Some of the faces carved into city buildings are beautiful and peaceful. Others, like these, seem pained and distressed. What’s the story behind their expressions and why they’re paired up? If only we knew.
In the West Village, this man and woman are locked in a gloomy stare:
Troubled spirits East of Union Square:
On the facade of the Camelot, a tenement in the South Bronx, these two have never actually seen each other:
Dr. Suess isn’t known as a political cartoonist, yet he created hundreds of posters and cartoons reflecting his opposition to fascism and isolationism as well as his support of President Roosevelt during World War II.
He wasn’t a New Yorker, but one political cartoon from 1941 poked fun at the corrupt Tammany political machine that controlled New York City politcs from the late 1800s to the 1930s and 1940s.
That Tammany cat looks kinda familiar, no? Picture him with a tall top hat.
The Tammany Society (reportedly named after Tamenend, a Lenape Indian leader) built the first Tammany Hall on 14th Street, then relocated to a new structure on 17th Street and Union Square East.
The new Tammany Hall didn’t get much use though; by the 1930s, with the election of reform-minded Mayor LaGuardia, among other factors, Tammany’s influence weakened. In 1984, the second Tammany Hall building became an off-Broadway theater still standing today.
Here it is in the 1920s:
There’s not much to admire about today’s city street sign; it does its job—namely, letting you know where you are—without much artistry or design.
But judging by some late-1800s photos, street signs used to be more ornate and had a few Victorian touches, as this 14th Street and Fifth Avenue picture reveals:
By the early 1900s, it looks like the Victorian flourishes have disappeared, at least on this sign on Fifth Avenue and 45th Street:
In the 1960s and 1970s, street signs were downgraded to simple rectangles on an unadorned post painted dark yellow. Occasionally you can still find one that hasn’t been replaced by the more contemporary brown or green sign.
This one at Union Square still stands; somehow it escaped the Department of Transportation sign-changing squad:
Sometimes street signs contain spelling errors, like this one here. It was fixed a few days after the misspelled sign was put up last April, but jeez, Mercer is not a hard one to get right!
Back in the days when trains criss-crossed the city on elevated tracks, riders must have gotten quite a rush at certain steep curves—some as high as 100 feet off the ground.
Angel’s Curve, also known as Suicide Curve, was part of the Ninth Avenue El at 110th Street, where the tracks swerved from Ninth to Eighth Avenue. Here’s an 1886 photo:
Another serpentine curve, shown in this late-1800s photo, was located downtown at Coenties Slip just before the East River. The tracks were part of the Third Avenue El:
Dead Man’s Curve, at Broadway and 14th Street, never leaves the ground, but it looks like a fairly exhilarating turn for streetcar riders. The 1897 woodcut below shows how dangerous it was for pedestrians.
The streetcars are gone, but it’s still a tricky intersection to cross.
It happened in September 1882 (on a Tuesday, actually); thousands of workers marched from Fifth Avenue to Union Square, where picnics, fireworks, and rallies were held, all in support of an 8-hour workday.
Beginning in 1894, the first Monday of September was designated ”National Labor Day,” a date set by President Grover Cleveland.
Labor Day weekend didn’t always mean last chance for a summer beach vacation; an annual parade occurred in the city every year for decades, and thousands of New Yorkers marched or came out in support. The parade was cancelled several times in the 1980s, then called off again in 2002 in honor of the victims of September 11.
Last year’s parade was KO’d as well, its popularity eclipsed in part by the massive West Indian Day parade in Brooklyn held the same weekend.
By Frederick Childe Hassam, 1890. That looks like Broadway and 14th Street behind the umbrella-wielding crowd. The painting belongs to the Museum of the City of New York.
Roscoe Conkling, isn’t that a great name? Conkling was a New York political fixture in the late 19th century, first as a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives and then later a member of the U.S. Senate. He was pro-Lincoln and pro-Grant in a city quite hostile to the Civil War.
Mr. Conkling’s statue sits at the southeastern corner of Madison Square Park. There’s significance for this: During the Blizzard of 1888, he decided to walk from his Wall Street office to his home on 24th Street. At Union Square, he fell in a snow drift, became ill, and died five weeks later.
His family asked the Parks Department to place the statue near where he fell in Union Square, but he wasn’t deemed important enough. Madison Square Park must have been for B-list New Yorkers.
Manhattan’s Fourth Avenue currently runs from Cooper Square in the East Village to Union Square, where it becomes the more sylvan-sounding Park Avenue South until 32nd Street.
But this valley of office buildings and manufacturing space wasn’t always so abbreviated. In the 1800s, Fourth Avenue stretched all the way to 42nd Street. In 1860, the road between 42nd and 32nd was renamed Park Avenue, so it would no longer be associated with the Fourth Avenue rail line that had just been diverted underground. It wasn’t until 1959 when the city council gave 32nd to 17th Streets the Park Avenue South moniker.
A few remnants of the old street name remain, such as this address on the corner of 23rd:
There’s also the Fourth Avenue Building, on East 27th Street, built in 1910:
