You can practically hear the clacking of the streetcar and the pitch from the vendor with a sack over his shoulder in this richly detailed view of West 14th Street looking toward Fifth Avenue from 1905.
A young man stands in front of the camera, looking defiant; a woman carries packages under her arms on this busy shopping street of middle-class department stores and emporiums. Another woman is in the street, perhaps trying to cross?
Fourteenth Street over a century ago had no garish store signs or street architecture, but its hustle and energy feels very similar to the vibe of the street today.
The front doors caught my eye first. Heavy and bronze, these two doors at the entrance of the Gap store at Third Avenue and 85th Street feature intricate carvings and curious allegorical figures reminiscent of ancient Greece.
On one door, a woman balances a locomotive engine in her left hand and grips a caduceus in the right. Behind her is a sailing ship, and beside her head are the words “commerce and industry.”
The man on the opposite door holds a staff with a beehive at the top. In his other hand is a key, and at his feet a cornucopia. “Finance and savings” is inscribed at his shoulder.
Classical figures like these are pretty much the last thing you’d expect to find as you walk into the Gap. But the same set of doors also exist on the 85th Street side of the building, and the allegorical images offer a solid clue about what this unusually dignified building in the heart of Yorkville was built for.
The building was once the home of Yorkville Bank—an Italian Renaissance Revival structure built to serve this growing middle- and working-class immigrant neighborhood in 1905, according to a 2012 Landmarks Preservation Commission report.
The cast-bronze doors, fabricated by John Polachek Bronze & Iron Company of Long Island City, arrived after a renovation in the 1920s.
Four stories of limestone, brick, terra cotta, and granite, the building has the imposing, fortress-like look of a typical bank building from turn of the century New York City—when savings bank failures weren’t uncommon and financial institutions wanted to instill a sense of trust and strength to entice potential customers.
The allegorical figures are part of this strength and trust. The train the woman holds is a symbol of industry; the caduceus suggests commerce, according to the LPC report. The key in the man’s hands represents prudence, and the cornucopia is a sign of plenty.
Yorkville Bank’s rise and fall (above, about 1940) seem to mimic the rise and fall of Yorkville. A solid neighborhood bank in the first part of the 20th century, it merged with Manufacturer’s Trust Company in the 1920s. Business slowed as Yorkville’s German, Hungarian, and Czech immigrant communities dispersed and the neighborhood began its slow absorption by the Upper East Side.
The bank closed in 1990, after which it underwent a renovation into a more up-to-date commercial space. A year later, the Gap moved in.
Thankfully the Gap kept the doors, as well as the charming “YB” (Yorkville Bank, of course!) inscription above them.
If you were a wealthy and well-connected New Yorker during the Gilded Age, your winter calendar would be packed with balls: assembly balls, charity balls, and of course, Caroline Astor’s annual ball, the highlight of the social season.
And if you weren’t one of the Astor 400? Well, you could read all the details about these swanky events in the newspapers, imagining yourself as a guest or shaking your head at the expense and decadence.
Join Ephemeral New York on January 19 for an intimate look back at Gotham’s winter soiree season during the late 19th century. “Having a Ball: The Gilded Age’s Most Outrageous Parties” is part of the Salmagundi Club’s monthly Afternoon Tea Talks series.
In the parlor at the Salmagundi Club’s beautiful lower Fifth Avenue brownstone (below), I’ll be discussing the social season with Carl Raymond, Tea Talks moderator and host of The Gilded Gentleman podcast.
Carl and I will explore what the season of balls was like and how a ball was organized. We’ll also cover the Gilded Age’s most outrageous and expensive balls, such as Alva Vanderbilt’s 1883costume ball and the 1897 Bradley-Martin ball at the Waldorf—which marked the beginning of the end of ostentatious, over-the-top balls.
The event will be held from 3:30 to 4:30 pm at 47 Fifth Avenue (between 11th and 12th Streets). Tickets are $40 and include a tea reception with sandwiches and cookies following the talk. Click here to purchase tickets!
[Top image: Everett Shinn; second image: Hyde Ball via Find a Gravel third image: Salmagundi.org]
When Andrew Carnegie decided to build a mansion for himself and his family on Fifth Avenue and 91st Street, he told his architects to construct “the most modest, plainest, and most roomy house in New York,” according to a 1971 Landmarks Preservation Commission report.
The mansion, completed in 1903, did not disappoint the industrialist-turned-philanthropist. At four stories and with 64 rooms surrounded on two sides by gardens, it was certainly roomy.
And while modest and plain are in the eye of the beholder, Carnegie’s Georgian-style house displayed more modesty and restraint than many of the pompous marble and stone castles going up on Fifth Avenue at the time.
But even an elegant mansion built in the style of an English country manor is likely to be influenced by the new design trends coming out of Europe at the turn of the century. The glass and iron canopy over the front entrance, with its curvy shape and floral motifs, seems to be a nod to Art Nouveau.
Though it never made a huge splash in New York City, Art Nouveau design prevailed in many European cities in the early 1900s. Buildings, clothing, and objects were designed with graceful, flowing lines and curlicues that mimicked flower stems, petals, and other forms found in nature.
The canopy is described as “Tiffany-style” by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel’s The Landmarks of New York, Fifth Edition. Based on early images and the 1910 postcard, above, it appears to be part of the original house Carnegie occupied until his death in 1919. (His wife resided in the home until she passed away in 1946.)
Whether the craftsman who created it was inspired by Art Nouveau or approached it with a different influence, the canopy adds a delightful touch to a Gilded Age mansion that since 1976 has been the home of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, according to The Landmarks of New York.
Very fitting that a world-class design museum occupies a mansion that inside and outside reflects such design and style.
Like many downtown neighborhoods, Chelsea has its share of back houses—a second smaller house or former carriage house built behind a main home and accessed only by an often hidden alleyway.
Now imagine not just one back house but an entire row of them forming a community where a group of people lived and worked for decades, almost locked within a city block. That’s kind of the story of Paisley Place, which got it start after yellow fever hit New York City in October 1822.
With an epidemic raging, city residents fled. “The banker closed his doors; the merchant packed his goods; and churches no longer echoed words of divine truth,” stated Valentine’s Manuel of 1863. “Many hundreds of citizens abandoned their homes and accustomed occupations, that they might seek safety beyond the reach of pestilence, putting their trust in broad rivers and green fields.”
A good number of these fleeing residents relocated to the village of Greenwich, putting down roots there and transforming it into an urban part of the city within a few decades.
Southampton Road making its way through Chelsea on the John Randel survey map from 1811
One group of immigrant artisans—Scottish-born weavers who carved out a niche by supplying New York with hand-woven linens—went a little farther north. These tradesmen and their families set up a new community in today’s Chelsea off a small country lane called Southampton Road. (above map).
“A convenient nook by the side of this quiet lane was chosen by a considerable number of Scotch weavers as their place of retirement from the impending dangers,” according to Valentine’s. “They erected their modest dwellings in a row, set up their frames, spread their webs…and gave their new home the name ‘Paisley Place.'”
This 1857-1862 street map shows a row of three houses in the middle of the block marked “weavers.”
Southampton Road, which once wound its way from about West 14th Street and Eighth Avenue to West 21st Street and Sixth Avenue, soon ceased to exist as Chelsea urbanized and conformed to the street grid. The houses of Paisley Place then became “buried in the heart of the block between 16th and 17th Streets and Sixth and Seventh Avenues,” wrote the Evening World.
Through the decades, the weavers carried out their trade. Paisley Place consisted of “a double row of rear wooden houses entered by alleys at 115-117 West 16th Street and 112-114 West 17th Street,” per The Historical Guide to the City of New York, published in 1905.
A similar map also from 1857-1862 marks another back house with “weaver”
More is known about their houses than the weavers themselves. “The little colony mingled only slightly with the scores of other nationalities of early New York,” stated another Evening World piece.
By the 1860s, the weavers became something of a curiosity, the subject of newspaper articles and magazine sketches. After 1900 the people of Paisley Place were gone; they either died or moved on when their hand-weaving skills were no longer needed in the era of industrialization.
Their homes hidden inside a modern city block held on a little longer. “The Scotch weavers are gone, but the houses which they built still hold their long accustomed place on the line of the vanished Southampton Road,” stated a Brooklyn Standard Union article from 1902.
17th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues
The writer of the Standard Union article noted that two remaining wooden houses had a “quaint picturesqueness [that] was of a sort to warm the heart of the antiquarian.”
Today, 17th Street doesn’t seem to carry any traces of this former community, and no remnants remain of the wood houses that would be in the middle of this tightly packed block. This antiquarian, however, wishes that something of their lives was left behind.
[Top image: Valentine’s Manual, NYPL; second image: John Randel survey map; third and fourth images: NYPL]
If you want potted flowers in contemporary New York City, you head to a garden center or farmers market. In an earlier Gotham, however, you waited for the flower carts to come, laden with petunias and begonias and other beautiful varieties for replanting in front yards, back yards, and on terraces.
Artist Henry Ives Cobb Jr. was moved enough to capture this scene, somewhere on Fifth Avenue. The date is unclear, but it looks like the flower cart is the only vehicle still pulled by a horse.
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.
Central Park was conceived as a respite from the noise and pollution of the industrial city—a tranquil landscape where New Yorkers could relax and refresh in a natural environment.
But in the first years of the park’s existence in the 1860s, it was the wealthy who enjoyed it the most. After all, in the early Gilded Age, they were the ones who had the leisure time to spare and the vehicles to bring them to this green space far from the center of the city.
So how did they use the park? By driving—or being driven. With fancy carriages and a coachman or two handling the road, New York ladies and gentlemen spent late afternoons traversing the park’s many drives. Sometimes a Gilded Age sportsman would take the reins on his own trotting horse.
“Another notable feature of former days was the driving in Central Park,” according to the book Fifth Avenue, from 1915. “Here might be seen old Commodore Vanderbilt, driving his famous trotter, ‘Dexter’; Robert Bonner, speeding ‘Maude S.’; Thomas Kilpatrick, Frank Work, Russell Sage, and other horsemen driving to their private quarter- or half-mile courses in Harlem; leaders of society or dowagers in their gilded coaches; and even maidens of the ‘Four Hundred’ driving their phaetons.”
When Weber & Heilbroner moved into the Marbridge Building at 34th Street and Sixth Avenue in 1923, this men’s clothing company had already established itself as a leading haberdashery—with stores throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle earlier that year.
Could this enormous faded ad looming over Sixth Avenue for the Marbridge store date back that far?
It’s hard to believe, but it certainly is appropriately faded and has an old-timey feel, with the words under the company name reading “Stein-Bloch Clothes in the New York Manner.” (Stein-Bloch was a manufacturer of men’s suits and coats.)
Weber & Heilbroner stores shut down for good in the 1970s, but this glorious ad in Herald Square refuses to let New York forget the men’s hats, suits, and overcoats they were known for through the 20th century.
Gilded Age new rich and old money families had one thing in common: they all employed an army of servants to clean their mansions, mind their children, prepare their meals, drive their carriages, and take care of any other task members of elite society deemed necessary. But who were these butlers, chambermaids, laundresses, cooks, valets, and coachmen—and what was life like for them?
In a new episode of the history podcast The Gilded Gentleman, host Carl Raymond (writer, editor, and social and cultural historian) has invited me to take a look at the roles and responsibilities of domestic staff in grand mansions and more modest homes. We’ll explore what servants did—and who they really were. The episode pays tribute to the “invisible magicians” without whom the dinners, balls, and daily workings of households of the Gilded Age would never have been possible.
Ephemeral New York 