An 1880s shooting gallery on St. Mark’s Place

No, not that kind—an actual shooting gallery.

It’s a remnant of Kleindeutschland, the “Little Germany” that encompassed the East Village from the 1840s through the early 1900s.

The shooting gallery was at 12 St. Mark’s Place, east of Third Avenue. A bas relief carved into the facade gives away the building’s original purpose: it depicts an eagle, crossed guns, and a symbolic target, with the words Einigkeit Macht Stark (“unity is strength”) carved above.

This was the home of the Deutsch-Amerikanische Schuetzen Gesellschaft, or German American Shooting Society.

Built in 1888, it housed a saloon, lodge rooms, bowling alley, and a small shooting range in the basement (club members did most of the actual shooting in Queens).

“By the 1880s, shooting became a middle class pastime, and most halls had moved to the suburbs along with many residents of Kleindeutschland,” states a Landmarks Preservation Committee report.

“However, the German-American Shooting Society Clubhouse remained an important link to the old neighborhood despite the migration.”

“It served as a headquarters for meetings of twenty-four such groups, and was the site of fund-raisers for the construction of rifle ranges and travel to Germany for international shooting contests.”

The Shooting Society owned it until 1920, and in subsequent decades, it served as a Ukrainian Culture Center and St. Mark’s Bookshop.

Today it’s a yoga studio . . . of course!

[Top photo: King's Handbook of New York City, 1890s]

What took the place of Ebbets Field after 1957

Everyone knows the story: At the end of the 1957 baseball season, the Dodgers moved out of their Crown Heights ballpark and decamped to Los Angeles.

But the 45-year-old stadium on Bedford Avenue didn’t sit empty.

It was used by semipro leagues and college teams before the wrecking ball, painted to resemble a baseball, finally arrived in February 1960.

Following two years of construction, the Ebbets Field Apartments—beige, monolith buildings rising 20 stories—opened to the public as rentals.

The apartments are still there, looking worn. And somewhere on the property this plaque also exists, a small commemoration of the fabled ballpark that opened 100 years ago this month.

Ebbets Field wasn’t the only city stadium to get the ugly apartment building makeover. The Polo Grounds, former home of the New York Giants, is now the Polo Grounds Towers, a public housing complex.

One small, faded plaque marks the former site of home base.

Madison Square Garden moves to Eighth Avenue

This 1930ish postcard shows what was then the “new” Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue and 49th Street.

It’s the third incarnation of New York’s iconic arena, and the first one located no where near Madison Square.

It moved here in 1925, and for the next four decades hosted boxing matches, circuses, rodeos, Billy Graham revivals, ice shows, and of course the Rangers and the Knicks.

Was this a good place to watch a game? It looks awfully cramped and crowded from outside.

In 1968 the Garden moved again, this time to its current home at 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue. In its place we have the office tower Worldwide Plaza, which looks strangely similar to the old MSG.

Some great old photos of the Garden and its very cool marquee can be found at Wired New York.

A WPA poster advertising a Queens roller rink

This WPA poster, part of a collection of posters digitized by the Library of Congress, must have been created in the early 1940s.

That’s because the New York City Building didn’t exist before the 1939 World’s Fair.

“After the World’s Fair, the building became a recreation center for the newly created Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The north side of the building, now the Queens Museum, housed a roller rink and the south side offered an ice rink,” the Queens Museum of Art website explains.

Julian’s: an old-school pool hall in Union Square

When the 1920s theater at 138 East 14th Street bit the dust in 1997, more was lost than just the Palladium nightclub, which had occupied the space in the 1980s.

On the second floor was the cavernous Julian Billiard Academy, run since 1933 by the Julian family but operating as a pool hall since 1916. Until Julian’s shut its doors in 1991, it was New York’s oldest billiards room and once one of hundreds across the city.

“Old school” is the way ex-customers describe it. Like the rest of this stretch of East 14th Street, it was slightly seedy but safe, attracting “students, actors, businessmen, and bums” and providing “safe harbor at most hours of the night and morning.”

What brought it down? High rent, of course. According to a New York Times article, it went from $300 a month in 1933 to $6,000 in 1987.

”I don’t know what I will do when my lease is up in four years,” the 53-year-old owner [Ron (Julian) Hickers] said as he looked out the window at a luxury apartment building rising across East 14th Street. ”I may just hang it up and go to Florida.”

Today, 138 East 14th Street is the site of NYU’s Palladium Hall dorm.

Here’s a link to a terrific grunge-era photo of the entrance of Julian’s, from a blog called The Devil Wears.

[Top photo: Courtesy Warehouse Magazine]

Where home plate once was at the Polo Grounds

The bathtub-shaped stadium known as the Polo Grounds, on Eighth Avenue and 155th Street in Harlem, met the wrecking ball in 1963 (here it is being dismantled at right).

In its place, the city built the Polo Grounds Towers, a public-housing complex with four 30-story red-brick buildings.

Maybe these projects were okay in 1968, but today, they’re as isolated and decrepit as the Polo Grounds were crowded and inspiring.

Inside the complex is one small reminder of the location’s former glory: a very faded plaque affixed to one of the red-brick buildings.

The plaque commemorates the Polo Grounds—home not just to the Giants but also the Yankees in the 1910s and the pre-Shea Stadium Mets in the early 1960s.

It’s supposedly placed at the approximate location of home plate, where greats like Willie Mays scored runs and Bobby Thompson hit his “shot heard round the world” in 1951.

The plaque is rusted and old—a faded bit of New York baseball history, like this secret staircase that once led to the Polo Grounds.

The incredible life of New York’s “strongest boy”

Born in 1910, Jack Beers’ early years echo a familiar East Side story.

His Austrian immigrant parents were desperately poor. His family shared a cold water flat on East Sixth Street, heating it with bits of coal that had fallen off trucks. Jack pitched in by hawking the Daily News on Avenue B.

But he was also entranced by bodybuilding. Blessed with incredible natural strength, he began training in Tompkins Square Park and later on Coney Island.

As a teenager, he performed as a strongman in city clubs and on vaudeville stages, earning local fame and the title “New York City’s Strongest Boy.”

His story is chronicled in the 2006 documentary Holes in My Shoes, which features Jack, then 94, talking about his life and revisiting his old East Side haunts.

After a hand injury at a pool hall ended his strongman career, he went to work at Fassler Iron Works on East 10th Street and helped build New York’s top skyscrapers. He trained dogs and later became a character actor.

As the trailer from Holes in My Shoes shows, Beers retained amazing power even as a very senior citizen—watch him rip a phone book apart with his bare hands. He died a few days short of his 99th birthday.

[Photo: Holes in My Shoes]

The “Boy Mayor” who cleaned up city politics

Sworn in when he was just 34, reformist John Purroy Mitchel became New York’s second-youngest mayor ever in 1914.

His age set him apart from his predecessors—as did his mission: to get rid of the corruption that had infiltrated city politics since Tammany rule in the 1800s.

“While in office Mitchel cut waste, improved accounting practices, and worked to professionalize the city’s civil service by standardizing salaries and work guidelines for municipal employees,” explains Columbia University (Mitchel was part of the class of 1899.)

He also cut police graft and created the first zoning laws, and four years later ran a reelection campaign that endorsed a national draft.

Tammany bosses were determined to beat him in 1917, and he was defeated by Tammany-backed John Hylan.

After losing the election, he enlisted in the Air Service and prepped to fight in World War I. On a training mission in Louisiana in 1918, he fell from his plane and was killed.

[Above: Mitchel throwing out the first pitch at the Polo Grounds in 1916]

Mitchel was memorialized all over the metro area: two flagstaffs in Bryant Park, Mitchel Air Force Base in Long Island, and this plaque at the entrance to the Central Park Reservoir.

[Photo: centralparknyc.org]

Madison Square Park: where baseball was born

Cooperstown, New York has traditionally been credited as the birthplace of baseball.

Hoboken also vies for the honor; the first professional game was played there.

But some historians say the southwest corner of Madison Square Park (right, in 1860) is where America’s pastime got its mid-19th century start.

“Our modern game of baseball was born in New York City in 1845,” writes Lynn Curlee, author of Ballpark: The Story of America’s Baseball Fields.

“A 25-year-old clerk named Alexander J. Cartwright organized a group of his friends as the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. Taking elements from older games, the young men developed a set of written rules, many of which still stand today.”

Still called the Knickerbocker rules, they establish the nine-inning game and mandate the ball should be pitched, not thrown, among other things.

Cartwright and his Knickerbockers practiced the game according to these new rules in and around the park, specifically Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street and then the Murray Hill Grounds at 34th Street and Park Avenue, making it the real birthplace of baseball in some eyes.

[Photo: The Knickerbockers and Excelsior clubs in 1858, from the NYPL Digital Collection]

The city park built to hide a sewage plant

Okay, so massive smokestacks loom on top of a platform surrounded by lush trees and flowers.

But other than that, you might never know that Riverbank State Park, along the Hudson River in Harlem, masks an industrial secret.

The park’s expansive lawn, pools, and ball fields were built in the late 1980s on top of the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant, which handles 125 million gallons of sewage daily.

With so much waste flowing around the park, does it reek? Some residents complained of a rotten-egg odor when it opened in 1993, but the stench seems to have gone away.

Of course, there are other environmental risks—like fire. In 2011, a four-alarm blaze that started in the treatment plant sent 30-foot plumes of smoke into the air and forced park-goers to evacuate.

Aside from that, it’s a lovely, clean park with a fantastic view of the Hudson—one that’s worth the trip to 145th Street to see.

[Bottom photo: the park from New Jersey, via Wikipedia]