The squatters who lived in “Hardlucksville”

The 1930s were a pretty rough time. Unemployment hovered around 20 percent nationally, while the city’s poorest neighborhoods, like Harlem, had a 50 percent out-of-work rate.

Where did Depression-era New Yorkers go when they had no money to pay rent? Some moved into the city’s many squatter camps.

These makeshift villages, many with disturbingly accurate nicknames, sprang up citywide, according to a March 26, 1933 New York Times article.

One called “Hardlucksville” formed off 10th Street next to the East River (at left). Five men resided there, selling firewood culled from the river:

“The three of them saw up the wood into stove lengths. the two others peddle the product in the East Side streets, trundling it from door to door in baby carts reclaimed from the junk pile. Among the five they earn a half-dollar a day, and that supports them,” the Times reported.

Another squat, “Camp Thomas Paine,” was home to dozens of World War I veterans; they lived in shacks in the West 70s near the Hudson River. And “Packing Box City” (above) popped up on Houston Street.

Central Park had its own Hooverville as well. Read more about it here.

The Village Halloween Parade’s humble start

For years, it’s been a colossal spectacle, with deep crowds lining Sixth Avenue, thousands of marchers donning fantastically creative props and costumes, and live TV coverage capturing each moment.

Plus tons of cops, police barricades, drunken kids, and litter—lots of litter.

But in the early 1970s, the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade was more of a small-scale bit of street theater, a mile-long walk planned by a local mask-maker and pupeteer for his West Village neighbors.

The giant caterpillars of the 1998 parade, standing tall on Sixth Avenue

It started in the courtyard of Westbeth, the factory-turned-artist lofts on Bethune Street. From there, a few dozen revelers in masks and costumes—including a man in a lobster outfit and a two-headed pig—wandered along the Village’s side streets to Washington Square.

The parade’s popularity took off fast—as did the number of marchers and viewers. By 1984, the parade grew so massive, the route had to be relocated to Sixth Avenue from Spring Street to 22nd Street to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of people who came to the Village to see it.

New York is a hell of a town

More than a few city neighborhoods currently or used to start with “Hell.” Hell’s Kitchen is the most famous—and enduring. (C’mon, does anyone really call it Clinton?)

The nabe’s moniker but it may have first been used in the late 1800s to describe the revolting slums and ferocious gangs in the West 30s and 40s.

Hell Gate is the name of the once-dangerous tidal strait separating Astoria from Randall’s Island. It’s also a lovely bridge that connects these two land masses across the East River.

Was Hell Gate once the name of the neighborhood on the Manhattan side of the East River too? I’m not sure, but maybe—there’s a Hell Gate Station post office on East 110th Street.

And let’s not forget the fantastically named Hell’s Hundred Acres, a gritty term for pre-1970s Soho. The beautiful cast-iron buildings that today house million-dollar lofts were used for decades as warehouses and manufacturing sites. 

Safety codes weren’t followed and the buildings allowed to deteriorate, so they often went up in flames—hence the nickname. This photo documents a 1958 fire in a Wooster Street factory that killed six firefighters. Hell’s Hundred Acres indeed.

An escort service’s 1980s New Wave ad

Ads for escort agencies based in New York City never seem to feature women who actually look like they live in New York City. But this vintage-1980s ad, for an outfit called Flash, is different.

Published in a March 1982 issue of the Soho News, it features a trendy, New Wave kind of chick, the sort of girl found in downtown indie classic Smithereens. 

No bikinis or breast implants—instead, these escorts come to your Tribeca loft decked out in geometric earrings and white plastic sunglasses.

Phone number blocked out to protect the Manhattan resident who has this number now.

Peeling back layers of downtown store signs

When a shop goes out of business, there’s a short yet sweet window of time during which the defunct store’s sign is down . . . and the ghost sign from a long-ago shop becomes visible. For a few days to a few weeks, you get this tiny glimpse into the city’s recent past.

Like Reisman’s Ladieswear at 226 East 14th Street. Not too many signs advertise “cut rate” clothing anymore:

Lafayette French Pastry, on Bleecker Street in the West Village, looks like it was a charming place to get a chocolate eclair in the 1960s. They moved over to Greenwich Avenue and West 10th several years ago:

I wonder what Richman, at 300 Canal Street, sold:

If the sign advertised a product or service, we’ll never know; it’s hidden behind a red blotch.

A glimpse into Soho’s manufacturing past

This remarkably well-preserved three-story faded ad was put up by a box company on Spring and Wooster Streets—a nice reminder that Soho was once a manufacturing neighborhood with many small factories. Note the great old phone exchange CA 6-7390.

What happened to the box factory? Probably turned into condos. A little research shows that there was a box company at 73 Wooster Street. Shut down in the mid ’90s, it was renovated into multimillion-dollar loft condos within a few years.

A guide to narcotics in the East Village, 1982

The Soho News, a weekly paper that covered downtown from 1973 to 1982, ran some news briefs about East Village smack shops and drug dealing titled “Alphabet City Soup” in their March 16, 1982 issue.

It included this informative guide to the most popular brands of cocaine and heroin available between Avenues A and D at the time. 

A New York cop shot by the Mafia in Italy

Born in Salerno, Italy, in 1860, Giuseppe “Joseph” Petrosino joined the New York Police Department in 1883. He is the only New York cop killed in the line of duty on foreign soil.

Petrosino grew up in Little Italy. Fluent in many Italian dialects, he rose through the NYPD ranks quickly, earning a promotion to detective in 1895 and then founding the NYPD bomb squad to thwart Mafia bombings. 

After another promotion, to lieutenant, in 1908, Petrosino was put in charge of the Italian Squad, an elite group of detectives who handled mob-related crimes. On his watch, thousands of arrests were made, and crimes against Italians dropped by half.

In March 1909 he went to Palermo, Sicily, on a top-secret investigation. Mobsters in the U.S. would not kill a policeman. But in Palermo, things were different. Lured into a meeting with a supposed informant, Petrosino was shot dead.

Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers attended his funeral; the procession went from Little Italy to Calvary Cemetery in Queens. In 1987, Kenmare Square, on Lafayette Street, was renamed Joseph Petrosino Square. 

Comics and zines for sale in SoHo

Remember zines? They had quite a heyday in the late 80s and 90s.

I’ve seen this place spelled Sohozat and SoHo Zat. Either way, it was a comics emporium in the late 70s and 80s on West Broadway and Grand.

The ad comes from the August 1984 issue of the East Village Eye. 

Whatever happened to Verrazano Street?

Giovanni da Verrazzano (he spelled it with two z’s) already has a bridge named after him. But a West Village street also was set to take his name in the 1940s—except the city never got around to building it.

 Verrazano Street (with one z, for some reason) would have run from Seventh Avenue South to Sixth Avenue and Houston Street, slicing through bits of Downing, Bedford, and Carmine Streets.

It was supposed to be an entryway to the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a Robert Moses–proposed superhighway that would have connected the Holland Tunnel to The Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges. 

The city was all set to build it; Verrazano Street even made it on to city maps in the ensuing years. But when the Lower Manhattan Expressway met fierce community opposition in the 1960s, the city abandoned the idea . . . and Verrazano Street as well, officially de-mapping it in 1969.