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.

Country-like Morningside Park

This circa-1900 postcard captures Morningside Park’s rugged beauty. It’s one of the city’s best-kept secrets.

That wild, gothic St. Luke’s Hospital building high on a bluff makes this look anything like New York today.

Riverside Park’s tomb of the Amiable Child

Not far north of Grant’s Tomb, at the edge of some woods near 125th Street on Riverside Drive, lies another tomb that’s much more modest. 

It’s the tomb of the Amiable Child, a monument marking the grave of 5-year-old St. Claire Pollack. 

Little St. Claire lived on a vast estate here in the 1790s. In 1797, according to one account, the boy fell to his death from the cliffs overlooking the Hudson River. His body was recovered on the rocks below.

His family chose to bury him on the property where he lived. When the estate was sold, they asked that the monument be kept “always enclosed and sacred.”

Eventually the land was absorbed into the neighborhood known as Claremont; then it was the site of Riverside Park.

The original monument had to be replaced a few times, most recently in 1967, after falling victim to the elements. 

The back of the monument includes this from the Book of Job: “Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh like a flower and is cut down he fleeth also as a shadow and continueth not.”

The squatters who lived in “Hardlucksville”

The 1930s were a pretty rough time. Unemployment hovered around 20 percent nationally, while the city’s poorest neighborhoods, like Harlem, had a 50 percent out-of-work rate.

Where did Depression-era New Yorkers go when they had no money to pay rent? Some moved into the city’s many squatter camps.

These makeshift villages, many with disturbingly accurate nicknames, sprang up citywide, according to a March 26, 1933 New York Times article.

One called “Hardlucksville” formed off 10th Street next to the East River (at left). Five men resided there, selling firewood culled from the river:

“The three of them saw up the wood into stove lengths. the two others peddle the product in the East Side streets, trundling it from door to door in baby carts reclaimed from the junk pile. Among the five they earn a half-dollar a day, and that supports them,” the Times reported.

Another squat, “Camp Thomas Paine,” was home to dozens of World War I veterans; they lived in shacks in the West 70s near the Hudson River. And “Packing Box City” (above) popped up on Houston Street.

Central Park had its own Hooverville as well. Read more about it here.

Brooklyn’s champion ice hockey team

Meet the men of the Crescents, also known as the New Mooners, an ice hockey team affiliated with Brooklyn’s Crescent Athletic Club.

They bagged several New York Amateur Hockey League championship titles between 1896 and 1918, when the team (and the league) disbanded in the wake of America’s involvement in World War I.

This is the 1911 crew. No helmets or padding for these guys. They played at an ice rink on Claremont Avenue in Brooklyn as well as at the St. Nicholas Rink on the Upper West Side, where they battled their chief rival, the wonderfully named New York Wanderers.

Riverside Drive’s Hendrik Hudson apartments

From a publication called The World’s New York Apartment House Album comes this sketch and description of a beautiful turn-of-the-century residential building, the Hendrik Hudson.

Spanning the entire block between Riverside Drive and Broadway at 110th Street, the Hendrik Hudson must have been a striking sight when it was completed in 1907. The facade was modeled after an Italian villa and the roof made from Spanish tile, topped by two imposing towers.

As ambitious as the facade was, the 7- to 9-room apartments were also innovative, explains Andrew Alpern’s Luxury Apartment Houses of Manhattan:

“Walnut paneling, wood-beamed ceilings, mahogany doors with glass knobs, and the latest designs in porcelain bathroom fittings were all used to attract tenants,” writes Alpern. “Also offered was a billiard parlor, a cafe, a barber shop, and a ladies hairdressing salon—all for the exclusive use of the building’s occupants and guests. Rents ranged from $1500 t0 $3000 per year.”

As Morningside Heights became kind of sketchy in the post World War II years, so did the Hendrik Hudson; at some point, one of its towers disappeared. The building went co-op in 1970. It looks like an terrific place to live today.

A poet in 1929 New York

In June 1929, 30-year-old Spanish poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca arrived for a nine-month stint in New York City. Depressed over a failed love affair and unable to speak or write in English, he composed poems (supposedly on the back of Columbia University stationery) tinged with loneliness and isolation.

Though he reportedly loved Harlem, where he lived while enrolled at Columbia, Garcia Lorca had a pretty grim outlook on the rest of New York.

His poems—collected as “Poet in New York” and published four years after his murder by Franco’s firing squad in Spain—portray the city is an inaccessible, spiritually empty place. “Dawn” starts:

Dawn in New York has/four columns of mire/and a hurricane of black pigeons/splashing in putrid waters.

Those who go out early know in their bones/there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die/they know they will be mired in numbers and law, in mindless games, in fruitless labors.

The opening of the West Side Express Highway

Planned in the 1920s to ease New York’s traffic hell, the West Side Express Highway opened in various stages beginning in 1930. Also known as the Miller Elevated, it stretched from downtown to 72nd Street.

It looks pretty and spotless in this 1930 postcard. By the 1960s, it was rusted out and in disrepair, and huge chunks occasionally fell onto the streets beneath it. Wisely, the city tore it down in the 1970s and 1980s.

Fight night in New York: “Stag at Sharkey’s”

Until 1920, boxing was mostly outlawed in New York state. A loophole allowed fights to take place in athletic clubs, so many bars became on-the-fly athletic clubs in order to host matches. One of these bars-turned-clubs was Sharkey’s, a saloon on Columbus Avenue near West 67th Street. 

Owned by heavyweight fighter Sailor Tom Sharkey, it’s the setting for this dark, raw 1909 painting by George Bellows. Bellows was part of the Ashcan School—a group of artists bent on depicting realistic, gritty scenes of daily life.

Bellows had a studio close to Sharkey’s; it was in the Lincoln Arcade building, then on Broadway and 65th Street. “Stag at Sharkey’s” remains one of his most popular works.

The story behind a little-known West Side street

Freedom Place runs just four blocks—from 66th to 70th Streets between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive.

It’s quiet and mostly residential, sided by various fortress-like post-war apartment houses.

Yet it didn’t exist until 1967, when it was carved out of a piece of what was then dubbed the “Lincoln Center urban renewal area” to honor three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in 1964.

Two of them, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were New Yorkers.

This unassuming plaque is on the corner of Freedom and 70th Street. In the early 1990s there was talk of building a monument to the murdered men, but it never happened.