Lost New York

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Wooden Turnstiles

February 13, 2010 in Art, Books, History, Lost New York by Cyrus | 2 comments

In my last post, I mentioned that older son loves to read series of books — the longer the better. Before he read the Percy Jackson series, he read all of Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House books. He’ll still read the latest one for old times’ sake: he read the latest, Magic Tree House #43: Leprechaun in Late Winter and pronounced it “very good.” His little brother the kindergartener loves them too, so we read them aloud to him on the bus to and from school.

Appropriately enough given this week’s snowy weather on the East Coast, we’ve been reading book #36 in the series, Blizzard of the Blue Moon, which is set in New York in 1938 during the Great Depression. For those of you who don’t know the series, the premise is that eight-year-old Jack and seven-year-old Annie, two kids who live in “Frog Creek, Pennsylvania,” discover a magic tree house in the woods near their house: the tree house is full of books and when you point to one and say, “I want to go there,” well, you go there, wherever “there” is. Their first four adventures take them to the time of the dinosaurs, to the middle ages, and to ancient Egypt. They learn that the tree house belongs to Morgan le Fay, who is portrayed as the magical librarian of King Arthur’s Camelot. (She’s much friendlier than any other version of Morgan le Fay I’ve ever encountered: remember Helen Mirren’s characterization in John Boorman’s Excalibur?!)

The books are very formulaic, as Morgan sends them on various missions that last about 10 chapters. The description of the tree house embarking on its journey is always the same, and my son can now recite it by heart. He’s learning about genre, which is fine by me. But in book 29 Christmas in Camelot, Osborne varies her formula: it is Merlin who sends Jack and Annie on their missions, four of them to mythical places like Camelot, and four to real-life places like Paris at the time of the Exposition Universelle (for which the Eiffel Tower was built).

Blizzard of a Blue Moon is one of these Merlin missions, and my son is enjoying hearing about places he knows: like Central Park and the IRT subway, which costs a nickel in 1938. Reading the book made me remember those old cross-shaped wooden turnstiles that were still installed in a few subway stations when I was growing up. Here’s a picture from the New York Transit Museum:

Note the fare: 5 cents! (Click here for more information about this particular photo, which comes from a wonderful collection of photos and images at nycsubway.org. The site is a treasure trove for subway buffs; in addition to the pictures, there is a wonderful collection of map PDFs.)

By the way, Jack and Annie’s mission in 1938 New York involves rescuing a unicorn that has been enchanted. Where do you suppose they end up?

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Vanishing City Vanishes for Now

February 9, 2010 in Events, Lost New York by Cyrus | No comments

Our friend David Freeland writes:

To all who were planning to attend tomorrow night, I’ve just received word that Dixon Place has decided to cancel this and all other events tomorrow because of the snowstorm that (if predictions are accurate) will be blanketing the entire New York region with lots of fluffy white stuff.  Fortunately, we will be rescheduling, so as soon as we determine a new date I will let you know!

Losing the Fun

February 7, 2010 in Lost New York by Cyrus | No comments

Freelance journliast David Freeland, one of the keynote speakers at last fall’s Lost New York conference and the author most recently of Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure, is taking part in a panel discussion this Wednesday evening February 10 entitled “The Vanishing City: Losing the Fun.” He’ll be joined by architectural historian Andrew Dolkart, author of The Row House Reborn: Architecture and Neighborhoods in New York City, 1908–1929; vaudeville performer and historian Trav S. D., author of No Applause–Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous; and Cindy VandenBosch, co-founder of the New York walking tour company Urban Oyster. They’ll be talking about why it’s important to preserve New York’s historic entertainnent venues and whether that project is economically feasible in these difficult times.

The panel takes place at the Dixon Place Theater (161 Chyristie Street, between Delancey and Rivington). The lounge opens at 7:30, and the panel begins at 8:00 p.m. Admission is $10. Call 212.219.0736 for reservations or go to www.dixonplace.org.

Previously. And.

RIP

January 28, 2010 in Books, Lost New York by Bryan | 1 comment

Full obit from the Times.

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Fish-eating, whiskey, death, and … rebirth?

January 21, 2010 in Food, Lost New York by Bryan | 4 comments

Whenever I throw caution — and my bank account balance — to the wind and order another round of oysters, I think about this, one of my favorite paragraphs in all of Joseph Mitchell. He’s describing a semi-fictional character, 93-yrs-old, who hangs out round the old Fulton Fish Market:

To Mr. Flood, the flesh of finfish and shellfish is not only good to eat, it is an elixir. “When I get through tearing a lobster apart, or one of those tender West Coast octupuses,” he says, “I feel like I had a drink from the fountain of youth.” He eats with relish every kind of seafood, including sea-urchin eggs, blowfish tails, winkles, ink squids, and barn-door skates. He especially likes an ancient Boston breakfast dish — fried cod toungues, cheeks, and sounds, sounds being the gelatinous air bladders along the cod’s backbone. The more unusual a dish, the better he likes it. It makes him feel superior to eat something most people would edge away from. He insists, however, on the plainest of cooking. In his opinion there are only four first-class fish restaurants in the city — Sweet’s and Libby’s on Fulton Street, Gage & Tollner’s in Brooklyn, and Lundy’s in Sheepshead Bay — and even these, he says, are disinclined to leave well enough alone. Consequently, he takes most of his meals at Sloppy Louie Morino’s, a busy-bee on South Street frequented almost entirely by wholesale fishmongers from Fulton Market, which is across the street. Customarily, when Mr. Flood is ready for lunch, he goes to the stall of one of the big wholesalers, a friend of his, and browses among the bins for half an hour or so. Finally he picks out a fish, or an eel, or a crab, or the wing of a skate, or whatever looks best that day, buys it, carries it unwrapped to Louie’s, and tells the chef precisely how he wants it cooked. Mr. Flood and the chef, a surly old Genoese, are close friends. “I’ve made quite a study of fish cooks,” Mr. Flood says, “and I’ve decided that old Italians are the best. Then comes old colored men, and then old mean Yankees, and then old drunk Irishmen. They have to be old; it takes almost a lifetime to learn how to do a thing simply. Even the stove has to be old. If the cook is an awful drunk, so much the better. I don’t think a teetotaler could cook a fish. Oh, if he was a mean old tobacco-chewing teetotaler, he might.”

Now that’s what I’m talking about. Of Mr. Flood’s four restaurants, none remain. Lundy’s, way out in Sheepshead Bay, has closed and reopened more than once, and now appears to be closed again. I never managed to make it out there. I’m not sure when Libby’s closed, but  Sweet’s and Sloppy Louie’s have been replaced by a tourist-friendly chain brewpub. (You know, that’s the kind of urban crime I’d like to see on the decline at the seaport, Messrs. Giuliani and Bloomberg.) I moved to the old waterfront neighborhood a year or so after Louie’s closed, though I did manage to catch the last few years of the Fulton Market.

Gage & Tollner was replaced by a TGI Friday’s, which eventually closed, and today in its space we’ll witness the Grand Opening of … an Arby’s. It could be worse, writes Brooks over at Lost City, who got a sneak preview. And it certainly was worse under the TGIF regime, by all reports. But we second Brooks’s call for a plaque or some other way to memorialize G&T. Would it be too much to ask for a raw bar as well?

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Ghostly Green

January 14, 2010 in Film, Lost New York by Cyrus | 1 comment

As Bryan noted yesterday, Tavern on the Green has gone the way of all things. The restaurant happened to be the place where my family celebrated my graduation from high school at the end of the same spring, ahem, when Woody Allen’s Manhattan was released. But I remember the spot less for that event than for its appearance in a film that was released five years later.

Meanwhile, work has begun on Ghostbusters III, which is scheduled for a 2012 release. The film reunites original cast members  Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, and Harold Ramis with director Ivan Reitman, who confirmed the other night on MTV that he will be directing. The script, written by Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky,  is currently in its second draft. The participation of Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis, and Annie Potts is rumored but not confirmed. For more on the story, see this article at totalfilm.com.

Previously.

Tavern on the run

January 13, 2010 in Lost New York by Bryan | No comments

The Huffington Post has a slideshow up today on the Tavern’s star-studded past and its last days. This probably only warrants a Tweet, right? But I kind of liked this picture.

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Lost NY: Croton Reservoir

January 11, 2010 in Lost New York by Cyrus | 2 comments

Croton reservoir : Fifth Avenu... Digital ID: 465505. New York Public Library

I’m reading our colleague E. L. Doctorow’s 1994 novel The Waterworks in preparation for a planned post about his most recent novel, Homer & Langley.

For today, I thought I’d share a wonderful little passage about a now-lost piece of New York. Indeed, it’s lost even by the time that the novel’s narrator begins his retrospective narration.

This passage occurs as the narrator is talking about a possibly supernatural event that may have taken place on 42nd Street in the shadow of the Croton Reservoir.

I’ll tell you here that I was ready to believe in every dark vision if it appeared at the Croton Holding Reservoir. Which is gone, of course. Our public library stands there now. But in those years its massive ivy-covered walls rose over a neighborhood monumental in its silence …. The few brownstone and marble mansions across the street along Fifth A venue stood aloof from the noisy commerce to the south. Our Mr. Tweed lived just a block north, practicing the same silence. It was an unnatural thing, the reservoir. The bouldered retaining walls were twenty-five feet thick and rose forty-four feet in an inward-leaning slant. The design was Egyptian. The corners were relieved by trapezoidal turrets, and bisecting each long wall face were temple doors. You went in, climbed up a stair to the parapet, and came out in the sky. From this elevation the rising city seemed to fall back before something that wasn’t a city, a squared expanse of black water that was in fact the geometrical absence of a city.

I grant you that it is a very personal feeling I had. New Yorkers loved their reservoir. They strolled along the parapet arm in arm and were soothed in their spirits. If they wanted a breeze in summer, here is where it would blow. Puffs rippled the water. Children launched their toy sloops. The Central Park, well to the north, was not yet finished, all mud holes and ditches and berms of shoveled earth, a park only in the eyes of its imaginers. So this was the closest we could come to pastoral.

But I am sensitive to architecture. It can inadvertently express the monstrousness of culture. As the complicit expression of the ideals of organized human life it can call forth horror. And then something happens appropriate to it, and maybe from its malign influence …. [Ellipses in original.]

To find out why our narrator has that peculiar “personal feeling” about the reservoir, take a look at chapter nine of the novel.

The picture above is from the digital archives of the New York Public Library. The NYPL caption reads: “Croton reservoir : Fifth Avenue in 1879, looking south.” The view below shows the reservoir “looking west at street level.”

Croton reservoir : 42nd Street... Digital ID: 465503. New York Public Library

Click on either picture to get to its NYPL page, which will allow you to see an enlarged image.

Unearthing Washington Square

October 27, 2009 in Lost New York by Bryan | No comments

06schematic.cityroom.jpg

Cat over at WSP Blog got the scoop on a tombstone unearthed last Friday during the newest phase of park renovations. Boldface and links are Cat’s:

Matt Kovary grew up in Greenwich Village, is working nearby and passes by the location every day. He contacted WSP Blog on Friday after walking by the Park that afternoon when he noticed that there was a large hole dug about 6 feet below the surface in the fenced-off construction area, right at the perimeter of the chain-link fence on the southern edge at Washington Square South and Sullivan Street.

According to Mr. Kovary, there were two people inside the fence, a
man and a woman, poring over and dusting off what appeared to be a tombstone
which he believed had been recovered from the hole. They were taking
pictures of it, and, when he asked whether it was indeed a tombstone,
the woman would only state that it was “sandstone,” admitting she was
not authorized to talk about it.

Mr. Kovary said that the artifact looked like “a tombstone, not unlike those you’d see at Trinity Church – but in much better condition.”
He wondered if it could have been “related to the original land owner”
and questioned whether this came from a “family cemetery” from 200 years ago or more.

Although skeletons and human bones from the Park’s time period as a “potter’s field” (1797-1825) have been discovered as recently as last year (see WSP blog entry “The Skeletons of Washington Square Park“), there seems to be less information about – and discovery related to – private cemetery usage before the area was a New York City park.

UPDATE

Inside the Apple adds this insight:

It is well-known that the park was once a potter’s field and by
some estimates up to 20,000 people were buried there. (We write about
the park’s early history in depth in Inside the Apple.) However, what has people scratching their heads is the fact that you don’t normally find a tombstone in a potter’s field.
The
tombstone isn’t so mysterious, however. Only a portion of today’s park
was the potter’s field. As Luther Harris writes in his wonderful book, Around Washington Square:
The
land area [of the original square]…was about 6-1/4 acres, a
respectable public space, but not a grand one. Much narrower than
today’s square, the potter’s field was limited on the east by a strip of church cemeteries,
and on the west by Minetta Creek, which ran southwest from the foot of
Fifth Avenue to the corner of MacDougal and West Fourth Street. (italics added)
Thus,
it seems likely considering where the current excavations are happening
that what’s been unearthed is a tombstone from one of these church
graveyards. The Scotch Presbyterian Church owned the largest cemetery
and vehemently opposed the park’s usurpation of their land. Perhaps
this is one of their brethren? We await a full report.

So do we. What a fun Halloween gift!

Previously on AHNY.

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Knickerbocker, Times Square, and the Tabula

October 8, 2009 in Books, Lost New York by Cyrus | 1 comment

knickhotel.jpgUnfortunately, I didn’t have an opportunity to transcribe more of the conversation between Berman and Freeland today, so instead I thought I’d offer you a moment from the book that I’m currently reading — or, rather, re-reading — The Dark River by John Twelve Hawks, a moment that seems appropriate given what both Berman and Freeland were starting to talk about when we left them.

The story with Twelve Hawks is that he lives completely off the grid: not even his agent knows who he is? (Which leads to rumors: could it be Thomas Pynchon slumming? Nah, we know what that looks like: it looks like Inherent Vice, which looks nothing like Twelve Hawks’s books.) The Dark River is the second book in the Fourth Realm trilogy and like its predecessor, The Traveler, its a wonderful pop-culture confection, a mash-up of (in no particular order) Star Wars, paranoid thrillers like the Bourne series, Kill Bill, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and any number of technophobic thrillers. I’m pretty sure that the writers behind the television series Heroes have read The Traveler, because the relationship between Nathan and Peter Petrelli is uncannily like that between the Corrigan brothers in the novel.

The idea is that our universe is only one realm — the fourth — of six. Most human beings are confined to the fourth realm, but certain visionaries, called Travelers, have the ability to cross over among the realms, leaving their bodies behind and sending their “Light” across the dimensional barriers. And when they come back, they come back with revolutionary ideas. Think Buddha, Jesus, Joan of Arc, and many many revolutionaries, famous and nameless, most of them persecuted over time. You see, there is a group called the Tabula that prizes order and control above all else and sees the Travelers as the greatest threat to order and control. Protecting the Travelers are Harlequins, warriors who fight with all kinds of weapons (but prefer swords above all). The first book is set mostly in Los Angeles and Arizona, but the second opens in New York. And as the ninth chapter opens, Gabriel, a Traveller, and Maya, a Harlequin, are on the run …

Naz had guided Maya and the rest of the group through a warren of stairs and passageways to the Times Square shuttle. The platform was a brightly lit area where a shuttle train departed from one of three parallel tracks. The gray. concrete floor was dotted with blackened pieces of chewing gum that formed a random mosaic. A few hundred feet away, a group of West Indian men with steel drums pounded out a calypso tune.

So far, they had avoided the mercenaries, but Maya was sure they were being watched by the underground surveillance system. Now that their presence in New York had been discovered, she knew that the full resources of the Tabula would be used to find them. According to Naz, all they had to do was walk down the subway tunnel and take a staircase to the lower level of Grand Central Terminal. Unfortunately, a transit policeman was patrolling the area and, even if he disappeared, someone might tell the authorities that a group of people had jumped onto the tracks.

The only safe route into the tunnel was through a locked door labeled with the tarnished gold lettering KNICKERBOCKER. In a more convivial era, a passageway once led directly from the subway platform to the bar of the old Knickerbocker Hotel. Although the hotel was now an apartment building, the door remained unnoticed by the tens of thousands of commuters who walked past it every day.

knick_door.jpgMaya stood on the platform feeling very conspicuous as commuters hurried to board the shuttle. When the train clattered out of the station, Hollis approached her and spoke in a quiet voice.

“You still want to get on the train going to Ten Mile River?”

“We’ll evaluate the situation when we reach the platform. Naz says there aren’t any cameras there.”

Hollis nodded. “The Tabula scanners probably detected us when we left the loft and walked through Chinatown. Then somebody figured out we were using the old subway station and hacked into the transit computer.”

“There’s another explanation.” Maya glanced over at Naz.

“Yeah, I thought about that, too. But I watched his face in the subway car. He really looked scared.”

“Stay close to him, Hollis. If he starts running, stop him.”

A new shuttle train arrived, took on a new crowd of passengers, and then rattled west toward Seventh Avenue. It felt like they would be standing there forever. Finally the transit policeman got a call on his radio and hurried away. Naz ran over to the Knickerbocker door and fumbled through the keys on his ring. When the lock clicked, he smiled and pulled the door open.

Why am I rereading The Dark River? Because the third book of the trilogy, The Golden City, just came out.

And, yes, the door that Twelve Hawks describes is real. If you want to know more, take a look at this post from forgotten-ny.com, which is the source of the pictures above.

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