The boy in red lobbing snowballs on a desolate tenement street

By 1905, nine playgrounds had been built in Lower Manhattan—products of a social movement started in the late 19th century that called for safe, supervised places for city boys and girls to play.

But nine playgrounds couldn’t possibly serve all the tenement-district kids who dwelled in downtown neighborhoods at the time. For most of them, the streets remained their playgrounds.

And snowbanks surrounding a block of rundown red brick storefronts made the perfect launching spot for a snowball fight.

George Luks painted “Children Throwing Snowballs” in 1905. The thick brushstrokes suggest action, almost chaos. Is it kids vs. kids, with two adults watching from a shop awning…or a group of kids lobbing snowballs at the adults, a shopkeeper in a smock and female customer dressed in black?

The boy in the red coat is in the center of the image, and our eyes are drawn to his warrior stance. At this moment, the boy might be imagining that he isn’t on a gritty snowbank but on top of a parapet. He’s a knight defending his kingdom, or a soldier leading his backup troops to victory—not just another poor city kid making mischief on a winter afternoon.

A night at Mrs. Astor’s January ball, the crowning event of the Gilded Age social season

Right now, if we could flip back the calendar to January in the Gilded Age, we would find ourselves in the middle of the exhilarating swirl of balls, parties, and charity events that made up elite society’s winter social season.

It was an annual ritual for decades. The season kicked off in November with the horse show and the opening of the Academy of Music’s opera series. (Though some of the select box seat holders tended to arrive late and leave early, more interested in gossip than opera.)

December was reserved for the weekly Patriarchs Balls held at Delmonico’s. And in January, the most anticipated gathering of old-money New Yorkers would commence: Caroline Astor’s annual ball.

Caroline Astor, of course, was Gilded Age Gotham’s society doyenne, a plump, plain-looking woman with a black pompadour (later a black wig) and a penchant for diamonds.

With her Knickerbocker heritage and 1853 marriage to John Jacob Astor’s grandson (who preferred sailing his yacht and carousing with other women over playing second fiddle at his wife’s social events), Mrs. Astor was able to propel herself into the role of society queen bee from the 1870s into the early 20th century.

Mrs. Astor reigned with help from her sidekick, Ward McAllister. The Southern-born McAllister was the inventor of the Patriarch Balls as well as the “Astor 400″—a list of the most socially prominent New Yorkers. At some point “the four hundred” were thought to be the number of people who could fit comfortably in the Astor ballroom, but the origin of this is in question.

In any event, Mrs. Astor’s mansion was certainly roomy enough to hold hundreds of people. But who would receive an invitation? According to Gilded Age socialite and memoirist Elizabeth Wharton Drexel, Mrs. Astor would carefully scan the Social Register, winnowing down potential invitees.

“Failure to be invited signified that, whatever your pretensions, you were a goat and not a sheep,” wrote Lloyd Morris, author of 1951’s Incredible New York.

Once a guest list was finalized, each hand-written invitation would be sent out. This “coveted slip of cardboard,” as Drexel described it, began with “Mrs. Astor requests the pleasure….”

What would these chosen guests—the “graded ranks of her hierarchy,” according to Morris—expect as they alighted from their carriages in front of Mrs. Astor’s rather staid mansion (second image) on Fifth Avenue and 34th Street?

On that night, “her mansion was ablaze with lights, and all its splendid rooms were banked with masses of flowers,” described Morris. “Through a wide hall, guests proceeded to the first of three connected drawing rooms, where their hostess received them, standing before the life-size portrait which she had recently commissioned from [portrait artist] Carolus-Duran.” (Top image, from 1890)

As she greeted her invitees, Mrs. Astor glittered in her Gilded Age finery, purchased during her annual trip to Paris.

“A tall, commanding woman of formidable dignity, she was magnificently gowned by Worth,” continued Morris. “Precious antique lace draped her shoulders, edged her huge puffed sleeves. Her pointed bodice and long train were of rich dark velvet, her skirt was of satin, embroidered with pearls and silver and gold.” A diamond tiara rested on her pompadour.

After greeting Mrs. Astor, guests made their way through the drawing rooms to the mansion’s art gallery (above photo), which functioned as a ballroom. While the orchestra played, a supper catered by prominent French chef J.A. Pinard was served in Mrs. Astor’s dining room where “the delicately embalmed bodies of terrapin and fowl reposed on ornate silver.”

In 1896, Mrs. Astor departed her Murray Hill mansion and moved into a sumptuous new palace on Fifth Avenue and 65th Street (below, in 1926). This French Renaissance double mansion was shared with her son John Jacob Astor IV and his young family.

After the move uptown, Mrs. Astor resumed holding her January ball, receiving 600 guests. “It was the largest and most elaborate ball given this season,” the New York Times noted.

The atmosphere was more luxurious than ever. On January 8, 1901, The New York Times covered the festivities once again, noting that this year’s ball had a record attendance of “the most representative men and women in society.”

“It was fully midnight before the last guest had arrived,” the Times wrote. “The entrance of the house was banked on either side by boxwood trees and masses of Southern smilax, in which were placed crimson poinsettias.”

“Mrs. Astor received alone in the drawing room, which was decorated with mauve orchids in golden vases, to the left of the main hall,” continued the Times. “She wore a superb gown of black velvet pailletted in silver, and all her famous diamonds.” (Below, in black with her tiara)

Supper was catered by Sherry, the restaurateur who operated his eponymous French eatery on Fifth Avenue and 44th Street frequented by old money and nouveau riche New Yorkers. The menu consisted of several dishes, including terrapin (clearly a Knickerbocker New York favorite), canard canvasback, foie gras, bonbons, and pommes surprises.

After supper, the cotillion began. Ninety couples danced to a live band. After the dancing ended around 3:30 a.m., many stayed for a second supper, the Times reported, along with a list describing some of the gowns female guests wore.

Mrs. Astor died in 1908; when she held her final ball isn’t clear. According to her obituary, she had suffered a nervous breakdown in 1906, living mostly in seclusion until her passing from heart disease two years later at age 78.

Her timing was impeccable. Lavish balls like hers were falling out of fashion, old money and new money had long intermingled, and society as she understood it was about to be lost to the ages.

[Mrs. Astor portrait: Metmuseum.org; second image: MCNY X2010.11.4466; third image: Wikipedia; fourth image: Wikipedia; fifth image: MCNY X2010.11.4462; sixth image: NYPL; seventh image: Wikipedia; eighth image: Wikipedia]

The wrecking ball comes for a Gilded Age relic mansion on Riverside Drive

The house stood for 42 years: a French-style chateau surrounded by beautiful terraced gardens. Completed in 1906, it spanned the once wide-open block of fashionable Riverside Drive between 73rd and 74th Streets.

By 1948, it had been abandoned for almost a decade following the deaths of the husband and wife who built it and made it their home. That year, the chateau was reduced to dust by a two-ton wrecking ball.

Such a house—one of the largest residences in New York City, a leftover relic of Gilded Age excess that remarkably stuck around until the post-World War II era—deserves an elegy.

The builder was Charles M. Schwab, the affable, big-spending president of U.S. Steel and then Bethlehem Steel. Schwab, who hailed from a small Pennsylvania town and began his career as a teenage stake driver, rose to become a steel magnate on par with Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick.

Unlike Carnegie and Frick, who created large yet restrained mansions on Fifth Avenue, Schwab decided to construct his dream home on Riverside Drive—which was supposed to overtake Fifth Avenue as the city’s premier “millionaire colony.”

“Carnegie and Frick have more money than I have, but I’m getting more value for my dollars than they are,” Schwab said, according to author Andrew Tully in Era of Elegance.

After arriving in New York, Schwab purchased the land in 1901, formerly the site of an orphanage. Five years and an estimated $10 million later, Schwab, his wife Eurana, and an army of servants moved in.

This palace on the Hudson featured 75 rooms, 50,000 square feet of living space, a power plant, a chapel, “a gym, a bowling alley, a pool, three elevators, and interiors in the styles of Henry IV, Louis XIII, Louis XV and Louis XVI,” wrote Christopher Gray in a 2010 New York Times Streetscapes column. Eurana happily took the job of overseeing the design of each and every room.

Schwab had the business smarts and optimistic personality of a successful industry leader, but he also had some potentially wallet-busting habits. He entertained lavishly, won and lost money at his weekly poker game, and played the casinos in Monte Carlo. He bought a 1,000-acre country estate in Pennsylvania and owned a villa in France.

Though he professed his love for his wife, he had a roving eye. At some point he launched an affair with the nurse of his sister-in-law that produced his only child, a daughter (who he supported and visited a few times a year, according to a Pittsburgh Quarterly article).

The Schwabs hosted parties in their chateau, but they didn’t strive to be part of the old money or nouveau riche elite. Schwab loved music; the couple held weekly concerts and salons, inviting musicians to play the pipe organ in their mansion.

Eurana, or “Rana” as she was known, “was a gardening enthusiast, and eschewed the numerous afternoon teas and other daylight functions for the verdant pleasures of her own backyard, which she transformed into an orderly jungle of blooms,” wrote Tully.

The Schwab mansion was also the site of charity efforts. In 1917 the couple opened their home to 200 Red Cross workers who needed a space to knit clothes and make bandages for World War I. In the 1930s, they hosted a carnival for 300 kids who lived in the rundown Gas House District of the West 60s.

After years of massive spending, the Depression hit the Schwabs hard. And their palatial dwelling was now an outlier surrounded by row houses and apartment residences. In the Gilded Age, single-family mansions, particularly in the chateau style, were in vogue. By the 1930s, most had been demolished.

A 1930 New York Times article announced the sale of the mansion to make way for an apartment building, but nothing came of it. (Below, the chateau in 1933)

In 1936, Schwab offered his mansion to the city as an official mayor’s residence. The offer was turned down. Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor at the time, reportedly said, “what me—in that?”

Three years later, Rana died at the age of 79. Schwab moved into an apartment hotel at 290 Park Avenue soon after, leaving the chateau, which he could no longer afford, for good. At 77 years old, he passed away later that year—in debt, per Tully.

The mansion lingered, empty and forlorn. Chase took title to it after Schwab’s death. But the bank couldn’t find any buyers for this white elephant of a house that came with massive expenses.

In 1947, the chateau was purchased by Prudential for a reported $1.25 million, according to Tully. The insurance giant’s plan was to invite buyers to pick over the interiors, then tear it down and replace it with a contemporary apartment house.

The wrecking ball came on March 31, 1948.

“Exactly at noon Fred Hoffman, operator of the crane that swings the giant ball unsentimentally into the sides of doomed buildings, worked a series of hand levers that smashed it with great force against the northwest tower,” stated a 1948 New York Times piece.

“A second blow knocked a hole up the 100-foot-high structure about 20 feet from the top. The hole widened as the ball struck twice more and then, on the fifth attempt, the whole top of the tower, weighing five tons, slowly started to sag in the north.”

“As a score of children watched eagerly and some old-timers a little sadly, the top suddenly plunged to the ground with a roar and a cloud of white dust,” per the Times.

It would take six more weeks to finish the job, razing to the ground this emblem Gilded Age excess and the life of a couple lost to the ages.

In 1950 a new apartment tower, Schwab House, opened in its place—with none of the bells and whistles of the magnificent mansion that preceded it.

[Top photo: Pinterest; second image: MCNY 26908.1E; third image: LOC; fourth image: Carmel of St. Therese of Lisieux; fifth image: New-York Historical Society Robert L. Bracklow Collection; sixth image: unknown; seventh image: MCNY X2010.18.314; eighth image: MCNY X2010.11.3076; ninth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

The “footsore and hungry” men waiting on the coffee line at Madison Square

There’s a civility among the men waiting in line for a free cup of coffee on a snow-covered night in Madison Square Park.

Shrouded in wintertime darkness, the long mass of men portrayed in John Sloan’s “The Coffee Line” stand with a sense of order. It’s not a horde jostling and grabbing; the men seem to form a single file queued up at the back of the coffee wagon, waiting for a cup.

Sloan, a Philadelphia transplant living on West 23rd Street at the time, apparently came upon this scene one night in 1905. He described it some years later:

“Winter night, Fifth Avenue at Madison Square, and a long line of cold and hungry men waiting their turn for a cup of coffee. This gratuity was a kindly gesture on the part of one of the newspapers,” quoted Michael Lobel in his book John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration.

The coffee wagons were part of a charity effort from William Randolph Hearst: wagons filled with coffee and rolls would stop in city parks at night to distribute their wares to “the footsore and hungry who have tramped the streets all day in the biting wind in search of work or food,” per a New York newspaper in 1906.

(Hearst was also running for mayor in 1905, so perhaps the charity coffee wagon was an attempt to refine his image.)

In 1905, Sloan (above, in an 1890 self-portrait) wasn’t the renowned Ashcan artist of tragic and comic moments in urban life; recognition by the art world came a few years later. When it did, “The Coffee Line” served as an example of Sloan’s ”relentless truthfulness,” as one California newspaper put it in 1909.

The darkness in “The Coffee Line” makes it hard to see the men; they’re the faceless and unseen New Yorkers lined up inside a park few New Yorkers would visit at this hour. Sloan makes us work to see them, squinting and staring until a figure or two appears—with help from the weak glow of streetlights reflected off the snow.

[“The Coffee Line”: Carnegie Museum of Art; self-portrait: Wikipedia]

A revealing wintertime photo of lower Fifth Avenue taken before the Civil War

Is this one of the oldest cityscape photo of New York City? Dating to 1855, according to the New-York Historical Society, it’s definitely in the running. (These photos seem to predate it by a decade or so.)

The photo is a copy of an original photo shot by an unknown photographer looking north from 21st Street and 22nd Street. We’re in antebellum Manhattan, when the avenue is still residential, even country-like. Madison Square had become a city park about a decade earlier; see the bare wintertime trees poking out beyond the high-stooped brownstones.

The church steeple probably belongs to Marble Collegiate Church, opened in 1854 at 29th Street. (The church erected an iron fence to keep livestock off their grounds!) The Fifth Avenue Hotel—mocked for being so far from the rest of the city—is four years away from opening in 1859.

As a child in the 1860s, Edith Wharton lived on 23rd Street just off Fifth Avenue. Her memories of the avenue at that time—which she calls a “placid and uneventful thoroughfare”—offer an idea of what it was like several years earlier:

“The little girl and her father walked up Fifth Avenue; the old Fifth Avenue with its double line of low brown-stone houses, of a desperate uniformity of style, broken only—and surprisingly—by two equally unexpected features: the fenced-in plot of ground where the old Miss Kennedys’ cows were pastured, and the truncated Egyptian pyramid which so strangely served as a reservoir for New York’s water supply,” Wharton wrote in 1934’s A Backward Glance.

What a rare glimpse at pre-Gilded Age New York—before an explosion in population and wealth brought enormous mansions, then a rollicking theater district and shopping emporiums, to this serene section of the city’s most central thoroughfare.

[Photo: New-York Historical Society]

The delightful 1890s sidewalk clock on Third Avenue is missing its ancient symbol

You could say that sidewalk clocks (along with street lamps and fire call boxes) are the original New York City street furniture.

These elegant cast-iron timepieces began towering over Gotham’s sidewalks in the late 19th century in business districts thick with pedestrian traffic. (In one fanciful instance, the clock was embedded into the sidewalk itself on Broadway and Maiden Lane.)

They were designed for function—this is an era before wristwatches made their debut—as well as advertising. What better way to establish your business as solid and dependable then having its name emblazoned on a charming cast-iron clock?

That’s likely why, in 1898, Adolph Stern placed this black and gold sidewalk clock in front of his shop on Third Avenue near 85th Street. According to a New York Daily News article from 2001, Stern owned a jewelry store on this busy section of Yorkville under the elevated train.

Stern’s store was less a jewelry store and more of a pawn shop that sold jewelry. The Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) has it in their 1981 historic designation report that the clock stands in front of 1501 Third Avenue, which was “occupied by a pawn broker for many years.” The clock “was probably installed as an advertisement for that business,” per the LPC report.

The 17-foot tall double-faced clock standing outside Stern’s shop on 1501 Third Avenue (above and below in 1940, now Stern & Son) became a fixture on the streetscape. “With its paneled base, fluted column, and scroll top, this clock is almost identical to the Sherry Netherland clock,” states the LPC report, of the clock in front of the hotel at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street.

“The dial, however, is crowned by a giant screw and watch fob ring, creating a delightful oversized pocket watch.” The Third Avenue clock had something even more unique above the fob ring: an ancient pawn shop symbol consisting of three gold balls supported by a three-pronged bar (see above and below photos).

For decades, this giant timepiece stood as a witness to a changing neighborhood and a changing world. Wristwatches became normalized; Yorkville began losing its German population, the elevated train came down, Stern’s shop gave way to a furniture store…and handsome examples of street furniture were often left to fall into disrepair.

As the 20th century went on (below in 1932, mostly hidden by the el train) and the old clock became marred by graffiti, it went missing.

“Century-Old Clock Gone From the Sidewalk,” a newspaper headline read in August 1985, explaining that someone made off with the clock after $4,000 had been raised to refurbish it. A witness from a furniture store said they saw several men in a van take it away, claiming they had “police permission.”

Apparently it was just a mix-up: a Long Island man who collects clocks got the go-ahead from a city administrator to buy it and haul it away, according to a Newsday article a month later. The city got it back with the intent of doing repairs.

Restoration came in the late 1990s, and the sidewalk clock was reinstalled in front of 1501 Third Avenue in 1999, according to a plaque on the base of “The Yorkville Clock,” as it’s now called.

Delightful as the clock is (and a comfortable place to lean against, as the man in the photo at top demonstrates), something has been left off it: the three balls that comprises the ancient pawn shop symbol.

Too bad—the symbol (or a reproduction of it) could have served as a wonderful reminder that a pawn shop had the idea to install the clock here more than a century ago.

If the clock looks familiar and you’re an old movie fan, you may have seen it in a scene in the 1945 drama The Lost Weekend, starring Ray Milland. The site nycinfilm.com has photos from the scene where the clock appears and info on how it was shot.

[Third image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; fourth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; fifth image: MCNY, 33.173.234]

The despondent artist who painted a dark and distorted 1920s New York City

His name doesn’t seem to generate much enthusiasm today. But Arthur Clifton Goodwin, born in 1864 in New Hampshire, earned praise and space in exhibitions as a painter of city streets, landscapes, and waterways in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Self-taught and based mostly in Boston during his lifetime, he belonged to no school or movement, per the John Raimondi Gallery.

Swan boats at the Public Garden, Boylston Street in the evening light, snow-covered Beacon Hill—many of his Boston cityscapes were infused with warmth and light in an Impressionist style, which was popular among American artists of the time.

But the painting above, likely completed between 1920 and 1927 when he lived in New York, has a darker feel. “Fifth Avenue, New York, Near St. Patrick’s” used gritty brushstrokes to create sooty skies, rain-soaked streets, and a dark and distorted Fifth Avenue.

“Times Square, New York,” also dating to the 1920s, is equally rough and murky. In this entertainment mecca of electric theater lights and illuminated billboards, Goodwin depicted a distant patch of blue sky amid shades of gray, black, and white—along with humans navigating slushy sidewalks and overshadowed by the brick and mortar canyon.

It’s too simplistic to read into an artist’s backstory and come up with a clear reason for a change in tone or style. But without much to go on concerning Goodwin’s backstory, a possible explanation for his dark turn could be found in the biographical writeup on the Raimondi Gallery website: heartbreak.

“In 1920, Goodwin painted Washington Square from his studio there. After his marriage failed, the despondent artist returned to Boston and Goodwin led the life of a Bohemian and drank excessively,” the writeup states.

Goodwin’s despondency apparently led to his death at age 65 in 1929.

“Although Goodwin never studied in Paris, he vowed one day he would go to see the Impressionists work firsthand. Tragically, after an excessive drinking binge, Goodwin was found dead in his Boston studio with tickets to Paris in his pocket.”

[Top painting: Grogan & Company; second painting: Wikipedia]

The mystery of the 50-foot plaster female statue that once towered over Times Square

It was September 1909 when New Yorkers in Times Square began noticing the colossal white figure, shrouded in scaffolding between 45th and 46th Street across from Cafe Madrid and the Hotel Astor.

By October, the white figure gained a female face and form. A statue was emerging in the city’s bustling new entertainment district—where glittery theaters, late-night lobster palaces, and enormous illuminated billboards had edged out the carriage-making trade that once called the former Longacre Square home.

A new monument wasn’t necessarily unwelcome; the city was filling up with them on Fifth Avenue, Riverside Drive, and public parks like Union Square. The problem, however, was that no one knew who the Times Square statue would honor or what it was supposed to mean.

“Shopkeepers on both sides of the square, restauranteurs and hotel men, theatrical men, and box office and ticket sellers questioned each other and everyone they met, but no one knew why or what the strange figure was to represent,” reported the New York Times on October 5.

The Times did a little digging, and an explanation appeared. The 50-foot plaster statue was the work of a young Italian-born sculptor, Leo Lentelli. It was commissioned by a recently formed civic group called the Association for New York.

The group’s purpose was to “challenge indiscriminate abuse and criticism of New York City,” according to the president, William Harmon Black.

What kind of criticism, specifically? That the city had poor credit and the “aspersions constantly cast upon the integrity and honesty of the municipal authorities,” said Black, who was also the president of the city’s Board of Aldermen (and would go on to hold numerous offices and appointments).

Erecting a statue in the middle of Times Square simply as “an artistic, silent exhortation to civic pride and confidence,” wrote the Times, raised many eyebrows. So when “Purity,” as the statue was named, had its official unveiling on October 8, newspapers had fun covering it.

“The new plaster Virtue got a real glimpse of Broadway, the Tenderloin, and the Rialto last night, when for the first time they knocked off the wooden shackles which bound her plastic form at the upper end of Times Square, threw half a dozen spotlights on her, and otherwise held her up to the public gaze,” the newspaper wrote, calling the statue by a different name.

“If she blushed she did not show it, and if those who saw her appreciated her kalsomined presence, it was only noticeable in their amused smiles.”

Puzzled Times Square visitors had their own thoughts about Purity. “‘Is she a suffragette?’ inquired a newcomer, according to one newspaper. ‘She’s got a look in her eye that means business.'”

While newspaper writers and savvy New Yorkers mocked the statue, its real purpose came to light: Tammany Hall, the corrupt Democratic political machine that dominated Gotham’s politics through the 19th and early 20th centuries, built it specifically for this election season. (Tammany’s corruption and influence is illustrated in the below cartoon from Puck in 1899.)

Purity “was commissioned by the notorious political gang of Tammany Hall, who figured it to be the best way to announce their ‘pure and noble’ intentions to the public after an opponent accused them of crooked practices,” states a 2016 article by New York Nimby.

Knowing for sure that Tammany Hall was behind the statue didn’t stop the mocking. One civic group announced it was putting up its own statue as a rival.

“The Committee of One Hundred announced yesterday that a plaster creation would be unveiled to-morrow in its exhibit on 16th Street as an answer to the ‘Miss Purity’ statue erected in Times Square,” wrote the Times on October 20. The statue “would represent Miss Purity prostrate, with the Tammany Tiger clutching at her throat.”

Purity was supposed to remain in place until December. But its plaster began deteriorating in the rain and wind not long after the unveiling. Once Election Day was over—and it proved to not be favorable to Tammany Hall—the statue was slated to meet the wrecking ball.

“Tammany’s defeat—for she was a Tammany daughter—must have made her sorrowful, and maybe she didn’t care whether she lived her full span out or not, concluded The Times on November 20.

Workmen took sledgehammers to Purity’s face and arms. A crowd formed to watch, and bill stickers began plastering her pedestal with advertisements, as they had a few days before the pedestal would be carried away. “Back to the dust pile for her, election being over,” the Times headline read.

The spot where Purity stood for all of two months became the site of a very different statue in 1937—that of Father Francis P. Duffy, chaplain for the city’s “Fighting 69th” infantry regiment. This end of Times Square has since been known as Father Duffy Square, with Purity long forgotten and Tammany Hall also in history’s dustbin.

[Top image: New-York Historical Society/Robert L. Bracklow Photograph Collection; second photo: Bain Collection/Library of Congress; third image: New York Times 1909; fourth image: New-York Historical Society/Robert L. Bracklow Photograph Collection; fifth image: Puck, 1899; sixth image: The Sun 1909; seventh image: New-York Historical Society/Robert L. Bracklow Photograph Collection]

A Yorkville shop from the 1950s hangs on to its old-school phone exchange

Small businesses with their roots in the early to mid-20th century still abound in the pockets and corners of Manhattan. And what a treat it is to come across one of these old New York businesses still using a pre-1960s two-letter phone exchange.

Case in point: Abbey Locksmiths, at 1558 Second Avenue just shy of 81st Street. The main sign for this business, established in 1952, has an all-numerical phone number.

But look closely at the neon signage in the front window: the phone number starts with LE.

LE for Lexington? After years of looking into these old-school phone exchanges, I’ve found that though some are named for local streets and landmarks, others have no ties to the neighborhood.

But Lexington Avenue is just two avenues away, a shopping street with a subway stop at 86th Street. In the absence of a comprehensive guide to old New York phone exchanges, it’s as good a guess as I can come up with.

Check out more two-letter phone exchanges found around the contemporary city here.

A New York City painter captures the light and magic of Christmas morning

Born in Prussia in 1841, Henry Mosler spent his early years in New York City as part of a Jewish family that escaped revolution and war in their homeland.

His humble beginnings forced him to sell newspapers at City Hall as a child; he also worked for a time stripping tobacco, per his 1920 obituary. Only after his family relocated to Cincinnati and established a business manufacturing safes did Mosler launch his long career as a painter.

He covered the Western theater of the Civil War as a correspondent for Harper’s Monthly, then spent decades living in France, winning salon prizes and notoriety for his portraits of life in Brittany.

In 1894 he decided to return to New York City. Mosler set up a studio in Carnegie Hall and focused on historical genre paintings—pictorial representations of events in American history.

Why Mosler (above in 1860), of Jewish heritage, decided to paint this Christmas scene in 1916 is a bit of a mystery. In it he depicts two children peering out the cracked door of their shadowy bedroom and into the glow of the family Christmas tree laden with presents.

It’s an enchanting scene of light and dark, of discovery and surprise. We can’t see the children’s expressions, but no matter—the painting perfectly captures the magic of a child’s Christmas morning.

[Second image: Wikipedia]