The Irving Place “bachelors” host Sunday salons

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]

A Gramercy beer garden inspired by a castle

New York doesn’t have many German Renaissance-style buildings inspired by castles in the Alps.

But there’s one at 190 Third Avenue, and it’s an unusual, curious reminder of the area’s once-thriving German immigrant neighborhood.

Plus, it has a literary reputation, and rumors swirl that it served as a spy hangout too.

The back story begins in 1896, when the original building, near 17th Street, was bought by a German-American intent on turning it into a beer garden.

Remodeled to resemble Heidelberg Castle in Germany, Scheffel Hall (the name comes from a German balladeer) catered to German natives living in the upper reaches of Kleindeutschland, then centered in the East Village.

After changing hands in 1904, Scheffel Hall became Allaire’s, a full-fledged restaurant, then a German-American music hall, a rathskeller, and later the jazz club Fat Tuesday’s until 1995.

“Its patrons have included a number of leading politicians and writers, notably O. Henry who used Scheffel Hall as the setting for a short story in 1909,” states a Landmarks Preservation Committee Report from 1997.

H.L. Mencken also hung out there, as did other literary figures in Gramercy.

And then there’s the espionage angle: Allaire’s was reportedly a gathering place for German American spies during World War I, reports New York Architecture.

Today it’s a Pilates studio, but that’s okay. The owners haven’t touched the facade, and the dark woodwork and detailing in the interior remains.

When the city dined at the Times Square Automat

“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.

An Art Deco globe illuminates a New York lobby

The 37-story New York Daily News building, at 220 East 42nd Street, is pure Art Deco beauty.

And it’s even more of a masterpiece thanks to the illuminated 12-foot globe that’s been revolving under a black glass dome in the lobby since 1930.

“Around it, spreading across the floor like a giant compass and literally positioning New York at the center of the world, bronze lines indicate mileage to various international destinations,” writes Fodors.com.

“The Daily News, however, hasn’t called this building home since the mid-1990s, 15 years after it played the offices of the fictional newspaper the Daily Planet in the original Superman movie.”

It attracts lots of gawkers today, just as it has for 80 years. [Image above courtesy of New York Architecture]

What the Times Magazine ran one Sunday in 1964

The New York Times has published a Sunday magazine since 1896; it was an attempt by new owner Adolph Ochs to set the Times apart from the papers that ran Sunday comic supplements and attract more intelligent readers.

I don’t know what the features were like back in the Gilded Age. But as this table of contents from the October 4, 1964 edition reveals, the articles and sections weren’t all that different from the stories the editors run today: rich kid/helicopter parent problems, national politics, art around the world, a little science and sports thrown into the mix, and of course, a crossword puzzle!

The loveliest stretch of houses in old Chelsea

Chelsea has more than its share of gorgeous homes. But a row of townhouses stretching along the south side of West 20th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues just may be the sweetest and have the most historical cred.

This is Cushman Row, seven red-brick beauties at numbers 406 to 418 completed in 1840. They’re among the oldest homes in Chelsea, considered to be the best examples of Greek Revival architecture in the city.

The row was developed by Don Alonzo Cushman, a wealthy friend of Clement Clark Moore.

That’s the same Moore who wrote “A Visit From St. Nicholas” and was the grandson of the 18th century British army captain who built his country estate here and named it after Chelsea Royal Hospital in London.

Cushman lived in Greenwich Village. But as the Village filled up and the city moved northward, he bought property from Moore in Chelsea, which Moore hoped to develop into a graceful new residential neighborhood.

On blocks like West 20th Street, with the neo-Gothic General Theological Seminary across the street, he succeeded.

Some of the features that make Cushman row so impressive are the uniform 10-foot deep front yards, recessed doorways, attic windows encircled with decorative wreaths, and the wrought-iron handrails and yard railings.

Check out the pineapple, a traditional symbol of hospitality, on the black iron newel at number 416.

Stribling has a recent listing for this house, with photos of the interior and backyard. No price is given, but with real-estate taxes running around 30,000 a year, it’s going to cost a lot.

A Beaux-Arts facade on 31st Street has a secret

Once-fashionable 31st Street is a good place to hunt for hidden architectural gems. And number 19, just west of Fifth Avenue, is a striking example.

Look past the Herald Square Hotel sign, and its Beaux-Arts beauty comes to light: a limestone and red brick building with enormous arched front windows.

They frame a cherub holding a pen, surrounded by symbols of the arts: musical instruments, paintbrushes, and a pad. The words “wit” and “humor” appear on a banner.

So what’s it all about? The clue lies under the third-floor front windows. Beneath each window is the word “Life”—for the magazine that once was headquartered here.

When Life moved into the building, designed in 1895 by architects Carrere and Hastings (the same guys who designed the New York Public Library), it was a different publication from the 20th century version.

Life was a general-interest humor magazine, similar to rivals Puck and the New Yorker, and they published a fairly impressive group of literary and artistic talents, including Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the Gibson Girl illustrations that debuted in the 1890s.

The cherub was sculpted by Philip Martiny. “Winged Life” is its name, and it symbolized a magazine that in the 1930s was turned into a photo weekly and then shut down in 2000.

A 1960s “party of the century” at the Plaza Hotel

November 28, 1966 was a rainy Monday in Manhattan. That didn’t stop the city’s elite from donning black and white attire and eye masks and attending the exclusive Black and White Ball—a masquerade party thrown by writer Truman Capote for Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post.

“The guests, as spectacular a group as has ever been assembled for a private party in New York, were an international who’s who of notables,” wrote Charlotte Curtis for The New York Times.

“There were 510 diplomats, politicians, scientists, painters, writers, composers, actors, producers, dress designers, social figures, tycoons, and what Mr. Capote called ‘international types, lots of beautiful women and ravishing little things.’”

The invite list reads like a time capsule of the mid-1960s: Lynda Bird Johnson, Candice Bergen (below), newlyweds Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow (left), Diana Vreeland, William F. Buckley, Andy Warhol, George Plimpton, and assorted Vanderbilts, Fords, and Kennedys.

Capote forked over $16,000 for the event. “The ballroom had been done up in red, with not a flower in sight—‘the people are the flowers,’ declared Capote,” states At the Plaza by Curtis Gathje.

Writes Deborah Davis in The Party of the Century: “Jean Harvey Vanderbilt compared the party to the court of Louis XV because ‘people promenaded around the perimeter of the room in their finery, looking at each other.’ One guest commented, ‘It’s weird, there are only black and white and red in this room, and yet everything’s so . . . so colorful.’”

CBS News covered the party live from the coat room (so much for the idea that celebrity-driven media is a new thing).

At the end of the evening, Capote (with Katherine Graham, left), flying high thanks to the recent success of In Cold Blood, remarked, “It was just what it set out to be . . . I just wanted to give a party for my friends.”

Partying with Zelda Fitzgerald in the 1920s

Every decade in New York, a couple comes along and serves as an emblem for the time.

In the first part of the Roaring 20s, that couple was F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

On April 3, 1920, reunited in New York, they married in a hasty ceremony in front of eight people at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They stayed at the Biltmore Hotel, then the Commodore Hotel, getting kicked out of both for being too rowdy.

They celebrated their eviction by spinning giddily through the hotel’s revolving doors for half an hour. Zelda also earned wild child status when one night she jumped into the fountain at Union Square fully clothed.

“They did both look as though they’d just stepped out of the sun,” wrote Dorothy Parker.

Scott’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, was a hit, and New York’s smart set was dazzled by the young couple. Zelda was particularly taken with the city’s nightlife, according to Nancy Milford’s Zelda: A Biography. In Zelda’s words:

“Girls in short amorphous capes and long flowing skirts and hats like straw bathtubs waited for taxis in front of the Plaza Grill; girls in long satin coats and colored shoes and hats like straw manhole covers tapped the tune of a cataract on the dance floors of the Lorraine and the St. Regis.”

“Under the sombre ironic parrots of the Biltmore a halo of golden bobs disintegrated into black lace and shoulder bouquets . . . . It was just a lot of youngness: Lillian Lorraine would be drunk at the top of the New Amsterdam by midnight, and football teams breaking training would scare the waiters with drunkenness in the fall. The world was full of parents taking care of people.”

Of course, the parties didn’t last. After moving to Paris later in the decade, the golden couple split, and Scott went to Hollywood to try his hand at screenwriting, where he died of a heart attack in 1940.

By 1930, Zelda was in a Maryland mental institution. There, she perished a fire in 1948.

A thanksgiving message on a Harlem church door

A church in Hamilton Heights greets visitors at its doors with this message, from Psalm 100:4, a reference to a different kind of thanksgiving than our contemporary turkey/football/parade holiday.