Paper remnants of long-ago Brooklyn businesses

If you live in an old Brooklyn house, check under your floorboards.

That’s how one resident of a circa-1887 Clinton Hill brownstone mansion discovered a treasure of letters, receipts, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera dating from 1900 to 1910.

Why the papers were stashed beneath the floorboards is a mystery.

But I’m glad they were. They offer a rare glimpse of the ordinary businesses and services available to well-off Washington Avenue residents at the end of the Gilded Age.

Oh, and the phone exchanges! Imagine reaching a business with just a 2- or 3-digit number.

John D. Gunning offered “sanitary examinations and peppermint tests” as part of his plumbing and gas fitting business, above.

He must be the same John D. Gunning whose 1917 death notice in the New York Times notes that he “succeeded his father in the contract plumbing business.”

The Union League Stables were next to the glorious Union League Club building, now a senior citizen community center.

Amazingly, F.M. Fairchild Sons funeral directors are still in business—but on Long Island, not in Brooklyn.

Lovely posters advertising the New York Herald

In the late 19th century, the city supported close to 20 English-language daily newspapers, with the New York Herald one of the most popular.

The Herald’s winning formula? A sensationalist tone, reliance on illustrations, and coverage of fashion, arts, and culture.

Yep, all the lifestyle fluff newspapers today need to attract readers.

Perhaps these sweet, apparently hand-drawn posters advertising the coming Sunday edition had something to do with it though.

Cartoons, new fiction, and illustrations of Central Park plus new routes concerning the cycling craze: good reading on a May Sunday in the mid-1890s.

[posters from the New York Public Library Digital Collection]

A city anti-Nazi group’s bold matchbook ad

In 1933, after Hitler came to power in Germany, an organization that would eventually be called the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights was formed.

The West 47th Street–based group’s goal: to convince Americans of all backgrounds to join in a total boycott of Germany.

This powerful matchbook cover advertisement plainly makes the case.

Throughout the 1930s, the boycott movement gathered steam, according to jewishvirtuallibrary.org.

“In January 1939 dissolution of the B’nai B’rith in Germany moved its American counterpart to join the boycott movement,” states one entry.

“However, the American Jewish Committee remained unalterably opposed to the movement throughout the Nazi era.

“In the United States, a non-belligerent until Pearl Harbor, the boycott was continued until 1941.”

Inside of the matchbook, it reads: “Help End the Nazi Dictatorship by becoming a member of the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League.”

I have no idea how many people did.

Vintage ads for downtown clubs from the 1980s

They’re long gone, the spaces they once occupied now housing much less cool venues—even a shopping mall.

But in the early and mid-1980s, these were the dance clubs and after-hours spots where the cool kids hung out.

Save the Robots operated at 25 Avenue B—near the corner of Second Street, a notorious heroin cop spot—as a semi-legal underground club. Club kids, drag queens, and bar employees from other establishments finally off work after 4 a.m. were frequent customers.

“In the olden days of a mere two years ago, 8BC had a log cabin ambiance—dirt floor, no heat—and didn’t meet a single licensing requirement,” wrote C. Carr in On Edge: Performance Art at the End of the Twentieth Century, published in the 1980s.

The performance space-slash-club only lasted a few short years, but it hosted artists and bands from Karen Finley to They Might Be Giants, with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat on the walls.

Nightlife king Peter Gatien opened the Limelight in a circa-1845 Chelsea Episcopal church in 1983. Its rise as a goth dance club and club kid drug mecca has been pretty well-documented.

Who would have though that in 2011, it would be the site of the Limelight Marketplace, sort of an upscale mall with boutiques and food stalls?

All ads come from various issues of The East Village Eye.

Spring shoe shopping in Victorian-era Brooklyn

These days, there’s no shortage of boutiques and shops in Brownstone Brooklyn—and the same could be said for the downtown Brooklyn of more than 100 years ago.

But instead of tweeting about a sale or building a Facebook following, Victorian-era stores advertised their services and goods by handing out colorful trade cards, like the two here.

So when winter was over and well-off ladies wanted to purchase spring shoes, they knew to head over to Joseph J. Byers.

His shop must have been popular; the store ran lots of ads in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in the 1880s.

Their 110 Court Street store is now the site of a multiplex.

Fred Finch’s Fine Shoes dates back to at least the 1870s. I think it’s the site of a Dr. Jay’s now, part of the illustrious Fulton Street Mall.

This second card comes from the Brooklyn Public Library’s wonderful database of old Brooklyn trade cards. They have cards from all kinds of merchants and businesses that existed on Fulton Street in the 19th century.

The cut-rate beginning of Barneys New York

Like Saks and Henri Bendel, Barneys New York has long been the epitome of a high-end fashion retailer.

Which makes these unabashedly low-end ads, found on a matchbook from the 1930s or 1940s, all the more interesting.

Seems that luxury department store Barneys was once bargain basement Barney’s, a menswear store openly hawking factory rejects, auction stocks, and showroom models.

Launched by Barney Pressman in 1923, the store began as a 200-foot hole in the wall on Seventh Avenue at 17th Street.

Barney may have been gimmicky, but he also sold quality—soon luring devoted clients to a part of Manhattan known more for its Irish pubs than clothing stores.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that Barney’s son edged the store into the luxury realm.

In the 1970s, Barney’s added a women’s department; in the 1990s, the store (without the apostrophe) decamped the now-blocklong 17th Street store for the Upper East Side, where Barneys holds court today.

A remnant of “Little Ukraine” in the East Village

A handful of Ukrainian storefronts and signage are still hanging on along lower Second Avenue.

There’s Ukrainian soul food standby Veselka and the Ukrainian National Home, both off of East Ninth Street. Taras Shevchenko Place and St. George’s Church are around the corner on East Seventh.

But the East Village’s Ukrainian presence is a shadow of what it was in post–World War II New York, when Ukrainian immigrants poured in, reportedly topping 60,000 in the 1950s.

Here’s a piece of ephemera from that once-thriving community. Stephan Kowbasniuk was a well-known lawyer in Little Ukraine; in this ad he offers to handle passports, shipping, real estate transactions, and citizenship papers.

It’s tough to date the ad, but considering the vintage Algonquin phone exchange, it must be pre-1960s.

[Thanks to frequent Ephemeral commenter Mick Dementiuk for the Ukrainian translation]

When city businesses advertised on matchbooks

It was cheap and easy advertising back in another New York, when everybody smoked everywhere—restaurants, bars, parks.

And though the businesses on these vintage matchbook covers are long gone, they were going strong when the covers were printed between the 1920s and 1940s.

Roulston’s was a grocery store chain headquartered in factory building near the Gowanus Canal.

Pete Hamill wrote of his father’s job there in 1994′s A Drinking Life:

“You should be very proud of your daddy, my mother said. He only finished eighth grade and he is working as a clerk. The reason is his beautiful handwriting.

“He was working at the main office of a Brooklyn grocery chain called Thomas Roulston & Sons and brought home nineteen dollars a week.”

Astor Coffee—I was hoping it was an old-school coffee house on Astor Place, perhaps where the Starbucks is now.

Instead, it was the house blend at the gorgeous and grandiose Astor Hotel, late of Times Square, a lovely place to hang in the 1920s.

The coffee was so popular they sold it at retail establishments around the city.

I couldn’t find anything about the Flatiron Cafeteria; I imagine it was just another spot in Depression-era New York to get a cheap cup of coffee and sandwich.

But I love the matchbook cover—and of course, the old-school phone number.

Today, 164 Fifth Avenue is an Eileen Fisher clothing store.

When indie video stores popped up in the 1980s

It’s August 1984, and while thumbing through this month’s edition of downtown arts newspaper the East Village Eye, you come across this New Wave–esque ad.

How exciting to see that a video store will be coming to East Ninth Street. I bet it did a pretty good business there for awhile too.

New York’s scary 1930s venereal disease posters

Think the Bloomberg administration is heavy-handed when it come to public health pronouncements? (Soda is bad, smoking is bad, fat is bad, etc.)

Then check out what New Yorkers were forced to stare at on subway cars and bus depots in the late 1930s when LaGuardia was mayor.

The steep decline in syphilis and gonorrhea cases after World War II in the U.S. is probably the result of antibiotics, not so much these finger-wagging warnings.

They were made by the Works Progress Commission’s Federal Art Project, and if you dig the cool design—or have an interest in the history of bacterial STDs—you can buy reproductions from www.vintagraph. com.