Mysterious male names over tenement doorways

Ever notice that when a tenement building has a name, it tends to be female? Bertha, Florence, Rose, Sylvia—names popular at the turn of the last century, when so many tenements were built, are etched above doorways all over the city.

But a handful of tenements buck the trend and appear to be named for a man. Is it the developer himself, or just a random name that happen to appeal to circa-1900 ears?

I wonder if that’s the case with Jerome. It’s the name of a tenement in Morningside Heights, perhaps a nod to Leonard Jerome, a flashy 19th century financier whose name still graces a park and thoroughfare in the Bronx? He’s also the grandfather of Winston Churchill.

Theodore, on the Upper East Side, could be a tribute to Theodore Roosevelt. Or the builder’s son or brother?

The Roger, on 160th Street and Edgecombe Avenue in Washington Heights, is named for Roger Morris, a British army colonel who fought in the French and Indian War.

In the 1760s, he retired to an Upper Manhattan estate (now known as the Morris-Jumel Mansion) that still stands today.

I don’t know who Edgar was or why a tenement on West 125th Street was named for him. But instead of the name being carved above the door, it’s laid in tile on the floor.

Two more obsolete East Side phone exchanges

I love this ad for Gnome Bakers, especially the tagline. How unusual could their bread and rolls have been? It comes from a 1973 New York Mets program.

The best part is the old RE phone exchange, assigned to phone numbers from a part of the Upper East Side starting in 1930. It stood for Regent—perhaps the name of a landmark hotel or theater nearby?

A good place to look for old phone exchange signs around the city is near service elevators. This one was spotted in east midtown around 35th Street.

JU is either for Judson, in Manhattan, or Juniper, given to a stretch of Queens.

If we knew the name of the elevator company, we could figure out which one. But alas, no trace of the name could be found.

The car accident that could have changed history

At 10:30 p.m. on December 13, 1931, Winston Churchill was in a hurry.

In Manhattan on a lecture tour, the British statesman was late for a meeting with his friend, financier Bernard Baruch. Stepping into 76th Street, he made a potentially fatal mistake: He didn’t look both ways to see if a car was coming.

Unfortunately one was. The car dragged Churchill and then left him in the street.

The accident scored him eight days in Lenox Hill Hospital with a gash to the head, among other injuries (they gave him a prescription for medicinal alcohol—it was Prohibition, after all).

Churchill admitted the accident was his fault and arranged to meet the driver of the car that hit him, a jobless immigrant named Mario Contasino.

“Mrs. Churchill, hearing of the ill fortune of Contasino in his quest for work, suggested her readiness to help him financially. But when a member of the party proffered a check Mr. Contasino declined it,” wrote The New York Times.

Churchill’s injuries weren’t life-threatening, obviously.

But if he was killed on Fifth Avenue, and didn’t return to England to serve as prime minister during World War II, perhaps history would have taken a different course?

The bronze celestial globe in an East Side park

In a quiet, teardrop-shaped Clara Coffey Park in the East 50s is this curious sculpture.

It’s a sundial and an armillary sphere—an astronomical model showing the relationships among the principal celestial circles, the Parks Department explains.

The stone pedestal gives the four cardinal directions, and a bronze band is decorated with impressive images of each zodiac sign.

It’s a mystical and enchanting object installed here in 1971, and it can make an observer feel very small and inconsequential in the scheme of the universe.

The same sculptor is credited with this sundial in Central Park.

An East Side farm gives way to lovely row houses

Two centuries ago, a wealthy New Yorker named Adam Treadwell bought a 24-acre farm on Manhattan’s East Side, about where the East 60s are today.

When he died in 1852, his heirs inherited the property. Soon they began selling off small parcels to individual owners.

These new owners did something smart: they set up an agreement stipulating the height and width of the buildings they planned to put up, and they barred certain businesses from opening up there.

Their foresight leaves us with two breathtaking blocks mostly of four-story row houses built between 1868 to 1876, according to the document designating East 61st and 62nd Streets between Second and Third Avenues the Treadwell Farm Historic District.

The row houses were built in the French Second Empire and Italianate styles popular at the time.

“Today, the district is appreciated for the way it reveals the design aesthetic of the 1910s and 1920s,” explains the website for the Friends of the Treadwell Farm Historic District.

“During those years, most of the buildings were ‘modernized,’ i.e., stoops removed, and projecting detail stripped resulting in simplified elegance.”

There’s no river view or doormen standing by, but these two tree-lined blocks rank as among the loveliest in Manhattan, a tiny, little-known oasis of calm and beauty amid the crowds and traffic of East Midtown.

Take a peek inside one, recently for sale, via this Curbed listing. Price: just 7.9 million!

The secret wild boar of a Sutton Place park

There’s a sweet little vest-pocket park tucked off Sutton Place at the end of East 57th Street.

Besides the quiet East River view, the park has another magnificent, little-known feature: a statue of a wild boar, cast in bronze, sitting on a granite pedestal along with snakes, crabs, salamanders, and other creatures.

If the boar looks familiar, you may have seen it in Italy. There, Renaissance sculptor Pietro Tacca’s bronze Porcellino (“piglet”) decorates a fountain in Florence.

Tacca based his much-loved boar (below), whose snout is rubbed for good luck, on an ancient Greek marble original discovered in Rome in the 16th century.

The Sutton Place boar is a copy of that replica, installed in 1972 by a neighborhood philanthropist who also donated the bronze Peter Pan statue to Carl Schurz Park, about 30 blocks north along the East River.

This wild boar is a powerful piece of animal art, one of many across the city.

Of course, it’s not exactly a cuddly sculpture for kids—especially on the base, where there’s a bronze snake munching on a mouse!

East Side neon signs that give New York its glow

All the warm, glowing neon that lights up the evening sky makes the city feel magical and inspiring, especially when it’s dreary and dark outside.

I’ve never been to the Subway Inn, but it’s a legendary dilapidated dive bar on 60th Street off Lexington Avenue, opened in 1934, with an equally legendary sign.

Papaya King is on 86th Street and Third Avenue. They’ve been shilling supercheap hot dogs and papaya drinks for 80 years!

The story of the Upper East Side “Spite House”

New York City real estate brings out the evil in people.

Take the bizarre case of wealthy clothier Hyman Sarner and eccentric contractor Joseph Richardson, who owned separate parcels of land on 82nd Street and Lexington Avenue in the 1880s.

Sarner wanted to build an apartment house on his lot. So he offered Richardson $1,000 for his parcel, a five-foot wide ribbon on Lexington seemingly too narrow to develop.

Richardson demanded $5,000. Sarner refused, was called a tightwad, and had the door slammed in his face, explains this passage from the 1929 edition of Valentine’s Manual of Old New York, by way of New York Architectural Images.

In 1882, Sarner constructed his residence anyway. And then Richardson came up with a nasty plan to spite his neighbor forever.

“‘I shall build me,’ Richardson said to his daughter, according to Valentine’s Manual, ‘a couple of tall houses on the little strip which will bar the light from Sarner’s windows overlooking my land, and he’ll find he would have profited had he paid me the $5,000.’”

Richardson did just that; he moved into what was known all over the city as his “Spite House,” a much talked-about and gawked-at curiosity. Check out floor plans here.

He died there in 1897. The Spite House, as well as Sarner’s apartment building, were bulldozed in 1915 to make way for a new apartment residence at 129 East 82nd Street, which still stands today, at left.

[Bottom photo: Streeteasy]

Here’s a collection of other Spite Houses around the country.

The Upper East Side’s secret 19th century alley

If you’ve never heard of Henderson Place, a lilliputian cul-de-sac off of 86th Street and East End Avenue, you probably have plenty of company.

This is one of those dollhouse-like nooks tucked among big apartment houses that even longtime Manhattan residents never see.

But it’s such a pretty, well-preserved enclave of Victorian-era New York, it’s worth a walk-by.

Named for landowner John Henderson, the 24 Queen Anne–style houses (as well as others surrounding it that were demolished years ago, as shown in the undated photo) went up in 1882 for “persons of moderate means.“

“The use of features such as wide arched entryways, terra cotta plaques, windows divided into tiny square panes, and projecting bays and oriels produced an enclave of buildings that were of a high level of design, even though they were not intended to house members of a higher social class,” states nyc-architecture.com.

The houses on the west side of Henderson Place were torn down in 1940, while the rest of the alley was designated a historical district in 1969.

Of course, they’re no longer in the price range of the typical person of modest means. According to this Streeteasy listing, one of the houses recently sold for about $4 million. Take a peek inside here.

[Vintage photo: Museum of the City of New York]

Who stole this Peter Pan statue from a city park?

You’d have to be pretty brazen (or very drunk?) to abduct a statue from a city park.

But there’s something extra heartless about making off with Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up.

It happened 14 years ago in Carl Schurz Park, along the East River. There, a bronze Peter Pan has held court in the middle of a garden since 1975.

One morning in August 1998, however, Peter Pan vanished. “The statue was made by Charles Andrew Hafner in 1928 and showed the slender youth in his distinctive feathered cap and belted tunic sitting on a tree stump with a fawn, a rabbit and a toad at his feet,” wrote The New York Times.

“It had been cut off its stone base and weighed about a thousand pounds, officials said.”

Dozens of police officers investigated—this is the park that’s home to Gracie Mansion, after all. The next day, a scuba team found it at the bottom of the East River.

After divers recovered the statue, Peter Pan went back up in his usual spot in the park, where he’s been enchanting visitors ever since.

So who did it? Though no suspect was ever identified, “investigators said the disappearance of the beloved statue from Carl Schurz Park appeared, appropriately enough, to be the work of a band of overly high-spirited youths, perhaps latter-day Lost Boys who turned on their own icon,” a follow-up Times article stated.