Where Bob Dylan got his start in the Village

In April 1961, Dylan played his first paying gig at Gerde’s Folk City, an early folk music venue in the Village and a launching pad for Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, and other 1960s folkie legends.

A very enthusiastic review in the New York Times that September helped make him a household name:

“A bright new face in folk music is appearing at Gerde’s Folk City,” write reviewer (and eventual Dylan biographer) Robert Shelton. “Although only 20 years old, Bob Dylan is one of the most distinctive stylists to play in a Manhattan cabaret in months.

“Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair . . . . His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica, and piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.” 

A review of Gerde’s from The New Inside Guide to Greenwich Village, 1965

Gerde’s was at West Fourth Street, at Mercer. The club moved to West Third Street in the 1970s, closing up shop in the 1980s. The West Fourth Street building in the photo above was torn down, replaced by a structure housing Hebrew Union College.

Legendary Lüchow’s on East 14th Street

I’m not aware of any New York City eatery with an umlaut in its name. But for a century, there was Lüchow’s—the German restaurant that served wiener schnitzel, sauerbraten, and other old-world, heavy-duty delicacies since 1882.

Lüchow’s opened when Union Square was New York’s theater and music hall district. It consisted of seven separate dining rooms, a beer garden, a bar, and a men’s grill. One room was lined with animal heads; another displayed a collection of beer steins. Must have been a serious dining experience.

Of course, when the city’s fortunes turned in the 1970s, so did Lüchow’s. The restaurant shut its doors for good after a mysterious 1982 fire. It’s now the site of a New York University dormitory.

Check out this review from Knife and Fork in New York, a 1949 guide to the city’s best eateries:

The turbulent history of Tompkins Square

This photo, from John Gruen’s The New Bohemia, shows a snow-covered, placid Tompkins Square Park in the early 1960s. No hipsters or crusties; no playgrounds or dog runs either.

There’s St. Brigid’s Church on Avenue B in the back. The statue of post-Civil War Congressional Rep. Samuel Cox is in the foreground. And you can just make out the shadows of the then-new housing projects on Avenue D. 

Tompkins Square is quiet and lovely these days, but it’s been the scene of some pretty bloody riots since it opened in 1850. Food shortages and unemployment prompted demonstrations in 1857; the deadly 1863 Draft Riots spilled into Tompkins Square as well. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then came the Tompkins Square Riot. In 1874, thousands of workers gathered at the park to protest poor economic conditions brought on by the Panic of 1873. Police on horseback fought back the crowds by beating them with clubs, as illustrated below.

A new round of Tompkins Square riots pitting cops against protesters started up again in the late 1980s and early 1990s—another period of economic recession.

How not to act like a tourist in New York, 1920

Some helpful hints for tourists visiting the city in 1920, courtesy of Valentine’s City of New York: A Guide Book, a popular travel handbook covering where to go and what to do in Gotham in the early 20th century:

The most interesting “don’t” farther down on the list concerns female smoking, a new social scourge hitting big cities around the time the book was published:

Meet the kids from Bowling Green

In the early years of the 20th century, the streets near Bowling Green—the oldest public park in the city, at the foot of Broadway in Lower Manhattan—were home to thousands of families, “crowded into tenements made out of old warehouses and former fashionable houses now fallen into decay,” explains Valentine’s City of New York Guidebook, published in 1920.

These are some of the kids growing up in that neighborhood, which at the time was a melting pot of Irish, Polish, Syrians, Greeks, Armenians, and “people from Palestine and Mesopotamia,” the book notes.

 

This is the era of settlement work, when wealthier New Yorkers began donating time and money to help poorer neighborhoods with schools, health care, and other social services. As the book explains:

“Both the children and the mothers have found a great friend in the Bowling Green Neighborhood Association, an organization which has voluntarily taken up settlement work. They have provided a playground, a little hall where dances and social affairs can be had, a modest little library, a babies clinic, and other desirable attributes.

“The infant mortality, from an abnormally high rate, has been reduced to correspond to the average of the city at large, and in other ways the neighborhood association has made for itself a warm spot in the heart of these friendless foreigners.”

The Village’s art house movie theaters

There are lots of places in the city that show independent and foreign films. But movie fanatics who lived in New York in the 50s, 60s, and 70s still bemoan the loss of certain legendary theaters, like Bleecker Street Cinema, which opened in 1962 and closed in 1990.

After ceasing to show art films, Bleecker Street Cinema had a short stint as a porno palace, then was renovated for retail use. 

This page, from the 1965 Inside Guide to Greenwich Village, calls it “a film-lover’s paradise,” then lists other artsy theaters, most of which are long gone. Cinema Village still exists, but the Greenwich Theater is now an Equinox, and the Eighth Street Playhouse a retail outlet.

Old St. Marks-in-the-Bouwerie

St. Mark’s Church has stood at Second Avenue and 10th Street since 1799. Before that, in 1660, a much smaller family chapel was put up by Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Amsterdam who owned the farm—or “Bouwerie”—on that site.

This 1853 illustration, from Valentine’s City of New York Guide Book, shows the current church building with its Greek Revival steeple, just before a portico was added in 1854. Hmm, was the East Side still so bucolic back in the middle of the 19th century? This depiction seems like a bit of an exaggeration.

Here is St. Mark’s 80 years later, in 1936. The church looks kind of spooky and barren, the facade missing the stone and brick we’re used to seeing today. 

St. Mark’s circa 2008, a lovely landmark open to the public and a reminder of New York’s Dutch colonial past. There are few other places in the city where can you walk along tombstones that mark the burial sites of prominent New York citizens of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Give my regards to Broad Street

An 1825 view of Wall Street from Broad Street, from Valentine’s City of New York Guide Book, published in 1920. Trinity Church is in the center, while a Presbyterian church and Simmons’ Tavern are on the right. (Note the cute hound dashing across the road.)

 

This drawing was done before the Great Fire of 1835, which destroyed about 700 buildings in lower Manhattan. Simmons’ Tavern, which looks like it was made from wood, may have been one of them.

Edgar Allan Poe’s bucolic Bronx cottage

In 1846, Edgar Allan Poe, his wife (and cousin) Virginia, and his mother-in-law moved from Manhattan to a little wooden house built in 1812 in The Bronx’s rural Fordham neighborhood. The isolated, modest home, which rented for just $100 a year, must have suited Poe well; he wrote “Annabel Lee” and “The Bells” there.

But his time in the house would be short. Virginia succumbed to tuberculosis in 1847. Poe died in 1849 in Baltimore. The home passed through several hands until 1905, when the New York State Legislature designated funds to preserve it as a historical landmark. 

A 1920 photo from Valentine’s City of New York guidebook:

In 1910 the house was moved to Kingsbridge Road and the Grand Concourse, restored with original furnishings (including Poe’s bed and rocking chair), then designated a landmark in 1962.

Next spring, Poe Cottage will close for yearlong renovations, so if you want to see it, better make plans soon. More information is here.

Chinese food beyond chop suey

New York’s love affair with Chinese food goes back at least a century, as these postcards attest.  

The back of this next postcard, for Ding Ho, reads, “The most modern Chinese Restaurant in the Times Square Section, serving American and Cantonese dinners at popular prices.”

I get the sense that these two establishments served relatively authentic cuisine. But most places apparently didn’t. Valentine’s City of New York, a guidebook published in 1920, felt the need to warn out-of-towners that the city’s Chinese restaurants were tourist traps:

“Few homegrown Chinese take nourishment in these places, because they feel kind of out of place and they hate to break in on the nice white people from uptown and Brooklyn. But the waiters are all Chinese, for the same reason that the walls have Chinese dragon tapestry. The lights are shrouded in fantastic shades, and the place is redolent with the perfume of fire cracker punk, which exhales a not unpleasant odor.”