The 1970s Top-40 music scene lives on thanks to this almost perfectly preserved ad, on the side of a building at 145th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue.
I’m guessing it went up in the disco era, when radios all across the metro area were set to 77 AM, then a hugely popular station.
WABC is all talk today—it’s been that way since 1982.
Ever notice the 13-story geometric abstract painted on the side of a prewar loft building on West 3rd Street between Mercer Street and Broadway?
It looks like something straight out of the 1970s city, when this part of the Village was a warren of underused loft structures, and landlords didn’t know—or care—what was painted on them.
Here’s the backstory of this curious relic of a less restrictive city. Created in 1970, it was commissioned by a artists’ group called City Walls, Inc. and painted by a cofounder of the group known as Tania.
City Walls apparently went around the city looking for facades to paint, and when they found one, they simply asked the landlord for permission.
Of her “three-dimensional” painting of overlapping pyramid shapes, Tania had this to say in a 1971 New York Times article:
“I want to take art out of the museums and galleries. . . . A wall belongs to everybody; it can’t be traded on the art market.”
Could an arts group paint a public wall today? Probably not without paying a hefty fee for the privilege.
City Walls was also responsible for this mural a few blocks south on Houston Street, titled “Gateway to Soho.”
[Photo, right, by Beyond My Ken]
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.
Inspired by the 1972 Helen Levitt photo “Kids With Laundry” that was posted here last week, Ephemeral reader Paul Mones sent me these snapshots he took in the early spring of 1973.
Born in the Bronx, Mones was a college student then; the photos were part of an essay for an urban sociology class he took at SUNY Buffalo.
They chronicle some seemingly ordinary street scenes from 33rd Street to 50th Street or so: the merchants, shoppers, pedestrians, and storefronts of a typical stretch of Manhattan in the early 1970s.
I imagine that Mones didn’t think he captured anything remarkable when he developed the film. But he did: They’re lovely, unposed glimpses into little moments of a vanished time, as he put it.
Check out the hand-painted bar signage, pre-Korean deli vegetable dealer, metal garbage can, and messy bargain bins outside a discount store that’s now probably the home of a fusion restaurant or upscale cocktail lounge.
And a shoeshine stand/umbrella repair place! So many relics of another era.
[All photos copyright Paul Mones]
This 1899 photo of ladies decked out in their elaborate hats and bustles for a day of shopping are wonderful.
But I also love the street sign, lamps, mailbox, and fire hydrant (across 14th Street), published in New York Then and Now in 1976.
“The corner building was originally the William M. Halstead residence, built in the 1830s,” the caption to the photo tells us.
“One of the earliest mansions on the avenue, it was later altered and became, successively, the Old Guard Armory, Midget Hall and Brewster’s Hall; it eventually was occupied by the Gregg Furniture Co.”
The scene is very different in 1974. The tall buildings replaced smaller-scale mansions in the early 1900s, and a white-brick apartment residence occupies the northeast corner.
The lovely signage and lamps are gone . . . as is the shopping traffic.
Today, the streetscape looks the same as it did in 1974, with a few exceptions: more foot and vehicular traffic, thanks to lower Fifth Avenue’s resurgence as a retail district.
Also, there’s new traffic lights . . . and bank branches on both corners.
After graduating from Smith College in 1970, 22-year-old Patrice Leary did what thousands of other new grads do: She moved to New York City.
Patrice sublet a brownstone apartment at 310 West 73rd Street—then a sketchy block, but one that was likely affordable on a teacher’s salary.
She took a job teaching second grade at the posh Brearley School. She dated. She hung out with her roommate.
She worried about crime as well, “installing an extra lock on her steel door,” according to a New York Times article.
Weeks later, on October 29, friends noticed her apartment door was ajar. “Inside they saw her body, mutilated and bloody, clothed in a bra and underpants, lying on the floor,” noted the Times.
Investigators later determined that Patrice had been stabbed in the heart, a phone cord wrapped around her neck. Her head was also bashed in with a hammer.
Neighbors reported seeing a tall white man running out of the brownstone about the time Patrice had been murdered. But no suspect was ever named.
Police took the case hard. “This was no trollop or junkie,” said a lieutenant.
“This wasn’t someone who’s been pushing for trouble. This was a fine, decent girl, the kind of person you want to help and protect.”
The Times even pointed out that the Medical Examiner determined Patrice was still a virgin when she died, a detail I don’t think you’ll ever find in a newspaper today.
Even after a $1500 reward was offered for any information leading to an arrest, Patrice’s killer was never found.
[Photo: West 73rd Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. where Patrice was killed, from Trulia]
Varick Street between West Houston and Clarkson Streets comes across as a sleepy little stretch of the city in this 1921 photo.
A row of early 19th century Federal-style houses cover the entire west side of the block. And a corner cigar store and carpenter/cabinet maker are the only businesses—aside from the horse-drawn ice cream delivery wagon.
Notice the horsecar tracks? “[They're] those of the Sixth Avenue Ferry line, which ran from the Desbrosses Street Ferry via Varick and Carmine Streets to Sixth Avenue,” states the wonderful New York Then and Now, which published the photo.
“On the extreme left is the entrance to the IRT Broadway-Seventh Avenue line subway, opened beneath Varick Street on July 1, 1918.”
The street didn’t look like this for much longer. In 1924 the 10 houses were demolished, a 12-story light-industry loft structure put in its place, as seen in the 1974 photo above, also from New York Then and Now.
The loft building casts a dark shadow over the block to this day (at right). It’s part of the no man’s land south of the West Village but a little too West for Soho that I believe is called Hudson Square.
Remember album art—and hey, remember albums?
Back in the rock LP’s heyday, images of the city made it on many a front and back cover.
The New York locations for the cover art on The Doors’ Strange Days and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan have gotten plenty of exposure.
But some cover shots and images deserves a second look.
Simon and Garfunkel’s first album was shot in the 53rd Street subway station. (Vintage trash can at left.)
When it came out in 1964 on the heels of Beatlemania, it bombed . . . then became a hit after a re-release two years later.
Art Garfunkel has said that they took hundreds of shots on the platform before finally getting the right one.
Gem Spa is still on the corner of Second Avenue and St. Marks Place, as it was when the New York Dolls posed there for the back of their 1973 first LP.
Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic cover was photographed in 1974 just inside Central Park off of Fifth Avenue.
That’s a real pretzel vendor working a snowy city day there, selling his “pretzles” at bargain-basement prices.
Lots of legendary New York clubs were born in 1970s: CBGB on the Bowery, Studio 54 west of midtown, Paradise Garage on King Street.
But lets not forget Plato’s Retreat, the notorious swingers’ club that epitomized the free-sex atmosphere of pre-AIDS New York.
Opened in 1977, Plato’s Retreat held court in the basement of the then-crumbling Beaux Arts Ansonia Hotel on Broadway and West 74th Street.
Management laid out strict rules: No gay men, couples only (though women could have sex with each other), no drugs, no booze.
Celebrities indulged in orgies with regular joes and janes from the suburbs. A “mat room” was for exhibitionist sex. Clothes were optional. Guests could bump uglies in the disco, the Jacuzzi, and the huge swimming pool.
Of course, it wouldn’t last long. In 1980, Plato’s Retreat moved out of the Ansonia to a much bigger space at 509 West 34th Street. Owner Larry Levenson went to prison for tax evasion in 1981.
And then AIDS hit the city. Mayor Koch ordered the health department to shut down gay bathhouses as well as straight sex clubs like Plato’s Retreat. By 1985, it was over.
East Harlem is home to colorful murals—chronicling rappers, revolutionaries, even cartoon characters (Mickey Mouse is on 110th Street, go figure).
But the four-story mural on Lexington Avenue at 104th Street is really something. “The Spirit of East Harlem,” painted by Hank Prussing in the mid-1970s, chronicles the domino players, musicians, mothers, and playground denizens of the neighborhood at the time.
The Daily News has some backstory:
“The mural, which survived a building fire in 1974, depicts children and adults from a neighborhood devastated by the housing abandonment and economic hard times of the 1970s.
“‘I saw people that seemed to be living life to the fullest, even though on the outside it didn’t look that way,’ said Prussing, 50. ‘It’s that incredible community spirit that came through. They were all closely knit, like a big family.’”
