The mystery of the gilded glass booth outside Midtown’s St. Regis Hotel

It’s an eye-catching piece of street furniture: a booth made of glass, brass, and copper, with a door like a Romanesque arch and a capsule-shaped side compartments.

This unusual sidewalk booth can be found under the awning at the East 55th Street entrance of the St. Regis Hotel.

Built on Fifth Avenue in 1904 by John Jacob Astor IV (the only son of the infamous Mrs. Astor), the Beaux-Arts St. Regis has long been one of Manhattan’s most luxurious hotels, heralded as “the new shrine of the millionaire” shortly after it opened by the New York Times. (Below in 1907)

The purpose of this glass and metal booth seems clear—it’s an enclosed space for a doorman to wait for guests, something all hotels and attended apartment houses had and still have.

Architectural critics writing just after the hotel opened gave it the fancy name of “sentry box” rather than a doorman’s station—a hint that maybe it was more for security rather than assisting guests with heavy luggage.

But whatever it’s called, the design and shape intrigue me. A hotel as sumptuous and technologically advanced as the St. Regis—guests were pampered with air-cooled rooms and a private telephone in each suite—would definitely not build an ordinary-looking doorman booth. But what is it, exactly?

According to a doorman I spoke to (who said it’s been in front of the entrance since the hotel’s early days), it’s probably a Gilded Age–era elevator, or an exact replica of an elevator passengers would find circa 1904. This explanation is based on years of elevator-savvy passersby pointing out what it is and explaining the different parts, delighted to talk about their trade.

It does have kind of a Willa Wonka and the Great Glass Elevator vibe. Still, the question remains as to why the hotel placed a fancy elevator outside the entrance.

Was it to let potential guests know that the hotel was equipped with the latest in elevator mechanics? A clever way to repurpose one that broke down and couldn’t be used? It’s too heavy to be moved, the doorman told me, so it remains in place.

The St. Regis has another relic of a previous New York City, and I don’t mean the 1935 Maxfield Parrish mural at the King Cole Bar.

Look up above the 55th Street awning and you’ll see a copper sign that says “St. Regis Cab Call.” (Above photo shows the original sentry box and part of the cab call.)

Old-time taxi signs can still be spotted on apartment buildings and hotels, but I’ve never seen this kind of sign before—which I think let cab drivers in a pre-Uber era know how many people at the hotel were waiting for a ride.

[Second image: MCNY, X2011.34.287; fifth photo: via Andrew Alpern]

Three New York City subway stops, three different design styles

How many ways are there to style a subway entrance sign? In New York City, dozens of designs and typefaces are used across the subway system—often with no rhyme or reason.

Take this gold and white sign on William Street. It’s for a side entrance/exit for the Fulton Street station, affixed to a 20th century office building called the Royal Building.

Its long tapered shape, the white block (a light?) at the top—I’ve never seen anything like it.

More than a few stops in Midtown style their subway signage with Art Deco lettering, like this subway sign on East 42nd Street. The design is sleek and modern, just like so many of the office towers on this crosstown thoroughfare.

The M above it is an unfortunate remnant from the late 1960s, when the MTA had the idea to unify all the different subway lines and rebrand them. The effort didn’t stick, but some of these Ms remain.

This last subway sign image comes from the East 23rd Street 6 train entrance, I believe. The typeface and tile feels classical, and the V instead of a U is a nice Roman touch.

Why this design for this stop? I don’t know—but I do know that all the variety of styles in the subway make traveling underground a little more interesting.

A cluster of delightful West Side row houses that look like one enormous mansion

Look up at the massive brick and mortar confection at the southeastern corner of West End Avenue and 102nd Street, and you might think you’re facing one wildly idiosyncratic Gilded Age mansion.

There’s the center tower with four stories of bay windows capped by a bell-shaped roof. On the West End Avenue side are chimneys, carved panels, stained glass, and windows of all styles. On the 102nd Street end, balconies, pedimented parapets and a stoop entrance animate this sleepy side street.

Because all these ornamental eccentricities are united in brownstone and fronted by a lacy iron fence, it seems like one house—specifically a surviving example of one of the mansions built in the late 19th century in the rapidly urbanizing West End of Manhattan (the Upper West Side of today).

But a closer look tells a different story. Rather than one mansion, this corner features four separate townhouses completed in 1893. As a group, it’s the “sole surviving example of a type of site planning used on several corner plots on West End Avenue in the early 1890s,” stated the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) in 1990.

Number 858 is in the center, and numbers 854 and 856 face West End Avenue. Number 254 West 102nd Street is around the corner, unattached to its three sisters except by a thin band of brownstone above a path leading to the shared backyard (below left).

These clusters of fanciful row houses were a popular house style on the Upper West Side of the late 1800s, as the LPC pointed out. The style worked for builders, who wanted to maximize profits on the corner lots they purchased by putting up as many separate houses as possible.

Meanwhile, discerning middle- and upper middle class buyers were turning up their noses at the traditional brownstone row houses built in the 1860s and 1870s. Instead, they desired dwellings that rebelled against what was then considered boring, woefully out of date uniformity.

They also sought lots of light, an amenity traditional row houses didn’t offer. That might be why the architects decided to build one of the houses unattached—it afforded the opportunity for more back and side windows, plus a yard in the middle and Hudson River views from the top floors.

“Highly animated by recessed entrances and balconies, these lively Queen Anne/Romanesque Revival–style houses typify the eclectic residential architecture of West End Avenue in the 1890s,” wrote Barbara Diamonstein-Spielvogel in her book, The Landmarks of New York. (Below, two of the houses in 1910).

“By detailing each building individually, the architects also expressed a reaction against the uniform look of the city’s older Italianate row houses.”

Like so many other houses on West End Avenue, which like Riverside Drive was designated as a commerce-free residential thoroughfare, this group of houses was built on speculation.

The interiors featured several bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens with butler’s pantries, and front parlors with music rooms. “All the principal living and sleeping rooms have mantels, mirrors, and open fireplaces, with tiled hearths and onyx or marble facings,” wrote the Real Estate Record and Guide in an approving nod published in February 1893. (Below, in 1940)

Such an attractive cluster of row houses should have had no problem finding buyers. But with the city and nation in the grip of the Panic of 1893, the developers found themselves with few takers.

Number 856 was sold first, noted the LPC. Two years later, the remaining houses were sold to the investors, and architect/developers Ernest Schneider and Henry Herter took title to Number 858. That house sold in 1897, then the title reverted to Schneider and Herter in 1898. (Below, the row houses in 1893)

The others sold in the mid-1890s but seemed to change hands often. Number 254 West 102nd Street became a boarding house.

These days, the cluster of Gilded Age row houses are charming anachronisms on a West End Avenue long dominated by rows of prewar apartment houses. Each of the four, now all rental buildings, seems to be in decent shape. A few front entrances have been altered; some ornamentation has disappeared.

But as a surviving example of a type of housing once found on many corners of the Upper West Side, this group continues to delight passersby with its whimsical style and beguiling backstory.

[Fifth photo: NYPL Digital Collection; sixth photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; seventh photo: Real Estate Record & Guide]

What a breathtaking aerial view of Riverside Drive says about Manhattan in 1910

Riverside Drive was just 30 years old when this stunning birds-eye panorama of the Drive between about 110th and 123rd Street was taken, according to the Kermit Project, which posted the photo (via Shorpy.com) and some information about it.

Though it’s more than a century old, click into the photo to magnify the view—you’ll see that the landmarks of the Riverside Drive of today are already in place.

The dome and columns of Grant’s Tomb stand to the north, some elegant prewar apartment towers loom over low-rise dwelling houses (almost all of which will disappear in the ensuing decades), and the carriage road and traffic road are separated by a wide swath of Riverside Park.

But the enlarged view of the photo reveals some vestiges of the Riverside Drive of old. On the lower left are people riding horses—a reminder that Riverside Park once had a popular bridle path.

See that pier sticking out into the Hudson? It belonged to Columbia University. A larger pier juts out at 125th Street that served ferries going back and forth to New Jersey, according to the Kermit Project. No George Washington Bridge quite yet!

Is that an early form of scaffolding on the lower right side of the image? It blocks the front of a bow-fronted row house, which resembles 292 Riverside Drive, a C.P.H. Gilbert–designed house that still stands on Riverside between 101st and 102nd Street—putting this view south of 110th Street.

The theater ads on the lower left are a lot of fun, and a reminder that popular entertainment a century ago was no smarter than what we stream today.

Want to learn more about the history of Riverside Drive, especially the Drive in the Gilded Age—when this avenue rivaled Fifth Avenue as the city’s millionaire row? Join Ephemeral New York on an upcoming walking tour! Tour dates are as follows:

Sunday, April 14: A few tickets remain for The Gilded Age Mansions and Monuments of Riverside Drive, organized by Bowery Boys Walks.

Sunday, May 5: Sign up for Exploring the Mansions and Memorials of Riverside Drive, organized through the New York Adventure Club.

Sunday, May 12: Sign up for The Gilded Age Mansions and Monuments of Riverside Drive, organized by Bowery Boys Walks.

Hope to see everyone on these fun, insightful walks up one of New York’s most beautiful avenues!

[Photo via Shorpy]

The story of New York’s oldest Titanic memorial, unveiled exactly one year after the disaster

The R.M.S. Titanic went to its watery grave in the Atlantic Ocean on the morning of April 15, 1912. Few cities felt the tragedy as deeply as New York City.

At the end of its maiden voyage, the luxurious ship was set to dock at the White Star Line’s Pier 59, near today’s Chelsea Piers. Instead, 706 dazed survivors picked up by the R.M.S. Carpathia disembarked a few blocks away at Pier 54—greeted by a crowd of thousands desperate for news about the iceberg that sank the ship and the whereabouts of family members.

St. Vincent’s Hospital tended to survivors; Lower Manhattan hotels put them up as guests. The Women’s Relief Committee, a newly formed group made up of prominent society ladies, raised thousands of dollars for stranded passengers, especially those in steerage.

Influential and lesser-known residents went down with the ship, including Macy’s owner Isidor Straus and his wife, Ida, and John Jacob Astor IV (the son of Mrs. Astor, the society leader). Their absence was felt immediately in a city stunned with grief.

In response to so much tragedy, no time was wasted planning a monument to the lives lost—one that would function as not just a memorial but also as a guiding light for ships in New York Harbor.

“The Seaman’s Benefit Society has undertaken the task of collecting the funds for the erection of a permanent memorial to the men and women lost on the Titanic in the form of a lighthouse tower on the new Seaman’s Institute at the corner of Coenties Slip and South Street,” wrote the New York Times on April 23, 1912.

The lighthouse memorial, which would have a lantern gallery and a fixed green light viewable as far away as Sandy Hook, was to be topped by a time ball that dropped down a pole at noon, so seaman could set their chronometers (and Lower Manhattan dwellers could set their watches).

Though it honored everyone who went down with the ship, the memorial would be “in memory of the engineers who sent their stokers up while they went to certain death; the members of the heroic band who played while the water crept up to their instruments; and of the officers and crew who put duty above personal safety,” noted the Times.

“It will be given in memory of those in the steerage who perished without ever realizing their hopes of a new land, the America of endless possibilities.”

Putting the memorial on top of the new Seaman’s Institute was also a fitting choice. This organization, launched in 1834 as the Seaman’s Church Institute, helped take care of the thousands of sailors who came to New York City on the many vessels over the years that made shipping and trade a powerhouse of Gotham’s economy.

The cornerstone for the Institute’s new building went in the ground on the morning of the sinking of the Titanic. One year later, the completed building—featuring dormitory rooms, a bank, library, and chapel—hosted a dedication service for the Titanic Memorial Lighthouse perched on its roof.

The lighthouse, designed by Warren & Wetmore (the architects behind Grand Central Terminal) went into service that November, according to the South Street Seaport Museum.

For the next 55 years, as ship traffic decreased in New York Harbor and South Street’s fortunes turned, the Titanic memorial with its time ball stayed in service on the roof. In 1968, the Seaman’s Institute moved to a new headquarters on State Street. The top of the Titanic Memorial was given to the South Street Seaport Museum.

But it wasn’t until 1976 when the memorial lighthouse went up on a triangular corner at Pearl and Fulton Streets (now known as Titanic Memorial Park), held in place by a concrete podium. The time ball is also gone; it’s been replaced by an ornamental sphere.

Here it still stands, a memorial to a maritime disaster that hit the city hard and remains in the public imagination.

I’m not the only one who has noticed it could use some TLC. A group dedicated to restoring the monument has formed, according to a 2022 New York Times piece. But a costly restoration of a relic not many passersby notice remains uncertain.

[Second photo, NYPL, 1915; Third photo, MCNY, 88.1.1.2369; fourth photo, MCNY by Edmund Vincent Gillon; 2013.3.1.960]

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]

This forgotten Uptown apartment house is almost as old as the Dakota

You’re forgiven if you’ve walked down East 106th Street and missed this seen-better-days former apartment residence on the unlovely corner of Third Avenue.

Stained and grimy, the facade is the color of cardboard with mustard trim. What might have been a grand picture window on Third Avenue has long since been blocked up and is now above the wraparound awning of a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

On the 106th Street side, another entrance is filled in and marred by graffiti. The only remaining door is marked “176” near the building’s red brick, non-adjacent tenement neighbor.

Now imagine how lovely this slender structure must have been when it was finished in 1887, three years after the Dakota on West 72nd Street and in the height of the Gilded Age.

Five stories high, the building features bay windows, Romanesque arches, caryatids, grotesque faces, floral motifs, geometric designs, and one top-floor balcony window framed by columns looking out high above the corner.

All of the design motifs and ornamentation on such a stately building give it some playfulness. (Or turn it into a hot mess, depending on your architectural tastes.) It makes me wonder who built it, who lived there in its glory days, and what else is known about 1922 Third Avenue’s backstory.

The story begins in November 1886. That’s when the Real Estate Record & Guide announced that architect F.A. Minuth, whose work focused mostly on residences and lofts, has completed plans for a “five-story and basement yellow brick and terra cotta with stone trimmings” apartment house and store.

The basement, first floor, and second story “will be reserved for stores and business purposes, the upper part will be arranged for three families on each floor and have private halls and all improvements.” The cost was estimated at $22,000.

The builder was a man named Martin Disken—hence the building’s name carved into the center top, “The Disken.”

An Irish immigrant turned Brooklyn (Rutland Road) resident, Disken is described in his 1924 Brooklyn Eagle obituary as a building contractor. When he filed for bankruptcy in 1899, however, the notice in the New York Times called him a “builder and plasterer” residing on 129th Street “with known liabilities and no assets.”

It’s probably safe to say that by 1899, Disken no long owned his eponymous apartment house. It might also be assumed that by that time, the building’s fortunes were turning.

By the turn of the century, the rapid development of uptown Manhattan was not quite the sure thing real estate investors and speculators thought when they rushed to put up houses on Harlem streets that were open fields just a decade earlier.

Sure enough, a real estate crash in the early 1900s kept middle- and upper-class families away from Harlem’s many new brownstones and apartment residences.

Also preventing The Disken from being the next Dakota or Osborne was the constant rumble of the Third Avenue Elevated. East 106th Street was a crosstown street, so the El stopped outside that second-floor window. Families would not accept that kind of intrusion if they could help it.

The next owner of 1922 Third Avenue, Isaac Fiedenheit, who bought it in 1891 per the New York Herald, likely saw the Disken’s upper class families move to better neighborhoods—as the area transformed into a working class shopping neighborhood on the border of Italian Harlem.

In 1921, Jesse Adler, the owner of a shoe store chain that occupied the ground floor space since 1906 bought the building. The Herald reported that it was now worth $100,000 and “above the ground floor are four lofts.”

How long Adler’s remained opened isn’t clear (photo above is from 1940), but by the 1980s the commercial space was taken over by The Wiz.

Is the Disken an apartment building again? It’s hard to know what’s happening on those upper floors. The facade is dingy and forlorn; the windows free of curtains or other homey touches.

But for a brief time more than a century ago, this unusual building (and its earliest residents) gave the corner a sense of Gilded Age elegance.

[Fifth photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

The eclectic Riverside Drive houses inspired by Elizabethan England

Is that the crenellated crown of a faux Medieval castle looming five stories above Riverside Drive and 83rd Street—flanked by European-inspired row houses with dormer windows and tiled roofs?

The separate dwellings that compose this delightful design mashup are quite a sight among the Drive’s mostly uniform prewar apartment houses. Who built these eclectic residences and what inspired him is worth delving into.

Let’s go back to the New York City of the 1890s. Upscale residences were going up in the part of the city known as the West End, especially on West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. But buyers were tired of brownstones—unbroken row upon row of which filled Midtown and the East Side.

Once considered elegant, brownstones were now derided as gloomy cookie-cutter homes for speculators to sell to the city’s nouveau riche. Edith Wharton reportedly proclaimed brownstone as the “most hideous” stone ever quarried.

Architect-developer Clarence True also disliked brownstones. Born in Massachusetts in 1860, True came to New York at age 20 and trained with Richard Upjohn before establishing his own design concern in 1889.

True called brownstones “bad copies of the Farnese palace [that] ought all to be torn down,” according to “The Magnate-Messiah of the Upper West Side” by architectural site Urban Omnibus.

Instead of mud-brown facades and high stoops, True favored an entirely different kind of residential design—one that contained elements of Romanesque and Renaissance Revival, explains a 1991 report from the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC).

True called it “Elizabethan Revival,” according to the LPC report. This pastiche is best expressed at 107-109 Riverside Drive. With its castle-like battlement, it anchors the cluster of houses True constructed at the 83rd Street corner (above in 1910).

True built this group of idiosyncratic dwellings in 1898-1899 on speculation. He was especially drawn to Riverside Drive, which opened in 1880 and was supposed to overtake Fifth Avenue as New York’s “millionaire colony.” True called the Drive “the most ideal home site in the Western Hemisphere.”

“True designed several hundred houses, primarily in groups, on the Upper West Side in the years between 1890 and 1901, and was largely responsible for promoting the development and establishing the character of lower Riverside Drive,” states the LPC report.

True certainly was bold. He designed the townhouse group from 102-109 Riverside Drive to have extended stoops and bays that went beyond the property lines. The Department of Buildings protested, but True didn’t back down—until the owner of a neighboring property took him to court claiming that “his sprawling row houses devalued her property by obstructing her view, light, and air,” explained Urban Omnibus.

The neighbor won the case, and the buyers of the houses fronting Riverside Drive “were forced to hire new architects to trim their façades, erasing True’s undulations.”

Even with the less fanciful facades (above in 1940), True’s Elizabethan Revival row still stuns more than 120 years later. Over the 20th century, changes hit the group of houses—several (if not all) have been carved up into apartments, and Number 102 was demolished before 1932.

But what a treat it is that this collection of confection-like houses remains on Riverside Drive, charming passersby with design bells and whistles created as antidotes to plain, restrained brownstones.

True’s Elizabethan Revival townhouses are part of Ephemeral New York’s Gilded Age Riverside Drive Walking Tour! To join the tour scheduled for Sunday May 12, click this link. More upcoming tour dates will be announced soon.

[Fourth photo: NYPL Digital Collections; sixth photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

A spooky remnant of the Third Avenue El still stands on East 99th Street

Officially, the era of the elevated train in Manhattan ended in 1955. (Not subways that go above ground at certain points but actual elevated train lines.)

That’s when miles of track and trestles were removed from the borough’s Third Avenue El, the last of the mighty above-ground railroads that roared up and down four major avenues starting in the late 1860s and helped reshape Gotham northward.

But even though the infrastructure of the elevated trains has vanished from the streetscape—along with the grime they attracted and the ear-splitting noise they produced—some remains of their existence can still be found in the modern city.

One of these remainders stands at Third Avenue and East 99th Street. This stately granite and brick building, partially dug into the side of a hill on an East Harlem tenement block, has the bureaucratic-sounding name of Substation 7.

Opened in 1901, its function was to produce the electricity needed to power the Third Avenue El—which like the elevated lines on Second Avenue, Sixth Avenue, and Ninth Avenue switched from steam power to electricity by 1903, according to Under the Sidewalks of New York: The Story of the Greatest Subway System in the World, by Brian J. Cudahy.

The operator of all the elevated lines at the time was the Manhattan Railway Company—and the company name is still (faintly) visible on the front of the substation. (Click the second photo to enlarge it and view the name.)

Other substations can still be found in New York City. But Substation 7 “is the only Manhattan substation that dates from the electrification of the pre-subway elevated system and also retains its original appearance,” stated engineering historian and New York City electricity systems expert Joseph J. Cunningham, in a 2013 article about the substation in the New York Times.

That original appearance gives it a spooky vibe, with bricked-in windows and a carriage house-style front entrance blocked from the public via a metal security shutter and iron fence.

Yet even once the Third Avenue El was supplanted by the underground subway, Substation 7 continued its role as a power station (above, in 1901, almost complete and surrounded by elevated tracks).

“No. 7 was the primary supply of power for the upper portion of the Lexington Avenue subway from 1918 into at least the late 1970s, when other substations were constructed underground,” states the New York Times piece.

Despite its abandoned feel, the substation now serves as the MTA’s “fire extinguisher shop.” Thanks to its long use from the late Gilded Age through much of the 20th century, it was never converted to commercial use and remains a part of the Manhattan’s transit present—and a ghost of its turn of the century past.

[Second image: NYPL Digital Collections; fourth image: MCNY, F2012.53.103C]

A dynamic scene at a rooftop theater reveals changes in Gilded Age society

Going to the theater has always been a beloved New York City pastime. But theater became even more thrilling with the advent of open-air rooftop gardens—which hit the scene in the late 1880s with the opening of the rooftop theater at the Casino on Broadway and 39th Street.

It wasn’t just the cool breezes that appealed to New Yorkers. “Only at the turn of the century did amusements of this sort become acceptable places for respectable women,” explains the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has this painting, by William Glackens, in its collection.

“Hammerstein’s Roof Garden,” from 1901, depicts theater magnate Oscar Hammerstein’s semi-outdoor Palace Roof Garden at Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street. While men and women sit side by side at tables configured to encourage socializing, performers entertain the well-heeled crowd.

As an Ashcan artist, Glackens wasn’t just interested in capturing a lively scene. “The arena into which they gaze is lit by a filigreed tangle of electric lights, a recent invention that had made nighttime theater possible,” states the Whitney.

“In this painting, Glackens portrays not simply a night at the theater, but the changing mores of post-Victorian society and the impact of new technology on everyday life.”