The stained-glass ghost of a Village shoe store

When Igor’s Barber Shop took over this modest storefront at 15 Eighth Avenue last year, the owners could have covered up the stained-glass sign on the facade, all that was left of a shoe store that occupied the circa-1845 building.

Luckily, they didn’t. They decided that this piece of old Greenwich Village should remain. It’s been exposed under the Barber Shop sign for at least a year now, and it’s wonderful to see.

Who was J. Yormark? The Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation put together a fantastic Off the Grid blog post that provides a little bit of backstory on Jacob Yormark, a young immigrant from Austria-Hungary who opened his shoe store in the 1890s.

He lived above the store, at least in the 1920s, when this announcement of his daughter’s engagement notice ran in The New York Times.

[Photo of Eighth Avenue at West 12th Street in 1929 from the NYPL. Yormark’s is the third building from the five-story one at the corner]

Three different ways of seeing Hudson Street

It looks like the automobile age has barely arrived to this shabby but not chic corner at Hudson and Barrow Streets.

The photo dates to 1925, but notice the horse-drawn wagons and the store sign advertising harnesses across the street.

That’s P.S. 3 on the corner of Grove Street, with the flagpole on the mansard roof. And trolley tracks run up the center of the street, notes the caption to the photo, both published in 1976’s New York Then and Now.

The little Federal-style houses are long-gone by 1975, the year the second photo was taken, and a tall postwar apartment building looms in the distance.

P.S. 3 is still there, its flagpole moved to the front entrance. A deli and photography shop are the only businesses visible. Too bad the trolley tracks and the lovely bishop’s crook lampposts have disappeared.

Hudson Street at Barrow hasn’t changed much since 1975.

And though they’re out of view in the above photo, the Belgian blocks on Barrow still poke through the pavement opposite local dive Barrow Pub.