Prohibition-era New York’s favorite madam

Polly Adler was born in Russia in 1900 and immigrated to New York City when she was a teenager. But hers is no typical Ellis Island kind of story.

After toiling away in a Brooklyn corset factory, 24-year-old Adler found a more lucrative gig: supplying prostitutes, liquor, and an all-night party to top entertainers, politicians, and gangsters.

Adler created clubhouse-like brothels at different locations through the 1920s and 1930s. She ran a house of ill repute in the Majestic Apartments on Central Park West, as well as at other luxe addresses on the Upper East and Upper West Sides.

The famous and important of both sexes (Dorothy Parker was a regular) hung out and mingled. Mayor Jimmy Walker, Joe DiMaggio, and Dutch Schultz reportedly enjoyed the sexual services.

Adler was arrested more than a dozen times, exiting the madam business in the mid-1940s. She attended college, wrote her memoirs, and died in 1962 in Los Angeles.

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?”

New York City: a separate sovereign nation?

Sound crazy? Maybe, but secession has been proposed several times over the years.

In 1969, when writer Norman Mailer and columnist Jimmy Breslin ran for mayor and city council president on the Independent Party ticket, one of their ideas was to make New York City the 51st State. 

And in 2003, City Council member Peter Vallone introduced a bill that would allow the city to cut the state loose—because upstaters were sucking out too much of the city’s revenue.

But perhaps the closest New York City came to actually becoming sovereign was in 1861. The Civil War was pretty unpopular here because the city stood to lose so much money, since New York manufacturers wouldn’t be able to continue importing cotton from the South.

So Mayor Fernando Wood (looking dapper at left) proposed that the city form a city-state called Tri-Insula—that’s Latin for “three islands”—composed of Manhattan, Long Island, and Staten Island.

With Tri-Insula its own entity separate from the Union and the Confederacy, the Southern cotton trade wouldn’t have to stop.

In the end, it was just too radical an idea even for New Yorkers to accept.

Walkin’ about Wallabout

Wallabout is either a dressed-up name for the gritty area abutting the Brooklyn Navy Yard and sliced by the BQE. Or it’s a true neighborhood with a vibe distinct from Fort Greene and Clinton Hill to the south.

Whatever your take, Wallabout is a stronghold of Brooklyn history that’s worth a look. The name comes from the Dutch word Waal-bogt, which means a bend in the river. This bend is Wallabout Bay. Here, the British docked 12 prison ships holding captured Revolutionary War soldiers.

More than 11,000 men died on ships like the one in the engraving above. Some of their remains are entombed in the haunting Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in nearby Fort Greene Park.

Wallabout grew into a residential district in the mid-19th century, housing workers who toiled along Brooklyn’s thriving waterfront. These workers lived in wood frame houses, some of which still stand.

These 2- and 3-story houses, with lovely porches, are modest and charming—especially compared to the mansions up the hill closer to the Pratt campus.

In fact, historic Wallabout, which the Historic District Council defines as eight blocks roughly between Myrtle and Park Avenues, has the largest concentration of pre-Civil War wood frame homes in the city.

Wallabout has literary cred as well. Walt Whitman is believed to have lived in the nabe; his former home is supposedly 99 Ryerson Street (not pictured, since it’s covered in cheap siding).

Jack London: a hobo in City Hall Park

Writer and San Francisco native Jack London is usually associated with California, the Pacific Northwest, and Alaska, thanks to novels like White Fang and To Build a Fire.

But he spent some time in New York City too. While hobo-ing around the country in the early 1900s as a young man, London lived for a few months in City Hall Park downtown.

He recounts a typical day as a park vagrant in his autobiographical memoir, The Road, published in 1916:

“It was during a week of scorching weather. I had got into the habit of throwing my feet in the morning, and spending the afternoon in the little park that is hard by Newspaper Row and the City Hall. It was near there that I could buy from push-cart men current books (that had been injured in the making or binding) for a few cents each.

“Then, right by the park itself, were little booths where one could buy glorious, ice-cold, sterilized milk and buttermilk at a penny a glass. Every afternoon I sat on a bench and read and went on a milk debauch. I got away with from five to ten glasses each afternoon. It was dreadfully hot weather.”

London goes on to describe a nearby game of “pee wee” played by some “gamins” before the cops broke it up. It’s a pretty neat glimpse into daily life in downtown New York City at the time. Read more from The Road here.

Mabel Dodge’s bohemian salons in the Village

Greenwich Village in the teens was a forward-thinking place, populated by artists and writers, anarchists and free-love practitioners, labor leaders and birth-control proponents. Bringing them together each week in her apartment at 23 Fifth Avenue was 33-year-old Mabel Dodge.

Was she really interested in new ideas, or just a celebrity hound? It’s hard to say; she simply proclaimed that she “wanted to know everybody.”

Born rich in Buffalo, she found herself in the Village in 1912 after spending years in Italy with her second husband, where she mixed with the European culturati.

In New York, now divorced, Mabel decided to gather the city’s “movers and shakers” together during weekly salons, where ideas could be presented and debated. 

Mabel’s salons were legendary. Anarchist Emma Goldman talked to poet Edward Arlington Robinson, while Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger chatted up artist Alfred Stieglitz.

Writer John Reed, who later became her lover, also was a regular. She held nights devoted to  ”dangerous characters,” “sex antagonism,” and “evenings of art and unrest.”  

The salons came to and end after a few years. Mabel wrote for various publications and put out her memoirs in the 1930s. By then she was living in Taos, New Mexico, with her fourth husband. She died there in 1962.

Hunger and hopelessness on the Bowery

If New York had to nominate one street as its most rock-bottom skid row ever, it would probably have to be the Bowery. Not the Bowery of 2009, of course, with its influx of luxe hotels and boutiques.

I’m thinking of the Bowery of 1909, where down-on-their-luck men stood on bread lines and passed time in 15-cent hotel rooms, as these Library of Congress photos show.

If a man found himself on the Bowery, that was pretty much it for him. He’d sunk as low as you could go, and things weren’t going to get better.

Theodore Dreiser understood this when he wrote Sister Carrie. It’s an underrated turn-of-the-century New York novel chronicling the rise of a young, ambitious actress (kind of a Carrie Bradshaw of the 1890s) juxtaposed with the fall of her older common-law husband. 

Sister Carrie ends with the husband, the unemployed, weakened, and abandoned Hurstwood, committing suicide in a Bowery flophouse:

“Hurstwood laid down his fifteen cents and crept of with weary steps to his allotted room. It was a dingy affair—wooden, dusty, hard. A small gas-jet furnished sufficient light for so rueful a corner.

“‘Hm!’ He said, clearing his throat and locking the door.

“Now he began leisurely to take off his clothes, but stopped first with his coat, and tucked it along the crack under the door. His vest he arranged in the same place. His old wet, cracked hat he laid softly upon the table. Then he pulled off his shoes and laid down.

“It seemed as if he thought for a while, for now he arose and turned the gas out, standing calmly in the blackness, hidden from view. After a few moments, in which he reviewed nothing, but merely hesitated, he turned the gas on again, but applied no match. Even then he stood there, hidden wholly in that kindness which is night, while the uprising fumes filled the room. When the odour reached his nostrils, he quit his attitude and fumbled for the bed.

“‘What’s the use?’ he said, weakly, as he stretched himself to rest.”

Greenwich Village’s legendary Grapevine Tavern

Back in the early to mid-19th century, when the Village really was a country village north of the main city, this quaint clapboard house became a tavern known as the Old Grapevine. 

Located on the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and 11th Street, it’s probably the first legendary Village bar. The Old Grapevine attracted artists, businessmen, Union officers, Southern spies, and politicians, who dropped by after visiting Jefferson Market Courthouse two blocks south.

It was such a gathering spot that the phrase “I heard it through the grapevine” originated there. (Yep, a grapevine used to cover the 11th Street side of the tavern.)

Its closing in 1915 merited the kind of nostalgic media coverage given to CBGB or the Cedar Tavern when they shut their doors:

“It was not only a place to warm the inner man with the fermented juice of the grape, malted beers, and fine musty ale, but a place where good fellows met, as in the more palatial clubs today, to match their wits, tell the latest story, and discuss in a friendly way the political destinies of the nation,” wrote The New York Times. 

Speaking of warming the inner man, one ex-owner was proud that he didn’t serve women.

“Never in my career have a sold a drink to a woman,” the Times quoted him. “No women were allowed in the place. It was no hang-out for roisterers. . . . From the day I went there in 1870 [it] was a gentleman’s cafe.”

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.

The New York Sun’s “Great Moon Hoax” of 1835

Life on the moon? Yep, it’s really true, and the New York Sun had the exclusive scoop. In late August 1835, the newspaper published a week-long series covering a powerful telescope that allowed astronomers to view the moon’s surface.

So what was on the moon? According to the Sun, living the lunar life were winged humans called “man-bats,” bison, unicorns, beavers walking on two legs, as well as rivers, valleys, and forests. The lithograph below gives you an idea.

Of course, it was all a hoax planned by the paper’s editors, designed to drum up circulation. The stunt worked, but then, the Sun tallied its own circ numbers, so who really knows.

Many New Yorkers fell for it while others weren’t sure what to think. The Sun raised the possibility that the story wasn’t true in a September 1835 article, but they never ‘fessed up completely.

The Sun has one lovely legacy: this weathered yet elegant clock-thermometer that survives on Chambers Street.