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.

From Gilded Age beer garden to 1970s strip club: 100 years of vice on a Chelsea corner

There’s a four-story tenement on the traffic-choked corner of Sixth Avenue and 24th Street with some curious signage.

Not the store sign for a now-shuttered ground floor cafe, nor the enormous “for sale” banner spread across the second floor of the facade. (Yikes, is this red-brick beauty in danger?) Signage that’s much more intriguing comes into view when you stand nearby and look up.

On the corner of the building, two brownstone nameplates say, well, “The Corner,” in Victorian-style lettering. Above the cornice is a pediment that reads “The Corner” with “Koster & Bial” underneath.

So what was The Corner, and who were Koster and Bial? The tenement is all that’s left of a theater and beer garden empire that stretched across Sixth Avenue and offered excess beer, edgy performances, and illicit adventures to libertine New Yorkers.

The story begins in the Gilded Age, when this stretch of Sixth Avenue was part of the Tenderloin—a vice district extending to Ninth Avenue from roughly 23rd Street to 42nd Streets that featured theaters, music halls, saloons, gambling dens, disorderly houses, and every other type of lowdown entertainment worthy of a world-class late 19th century metropolis with money to burn.

In 1879, German immigrants brewers John Koster and Albert Bial opened a concert hall at Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street. Their holdings up until then included three restaurants near City Hall, plus another in the New York Tribune building on Park Row that became a hangout for “politicians, clubmen, brokers, lawyers, and prominent men about town,” wrote the New York Times.

But operating a theater was a different game, especially when bringing musical acts to New Yorkers was second to Koster and Bial’s main goal of distributing and selling beer.

To make it all work, they tried a new type of entertainment. After taking over another existing theater at 115-117 West 23rd Street, they created a 1200-seat venue that’s credited with being the first to introduce vaudeville to New York City—importing talent from Europe to titillate Gilded Age audiences.

In 1886, The Corner was born. Koster and Bial used the red brick tenement as a beer garden annex for their popular theater. “Music programs were presented in the German style of a beer garden with food and drink part of the offerings,” noted 14to42.net. Inside was a handsome bar, as seen below.

The theater/concert hall (below) and The Corner were bookends for a raucous, rollicking scene—with the kind of suggestive performers Gotham soon couldn’t get enough of. Needless to say, this wasn’t Mrs. Astor’s kind of theater, nor Mrs. Vanderbilt’s.

“Business boomed with the likes of Mademoiselle Armen d’Ary from the Follies Bergere, and Maudi, the Lightning Calculator, but Koster and Bial’s biggest draw was the Spanish dancer Carmencita, who is immortalized in portraits by John Singer Sargent and William M. Chase (below),” wrote John Tauranac in his book, Manhattan’s Little Secrets.

Conductor Victor Herbert served as musical director for Koster & Bial’s, playing the venue with his 40-piece orchestra.

Considering that the theater-music hall was in the Tenderloin, it’s not surprising that Koster & Bial allowed a little hanky panky to go on. Under the stage was a space known as the cork room, decorated with the corks from champagne bottles: “where the stage-door johnnies could cavort with the hoofers in an atmosphere decorously described as ‘fast,'” wrote Tauranac.

Boxes inside a balcony that ran across the theater “served as the scene of the most private kinds of activities,” stated Neil Gould, author of Victor Herbert: A Theatrical Life.

Koster and Bial’s entertainment offerings didn’t last long on 23rd Street or at The Corner. “In 1896, Koster & Bial did close and entered into a brief partnership with Oscar Hammerstein 2d at his 34th Street Manhattan Opera House (on the present site of Macy’s),” explained the New York Times in 1995. 

The partnership created a new Koster & Bial’s, but the venture proved to be disastrous. By the century’s end, both men had died, and their 34th Street theater and roof garden closed its doors in 1901.

That wasn’t the end of illicit activity in the red brick tenement at Sixth Avenue and 24th Street. Almost a century later in a very different Manhattan, infamous strip club Billy’s Topless moved into the space in the mid-1970s.

More of a local dive bar with a small stage for topless dancers and a buffet warmed by cans of sterno, Billy’s was one of those infamous New York establishments that in the 1980s and 1990s was tolerated—if not celebrated—as an anachronistic landmark of a grittier city.

Then the late 1990s arrived, and with it Guiliani-era reforms—specifically a new zoning law that barred sex-related businesses from operating within 500 feet of a residence, school, or house of worship. Now, Billy’s existence was threatened.

In the spirit of Koster and Bial, Billy’s held on. As the law took effect, the dancers began wearing bikini tops, and Billy’s Topless became Billy Stopless, as a 2007 post from Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York recalls.

Ultimately Billy’s closed up shop in 2001, ending the tenement’s century-plus run as a site of illicit activity. But the building is for sale; perhaps another vice or sin business will keep the tradition going.

[Third, fourth, and fifth images: NYPL; sixth image: William Merritt Chase/Metmuseum.org; seventh image: Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York]

What the 1910s stained glass windows say about a 19th century Brooklyn tavern

With its tin ceiling, mosaic tile floor, and handsome mahogany bar, Teddy’s Bar and Grill is like stepping into a late 19th century time machine.

This corner tavern on Berry and North Eighth Streets in Williamsburg opened in 1887 as a family-run Irish tavern, according to Teddy’s website. At the time, Brooklyn was a separate city and Williamsburg was a working-class district of Irish and German immigrants, many of whom worked along the waterfront a few blocks away in sugar refineries and other industrial plants.

Take a seat at the bar inside, and you can almost imagine the flickering gas lamps softly illuminating the barroom, and men—only men, as women were not welcome in taverns at the time—coming by for growlers of beer and community.

Outside the bar, there’s one aspect of Teddy’s that I couldn’t take my eyes off: the multicolor stained-glass windows above the entrance. It’s not unusual to see stained glass like this in an old-school New York bar—delicately wrought with gorgeous colors and design motifs.

But the words emblazoned across the front intrigued me: “Peter Doelger’s Extra Beer.” Who is Peter Doelger? The answer lies in the next chapter of Teddy’s, after it traded hands in 1911.

“The place was purchased by a Bavarian German immigrant named Peter Doelger who was one of New York’s most successful brewers,” explains a 2018 post from the Greenpointers website.

“Doelger, who had started a brewery on the Lower East Side in 1859, is largely responsible for introducing lager beer into New York. The New York Sun wrote that before Doelger opened his Lower East Side brewery, lager beer, in the brewing of which he was to make a fortune, was an exotic and unappreciated drink…a mysterious German drink, as remote from most of the community as pulque or vodka is today.'”

By the 1910s, Doelger’s brewery operated on East 55th Street near the East River. He “was looking to purchase New York bars as an outlet his beers, so his establishment exclusively served Doelger’s brews,” states Greenpointers.

The stained-glass windows are over a century old, but they’re a good 30 years younger than the bar’s other anachronisms, like the tin ceiling and interior woodwork.

Doelger died in 1912, and his brewery, run by his sons, shut down for good in 1947. Teddy’s (above in 1940) entered a new era after it was bought by Teddy and Mary Prusik, who renamed the bar in the 1950s, per Teddy’s website.

The Prusicks were Polish immigrants, and at the time they purchased the bar, the north side of Williamsburg had become a Polish enclave, according to Greenpointers.

The couple operated the tavern until 1987, when it was sold to new owners who added a kitchen and a dining room in an old carriage house next door, states Teddy’s.

In 2015, Teddy’s landed its current owners, and the clientele tends to reflect the demographics of Williamsburg in the 21st century. It’s a bar with a wonderful old-school vibe, but I wonder if the name of a 19th century beer baron in glass above the entrance holds any weight.

[Fourth image: taverntrove.com; Fifth Image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

An early 1900s laundry detergent ad comes back into view on East 72nd Street

It’s the upside of urban redevelopment: when old and unloved buildings meet the wrecking ball, sometimes a long-concealed faded ad comes back into view.

This has happened at the southwest corner of Second Avenue and 72nd Street. On the side of a still-standing tenement inside a walled-off construction site are the remnants of a full-color ad for a very 19th century-sounding soap brand.

Much of the ad has been painted over. But enough remains to decipher the product, which happened to be manufactured in Manhattan.

“James Pyle’s Pearline Washing Compound,” the first part of the ad says. “The Great Invention,” it continues.

The rest of the ad is hard to read, but it may say “for saving toil and expense without injury to the texture, color, or hands—as vintage print ads (below, about 1910) for the product state.

Larger letters against a blue background read “Pearline: Best by Test.”

So what was Pearline? Apparently it was detergent for washing clothes, and its appearance on store shelves coincided with the beginnings of advertising and marketing.

“Pearline soap began appearing as a product around 1877, was trademarked on November 21, 1899, and continued to be active use well after the rights to the name was purchased by Procter & Gamble around 1912,” states the Hagley Library’s Digital Archives.

According to the Faded Ad Blog, James Pyle manufactured Pearline first at 350 Washington Street in the 1850s, then at 414 Washington Street (now a very pricey Tribeca condo loft residence). A 1903 issue of Soap Gazette and Perfumer reported That Pyle was moving his soap factory to Edgewater, New Jersey.

How long will the Pearline ad be visible from the street? It depends on the pace of construction at this prime piece of Upper East Side real estate.

Whatever replaces it (a 21-story residential tower, according to New York Yimby), you can bet this piece of ephemera—which tells us a little about how laundry was done in an era before machines—will be concealed from view once again.

[Thanks to Ephemeral reader Johnny Jets for alerting me to this find!]

Three eras in New York City history, three vastly different subway sign styles

How boring would the New York City subway system be if every station was built at the same time, resulting in a uniform look for the signs outside every subway entrance?

Luckily, that didn’t happen. As stations opened across the boroughs in the decades after the 1904 debut of the first stretch of the IRT, the signage at each stop reflected the design ethos of its era.

This Gilded Age gaslight-style subway sign (above) can be seen outside the Museum of Natural History subway stop. It’s a reproduction, sure, but also an homage to the museum’s move to this site on Central Park West in 1877, shortly before electric street lights arrived and put gas lamplighters out of business.

This rocket-shaped metallic sign outside the Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street station in Brooklyn feels very Art Deco, with its vertical and geometric features.

Turns out the Fourth Avenue portion of this now-combined station opened in 1933, when Art Deco reigned in Gotham. Hence, an Art Deco sign.

For years I was puzzled by these blue M signs at some subway entrances, like this one outside the Lexington Avenue and 68th Street station.

Apparently the M signs were an effort in 1960s rebranding, an attempt to give the New York City subway system—a combination of lines from three separate private companies—a unified look and logo.

“The New York City Transit Authority tried some out, and a blue M was introduced in the late 1960s when the Transit Authority was acquired by the statewide Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), but it never really caught on,” explains an informative site called The Beauty of Transport.

More than 50 years later, some of these ill-fated M signs remain.

A faded sign with a mystery two-letter phone exchange beside a Bronx highway

Discovering faded ads for city businesses is always a delight. And an ad that includes one of those old two-letter phone exchanges officially phased out in the 1960s? Bring it on.

This one above, beside the Bruckner Expressway between 140th and 141st Streets in the South Bronx, is for a shipper and mover called La Flor de Mayo Express. Weathered by the elements, the ad itself isn’t very old—but the business is.

“Serving the Hispanic Community since 1934,” the sign tells us, adding four locations: New York, Puerto Rico, Santa Domingo, and Florida. Still in business almost 90 years later, the company likely helped fuel the growth of the Puerto Rican and Dominican communities in the city in the decades after World War II.

Now, the two-letter phone exchange: LU. That’s something of a mystery. It could signify a geographical location in the neighborhood or well-known attraction.

Maybe Longwood, after the nearby neighborhood? Or Lorillard, for the tobacco company that got its start along the Bronx River in the 18th century? These past posts share more old-school New York City phone numbers.

[Thanks to Justine for discovering this one!]

A rare vintage wooden phone booth inside a fabled Brooklyn tavern

They used to be everywhere: restaurants and bars, drugstores and soda fountains, libraries, private clubs, schools, and hotel lobbies. But the wood phone booth with a hinged door that closes like an accordion has almost totally vanished from the cityscape.

These relics of 20th century New York City, with their secretive air and noir-ish feel, are dwindling fast. So it’s quite a thrill to find one by accident inside—where else?—an old-school Irish saloon where generations of Brooklynites gathered to drink their troubles away.

The phone booth is in the back room of Farrell’s, opened in 1933 (the year Prohibition was lifted) on Prospect Park West and 16th Street. The phone inside it no longer works; the booth is used to store cleaning products.

But it’s still there, a totem of a pre-cell phone era that forced you to engage with the people around you, none of whom were stealing frequent glances at a handheld device.

Farrell’s earned literary cred when Pete Hamill wrote about this neighborhood bar that his father disappeared into while Hamill was growing up on Seventh Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets.

“The place was always packed, the men three deep at the long polished wooden bar, served by two bartenders in starched white shirts and neat ties,” Hamill wrote in his 1994 memoir, A Drinking Life. “At that bar, where the men made jokes, drank beer and whiskey, placed bets on horses, and put cigarettes out on the tile floors, I felt at home. I was, after all, Billy Hamill’s son.”

Besides its wood phone booth, Farrell’s has other remnants that give it its wonderful time warp vibe. First, there’s the lovely ceiling, with light fixtures almost as old as the establishment itself.

Also, Farrell’s has one of the most glorious neon signs in all of Gotham. A storm years ago knocked an older sign down; now it hangs inside.

A new neon sign, however, is proudly affixed to the building, beckoning drinkers and fans of atmospheric taverns with dimmed lights and wood bars.

The once-delightful, now decayed 1892 terra cotta house under the Queensboro Bridge

It’s a startling sight amid a mostly desolate, formerly industrial patch of the Long Island City riverfront in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge.

At 42-10 Vernon Boulevard on a lawn leading to the East River sits a fairy-tale brick and terra cotta relic: a two-story confection of stepped gables, chimneys styled with spirals, round red roof tiles, and panels carved with floral motifs and grotesque faces.

Considering the boarded-up windows and barbed-wire fence the building crumbles behind, you might disregard this unusual remnant as a hopeless wreck.

But before you do, get to know the story behind the isolation and deterioration of this eccentric holdout—a former jewel of an office headquarters colloquially known today as the Terra Cotta House.

The story of the Terra Cotta House aligns with the story of terra cotta’s popularity in New York City. Amid a Gilded Age construction boom in the 1870s and 1880s, this clay that could be shaped into ornamental forms and then fired in a kiln became an in-demand building material.

Terra cotta was versatile, cheaper than stone, and fireproof. To meet the demand for it, a company called the New York Architectural Terra-Cotta Works opened a manufacturing complex in the rapidly industrializing, recently incorporated municipality of Long Island City.

“Established in 1886, the company was the only major terra cotta manufacturer in New York City, and, when completed, its facilities were the largest in the country for architectural terra cotta,” noted the Historic Districts Council.

The terra cotta wasn’t totally native to Queens, alas. The clay came from New Jersey, though the molding and carving and firing in kilns was done by skilled artisans in the facility.

The original complex burned down three months later. But the company rebuilt quickly, moving its growing manufacturing operation to a new site on the East River waterfront, according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report published in 1982.

“Situated in what was then rural Long Island City, Queens, the great complex had crucial river access to the skyscraper explosion going on across the way in Manhattan,” a 1987 New York Times article reported.

In 1892, the leaders of the New York Architectural Terra-Cotta Works decided to construct a new office headquarters on the site of its manufacturing plant. The two-story building—today’s Terra Cotta House—was to be a showpiece for the company. (Fourth photo, with the Queensboro Bridge still under construction)

“Placed at the easternmost end of a nearly two-acre site with a frontage of over 200 feet on the East River, the headquarters building stood against a backdrop of the company’s entire manufacturing, warehouse, and shipping operation,” stated the LPC report.

With its fanciful headquarters and manufacturing operation at one site, the company made its mark of Gotham’s cityscape. It produced terra cotta ornamentation for Carnegie Hall, the Ansonia Hotel, the Montauk Club in Park Slope, and scores of other buildings, according to the New York Times.

“By 1915, the company was the fourth largest employer in Long Island City,” noted the LPC report. The 1920s saw a boom—and then bankruptcy in 1928. A new company formed and took over the space, but by the 1940s, the manufacturing site was empty.

The Terra Cotta House was still in use as a construction company office until 1968, after which it was sold to Citibank. In 1976, the manufacturing operation was bulldozed.

“Today only the New York Architectural Terra-Cotta Works building survives as a symbol of the material and industry which transformed the construction profession in the late 19th century,” wrote the LPC.

That was in 1982, the year the building was landmarked. In the ensuing 42 years, the Terra Cotta House seems to have remained in a state of decay, its back to the buildings across the East River in Manhattan it may have helped build a century ago.

The future of this delightful monument to Long Island City’s industrial past appears to be a mystery.

[Fourth photo: Greater Astoria Historical Society]

The faded remains of a Brooklyn shoe factory

Obscured under a fire escape, it’s not easy to see. But squint hard in front of the four-story, 19th century brick walkup at 74 Greenpoint Avenue, and you’ll make out the faded lettering that marks this address as the one-time home of Walsh’s Shoe Factory.

It’s a phantom sign from perhaps the early decades of the 20th century—when the new borough of Brooklyn was a manufacturing powerhouse. That was especially true in Greenpoint, home of breweries and shipyards, of the Astral Oil Works and countless machine shops.

The faded letters are all that remain of the factory, and information about who Walsh was and when the factory shut its doors is hard to come by.

“In the 1879/1880 Lains Directory, several Walshes are listed as shoemakers, working at 74 Greenpoint Ave and living at 106 India Street (Alvin S. Walsh, Charles A. R. Walsh, Edward Walsh Jr., Everett B. Walsh),” notes the Instagram site Gethookedbrooklyn, in a 2021 post. (This information also comes from a comment left on Forgotten New York’s walking Greenpoint Avenue post from 2013.)) Which Walsh brother started the factory, if any, isn’t known.

The sign is now a ghost, but 74 Greenpoint Avenue is a hot property; the building was recently renovated as a 13-unit rental. In the small space where factory workers once sewed, assembled, and shipped shoes, renters can now enjoy a two-bedroom unit for $4000 a month, per Streeteasy.

A warning about fireworks from a 1930s New York public health poster

Fireworks have been a Fourth of July tradition in New York since at least the 1840s, when an annual display of patriotic pyrotechnics was staged over Castle Garden at the foot of the Battery. Across the East River, the city of Brooklyn celebrated Independence Day with a fireworks show in Fort Greene.

Another Fourth of July tradition was for individual New Yorkers to set off firecrackers of their own. Beginning in the 1800s, this holiday ritual continued into the 20th century—leading to the inevitable roundup of next-day newspaper articles covering all the people injured or killed by sparklers and rockets.

“2,600 in City Hurt by Fireworks,” a New York Times headline announced on July 5, 1934. That was “1,500 more than last year injured here despite police drive on bootleg noisemakers,” the article continued. Fireworks injuries included fingers and hands burned or blown off, and eye trauma.

Selling fireworks was already illegal in Gotham; the ban went on the books in 1909. To stem the rise in casualties, the New York City Department of Health publicized the dangers.

With the artistic and printmaking help of the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA), the department circulated this red, white, and blue graphic poster (top image) warning people, especially kids, to stay away from firecrackers. (The two boys in the second image, bandaged up at Bellevue Hospital in 1938, apparently didn’t heed the call of the poster.)

Were the posters effective? It seems so. On July 5, 1938, the New York Times noted that unsanctioned fireworks set off throughout the city injured 846 people, mostly kids, down from 1,180 a year earlier.

The firecracker poster is one of many Depression-era posters themed around public health campaigns against everything from syphilis to unsanitary tenements. Click on the links to see examples of these Art Deco-style posters—created by the WPA to address the health problems plaguing midcentury Gotham.

[Top image: Library of Congress; second image, MCNY, X2011.4.11027]