An East Village restaurant’s ghost sign is a relic of the neighborhood’s Italian immigrant past

By the time Sicilian immigrant Michael Lanza founded his namesake restaurant in 1904, the location he chose on First Avenue between 10th and 11th Streets was shaping into a mini Little Italy.

Across the Avenue on 11th Street was Veniero’s, the Italian bakery dating back to 1894. in 1908, specialty grocers Russo’s would open a few doors down. John’s red sauce joint got its start on East 12th Street also in 1908, and De Robertis Pastry Shoppe launched in 1904 steps away.

Mary Help of Christians Church, completed in 1917, catered to Italian Americans. The Italian Labor Center up the way on 14th Street served as headquarters for the cloakmakers’ union beginning in 1919.

The church met the wrecking ball in the 2010s, and De Robertis shut its doors in 2014. As the East Village’s immigrant population dwindled, so did the dozens of ordinary Italian American businesses: barber shops, funeral homes, bars, and groceries. (Above, Lanza’s in 1940)

Since 2016, Lanza’s has been gone too. But a remnant of this red sauce favorite of locals (and mobsters from the Gambino and Bonanno familes, per Village Preservation) still exists.

Its original stained-glass sign still graces the entrance to 168 First Avenue, which is now home to Joe & Pat’s, a pizzeria. Joe & Pat’s also kept Lanza’s tile floor at the entrance, as well as the kitschy oil paintings of Italian cities hanging above the tables inside.

Joe & Pat’s is also an Italian immigrant business, started by two brothers who arrived on Staten Island in 1958 and opened their pizzeria in 1960.

Keeping the Lanza brand in their East Village outpost had to be intentional—an homage to a legendary restaurant and maybe to the immigrant enclave that helped sustain it.

[Second image: NYC Department of Records and Information Services]

This Upper East Side Russian Orthodox cathedral has dramatic beauty—and a dramatic backstory

Slender, inconspicuous East 97th Street is the last place you would expect to come across a cathedral with breathtaking onion domes crowned by gilt crosses.

.But take a walk between Madison and Fifth Avenues, and you’ll find yourself face to face with St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral.

It’s a spectacular Baroque beauty of red brick, gray stone, limestone trim, and cherub faces carved into rooftop pendant arches. The facade is opulent and glorious—and unique. It’s the only example of Moscow Baroque in New York City and possibly the sole example in all of America.

What exactly defines Moscow Baroque? Like the Baroque style of Western Europe that came into vogue in the 16th and 17th centuries, it’s exaggerated and bold, with dynamic curves, grand decorative elements, and domes and cupolas that reach toward the heavens.

Moscow Baroque, which emerged in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, combined these characteristics with more traditional Russian architecture.

The interior of the cathedral also reflects the Baroque aesthetic, with frescoes on the walls and ceiling, gilded surfaces, rich colors, and theatrical lighting.

Sunlight illuminates the sanctuary through stained-glass windows. It’s a space like no other in New York, and it feels much larger than the 900-seat cathedral it actually is.

Such a dramatic cathedral inside and out also has a fittingly dramatic backstory driven by the political upheaval in Russia in the 20th century.

Completed in 1902, it was the home church of the congregation of St. Nicholas, founded in the 1890s by immigrants from the Russian empire. By 1899, the congregation had 300 members and was too large for its rented rooms at 323 Second Avenue near Stuyvesant Square.

Low funds drove the decision to relocate to Carnegie Hill. “The congregation chose an inexpensive uptown location at 97th Street off Fifth Avenue, in an area that was beginning to emerge as a neighborhood of modest flats,” wrote Christopher Gray in a 2000 New York Times Streetscapes column.

Czar Nicholas II donated the first rubles to construct the new church, stated David W. Dunlap, author of From Abyssinian to Zion: a Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship. Two years after it opened in 1904, a New York Times reporter observing the consecration of a new solid oak, Russia-made altar wrote up his impressions.

“The air was heavy with perfume, and the multitude of sacred candles shedding a dim light throughout the church combined with the solemn chant of choristers and the psalm singers to produce a quaint splendor seldom surpassed in this city,” stated the reporter.

In 1905, the Russian Orthodox Church made St. Nicholas its official American headquarters, designating the church a cathedral, wrote Gray.

But events in Russia had an effect on the congregation. Czar Nicholas II abdicated his throne in 1917 and was executed with his family the next year. The Russian revolution was in full swing.

“After the Communists came to power they began remaking the Russian church to fit the goals of an atheist state,” wrote Gray. “Priests and bishops were persecuted and fled Russia, replaced by clerics who were willing to accommodate themselves to the party line.”

In 1920, Bolshevik sympathizers came to St. Nicholas and disrupted a communion service, “but were thrown out by the faithful,” wrote Gray. They weren’t the only ones tossed from the sanctuary.

A Moscow-appointed religious leader was sent to take over the cathedral in 1923, but he was “carried out of the building and down the steps onto 97th Street, kicking and screaming,” stated Gray.

“In the following decades St. Nicholas had an uneasy time as the official church of an officially atheistic country that was to many Americans the enemy of the United States,” he added.

That uneasy time included an ongoing lawsuit over the control and ownership of the cathedral, which the U.S. Supreme Court gave to the Moscow-backed leadership in a 1952 ruling, per Dunlap.

With the Soviet Union long dissolved, the struggle for church control seems to have taken a back seat to the struggle of fundraising. St. Nicholas has been a New York City landmark since 1973, and a major restoration took place in the early 2000s.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report includes an appropriate passage from a Russian Orthodox publication. The passage appears to be from the cathedral’s early days, but it describes today’s St. Nicholas perfectly.

“Standing as it is, among the tall apartment buildings of routine style, it strikes one like a ray of sun on a cloudy day,” per the LPC report. “It’s graceful and creative facade attracts and fascinates the eye.”

Meet the miniaturist who painted exquisite portraits of the Gilded Age’s best-known characters

New York’s Gilded Age was an era defined by bigness. Townhouses were replaced by mansions. Dry goods emporiums dominated Broadway. Comically proportioned bustles exaggerated a woman’s silhouette.

One exception, however, was the miniature. Popular throughout history, these tiny painted portraits experienced a resurgence in the late 19th century among elites, particularly women. They would display them in a parlor cabinet, for example, or wear one as a piece of jewelry.

Portrait photography had become an accessible medium by the late 19th century, which perhaps made miniatures more prized. But paintings also provided “realistic coloring of the subjects’ faces and a vitality that was missing in black and white photos,” wrote Kathleen Langone in her book The Miniature Painter Revealed: Amalia Küssner’s Gilded Age Pursuit of Fame and Fortune.

It was an ideal time to be a miniature painter—and a talented Midwestern native with a knack for self-promotion took advantage of the opportunity.

Born in 1863 in Indiana to a German immigrant family, Amalia Küssner (top image) showed an early talent for drawing. After a stint at a finishing school in New York City, she returned to Indiana to launch an art studio specializing in watercolor miniatures.

But like so many artists, she wanted a larger life than the Midwest offered, and that meant a move to New York City in 1891. She spent a year working for Tiffany’s, then began racking up hefty commissions for painting some of Gotham’s wealthiest and most notable women.

Those included actress Lillian Russell, Emily Havemeyer (of the sugar-refining Havemeyers), Alva Vanderbilt Belmont (at left), and Caroline Astor, the doyenne of the city’s social world.

What made Küssner so popular? An Indiana classmate connected her to Gilded Age society figures when she first relocated to New York. Yet she also benefited from the way she posed women.

“She became known for her wrap style, where many of these ladies wore swaths of fabric like tulle, velvet, or satin, and often layered on top with lace or silk flowers,” noted Langone on the Her Half of History podcast.

Küssner painted her subjects in gemstone jewelry, which made them look regal. This no doubt flattered the women who posed for her, who liked to think of themselves as New York royalty.

She also was adept at the Gilded Age version of airbrushing by painting subjects “in semi-darkness to accent their facial features, while she would sit by a window with natural light,” stated Langone.

And Küssner proved to be canny about self-promotion. “In New York, she knew that she had to dress above her station, as they would say,” said Langone in an interview with Artnet. “She took every penny she had to dress as elegantly as she could. As she got more money, she would buy gowns from House of Worth.”

Her fame—particularly as a young female artist in an art world dominated by men—landed her in New York City newspapers. Reporters wrote about Küssner’s trip to England in 1896, “where, apparently, she is duplicating her New-York success,” stated the New York Times that year.

The trip to the UK was orchestrated by New York-born socialite Minnie Paget, who arranged for Küssner to paint miniatures of British royal figures as well as Consuelo Vanderbilt, daughter of Alva Vanderbilt Belmont and now the unhappily married Duchess of Marlborough (fourth image).

Through the end of the 19th century, Küssner would travel the world to paint the Prince of Wales, Czar Nicholas II and his wife, and mining magnate Cecil Rhodes. (Above left, an 1894 miniature of Matilda Thora Wainwright Scott Strong, a Pennsylvania heiress.)

She would marry into the elite world she painted, with a 1900 wedding at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to lawyer Charles duPont Coudert. Her husband’s family felt she didn’t have right the society credentials. But they did gift the couple a house at 53 West 48th Street, per the Brooklyn Times Union.

After her marriage, Küssner (above, in 1899) and her husband journeyed to Europe and the UK, and they spent most of the rest of their lives abroad. She continued to paint miniatures, but the Gilded Age was ending, and her fame was fading.

When she died in Switzerland in 1932, it was the Indiana newspapers, not the New York media, that took note and recounted her extraordinary life and career.

[Top photo: Wikipedia; second image: LOC; third image: newportalri.org; fourth image: the World; fifth image: Wikipedia; sixth image: sketch of Amalia Küssner by Violet Granby, 1899, via Artnet]

Take a walk through the Beatles-inspired co-op on 24th Street that built a Liverpool Street in its lobby

If you were asked to name a New York City building closely associated with The Beatles, the Dakota would likely come to mind first.

Perhaps you’d also think of the Plaza Hotel, where the fab four holed up on their first trip across the pond in February 1964. Or John Lennon’s East 52nd Street penthouse, where he lived with May Pang during his “lost weekend” in the mid-1970s.

But there’s another Beatles building on East 24th Street. No, none of the band members ever resided in this former J.M. Horton’s ice cream factory, which sits in the middle of a Gramercy side street of tenements and small stores.

The Beatles theme came from the 1970s developers of this factory-turned-apartment house. The developers were so Beatles-obsessed, the ground floor interior was renovated into an ode to the lads from Liverpool, according to a recent New York Post article.

Instead of a typical staid lobby setup, residents and visitors pass through a lobby that evokes a charming Liverpool-like street—complete with cast-iron street lamps, a terrace with chairs and a table, and Tudor details like brick and dark wood beams.

The building, at 215 East 24th Street, includes other British and Beatles-related touches.

The lobby doors of the ground-floor apartments are styled to look like the front doors of homes and shops you might encounter on a UK street, with multi-pane glass, shingled awnings, and fanlights.

The name of the building? The Penny Lane, of course. It’s an homage to the sunny song the band released in 1967. (Unfortunately there’s no architectural nod to the barber shop referenced in the lyrics.)

The Horton Ice Cream company was to ice cream what the Beatles were to popular music. Founded in 1865 by New Yorker James Madison Horton, the brand opened retail outlets across the city. (One ghost sign for a former Horton’s can still be seen on a Columbus Avenue walkup.)

By the late 19th century, Horton’s produced 3 million gallons of the sweet stuff per year, according to a 2015 article in West Side Rag. But facing heavy ice cream competition through the decades, the brand disappeared in the 1960s. The East 24th Street plant was vacated by the early 1970s.

In 1975, a renovation of the factory into apartment residences by the Conthur Development Company was announced. The 179-unit, seven-story building opened soon after, with many generously proportioned apartments that took into account the high ceilings of the former factory.

The decision to give the building a quirky Beatles theme isn’t referenced in any of the 1970s articles about the co-op’s beginnings. And the person or people who came up with the Liverpool lobby idea are unknown.

There’s another mystery attached to the Penny Lane. The building was completed with an attached parking garage. The Beatles-fanatic developers commissioned a mural featuring 12 Beatles album covers to be painted inside the garage.

The garage underwent a renovation, and sometime after 2007, the mural disappeared. Was it painted over—or stored for safekeeping? New York City Beatles fans would love to know.

[Third image: Beatlesebooks.com]

Why the Greek goddess of sacred poetry and music stands tucked behind a fence on the Upper East Side

As anyone who has ever taken a walk through a city park knows, New York is rich with beautiful bronze statues.

Typically they grace a public space, often on a decorative pedestal or base and in a setting that underscores their importance (or their importance at the time the statue was completed).

Then there are the statues you come across in an unexpected place, say an ordinary city block. That was my curious introduction to this stunning sculpture of Polyhymnia, which sits behind a fence in a courtyard on East 87th Street steps from Fifth Avenue.

Poly who? Polyhymnia is the Ancient Greek goddess of lyric poetry. One of the nine muses, she’s a daughter of Zeus and also the goddess of music, song, and dance.

Here she stands on a marble base amid orange flowers and a wall of ivy; in front of her is a wrought-iron fence and gate. Clad in Classical garb and with a child beside her, she looks pensive, her eyes cast down toward the child. She appears to be holding a lyre.

So how did Polyhymnia end up on one of the most luxurious townhouse blocks in Manhattan? Her story begins in 1895 with the establishment of a group called Der Liederkranz Damen Verein.

The German name translates into “The Liederkranz Ladies’ Club.” This was an all-female auxiliary organization that supported the philanthropic and social activities of the Liederkranz Club—a singing society formed in New York City in 1847 for men of German descent.

In the decades before the Civil War, German immigrants came to New York by the thousands; in 1860, they comprised a quarter of the city’s population. Groups like the Liederkranz Club offered fellowship and culture for German newcomers as they navigated life in a not always welcoming metropolis.

“During the period preceding the Civil War, German American singing groups sprang up all over America, preserving German musical tradition and keeping the culture alive,” explained the website for the Liederkranz of the City of New York, the group’s current name. “Interest in the music of Germany was at its height.”

By the late 19th century, the group had hundreds of members. William Steinway, of Steinway Pianos fame, then became president of the Liederkranz. He helped guide members to raise funds for a clubhouse that was eventually built at 111-119 East 58th Street (below photo).

Two years after the Damen Verein formed, members commissioned sculptor Giuseppe Moretti to create the statue of Polyhymnia. It was presented as a gift for the clubhouse in 1897 to honor the Liederkranz Club’s 50th anniversary.

Facing a decline in membership after World War II, the Liederkranz sold the East 58th Street clubhouse. In 1949 members purchased the former Henry Phipps mansion—a 1904 granite and limestone Beaux Arts jewel built by this steel magnate turned philanthropist—at 6 East 87th Street.

When the Liederkranz moved to the Upper East Side, Polyhymnia came along, situated ever since in the small courtyard behind the wrought iron fence.

While the Liederkranz is still sponsoring music events and supporting cultural and social exchange, Damen Verein disbanded in 2009. Polyhymnia “serves as a permanent reminder of the spirit and generosity of the Damen Verein,” states the website.

And she’s a wonderful, slightly mysterious muse who will stop you in your tracks if you happen to find yourself on East 87th Street.

[Fifth photo: MCNY, X2010.11.5555]

This sweet 1820s house is a reminder that the Bowery was once a middle-class residential street

Before the raucous dance halls and concert saloons, before the earsplitting roar of the elevated train, before the bars, breadlines, beer gardens, flop houses, wholesale districts, and early 2000s transition into a luxury hotel district, the Bowery was a residential road of tidy, single-family houses.

For a short time, anyway. But first, a little backstory.

What was known as “Bowry Road” by the Dutch—who established New Amsterdam in the early 1600s—served as a carriage and wagon drive so the burghers who ran the colony could get to and from their farms on the outskirts of town. In the 18th century, cattle drovers herded their livestock on this former Native American footpath, close to the slaughterhouse district at the Collect Pond.

After the turn of the 19th century, New York was in the throes of a population boom, with about 60,000 citizens in 1820 and more arriving every year. The Bowery, as it was officially renamed in 1813, was eyed for residential development.

First the cattle pens had to go. Several wealthy neighbors who hoped to rid the Bowery “of its noise and filth” bought out slaughterhouse owner Henry Astor (older brother of John Jacob) in the 1820s, per the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As the slaughterhouses began moving north to 23rd Street, vast family estates and small farms were sold off and carved up into new side streets. The gaslit, Roman temple-like Bowery Theater opened in 1826 and aimed to lure an elite clientele (fifth photo).

Thus began the Bowery’s stint as a fashionable address. Few of these early houses from the Bowery’s genteel era still stand. One that does is at 306 Bowery, across from First Street.

A mile or so north of where the Bowery begins at Chatham Square, this three-and-a-half story survivor is a relic of a street that by the 1830s “had become a bustling neighborhood composed in large part of brick and brick-fronted Federal-style row houses,” according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Number 306 was built not by a family but as an investment. George Lorillard had the house constructed in 1820 “at a time when this area was developing with homes for the city’s expanding middle class,” states the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s 2003 report on the NoHo East Historic District.

Lorillard was the son of Pierre Lorillard, a French Huguenot who immigrated to New York around 1760 and started a snuff-grinding factory near Chatham Square.

By the 1820s, George Lorillard had taken over his father’s tobacco company and begun investing in real estate—building not just 306 Bowery but also 308 and 310 next door.

Number 306 had all the early 19th century touches that the family of a merchant or trader would desire: three stories, Flemish bond brickwork, sandstone lintels on and above the window sills, plus a half-floor with dormer windows and a peaked roof where a servant or two could board.

The house was alone on the block when it was first built, and the attic story had small windows open to the north and south, as this lithograph from 1862 shows. (I added the lithograph to the post courtesy of a resident who moved into 306 Bowery in the 1970s and rebuilt the roof in 2004.) The lithograph also reveals two chimneys as well as an entertainment venue a few doors down: a “bowling saloon.”

Who lived in this pretty little house? The earliest known tenant was a woman named Ann Fisher, who lived there in the 1820s, according to the LPC report. A notice announced that her funeral would be held in the house, or “her late residence,” as The Evening Post put it in 1838. She was 72 years old and the widow of Richard Fisher.

Lorillard sold the house in 1841. Maybe he sensed that the Bowery’s proximity to the Five Points slum district would eventually ruin the home’s value as an investment. Or he saw the Bowery’s low-rent future. Streetcars began running between Prince and 14th Street in 1832, states the Bowery Alliance, and the crowds at the Bowery Theater were increasingly coarse.

New residents moved in and out through the next several decades. A medical doctor, E.F. Maynard, lived there in the 1830s, per the 1837 Evening Post, and then bought it from Lorillard. Mahnor Day, a publisher and bookseller, was the next owner. After his death, his estate owned the house until 1899, according to the LPC report.

It was in the middle of the 19th century when the Bowery lost its appeal as a middle-class residential street. Commerce had moved in, then the rollicking vaudeville theaters, saloons, and late-night oyster houses. Working class and poor people, many who were German immigrants, rented rooms in the carved up old houses and new tenements.

Gang fights broke out. Criminals hung around, looking for easy marks. The Third Avenue Elevated began spewing steam overhead in 1878—two years after 306 Bowery underwent alterations to turn its ground floor into a storefront.

The era of the Bowery as an entertainment district was underway. 306 Bowery escaped major alteration (aside from a new fire escape, as seen in this 1940 photo) and remained a single-family home and ground-floor store until 1966, when it was portioned into artists’ studios.

Most recently the little house was home to a Patricia Field boutique, which closed in 2015. Its more heavily renovated sister houses at 308 and 310 Bowery are (or were) occupied by pricey drinking establishments.

The future feels uncertain for this 205-year-old remnant. But if you close your eyes and shut your ears, and you envision a front stoop instead of a storefront, you can almost imagine the house as it was in 1820 at the dawn of the Bowery’s brief turn as a respectable middle-class enclave.

[Third image: painting by William P. Chappel, Metmuseum.org; fifth image: NYPL Digital Collections; sixth image: NYPL Digital Collections; seventh image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

The mysterious blocked-off entryways built into a Central Park transverse road

There’s so much exquisite natural and structural beauty grabbing your attention in Central Park that you probably don’t give the transverse roads much thought.

You know the transverse roads. Part of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s 1858 Greensward plan for the park, these four serpentine roads at 65th, 79th, 85th, and 97th Streets are sunk below the park’s grade and surrounded by stone embankments.

The transverse roads allow for east-west traffic through the park with as little disruption as possible. It’s a brilliant design element that helps park-goers feel removed from the usual urban distractions without stopping the flow of transit.

But the 85th Street transverse road presents a mystery: what was the purpose of these entryways on opposite sides of the road, and where did they lead?

With their Romanesque design, they seem to be original features built into the stone embankments, or perhaps late 19th century additions. The one in the first image is bricked in; the second is blocked by a locked gate.

Maybe they served as passageways for the men who built Central Park, so they could continue their work or maintain crucial park functions as the park opened in stages through the 1860s? Or perhaps they were storage areas that became obsolete in the 20th century and subsequently blocked off, no longer needed.

Whatever their original function, I get the feeling they add something interesting to Central Park’s backstory and how this jewel of a city park came to be—or how it continues to be such a wonderful respite for today’s New Yorkers.

What happened to the flashy amusement park nicknamed the Coney Island of Canarsie?

It was just a few miles on the Brooklyn shoreline from the real Coney Island—an amusement mecca of Greco-Roman towers, dance pavilions, and electric lights fronting a new boardwalk beside Jamaica Bay.

Opening to a crowd of 30,000 New Yorkers in May 1907 in the sparsely populated South Brooklyn area of Canarsie, Golden City, as its developers named it, satiated the fantasies of summertime fun seekers.

Built to rival the great amusement venues at Coney, Golden City’s nine acres of extreme rides and attractions dazzled the imagination.

There was the Coliseum Coaster, the “Over the Rockies” scenic railway, the Double Whirl (a ferris wheel with a revolving base), “Down the Niagara,” which sent riders on boats through rapids and whirlpools, and “Love’s Journey,” which had couples sitting side by side through dark tunnels while confetti was thrown at them.

Perhaps the most insanely creative ride was “Human Laundry,” where patrons “were washed in a giant tub, then spun dry, thoroughly dried by wind, pressed between upright rollers, and sent down a laundry chute slide to the street,” explains the website Lost Amusement Parks.

Like all great pleasure parks of the early 20th century, the wild rides were just the beginning. Dance halls, a bandstand, motorcycle daredevil shows, exotic animals, a funhouse, a carousel, vaudeville performers, and a skating rink rounded out the offerings.

“In addition to the rides, the park staged a number of live shows at ‘The Barbary Coast’ amusement hall, allowing Broadway stars to try out new material before bringing the act to the major stages in Manhattan,” states the Brooklyn Public Library.

The park’s most popular live action show, ‘The Robinson Crusoe Show,’ was a 22-minute telling of the Daniel Defoe novel that cost the park $60,000 to stage,” per the Library.

Sixty grand was a lot of money in 1907, and the entire park was estimated to cost at least half a million bucks to build and operate.

But Golden City’s developers bet that there was room for another amusement park in a city dominated by Coney Island, the Rockaways, and smaller pleasure palaces like the Fort George Amusement Park in Upper Manhattan and Starlight Park in the Bronx.

For several years, they were right. The completion of an elevated train to Canarsie and extension of surface lines in the early 1900s made it easier for day-trippers from all over Brooklyn to pay the nickel fare and get to Golden City faster than if they boarded a train for Coney.

“To many an ordinary man with a large family to take on an outing the saving in carfare will be a material consideration,” commented the Brooklyn Daily Times in May 1907.

Improved rapid transit and the influx of visitors made Canarsie, formerly a fishing hotspot, a resort-like area ready for big development. “Cool—Canarsie shore—Clean,” stated a 1916 ad featuring area hotels and restaurants. “The mecca for the pleasure seeker.”

By the late 1930s, however, Golden City sat empty, its visitors gone, concessions shuttered, and buildings condemned. What happened?

For starters, running an amusement park open only during warm-weather months is a challenge. The park was initially popular, and the developers announced that they were expanding it by 50 acres, according to Lost Amusement Parks. The price to get into the park rose to 25 cents—which perhaps wasn’t enough to break even.

Then there were fires. “In 1909, a fire that began in one of the park’s restaurants quickly spread, causing $200,000 worth of damage and destroying the restaurant, dance hall, photography gallery, and office,” states the Brooklyn Public Library. “The park was able to resume normal operations, but was the victim of fire again in 1912 when the Tunnel of Love was destroyed.”

The Great Depression put the final nails in the coffin. “The park was already losing money when a 1934 fire damaged the park so badly that management refused to rebuild,” explains the Brooklyn Public Library.

In 1938, New York City bought the Golden City site, with the understanding that the developers who owned it would hang onto it through September of that year. But Parks Commissioner Robert Moses “had his steam shovels scoop up and haul away the beer gardens, shooting galleries, and other amusements,” the developers alleged per a Brooklyn Citizen article in 1941.

Moses then remade the site into the Belt Parkway. Did any remnants from Golden City survive?

Just the carousel, apparently. Carved by the Brooklyn firm Artistic Carousel Company and installed at Golden City in 1912, it was salvaged by a Long Island amusement park called Nunley’s when Golden City closed.

After Nunley’s went out of business, the hand-carved painted horses were restored to their original beauty. What’s now known as Nunley’s carousel appears to be owned by the Long Island Children’s Museum—a Golden City relic of Brooklyn’s golden era as the cheap thrills capital of Gotham.

[Top image: Lost Amusement Parks; second image: Lost Amusement Parks; third image: Brooklyn Citizen; fourth image: ebay; fifth image: ebay; sixth image: Long Island Children’s Museum; seventh image: Center for Brooklyn History/Brooklyn Public Library]

The faceless men haunting the Third Avenue El in the twilight of the 1930s city

You can practically feel the clattering rush of the elevated train roaring above Third Avenue in this dramatic 1930s painting by Bernard Gussow, a Russia-born artist who was raised on the Lower East Side.

The amber train, twilight skies, and green and pink tints to the storefronts give rich pops of color to what could have been an ordinary scene of urban mass transit. The steel tracks cut through the cityscape with an energy that commands the center of the canvas and almost cleaves it in two.

Gussow seems to guide our eyes to the space illuminated under the tracks. And then things get creepy. What is it with the faceless men watching the woman in workday clothes, who appears to be startled by one man walking close behind her?

The painting is set at the end of the day, or perhaps early in the morning before it starts—two points in time when nighttime denizens occupy the same space as those who live their lives in the daytime.

It’s a narrative of contrasts: the concrete ground under the tracks and the heavenly blue skies above; the drab, expressionless men and the woman who communicates vulnerability; the convergence of day and night; the skyscrapers in the shadows while life on street level takes the spotlight.

Gussow captured many subway and elevated train scenes, often with a gentleness that has something to say about the anonymity of the modern city. But “Third Avenue El,” as this painting is plainly titled, feels darker and more mysterious.

The holdout houses on a former colonial-era farm by the East River meet the wrecking ball in 1914

It’s hard to imagine in today’s river-to-river concrete city, but Manhattan at one time was almost entirely an island of farms and estates.

As the colonial outpost once known as New Amsterdam transitioned into the city of New York, vast tracts of land were sold and parceled out to new owners and developers—who built urban neighborhoods to accommodate the booming population and surge in commerce and industry.

One by one, as the city expanded northward in the late 18th and 19th centuries, farms in today’s Greenwich Village, Murray Hill, Gramercy, Chelsea, and Midtown were sold off—disappearing into a cityscape of new homes, factories, mass transit hubs, and business spaces.

But farmland in the upper reaches of Manhattan held out for much longer, thanks to their relative remoteness. One of these was the farm of Peter Schermerhorn, which stretched from today’s 63rd and 67th Streets on York Avenue along the East River.

You know the old-money Schermerhorns. The patriarch of this Knickerbocker family arrived in New York from Holland in the 17th century and made his home in the Albany area. A century later, a branch of the family relocated to Gotham, becoming merchants, shippers (Schermerhorn Row on South Street is named for them), and landowners in Manhattan and Brooklyn (see Schermerhorn Street, which runs from Flatbush Avenue to Brooklyn Heights).

Peter Schermerhorn (right), a ship chandler and merchant, wasn’t the first settler to take hold of this expanse of riverfront. It was originally part of a larger estate owned by David Provoost, a descendent of a French Huguenot immigrant who made his fortune as a merchant.

The Provoost farm was divvied up in 1800, according to a 1922 New York Times story; Schermerhorn supposedly purchased it and added the farm to land he already owned to the north in 1818.

With the land came some outbuildings, including a pretty, colonial-style farmhouse (top two images) on high ground near the future East 63rd Street dating back to 1747.

“Early records state that the house was, for a time after the Revolution, the country home of General George Clinton, who became the first Governor of the State and afterward Vice President of the United States, and tradition also says that Washington visited Clinton at the house and enjoyed the peaceful river view from beneath one of the ancient trees,” reported the New York Times in another 1922 article.

Along with the farmhouse, the Schermerhorn farm had a pre-Revolutionary War chapel building and a cemetery for family members. Over the years, other buildings were added.

Surrounded by woodlands, the family’s nearest neighbors may have been the Jones family to the north, who owned an estate known as Jones Wood, which almost became the site of Central Park.

To the south was the Beekman mansion and estate in today’s East 50s. In between would have been the still-standing Mount Vernon Hotel, built for President John Adams’ daughter as a home but by the early 19th century a summer resort for elite New Yorkers seeking cool breezes and countryside relief far from the sweltering city center.

What was life like in the 19th century on the Schermerhorn’s countryside farm estate, with its ornamental gardens and groves of trees? Probably isolated at first, but as the century went on, railroads and manufacturing invaded; streetcars and later elevated trains brought traffic and crowds to nearby avenues.

Both Peter and his wife Sarah passed away in the middle of the century. Their children inherited the property, and then their heirs. But according to a report by Rockefeller University, it appears that the Schermerhorn descendants moved to a new mansion on 23rd Street in the 1860s and no longer occupied the farmhouse.

A German immigrant, August Braun, leased half of the property and ran a successful boating and bathing facility at the river’s edge. In 1877, the Pastime Athletic Club built a running track on the other half of the estate, using the rundown chapel as a gymnasium.

By the turn of the 20th century, the urban city ringed the former farm, with tenements, apartment houses, and breweries constructed near what was still known as Avenue A; it wouldn’t be renamed York Avenue until 1928.

In 1903, a different kind of wealthy New Yorker took came calling: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. This financier and philanthropist son of the Gilded Age founder of Standard Oil had plans to build the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research here, and he set about acquiring land for his new biomedical research facility.

Schermerhorn descendant William Schermerhorn (or his estate) sold the farm to Rockefeller. In the Institute’s early days, the roughly 150-year-old colonial farmhouse was repurposed as a nurses’ station and dispensary as part of a hospital for sick babies on the institute’s campus.

The hospital closed, and the farmhouse met the bulldozer in 1914—as did the chapel and the remnants of other outbuildings on the property that year or sometime before or after. (The cemetery remained sans the headstones, which were toppled and broken long before Rockefeller bought the land.)

Newspapers chronicled the passing of what was deemed the second-oldest house in Manhattan, but not all took a nostalgic ot wistful tone.

“When built in 1747 it was surrounded by woods on all sides but the river,” noted the Sun in 1914, which added that now the marked-for-destruction farmhouse was surrounded by brick medical institute buildings, “in which many wonderful medical wonders are being performed.”

In 1955, the institute became The Rockefeller University, maintaining its presence with a gated driveway and many buildings on sloped grounds overlooking the East River.

[h/t to the Urban Archive for featuring the Schermerhorn farmhouse in its latest newsletter]

[Top photo: Frank Cousins Collection/NYC Design; second photo: Frank Cousins Collection/NYC Design; third photo: Find a Grave; fourth image: The Rockefeller University; fifth image: The Rockefeller University; sixth image: NYPL Digital Collections; seventh image: The Rockefeller University; ninth photo: Frank Cousins Collection/NYC Design]