All that remains of a legendary Astor Place department store few New Yorkers remember

The letters are large and elegant, but they’re easy to miss—set against an off-white facade above a rusty garage door on Lafayette Street.

“Wanamaker,” the letters read. You’re forgiven if the name doesn’t ring a bell. This faint signage is just about all that remains of Wanamaker’s, a top department store that arrived in New York City in 1896 and became a leading retailer through the mid-1950s.

The story of Wanamaker’s echoes the story of so many of Gotham’s legendary dry goods emporiums, as they used to be known. These highly competitive stores made huge profits thanks to the riches of the Gilded Age and the introduction of modern consumerism.

Except Wanamaker’s got its start in Philadelphia, where namesake John Wanamaker opened his first men’s clothing shop in 1861. By the end of the century, Wanamaker began branching out into other cities as well as New York.

Wanamaker’s first occupied the former A.T. Stewart store on Broadway between 9th and 10th Streets (above, in 1901), then expanded its footprint by building a much larger store at 770 Broadway, between Eighth and Ninth Streets, in the early 1900s. A skybridge reportedly connected the two structures.

“Clad mostly in terra cotta, this grand shopping palace contained thirty-two acres of retail space, an auditorium with 1,300 seats, and a large restaurant to round out the shopping experience,” states Village Preservation’s Off the Grid blog. 

Unlike other major New York City department stores, Wanamaker’s never moved to Midtown. The store stuck it out on Astor Place until shutting its doors in the mid-1950s. A fire then consumed the empty older building. An apartment residence called Stewart House sits there today.

The Wanamaker sign I found isn’t on the 770 Broadway building; you can view it on the Lafayette Street side of 730 Broadway, where the company had a warehouse, according to a 1982 New York Times article.

The only other remnant of this retail giant is on New York City maps—Ninth Street between Broadway and Lafayette is still called Wanamaker Place.

[Second image: NYPL Digital Collections; third image: NYPL Digital Collections]

This stunning Lafayette Street theater was the city’s first free public library in the 1850s

In the first half of the 19th century, John Jacob Astor was the richest man in New York City—and also the richest man in America.

Arriving in postwar Gotham in the 1780s, Astor made his fortune in fur before he turned his attention to real estate. He began buying parcel after parcel of cheap, eventually quite profitable land across the city (earning the nickname “New York’s landlord” for his shrewd deals and strict leasing policies).

Astor House, Astor Place, The Astor Theater—all were named for this German immigrant and Astor family patriarch. In the 1830s, he also developed today’s Lafayette Street as an exclusive enclave known as Lafayette Place. Many of the city’s richest families resided inside the columned row houses of LaGrange Terrace in the decades before the Civil War.

Toward the end of his life, however, Astor was thinking of a way to give something back to New York. “He had vague notions as to how best to spend the money, but in the [1830s] some friends first gave him the idea of establishing a library,” explained the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in a 1911 article.

A library would have been a novel idea at the time. Though rich New Yorkers had their own private libraries, public libraries didn’t exist in Gotham yet. True, the New York Society Library, established in the late 18th century, was open to anyone…but only if they could afford the subscription, that is.

So Astor set aside an estimated $400,000 in his will (with sums of money already allocated for books, construction, and other costs). The idea was that once he passed away, a free public library would be built on Astor-owned land on Lafayette Place.

Astor’s wishes were carried out after he died in 1848. A board of trustees including Washington Irving, Joseph Green Cogswell (a teacher who became the library’s first librarian), and Astor’s son William B. Astor (father-in-law of Gilded Age society swan Caroline Astor) hired an architect and began purchasing books, temporarily renting space on Bond Street to await the completion of the new building, according to the New York Public Library.

In January 1854, the original Astor Library opened its doors (above drawing). “The trustees of the Astor Library have erected a noble monument to the rich old gentleman whose name it bears,” the New York Times wrote in April of that year. “They have built a handsome house in a handsome place, and so contributed to adorn the city.”

The Times went on to note that this “free” library really isn’t free—in the sense that the books can’t be taken out of the building (it was intended to be a reference library) and no one under age 16 is permitted inside. Another newspaper compared it favorably to the great libraries of Europe, then likened it to “a kind of literary museum” because the books have to stay in the building.

Despite the reviews, the library found many fans. “The Astor Library was open to the public during the day on weekdays and Saturdays,” wrote the NYPL. “Most readers reported to a main desk to request books which were then paged from the shelves. Some readers, usually scholars, were granted the privilege of being alcove readers, and they had full access to alcoves of books devoted to specific topics.”

A few years after opening, the library expanded (fourth photo, above), and it grew again in 1881 (fifth illustration, above), with space to hold more than 400,000 volumes. But even with the Astor name and fortune behind it, the library ran into financial troubles.

In the 1890s, it combined with the Lenox Library, endowed in 1870 by James Lenox, and the Tilden Trust (not a library yet, but a fund intended to establish one). The combination became the basis for the New York Public Library, consisting of the main library beside Bryant Park followed by neighborhood branches.

“The Astor building finally closed to readers on April 15, 1911, shortly before the opening of the new Central Building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street,” the NYPL noted.

The Brooklyn Eagle was wistful about the closing (below photo, books being taken out of the shuttered library). “Nearly all the great men of Europe who have visited America during the past half century have paid a visit to the Astor Library. Washington Irving was almost a daily visitor…Longfellow and Hawthorne spent many hours there pouring over the reference volumes….”

“The building stood almost in the country when it was opened, but of late years the old colonial houses by which it was surrounded have disappeared and it has become shut in by huge skyscrapers,” the Eagle wrote.

The Astor Library may have shut its doors—but the building that housed those handsome volumes and reading alcoves began a second life. It was purchased in 1920 by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to house Jewish refugees, then faced demolition in the 1960s.

Since 1967, it’s been the home of the Public Theater, a nonprofit performance space led by theatrical producer Joseph Papp. “When I came into that building, it was in ruins, it was falling apart,” he said in a PBS interview. Today, it’s arguably the most magnificent structure on Lafayette Street.

[Second image: Wikipedia; third, fourth, fifth, and sixth images: NYPL Digital Collections; seventh image: Brooklyn Daily Eagle]

This Gothic building near Avenue C was an “industrial school” for poor and homeless kids

In the 1880s and 1890s, the East Village of today became a magnet for lodging houses and training schools designed to help impoverished children from becoming casualties of the harsh life of New York’s streets.

The Sixth Street industrial School, 630 East Sixth Street

It was an era of great support for private social services. The Tompkins Square Lodging House for Boys and Industrial School on Eighth Street and Avenue B opened in 1887. The Elizabeth Home for Girls, on 12th Street between First and Second Avenues, took in its first residents in 1892.

In 1890, the Sixth Street Industrial School (above) opened its doors just west of Avenue C, in what was then called the Dry Dock District. Like the other buildings, it’s a stunning Gothic beauty with a stepped roof, dormer windows, and resplendent red brick. Also like the others, Calvert Vaux—the co-designer of Central Park—is the architect (with a partner, George K. Radford).

CAS: Children’s Aid Society

Each facility—which taught some academic classes along with lessons in specific trades and the life skills a young person would need to eventually live independently—was overseen by the Children’s Aid Society. The CAS got its start in 1853, when a young minister named Charles Loring Brace sought to help the estimated 10,000 street children, or “street rats” as police called them, living on their own and often working dangerous jobs or forced into criminal activity to survive.

At least a dozen lodging houses and industrial schools were built by the CAS and designed by Vaux and Radford all over Manhattan, including the 14th Ward Industrial School on Mott Street and the Sullivan Street Industrial School in today’s Soho. (Both buildings still grace the cityscape.)

The Sixth Street Industrial School in 1939-1941

“Vaux sought to develop buildings that stood out from the city’s tenements, which defined poor and immigrant life in the area with generally grim living conditions,” stated an Off the Grid post from Village Preservation. “His buildings, often free-standing, displaying varied rooflines, and characterized by ornamental features that recalled Dutch architecture, attempted to evoke the feeling and image of a ‘snug country inn.’”

The CAS was a popular charitable organization in the benevolent Gilded Age city, garnering financial support from society families like the Astors. Funding for the Sixth Street Industrial School came from Mrs. William Douglas Sloane—aka Emily Vanderbilt, daughter of William Henry Vanderbilt and granddaughter of Commodore Vanderbilt.

“The Sixth Street School, under the generous support of Mrs. William D. Sloane, continues its good work among the poor of the East Side,” stated the CAS annual report from 1892. “The primary and industrial classes are most successful, and the children receive a training which is of value to them all through their life.”

Industrial schools and lodging houses for poor or homeless kids disappeared during the 20th century. The CAS still exists though, rebranded recently as Children’s Aid. And while the breathtaking building at 630 East Sixth Street is no longer a school, it continues to serve as a nonprofit called Pencer House, “an apartment building for limited-income and formerly homeless New Yorkers,” according to the organization’s website.

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

The geometric stillness in a Precisionist painter’s view near Avenue A

Niles Spencer was a Rhode Island-born painter who moved to New York City in 1916. “The lively intellectual milieu of Greenwich Village was in its heyday, and Spencer was exposed to many of the radical theoreticians and personalities of the time, who encouraged him to begin working in new directions,” stated New York City’s Forum Gallery.

“Deeply influenced by Cézanne’s faceted explorations of landscape and still life, Spencer’s paintings began to focus on the geometry of architectural shapes and how they related to their landscape.”

The painting above, “Near Avenue A,” was completed in 1933. The scene reduces what looks like a view from the old Gas House District (where Stuyvesant Town is today) to a “spare dynamic, architectonic composition” per the Forum Gallery.

Spencer is often grouped as a Precisionist painter, a style that flourished in the early to mid-20th century. (George Copeland Ault is another Precisionist whose work can be seen here.) “Searching for a singular modern American subject, they venerated the machine and industry as an exaltation of the dynamism of the future,” wrote the Forum Gallery.

“Near Avenue A” is at the Museum of Modern Art. It captures a scene that’s hard to recognize in the Manhattan of today—but the round gas storage tank in the background places it on the East Side of the 1930s.

Just how old is the lovely stained glass ceiling at Veniero’s pasticceria?

There’s a lot to love about Veniero’s, the cafe and bakery on East 11th Street since 1894. First and foremost are the pastries, but also the tin ceiling, the old-school glass bakery counters, and the wonderful pink and green neon sign on the facade.

But what I noticed for the first time during a recent visit for gelato was the spectacular stained glass panels spanning the length of the ceiling, with their unusual red, gold, and green floral motifs.

I knew they must have been in the cafe for decades, and I wanted to know just how long and where they came from. On one hand, a 1990 New York Times article about bakeries in Manhattan has it that the stained glass was only installed in 1984.

“The only change over the years [at Veniero’s] has been the addition six years ago of an adjoining warm enclave, with a ceiling of stained-glass panels and the original pressed tin,” the article stated.

However, Veniero’s own website suggests the stained glass dates to the 1930s. During the Depression, owner Michael Veniero left the day-to-day management of the store to his cousin Frank.

“Under Frank’s leadership and eventually ownership, Veniero’s evolved into what it is today,” the site says. Frank “filled his new kitchen with Italian bakers and decorated his new cafe with imported Neapolitan glass that still gracefully adorns our ceiling today.”

How an East Village alley was renamed for a Ukrainian poet hero

From the city’s earliest days, streets were named after local bigwigs, typically a landowner. So in 1830, when it came time to name the one-block alley between today’s East Sixth and Seventh Streets (part of an early 18th century enclave called Bowery Village), the tradition continued.

The little slip between Third and Second Avenues became Hall Street, after Harlem landowner Charles Henry Hall, who sold the property to the city in 1828, according to a New York Times piece by Michael Goldman from 1999.

Hall Street didn’t always make it onto 19th century street maps, and it was changed in 1855 to Hall Place for unknown reasons. For 148 years, as Bowery Village morphed into the Lower East Side and then broke off to become the East Village, the Hall name stuck.

Hall Street, between Seventh Street and Tompkins Market on an 1840 map

Then in 1978, Charles Henry Hall was replaced by Taras Shevchenko, and the street officially bore the name Taras Shevchenko Place. Who is Taras Shevchenko, and what prompted the name change?

Hall Place made it on the map in 1903

“Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) was a Ukrainian writer, painter and political activist whose novels and poems, written in Ukrainian, gave forceful expression to his countrymen’s nationalist sentiment at a time when aspects of the culture, including the language, were being suppressed by the Russian czar,” Goldman wrote.

Taras Shevchenko in 1859

Considered a hero to many Ukrainians, the name change was pushed by the Ukrainian immigrants who settled around East Seventh Street after World War II and built a community dubbed “Little Ukraine” that topped 60,000 people in the years following the war, according to Village Preservation.

The site of Tomkins Market in its Hall Street days, Taras Shevchenko Place ends at McSorley’s to the north and borders St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church on one side.

It also borders a newish Cooper Union building. Back in 2001 as plans for the new building unfolded, Cooper Union wanted to “demap” Taras Shevchenko Place and create a pedestrian walkway. Thanks to community pushback, that never happened.

[Second image: NYPL; third image: NYPL; fourth image: Wikipedia]

A ghostly store sign returns to view on Avenue B

Humble, homemade-looking store signs used to be more prevalent in Manhattan. Now, one of these unadorned signs—for an unbranded cosmetics and gift shop—is back in view at the tenement storefront at 205 Avenue B.

Nothing about this former store seems to exist in archives or old neighborhood photos, making the sign a ghostly remnant of a very modest-looking local business.

How far back in East Village history does this sign go? I’m not sure, but the store may have been selling makeup and gifts up until about 40 years ago. The sign reappeared sometime after Raul Candy Store closed in 2019, 38 years after setting up shop at 205 Avenue B in 1981, per EV Grieve.

h/t: Ghost Signs NYC

The teens who found splendor on the gritty East Side docks of the 1940s

The smokestacks and storage tanks of the East River waterfront of the 1930s or 1940s should be an unappealing place to meet friends. But painter Joseph Lambert Cain has captured a group of teenagers gathered on a pier here to sunbathe, talk, and pair off.

For these teens, perhaps from the Lower East Side or the Gas House District in the East 20s, the waterfront is an idyllic location—away from the critical eyes of adults and into the warm embrace of the working class city they likely grew up in.

Cain titled his painting “New York Harbor.” I’m not sure of the date, but my guess is about 1940. The riverfront industry surrounds them, but the modern city of skyscrapers is within sight and reach.

A lost East Village alley on a 1963 downtown map

Old maps tell us a lot about the subtle changes to New York’s streetscape. Take this illustrated map of the Village that’s almost 60 years old, for example.

Published in August 1963 by the Village Voice, the map covers not just Greenwich Village but a portion of the Meatpacking District (see “Little West 12th Street” in very small print), a slice of Chelsea, and a bit Gramercy Park, with that sliver of Irving Place at the top right.

The map extends all the way east to First Avenue. Makes sense; the newly christened East Village was at the time becoming a hipster alternative to pricey Greenwich Village, with its own clubs, bars, theaters, and head shops. The new, young residents here would likely be Village Voice readers.

“Stuyvesant Alley,” by Armin Landeck, 1940

Much of the Village Voice map aligns with the streetscape today. But there’s something missing in the contemporary East Village—it’s a place name on the map between Third and Second Avenues and East 11th and 12th Streets.

“Stuyvesant Alley,” the map says, marking a slender lane in the middle of the block. Okay, but there’s no Stuyvesant Alley anymore. So what happened to it?

Stuyvesant Alley, not named on this 1868 map

First, let’s see what the backstory is. The “Stuyvesant” name is obvious; the alley was created on land once part of the farm Peter Stuyvesant established for himself and his descendants in the 17th century. Parcels of his “bouwerie” were sold off for development in later centuries, but the Stuyvesant name stuck.

Stuyvesant Alley appears in several 19th century neighborhood maps, like the one above, from 1868. The alley isn’t named, but it runs through East 11th to East 12th Street. It also seems to have some small buildings lining it—perhaps stables?

By 1879, the alley’s name made it on the map (above), along with other places in the heavily developed neighborhood, like the Astor Place Hotel and Tivoli Theatre.

In the 1920s, Stuyvesant Alley showed up in an article in the New York Herald. An art exhibit was to be held at One Stuyvesant Alley in November 1922, the paper reported, hosted by a group of painters who called themselves the Co-Arts Club.

“The Co-Arts Club has established themselves in Stuyvesant Alley, the last frontier of Bohemianism on the East Side,” the Herald stated wistfully. “The ruthless march of tenements and factories has left only the alley untouched and the light bathes the studios there with an undimmed purposefulness.”

The painting of the alley as a narrow driveway surrounded by red brick and stone buildings (second image above) is the work of Armin Landeck in 1940. Whether Landeck’s depiction was true to life is hard to know; it’s also unclear which end of the alley he’s looking down.

His view is different from that of this 1934 photo of Third Avenue and East 11th Street (above), which shows the buildings on either side of the entrance to Stuyvesant Alley.

The alley made it into the 1960s, since it’s on the Village Voice map. But the trail goes cold after that.

To explain its undocumented disappearance, I’m going with what the Village Preservation’s Off the Grid blog concluded in 2014, when they took a closer look at Stuyvesant Alley: “The alley appears to have been wiped from the map in the 1980s when NYU built their large dorm on the corner of Third Avenue and East 11th Street.”

Thanks to Mick Dementiuk for sending the link to the map my way.

[Top image: Village Voice map via The Copa Room; second image: Brooklyn Museum; third image: fourth, fifth, and sixth images: NYPL]

A moment in time somewhere on the Bowery

An abandoned street cleaning cart. Men in hats walking alone. A streetcar traveling on dusty Belgian block pavement, an elevated train overhead, a succession of store signs and advertisements.

It’s just a glimpse in time around the turn of the century on the Bowery. But where, exactly? One of the buildings has 57 on it, suggesting 57 Bowery. That address no longer exists; it would have been near the entrance of the Manhattan Bridge.

There’s another sign that might give us a clue: the ad propped against a pole at the edge of the sidewalk. It looks like the first word is “London.” A theater with that name existed at 235 Bowery, where the New Museum is today between Stanton and Rivington Streets.

Whatever the exact address is, you can practically feel the energy and vitality—the pulse of a street now synonymous with a lowbrow kind New York life.