When I first saw it, I thought it was honoring fallen soldiers who had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But this mural, at the end of the line on the 4 train at the Bronx’s Woodlawn station, memorializes Vietnam War veterans.
It’s been there since 1985, enduring graffiti tags ever since.
The 1970s Top-40 music scene lives on thanks to this almost perfectly preserved ad, on the side of a building at 145th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue.
I’m guessing it went up in the disco era, when radios all across the metro area were set to 77 AM, then a hugely popular station.
WABC is all talk today—it’s been that way since 1982.
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]
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.
When the stately Beaux-Arts apartment building at 555 Edgecombe Avenue opened in 1916, it rented to white tenants only.
But the population of Harlem was already changing, from mostly Irish and Jewish residents to African-Americans.
By the 1940s, the building, located on 160th Street at the edge of the posh Sugar Hill neighborhood, was exclusively black.
Sitting high on a bluff and commanding gorgeous views of the treetops of Edgecombe Avenue and across the Harlem River, these 13 floors plus a penthouse were home to Harlem’s elite.
That included academics, entertainers, and athletes such as Count Basie, Joe Louis (below), Sonny Rollins, sociologist Kenneth Clark, and Paul Robeson (above).
And though today it’s officially within the borders of Washington Heights, 555 Edgecombe is historically identified as part of Harlem.
It’s not an especially distinctive building architecturally, but it is handsome and sturdy, an emblem of the neighborhood’s prime years as a center of artistic and activist achievement.
[Photo right: Property Shark]
Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, who died last year at age 47, isn’t the only musician to have a New York playground named in his honor.
Not far from his namesake park on Atlantic Avenue is Harry Chapin Playground, at Columbia Heights and Middagh Street.
Like Yauch, Chapin grew up in Brooklyn Heights. And just as Yauch spent his childhood playing at the park eventually named for him, so did Chapin.
Harry Chapin Playground was dedicated to the singer in 1987, six years after his life was cut short when the car he was driving on the Long Island Expressway collided with a truck.
How the west side of Central Park, at 81st Street, ended up with a Diana Ross Playground is an entirely different story.
According to this 1984 People article, Ross “had a dream” to create a playground for kids in the park. She planned to build it with cash raised from her July 1983 free concert on the Great Lawn. But after the show, she told the city she didn’t make any money.
Eventually, Ross put in $275,000 to fund the playground, which opened in the late 1980s.
In 1858, as Pfaff’s beer cellar at 647 Broadway began attracting an arts-oriented crowd, a new building just blocks away on 10th Street would further build Greenwich Village’s reputation as a neighborhood of artists.
Called the Tenth Street Studio Building, it was a handsome three-story structure made up of 25 studios plus communal space.
“[The studios were] an attempt to create a place for visual artists and architects to live together, to have affordable studio space, and to sell their works,” wrote Michelle and James Nevius in Inside the Apple.
Designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the building, at 55 West 10th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, was a hit with artists.
Winslow Homer, John LaFarge, Frederick Church, Alexander Calder, Worthington Whittredge (above), and William Merritt Chase all took studio space there.
Chase even made the interior of his studio, crammed with objects and art collected during his travels, into a subject numerous times. This painting, from 1880, features an attractive young woman, a Bohemian feel, and a shadowy profile of Chase (below) on the right.
The Tenth Street Studios inspired the building of other artists’ spaces in the neighborhood, which drew more artists and art lovers to Greenwich Village. Ever since, the Village has been known for its creative culture.
Too bad the Tenth Street building that started it all no longer exists. Photographed by Berenice Abbott in 1938 (top), it was knocked down 18 years later to make way for an apartment house.
Just as abortion and the death penalty are hot-button issues today, temperance divided Americans in the 19th century.
The millions of members of the American Temperance Society, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and other groups believed that banning alcohol could eliminate major social problems like poverty and crime.
These organizations were pretty powerful. But it was hard to persuade people to give up booze when alcoholic beverages were often safer to drink than water.
That’s where the temperance fountain comes in.
“The premise behind the fountains was that the availability of cool drinking water would make alcohol less tempting,” wrote Therese Loeb Kreuzer in a 2012 article in The Villager.
“In the 19th century, temperance fountains could be found in cities and towns from coast to coast. Now few of them remain.”
Two still stand in Manhattan. One is in Tompkins Square Park, a strange place for a temperance fountain considering that the area was packed with beer-loving Germans at the time.
Donated by a wealthy temperance crusader who had it cast in 1888, it features a bronze figure of the Greek Goddess Hebe, cupbearer to the Gods, on top of a pedestal supported by four columns.
Blocks away on the west side of Union Square is New York’s second remaining temperance fountain. Paid for by another rich temperance convert and dating to 1881, it’s a figure of Charity that really works the innocent mother and children angle.
“Bronze dragonflies and butterflies frolic above the lions,” wrote Kreuzer in The Villager. “Then comes a richly sculpted band of acanthus leaves and birds. The ensemble is topped by a figure of a mother dressed like the Virgin Mary in a Renaissance painting. She holds a child in her right arm, while dispensing water from a jug to another child who looks at her adoringly.”
Both statues are the legacies of the movement that gave us Prohibition—and speakeasies—in the 1920s.
[Top two photos: Wikipedia]
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]
William Glackens contrasts the calm quiet of a lower Manhattan park with the smoke-choked industrial Brooklyn waterfront across the river in his 1902 painting “East River Park.”
Is this the same East River Park that exists today south of East 12th Street? According to the NYC Parks Department, the current park was conceived by Robert Moses in the 1930s.
The painting is part of the collection at the Brooklyn Museum. “William Glackens found ample subject matter in the parks of New York and the city dwellers who frequented them,” the museum website explains.
“Here he depicted the natural features of the East River Park, and the pastimes of its inhabitants, in sharp contrast to the bustling industrial setting of Brooklyn’s waterfront visible across the water. For the many immigrants living in small, cramped quarters, the urban parks of Brooklyn and Manhattan served as a refuge from the poor conditions and overcrowding of tenement life.”
