Grotesque readers at a Gramercy public school

I love the Gothic entrance to P.S. 47, a city school on East 23rd Street that serves both deaf and hearing students and also goes by the name The American Sign Language and English Secondary School.

The facade features gargoyles and vaguely Medieval-looking figures in hoods and cloaks. It’s all a little Harry Potter-esque, which should charm the students who attend.

But my favorites are the two figures flanking a doorway to the left of the main entrance, each figure holding open books in spindly hands.

 

The figures don’t resemble kids, but I’m not sure who they are supposed to be or represent.

They appear to be reading aloud, yet they’re a little too creepy-looking to be teachers!

Here’s another literature-loving grotesque, from a building at the City College campus in the 130s.

What did NYU frat boys look like in the 1890s?

Meet the bros from Psi Upsilon fraternity, posing in their house at the college’s University Heights campus in the Bronx in 1897.

The photo comes from a fascinating historical timeline on New York University’s website.

A bong (or a hookah pipe?), goofy hats, experiments in facial hair—they don’t look that different from the NYU students flocking to downtown pubs and dive bars today!

Stained glass beauty inside an 18th Street school

From the outside, the Bayard Rustin “educational complex”on 18th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenue looks like a fortress.

Built in 1930 as The Straubenmuller Textile High School, it’s an imposing structure that doesn’t appear to be very inviting.

Walk into the massive lobby, though, and you’ll notice something really imaginative only students and teachers get to see: two enormous, richly detailed stained glass windows.

Each window has different panels depicting students learning grammar, music, math, history, and other subjects even high school students at a technical school like this one were once expected to know.

There are also scenes from ancient Greek and Medieval legends. The phrase “Thou gavest thy good spirit to instruct them” runs along the bottom.

They’re not the only examples of art hiding in the building.

Painted on all four lobby walls are murals of great civilizations—including workers putting together steel beams high above the 1930s Manhattan skyline.

Painted by WPA muralist Jean Charlot, they’re a bit faded, and worth a look (better ask school security officers first though—they have their eye on you.)

Music and theater on East 10th Street in the ’80s

If you found yourself looking for entertainment in the East Village 30 years ago, you might have ended up at the Limbo Lounge, described as a “gallery and performance space; serves refreshments” in this 1984 New York cover story on the newly hip Lower East Side.

This is where campy cult play Vampire Lesbians of Sodom got its start in 1984, two years before the Limbo Lounge closed.

Then there’s 350 East 10th Street, the former PS 64, decommissioned as a school and used for years as a performance space for community groups, artists, and musicians.

Rockers, rappers, breakers, and scratchers—and local punk band 3 Teens Kill 4, wonderfully named after a New York Post headline! Both ads come from the May 1983 issue of the East Village Eye.

A 1970s class picture from a West Village school

In the broke New York City of the 1970s, P.S. 41, on West 11th Street, was a lot rougher than it is today.

Parental involvement was minimal. Big yellow school buses, not nannies, ferried kids back and forth from their homes in the Village, Soho, and Lower East Side.

It wasn’t uncommon to have your brown-bagged lunch stolen and eaten by a hungry classmate before you got to it. And 30 kids to a class with one teacher? Totally normal.

One thing probably hasn’t changed though: class pictures are always pretty goofy. What became of these first graders from 1975, who are now in their early 40s?

City signs that should have been spell-checked

New York street signs are a fascination of this website—very old signs and wonderfully ornate ones in particular.

But misspelled signs are fun too, like this one an Ephemeral reader sent over. It comes from Robert Wagner Middle School on East 76th Street. Hopefully it kept all the “loiters” away . . . .

City sign makers have put up some other fails in recent years. My favorite is this street sign from 2008 that was briefly installed in front of the Angelika Film Center on West Houston. Merser Street?

Another gem is this, um, Bleeker Street subway station sign, from May 2007, caught by a blogger at debcentral.com.

I’m assuming it’s been fixed since then, but who knows?

Gothamist has a fun compilation of other bastardizations and typos here.

Stars who started out at Seward Park High School

I wonder why so many famous actors and entertainers attended the Lower East Side’s Seward Park High School?

Among its alumni: Walter Matthau, Jerry Stiller, Zero Mostel, Estelle Getty, Tony Curtis (then known as Bernard Schwartz), Sammy Cahn, Aida Turturro, Keenan Ivory Wayans, and former Black News host Bill McCreary.

Opened in 1905 as P.S. 62 and renamed Seward Park Junior High, it evolved into a senior high school in the 1920s.

In 1929, the current school building went up on the Lower East Side block bounded by Essex, Broome, Grand, and Ludlow Streets—a few blocks from the actual Seward Park.

The school and park were named for William H. Seward, the former New York senator who served as secretary of state in the Lincoln administration . . . and was almost assassinated along with his boss.)

Seward Park won’t be producing any more notable alumni. The school graduated its last class in 2006, and the building now houses several smaller schools and academies, none of which are named after any New York politicians or landmarks.

This Brooklyn high school has also enrolled its share of future celebs.

A last remaining mansion on Riverside Drive

When megabucks lawyer Isaac L. Rice built his four-story Georgian-Beaux Arts residence (below, in a NYPL photo) there in 1903, Riverside Drive was supposed to eclipse Fifth Avenue as the city’s most luxurious place to live.

That didn’t quite happen, though Riverside Drive certainly had its share of opulent homes—especially the 30 or so free-standing mansions that used to line the street.

Today, only two remain. One is the Rice mansion on 89th Street, across from the Soldiers and Sailors monument overlooking the Hudson River.

Called Villa Julia after Rice’s wife, the red brick, white marble mansion was spectacular in its day.

The entrance, on 89th Street, featured a two-story stone arch, and the grounds had a reflecting pool and colannaded garden.

Inside, Rice built himself a chess room—he was an avid fan of the game.

The Rices didn’t live there very long. They decamped in 1907 for the new Ansonia apartment building on 74th Street.

In 1954, the mansion was bought by a Yeshiva, which still owns it today.

It’s a bit shabby and not as impeccably maintained as it could be, but it’s still a lovely reminder of how the superrich lived in New York more than 100 years ago.

The sad remains of a Harlem grammar school

Public School 186 was a gorgeous Italian Renaissance–style school on 145th Street off Broadway.

There it is, with wide windows and a courtyard, circa 1920 in the photo (courtesy of the NYPL Digital Collection) on the right, just 17 years after opening.

Here it is today, a ruin so dilapidated, trees grow out of the second floor windows and trash mars the courtyard where generations of kids used to play.

A weathered wrought-iron fence tops the original cement barrier between the school and the street.

P.S. 186 is in shocking condition—but how did it get this way?

The city closed the school in 1975; the building changed hands until it was bought (for $215,000!) by the Boys and Girls Club of Harlem in 1986.

The club did nothing with it, letting it fall into disrepair until finally signing on with a developer in 2009 to help turn it into a community center, low-cost housing, and possibly another school, according to a New York Times article from 2010.

Scaffolding on the outside hints that P.S. 186 may finally be getting its makeover.

Nathan Kensinger has incredible photos of the outside and interior of the ghostly, eerie school, taken in 2009.

A look at New York University’s class of 1932

Born around 1910, these seniors were little kids during World War I, teenagers in the booming but dry 1920s, and then had the misfortune to earn their degrees during the worst economic climate in the history of the nation (hmm, sound familiar?).

A look through their yearbook, The Album, reveals that they were mostly from the New York area (NYU was a commuter school back then) and of Jewish, Italian, and Irish backgrounds.

Their commencement address, delivered at the Bronx campus (NYU’s main campus at the time) also strikes a familiar note. School chancellor Ellsworth Brown, cautioned students about “bow[ing] down in the worship of the dollar”:

“Our economic safeguard . . . is to be found in new standards of life, in a regenerated scale of values and in the spiritual aspirations of mankind,” the chancellor told them.

A few could still be alive today. I hope they had good lives.