Building facades spared from the wrecking ball

I guess the developer of this residential high-rise at 931 First Avenue and 51st Street deserves praise.

He could have bulldozed the entire circa-1892 Romanesque revival elementary school building located on this corner and put up his high-rise at street level. 

Instead, he kept the beautiful facade in place and built a condo tower inside it.

It’s kind of the same story with this new New York University dorm, a sleek, 26-story tower in the East Village.

It was constructed behind what’s left of St. Ann’s, on East 12th Street near Fourth Avenue, which spent most of its life as a Catholic church. Put up in 1847, it started out as a Baptist church and even housed a synagogue in the 19th century.

When NYU made its plans for the dorm a few years back, they decided to preserve a portion of the church’s facade and the gothic tower.

Turn of the century Cooper Square

A web of elevated train tracks is flanked by sloped-roof buildings on the right and lovely Cooper Union—described in this postcard as “the Cooper Institute”—on the left.

Looks like some really sweet buildings have long since disappeared.

Soda and smack on Avenue D

Suburban drug-seeking kids of the 1980s: the cops from the East Village’s Ninth Precinct never believed your stories of randomly getting mugged on Avenue D on your way back to Great Neck.

Here’s what one detective had to say to The Soho News on March 16, 1982:

Later in the article, the reporter quotes another cop calling Avenue D “the world’s largest retail drug market.” 

The squatters who lived in “Hardlucksville”

The 1930s were a pretty rough time. Unemployment hovered around 20 percent nationally, while the city’s poorest neighborhoods, like Harlem, had a 50 percent out-of-work rate.

Where did Depression-era New Yorkers go when they had no money to pay rent? Some moved into the city’s many squatter camps.

These makeshift villages, many with disturbingly accurate nicknames, sprang up citywide, according to a March 26, 1933 New York Times article.

One called “Hardlucksville” formed off 10th Street next to the East River (at left). Five men resided there, selling firewood culled from the river:

“The three of them saw up the wood into stove lengths. the two others peddle the product in the East Side streets, trundling it from door to door in baby carts reclaimed from the junk pile. Among the five they earn a half-dollar a day, and that supports them,” the Times reported.

Another squat, “Camp Thomas Paine,” was home to dozens of World War I veterans; they lived in shacks in the West 70s near the Hudson River. And “Packing Box City” (above) popped up on Houston Street.

Central Park had its own Hooverville as well. Read more about it here.

The rustic cabins of Manhattan

Who says you’re limited to a walkup, loft, or big-box apartment building when it comes to your housing options in Manhattan? Consider a cabin or cottage, examples of which can be found in various neighborhoods. 

This little brick number is in the West Village—worth about a million times more than the Unibomber’s Montana cabin.

High in the sky on Third Avenue is this chalet-like structure, with a lovely chimney:

An East Village abode that may be more hut than cabin. But look at that cute pseudo-thatched roof!

Old phone exchanges: East Side edition

This one was spotted on an apartment building in Manhattan’s East teens. ST is for Stuyvesant; Peter Stuyvesant’s bouwerie occupied today’s East Village and Gramercy Park neighborhoods.

Hidden behind a contemporary banner is this swinging 1960s sign, for Frenchman, an air conditioner business on First Avenue and 19th Street.

OR for Orchard? Oregon? Both Manhattan exchanges spanned the East Side below midtown.

Peeling back layers of downtown store signs

When a shop goes out of business, there’s a short yet sweet window of time during which the defunct store’s sign is down . . . and the ghost sign from a long-ago shop becomes visible. For a few days to a few weeks, you get this tiny glimpse into the city’s recent past.

Like Reisman’s Ladieswear at 226 East 14th Street. Not too many signs advertise “cut rate” clothing anymore:

Lafayette French Pastry, on Bleecker Street in the West Village, looks like it was a charming place to get a chocolate eclair in the 1960s. They moved over to Greenwich Avenue and West 10th several years ago:

I wonder what Richman, at 300 Canal Street, sold:

If the sign advertised a product or service, we’ll never know; it’s hidden behind a red blotch.

Astor Place: rocked by a deadly riot

A riot sparked by dueling performances of Macbeth? Hard to believe, but it happened 160 years ago in Astor Place. Today, skate rats are the most menacing crowd you’ll find there.

But in 1849, things were different. Top U.K. actor William Charles Macready, a favorite of New York City’s upper crust, was booked to perform Macbeth at the refined Astor Place Opera House on May 10. 

That same night, American-born Edwin Forrest (at left, a daguerreotype by Mathew Brady), who started his career in theaters on the nearby Bowery for working-class crowds, was also scheduled to play Macbeth a few blocks away. Once friendly, the actors were now rivals.

On May 7, Forrest’s fans—whipped up by newspaper stories and anti-English sentiment—arrived at Macready’s opening performance and proceeded to bombard the stage with eggs and shoes. 

Macready wanted to go back to Britain, but prominent New Yorkers, like Herman Melville and Washington Irving, persuaded him to stay.

Before the May 10 performance, Forrest’s fans went into riot mode. About 20,000 men amassed outside the opera house, tossing rocks through windows and attempting to set it on fire. While police tried to quell the crowd outside, Macready finished the show and took off.

The rioters did not. National Guardsmen were called in to restore order. They fired on rioters as well as innocent bystanders. After it was finally brought under control, the riot had claimed 22 lives.

Cross streets carved into tenement corners

Before reliable metal street signs were put up on every corner of the city letting you know exactly where you were, it was probably pretty helpful to have the cross street names chiseled into the corner of a tenement or warehouse.

Now, of course, the cross street carvings have outlived their usefulness. They’re worn down by the elements, but it’s always a treat to look up and see one.

Like this sign on Market and Madison Streets, on a rundown tenement:

The carving at Third Avenue is missing its counterpart—it should read 110th Street:

This one at Fifth Street and First Avenue isn’t carved into the corner. The numbers look old, but not that old—perhaps the original corner blocks were replaced and new street numbers put up:

The loveliest street corner sign, of course, is in Tribeca, on Hudson and Beach Streets.

A guide to narcotics in the East Village, 1982

The Soho News, a weekly paper that covered downtown from 1973 to 1982, ran some news briefs about East Village smack shops and drug dealing titled “Alphabet City Soup” in their March 16, 1982 issue.

It included this informative guide to the most popular brands of cocaine and heroin available between Avenues A and D at the time.