The bums and barflies on a 10th Avenue corner

“Well-bred people are no fun to paint,” Reginald Marsh once reportedly said.

Known for his exaggerated, carnival-like paintings of crowds of showgirls, shoppers, and Coney Island beach-goers, Marsh was deeply taken by the forgotten men of 1930s New York—casualties of the Depression who gathered at bars and on breadlines.

His 1931 etching, “Tenth Avenue at 27th Street,” gives us a detailed look at a crowd of anonymous men lined up along the side of a shadowy saloon in a rough-edged neighborhood.

The men either look away, leaning against the bar like it’s a lifeboat, or leer at a lone woman.

Hmm . . . what would Marsh think of this same corner 86 years later, with the High Line and art galleries drawing the well-bred people who never made it into his sketchbook?

[Second image: Google]

Mystery and misery in a forgotten painter’s city

John R. Grabach didn’t just paint scenes of working-class life—he was the working class. [Below, “New York Street Scene: Man Made Canyons”]

Born in 1886, Grabach grew up in blue collar Newark. Set on becoming an artist, he held various jobs—die cutter, freelance illustrator, greeting card designer—while taking classes in Newark and at the Art Students League in Manhattan.

[“Sidewalks of New York,” 1920s, Lower East Side]

“Inspired by Ash Can school artists, Grabach became fascinated with the urban landscape,” the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) wrote on their website.

[“The Lone House,” 1929]

Like Ash Can artists George Bellows and Robert Henri, he began working in New York in the 1920s, where he painted everyday images of tenements, clotheslines, skyscrapers, and city streets.

Grabach’s work reflected the beauty and mystery of contemporary urban life, as well as its disorienting loneliness and despair.

[“New York East Side,” 1924]

“Toward the end of the decade his lighthearted treatment changed as he became more concerned with social conditions, and consequently during the Great Depression his urban images developed a stronger, satirical tone, and the figures were made larger and dominated the scene,” stated LACMA.

[“The Fifth Year,” 1934]

By now, he’d won awards and recognition, and he became a beloved teacher of drawing at the now-defunct Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art (a casualty of Newark’s budget woes in the 1990s).

But like so many other artists, Grabach gradually lost prominence and never became a household name. He died in relative obscurity in 1981.

He may not have been a trailblazer in the art world, but his work reflects an unappreciated sensitivity to the urban experience.

Haunting desolation on South Street in the 1930s

South Street was a still and empty place of tenement dwellers overshadowed by the Brooklyn Bridge in “South Street Stoop,” painted in 1935 by O. Louis Guglielmi.

“[Guglielmi’s] dreamlike works were critical commentaries on the social injustices of capitalism,” states Bruce Weber, author of Paintings in New York.

“The son of Italian immigrants, Guglielmi had grown up in Harlem and experienced  his own financial difficulties in the early 1930s and applied for federal relief. Beginning in 1935, he received a regular government paycheck as a member of the easel division of the Works Progress Administration.”

Hard times on Depression-era East 61st Street

Last week, Yale University launched an interactive digitized photo archive packed with 170,000 incredible photos taken during the Depression.

The images, shot by various photographers, are also part of the Library of Congress. They cover faces and places across the nation—including ordinary residents of New York City working, playing, and rushing on their run.

But one subset of photos, shot by Walker Evans in 1938, is particularly haunting. These 40 or so images focus on one gritty tenement block on East 61st Street, and the unglamorous people who live there.

This isn’t the East 61st Street of Bloomingdale’s or Fifth Avenue. This is the East 61st Street between Third and First Avenues, a poor neighborhood known at the turn of the century as Battle Row.

In the middle of the Depression, East 61st Street looks like a regular workaday part of New York City—thanks in part to the corner cafeteria, an idling beer truck, and laundry-laden fire escape (below).

The people seem ordinary too. Kids play on the stoop, men and women gather to talk, a lone woman hangs out a window. A solitary older gentleman sits on his stoop forlornly.

Who were they? The photos reveal their quiet humanity, and their stony faces hint at hard times. They certainly don’t look like they enjoyed having Evans hang around with his camera.

Above, a resident is moving in or out of one building—via a horse-drawn wooden cart. And are those Belgian blocks paving the road?

Evans and his camera lurked around other parts of Manhattan in the 1930s as well, like on the subway, where he surreptitiously shot random subway riders staring, reading, or lost in their daydreams.

The Rockefeller Center that never came to be

Rockefeller Center is a symbol of 20th century New York City: a 14-building Art Deco icon  that’s crawling with tourists and office workers.

But the complex there today wasn’t the original city within a city that John D. Rockefeller Jr. envisioned for 49th to 50th Streets between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

In 1928, the plaza surrounded by towering buildings was to be called “Metropolitan Square” (right).

Anchoring it would be a new home for the Metropolitan Opera, then located in an 1880s theater on no-longer-trendy Broadway and 39th Street.

Rockefeller offered land at the site to the Met for free; they simply had to raise the funds for a new theater. (One proposal by architect Joseph Urban is at left.)

A deal was set . . . and then the stock market collapsed in 1929. The Met backed out.

“Although the Rockefellers were also hit by ‘Black Tuesday,’ losing half their fortune, the 54-year-old heir managed to finance the costly development by agreeing to be personally responsible for the repayment of the loans,” stated the website for PBS’s American Experience.

“In the absence of an opera building, [Rockefeller] envisioned a commercial development for the site. . . . Over the course of nine years, in the depth of the Depression, the building of Rockefeller Center would provide employment for 75,000 workers.”

[Below, what the neighborhood looked like before it was torn down and replaced by glitzy skyscrapers and office space, from the MCNY]

By 1939, construction finished on the last building. “The vertical thrust of the whole ensemble was meant to symbolize humanity’s progress toward new frontiers, a theme dear to Rockefeller, who sought to advance that cause through his philanthropies,” explained PBS’ American Experience.

West 16th Street’s rooftops and water towers

Chelsea’s residential rowhouses collide with its more contemporary Art Deco and industrial architecture in Mark Baum’s “Seventh Avenue and 16th Street, New York.“

Painted in 1932, the view looks very much the same today—when the sun hits the right way, it’s a blaze of red brick, warm yellow, and burnt brown.

“Tattoo and Haircut” on the Bowery

Tattoo parlors, sketchy barber shops, and shady characters hanging around an all-night Bowery mission are all part of painter Reginald Marsh’s “Tattoo and Haircut,” completed in 1932.

Marsh’s paintings typically feature the city’s marginalized Depression-era outcasts.

“What interested Marsh was not the individuals in a crowd, but the crowd itself … In their density and picturesqueness, they recall the crowds in the movies of Preston Sturges or Frank Capra,” wrote Marilyn Cohen in Reginald Marsh’s New York.

Radio City: “A must on every visitor’s list”

So states the back of this technicolor postcard, which has more to say about what was then the world’s biggest theater:

“On its huge stage are produced gigantic spectacles of great beauty and its screen provides the latest and best in motion picture entertainment. It has its own broadcasting studio atop the roof.”

And if John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s original plans didn’t go awry, it would be the home of the Metropolitan Opera. But then Wall Street crashed, the opera company bailed . . . and since 1932 Radio City has been serving up pop music and gaudy musicals.

Looking for a job during the Great Depression

A photographer for Look magazine captured this circa-1930s image of men flocking around the help-wanted notices outside the Sherman Employment Agency, on Sixth Avenue.

Hopefully these guys weren’t too down and out to afford the 30-cents-and-under meals advertised next door.

Prohibition-era New York’s favorite madam

Polly Adler was born in Russia in 1900 and immigrated to New York City when she was a teenager. But hers is no typical Ellis Island kind of story.

After toiling away in a Brooklyn corset factory, 24-year-old Adler found a more lucrative gig: supplying prostitutes, liquor, and an all-night party to top entertainers, politicians, and gangsters.

Adler created clubhouse-like brothels at different locations through the 1920s and 1930s. She ran a house of ill repute in the Majestic Apartments on Central Park West, as well as at other luxe addresses on the Upper East and Upper West Sides.

The famous and important of both sexes (Dorothy Parker was a regular) hung out and mingled. Mayor Jimmy Walker, Joe DiMaggio, and Dutch Schultz reportedly enjoyed the sexual services.

Adler was arrested more than a dozen times, exiting the madam business in the mid-1940s. She attended college, wrote her memoirs, and died in 1962 in Los Angeles.