The tidy tenements of Williamsburg in the 1940s

Working class Brooklyn looks like a diorama of tidy townhouses and tenements in this painting by Russian American artist Maurice Kish, completed in the 1940s, according to Live Auctioneers.

It’s a uniformly cozy scene on the industrial side of the East River. Snow covers the slender streets and sidewalks, and neat reddish houses with their rooftop water towers and smoking chimneys give Williamsburg an intimate feel.

Looming far in the background is the skyscraper city in Manhattan, shrouded in darkness.

Where the hangman lived on Washington Square

You wouldn’t know it today, as you walk through the marble arch or past the central fountain. But an estimated 20,000 bodies are buried beneath Washington Square Park.

Paupers, unknowns, prisoners, yellow fever victims—between 1819 and 1821 or 1823 (sources vary), they ended up here, when Washington Square served as the growing city’s potter’s field.

The square, bucolic and out of the way, was an ideal spot for a burial ground. (Above, in the 1880s)

It would be another decade or so before the north side would become “The Row,” a place of fashionable brownstones for the rich. (Below, in 1936)

And though houses were starting to sprout up in what was then the suburb of Greenwich, this was not yet a dense residential neighborhood.

Still, when the potter’s field opened, the gravedigger, Daniel Megie, had to find somewhere to live close to work.

In 1819, this “keeper of the potter’s field,” who also served as the hangman for Newgate Prison at the end of Christopher Street, paid $500 for a corner plot of land on today’s Washington Square South and Thompson Street.

Here, he built a two-story wooden frame shack, “where he could keep his tools and sleep,” according to a 1913 New York Times article.

“For three years he dwelt there, smoothing the resting places in the Field of Sleep,” wrote Anna Alice Chapin in her 1920 book, Greenwich Village.

As the prison hangman, Megie was tasked with executing prisoners in Washington Square—as legend has it from the infamous “hangman’s elm” on the northwest side of the square.

Megie departed his wood house in the early 1820s, when Washington Square ceased to be a potter’s field and the last public hanging took place.

What happened to him is lost to history.

But his home survived almost for a century, serving as a tavern, general store/soda fountain, and then as a Bohemian hangout Bruno’s Garret and then a coffeehouse/spaghetti dinner restaurant operated by Grace Godwin.

Today, the site of the wood frame house built by Washington Square’s hangman and gravedigger is part of NYU.

[Top image: Jessie Tarbox Beals, 1920; second image: NYPL, 1880s; third image: Berenice Abbott, 1936, MCNY: 89.2.1.126; fourth image: New-York Historical Society, 1914; fifth image: NYPL 1925; sixth image: NYPL 1927]

Where you’d go for pierogi and borscht in 1976

Things probably haven’t changed much at the East Village’s Ukrainian Restaurant since this ad ran in the New York City phone book in 1976.

But that’s the way the people who run this old-school restaurant on Second Avenue seem to like it.

In business for 50-plus years, it’s a product of Little Ukraine, aka the Ukrainian community that settled in the East Village during and after World War II, according to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.

Other holdouts for hearty pierogi, stuffed cabbage, and borsch in the East village include the legendary Veselka.

RIP Kiev; you are missed.

The fantasy of window shopping in New York City

When Ashcan artist Everett Shinn painted this woman seemingly spellbound by the stylish mannequins behind a department store window, the concept of “window shopping” was a relatively new phenomenon.

Shinn completed the painting, simply titled “Window Shopping,” in 1903. It perfectly captures the consumerism ushered in by the rise of the Gilded Age city’s magnificent emporiums, where the latest fashions were on display on the Flatiron and Chelsea streets that once made up Ladies Mile.

“Shinn may have appreciated the way shop windows, like the vaudeville stage, created a fantasy space that functioned also as a site of cultural exchange,” art consultant Janay Wong explained on a Sotheby’s page focusing on the painting.

“Moreover, he may have been drawn to the ‘modernity’ of the shop window, which had only recently come into being, the result of new technologies that made possible the production of plate glass, colored glass, and electric light.”

The faded ghost sign for a Ludlow Street grocery

55 Ludlow Street blends right into the Lower East Side streetscape.

It’s a six-story building between Hester and Grand that probably started out as a brick tenement in the late 19th or early 20th century before getting an upgrade that smoothed out the facade and front windows.

Photos over the past few years show the first floor commercial space covered in graffiti, with no apparent occupant in place.

But one turn-of-the-century feature remains: the very faded phantom outline of a sign, “wholesale grocers,” above the first-floor entrance.

So who were these wholesale grocers, and when did they run their business?

It could have been the sign for Bernstein & Wolfson, a wholesale grocery founded by Morris H. Bernstein, 44, described in his 1916 New York Times obituary as “the mayor of the East Side” and head of one of the largest groceries in the area.

“He lived at [illegible] Orchard Street, and his death is said to be hastened by his active preparations for the celebration of his 20th year as a grocer on the East Side, which was to have taken place in Webster Hall on March 25,” wrote the Times.

A grocer’s directory from 1917 continued to categorize Bernstein as the “strictly wholesale” grocer at 55 Ludlow Street.

Bernstein & Wolfson didn’t appear to last much longer. By 1919, the New York Herald reported that the entire building at 55 Ludlow Street was leased to a candy company.

Here it is in a 1940 Department of Records tax photo…looking not far off from the way it looks today. Special thanks to Robert G. for spotting this ghost sign and taking the photos!

[Fourth photo: NYC Department of Records Tax Photo]

A postcard view of the last J.P. Morgan mansion

The fence is gone, as is the blanket of ivy and red paint. But the brownstone mansion on Madison Avenue and 37th Street remains, one of the buildings that today makes up the Morgan Library and Museum.

Interestingly, this surviving mansion, built in 1852-1853 as part of a trio of identical impressive houses, was never the financier’s home.

J.P. Morgan resided at 219 Madison Avenue, the southernmost mansion on the corner of 36th Street, from 1881 to his death in 1913, according to The Morgan Library and Museum website.

His house was demolished in 1928. Before it met the wrecking ball, Morgan had architect Charles McKim design his library, the white marble building in the center of the postcard (and in the bottom photo), completed in 1906.

The mansion on the corner of 37th Street, number 231 Madison? That was the home of J.P.’s son, Jack, purchased by his dad.

“Morgan bought the central brownstone in 1903, which was then razed to make space for a garden, and a year later he purchased the northernmost house, at 231 Madison, for his son, Jack Morgan,” the site states.

“With forty-five rooms, including twelve bathrooms, the house was one of the most impressive residences of its day.”

J.P. Morgan’s mansion was distinctive as well; it’s thought to be the first private home powered by electricity in the early 1880s.

Carrying out his father’s wishes, Jack Morgan created the Morgan Library and gave his father’s incredible art and rare book collection to the new institution—which has been open to the public ever since.

[Second photo: Morgan Library and Museum; fourth photo: MCNY, 1920, X2010.11.5391]

The man behind a manhole cover on 78th Street

Just when you think you’ve seen every old-school manhole cover that still remains in New York, you discover another you’ve never noticed before—with a new name embossed on it and a different design.

This lid, made by M. Dattner, is a new one for me—spotted on East 78th Street between First and Second Avenues.

That’s less than five blocks from where Dattner had his hardware store at 1585 First Avenue, which for a time was also his home, according to Walter Grutchfield’s wonderful website.

Who was Dattner? According to Grutchfield, Moritz “Morris” Dattner immigrated from Austria in 1903. He went into business with a brother who had a hardware company at 1210-1212 First Avenue, then began his own concern.

He registered for the World War I and World War II drafts, and by the 1940s he had moved to Brooklyn. He died in 1963, and I like to think that this manhole cover is something of a memorial.

More manhole covers from across the city can be found here.

This luxury building had a private dock for yachts

River House, the majestic Art Deco apartment building at the end of East 52nd Street, offers lots of amenities.

Residents of this tony co-op built in 1931 on the site of a former cigar factory enter and exit through a cobblestone courtyard with a private driveway behind a wrought-iron fence.

Multi-room apartments have panoramic views of the East River, and the 26-story building features the River Club, a members-only club with a gym, pool, and dining room.

Too bad one of the original selling points River House dangled in front of its earliest prospective tenants is no longer there: a private dock on the East River where residents could park their yachts.

It’s hard to believe, but this really did exist. Even though the building opened during the Great Depression, that didn’t stop residents from using the dock to sail back and forth to their Long Island mansions, as one Daily News article from 1940 shows.

The yacht dock’s demise began when the city decided to build the East River Drive (later the FDR Drive) along the river in the 1930s, cutting into the dock. City officials apparently tried to work out a compromise.

“At River House, the highway is all at one level, the same level as the original dockside landing,” wrote Christopher Gray in a 2005 New York Times column.

“The city built a high wall separating the landing from the highway—leaving plenty of light, if no view—and erected an elevated walkway to a new riverside landing just beyond the highway itself.”

Apparently it just wasn’t the same without the original dock, and residents either gave up their yachts or parked them elsewhere.

[Top photo: MCNY, 1931: 88.1.1.2083; second photo: MCNY 1931: 88.1.1.2058; third photo: MCNY, 1938; fourth photo: MCNY 1931: 88.1.1.2121; fifth photo: City Realty]

A last remnant of the Duane Street shoe district

New York is a necropolis of defunct businesses. But every so often an old sign from one of these dead and gone businesses reappears like a ghost, reminding us that at another time in another New York, they were part of the cityscape.

One of these long-gone stores recently revealed itself at 114 Chambers Street in Tribeca. “Craig’s Shoes” it reads, looking strangely British and very old-fashioned.

Tribeca Citizen also noticed the back-in-view sign earlier this summer.

Reader comments explain that Craig’s had been in business since 1949, ending its run in 2006 at a second store site on 132 Chambers Street, which was to be demolished and replaced by the AKA Tribeca Hotel.

Interestingly, Craig’s wasn’t just a one-off shoe store in a neighborhood once known for its light industry and food provisions businesses.

This pocket in Tribeca centered around Duane Street was once the center of the “shoe-jobbing district,” as the area is nicknamed in the 1939 WPA Guide to New York City via Tribeca Citizen.

A New York Times article from 1920 calls it the “Duane Street shoe district,” while other articles go with the “downtown shoe district.”

(At left, 114 Chambers Street in 1940; a shoe icon hangs off the side of the building next door.)

The shoe district appears to have taken off in the late 19th century, and by the 1920s several shoe manufacturers had factories here.

Tribeca wouldn’t be coined until the 1970s, of course, and by that time, the shoe manufacturers and side businesses catering to it were all but gone.

Another curious remnant of the shoe district does still exist, at least it did a decade ago.

It’s this beautiful street clock affixed to 145 Duane Street, former home of the Nathaniel Fisher Company—wholesale shoe sellers described as one of “the oldest shoe firms in America,” according to an 1894 New York Times article.

[Third image: Boot and Shoe Recorder, 1921; fourth image: New York City Department of Records]

How Central Park got its Shakespeare Garden

It’s hidden in Central Park near West 81st Street: a four-acre oasis of winding hillside paths and wooden benches resplendent with colorful, fragrant plants and flowers.

But this lovely green space of quiet and peace near Belvedere Castle isn’t just any garden in the park.

It’s the Shakespeare Garden—filled with a dazzling display of the trees, plants, and flowers that William Shakespeare referenced in his poems of plays. It’s also designed to evoke the English countryside of the 1600s.

Like many of Central Park’s magnificent landscapes, the Shakespeare Garden never appeared in the original plans for the park laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in the 1850s.

How the garden made it into the park near West 81st Street has to do with the Shakespeare garden fad of the early 20th century in England and America, sparked by Shakespeare’s 300th birthday in 1916.

What eventually became the Shakespeare Garden started out as the “Garden of the Heart,” created in 1913 as a garden for kids to learn about nature by Dr. Edmond Bronk Southwick.

 Southwick (below right) was the park entomologist—and also an avid Shakespeare fan, according to Garden Collage.

He either took it upon himself or was nudged by city officials (sources vary) to turn this very popular children’s garden into a landscape of “beautiful plants and flowers mentioned in the works of the playwright, as well as those featured in Shakespeare’s own private garden in Stratford-upon-Avon,” states CentralPark.com.

(Above right, the garden in 1916, with a waterfall that’s no longer there.)

On April 23, 1916—as part of the city’s Shakespeare Tercentenary Week—Southwick’s children’s garden was formally renamed the Shakespeare Garden, the Sun reported.

In its early years, the city’s Shakespeare Society and Southwick himself maintained the array of plants, including columbine, primrose, wormwood, quince, lark’s heel, rue, eglantine, flax, and cowslip, according to CentralParkNYC.org.

But the Society broke up in 1929, and the Shakespeare Garden went into a long decline, eventually restored and saved by the Central Park Conservatory and volunteers.

The Shakespeare Garden has undergone some changes. Plaques containing quotes from the Bard’s works can now be found beside some of the plants.

Also, a mulberry tree that supposedly grew from a mulberry cutting from Shakespeare’s actual garden was felled by a 2006 storm and had to be removed.

Today it remains a magical, slightly secretive spot in the park with spectacular flowers that would likely get a nod of approval from the writer behind the English language’s most romantic poetry and plays—and anyone seeking serenity and beauty. (And a place to curl up with a book!)

Central Park’s garden is not the only Shakespeare Garden in the city. The Brooklyn Botanical Garden has one, too.

[Fifth and sixth images: New York Times, 1916]