Whatever happened to Manhattan’s 13th Avenue?

It’s true, there really once was a 13th Avenue on Manhattan’s West Side—built on landfill in the 1830s starting at about 11th Street and going to 25th Street. Here’s part of it on an 1899 map from the New York Public Library digital collection.

It seemed to exist as a dreary access road to shipping piers, ferry terminals, dumping grounds, and factories, according to several articles in the New York Times archive.

“There are no sidewalks to speak of on Thirteenth-avenue and no surface indications of pavements,” one 1886 article reported. “A foot path winds through it, showing the course pedestrians take to dodge the deeper mud holes in wet weather.”

An 1883 story reported, “[Thirteenth Avenue] begins in a very humble and unpretentious way, but during its brief course of about a dozen blocks it gradually improves in width and general appearance.

“Unfortunately, however, at the very point where it begins to promise great things, and the casual pedestrian feels inclined to fancy it, the avenue ends abruptly in a high board fence, which proves an impassable barrier to all except the most accomplished acrobats.”

The article goes on to describe some of the people who hung around 13th Avenue: Italian immigrant women who pick through trash, night watchmen, and lumbermen.

Exactly when 13th Avenue was de-mapped for good is a mystery.

Old-school subway signage

The MTA should bring back some of these vintage posts and signs—they’re such a cool throwback to old New York. These lantern-like beacons guard the Fifth Avenue and 59th Street station:

Vintage signage on the New York Life building, on Park Avenue South—important enough to have its own subway entrance. Interborough Rapid Transit is today’s 4, 5, and 6 line.

I hope the MTA does not replace or tidy up this weathered, slightly rusted subway post, in Inwood:

The East River waterfront, 1906

Here is bustling, turn of the century Lower Manhattan, before skyscrapers. The Woolworth Building won’t be built for another seven years. The Williamsburg Bridge is just three years old; the Manhattan Bridge is three years away.

Shipping is still the lifeblood of the city, and probably no one can imagine that South Street will be just a tourist attraction before the century is over.

Things look dark, packed, and coated in grime. But the city radiates excitement and beauty.

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.

The rats of the Graybar Building

New York City buildings are decorated with images of horses, goats, elephants, birds, even squirrels. But only on the Graybar Building, an office tower next to Grand Central Terminal, will you find rats.

Yep, three cast-metal rats are depicted climbing above the building’s entrance at 420 Lexington Avenue.

So why rats? It’s not clear, but the architects who built the tower in the 1920s seem to be depicting the cone-shaped objects attached to mooring lines of ships that deterred rats from getting on board.

Or maybe it’s some kind of commentary on the rat race of professionals who ply their trades in office buildings like the Graybar every day.

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.

A look at the old East 18th Street subway station

This vintage postcard sheds some light on the 18th Street station on the Lexington Avenue line—one of the original IRT stations that opened in 1904. It’s been closed since 1948 after the 14th Street-Union Square platform was lengthened.

Though the MTA has made 18th Street and other abandoned stations off-limits since 9/11, you still can catch a glimpse of it if you take the 6 train and look really hard out the window.

The station walls are dark and graffiti-covered, but it’s not hard to see the old columns and staircases—ghostly reminders of different periods in the city’s past.

A crowd forms on Sixth Avenue and 14th Street

“Ashcan School” artist John Sloan really had a thing for the Sixth Avenue El. Several of his paintings depict the El at Third Street or Eighth Street; Jefferson Market Courthouse can often be seen in the distance.

Here he highlights the next stop on the El, at 14th Street. It’s still a major shopping crossroads. Currently a Starbucks and Urban Outfitters occupy the Southeast corner, past the “Shoes” marquee in the painting.

The building across the street with the pointed turret is still there. Down toward Seventh Avenue looms the Salvation Army headquarters, also still in existence.

Madison Square Garden on the move

Ever wonder why it’s called Madison Square Garden—when it’s not near Madison Square? 

The current Garden, on 33rd Street, is the fourth incarnation of New York’s premier sports and entertainment arena.

The first, at right, opened in 1879. Occupying an old railroad depot at Madison Avenue and 26th Street, it became a successful, 10,000-seat venue that featured boxing, bike racing, and ice hockey.

A decade later it was torn down. Famed architect Stanford White designed the second MSG in 1890, below left. This beautiful, 8,000-seat Moorish structure sported cupolas, arches, and a 32-story tower that made it the second tallest building in the city. 

 Madison Square Garden II’s rooftop restaurant became a chic place for New York’s Gilded Age elite to socialize. It’s also where White was murdered in 1906.

He was shot point-blank by Harry Thaw, the jealous husband of a teenage showgirl the 40-ish White had been having an affair with.

By 1925, White’s palace met the wrecking ball, and the third MSG was completed at 50th Street and Eighth Avenue. This arena was home to the Rangers, Knicks, and lots of boxing matches.

Outdated by the late sixties, it was replaced in 1968 by the fourth and current Garden, built on the hallowed grounds of the original Penn Station.

Greenwich Village’s legendary Grapevine Tavern

Back in the early to mid-19th century, when the Village really was a country village north of the main city, this quaint clapboard house became a tavern known as the Old Grapevine. 

Located on the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and 11th Street, it’s probably the first legendary Village bar. The Old Grapevine attracted artists, businessmen, Union officers, Southern spies, and politicians, who dropped by after visiting Jefferson Market Courthouse two blocks south.

It was such a gathering spot that the phrase “I heard it through the grapevine” originated there. (Yep, a grapevine used to cover the 11th Street side of the tavern.)

Its closing in 1915 merited the kind of nostalgic media coverage given to CBGB or the Cedar Tavern when they shut their doors:

“It was not only a place to warm the inner man with the fermented juice of the grape, malted beers, and fine musty ale, but a place where good fellows met, as in the more palatial clubs today, to match their wits, tell the latest story, and discuss in a friendly way the political destinies of the nation,” wrote The New York Times. 

Speaking of warming the inner man, one ex-owner was proud that he didn’t serve women.

“Never in my career have a sold a drink to a woman,” the Times quoted him. “No women were allowed in the place. It was no hang-out for roisterers. . . . From the day I went there in 1870 [it] was a gentleman’s cafe.”