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]

Why this subway grate off East 52nd Street is the most famous grate in New York City

Some pedestrians try to avoid walking over subway grates, others march across these sidewalk ventilation openings without care.

However you handle them, subway grates are a fact of life in New York City, and underground mass transit couldn’t exist without them.

Metal, utilitarian, and usually filthy, they aren’t especially noteworthy. But one particular subway grate on the East Side is perhaps the most famous grate in Gotham.

This subway grate is on Lexington Avenue near 52nd Street. What makes it so celebrated? This is the grate a flirtatious Marilyn Monroe stood above during the filming of The Seven Year Itch—while wearing a white dress blown upward by a passing train.

Director Billy Wilder’s tale about a family man (played by Tom Ewell) on his own for the summer and tempted by his beautiful new upstairs neighbor (Monroe) began filming almost 70 years ago.

At one in the morning on September 15, 1954, Ewell and Monroe were set to film the subway grate scene; it was to follow after the couple walk out of the Trans-Lux Theater. They then stop at the grate in front of a jewelry store.

“Hearing an approaching subway train, Monroe stepped onto the grate, having her skirt blown high by the train passing underneath, saying ‘ooh do you feel the breeze from the subway, isn’t it delicious,'” stated Atlas Obscura, in a 2014 article.

But the filming of that scene early in the morning? It was actually a publicity stunt. “Leaking the time and location of the event to the press, somewhere between 3-5,000 spectators showed up to catch a glimpse of Marilyn’s legs,” continued Atlas Obscura.  

After three hours and 14 takes at the subway grate, the scene still wasn’t wrapped, thanks to all the noise from the crowd. As a result, the scene that ended up in the film was actually done on a set in Hollywood, reported The Guardian.

Okay, so the actual subway grate embedded in the sidewalk didn’t make it into the movie. But the recreated scene in California is supposed to be the grate on Lexington Avenue at 52nd Street—where the jewelry store and Trans-Lux Theater have long since disappeared and a charmless office tower reigns.

[Second image: TMC]

A faded ad holding on in a shrunken Manhattan business district

It’s a slender ad that reads vertically, found on East 62nd Street in that mouse trap of approach roads on the Manhattan side of the Queensboro Bridge.

“Decorators Center” it says, with an address number above it: “315.”

Sure enough, 315 East 62nd Street, the building the ad is painted on, was known since the 1960s as the Decorators Center Building, a “headquarters for interior decorators and furniture concerns,” noted the New York Times in a 1961 article reporting that the new structure was 90 percent leased.

Today, 315 East 62nd Street seems to be empty, perhaps a symbol of the business enclave known as Manhattan’s design district. Its borders used to run from Third to First Avenue in the East 50s and 60s.

East 58th Street between Second and Third Avenues bears a street sign that calls it “Designers Way,” and the same stretch of East 59th Street has the honorary title of “Decorators Way.” Both blocks are lined with appealing little shops and showrooms for furniture, fixtures, and other interior design staples.

But like so many of Manhattan’s once-bustling commercial districts—the garment district, the flower district, the novelty district, radio row, and so on—the design district seems to be a shrunken version of what it was decades ago.

This lonely First Avenue pay phone is a relic from another New York City

Through most of the 20th century, they could be found all over the city: on street corners, in hotels, drugstores, and restaurants, inside schools, libraries, train stations, and other public buildings.

But it’s been at least a few decades since cell phones arrived and the lowly coin-operated pay phone was relegated to history’s dustbin.

So spotting one of these coin-operated phones inside an ordinary D’Agostino’s on First Avenue at 53rd Street feels like coming across a relic. There’s no dial tone, and the chrome is appropriately scratched up. A Bell Telephone icon sits above a pre-21st century Verizon logo.

At 50 cents per call, I’d date this one back to the 1990s.

Perhaps it isn’t so unusual that pay phones can still be found here and there in private businesses. Just don’t expect to find a New York City public pay phone unless you’re on one Upper West Side avenue.

Though New York City supposedly removed its last pay phones from Times Square in 2022 (to be part of the collection of The Museum of the City of New York), four public phones inside glass and aluminum booths still remain on West End Avenue.

And an even earlier remnant of the communications era—the wooden phone booth—can sometimes be spotted in prewar-era bars, clubs, and restaurants, though usually the phone itself has vanished.

How fate and coincidence brought a firefighter statue honoring 9/11 to East 43rd Street

New York City is home to dozens of monuments marking the terrorist attacks and commemorating the thousands of lives lost on September 11, 2001.

Some are official, like the reflecting pools situated in the footprints of the Twin Towers. Others are less grand but equally powerful—street murals of American flags, an inconspicuous bronze plaque put up by a First Avenue hospital, and a Central Park memorial to children who lost parents on that terrible day.

Then there’s the statue of a firefighter on East 43rd Street, half a block from Bryant Park. Here, a nine-foot bronze figure of a fireman kneels on a granite base, one hand on his helmet and the other on his forehead in anguish, distress, and maybe prayer.

“The Kneeling Firefighter,” as it’s called, is not an exquisite piece of art, but it’s poignant and moving. It’s also something of a surprise to come across outside the headquarters of Emigrant Bank on an unglamorous stretch of Midtown that doesn’t seem a likely place for any kind of memorial.

What the statue does have, however, is an unusual backstory involving coincidence and perhaps fate.

The story of The Kneeling Firefighter begins in Missouri in 2000, when the Fire Fighters Association of Missouri commissioned the statue to honor those who have fallen in the line of duty.

Designed by Pittsburgh-based Matthews Bronze and cast in Parma, Italy, the statue was shipped back to the United States, landing at Kennedy Airport on September 9 and then bound for Missouri, according to fireengineering.com.

The Kneeling Firefighter was in customs at JFK on September 11—which became a horrific day of terror and mass casualties that paralyzed the city and put a stop to all air travel.

With hundreds of firefighters lost or missing at what remained of the World Trade Center, Matthews Bronze decided the statue, still detained in customs, should stay in New York City, and they would create another one for the Missouri group.

“It was fate that the 2,700-pound statue arrived in the United States on September 9 at Kennedy Airport,” a post on the Matthews Bronze website states.

“The statue, which was originally intended to be shipped by ocean freight to the United States for a mid-October delivery to the Missouri Firefighters Association, was air freighted to the United States at the direction of Matthews product manager to ensure the October delivery.”

An executive at the company “drove from Pittsburgh to the airport and put the statue on the back of a flatbed truck,” explained the New York Post on September 20, 2001. “Then he drove the statue to Midtown, where it was parked Tuesday in front of the Milford Plaza Hotel on Eighth Avenue at West 44th Street.” (Third photo, via Matthews Bronze)

The Kneeling Firefighter remained at this site, placed on a temporary granite foundation by the Milstein family, which owned the Milford Plaza. The Milford Plaza was a fitting site for the statue, as the hotel donated money for supplies as well as hundreds of rooms for search and rescue workers.

The statue went into storage at some point until 2011, when the Milstein family found its permanent home on East 43rd Street outside the Milstein-owned Emigrant Bank, according to fireengineering.com.

It’s hardly New York’s only firefighter memorial. Every September 11, the Fireman’s Memorial on Riverside Drive and 100th Street, built in 1913, attracts many mourners. City firehouses themselves also serve as makeshift memorials.

But The Kneeling Firefighter was actually in New York City as 9/11 unfolded—and it’s the first commemorative statue honoring the 343 members of the FDNY who perished while trying to save lives at the World Trade Center.

[Third photo: Matthews Bronze]

The freed slave who ran a famous 19th century roadhouse on today’s Second Avenue

Imagine New York in the 1810s: the population almost topped 100,000, City Hall had just been completed, and the northern reaches of the booming young city now extended past Canal Street.

And though slavery wouldn’t be illegal in New York State until 1827, New York City had passed legislation in 1799 that gradually abolished the practice and granted freedom to many enslaved residents.

One of these formerly enslaved residents was Cato Alexander, who was born in the city in 1780, according to a 2015 article in Eater by David Wondrich. Another account has it that Cato was born enslaved in South Carolina, bought his freedom, and then came to Gotham.

Though his origins are unclear, at some point after 1800, Alexander was a free man in New York City.

“Broad-shouldered, sturdy, and about 5 feet 8 inches in height,” according to a 1902 recollection by a writer in the Sun, Alexander worked as a chef at inns and hotels before opening his own roadhouse four miles outside the main city east of the Boston Post Road—today’s Second Avenue and 54th Street (top illustration).

Though a busy corner of Turtle Bay now, in the early 1800s this spot was the hinterlands; one of the nearest houses was the Beekman mansion, at today’s 50th Street beside the East River. The tavern was also located close to the shot tower (above illustration) at 53rd Street and the East River.

“The location was a shrewd one,” wrote Wondrich. “Cato’s Tavern was a ten-minute gallop out of New York City, then occupying just the southern tip of Manhattan, and it soon became the natural resort of all the city’s fast young men.”

“They would race their carriages up there, drink his famous gin cocktails, brandy juleps and punches, eat his famous game and curried oysters, and then race on back (sometimes with disastrous results).”

Cato’s was also near a wooden bridge known as the “kissing bridge” in pre-Civil War New York, seen in the illustration above—it offers a sense of just how bucolic the area was at the time.

Stage Coach and Tavern Days, published in 1900, recalled that Cato’s had a separate ballroom for dancing, “which would let thirty couple swing widely in energetic reels and quadrilles,” wrote author Alice Morse Earle. “When Christmas sleighing set in, the Knickerbocker braves and belles drove out there to dance; and there was always sleighing at Christmas in old New York—all octogenarians will tell you so.”

Though Alexander faced bigotry and racism from some rowdy customers, according to Wondrich, he was by many accounts highly respected, his tavern popular in a town with plenty of taverns and roadhouses at the outer limits of the city. (Below, a tavern on Broadway near Canal Street in 1812)

New Yorkers also raved about his talents with drinks. Irish comedian Tyrone Power (an ancestor of the American actor by the same name) stated that “Cato is a great man, foremost amongst cullers of mint, whether julep or hail-storm, second to no man as a compounder of cock-tail, and such a hand at gin-sling,” according to revolutionarywarjournal.com.

Cato’s continued to operate into the 1840s. By then, the urban city would have begun creeping up to Turtle Bay, marking the beginning of the end of the country roads and trotting lanes that brought sportsmen and travelers to his now-famous establishment. (Below, Second Avenue at 54th Street today.)

Alexander himself was also falling into debt. “He was always polite, kind-hearted, and obliging—too obliging sometimes for his own interest, for some of his customers borrowed considerable sums of money from him and forgot to refund,” wrote historian Benson Lossing, as quoted by the Sun.

He closed his tavern in the 1840s, tried his hand at operating a saloon on Broadway, and ultimately “died in poverty in 1858, aged 77,” wrote Wondrich.

[First, second, third, and fourth images: NYPL]

The story of an alley almost nobody knowns near Grand Central Terminal

The streets around Grand Central Terminal enjoy high profiles: 42nd Street, Park Avenue, Vanderbilt Avenue, the Park Avenue Viaduct. Because they surround a train terminal that sees 750,000 visitors every day, they’re almost always crowded with foot and car traffic.

So what to make of lonely Depew Place, a spit of roadway starting at the dark and dingy back of Grand Central on East 45th Street, and then running alongside Park Avenue next to the terminal before unceremoniously ending in a loading dock a block later?

I’ve often wondered about this slender, little-known street. It seems to have been de-mapped, but the street sign looks new. Was this ever an actual city street before the current Grand Central Terminal opened in 1913—and if so, where did it lead to, and why was it almost entirely eliminated?

Depew Place did begin life as a New York City street, laid out in 1884 on the east side of the old Grand Central Depot (below), according to oldstreets.com. Grand Central Depot opened in 1871 and was demolished in 1899.

According to the above photo, from the New-York Historical Society, Depew Street extended all the way to 42nd Street and was a regular commercial strip. (The photo is undated, but it looks to be in the late 19th century.)

But when plans for the current Beaux-Arts Grand Central Terminal were made in 1905, officials decided that Depew Place would have to close, at least while construction was commencing.

After the new Grand Central Terminal was completed and began serving passengers eight years later, Depew Place’s fate was revealed. (Below, still existing alongside the new Grand Central)

“Under a 1925 perpetual easement to the city, its upper level is now occupied in part by the northbound ramp carrying Park Avenue around the terminal,” states oldstreets.com. “A part also remains as an alley to the post office loading docks on the south side of 45th Street.”

So Depew Place remains, mostly unknown and forgotten, a century later. Oh, and who was Depew?

Chauncey Depew was a U.S. Senator from New York as well as the president of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York Central Railroad. Vanderbilt built the original Grand Central Depot, and Depew was apparently an important enough figure to have his name grace an adjacent street.

[Second photo: New-York Historical Society; third and fourth photos: NYPL]

Two married artists, two similar views looking outside their East Side hotel window

When Alfred Stieglitz met Georgia O’Keeffe in 1916, the 52-year-old photographer and 28-year-old painter began a passionate love affair that led to their marriage in 1924 and an artistic adventure of ups and downs until Stieglitz’s death in 1946.

At the time, Stieglitz was already part of the New York City art establishment. In the early 1900s he founded the Photo-Secession, a movement to accept photography as an art form. His own work, particularly his city scenes, won praise for its softness and depth.

He also established his own gallery, where he exhibited O’Keeffe’s early abstract drawings before falling in love with her and considering her his muse.

After the couple wed, they moved into the Shelton Hotel (bottom image in 1929). A 31-story residential hotel that opened just a year earlier on Lexington Avenue between 48th and 49th Streets, it billed itself as the tallest hotel in the world at the time, with commanding views of the East Side of Manhattan.

Stieglitz and O’Keeffe took advantage of these views. From their apartment on the 30th floor, O’Keeffe painted several images of what she saw outside her window in the 1920s—industry along the East River, the lit-up windows of skyscrapers lining the business corridors of East Midtown after dark.

But one from 1928 struck me the most, and it’s simply titled “East River From the Shelton Hotel” (top image). Though the couple had very different styles and worked in different mediums, the painting feels very similar to a 1927 Stieglitz photo.

“From Room 3003—the Shelton, New York, Looking Northeast” captures the same expansive cityscape of neat and uniform low-rise tenement blocks and belching smoke along the riverfront.

Both works seem to hint that the East Side which came of age in the late 19th century would soon give way to the tall, sleek city of the Machine Age that Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were currently part of.

[First image: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Second image: Art Institute of Chicago; third image: MCNY, X2010.29.218]

The story of the two young faces on an 1861 Turtle Bay row house

It’s a charming scene on the facade of 328 East 51st Street: a boxy bas relief sculpture of two short-haired young children. One holds what seems to be a pet, perhaps a kitten, while the other looks on and touches it with tenderness.

Such a sweet depiction in a domestic setting would lead you to assume that the children were part of a family that once resided in the house, built in 1861 between First and Second Avenues.

Turns out the real-life children in the bas relief never lived at number 328; their childhood home was a stunning mansion farther uptown. And while questions remain about their connection to the artist who sculpted it, how it came to be installed above the door in the 1960s is less of a mystery.

First, the identity of the children: They are Julia and Louise Comfort Tiffany, the twin daughters of artist and designer Louis Comfort Tiffany, according to a New York Times FYI column from 2000 by Christopher Gray.

The twins were born in 1887 to Tiffany’s second wife. Julia and Louise are two of Tiffany’s eight children, and they resided with their parents in the Tiffany family mansion on 72nd Street and Madison Avenue. (Julia and Louise are the granddaughters of Charles Tiffany, founder of the jewelry store.)

Twins Julia and Louise Comfort Tiffany as babies in a family photo, 1888

The bas relief of the sisters was made by Mary Lawrence Tonetti, according to Gray. Born into a prominent old New York family, Tonetti was a rare female sculptor of the Gilded Age—studying at the Art Students League under Augustus Saint-Gaudens before becoming his assistant in the 1890s.

How did Tonetti come to sculpt the faces of Julia and Louise? “Neither the date nor the circumstances of the commission are known, but the Tiffany twins appear to be about 10 or 12 in the panel, which suggests it was done around 1900,” wrote Gray.

328 East 51st Street in 1939-1941, without the bas relief on the facade

The connection between Tonetti and the Tiffany sisters appears to be lost to the ages. But Gray has an explanation for how the sculpture ended up on 328 East 51st Street.

The row house was purchased in 1965 by a former stage actress named Katharine Cornell. Cornell’s name might draw a blank today, but she gained fame in the 1930s and 1940s for her many starring turns on Broadway, playing the leads in 1931’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street and Romeo and Juliet in 1934.

Cornell’s leading-lady status was so solid, she was dubbed “first lady of the theater” by the critic (and Algonquin Round Table member) Alexander Woollcott, according to her 1974 New York Times obituary.

Cornell had been friendly with Tonetti when the two were neighbors in Sneden’s Landing, a small village on the Hudson River waterfront in Rockland County. Cornell had seen Tonetti’s sculpture of the Tiffany sisters and took a liking to it, according to Gray’s Times piece.

Tonetti died in 1945. When Cornell moved from Sneden’s Landing to East 51st Street in 1965, Tonetti’s daughter-in-law gave her a copy of the sculpture a housewarming present, states Gray.

Cornell passed away almost 50 years ago, and the row house has long since changed hands. But the young faces of Julia and Louise Comfort Tiffany remain—an anonymous ode to the innocence and wonder of two little girls.

This isn’t the only bas relief of children on a New York City residence. Outside a Gilded Age mansion on Riverside Drive and 89th Street, Isaac and Julia Rice installed this frieze of their six beloved children. Though weathered and faded, it still stands today.

[Third image: Wikipedia; fourth image: NYC Department of Records and Information Services]

The spooky spider web windows on 57th Street

The scary season is upon us, and Halloween-loving New York City residents are decorating their front stoops, windows, and terraces with witches, skeletons, and spider webs. But one East Side apartment building flaunts cast-iron spider webs across its front windows all year long.

The spider web windows are at 340 East 57th Street, a 16-story vision of prewar elegance between First and Second Avenues. Look closely at the service door above: this web has a black spider sitting in it, waiting and watching. It looks particularly Halloween-like with the orangey glow from the inside light.

The building’s architect, Rosario Candela, was one of the legendary designers of Manhattan’s most exclusive residences in the 1920s. I’ve posted about this building before, and I still don’t know if he had a hand in creating those spider web window guards.

If so, I appreciate Candela’s sense of spooky playfulness. Also playful but not quite spooky: the whimsical seahorse reliefs below the second-story windows.