Meet the Death-O-Meter, a tough-to-ignore 20-foot sign installed near Grand Army Plaza in 1927. The finger-wagging sign kept track of the number of traffic accidents and fatalities in the borough and reminded motorists to put on the brakes at this dangerous traffic circle.
Perhaps the Death-O-Meter should be brought back to certain city intersections and traffic circles? It must be in a storage unit gathering dust somewhere.
Sandwiched between so many other restored brownstones and townhouses on Sixth Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets are the lovely Milton Apartments. Built in 1890, these two four-story buildings (numbers 489 and 491) have pretty Queen Anne–style details.
I don’t know who Milton was, but a Brooklyn Daily Eagle article from October 1890 records this real estate transfer:
“On Sixth Avenue, near Eleventh Street, two four story brick dwellings, 20 x 60, for six families and store in each. George O. Van Orden, owner; cost $32,000.”
Wonder what those two buildings that collectively make up the Milton Apartments costs today!
All Saints Episcopal Church, on Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, looks like a typical city church—a beautiful gothic structure with lovely matching porch lamps welcoming visitors on either side of the front steps.
But the lamps have deeper significance. They honor Sgt. Stewart W. Oberle, killed by hostile fire in Vietnam on June 30, 1969. He was just 22. His family dedicated the lamps later that year in his memory.
A turn-of-the-century view of Methodist Hospital on Seventh Avenue in the Slope. Originally known as Methodist Episcopal Hospital, it was built with a $400,000 gift from Brooklynite George Seney, who, according to a Brooklyn Daily Eagle article, did not want his name associated with the hospital.
The Eagle article says the hospital has “75 beds, many of which are endowed.” In other words, they were reserved for sick people who could not afford a room. Endowing a hospital bed was a popular way for wealthier citizens to “give back” back in the day.
In A Drinking Life, Pete Hamill remembers his mother working at the hospital after his father lost his job in the 1940s: “My mother wasted no time with either blame or consolation; she started work as a nurse’s aide at Methodist Hospital, leaving at three in the afternoon, coming home around eleven. Sometimes Tommy and I walked her to work, passing the bars of my father’s world, and watched her vanish into the hospital.”
High school graduation season is almost here, and the whole pomp and circumstance thing hasn’t changed much in the last hundred years. Take a look at this June 1902 commencement program honoring Manual Training High School’s latest graduates.
Manual Training taught trades, but I don’t know exactly which ones because I can’t find anything about the school—except that at some point it was renamed John Jay High School and became a regular academic school on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope.
Lets hear it for the class of 1902.
Ephemeral New York 
