Where “discriminating” New Yorkers used to dine

Would today’s New York foodies approve of the Skipper restaurants, a mid-century mini-chain of dining establishments centered in midtown?

Well, the food is “well-cooked” and “balanced” (nutritious and no trans fats?), and they do their own baking, which might count as local fare.

The menu items probably wouldn’t go over well. A review in the 1949 restaurant guide Knife and Fork in New York notes the “deviled crab, southern fried chicken,” and “roast beef with Yorkshire pudding.”

And the decor wouldn’t attract a trendy crowd. It’s described in the book as “tearoomy” in the “colonial mood, with colorful wallpapers.” The Skipper sounds like an inexpensive place to grab a bite if you’re hungry and not especially picky.

Interestingly, the chain has a “Men’s Grill” on 44th Street. I know the city had male-only bars well into the 1960s (McSorley’s wasn’t open to women until 1970!). But single-sex public restaurants in the 1940s?

Ending it all at a popular midtown tourist hotel

Today, it’s the luxe Michelangelo Hotel. But from 1926 through the 1980s, it was the 2,000-room Hotel Taft, “one of the premier tourist hotels in the city,” a New York Times article recalls.

Over the years, that adds up to a lot of out-of-towners booking rooms to celebrate events and catch Broadway shows. But like any multistory hotel, the Taft has also had its share of suicides.

“Woman Phones News of Her Own Suicide,” a headline from June 1933 reads. After calling the city desk at the Daily Mirror, 35-year-old phone operator Miss Catherine Mary Dietz told a staffer that she’d just taken “36 tablets of poison” and was about to leap to her death from her room on the 18th floor, which she did, a moment later.

That wasn’t the only suicide at the Taft in 1933. In February, 40-year-old artist Charles Schomburg jumped from his 14th-floor room, leaving a note that read “financial reverses have brought me to this point of despondency.” His body hit the roof of the adjoining Roxy Theater.

Seven years later, a Brooklyn surgeon registered under a fake name and overdosed. “The body was found in bed clad in pajamas with the covers pulled it,” the Times wrote.

“In a wastepaper basket near by was a brown bottle containing a few crystals.” He left his home phone number on a pad on the night table.

A TV and theater actor also ended his life at the Taft. Philip Loeb (he played the father on The Goldbergs) OD’d there on sleeping pills in 1955. His apparent motive: The show dropped him because he’d been blacklisted as a communist.

The 1940s tourist attractions of the “Penn Zone”

If you think the streets around Penn Station are crowded with out-of-towners now, imagine how jammed they must have been in the 1940s.

Back then, this was the “Penn Zone,” according to this vintage postcard, a stretch of Midtown brimming with massive hotels and must-see sites for tourists.

Some are still here, of course, such as the Empire State Building and Macy’s (number 8). But the original Penn Station (2) bit the dust in 1963, and the Hotel McAlpin (4) is now called Herald Towers and is a rental apartment building.

Gimbel’s (10) and Sak’s 34th Street (9) are ghosts. The Hotel New Yorker (6) keeps packing them in, while the Hotel Martinique (3) endured a tortured history as a 1980s welfare hotel before reopening as a Radisson.

Solving a murder at Harlem’s Green Parrot Grill

It may be the only time a tropical bird helped crack a New York cold case.

On July 12, 1942, Max Geller, owner of the Green Parrot Bar and Grill on Third Avenue and 100th Street, was shot to death in his small restaurant by a lone gunman.

“None of the restaurant’s patrons could (or would) identify the killer, and the police had no clues,” wrote Patrick M. Wall in The Annals of Manhattan Crime, published in New York magazine in 1988.

Months passed, and finally, a breakthrough. Geller had kept a real parrot in his restaurant, and a detective learned that the bird was trained to call regular customers by name.

Witnesses had said that the bird screeched “robber robber robber” as his owner was shot. The detective, however, “had a hunch that the parrot had actually repeated “Robert Robert Robert.”

“Suspicion focused on a man named Robert Butler, 28, who had left Manhattan shortly after the shooting,” wrote Wall.

Cops located Butler, a former taxi driver, in Maryland, where he confessed to shooting Geller in a drunken rage because Geller refused to serve him.

Brought back to New York in November 1943, Butler was sentenced to 15 years.

[This is not the murder-solving parrot, but he probably looked similar. . . .]

A street photographer’s working-class New York

“Whether he trained his camera on exuberant summer scenes on the beaches of Coney Island or the intimate corners of Mulberry Street during the San Gennaro festival, as here, Grossman was one of the greatest chroniclers of working-class life in New York during the late 1930s and 1940s,” writes the Metropolitan Museum of Art of Sid Grossman.

[Left: "Mulberry Street, 1948"]

While still a City College student, Grossman launched his career as a freelance photojournalist; he and fellow lensman Sol Libsohn cofounded the Photo League in 1936, teaching the craft as well as shooting street scenes in Chelsea and Harlem.

[Below: "Harlem Scene: 133rd Street Between Lenox and Fifth Avenues," 1930s]

Grossman’s photos captured regular New Yorkers going about life in the 1930s, but by the 1940s, his photos often had a surreal quality, with subjects out of frame and staring back at the camera.

This made the viewer “an engaged participant in the scene rather than an aloof flâneur, rendering the experience of the picture not just an aesthetic dalliance, but a social activity as well.”

[above: "Two Young Women before a Pastry Shop at Night," 1948]

Grossman might have continued shooting New York—but photos of labor union unrest he took in the 1930s led to an FBI investigation, which deemed the Photo League a Communist front.

The league was blacklisted; Grossman died in 1955.

Leaving Bloomingdale’s on the Third Avenue El

Painter Lionel S. Reiss’ 1946 watercolor, “Going Home (Near Bloomingdale’s and the 59th Street Elevated),” captures a crowd of mothers, shop girls, laborers, and businessmen ascending the packed staircase.

I love the piece of the Chop Suey sign on the right—a vestige of the New York of a long-ago time.

Wooden phone booths tucked away in the city

Every once in a while you spot one, usually in the back of an outer borough drugstore or in an old-timey neighborhood pub.

Wherever you are, these relics from an older (and perhaps quieter) city instantly make you feel like you’ve traveled back to J.D. Salinger’s New York, or Mad Men–era Gotham.

A few recent finds include this booth downstairs at the Frick on Fifth Avenue and 70th Street. Too bad the phone itself is missing.

There’s also the wooden booths (separated by an open phone on the wall) near the entrance to the Park Avenue Armory at 66th Street.

These phones do work. And check out the seats! I don’t think they would support the butt size of today’s city residents.

Lost City kept a great running list of wooden phone booth sightings here. Ah, life before the endless chatter brought on by cell phones.

1940s Beat writer hangout: Hector’s cafeteria

There were actually four Hector’s cafeterias in Times Square, according to a 1970 New York Times article chronicling the closing of the last one on 44th Street and Broadway.

I don’t know which one is in this 1952 photo—nor is it clear which Hector’s was chronicled in the opening pages of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road:

“Dean had arrived the night before, the first time in New York, with his beautiful little sharp chick Marylou; they got off the Greyhound bus at 50th Street and cut around the corner looking for a place to eat and went right to Hector’s, and since then Hector’s Cafeteria has always been a big symbol of New York for Dean.

“They spent money on beautiful big glazed cakes and creampuffs.”

Desserts seemed to be Hector’s specialty. “The dessert counter, 12 feet long and three feet high, was a gourmond’s dream,” the Times article says.

Building Stuyvesant Town in the 1940s

In early 1945, more than 3,000 families moved out of the 600 or so old tenement buildings (such as these at left) between East 14th and 23rd Streets.

Everything on those blocks—including the tenements, two schools, three churches, and two theaters—was razed.

Within a few years they were replaced by the 9,000-apartment Stuyvesant Town, opened in 1947. 

Village writer Dawn Powell chronicles the former Gas House District and the building of Stuy Town (looking like legos in the NYPL photo below) in her diary:

“October 19 [1947]: Walking over to the East River Drive with Joe at night in rainy mist, seeing new houses of Stuyvesant Village rear up against old tenements, new stylish drive cutting through old streets, then the huge power plant—dark, oppressive, like a medieval forge—on to East River Park Drive. Silent boats and tugs gliding along, a body of man in doorway.”

The Lonely Hearts Killers of the 1940s

Ex-con Raymond Fernandez had a sociopathic way of meeting women: He would answer lonely hearts ads—the 1940s version of JDate and Craigslist—gain a single woman’s trust, and then rob her.

In 1947, he answered an ad placed by Florida resident Martha Beck, who promptly fell in love with him, abandoned her kids, and moved into his West 139th Street apartment.

She became his common-law wife and accomplice. Posing as his sister, she helped Fernandez romance and rob vulnerable single women via the lonely hearts ads around the country.  

Problem was, she’d become jealous, and that led her to start killing the women in a rage. 

From 1947 to 1949 she and Fernandez killed 20 women, police suspected. They were finally nabbed by police in Michigan when a young widow’s family became suspicious.

Extradited to New York, they stood trial for three murders. It was a sensational case in the summer of 1949, with lurid tabloid tales of sexual depravity and cracks about Beck’s weight.

Fernandez and Beck were convicted of all charges. Before being executed at Sing Sing in 1951, Fernandez’s last words were supposedly, “I love Martha! What do the public know about love?”