“Swinging, exclusively single social events”

In 1970, the whole idea of a singles scene was still pretty new. The first bar officially known as a singles bar—a T.G.I. Friday’s on East 63rd Street and First Avenue—opened in 1965, packing in young unmarried professionals and turning First and Second Avenues uptown into a singles zone in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Soon ads like these, from the March 28, 1970 issue of Cue magazine, began springing up, hoping to attract New Yorkers looking for a mate. And the era of the desperate, Looking for Mr. Goodbar single was born.

Considering that they make a point of accepting anyone 18 to 50, this social events group doesn’t look especially promising. I wonder just how “elegant” the “swinging night clubs” Plaza 9, Act 1, and The Roundtable really were!

The South Bronx mystery chick

This statue graces the front courtyard of a high-rise Grand Concourse apartment building. She’s one formidable female, but who is she?

Taking a walk down the Village’s Charles Lane

Charles Lane, a narrow alley from Washington to West Street in the West Village, is all that remains of the northern boundary of Newgate State Prison, which stood at the foot of the Hudson here from 1797 until the 1820s. Also known as Pig Alley, Charles Lane was later paved with unique stones not seen elsewhere in the city, according to the Greenwich Village Society of Historical Preservation.

Here’s Charles Lane in the 1930s, photographed by Berenice Abbott. Is that the old Ninth Avenue El that ran along Greenwich Street, or is it a remnant of the High Line?

Charles Lane today is surrounded by pricey West Village real estate, but it doesn’t look all that different, and the paving stones remain the same. Amazing it wasn’t bulldozed and turned into the Charles Lane Condos:

Luxury apartment hunting in 1936

Perhaps we’re headed for a repeat of the 1930s, when ritzy uptown apartment buildings put up in the 1920s for wealthy New Yorkers didn’t attract quite enough renters, thanks to a little thing called the Great Depression. Hence the need for ads like these offering amenities and stabilized rents, which appeared in The New Yorker in July 1936.

What were the “unusual transportation facilities” available at the Majestic, as promised in this ad? And 277 Park Avenue sounds like an appeal to the pleasures of suburbia:

 

The Beaux-Arts Apartments don’t come off as very luxe, considering the free bus service and pension plan. Pension plan?

Who would try to assassinate a New York mayor?

A deranged city employee who blamed the Mayor when he was fired from his job, that’s who. It happened in 1910 as Mayor William Jay Gaynor—a Tammany Hall candidate who actually helped clean up corruption once he was elected—was in Hoboken boarding a ship bound for Europe. 

The employee, James Gallagher, fired a bullet through the Mayor’s throat after supposedly shouting, “You took my bread and butter away; now I’ve got you.”

Amazingly, the shooting was captured on camera. A New York World photographer snapping a routine photo caught the second the bullet tore into the Mayor’s neck and blood splattered on his coat.

The Mayor survived with the bullet lodged in his throat. Gallagher was never tried for the assassination attempt at the Mayor’s request, though he was sentenced to 12 years in a New Jersey prison for wounding street cleaning commissioner William Edwards, who was shot in the arm while with the Mayor.

Mayor Gaynor died from the effects of the bullet in 1913, the only New York City mayor ever to be the target of an assassin’s gun. Gallagher also died in 1913 in prison.

“Ho every one that thirsteth”

As inscribed on the water fountain/wash bowl on the facade of East 14th Street’s Gothic-style Immaculate Conception Church, built in 1896.

The phrase comes from the Old Testament: “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money, come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”

 

Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the fountain works, and the basin was filled with trash last week when the photo was taken. Still, the words are inspiring, and how many fish spouts do you see in the city?

Meet the kids from Bowling Green

In the early years of the 20th century, the streets near Bowling Green—the oldest public park in the city, at the foot of Broadway in Lower Manhattan—were home to thousands of families, “crowded into tenements made out of old warehouses and former fashionable houses now fallen into decay,” explains Valentine’s City of New York Guidebook, published in 1920.

These are some of the kids growing up in that neighborhood, which at the time was a melting pot of Irish, Polish, Syrians, Greeks, Armenians, and “people from Palestine and Mesopotamia,” the book notes.

 

This is the era of settlement work, when wealthier New Yorkers began donating time and money to help poorer neighborhoods with schools, health care, and other social services. As the book explains:

“Both the children and the mothers have found a great friend in the Bowling Green Neighborhood Association, an organization which has voluntarily taken up settlement work. They have provided a playground, a little hall where dances and social affairs can be had, a modest little library, a babies clinic, and other desirable attributes.

“The infant mortality, from an abnormally high rate, has been reduced to correspond to the average of the city at large, and in other ways the neighborhood association has made for itself a warm spot in the heart of these friendless foreigners.”

The girls who lent their names to tenements

Just as ships tend to be named after chicks, New York’s new-law tenement buildings also seem to have been given mostly female monikers. The names reflect popular girls’ names at the turn of the last century, when most tenements were constructed.

Perhaps they were the names of wives and daughters of the developers? Or maybe the builders just liked the way they sounded.

The Lilly and The Johanna are in the West Village:

The Aurora is in Sunset Park, the Brooklyn neighborhood that used to be home to many Norwegian immigrants:

Okay, Venus may not have been a top-10 girls’ name back in 1901. But it’s a terrific name for a tenement in South Williamsburg, isn’t it?

Brooklyn’s Prospect Hill water tower

This image is from a postcard dating back to the 1890s, soon after the tower was built. According to a Brooklyn Daily Eagle article from January 18, 1893, a water shortage threatened the city (the city of Brooklyn, that is, which had yet to become part of New York City):

“There would be no substantial relief until the water tower at Prospect Hill should be put in use, which would be in two or three months,” the article states. 

This prime part of Brooklyn looks awfully lonely and barren in the photo. But things would quickly change: The Brooklyn Museum would soon be built on a land to the east of the water tower and adjoining reservoir. Eastern Parkway would eventually be lined with trees and apartment houses.

The tower itself was constructed to supply water to houses near Prospect Park, which there would be many more of in the coming years.

The Village’s art house movie theaters

There are lots of places in the city that show independent and foreign films. But movie fanatics who lived in New York in the 50s, 60s, and 70s still bemoan the loss of certain legendary theaters, like Bleecker Street Cinema, which opened in 1962 and closed in 1990.

After ceasing to show art films, Bleecker Street Cinema had a short stint as a porno palace, then was renovated for retail use. 

This page, from the 1965 Inside Guide to Greenwich Village, calls it “a film-lover’s paradise,” then lists other artsy theaters, most of which are long gone. Cinema Village still exists, but the Greenwich Theater is now an Equinox, and the Eighth Street Playhouse a retail outlet.