Rhinelander Gardens: then and now

Designed by James Renwick—architect of Grace Church on Tenth Street and Broadway and St. Patrick’s Cathedral—these “three-decker” row houses stood at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 11th Street since 1855.

I’m not sure what connection they have to the Rhinelanders—an old New York family—but the family probably owned the land they were built on, hence the name.

Another Rhinelander real estate site is just around the corner on Seventh Avenue.

Berenice Abbott took the photo in 1937. Rhinelander Gardens only lasted another 20 years. Amazingly, the city tore them down (and their lovely front lawns and cast-iron balconies!) to build P.S. 41.

The school is very 1950s. The tenement apartment building on the far right, the Unadilla, still exists.

Lost New York, by  Nathan Silver, published in 1967, has this to say:

“The setback fronts of the houses were the result of the imperfect match of the old Greenwich Village street pattern with the upper Manhattan grid. Some deep fronts can still be seen on 11th Street, but the Rhinelander row was demolished in the late 1950s.”

Turn of the century Cooper Square

A web of elevated train tracks is flanked by sloped-roof buildings on the right and lovely Cooper Union—described in this postcard as “the Cooper Institute”—on the left.

Looks like some really sweet buildings have long since disappeared.

Hunter College’s infamous “Axis Sally”

Small-town girl Mildred Gillars came to New York City to make it as an actress. But she wound up a household name for an entirely different line of work: Nazi radio propagandist. 

Born in 1900, she moved to the city in the 1920s, earning small parts in vaudeville shows and musical comedies. 

At some point she enrolled in Hunter College, then a single-sex school. There, the story goes, she began an affair with a professor-turned-Nazi who she followed to Berlin in the 1930s.

After World War II broke out in 1941, he convinced her to broadcast a regular show for Radio Berlin. Each broadcast attempted to demoralize U.S. soldiers stationed in Europe by implying that their families and government didn’t care about them.

Mildred was one of several “Axis Sallys,” the name given to women who spread propaganda for Germany, Italy, or Japan. Another Axis Sally was the daughter of midtown restauranteur Louis Zucca.

Once the war ended, Mildred was captured and brought back to the states for trial in 1948. Convicted of treason, she lived behind bars in West Virginia until being paroled in 1961. She died, with little fanfare, at 87.

A poet in 1929 New York

In June 1929, 30-year-old Spanish poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca arrived for a nine-month stint in New York City. Depressed over a failed love affair and unable to speak or write in English, he composed poems (supposedly on the back of Columbia University stationery) tinged with loneliness and isolation.

Though he reportedly loved Harlem, where he lived while enrolled at Columbia, Garcia Lorca had a pretty grim outlook on the rest of New York.

His poems—collected as “Poet in New York” and published four years after his murder by Franco’s firing squad in Spain—portray the city is an inaccessible, spiritually empty place. “Dawn” starts:

Dawn in New York has/four columns of mire/and a hurricane of black pigeons/splashing in putrid waters.

Those who go out early know in their bones/there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die/they know they will be mired in numbers and law, in mindless games, in fruitless labors.

The smiling kids of Brooklyn’s P.S. 3

Sixth graders? Eighth graders? It’s hard to tell. The boys are young enough to get away with wearing knickers with their suits and ties.

The girls have bobbed hair and fashionable middy blouses—very 1923, when this class picture (now a postcard) was taken.

Photo by B. Merlis

Public School 3 was on Hancock Street near Bedford Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, according to the postcard. Today there’s a P.S. 3 nearby on Jefferson Street.

The famous alumni of Midwood High School

What do Woody Allen, Marvin Hamlisch, and Emmanuel Lewis all have in common? All three graduated from Brooklyn’s Midwood High School. Woody got his diploma in 1953, Hamlisch in the early 1960s, and Webster in the ’80s.

Other famous Midwood students include Grease’s Didi Conn, poet June Jordan, and Prison Break star Wentworth Miller (though Miller transferred elsewhere before graduating).

For a school known for its math and science brainiacs, Midwood seems to produce a lot of actors and musicians too.

Midwood was built in 1940 on Bedford Avenue and Glenwood Road; construction costs ran to $2 million. Looks like the board of education got a good deal. It’s a lovely looking school building, with its six columns and cupola crowning the top.

1970s New York flashback: The Magic Garden

Were you a little New Yorker in the 1970s with access to a television between one and three o’clock on weekday afternoons? Then odds are you were captivated by The Magic Garden.

It was low-budget local TV at its best. Broadcast on channel 11, the show’s hosts, Carole Demas and Paula Janis (Carole had the dirty blond hair; Paula was the brunette), sang songs, read jokes from the Chuckle Patch, and talked to Sherlock the squirrel puppet. Very trippy, but very entertaining.

Former New York City teachers, Carole and Paula originally met at Brooklyn’s Midwood High School. They still perform together, and DVDs of the original show are now available. 

Brooklyn: the borough with its own holiday

If you notice lots of school-age kids roaming the streets on Thursday, chalk it up to the day off all city students get on the first Thursday in June.

Why the holiday? It’s a relic that originated way back in the 1820s as Anniversary Day (or Rally Day), which commemorated the formation of the Brooklyn Sunday School Union. Hey, Brooklyn didn’t earn its nickname, City of Churches, for being secular.

Campfire girls in middy blouses march down Bedford Avenue in honor of Brooklyn Day, around 1920.

For decades, the holiday was celebrated in Brooklyn, officially becoming Brooklyn Day in 1905. Tens of thousands of Brooklynites paraded all over the borough every year, carrying banners and listening to politicians expound on the importance of God, religion, and freedom.

By 1959, the holiday was broadened to Brooklyn-Queens Day; Queens Sunday Schools had been having parades of their own all along. In 2006 it became a day off for students in all five boroughs.

Congratulations to the class of 1916

Queens had only been part of New York City for 18 years when these seniors, from Long Island City’s William C. Bryant High School, earned their diplomas.

Most of the girls—with names like Agnes, Anna, and Frances—are wearing comfy middy blouses, the must-have fashion trend of the teens. The boys—several Williams and Georges—are stuck in suits.

Taking a field trip back to the 1970s

There’s just something about a mid-1970s class picture—the kids are so adorably goofy in those wide collars and bright colors, you can’t not look. 

Before it began billing itself as “The Greenwich Village School,” it was plain-old P.S. 41 on West 11th Street and Sixth Avenue. And in the cash-strapped 1970s, a kindergarten class with 32 kids and one teacher was perfectly acceptable.