All the ways to get to 23rd Street in 1910

By foot, streetcar, horse-driven carriage, automobile, or elevated train, New Yorkers at the turn of the 20th century came to do its shopping on 23rd Street—the northern border of the Ladies Mile shopping district, which boasted eminent stores such as Stern Brothers and Best & Co.

23rd Street was such a busy shopping corridor, postcards showing the commercial hustle and bustle were printed for sale. This one, dated 1910, looks to capture the street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

See the “toys” sign hanging off a building on the left? That might be the original FAO Schwarz, which operated at 39 and 41 West 23rd Street from 1897 to 1935, when the store moved uptown.

[Postcard: MCNY X2011.34.504]

Before the Apple store, it was the Hotel Savoy

Fifth Avenue at 59th Street has been a prime piece of real estate since the late 19th century. The first luxe development there was the Hotel Savoy, built in 1892. It was actually an apartment house with a host of wealthy tenants. 

It also seemed to be a fairly popular place to commit suicide. The New York Times archive includes several accounts of well-to-do men who offed themselves there.

The Hotel Savoy was replaced in 1927 by the Savoy Plaza Hotel, a McKim, Mead, and White beauty razed in 1964 to make way for the 50-story GM Building. To protest the demolition of such a lovely Art Deco structure, about a 100 architecture students and teachers held a “funeral march” at Grand Army Plaza across the street.

But the Savoy Plaza bit the dust anyway, and now New Yorkers rush in and out of FAO Schwartz (in the GM Building) and the subterranean Apple Store, not the smoky hotel bars and restaurants of another era.