The holdout stable squeezed between white brick apartment houses on the Upper East Side

What kind of block was East 63rd Street between Second and Third Avenues in the first half of the 20th century?

Like so many other streets hemmed in by elevated trains and relatively close to the riverfront, it was a modest stretch of walk-up residences, stores, and stables—anchored on the Second Avenue end by the Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls, one of the city’s young women’s residences that offered room, board, and a sense of security for modest fees.

By the 1960s, however, this part of East 63rd Street had undergone a facelift.

Gone were most of the low-rise buildings, overtaken by a tide of almost identical tall postwar apartment houses. Their white glazed brick “was supposed to make them look like beacons of clean, shiny modernism in the midst of the dirty city,” wrote The New York Times in a 2011 article.

Nothing illustrates the changed face of the block like this lone holdout stable at 212 East 63rd Street, now hemmed in by white-brick giants.

Even the sides of the stable, which juts out from its neighbors, is covered in white brick. It’s a strange attempt to obscure its old-school style and construction.

How this stable managed to evade demolition is a mystery. Built in 1899 and once home to horses and the grooms who tended to them, it has the architectural hallmarks of the late Gilded Age: rounded, Romanesque ground-floor windows and doorway, and the ornamental arrangement of the bricks above them.

Tidy and well maintained, the stable’s backstory is missing (as is its chimney, though maybe it’s just out of view). It has long since transitioned into a residence.

This holdout serves as a reminder of an East 63rd Street with rougher edges, and while other buildings fell, it continues to grace the contemporary cityscape with its modest beauty and 19th century vibes.

[Third image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

What a 1960s road map reveals about New York’s hospitals and department stores—then and now

Around 1964, Hagstrom published a road map of New York City—the old-fashioned folding kind that always ended up in a creased mess. And it reveals some interesting changes in the cityscape over the past 60 years.

Back then, subway routes were noted as either the IRT, BMT, or Independent line; the Metropolitan Opera House stood at Broadway and 39th Street; and the neighborhood about to be rechristened the East Village was a vast and empty space simply labeled “East Side.”

But the “High Spots in New York” map, as Hagstrom called it, reveals even more differences between the city of the 1960s and contemporary Gotham in the map’s sidebars, which list places of interest worth visiting.

Skyscrapers worth a look include the Singer Tower, born in 1908 and demolished in 1968. Nightlife suggestions feature the Village Gate and Sammy’s Bowery Follies, both vanished. Movie theater options include the Greenwich, formerly on Greenwich Avenue and 12th Street (now a gym), and the Gramercy, once on Lexington Avenue and 23rd Street.

But I think the biggest changes are in two lists the map provides: one of hospitals, the other of department stores.

The New York of today is a city with a handful of huge hyphenated hospital conglomerates. But look at the hospitals from 1964.

St. Luke’s and Roosevelt are separate entities, St. Vincent’s serves the Village, University hasn’t been renamed NYU Langone, and Sydenham, which opened in 1892 on East 116th Street, operated in West Harlem. (It closed in 1980.)

The department store list is a little heartbreaking for New Yorkers who remember the city as a department store wonderland. Of the 21 stores on this list, I count only four that still stand: Macy’s, Saks, Bergdorf’s, and Bloomingdale’s.

It’s not that the city was better off with more small hospitals or a larger selection of department stores. But it’s jarring to see the differences between 1960s New York and the Manhattan we live in today laid out so starkly on a 60-year-old road map.

What’s on the menu for Mother’s Day 1960 at the Park Lane Hotel

It’s Mother’s Day 1960, and you’re part of a well-to-do family looking to celebrate the holiday at one of the Mother’s Day brunches hosted by hotels and restaurants all over the city.

You choose the Park Lane Hotel, which in 1960 actually was on Park Avenue, opposite the Waldorf-Astoria. (Since 1971, the Park Lane Hotel has been on Central Park South.)

So what’s on the menu? Things start off light, with the requisite offerings of consommé, grapefruit, and melon.

For the entreé course, the eggs benedict look tasty, but the boneless squab chicken casserole less so. And what exactly is “mother’s style” chicken fricassee?

Maybe the simplicity of the cold buffet selections are the way to go, topped off with the mysterious (but probably delicious) “mother’s day” layer cake.

I’m sure the actual Mother’s Day brunch at the Park Lane in 1960 satisfied many families and the moms who were honored.

But the menu reveals something interesting about how restaurant menus have changed in the last 60 years. Rather than a selection of the kind of adventurous offerings contemporary New York City menus typically feature, this one reflects a very midcentury American palate for casseroles, strawberry shortcake, creamed chicken, and V-8.

Did New York restaurants evolve at some point in the last 60 years, or did they typically offer the kinds of unfancy food options people actually prepared and ate in their own homes at the time?

Then again, the price of this meal for each person is a mere $5, per the menu. Even for 1960s prices, that sounds like a decent meal in an upscale setting for a bargain.

[NYPL Digital Collections]

From a merchant’s mansion to a home for friendless women, the many lives of an 1847 brownstone on 14th Street

A rollicking mix of apartment buildings, loft spaces, bars, and discount stores, West 14th Street hasn’t been considered an elite place to build a home for almost two centuries.

But in the New York of the 1840s, what had once been the dividing line between the urban city and the wilds of Manhattan was transforming into a fashionable residential thoroughfare.

Families with money and means began purchasing land on West 14th Street and putting up wide, roomy brownstones from Union Square to Eighth Avenue. One of those new brownstone dwellers was Andrew S. Norwood.

Norwood’s name wouldn’t resonate with contemporary city residents. But in his day, this Knickerbocker New Yorker was considered one of Gotham’s “solid and substantial” citizens, per Valentine’s Manual of Old New York.

Born in 1770 and the son of a Patriot, Norwood became a successful merchant, stockbroker, the owner of a line of packet ships, a founder of the Presbyterian church on Cedar Street, a friend of the Marquis of Lafayette and “the Washington family,” and a resident of a posh home on Bond Street, per Valentine’s Manual.

In 1845, he added real estate developer to the mix and bought several lots on 14th and 15th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, states the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC). By 1847, he had built the first three brick or masonry buildings on the north side of the block: numbers 239, 241, and 243 West 14th Street.

All three met the definition of “first class” single-family houses, per the LPC. Norwood chose 241 as his family home, an outstanding example of “a transitional style which combines Greek Revival with Italianate features,” wrote the LPC, noting the full-length French doors on the first floor windows, the cast-iron balconies, and the brownstone trim on the red brick facade.

We can assume Norwood and his family lived well inside their new house, with its 14-foot ceilings, 13 fireplaces, mahogany parlor doors, silver doorknobs, and mantelpiece made of Carrara marble. The generously sized house had room for dinner parties and servants’ quarters, and one can imagine the family hosting prominent West 14th Street neighbors, like the Van Beurens.

At age 86, Norwood passed away in his house in 1856—just as commercial establishments were coming to 14th Street and the residential vibe was giving way to stores and theaters.

The house stayed in the Norwood family until the turn of the century. Norwood’s son, also named Andrew and also a stockbroker (and original member of the New York Stock Exchange), became the owner, per the LPC.

Whether he lived there until his death in 1879 isn’t clear; an 1871 ad in the New York Daily Herald notes an upcoming auction of “elegant household furniture” at 241 West 14th Street.

In any case, the house’s days as a 19th century private residence were over. By the 1880s it served as a boarding house, according to a New York Times mention.

In 1890, the house changed hands again. Now it functioned as the headquarters of the New York Deaconess’ Home and Training School of the Methodist Episcopal Church, an organization that “trained nurse deaconesses who care for the sick poor in their homes,” according to an 1895 New York City charities directory.

King’s Handbook of 1892 added that the charity had “about a score of inmates” who study the bible, medicine, hygiene, and nursing to prepare for being in service to “the poor and the sick…the sick and the dying.”

Five years later, a different type of “inmate” lived in Andrew Norwood’s house, which had now become the “Shelter for Respectable Girls.” Run by a Christian denomination, the shelter put out an urgent plea in the New York Times in 1899 for donations to continue its work “giving shelter and help to respectable girls who are homeless and friendless.”

In 1900, more than 500 girls stayed at the shelter, which catered to young “friendless” women who came to New York for job opportunities yet had no connections, nor a “respectable” place to stay.

In the early 1900s, after the Norwood estate sold the house, a dentist became the occupant. At some point in the 20th century it transformed into a funeral home. Perhaps this is what the vertical sign hanging off the facade states in the fourth photo, above, from 1940.

Andrew Norwood’s home became a private residence once again in 1976, when a real estate broker named Raf Borello bought the property, according to venuereport.com. Borello began a 30-year restoration of this 1840s anachronism.

The restoration involved “uncovering layers of paint, plaster, dirt, and muck to bring the house back to its glory days,” stated venuereport.com. “By the time Borello died in 2005, the property was fully restored, featured a phenomenal garden in the back, and the exterior had been registered to the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission.”

What would come next for this revitalized remnant of pre-Civil War New York City?

It was purchased in 2007 and transformed into the Norwood Club, a members-only club described in venuereport.com by the owner, Alan Linn, as “a modern-day salon for the creative community in New York, a space to congregate, socialize and swap ideas.  It is a ‘home for the curious.'”

The Club seemed to thrive for at least a decade, with more than a thousand members who submitted to an interview before being selected to join. Perhaps the pandemic took its toll, as the Norwood Club closed in 2022.

Since then, Andrew Norwood’s elegant brownstone, so lovely and stylish in its era, has been looking rough around the edges. Debris is scattered on the stoop, and the columns flanking the front doors are flaking and cracking.

Let’s hope a savior appears for this dowager of a brownstone on an unbeautiful block but with such a deep and rich backstory.

[Fourth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; fifth image: New York Times]

What remains of an East Harlem five and dime store that opened almost a century ago

It doesn’t look like much, just another semi-vacant commercial building—this one on the southeast corner of 106th Street and Third Avenue—now occupied by a Duane Reade.

But give it a closer look, and Art Deco decorative touches come in to view, like the patterns in the light bricks and small geometric shapes above the first and second floors. With its enormous windows, this space was meant to be welcoming and accessible.

On the 106th Street side is a slab in the middle of the facade by the roofline. It proudly carries a name: Kress. What was Kress?

Similar to Woolworth’s, S. H. Kress & Co was a five and dime retail chain that at its height had more than 250 stores across the country. Houseware, toys, accessories, candy, goldfish, underwear, notions, paper goods, and all kinds of random thingamajigs could be found in a Kress store.

The chain was founded by Samuel W. Kress in 1896 in Memphis. As stores expanded nationwide, Kress moved his company headquarters to New York City. He also purchased a Fifth Avenue penthouse for his family and his growing art collection.

Several Kress outlets soon opened in Gotham, including one on Fifth Avenue and 39th Street (shuttered in the late 1970s) and another at 256 West 125th Street. Opened in 1920, it was likely the very first New York City Kress store, according to Walter Grutchfield.

The Kress on East 106th Street made its debut five years later, stated Grutchfield, adding that it closed up in 1994. “It seems to have been the last surviving Kress store in New York,” he wrote.

Five and dimes were very popular in their 20th century heyday; they were utilitarian versions of more glamorous department stores that sold a variety of usually more expensive items under one roof.

Imagine this enormous Kress store in its 20th century prime, when the neighborhood was a shopping corridor bustling with middle- and working-class customers. The store would have been partly obscured by the Third Avenue Elevated tracks until the 1950s. (Above, in 1940)

Perhaps it’s fitting that Duane Reade now operates in the former Kress space. The pharmacy chain might be the closest replacement New Yorkers have for five and dimes like Kress and Woolworth—which had a store not too far away on Third Avenue and 121st Street.

[Third photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

The forgotten painter who captured the contrasting landscapes of 1930 New York City

By the Depression year of 1930, New York City was increasingly becoming a city of highs and lows.

[“Sixth Avenue and Ziegfeld Theater”]

The highs were evident in Gotham’s skyline. Elegant residential towers lined the borders of Central Park and the city’s posher avenues. The Chrysler Building rose above 42nd Street, and the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center soon followed at different ends of Midtown.

At odds with these gleaming towers were the lows—the many low-rise blocks across Manhattan. Spread out between their new high-rise neighbors and congregated in poorer, more densely packed areas were tenement buildings, factories, and warehouses, some crumbling with age.

[“The Cavalry, Central Park”]

Someone who appears to have noticed this stark contrast in the cityscape was Médard Verburgh. A Belgian painter of sensitive, colorful portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, Verburgh’s work was to be exhibited at the prestigious Newhouse Galleries on East 57th Street in January 1930.

Though Verburgh seems to be an artist forgotten by the contemporary world, he had a presence in the first half of the 20th century. A critic writing in the New York Times described the Newhouse Galleries exhibit as one that “should not be missed by anyone interested in Belgian art—or, for that matter, in art more catholically considered.”

Verburgh, 44 years old at the time, presumably came to the city for the exhibit. He also apparently felt inspired enough by the physical landscape to paint it.

[“On the Rooftops of New York”]

Each of the four works in this post date to 1930, and all capture the city’s contrasts in vibrant colors and rough brushstrokes. The top image, “Sixth Avenue and Ziegfeld Theater,” juxtaposes office towers and smaller commercial and residential holdouts on a busy traffic artery of the then-modern city.

The Ziegfeld Theater, opened in 1929 at the corner of 54th Street, would be the whitish building on the left—though it doesn’t resemble the actual Ziegfeld Theater that occupied this site until it was demolished in 1966.

The second painting, “The Calvary, Central Park,” showcases the enormous apartment towers and office buildings of Central Park South looking like a fortification around the expansive pasture of the park and the equestrians riding inside it.

[“Le Metro Aerien”]

“On the Rooftops of New York,” the third painting, features tenement roof dwellers dancing and making music, a black cat curled up in the corner bearing witness to the sounds and steps. It’s an intimate and personal scene with the impersonal, impenetrable skyline in the background.

The final painting has a French title, “Le Metro Aerien”—or The Aerial Metro in English. Here Verburgh gives us the thickest brushstrokes with images of a brick-red warehouse or factory and an elevated train circling in front of it, and sketches of skyscrapers in the rear.

Exactly what neighborhood the painting is set in isn’t clear, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Verburgh presents another contrast of the old and new New York City—the energy and might of the old in comparison to the fortresslike facelessness of the 1930 skyscraper metropolis.

Join Ephemeral New York on a time-traveling walking tour of Gilded Age Riverside Drive!

Which still-standing mansion built in 1907 has a mysterious basement tunnel leading to the Hudson River? Where is one of the few Beaux-Arts row houses that has its original wood-carved doors? Why is the Drive the only avenue in Manhattan that branches off into small carriage roads?

Which famous American writer came to a rock outcropping in Riverside Park every day to stare across the Hudson River? Who was the rich wife and mother so disturbed by tugboat horns on the riverfront that she formed a committee to suppress “unnecessary” noise?

Join Ephemeral New York on a time-traveling walking tour that answers these questions and delves into the backstory of the city’s most beautiful avenue!

Opened in 1880, Riverside Drive came into its heyday in the Gilded Age—but the tour will explore the long history of this western edge of Manhattan that was once isolated farmland and then one of the city’s mansion-lined millionaire miles.

Tours have sold out so far this spring, but tickets remain for two tours coming up on Sunday, May 5, Sunday May 12, and Sunday, June 2:

Sunday, May 5, 1-3:15 pm: get tickets at this link

Sunday, May 12, 1-3:30 pm: get tickets at this link

Sunday, June 2, 1-3:30 pm: get tickets at this link

The tours are fun, breezy, and filled with secrets and insights. Hope to see everyone there!

The magnificent mantelpiece that greeted guests at the Vanderbilt mansion on 57th Street

Imagine being a first-time guest to one of Alice and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Gilded Age balls or dinner parties, held at their spectacular new mansion on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street.

As you pass through the front doors of the house, completed in 1883, you’re received in view of this stunning ornate mantelpiece. At the time, it dominated the mansion’s entry hall, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It’s the kind of objet d’art one would expect from a Vanderbilt mansion. Sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who had been hired by artist John La Farge, the mantelpiece features “two classical caryatids, Amor (Love) and Pax (Peace), [which] support the expansive entablature with bowed heads and upraised arms,” noted the Met.

Elaborate carvings and floral motifs decorate the mantelpiece. Above it is a mosaic with Latin words across a woman’s head. Cornelius Vanderbilt himself chose the phrase, which translates into “the house at its threshold gives evidence of the master’s good will. Welcome to the guest who arrives; farewell and helpfulness to him who departs,” according to Wayne Craven, author of Gilded Mansions: Grand Architecture and High Society.

The mantelpiece was commissioned by the Vanderbilts—and it outlasted them and their house as well. An 1890s renovation doubled the size of the mansion, and the mantelpiece with the caryatids was relegated to a family sitting room on the second floor, states Craven.

Not long after the expansion, Cornelius Vanderbilt (grandson of the Commodore) suffered a stroke, passing away in 1899. Alice stayed in the house with an army of servants, struggling to pay for the upkeep even with a multimillion dollar inheritance.

In the 1920s she moved out and put the house up for sale (below in 1907), correctly anticipating that the land it sat on was more valuable than the house, which would be torn down. In the house’s final weeks she managed to salvage some items from the interiors.

She donated a sculpture group to the Sherry-Netherland Hotel going up across Fifth Avenue. And to the Met she gave this mantelpiece, a lovely remnant of Gilded Age art and architecture and the kind of wealthy family palace New York will never see again.

[Third and fourth images: Wikipedia]

The mystery of the gilded glass booth outside Midtown’s St. Regis Hotel

It’s an eye-catching piece of street furniture: a booth made of glass, brass, and copper, with a door like a Romanesque arch and a capsule-shaped side compartments.

This unusual sidewalk booth can be found under the awning at the East 55th Street entrance of the St. Regis Hotel.

Built on Fifth Avenue in 1904 by John Jacob Astor IV (the only son of the infamous Mrs. Astor), the Beaux-Arts St. Regis has long been one of Manhattan’s most luxurious hotels, heralded as “the new shrine of the millionaire” shortly after it opened by the New York Times. (Below in 1907)

The purpose of this glass and metal booth seems clear—it’s an enclosed space for a doorman to wait for guests, something all hotels and attended apartment houses had and still have.

Architectural critics writing just after the hotel opened gave it the fancy name of “sentry box” rather than a doorman’s station—a hint that maybe it was more for security rather than assisting guests with heavy luggage.

But whatever it’s called, the design and shape intrigue me. A hotel as sumptuous and technologically advanced as the St. Regis—guests were pampered with air-cooled rooms and a private telephone in each suite—would definitely not build an ordinary-looking doorman booth. But what is it, exactly?

According to a doorman I spoke to (who said it’s been in front of the entrance since the hotel’s early days), it’s probably a Gilded Age–era elevator, or an exact replica of an elevator passengers would find circa 1904. This explanation is based on years of elevator-savvy passersby pointing out what it is and explaining the different parts, delighted to talk about their trade.

It does have kind of a Willa Wonka and the Great Glass Elevator vibe. Still, the question remains as to why the hotel placed a fancy elevator outside the entrance.

Was it to let potential guests know that the hotel was equipped with the latest in elevator mechanics? A clever way to repurpose one that broke down and couldn’t be used? It’s too heavy to be moved, the doorman told me, so it remains in place.

The St. Regis has another relic of a previous New York City, and I don’t mean the 1935 Maxfield Parrish mural at the King Cole Bar.

Look up above the 55th Street awning and you’ll see a copper sign that says “St. Regis Cab Call.” (Above photo shows the original sentry box and part of the cab call.)

Old-time taxi signs can still be spotted on apartment buildings and hotels, but I’ve never seen this kind of sign before—which I think let cab drivers in a pre-Uber era know how many people at the hotel were waiting for a ride.

[Second image: MCNY, X2011.34.287; fifth photo: via Andrew Alpern]

Three New York City subway stops, three different design styles

How many ways are there to style a subway entrance sign? In New York City, dozens of designs and typefaces are used across the subway system—often with no rhyme or reason.

Take this gold and white sign on William Street. It’s for a side entrance/exit for the Fulton Street station, affixed to a 20th century office building called the Royal Building.

Its long tapered shape, the white block (a light?) at the top—I’ve never seen anything like it.

More than a few stops in Midtown style their subway signage with Art Deco lettering, like this subway sign on East 42nd Street. The design is sleek and modern, just like so many of the office towers on this crosstown thoroughfare.

The M above it is an unfortunate remnant from the late 1960s, when the MTA had the idea to unify all the different subway lines and rebrand them. The effort didn’t stick, but some of these Ms remain.

This last subway sign image comes from the East 23rd Street 6 train entrance, I believe. The typeface and tile feels classical, and the V instead of a U is a nice Roman touch.

Why this design for this stop? I don’t know—but I do know that all the variety of styles in the subway make traveling underground a little more interesting.