New Year’s Day dinner on the Bowery

Fried rabbit on toast, canned Oyster Bay asparagus, hot mince and pumpkin pie—these and other delicacies were on the menu at M.F. Lyons’ Dining Rooms on the Bowery for New Year’s Day dinner in 1906.

And yep, those prices are in cents. I wonder what kind of residents showed up for this meal.

“Mike” Lyons’ restaurant has an interesting history. It was the sight of dinners featuring corrupt Tammany Hall politicians such as “Little Tim” Sullivan. 

Opened in 1872, it met its end in 1907, long after the Bowery’s heyday as an entertainment district.

“From 1,200 to 2,000 people were fed every night,’ a 1907 New York Times article reported. “At 3 in the morning there was a man back of every chair waiting to grab it, on special occasions, and the police patronage which had always been considerable increased.

“There was one class of patrons who continued faithful to the Lyons standard. This was the Lyons food line, composed exclusively of women, who at 5 in the morning were at the doors now closed with baskets,” the article continued.

“The left-over food was given to them without question or discrimination. These will mourn the passing of Lyon’s.”

The menu comes from the New York Public Library’s menu collection.

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.

The United Nations in New York

The brand-new United Nations Headquarters, built on 17 acres along the East River in 1949-1950, as depicted in a postwar technicolor postcard.

These are the only 17 acres in New York City that are considered international territory—under the jurisdiction of the United States, that is. 

The “Wolf of Wall Street”

David Lamar was kind of a low-grade Bernie Madoff. He earned his nickname partly by taking millions of dollars from private citizens, promising to invest their cash in stocks and securities, and then keeping the money for himself.

Falsely claiming to be a scion of a wealthy Georgia family, Lamar lived large. He mingle with politicians and financial bigwigs, pretending to be a legit finance guy.

But for three decades he would be in trouble with the law, indicted for grand larceny, hiring detectives to commit murder, hiring Monk Eastman’s gang to beat a man up, and impersonating a politician over the phone. 

He died penniless in 1934 in the Hotel Wellington in midtown. Three waiters who he had generously tipped during his days on Wall Street chipped in and paid for his funeral.

Lower Manhattan criss-crossed by wires

As this 1880s postcard reveals, New York streets in the late 19th century held messes of wires—telephone and telegraph wires like these as well as power lines.

The streets are much more attractive—not to mention safer—now that all the wires have to be buried underground. It’s a result of the Blizzard of 1888. That March storm dumped so much snow on the city, exposed wires and polls all over New York snapped like twigs, knocking out power and communication and paralyzing the city. 

The bad old days of Tompkins Square Park

In December 1986, the city unveiled plans for a massive renovation of Tompkins Square Park—new landscaping, new playgrounds, no more bandshell. The goal was to create more open space and make it a lot less sketchy.

Well, those plans didn’t go over well with community leaders, reported an article in that month’s East Village Eye. 

“Open space would break up the traditional uses for the park. As it is, all the people in the community have a little part they feel comfortable in,” one local told the paper.

“There’s the Ukrainian old men’s area, and the bandshell, used mostly by younger people. There are four different playground areas, divided more or less by age group. And there’s the part where older black men play cards. Tompkins Square is like a mirror held up to our community.”

Eventually the park did get its renovation in 1991-1992. But not without a fight, namely the riots in the late ’80s sparked by cops trying to clear encampments of homeless people—like “Dog Man” above.

The real first New York City subway

It must have been a good idea in the 1860s. That’s when inventor Alfred Ely Beach decided to construct an underground rail system powered by compressed air—think of those little pneumatic tubes that offices used to exchange memos in pre-email days.

The pneumatic subway was plagued by problems. Beach couldn’t get a permit to build it because Tammany Hall politicians had plans for a subway of their own. But he managed to get it going in secret.

Fifty-eight days later he had a tunnel running from Warren Street across Broadway to Murray Street, a distance of about 300 feet. He opened it to the public on February 26, 1870.

Passengers traveled in the line’s one deluxe car, and the station under Warren Street featured carpeting, paintings, and a grand piano. The cost of a ride: 25 cents (all of it donated to charity).

“Such as expected to find a dismal, cavernous retreat under Broadway, opened their eyes at the elegant reception room, the light, airy tunnel and the general appearance of taste and comfort in all the apartments….” commented The New York Times.

Of course, the pneumatic subway didn’t work out. Beach never got the financing to extend the line to Harlem as he had hoped. And advances in engineering made the air-powered subway obsolete.

Beach’s subway closed in 1873. The tunnel was used as a shooting gallery and then shut off for good by 1900, damaged by a fire in the building above it.

In 1912 workers excavating a tunnel for the N and R trains came upon the old tunnel and wooden subway car (at right). So where is the tunnel now? The consensus seems to be that it was destroyed during construction of other downtown stations.

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.

The NYPD’s infamous “Clubber” Williams

Alexander “Clubber” Williams was an NYPD inspector in post–Civil War New York City; as captain of the precinct on 35th Street, he’s credited with breaking up the fearsome Gas House Gang that lorded over the East 30s, then known as the Gas House District.

In 1876 he was transferred to a precinct on West 13th Street, where he’d have jurisdiction over a high-crime area centered around Broadway from the 20s to about 42nd Street thick with theaters, gambling dens, and prostitutes.

Remarking on his new assignment, he supposedly told a friend, referring to the protection money he was likely to receive from gambling operators and madams, “I have had chuck for a long time, and now I’m going to eat tenderloin.”

The name Tenderloin stuck for this seedy neighborhood. Formerly known by the fantastically colorful moniker Satan’s Circus, it was one of the city’s worst. Williams earned the title “Czar of the Tenderloin” for his rough and ready crime-prevention tactics.

Brought up on corruption charges several times over the years, Williams always beat the rap. And when accused of using excessive force, he replied, “There is more law at the end of a policeman’s nightstick than in a decision of the Supreme Court.”

In 1895, Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt had him retire. Williams insisted until his death in 1917 that he’d never clubbed anyone “that did not deserve it.”

1980s tabloid fodder: the Mayflower Madam

Back in 1979, 28-year-old FIT graduate Sydney Biddle Barrows decided that her fashion industry career wasn’t cutting it.

So the blue blood descendent (a Pilgrim ancestor came over on the Mayflower) embarked on a more lucrative career path: she started an escort service. 

The story was almost tailor-made for the New York tabloids. Called Cachet, her escort operation catered to mega wealthy, successful men. Barrows supplied attractive, well-groomed girls who she reportedly paid well and took great care of. 

Supposedly Cachet raked in a million bucks a year (this is 1980s money, of course).

Until 1984, that is, when she was busted. She spent a night in jail, plead guilty, and got off with just a fine—and a catchy new nickname.

But she never revealed the names in her so-called little black book. In subsequent years she co-wrote her autobiography, authored tomes on marketing, and has run a consulting business.