A piece of cord busts a 1936 Manhattan murderer

On April 10th, 1936, Nancy Titterton, a 34-year-old writer and book reviewer, was found dead in the empty bathtub in her apartment at 22 Beekman Place.

She’d been raped and strangled, her body left unclothed except for a pair of rolled-down stockings. The pajamas she’d worn the night before were wrapped around her neck.

The murder made headlines because it was so brutal. “There were signs of a struggle in the bedroom,” wrote Michael Kurland, author of Irrefutable Evidence: A History of Forensic Science.

“Ligature marks on the victim’s wrists indicated that she had been tied up before she was raped, but the rope had apparently been cut off and taken away.”

Adding to the media fascination was the fact that Titterton was known in literary circles; her husband was an NBC bigwig.

Also, crimes so vicious just didn’t happen on posh Beekman Place, a two-block residential enclave in the East 50s (above photo).

Luckily police had evidence to work with. Underneath Titterton’s body in the bathtub was a 13-inch cord, similar to the cord of a Venetian blind.

They traced the cord to a Pennsylvania upholstery wholesaler. It just so happened that the two men who discovered Titterton’s body were from a local upholstery shop; they were delivering a couch to the apartment.

One of the delivery men, the shop’s owner, was cleared. The other, a 24-year-old assistant named John Fiorenza, had spent time in prison for theft, where a psychiatrist labeled him a possible psychopath.

Police brought Fiorenza in for questioning. He admitted to raping and murdering Titterton, who he’d met the day before when he came to her apartment to pick up the couch.

“He claimed to have returned to the apartment convinced that Nancy Titterton had fallen for him during their brief encounter the day before,” wrote Kurland.

“When she rebuffed him, he became so furious he tied her up and raped her. . . . Afterward, he had strangled her and left her in the bathtub.”

Convicted of murder in a trial that started six weeks after the slaying, Fiorenza (at right, the morning of his execution) went to the electric chair at Sing Sing in January 1937.

Some mysterious names carved into tenements

I love that even the lowliest tenements typically have names. A developer would complete his building, then carve a word or two above the entrance—such as the name of the street or a popular politician—to distinguish it from the pack.

Some names are obvious, others more mysterious, such as this one in the East Village. The Claremount is a handsome building on East 12th Street. But why Claremount?

Claremont Avenue, named for an old New York family, is a short street in Morningside Heights, but I’m not aware of any connection between the Claremonts and the East Village. Perhaps it just sounded posh.

The Nonpareil is a tenement on Edgecombe Avenue on the Harlem/Washington Heights border. It translates into “having no match” or “unrivaled.” Quite a boastful name for such a humble building!

Minneola is reportedly a Native American word for “a pleasant place.” Hence this building, in the South Village. Or is it a misspelled homage to Mineola, Long Island?

Helen Court sounds like a soft, peaceful tenement. It’s in Harlem near 125th Street. Helen was a popular name about a century ago. Who was Helen—the developer’s wife or daughter?

Bridges and barracks in an East River postcard

This 1940s technicolor postcard shows the sturdy Triborough (aka the Robert F. Kennedy) Bridge in the foreground and the stunning Hell Gate Bridge, which carries rail traffic, behind it.

It’s only one leg of the Triborough though; the bridge connects the Bronx to Manhattan to Queens—leapfrogging over the joined-via-landfill Randall’s and Ward’s Islands.

I’m curious about the barracks-like white and red buildings in the background on what looks like Randall’s and Ward’s Islands. In the 1930s, the island became home to a psychiatric hospital that still operates today; it replaced an older insane asylum.

Are these barracks part of the psych hospital—or used as housing for some other group of people the city didn’t want in Manhattan or the the other boroughs?

A vintage subway sign hangs on in the Village

It’s been more than a year since this old-school sign was uncovered after the removal of a newsstand in front of a subway entrance at Sixth Avenue and West Fourth Street (Gothamist scored the details in September 2011.)

Amazingly, the MTA hasn’t yet covered the slightly tattered but very charming sign. Could it be here to stay—a ghost from New York’s transit past reminding riders that the A, C, and E used to be part of the Independent Subway System, opened in 1932?

The IND ran as a separate network from the privately owned IRT and BMT lines for eight years, until all three lines merged into one enormous city-run system in 1940.

Where Andy Warhol was shot in Union Square

Andy Warhol had three workspace-slash-hangouts he called his “factories” in Manhattan.

But it’s the second factory, on the sixth floor of the Decker Building (on the right) at 33 Union Square West, that gets the most attention. This is where Warhol mass produced his silkscreens and shot films from 1968 to 1973.

And in July 1968, it’s where he was shot himself.

If you’ve seen the movie, you know the story. The short version: 31-year-old Valerie Solanas (below), nursing a grudge after Warhol showed little interest in her screenplay, showed up at the factory around 4 pm. She pointed a handgun at him while his Superstar entourage was bustling about, according to Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties.

“No one showed any awareness of what she was doing until they heard the first explosive crack, which missed,” writes author Steven Watson.

“Mario Amaya thought it was a sniper firing at them from another building. Fred Hughes thought it was a bomb detonating at the headquarters of the Communist Party two floors above. . . . Andy was the first to realize what was happening and yelled ‘No! No! Valerie! Don’t do it!'”

Warhol crawled under a desk. Solanas’ second shot missed, but the third one, fired at close range with Warhol trapped, tore through his chest.

An ambulance brought him and Mario Amaya, who was also shot, to the old Columbus Hospital on East 19th Street. Initially pronounced clinically dead, doctors cut him open and massaged his heart, saving his life with a five-hour operation.

Warhol recovered, and in 1973 moved his factory (now under much tighter control) to 860 Broadway, just up the street. Solanas turned herself in, scored three years’ prison time, and died in 1988.

An East Side farm gives way to lovely row houses

Two centuries ago, a wealthy New Yorker named Adam Treadwell bought a 24-acre farm on Manhattan’s East Side, about where the East 60s are today.

When he died in 1852, his heirs inherited the property. Soon they began selling off small parcels to individual owners.

These new owners did something smart: they set up an agreement stipulating the height and width of the buildings they planned to put up, and they barred certain businesses from opening up there.

Their foresight leaves us with two breathtaking blocks mostly of four-story row houses built between 1868 to 1876, according to the document designating East 61st and 62nd Streets between Second and Third Avenues the Treadwell Farm Historic District.

The row houses were built in the French Second Empire and Italianate styles popular at the time.

“Today, the district is appreciated for the way it reveals the design aesthetic of the 1910s and 1920s,” explains the website for the Friends of the Treadwell Farm Historic District.

“During those years, most of the buildings were ‘modernized,’ i.e., stoops removed, and projecting detail stripped resulting in simplified elegance.”

There’s no river view or doormen standing by, but these two tree-lined blocks rank as among the loveliest in Manhattan, a tiny, little-known oasis of calm and beauty amid the crowds and traffic of East Midtown.

Take a peek inside one, recently for sale, via this Curbed listing. Price: just 7.9 million!

A photographer’s poetic, playful Lower East Side

Born in a Hester Street flat to Russian immigrant parents, Rebecca Lepkoff came of age during the Depression—and became a keen observer of street life in her Lower East Side neighborhood.

“I really enjoyed all the people and what they were doing. I was into loving the streets,” she told the Daily News in an interview last March. “Everyone was outside: the mothers with their baby carriages, and the men just hanging out. The apartment houses were too small to stay inside.”

A member of the New York Photo League, a photographer’s cooperative, Lepkoff gained a rep for her tender glimpses of mid-century life between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges: a world of El trains and corner stores, of pushcart vendors and laundry lines.

Her portraits of children entertaining themselves on front stairs and sidewalks capture something lost in contemporary New York: a freedom kids used to have to create and explore without being watched by adults.

“The kids played in the street,’” she told the Daily News. “They didn’t stay home. There weren’t many playgrounds. So they made up their own games, and they’d find sticks and whatever.”

Lepkoff still takes pictures, and her work is enjoying more notoriety, thanks to recent exhibits at the Tenement Museum and the Jewish Museum.

Through January 4, some of her work can be seen at the Lower East Side Jewish Conservatory‘s exhibit “On the Cusp of Change: The LES, 1935-1975.”

[Photos copyright Rebecca Lepkoff]

The secret wild boar of a Sutton Place park

There’s a sweet little vest-pocket park tucked off Sutton Place at the end of East 57th Street.

Besides the quiet East River view, the park has another magnificent, little-known feature: a statue of a wild boar, cast in bronze, sitting on a granite pedestal along with snakes, crabs, salamanders, and other creatures.

If the boar looks familiar, you may have seen it in Italy. There, Renaissance sculptor Pietro Tacca’s bronze Porcellino (“piglet”) decorates a fountain in Florence.

Tacca based his much-loved boar (below), whose snout is rubbed for good luck, on an ancient Greek marble original discovered in Rome in the 16th century.

The Sutton Place boar is a copy of that replica, installed in 1972 by a neighborhood philanthropist who also donated the bronze Peter Pan statue to Carl Schurz Park, about 30 blocks north along the East River.

This wild boar is a powerful piece of animal art, one of many across the city.

Of course, it’s not exactly a cuddly sculpture for kids—especially on the base, where there’s a bronze snake munching on a mouse!

An old postcard peeks inside the Hudson Tubes

Here’s a glimpse inside the cast-iron tube PATH trains travel through as they shuttle from New Jersey to Lower Manhattan.

Engineered by the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad Company, they opened to the public with huge fanfare in 1908.

Known as the Hudson Tubes, they were also called the McAdoo Tunnels, named after William Gibbs McAdoo, who financed construction and led the efforts to link the two states by rail.

A Chelsea block lined with brothels in the 1870s

Today, 27th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues is kind of a mishmash of wholesale business and small shops anchored on the western end by the Fashion Institute of Technology.

It was a different world in the 1870s, when the block ground zero for prostitution, with 22 houses of ill repute lining both sides of the street.

That’s in addition to dozens of other brothels on nearby blocks. This was the city’s post–Civil War neighborhood of vice, called the Tenderloin, a sinful stretch of 23rd to 42nd Streets between Sixth and Eighth Avenues.

The brothels of 27th Street were so notorious, they scored a mention in The Gentleman’s Companion, a guide to prostitution published in the 1870s, reports Andrew Roth in his book Infamous Manhattan.

Among the proprietors listed in the guide are “Mrs. Disbrow, 101; Mrs. Emma Brown, 103; Miss Maggie Pierce, 104; Joe Fisher, 105; Miss Dow, 106; Mrs. Standly, 107,” writes Roth.

Number 107, in the photo, is noteworthy because it’s the only original building left.

“Evidently the author of The Gentleman’s Companion didn’t think too much of the place, since his only comment is ‘the Ladies boarding-house at 107 West 27th St. is kept by Mrs. Standly and is very quiet.'”

“Not much of an endorsement, but better than the review received by her next-door neighbor . . . of which he warns that ‘the landlady and her servants are as sour as her wine,'” adds Roth.