A Brooklyn housing project praised by architects

Public housing complexes rarely get any love—especially for their design.

But it’s a different story with the Williamsburg Houses.

This group of 20 buildings on a sprawling site on Bushwick Avenue earned big props for its Modernist touches, designed in part by Swiss architect William Lescaze.

“When the complex opened in 1938, its design was revolutionary,” wrote The New York Times in 2003.

“Rather than follow the emerging public housing pattern of large red-brick apartment houses scattered across lawns, the development was four stories tall, clad in tan brick with decorative blue panels and European Modernist features like doorways sheltered by aluminum marquees.”

“The buildings were set at a rakish 15-degree angle to the street grid, a feature designed to sweep fresh air into the courtyards and spill sunlight into the windows of the 1,622 apartments.”

In their 1939 guide to New York City, the Federal Writers’ Project added that the 25-acre location was once home to 12 slum blocks.

“All apartments—two to five rooms—are equipped with electric stoves, refrigerators, and modern plumbing, and supplied with steam heat, hot and cold water.”

Oh, and the 6,000 working-class New Yorkers who moved in were charged rents between $4.45 and $7.20 per week.

After a long post-war decline, the Williamsburg Houses underwent a restoration in the mid-1990s.

That turned up a hidden treasure: WPA murals by pioneering abstract artists. They’d been neglected for years and hidden behind coats of paint in community rooms.

The Brooklyn Museum has the restored murals on view now.

The development earned landmark status in 2003, the third public housing project in the city to do so.

Bits of light illuminating the East River at night

There’s a moody blue-black sky over the lower end of a smoke-choked East River in this painting, “Night, East River, New York,” by Danish-born Impressionist and New York transplant Johann Berthelsen.

Streaks of flickering light from the Brooklyn side illuminate the tugboat, the bridge, and the belching smokestacks of a long-gone industrial city.

A piece of cord busts a 1936 Manhattan murderer

On April 10th, 1936, Nancy Titterton, a 34-year-old writer and book reviewer, was found dead in the empty bathtub in her apartment at 22 Beekman Place.

She’d been raped and strangled, her body left unclothed except for a pair of rolled-down stockings. The pajamas she’d worn the night before were wrapped around her neck.

The murder made headlines because it was so brutal. “There were signs of a struggle in the bedroom,” wrote Michael Kurland, author of Irrefutable Evidence: A History of Forensic Science.

“Ligature marks on the victim’s wrists indicated that she had been tied up before she was raped, but the rope had apparently been cut off and taken away.”

Adding to the media fascination was the fact that Titterton was known in literary circles; her husband was an NBC bigwig.

Also, crimes so vicious just didn’t happen on posh Beekman Place, a two-block residential enclave in the East 50s (above photo).

Luckily police had evidence to work with. Underneath Titterton’s body in the bathtub was a 13-inch cord, similar to the cord of a Venetian blind.

They traced the cord to a Pennsylvania upholstery wholesaler. It just so happened that the two men who discovered Titterton’s body were from a local upholstery shop; they were delivering a couch to the apartment.

One of the delivery men, the shop’s owner, was cleared. The other, a 24-year-old assistant named John Fiorenza, had spent time in prison for theft, where a psychiatrist labeled him a possible psychopath.

Police brought Fiorenza in for questioning. He admitted to raping and murdering Titterton, who he’d met the day before when he came to her apartment to pick up the couch.

“He claimed to have returned to the apartment convinced that Nancy Titterton had fallen for him during their brief encounter the day before,” wrote Kurland.

“When she rebuffed him, he became so furious he tied her up and raped her. . . . Afterward, he had strangled her and left her in the bathtub.”

Convicted of murder in a trial that started six weeks after the slaying, Fiorenza (at right, the morning of his execution) went to the electric chair at Sing Sing in January 1937.

Warming up by the stove in a 1930s el station

Daniel R. Celentano depicts tired, weary commuters staying warm by waiting indoors for their train in “L Waiting Station.”

I couldn’t find the date, but I’d say it’s the late 1930s or early 1940s. I wonder what station we’re looking at? I love the wood floors and the man holding what must be a bucket of coal.

Pot belly stoves like that really existed in el stations, as this 1936 Berenice Abbott photo reveals. Looks warm and toasty, unlike most subway platforms in the wintertime.

Holiday matchbooks from 1930s midtown cafes

What better way to let customers know your restaurant honored the Christmas season than by advertising it on a matchbook? These long-gone Manhattan eateries apparently agreed.

If you worked in the vicinity of Lexington Avenue and 41st Street at any point from the 1930s through the 1960s, you may have spent your lunch hour at the no-frills-named President Cafeteria and Tavern.

“Serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner and open until 1a.m., the cafeteria advertised self-service hot meals ‘at reasonable prices’ in a relaxed, casual environment,” writes The Five O’Clock Teaspoon, a fascinating culinary history site.

“The self-proclaimed largest restaurant in the Grand Central Zone, The President was a reliable staple of the Murray Hill neighborhood and was a regular haunt of soon to be luminaries such as the writer Charles Reznikoff and the aspiring actress Susan Hayward.”

Rutley’s matchbook looks festive—but the restaurant sounds a little cut-rate. Opened in 1926, it closed in 1932, an apparent casualty of the Depression and Prohibition. Another Rutley’s, however, existed in the 1940s on Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street.

A street photographer captures the city in motion

Rudy Burckhardt arrived in New York in 1935. He was 21, born and raised in Switzerland, a medical school dropout determined to be an artist.

Though he painted and made short films, he’s known for his street photography: black and white shots of mid-century New Yorkers in motion amid a swirl of crowds and buildings, yet strangely alone in the modern urban landscape.

At right, he photographed friend and dance critic Edwin Denby on the roof of their apartment at 145 West 21st Street.

“[His] best artworks are the New York images from the ’40s, strange angled photographs shot from the tops of skyscrapers, or movements in the streets of Manhattan taken from the knees down,” wrote Valery Oisteanu on Artnet.com, for a retrospective of Burckhardt’s work exhibited in 2004 at the Tibor de Nagy gallery.

“He didn’t indulge in expressionist distortion, or depict grotesque sideshow freaks, but rather captured the melancholia of the metropolis,” wrote Oisteanu.

“The pedestrians in his snapshots execute a hectic choreography in navigating New York’s streets. It took the eye of a Swiss born New Yorker to sense the city’s pulse and its dramatic flair.”

Burckhardt, who served as the unofficial “house photographer” for New York School artists in the 1930s and who poet John Ashbery once called a “subterranean monument,” died in 1999 in Maine.

Near his home there, he committed suicide by drowning in a lake.

Celebrating Halloween in Central Park in 1936

Except for the pumpkin obscured in the background, there’s nothing particularly Halloween-esque about this poster, designed by the Works Progress Administration in 1936.

Though it looks like the carnival is geared toward adults, this poster for the same Halloween event clearly has kids in mind. I’d love to know what the prizes were.

Both are part of the Library of Congress’ excellent WPA poster collection from the 1930s and 1940s.

The 1930s Little Italy of a New York–born painter

Born in East Harlem’s Little Italy in 1902, Daniel R. Celentano studied with painter Thomas Hart Benton as a kid and later worked as an artist for the WPA.

He painted scenes all over New York but is perhaps best known for his depictions of sometimes raucous, sometimes solemn Italian-American neighborhood life during the Depression and World War II.

“Festival,” from 1934, features a “lively scene, evoking the scents of tasty Italian food, is overshadowed by the immense natural-gas tanks at the right that once blighted Manhattan’s immigrant slums,” states the Smithsonian website.

“Italian Harlem Street Scene” (I’m not certain of the exact date) is more foreboding.

The cross way in the distance on top of the tenement looks like it’s about to snap in the wind.

The 1940s folkie commune on West 10th Street

After traveling around the country in the 1930s making a name for himself as folk singer, Woody Guthrie arrived in New York City in 1941.

Here, he hooked up with fellow folkies, among them Pete Seeger, Bess Lomax, and Lee Hays.

Under the name the Almanac Singers, they and a rotating lineup of band members had kind of a loose collective going at this slender brownstone at 130 West 10th Street.

“Calling their house ‘Almanac House,’ the group of musicians earned their rent money by offering informal concerts in the basement of the building, charging their audience thirty-five cents per person,” states Exploring the Original West Village, by Alfred Pommer and Eleanor Winters.

In the forward of a book called Radical Walking Tours of New York, Pete Seeger says this about the communal home in the pre-World War II city:

“We lived at 130 West 10th Street off Greenwich Avenue in the fall and the first hootenanny in New York was held in the basement.”

At $100 a month, the rent was high, so they moved to cheaper digs on Sixth Avenue.

The Village wasn’t Guthrie’s only city neighborhood. Later in the 1940s he moved his family to a house on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island.

In 1952 he was diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease at Brooklyn State Hospital, now Kingsboro Psychiatric Center.

[Top: Guthrie performing in a 1943 Life photo]

Art Deco lanterns on a Centre Street building

The city government buildings down around City Hall Park were designed with style.

Take the Departments of Health, Hospitals, and Sanitation Building, at 125 Worth Street near Centre Street.

Greeting you on the Centre Street side of the 1935 structure are these magnificent lamps, held in place on the backs of men.

The rest of the building is pretty cool too: a fortress-like edifice with bronze grillwork and health themes decorating the facade.

The names of great scientists and giants of medicine are also carved into the facade, a reminder of the building’s public-health purpose.