Are these men decked out in dress coats and bowler hats ordinary commuters—or are they officials marking the opening of a subway entrance in the “new” Grand Central Terminal?
It’s hard to tell. But here they are captured in a moment in 1913, the year the new terminal opened and just nine years after the subway made its debut as well.
When the cycling fad hit New York in the 1870s and 1880s, it was danger-courting men who mostly took up the wheel—scorching down city streets and joining cycling clubs for group jaunts to the far reaches of New York and Brooklyn.
But with the invention of what was called the “safety bicycle,” which had wheels closer to the ground and pedals that powered the back wheel rather than the front, cycling became less a risky activity and more of an exhilarating way to get around.
That’s when women began cycling in large numbers.
The sense of freedom these “steel steers” offered is credited with paving the way for the women’s rights gains of the 20th century.
For starters, cycling helped change women’s fashion. It was impossible for the bright, sporty New Woman of the 1890s to ride while weighed down with petticoats and a corset like the women of her mother’s generation wore.
Women began wearing looser-fitting cycling suits with slimmer “divided” skirts (below right), which gave way to less confining everyday fashion.
“From wheeling to walking is but a step, and a sensible dressing being now firmly established in the cycling world, it is beginning to creep into the walking costume, and we are told that the skirts of those gowns are to be shorter,” wrote the New York Times in 1895.
Less restrictive clothes served as a metaphor for the New Woman’s less restricted social life. Cycling became something she could do alone or in a group without a chaperone.
Physical activity also had an impact. Previous generations of women were not encouraged to exercise; they were supposed to project physical frailty.
Biking required some level of exertion, however, and that changed the feminine ideal to one of action and strength.
The shift from an ideal of weakness to empowerment didn’t immediately give women the right to vote or instantly open up higher education to them.
But it appears to have helped move things in that direction.
“The bicycle has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance,” said Susan B. Anthony, who helped launch the equal rights movement in the mid–19th century well before the bicycle came along and women began riding through Central Park, Riverside Drive, and Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, three popular venues.
“I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”
[Photos: Women riders in Upper Manhattan, MCNY]
Central Park was originally intended to be a place of rest and relaxation, a naturalistic preserve away from the teeming crowds of the mid-19th century city.
So how did a posh, glitzy nightclub end up on the park’s East Drive at 72nd Street in the high society 1920s?
It has to do with James J. Walker, the nightlife loving, charmingly corrupt mayor of New York from 1925 to 1932.
The nightclub was called the Casino (above and left), and even before it became a club, it had an interesting history.
In 1864, it started out as a modest stone cottage designed by Calvert Vaux to be the “Ladies Refreshment Saloon,” where respectable women visiting the park unaccompanied by a man could grab a bite to eat.
By the late 19th century, it evolved into a regular restaurant. Rather than a gambling house, the Casino (“little house” in Italian) was “where well-to-do diners could get a steak for seventy-five cents” while sipping wine on a terrace (below), according to Andrew F. Smith’s Savoring Gotham.
Enter Mayor Walker. The Casino would now be run by Walker’s friends, who turned the expanded cottage into a Jazz Age nightspot.
“Under its new regime, the Casino catered to the rich and famous,” reported the Complete Illustrated Map and Guidebook to Central Park.
“Met at the door by liveried footmen, guests dined on elegant French cuisine, and—despite Prohibition—happily paid inflated prices for mixers to go with the bootleg liquor they brought with them.”
“Dancing, in a spectacular black-glass ballroom to the tunes of Leo Reisman’s society orchestra, went on until 3 a.m. Mayor Walker and his mistress, the Broadway showgirl Betty Compton (left), were often the last to leave.”
The Casino continued entertaining the city’s elite club crowd even after the Depression hit.
It was a huge success, grossing more than $3 million in five years of operation . . . with the city getting $42K in rent.
But by the early 1930s, it was seen as a symbol of excess. Mayoral candidate Fiorello La Guardia denounced it as a “whoopee joint.”
In 1935, Robert Moses, the city’s legendary Parks Commissioner, tore it down (above, right before demolition) and replaced it with Rumsey Playfield—a concert venue that entertains New Yorkers in an entirely different way today.
[Photos: centralpark.org; MCNY]
I only stuck around for a few minutes, so I can’t vouch for what the vibe of O’Reilly’s Pub, on West 31st Street in Midtown, is really like.
But there’s just something that warms the bones when you catch a glimpse of the soft glow of a bar sign like this one on a cold February evening.
If only the “restaurant” part underneath lit up as well!
John R. Grabach didn’t just paint scenes of working-class life—he was the working class. [Below, “New York Street Scene: Man Made Canyons”]
Born in 1886, Grabach grew up in blue collar Newark. Set on becoming an artist, he held various jobs—die cutter, freelance illustrator, greeting card designer—while taking classes in Newark and at the Art Students League in Manhattan.
[“Sidewalks of New York,” 1920s, Lower East Side]
“Inspired by Ash Can school artists, Grabach became fascinated with the urban landscape,” the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) wrote on their website.
[“The Lone House,” 1929]
Like Ash Can artists George Bellows and Robert Henri, he began working in New York in the 1920s, where he painted everyday images of tenements, clotheslines, skyscrapers, and city streets.
Grabach’s work reflected the beauty and mystery of contemporary urban life, as well as its disorienting loneliness and despair.
[“New York East Side,” 1924]
“Toward the end of the decade his lighthearted treatment changed as he became more concerned with social conditions, and consequently during the Great Depression his urban images developed a stronger, satirical tone, and the figures were made larger and dominated the scene,” stated LACMA.
[“The Fifth Year,” 1934]
By now, he’d won awards and recognition, and he became a beloved teacher of drawing at the now-defunct Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art (a casualty of Newark’s budget woes in the 1990s).
But like so many other artists, Grabach gradually lost prominence and never became a household name. He died in relative obscurity in 1981.
He may not have been a trailblazer in the art world, but his work reflects an unappreciated sensitivity to the urban experience.
Is this really the south side of Union Square a mere 40 years ago? Instead of Whole Foods and glass condos, it’s a crumbling stretch of discount stores.
This photo couldn’t be older than 1979; that was the year Sugar Babies debuted on Broadway. The bus ad for this musical references “Fun City,” a slogan dating back to Mayor Lindsay’s terms in the 1960s and 1970s.
Mays, a big box cheapo department store, occupied the enormous space between University Place and Broadway. Except for a couple of Woolworth stores on opposing ends of 14th Street, they didn’t have much competition.
One thing has stayed the same: the 14th Street crosstown bus continues to lumber along.
Here’s another view of Union Square in the 1970s—and the 19th century.
It’s a story that seems incredulous to modern sensibilities.
On September 1897, American explorer Robert Peary and his crew docked their steamer under the Brooklyn Bridge after returning from a long expedition to Greenland.
It was one of several trips Peary took to the Arctic beginning in the 1880s in his quest to become the first Westerner to reach the North Pole.
Peary didn’t reach his goal on this voyage. But he did bring back some curious cargo, which he displayed a few days later at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for thousands of New Yorkers who turned out for a glimpse.
On deck was a 100-ton meteorite—and six Inuits, including a father and his 7-year-old son, Mene, but called Minik.
It’s unclear why Peary brought the Inuit people, who were dressed in sealskin coats trimmed with polar bear fur and appeared somewhat distressed in the early autumn sun, reported the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Apparently he thought experts he knew at the American Museum of Natural History would like to study them.
Abandoned by Peary and with no where to go, the Inuits were housed in the museum basement and “treated as specimens and spectacles,” according to pbs.org. They were not part of an official exhibit but were on view for some museum guests.
The Inuits didn’t stay at the museum long. Their next stop was Bellevue.
With no immunity, all six became ill. In the fall, Minik’s father and three others died; one returned to Greenland. Minik survived but was now on his own.
Although he found New York at first to be “like a land that we thought to be just like heaven,” and he laughed when he saw bicycle riders in Central Park, he was now an orphan.
“Alone and out of place in New York, Minik benefited from the benevolence of one person—William Wallace, the superintendent at the Museum of Natural History,” stated pbs.org.
The Wallace family (with Minik, above) educated him; he even attended Manhattan College. “But despite being adopted and raised as part of the Wallace family, Minik never really felt at home in this foreign land.
“One newspaper described him as a “virtual prisoner.”
To make matters worse, he discovered that museum officials never gave his father the proper burial they claimed. Instead, his body became part of the museum collection.
In 1909, the same year Peary (at right) claimed to have reached the North Pole (a claim that has long been in doubt), Minik was finally able to leave New York and sail back to Greenland.
“The appeal of the Eskimo, Mene Keeshoo, brought here by Commander Peary and left on the lee shore of New York, to be returned to his native North Greenland again proves that home is a lodestone’s attraction for the most uncivilized of God’s creatures,” wrote the Eagle.
It wasn’t the homecoming he’d hoped. Minik didn’t feel as if he belonged in Greenland either. In 1916 he returned to America, where he found work in a New Hampshire lumber camp.
There, he contracted influenza during the epidemic of 1918 and died.
Minik is not the only human who lived in the museum. In 1906, a Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga also spent time there—before being put on exhibit in the Bronx Zoo. Really.
[Second photo: PBS American Experience; Fifth photo (the birthdate is said to not be accurate): Findagrave.com]
Every time I pass the lilliputian walkup at 17 East 13th Street, with “Erskine Press” faded on the facade, I imagine the 1920s Greenwich Village of Edmund Wilson, Djuna Barnes, and e.e. cummings.
Constructed in 1911 (Erskine Press had been operating out of a building across the street since 1895), the little walkup has amazingly escaped the wrecking ball.
It’s an emblem of the long-gone Greenwich Village of print shops, small publishers, struggling artists and writers, and a literary culture.
I’m not sure when Erskine Press moved out. But since then, the building has changed hands over last four or five decades—getting a new paint job and undergoing minor changes yet ultimately looking very Jazz Age.
In the 1970s it was a beloved French takeout charcuterie. In the 2000s, it housed The Adore, a sweet hideaway for coffee and pastries (right).
These days it’s a cafe for croque monsieur sandwiches. And somewhere behind it is a separate space with apartment rentals, starting in the 3K range—monthly rent rates Wilson, Barnes, and cummings would never have believed.
Everett Longley Warner’s “Along the River Front” captures the city in 1912 on the cusp of change.
The old New York waterfront, one of horse-drawn wagons loaded with packages heading to small commercial fish dealers and the office of a steamship line, have been dwarfed by the modern city’s enormous bridges and the traffic they carry.
This photo, from 1900, gives an idea of what Warner was looking at. He changed the name of the steamship line from the New Haven Line to the Maine Line, for unknown reasons.
Warner was an impressionist painter who lived in New York in the early 1900s. Despite early notoriety, his lovely depictions of industry and commerce in the city haven’t made him a household name.
At the beginning of 1884, everything seemed to be going Theodore Roosevelt’s way.
The 25-year-old Harvard graduate, a descendant of a colonial Dutch family with deep roots in New York City, had already written an acclaimed first book, The Naval War of 1812.
He’d also been elected to the state assembly and was making a name for himself as an energetic and outspoken Republican who wouldn’t tolerate financial corruption.
His personal life was going spectacularly as well. In 1880 he had married the tall, willowy girl of his dreams, Alice Hathaway Lee (below).
Roosevelt was crazy in love with Lee and ecstatic that after a year of courtship she agreed to marry him.
On a sleigh ride near her family home in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, after they had become engaged, “the horse plunging to his belly in the great drifts, and the wind cutting my face like a knife,” Roosevelt gushed about his love in his diary.
“My sweet wife was just as lovable and pretty as ever; it seems hardly possible that I can kiss her and hold her in my arms; she is so pure and so innocent, and so very, very pretty,” he wrote on February 3, 1880.
“I have never done anything to deserve such good fortune.”
Roosevelt’s political career would continue to soar. He became New York’s police commissioner, assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy, state governor, U.S. vice president, and then, thanks to an anarchist’s bullet, the nation’s president in 1901.
But before his political career would hit the national stage, fate would cut short this personal happiness.
Three years after he wrote that diary entry, on February 12, 1884, Roosevelt’s wife gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Alice Lee Roosevelt, in Roosevelt’s parents’ home at 6 West 57th Street, where they had been staying.
But the joy of a first child was short-lived. In another room, Roosevelt’s beloved mother, Mittie (below), was dying of typhus.
Lee’s health had also turned grave. One floor above Mittie, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt was battling an undiagnosed kidney disorder. Roosevelt went from room to room, but there was little he could do.
Both women died on February 14, Valentine’s Day.
In his diary that day, Roosevelt (above, in 1881) drew a large X. “The light has gone out of my life,” he wrote. The two Mrs. Roosevelts, one aged 22 and the other 48, were laid to rest at a double funeral at Green-Wood cemetery.
“Her baby was born and on February 14 she died in my arms,” wrote Roosevelt on February 17.
“As my mother had died in the same house, on the same day, but a few hours previously. . . . For joy or for sorrow my life has now been lived out.”
Two years later, Roosevelt would marry childhood playmate Edith Carow and have five more children, and by all accounts a very happy family life.
[Diary page: Library of Congress]
Ephemeral New York 
