'Dirty Old New York' on film

In case you haven't seen any of these... Jonathan Hertzberg has mashed-up movie clips from the 1960s and 1970s for a three-part series titled "Dirty Old New York, aka Fun City." (The videos made the rounds earlier this summer.)

Here's a look at video No. 3.



Jeremiah talked with Hertzberg yesterday. You can read that here.

Find video No. 2 here. And No. 1 is here.

And there will be a Part 4 soon...

At the Sagamore Cafeteria, 'always filled with bums snoozing over a cold cup of coffee'

Recently spotted this on the Old New York page on Facebook...

Description:
"Cafeteria near Cooper Union on Bowery. 1942. Photo by Marjory Collins. Photo from the Library of Congress."

As people in the Facebook comments pointed out, this was the Sagamore Cafeteria, St. Mark's Place and Third Avenue. Jack Kerouac called it "the respectable bums' cafeteria."

In his memoir, the poet Ted Berrigan recalled:

"The Sagamore was a big place always filled with bums snoozing over a cold cup of coffee. When you entered the place, you went through a turnstile and took a ticket, whih had various monetary values printed along its edges. Then, as you went down the cafeteria line, each counter man punch your new total cost.

Nobody bothered anybody, so it was a good place to sit if you wanted to talk for hours, which we usually did. Good, that is, if you could ignore so much human misery around you."

And today, of course, it looks like this...

July 4th on Union Square — 1876

[Click on image to enlarge]

A Centennial celebration, followed by epic lines for the restrooms at the nearby Starbucks.

From the NYPL Digital Gallery.

'Snowballing on the Lower East Side' (1900)

And then they all drew snow dicks on the locomobile steam automobiles.

Via the NYPL Digital Gallery.

Image Title: Snowballing on the Lower East Side.
Creator: Hambidge, Jay, 1867-1924 — Artist
Published Date: 1900
Original Source: From Century magazine.

Let's look at an aerial view of the neighborhood from 100 years ago

[Click on image to enlarge]

You may have seen this classic photo by Shorpy from 1913... I thought about it this past week while compiling the posts on St. Brigid's. (Like this post.)

EVG friend Pinhead linked to this photo a few years back for a St. Brigid's post on East Village Transitions.

Anyway, it's a shot looking to the east from the top of the Con Ed building on East 14th Street... Can you spot St. Brigid's? Tompkins Square Park?

Paying for these arrows by the hour, so ...

Recognize anything else...?

Marketing 166 Second Avenue in the 1920s: 'a desirable location for the modern home'

On Monday, Curbed had a post titled "19 Vintage New York City Real Estate Ads and Photos." This reminded me of the following item that I found at Columbia University's New York Real Estate Brochure Collection. (I have more brochures from around here if you're interested.)

It's a marketing brochure for 166 Second Avenue between East 10th Street and East 11th Street ... it isn't dated, but I'd put it around the mid-to-late 1920s.

Here's how Warren Hall was being marketed...

Location: "In the heart of the old aristocratic Stuyvesant and Astor Place section, a new and distinctive residential neighborhood is rapidly spring up. This district, so rich in City tradition, is once more coming into prominence as a desirable location for the modern home."

Sounds nice. But what about the traffic?

"The congested state of New York's transportation will never become a menace to residents of WARREN HALL. Within two blocks is the Astor Place Place station of the Fourth Avenue Subway, the 9th Street station of the Third Avenue Elevated and any number of surface lines leading in all directions."

[Click image to enlarge]

And all this cost a fortune for the times, really. Look at the rent.

[Click image to enlarge]

The least-expensive apartment was the two-room home on the third floor for $700 (assuming this was monthly, right?). The top-of-the-line penthouse home ("designed in the form of country bungalows, yet have all the city conveniences") went for $2,600.

Interestingly, the brochure notes that "the building will be completed in October, 1929" — right in time for the Stock Market Crash! Wonder how that hurt the move-in rate.

166 Second Avenue isn't called Warren Hall anymore... still a fine home. Here's a description of the building on Streeteasy ... interesting to see how it is being marketed circa 2009 (pre Nicoletta!) or so:

This is a dangerous location for food lovers! Blackhound bakery is right downstairs and the famous Veselka Polish diner is one block away. You can sit out front and enjoy your iced coffee at Dunkin Donuts before heading across the street to take advantage of the twice weekly farmers market.

The four active listings range in price between $2,700 to $8,400.

And now, let's start digging into the New York City Municipal Archives Online Gallery

Last week, the Department of Records unleashed images from its database — 870,000 digital photos of New York City dating back to the 1850s... the culmination of a four-year photo-digitalization project by city archivists, as The Wall Street Journal put it.

But! The overwhelming demand crippled the website... and no one could access the photos...

However! I randomly checked late last night, as I've been doing every 90 seconds the last eight days. Or so. ... and everything was up and running. Woo!

So, for starters, this was a rather quick and random search ... I just grabbed stuff as if I was ransacking Key Food before a hurricane...

These photos of workers in Tompkins Square Park are dated May 1941... (and nice to see that workers stood around then too — kidding!)

...in the top photo, you can barely make out the Avenue A street sign in the upper right-hand corner...

This shot in the Park looking west toward East Ninth Street wasn't dated...

The caption: "Old men and women seated on bench. Women wear babushkas and hold canes."

And here is the north side of Delancey Street west of Clinton Street dated June 7, 1906 ... There are a lot of Delancey shots from this time period.

Here are two random tax photos, which were taken some time between 1980 and 1988... (There are a lot of tax photos, though the images are very small...)

And some tax photos on the Bowery... You may recognize a few spots ...

... such as the former 9-17 Second Avenue, where the Mars Bar was eventually on the corner...

...and the current home of Gemma and the Bowery Hotel...

...7-Eleven is the third storefront in... in the bowels base of the 52E4 condo...

And some tax photos on East Houston....

...current home of the Ludlow...

...the Sunshine...

OK, going back in for more... Meanwhile, you can search yourself right here.

[All photos courtesy NYC Municipal Archives]

On the subway with Stanley Kubrick

As you may know, the Department of City Records unleashed some 870,000 photos of Manhattan dating back to the mid-1800s. But, no one can access them — the overwhelming demand shut down the site, as BoweryBoogie noted yesterday.

So. While we wait ... check out some photos that Stanley Kubrick (yes, that Stanley Kubrick) took on the NYC subways for LOOK Magazine in 1946...

[Museum of the City of New York]

You can find this photo and several others at the Museum of the City of New York blog.

[EVG repost] Then and now: The Provident Loan Society of New York

Yesterday, BoweryBoogie noted a potentially troubling sign at the old Provident Loan Society building at East Houston and Essex... Workers had delivered a Davey Drill to the site, as BB pointed out, generally employed before a huge construction/demolition project. One Boogie commenter heard the mega-CVS rumor coming here... (Read his whole post here.) We'll stay tuned for further developments...

Meanwhile, it's a good time to trot out this EVG post from November 2010...

-------------------

I've lost track of how many clubs this space has been in the last 15 or so years... The space was originally The Provident Loan Society of New York, which opened here in 1912... the space served as a studio for Jasper Johns in the 1970s...

Amazingly enough, the classic revival brick building has retained its look through the years... Here are some photos from the NYPL Digital Gallery..... the first photo isn't dated...



from 1936...



from 1935...


and today...


I wonder if, in 1912, locals were annoyed that another bank branch was opening...

Summer, winter in 1940s New York

We spotted this yesterday over at our friends at ANIMAL ... as they describe it " some silent amateur footage of Manhattan during World War II. Just a stroll through summery Greenwich Village, springtime Coney Island, and fun in a snowstorm."

[Updated] Fix up your shitty apartment the 1950s way

Gothamist dug up a treasure on YouTube this evening... an unintentionally hilarious video from some time in the 1950s that follows a fictional couple (Jack and Jill!) as they try to make their "unpromising space" into a home on the Lower East Side...



Difficult to cite our favorite moment (so many!)

We did enjoy this woman's fleeting appearance...

And just look at just how small this apartment is! Just slightly larger than, say, a suite at the Pierre. Oh, those poor kids from the 1950s!

What do you think a space this size would run on the LES today? Actually, the landlord would have already chopped up any rental left in a building this old into about six different apartments...

UPDATED:
Thanks to Esquared for pointing out that BoweryBoogie had already posted this gem last summer. Right here.

EVG flashback: When 72 Avenue B was a luxurious 1,750-seat theater

On Monday, we reported that Ben Shaoul is the mystery buyer of the Cabrini Nursing Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation on East Fifth Street at Avenue B, and according to one source, he has designs on converting the Center into condos when the lease expires in 2012... we'll have more on this later... Meanwhile, a flashback to an EVG post from Sept. 28, 2009...

You'll recognize Fifth Street and Avenue B here...



But until 1957, it was a Loew's theater...



According to Cinema Treasures:

Loew's Avenue B is part of one of the great rags-to-riches stories of showbiz history. Movie mogul Marcus Loew erected it on the very site of the tenement building where he was born. Needless to say, his birthplace was demolished to make way for the luxurious 1,750-seat theatre, which was designed by Thomas W. Lamb and first opened on January 8, 1913, with vaudeville as its main attraction and movies thrown in just as fillers.

The Avenue B was the top Loew's house on the Lower East Side until the mid-1920s, when the circuit took over the Commodore on Second Avenue, which was a much busier area for entertainment and shopping. The Avenue B was reduced to playing movies at the end of their Loew's circuit run, and remained so until its closure around 1957-58

.

As Cinema Treasures commenter Warren G. Harris noted:

The theatre cost $800,000 to build. In his opening night speech, Marcus Loew said "This is the most pretentious of the houses on our string, because my better judgment was over-balanced by my sentimentalism and my longing to do something better here than I ever did before." According to corporate histories, the Avenue B was never successful, but Loew's kept it running for decades as a memorial to its founder, who was born on the spot.

Top photo via.

[EVG Flashback] "Sophie's...remains a good place to stop time"

Originally posted on Feb. 25, 2009...

I finally watched the "Disappearing Manhattan" episode of "No Reservations" (this after blabbering away about it the last three months!). It debuted Monday night, and will air several more times. Grub Street yesterday provided a nice synopsis of what the episode covered.

In particular, I was interested in the last segment, in which Anthony Bourdain shoots the shit with Nick Tosches at Sophie's. It was all of about three minutes (and the shoot at Sophie's took nearly three hours, I was told).

Here's most of what transpired at Sophie's....

[EVG Flashback] Shopping in the East Village — then and now

On occasion we'll revisit an old EVG blog post ... like this one from Aug. 14, 2008...

Here are some archival photos I came across showing locals doing their shopping on Avenue C and Sixth Street in April 1950.



Here's a photo I took the other day showing locals doing their shopping on Seventh Street near Avenue B. 

From the EV Grieve archives: Looking at 1980s New York via network television

Originally posted on July 17, 2008....

Rolando at Urbanite brought back a memory for me with a post on The Equalizer from 1985. As he notes, The Equalizer shows Times Square in all its pre-Giuliani glory. (Via Jeremiah)

Here's a clip I found from the show's opening (New York looks so SCARY!):



And where was the Olde Garden, which you see at the 21-second spot?

Oh, and all this makes me think of Cagney & Lacey from 1982 (and what happened to Meg Foster?):


Still, I prefer the gritty realism of other shows. (ACID RAIN in MANHATTAN! @ the 2:26 spot)

When the city installed sheep lanes

So, according to the NYPL Digital Gallery, here we are at the "Junction of Broadway and the Bowery, 1831. [Union Square.]"

It's difficult to get your bearings without a Duane Reade to help.

3 old-timey scenes from the holidays

Oh, just three old-timey holiday scenes from the Museum of the City of New York archives....

First, Macy's from 1944 (no photographer listed)...



And Sixth Avenue looking south from 22nd Street circa 1902 (by Byron Company) ...



Also on Sixth Avenue from 1902 (by Byron Company)... no address given, but that's certainly the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion that later became the Limelight...

Tracing the origins of those weird angles off the Bowery

In preparation for a show at La Mama on East First Street in January, artist Jennifer Williams has been researching the footprint of the buildings around the gallery just off the Bowery... She found property maps via the NYPL digital archives dating back to 1853...

In looking at aerial views of the Bowery and Houston intersection, she noticed that some of the nearby buildings were erected at an odd angle.

As she writes on her blog, Bowery 2.0: "[I] learned that the weird angle actually relates to old farm property lines. I'm not entirely sure why the buildings from 1867 seem to follow the lines so closely, my guess is that the grid was still relatively new and the plots of land were being sold in parcels to individuals by the farm owners. I find the fact that even new buildings follow this footprint fascinating."




Click on image above a few times to compare the grids between First Avenue and the Bowery at different points from the past 150-plus years....

Visit the La Mama site for more on the show, featuring Williams and Wilfredo Ortega. Writes Williams about her portion of the show: "It's an amalgamation of memory, images, and research which will become a site specific collage construction (or deconstruction) of the Bowery’s present state.”

I'll have more from Williams on the exhibit later...

Meanwhile, Jeremiah has more today on the rapidly changing area around the Mars Bar. Read it here.

Long before the Mars Bar on Second Avenue

Thanks to Goggla for passing along this NYPL Digital Library link ... it's an undated photo of Second Avenue... looking north to First Street... The Mars Bar building once housed the Woolworth Theater. I couldn't find anything on it (granted, it was a quick search) ... So if you happen to know anything about the theatre... I wonder if people were devastated when the theatre shuttered?




Seeing the past helps put the present in perspective (OK, that was lame)... In trying times, I usually turn to the good book for inspiration.

"New York ... would seem on the face of it to be founded on progress, on change, on the bulldozing of what has faded to make way for the next thing, the thing after that, the future. The lure of the new is built right into its name; it is the part of the name that actually registers ... Manhattan is a finite space that cannot be expanded but only resurfaced and reconfigured ... New York has no truck with the past. It expels its dead."

— Luc Sante, "Low Life"

Jeremiah has more on Before Mars Bar today here.

Then and now: The Provident Loan Society of New York

As Eater reported Friday, the Element Nightclub on Houston and Essex is closing... Sunday marks the club's last night... Per Element management: "We are sad to say that the management of Element contacted us earlier to let us know that The Bank has been sold. They aren't sure what it will become but the one thing that is for sure is that it will no longer be a club."

I've lost track of how many clubs this space has been in the last 15 or so years... The space was originally The Provident Loan Society of New York, which opened here in 1912... the space served as a studio for Jasper Johns in the 1970s...

Amazingly enough, the classic revival brick building has retained its look through the years... Here are some photos from the NYPL Digital Gallery..... the first photo isn't dated...



from 1936...



from 1935...


and today...



I wonder if, in 1912, locals were annoyed that another bank branch was opening...