Friday, December 17, 2010

Hanging out at the Christodora House in 1929

Dec. 25 came early for a lot of NYC history buffs and other assorted bloggers... As you probably heard, the Museum of the City of New York has added like 50,000 archival photos to its, uh, archives... Shawn Chittle was the first to pass along the news to me Wednesday...Since then, I'm been ransacking looking through the photos, searchable by borough, era, etc.

So... some of my early favorites are the shots of Avenue B's Christodora House circa February 1929....Not much has changed from the exteriors....





Dunno about the interiors... never been inside ... so, here's the "music auditorium" (Did Iggy play here when he lived at the Christodora?)



the "Christadora medical clinic"



"fireplace in lounge"



My favorite: "Miss Kupkey's bedroom, D-4"



a "general view of the dining room"



And lastly... the fabled Christodora House pool!



The Christodora was built in 1928. Read more history here.

See more of the old-timey NYC photos at Curbed and Eater... and Jeremiah's Vanishing New York...

Photos by Samuel H. Gottscho
All photos from the Collections of the Museum of the City of New York.

PS
Two photos I took last month of the Christodora House that I didn't know what to do with...


6 comments:

  1. AS I recall Christadora House was realized as a social service institution....as is the bldg down B across from Bridgid's. I've been told this that and the other about the place. d
    I do know that it was on the market in the late '70's for a cool $60,000.
    Linus Carvaggio of Gas Station did the roof top railings...visible for a model who had the back penthouse with the glassed room.
    It's formidable, but I've never once met a person from the Christadora.
    It's like the Wonka factory, no one ever goes in and no one ever comes out.

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  2. this building creates the most wicked wind ever! i curse it for all my broken umbrellas

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  3. Johnny Swing made the railing. Not Linus. Linus would never speak with me. And I'm not a model, quite. Hardly. Interesting that people dump on the building as a "community facility" that should never have become "market rate", but it was built as a cross subsidy, market rate up top, Settlement House below.

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  4. My mother and father met each other when they stayed there in 1929, newly arrived in New York from Canada and Massachusetts, got married at the end of the year.

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  5. I understand, that as a condominium building now, people in the Christodora House can do what they want with their place (following rules), as they might with their home, such as making partitions. I noticed, (from pictures) the windows on every other floor are smaller, or larger, than the floor above it, or below it. Also, I learned that there are two staircases, and two elevators, which are in the front center of the building. I am wondering if the floors were equalized, and what are they made of. The building I'm in used to be three tenement buildings and after the second world war, it was partly reconstructed, with an elevator put in and a single facade put in front and a shallow backyard made in back. What do you think of that

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  6. I might have made a mistake. The windows may not be alternately shorter and/or taller on every other floor. Hope they're all the same. Sorry.

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