The “enigmatic emptiness” of a city sidewalk

“Edward Hopper’s haunting realist canvas evokes an enigmatic emptiness that has become the artist’s trademark,” states the caption accompanying this 1924 painting on the website of the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia.

“His sparsely populated New York cityscapes, bleak New England views, and lonely interiors share the same stark simplicity.”

“In New York Pavements Hopper used bold cropping, an elevated point of view, strong diagonal lines, and a simple, bleached palette to achieve an odd and detached effect.”

“From a bird’s-eye perspective, the only hint of narrative is the figure emerging from the lower left.”

It’s such an ordinary city scene yet so disquieting. Who is the nun with the baby carriage, and what neighborhood is this?

A posh Nolita alley’s rough and tumble past

Centre Market Place is a charming New York alley that’s easy to miss.

It’s just a one-block sliver of pavement behind the old Police Headquarters (now a luxurious residence) on Centre Street.

The alley is all very contemporary Nolita, with brightly painted townhouses topping expensive boutiques. But for the past 150 years or so, it was just another crowded strip in a poor stretch of the East Side.

It’s a block now mostly scrubbed clean of its rougher edges, which included a public bath at number nine on the Broome Street end.

Called the People’s Bath House and built by a private charity in the 1890s, it used to be crowded with mostly Italian immigrant tenement dwellers.

The site where it once stood is now an empty lot.

Centre Market Place also had an illustrious resident in the 1930s: crime photographer Weegee.

His one-room apartment, perfectly located near all the police action, was at number five.

A gritty industry thrived on the street as well: guns. Several gun shops were located there through much of the 20th century, fueled by the NYPD.

The gun dealers are gone, but the sign (below) still exists at number seven for Sile, a gun distributor with a branch in Brescia, Italy.

The busty ladies on a Henry Street tenement

There is something rather unsettling about these two women, fronting a tenement entrance on a stretch of Chinatown’s Henry Street.

It’s not the fact that they are thrusting their chests out—it’s the facial expressions, like demented dolls. They and the bearded man in the middle have been creeping out residents and passersby for at least a hundred years.

East Side cross streets carved into corners

Wherever you’ll find old-school brick and brownstone buildings, you’ll also be able to spot some addresses carved into the facade.

I love the fancy numerals on this brick 76th Street tenement. That’s definitely not Helvetica.

Henington Hall, off Avenue B, was a meeting place for political groups and speakers in the first half of the 20th century and today functions as an art studio.

Interestingly, it’s where David Greenglass—who helped send his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the electric chair—got married in 1942.

Used to be an elementary school at this corner on 51st Street and First Avenue. At some point it went up for sale and was bought by a developer—who kept the 1892 facade and built a high-rise inside it.

The filthiest part of an old-law city tenement

That would be the air shaft—the slender opening between tenements that developers built to satisfy an 1879 requirement mandating a window facing outdoors in every room.

These shafts did provide a bit of air and light. Unfortunately, they also functioned as dumps, with tenants tossing their waste down the air shaft, rendering them funnels of filth and disease.

Just how disgusting was it? This passage conveys it well. It’s from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty’s Smith’s account (based on her own childhood) of a young girl growing up in a Williamsburg slum:

“The airshaft was a horrible invention. Even with the windows tightly sealed, it served as a sounding box and you could hear everybody’s business. Rats scurried around the bottom. There was always the danger of fire. A match absently tossed into the airshaft by a drunken teamster set the house afire in a moment.

“There were vile things cluttering up the bottom. Since the bottoms couldn’t be reached by man (the windows being too small to admit the passage of a body), it served as a fearful repository for things that people wanted to put out of their lives. Rusted razor blades and bloody clothes were the most innocent items.

“Once Francie looked down into the airshaft. She thought of what the priest said about Purgatory and figured it must be like the airshaft bottom only on a larger scale.”

A fresh blanket of snow on a New York block

Robert Henri painted “Snow in New York” in 1902. Writes the National Gallery of Art, where the painting hangs:

“Henri’s Snow in New York depicts ordinary brownstone apartments hemmed in by city blocks of humdrum office buildings. This calm, stable geometry adds to the hush of new-fallen snow.

“The exact date inscribed—March 5, 1902—implies the canvas was painted in a single session. Its on-the-spot observations and spontaneous sketchiness reveal gray slush in the traffic ruts and yellow mud on the horsecart’s wheels.”

More cross streets carved into tenement corners

Before you could Google-map your location on your smart phone, and even before every corner of the city had accurate signs, these chiseled street names came in pretty handy, letting you know where you were.

Mostly you see them in tenement-heavy neighborhoods like the East Village, East Harlem, and the Lower East Side.

Brownstone and tenement Brooklyn have plenty too, like this faded old carving at Underhill Avenue and Bergen Street in Prospect Heights.

Not all cross street carvings are in neighborhoods once poor or working-class. One of the loveliest of all is at University Place and “Twelfth Street East,” done up Beaux-Arts style.

Where is Fourth Avenue and 128th Street?

This mysterious address, chiseled into the corner of a red-brick tenement, doesn’t sound like it’s in Manhattan.

But it is; today we know it as Park Avenue and 128th Street. So what’s with the Fourth Avenue moniker?

Fourth was the original 1811 street grid name for the avenue. In the 1860s, a section of Fourth between 32nd and 42nd Streets was renamed the more pleasant-sounding Park.

By 1888, the city demapped Fourth in favor of Park from 32nd to the Harlem River. In 1959, with Park Avenue’s cache in full swing, Fourth Avenue from 32nd to 17th Streets was renamed Park Avenue South.

Let’s hope that what remains of chopped-up Fourth Avenue, from Union Square to the Bowery, doesn’t also fall victim to the Park Avenue moniker makeover.

More out-of-date Fourth Avenue signage still exists on the street today—like these examples here.