Prohibition-era New York’s favorite madam

Polly Adler was born in Russia in 1900 and immigrated to New York City when she was a teenager. But hers is no typical Ellis Island kind of story.

After toiling away in a Brooklyn corset factory, 24-year-old Adler found a more lucrative gig: supplying prostitutes, liquor, and an all-night party to top entertainers, politicians, and gangsters.

Adler created clubhouse-like brothels at different locations through the 1920s and 1930s. She ran a house of ill repute in the Majestic Apartments on Central Park West, as well as at other luxe addresses on the Upper East and Upper West Sides.

The famous and important of both sexes (Dorothy Parker was a regular) hung out and mingled. Mayor Jimmy Walker, Joe DiMaggio, and Dutch Schultz reportedly enjoyed the sexual services.

Adler was arrested more than a dozen times, exiting the madam business in the mid-1940s. She attended college, wrote her memoirs, and died in 1962 in Los Angeles.

Hunter College’s infamous “Axis Sally”

Small-town girl Mildred Gillars came to New York City to make it as an actress. But she wound up a household name for an entirely different line of work: Nazi radio propagandist. 

Born in 1900, she moved to the city in the 1920s, earning small parts in vaudeville shows and musical comedies. 

At some point she enrolled in Hunter College, then a single-sex school. There, the story goes, she began an affair with a professor-turned-Nazi who she followed to Berlin in the 1930s.

After World War II broke out in 1941, he convinced her to broadcast a regular show for Radio Berlin. Each broadcast attempted to demoralize U.S. soldiers stationed in Europe by implying that their families and government didn’t care about them.

Mildred was one of several “Axis Sallys,” the name given to women who spread propaganda for Germany, Italy, or Japan. Another Axis Sally was the daughter of midtown restauranteur Louis Zucca.

Once the war ended, Mildred was captured and brought back to the states for trial in 1948. Convicted of treason, she lived behind bars in West Virginia until being paroled in 1961. She died, with little fanfare, at 87.

Who watches you on the streets of New York

Faces and grotesques are all over the city’s buildings, smiling or frowning at passersby through the years. It’s rarer to see a full-length sculpted figure looking down from a tenement to the street below, which is why these two are so eye-catching.

The woman above, who adorns a tenement on a Lexington Avenue corner in the 80s, looks like Botticelli’s Venus flipped around—with the shell on her head instead of at her feet. Her hand clutches what looks like a weapon, not her hair.

Partly obscured by the support bracket of an old fire escape, this figure, on a West Fourth Street and 10th Street walkup, strikes roughly the same pose. I wonder what is at its feet.

Manhattan on the small screen

As fans of Diff’rent Strokes and The Jeffersons know, modern, Upper East Side high-rise apartment buildings symbolized luxe living in the late 1970s.

If you could call one of these behemoths home, it showed that you had really made it.

The Jeffersons‘ building, at left, was at 185 East 85th Street, off Third Avenue. Remember George and Weezy bounding out of that checker cab and into the lobby in the opening credits? 

Arnold and Willis Jackson moved into the penthouse in the building below, 900 Park Avenue, to live with soon-to-be adoptive father Mr. Drummond. The circular driveway the limo lets them off at in the opening credits is a lot smaller in real life.

The Upper East Side high-rise went out of style by the 1980s—as a place to stage a TV show, that is. Sitcoms like The Cosby Show (10 St. Luke’s Place) and Kate and Allie (somewhere in the Village), took place in cozy brownstones.

What Nellie Bly found on Blackwell’s Island

Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in Pennsylvania in 1864, journalist Nellie Bly (she adopted the pen name because at the time, women reporters didn’t use their real names) moved to New York in 1887.

Broke but brave, the 23-year-old convinced New York World editors to let her investigate conditions at the city lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island, now Roosevelt Island. 

Bly feigned insanity and instantly got herself committed. She spent 10 days there before the World was able to get her released.

In a subsequent series of articles, she reported that the food was inedible, nurses often picked on and physically abused residents, and that many were sane but either couldn’t speak English or were left there by husbands who didn’t want them. And doctors couldn’t care less.

“The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat trap,” she wrote. “It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out.”

Bly later published her articles in a book, Ten Days in a Mad-House. The asylum, with its famous (and still existent) circa-1830s octagon tower, was closed. Mentally ill New Yorkers were then sent to a new facility on nearby Ward’s Island. 

Bly became a sensation, embarking on an international career as a journalist. She died in 1922 and is buried in the Bronx’s Woodlawn Cemetery. 

Old signs that feature old phone exchanges

Sutton Clock Shop, on Lexington and 61st Street, has been around for more than 60 years. Why install a more modern sign that features the numerical phone number when this old-school sign is so charming?

PL stood for Plaza, perhaps the Plaza Hotel on 59th and Fifth.

This hand-painted Michael Rizzo & Son sign points to a basement office on a brownstone on West 12th Street in the West Village. Wonder how they ended up with an OR exchange—for Orchard Street?

Where was Nathan Hale really hanged?

A 13-foot statue of Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale stands tall in City Hall Park. Yet no one seems to know for sure where he was actually executed for spying on the British.

There are two competing locations. A plaque posted on a Banana Republic store at Third Avenue and 66th Street claims that the 21-year-old American spy was strung up on a gallows within 100 yards of that site on September 22, 1776.

The information comes from a British Officer’s diary, which stated that the hanging occurred at “the Royal Artillery Park near the Dove Tavern at the old Post Road, now Third Avenue. . . .”

But there’s another plaque, on East 44th Street and Vanderbilt Avenue, that says this is the location of Hale’s execution and that the “British Artillery Park” existed here.

The building the plaque (below) is affixed to belongs to the Yale Club. Hale was a Yale graduate, class of 1773.

 

North Brother Island’s tragic past

North Brother Island is a 13-acre spit of land in the East River, between the Bronx and Riker’s Island. Unlike bigger Roosevelt Island nearby, it’s never been developed.

But it has been inhabited by people—sick people. Acquired by the city in 1885, officials built Riverside Hospital (at right) there, a place to quarantine New Yorkers who suffered from potentially deadly and easily communicable diseases such as typhus and smallpox. It also housed drug addicts until the 1960s.

North Brother’s most famous resident? Mary Mallon, aka Typhoid Mary. The Irish immigrant cook, a carrier of typhus, was committed there in 1908 and died 30 years later. 

The island has another connection to a tragic New York event: the General Slocum disaster. After this steamship caught fire near the island in 1904, hundreds of passengers—mostly German immigrant women and children enjoying an annual church boat trip—jumped into the East River to escape the flames.

The General Slocum finally beached on North Brother, and many passenger bodies washed up on its shore. All told, an estimated 1,021 people perished—the greatest loss of life in New York City until the September 11th terrorist attacks.

Today North Brother is inhabited mainly by birds; it’s a protected bird sanctuary. The latest episode of the web-only PBS show The City Concealed can take you there.

The enchanting Secret Garden fountain

Inside Central Park’s beautiful Conservatory Garden, at 104th Street and Fifth Avenue, is this sweet depiction of the two main characters from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1909 children’s classic The Secret Garden. 

The fountain and sculpture, by Bessie Potter Vonnoh, were designed as the centerpiece of a storytelling area in the Conservatory’s south garden, ringed by flowers, shrubs, and other blooms. It’s meant to memorialize Burnett, who died in 1924.

“New York’s most famous Bavarian Restaurant”

Well, maybe it used to be. Original Maxl’s served up old-fashioned heavy-on-the-beer-and-schnitzel fare on East 86th Street, when this was the main drag of German Yorkville. 

I’m not sure when it opened and can’t find anything pinpointing when it closed, but I don’t recall ever seeing a cabin-like facade on 86th Street. I’m pretty sure it’s a high-rise now.

A restaurant guide published in 1931, Dining in New York, has this account:

“Don’t even think of missing Maxl’s. It is a restaurant, a night club, an experience all rolled up in one and seasoned with frequent renditions of ‘Schnitzelbank.’ From the outside, Maxl’s is a peaceful German cottage, vine-hung, cozy, and inviting. The inside is something else again.

“There is a stringy three-piece orchestra, which stops every other moment to drink and sing a toast to each newcomer—an orchestra with a temperamental leader, who insists on grinding out well-known German ditties and resents all verbal college-boy intrusions. . . .

“. . . and there is ‘Happy,’ a 300-pound play-boy who, dressed up in knee pads and alpine hat reminiscent of a Swiss yodeler, knows all the words of all the songs.”