The white-brick residence at 155 East 38th Street doesn’t appear to be any different than the hundreds of others like it in Manhattan.
Except for one thing: the north side of the building sports a super old-school ad for apartment vacancies—air-conditioned, from 1 to 4.5 rooms!
The old OR exchange stood for ORchard, indicating a Lower East Side realty office ORegon.
“It seems hard to believe that Twenty-third Street—which is the first street in the city of which I remember anything, could have changed in so short a time,” wrote Edward Eugene “Gene” Schermerhorn in an 1886 letter to his young nephew, Phil.
“The rural scenes, the open spaces, have vanished; and the small and quiet residences, many of them built entirely of wood, have given place to huge piles of brick and stone, and to iron and plate-glass fronts of the stores which now line the street.”
It was the first of 10 letters Gene would address to his nephew, recently collected in a thin, enchanting volume, Letters to Phil, published by New York Bound in 1982.
Each chronicles his memories between 1848 and 1856 of a small-scale New York that had yet to experience the enormous growth that made it an international capital by the 1880s.
Gene’s city had a population of about 500,000 and a northern boundary barely exceeding 14th Street. A descendent of a prosperous family that came to Manhattan in the 17th century, he shows what it was like to be a curious, privileged boy before the Civil War.
“Twenty-third Street and in fact all the streets in the neighborhood were unpaved,” he wrote. “There was plenty of room, plenty of dirt (clean dirt), and plenty of boys; what more could be desired!”
Gene writes of the games he and his friends played: marbles, “base ball,” and kite-flying. The also chased the pigs that ran around Sixth Avenue.
His Manhattan was a rural paradise. “Up town at this time was almost inaccessible. Of course there was no Central Park. Third Avenue was open to Harlem passing through Yorkville which was quite a large village about 86th Street. . . .”
Chelsea was located to the west of Gene’s home; Murray Hill, to the east. “Eighth Avenue was open to Harlem, and in connection with the Harlem Lane (now St. Nicholas Ave.) was the great road for fast driving.”
The business district, at City Hall, contained “none of those magnificent buildings now so common in the lower part of the city. A building of any kind six stories high was very rare.”
Downtown had all the theaters, as well as Barnum’s Museum. “It was a delight to go there on Saturday afternoons.”
The rough side of town was at Broadway and Houston Street, the site of St. Thomas’ church. “[Sic] Opposite to it was a row of small two-storied wooden houses; many of them low grog shops—a very bad neighborhood.”
Gene and his brother skated on ponds at 32nd and Broadway and Sixth Avenue and 57th. They headed over to Park Avenue south of 42nd Street on Saturdays and “played among the rocks and watch[ed] the trains.”
“Sometimes we would walk in the region which is now the Central Park. It was a very rough and rocky place, with plenty of woods and scattered trees and very few houses except ‘Squatters’ shanties.”
New York’s industry centered around transportation. The East River housed “Dry Docks” and shipyards. “On the Bowery at 6th Street was the ‘Hay Scale’ where the loads of hay brought in on that side of the city were weighed.
“Facing this was the ‘Gotham Inn,’ quite a noted sporting tavern. On the corner of 3rd Avenue and 13th Street stood an old pear tree, which was planted on Gov. Stuyvesant’s farm in 1647.”
Gene gives a wonderful account of a free-range boyhood in a slower-paced city. But what he did with his life isn’t clear. He apparently never married; he may have lived a life of leisure. He died in 1922.
His nephew Phil is also a mystery. His 1952 obituary in The New York Times, however, says he lived on East 78th Street, was survived by a wife, and became a painter.
[Map of NYC in 1842; images from the NYPL Digital Gallery]
It looks like a pleasant spring or summer day on Riverside Drive and in the park beside it, based on this postcard stamped 1916.
We’re at 93rd Street. Grant’s Tomb can be seen over the treetops; open-topped automobiles and a double-decker bus share the road. Pedestrians linger on the sidewalks or on the teardrop-shaped green.
And in the distance, there’s no George Washington Bridge.
Penthouse: the word conjures up luxury and exclusivity.
Thing is, it’s a clever 1920s rebranding of the top of a building, where no one with any choice used to want to live.
For most of the city’s history, the single-structure mansion was the preferred domicile for the rich.
At the turn of the 20th century, monied New Yorkers were increasingly occupying “French Flat” cooperative apartments.
But even then, the undesirable rooftop apartment was given over to servants. Until the city and its tastes changed in the Jazz Age.
“By the end of the 1920s, the cliff dwellers of Manhattan were beginning to appropriate for their own pleasure the once forlorn roofs of apartment buildings,” writes Donald L. Miller in his excellent new book on New York in the 1920s, Supreme City.
“The ‘Cinderella’ of New York architecture, the ‘penthouse,’ or roof apartment, had for decades been considered the least attractive part of a high building, a boxlike residence for the servant class, set among soot-scarred chimneys and wooden water tanks.”
Now, with a vertical city making air and light the most luxurious commodities of all, developers and their wealthy clients had these “cramped dormitories for the laboring classes” torn down and “replaced by new luxury quarters.”
“[Reporter Virginia] Pope saw ‘a new chapter of New York’s social history . . . being written above the roof line,'” wrote Miller. “In there roof houses ‘New Yorkers achieved ‘a detachment impossible to any dwelling set on earth,'” wrote journalist William Irwin. “There were no neighbors in sight; ‘only the tainted air above Manhattan.'”
A 1924 New York Times article foresaw this new desire for penthouses, which were still very limited in number, and only a few dated farther back that the late teens.
One penthouse in particular, “is a substantial affair of steel construction, cement floors, and wire embedded windows. Windows on four sides give on the towers and steeples, the skyscrapers and the occasional treetops of the city.
“A wide walled terrace looks up to a ceiling no one can touch, the blue sky of heaven.”
[Top photo: 55 Seventh Avenue in the 1930s, by Berenice Abbott; second: a 1940s Gramercy Park penthouse, NYC Municipal Archives; Third: a postcard from the Penthouse restaurant, Museum of the City of New York; bottom photo: a Tudor City penthouse in the 1930s, MCNY]
Across the street from Grand Army Plaza at the Fifth Avenue and 59th Street entrance to Central Park is a lovely lone lamppost.
Made from cast iron and aluminum, the ornate lamp is only 35 years old—a gift to New York City from the city of Hamburg in Germany symbolizing friendship.
Known as the Lombard Lamp, it draws its inspiration from the beautifully crafted lampposts that have illuminated the Lombard Bridge in Hamburg since the 1870s (photo below).
“The series of lamps that line the bridge have long been beacons at the heart of this vital German city,” states the New York City Parks Department.
In 1979, city leaders in Hamburg decided to recreate their famous lamp and give it to New York.
The new lamp “has a lavish base composed of cherubs, garlands, and other decorative features,” notes the Park Department.
“Although it is hollow, the 15-foot lamp weighs more than 1200 pounds, and supports five globe-shaped luminaires.”
With its amber globes and imagery of bridge architecture and sea icons, it’s an enchanting replica—which fits right in with Grand Army Plaza’s Gilded Age celebration of glory and progress and abundance.
[Bottom photo: via Amusing Planet]
As longtime readers know, Ephemeral New York has been chronicling the city’s past since 2008.
I’ve enjoying researching and writing every post, and I’m so grateful for all the insightful comments and kind words from readers along the way.
On June 3, I’ll have something new to offer: a book. Titled New York City in the Gilded Age, it delves into one of the most dynamic periods in New York City history.
This is the era of gaslights, horse cars, and elevated railroads; of posh Fifth Avenue mansions and crowded tenements; of an explosion in population and industry as well as deep political corruption. It parallels our contemporary city, with its incredible growth amid a widening gap between the rich and poor.
New York City in the Gilded Age features hundreds of exceptional, rarely seen photos and images from the archives of the wonderful New-York Historical Society. It’s packaged with 50 stereographs and a stereoscope viewer, providing a truly 3D look at the city in the late 19th century.
Over the next weeks, I’ll be featuring content and photos from New York City in the Gilded Age. I hope everyone enjoys this closer look at the people and events of this era.
Published by Black Dog & Leventhal in partnership with the New-York Historical Society, the book will be available at Barnes & Noble, the Strand, and many other stores on June 3 (and Amazon and Indiebound right now).
Thank you again to everyone who has enjoyed Ephemeral New York over the years—it’s truly been a pleasure to produce this site.
Gilded Age New York was an era of great wealth. Yet if you were a poor kid living in a hardscrabble tenement district, you still didn’t have a decent place to play.
Sure, you had the traffic-snarled streets, which smelled of manure and trash. Or you could hang out in your tenement’s backyard or on the roof, both dirty and dangerous.
But it wasn’t until 1903 when the first city-run playground at the Lower East Side’s Seward Park—with gym equipment, a concert pavillon, and rows of rocking chairs for mothers with infants—opened to local children who desperately needed a place of their own.
Seward Park playground was the end result of a “playground movement,” a moral push from the progressive reformers of the era, who, with political allies like Theodore Roosevelt and Mayor Seth Low, opened schools and settlement houses.
They formed groups, such as the Outdoor Recreation League and the New York Society for Playgrounds and Parks, to help poor kids gain access to fresh air, trees, and playtime that they believed could prevent “crime and juvenile delinquency,” according to one reformer.
The adults accomplished their goal. By 1905, nine playgrounds had opened, becoming an iconic part of the cityscape.
But what did the kids around Seward Park think? From the beginning, the playground was a huge hit.
On opening day, October 17, 1903, “the crowd of 20,000 children present took matters into their own hands, mobbed the gates and swarmed into the 5,000 seats which had been reserved for school children and others,” wrote The New York Times the next day.”The programme was supposed to begin at 2 o’clock, but long before that hour all of the great square bounded by Canal, Hester, and Rutgers Street and East Broadway was full of children from one to sixteen years of age.”
In the driving rain, politicians pontificated. Jacob Riis, one of the reformers of the playground movement, took a turn at the podium.
“As anxious as I was to get the children into this park, I am more anxious at this moment to get them out,” reported the New York Herald.
“I came here to talk to the children, but I will wait until a fair day. I have done all the talking to the administration that I care to, and it is no longer necessary to talk to them, thank God.”
[Second photo: NYC Parks Department, 1908; third photo: NYC Parks Department, 1904; fourth photo: NYPL Digital Collection 1903; fifth photo: NYC Municipal Archives photo 1941]
“Keep New York clean” the tagline on city garbage cans tells us.
It’s just the latest in a long history of ad campaigns to get residents to stop littering.
The early appeals focused on the health consequences of garbage, as this ad sponsored by the Fifth Avenue Association (a commercial group organized to keep factories off Fifth Avenue) makes clear.
Cleanliness for cleanliness’ sake seems to be the message in this 1936 campaign, sponsored by the Department of Sanitation.
Did the Sanitation heads really enlist kids to be “junior inspectors” and spread the word about proper trash disposal?
Littering on the subway and inside stations was called out too. I’m not sure when this ad came out, but it was produced by the IRT, which went out of business in 1940.
A giant waste basket in the middle Times Square shaming New Yorkers for their poor littering habits seems like a pretty effective tactic. This photo was taken in 1955.
Did the campaign work? Probably not—as anyone who remembers a trash-filled, littered New York in the 1970s can attest.
At least we’ve come a long way from throwing food and other waste in the street, expecting feral pigs to come along and clean it up for us, as New Yorkers actually did well into the 19th century!
[Photos: NYC Municipal Archives; top photo: Shutterstock]
Greenwich Village Stories is a lovely new book from the folks at the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.
It’s filled with reminiscences from dozens of former and current residents—from artists to activists to politicians—who give their take on the beauty and spirit of the neighborhood.
It’s an evocative read that also captures how much the Village has changed over the years. Driving that point home is a wonderful map of Greenwich Village circa 1934 by puppeteer and illustrator Tony Sarg that has been reproduced in the book.
While the street grid is the same, the landmarks Sarg depicts with such affection don’t always exist anymore. Jefferson Market prison, the Washington Square Bookshop, the Village Barn, Luchow’s, and Wanamaker’s department store are all long gone.
Various hotels marked on the map are now apartment houses: the Albert, the Brevoort, the Lafayette. New York University, interestingly, barely gets a mention—the main campus in the 1930s was in the Bronx.
For about a year, the city’s 12,000 or so yellow taxis have been joined by a small new lime-green fleet. The new cabs are only allowed to pick up fares in Manhattan’s northern neighborhoods and the outer boroughs.
Seeing them raises the question: why are New York taxis generally supposed to be yellow, anyway?
The first automobile taxis weren’t painted any color at all. Powered by 800-pound electric batteries, about 100 of them trolled the streets in 1899. The two below are operating beside the Metropolitan Opera House on 39th Street and Broadway.
In 1908, 600 gasoline-fueled, red and green paneled taxis were imported to New York from France. The name “taxi” comes from their innovative new “taximeters” that recorded mileage.
The color change apparently began in 1915, when John Hertz, of Hertz rental car fame, opened a taxi company in Chicago.
Hertz reportedly read a study showing that yellow was the most visible color from a distance.
“It became an industry trend, which of course was continued when he and his partner, Walden Shaw, branched out to other cities, including New York City,’ explained New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission spokesperson, in a New York Times column from 1996.
In 1967, the city finally made it illegal for a taxi to be any color but yellow. That changed with the introduction of the official wasabi-colored taxis in 2013, increasingly more common among their bumblebee-yellow counterparts.
[Top: 1970s yellow cab awesomeness, Everett Collection; third: the last Checker Cab in New York City, from the New York Daily News; bottom: Berenice Abbott captures yellow taxis in traffic in 1936]
Ephemeral New York 