaudeville, part-burlesque revue staged on Broadway every year between 1907 and 1931—was never known as a Christmas show.

But the 1915 Follies did feature one holiday-themed number, entitled “I’ll Be a Santa Claus to You.”

The lyrics go like this:

“I’ll be a Santa Claus to you
If you’ll but say you will be true
I’ll bring you toys
Millions of joys
Presents that money can’t buy
Yuletide will be our honeymoon
You’ll ride beside me and we’ll spoon
Christmas it comes only once ev’ry year
I’ll make it come ev’ry day for you dear
I’ll be a Santa Claus to you.”

Sweet and kind of suggestive for a song written almost a century ago.

Dance-hall days on 14th Street

Fourteenth Street near Union Square has gone through many incarnations. In the late 1800s it hosted New York’s theater district, home to theaters and music halls as well as piano and organ salesrooms.

You can see the Steck Pianos sign and a sign for Estey, an organ manufacturer, in this 1880s photo of 14th street. And the street car on the left has the word “theatre” printed on the front.

By the the turn of the century the area slid into more of a low-rent vaudeville and dance-hall hub. It must have been a colorful, slightly depressing place to visit.

The narrator of “The Princess With the Golden Hair,” a short story by Village writer Edmund Wilson, published in 1942, observed:

“In the restlessness of my after-dinner boredom, I began looking in on the dance-halls. The first one I visited was desolating and soon drove me out again. Sparse couples—uninterested hostesses and  elderly stolid men—were shuffling  or revolving to monotonous music under lighting that was glamorless and garish.

“I wondered whether they were all like that or whether there mightn’t be gayer places: was this the type of the popular recreation that a city like New York had to offer?”

The perfect Christmas present in 1934

Radios were kind of like the iPod of the Depression. The December 19, 1934 edition of the Daily News is thick with ads for them—like this model, which features “foreign reception.”

What happened to Spear’s, an appliance store with five locations in the five boroughs?

Sounds like they were the 1930s version of Circuit City, the Wiz, Crazy Eddie, and all the other electronics stores that never seem to last very long.

Christmas at a Village settlement house

That’s quite a festive Christmas tree these Greenwich Village kids are posing in front of. They’re celebrating the holiday at the Greenwich Settlement House, which still stands on Barrow Street today. 

The photo, from the New York Public Library, is undated. Looks like it’s from the early 1900s, when settlement houses popped up in lots of poor New York neighborhoods.

They were funded by wealthy residents to help “settle” new immigrants by providing health care, job training, and art classes.

They taught their little charges well. A New York Times article from December 1914 reports that the kids from the Greenwich Settlement House would be singing carols in hospitals on Christmas Day:

“In addition, the children are rehearsing a play to be produced at the settlement house on Tuesday,” the article states. “After the play, each little girl and boy will receive a big bag of candy and an orange. Many of the children have decided to give their candy to the sick folk for whom they are to sing.”

Old-school subway signage

The MTA should bring back some of these vintage posts and signs—they’re such a cool throwback to old New York. These lantern-like beacons guard the Fifth Avenue and 59th Street station:

Vintage signage on the New York Life building, on Park Avenue South—important enough to have its own subway entrance. Interborough Rapid Transit is today’s 4, 5, and 6 line.

I hope the MTA does not replace or tidy up this weathered, slightly rusted subway post, in Inwood:

When “Little Egypt” scandalized New York

In 1896, a young woman named Ashea Waba—who had adopted the stage name Little Egypt—was invited to do some belly dancing at a bachelor party held at swanky Sherry’s restaurant in Midtown.

Belly dancing had recently been introduced to America. Victorian-era audiences were shocked by the sexy stomach swiveling—so much so that the dance was given the nickname the Hootchy-Kootchy.

Normally the Hootchy-Kootchy was performed in belly-bearing skirts or pantaloons, like in the photo of Little Egypt at left. 

But  cops were tipped off that she would be dancing naked. The vice squad came to Sherry’s, and Little Egypt was arrested.

After a trial that made all the New York tabloids, she was cleared of violating any vice laws.

Little Egypt then launched a burlesque troupe of Hootchy-Kootchy dancers and raked in $500 a night.

She died in her West 37th Street apartment in 1908 of “gas asphyxiation.”