Before we tell you where this is in Manhattan, we’ll give you a minute to study the photo. One clue, it is an area below Central Park.
Give up? It is an undated, unidentified portion of 58th Street. The photo comes via the New York Public Library stereoview collection. Continue reading
What could be a provincial European river city in the 19th century is in fact the southern portion of New York City in 1875.
This stereoview photograph of Battery Place, a street that ran for only three blocks along Battery Park, was taken from Broadway looking west towards the Hudson River and New Jersey.
Battery Place & vicinity 1852 Atlas of New York
The building to the extreme right is 1 Broadway, the Washington Hotel. The original building which stood on the northwest corner of Broadway was a house occupied by General Israel Putnam and used by General George Washington as his headquarters during the early days of the American Revolution. After the war’s completion it became the Washington Hotel. Continue reading
Central Park after the snow February 5, 1863. Woodcut from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper January 30, 1864.
New York City received its first significant snowfall this winter on January 7, 2016 with about 6 inches of snow covering Manhattan. That day and the next, Central Park had children sleighing down its various hills. Ice skating was available for all at Wollman Rink.
Would anyone today recognize Central Park 154 years ago with similar activity?
Reproduced here for the first time since it appeared in the January 30, 1864 edition of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, is this fantastic woodcut Illustration of Central Park. Unfortunately there is no artist attribution.
At first glance you would think this rural scene is not even in New York City, but the telltale signs are evident that this is indeed Central Park.
In the distant background, buildings can be seen. In the foreground is a proverbial one horse open sleigh. Other sleighs race past one another as their riders are covered in warm blankets and animal skins. One sleigh is named, the “Snow Bird.”
If you look carefully on the right you can see a familiar Central Park balustrade that onlookers are leaning against and taking in all the action. Skaters glide across the frozen lake which begs the question: if you did not own ice skates, where could you get them from?
There was a structure called the “skating tent” in the southern portion of Central Park that rented out skates. Continue reading
Many times I’ll come across stereoviews of 19th century New York City that I have never seen before. Usually they are of buildings or scenes I am acquainted with either by name or written anecdote. But here is a a stereoview that leaves me stumped.
As you see, it is clearly labeled New York City & Vicinity. Beyond those words under the right panel of the view, there is no other information. I do not recognize the large building which is the stereoview’s centerpiece, the surrounding structures, or an approximate year it was taken.
Maybe the view was labeled incorrectly by the stereoview manufacturer (which I highly doubt) or it is a scene in the “vicinity” of New York. It is a mystery building and I have been unable to determine anything. Continue reading
Looking at this 1905 stereoview photograph of the market located under the Williamsburg Bridge, the one thing that jumps out at you is the number of children present among the throng of humanity.
In the foreground of the photograph the children are looking directly at the photographer who must have set up his camera at least 10 feet above the crowd to get this extraordinary view.
The Williamsburg Bridge terminus in Manhattan is at Delancey Street, in the heart of the lower east side. As New York’s ever growing immigrant population flooded into the lower east side at the turn of the century, the area was steeped in poverty.
Many vendors sold their wares in the open streets, crammed onto pushcarts overfilled with fish, meat, fruits, vegetables, pots, candles and rags. Everything you could imagine was sold from these pushcarts.
To the residents of the neighborhood the pushcarts offered necessities for a reasonable sum. For the vendors, the pushcarts offered a meager living. For the city the pushcarts represented a nuisance, selling goods of questionable quality and safety, clogging traffic and dirtying the streets.
Before the bridge was officially opened on December 19, 1903, a market was set up under the bridge to move some of the vendors off the crowded streets.
The first group of vendors to set up in the market were the fish dealers who opened for business on March 30, 1903. Continue reading
If you’ve ever visited New York City you’ve probably seen the double deck buses that are all over Manhattan with a guide giving tourists facts over a loudspeaker.
This tradition of showing off the city from a motorized vehicle has been going on for over 110 years. Continue reading
The Metropolitan Life Building added a tower to its existing building in 1908-1909 enhancing the skyline of New York. An enterprising photographer from the Keystone View Company made his way to the top of the building to take this incredible stereoview photograph of Madison Square Park and the surrounding area.
Click to enlarge the photograph to bring out some great details.
Dividing the photo into four quadrants starting with the lower right, you can see two workers adjusting rope, one sitting, the other standing on steel beams 700 feet above the street.
In the upper right corner just past the beams we can see horse drawn vehicles along Madison Avenue and across 26th Street. The nearest building in the foreground is the roof of the Beaux-Arts style Appellate Division Courthouse on Madison Avenue and 25th Street. The courthouse is a New York City landmark.
On the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and 26th Street stands Madison Square Garden with its theater sign clearly visible. Directly across 26th Street on the northwest corner is a four story limestone building, home to The Society For The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Next to the SPCA building along 26th Street facing the park, are eight brownstones, with all their stoops intact. Continue reading
The Cost of Apartment Living In New York In 1892
Lexington Avenue and 64th Street – typical turn of the century brownstones
New York has always had a wide range of housing choices. But the gulf in living conditions between rich and the poor remains vast. If you have a lot of money, your housing choices are unlimited. If not, you are hard pressed to find anything decent. As Kansas gunslinger and New York journalist Bat Masterson observed in his final column, “Everybody gets the same amount of ice — the rich get theirs in the summer and the poor get theirs in the winter.”
The lowest of New York’s living quarters: the 7 cent per night lodging house
Over time when it comes to housing a lot of things have changed, others have not. In 1892 living conditions for the very poor in New York were abysmal. Maybe not as bad as they are now, but pretty close. The majority of New Yorker’s were not living in poverty, but were just plain working people at various income levels; some struggling to survive and in many cases raise a family.
Which brings us to the question about living in New York in 1892 – just what sort of housing did you get for your money?
The fabulous King’s Handbook of New York City, (1892), delves into everything related to New York, including home life, and answers the question.
One chapter in the book devotes itself to the types of housing available in New York.
The mansions, high class homes, bachelor apartments, middle income flats, boarding houses, tenements and lodging houses are all covered.
The most surprising thing is that you could live in a relatively decent neighborhood with room and board for about $10 per week. Realize of course that an unskilled laborer might barely earn that amount of money and paying room and board put them at the the precipice of poverty. For those people it typically meant finding lodging at a $2 per week boarding house.
The wealthy, professional and merchant classes could afford to choose their housing according to taste and preferences with a good deal of flexibility. The middle class also had choices which varied widely. So when you read about what you got for your money at $50 or more per month, you cannot help but feel envy for Gotham’s dwellers of the past. You come away with the feeling that New York was a much more affordable city 123 years ago. The prices quoted may have you looking for a time machine.
From King’s Handbook, a selection from the section on housing: Continue reading
Before There Was Central Park, There Was Green-Wood Cemetery
Greenwood Cemetery Bayside Ave. Fern Hill Mausoleums – print published 1855
While few New Yorker’s today take Central Park for granted, there was a time in the city’s history that open spaces where nature could be enjoyed unimpeded by noise and pollution were scarce.
Greenwood Cemetery The Angels Await stereoview circa 1870
The great public parks which we enjoy today did not come into existence until the late 1850’s with the creation of Central Park followed by Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in 1867. From the 1840s until the 1860s, the rural cemetery was the place to go if a New Yorker or visitor wanted to experience rolling hills, plains, lakes, fabulous artworks and stroll peacefully while contemplating life.
The oldest of these rural cemeteries in New York City is Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery which was founded in 1838.
Green-Wood itself put out its own tour book soon after its creation to give visitors what they called “the tour.”
Green-Wood Cemetery admission ticket 1886
What could you expect when you got there besides mausoleums and tombstones?
Nature in abundance.
To give you an idea of how popular it was to visit Green-Wood, this section of Appleton’s New York City and Vicinity Guide by W. Williams, published by D. Appleton and Co. (1849) extols some of Green-wood’s virtues: Continue reading
20 Stereoviews Of 19th Century Central Park
Some Long Vanished Scenes And Other Familiar Sites
Mount Saint Vincent Convent, east side of Central Park near 103rd street
Central Park is a constantly evolving mixture of landscape, architecture, buildings and people. Engineer Egbert Viele first surveyed the space encompassing the park. Landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, won the competition to design the park and construction started in 1858.
Over the last 150 plus years, the park has seen many additions and subtractions within it.
The 19th century version of Central Park has many things that a New Yorker today would find familiar and others that seem completely out of character; such as a convent located in the northern part of the park.
The Academy of Mount St. Vincent shown above in the 1860’s was a group of buildings which predated the park and contained a school and convent run by the Roman Catholic Sisters. The nuns left the buildings before construction started on the park and moved to Riverdale in the Bronx in 1857. The buildings they left behind remained for other uses such as a museum, storage and a rare plant conservatory. All the structures were destroyed by fire on January 2, 1881. The site of Mount St. Vincent at East 103rd Street is now the composting area for the park.
Here are some other views of Central Park from 1863-1896. Click on images to vastly enlarge.
Bethesda Fountain before sculptor Emma Stebbins famous bronze statue Angel of the Waters was installed in 1873.
Central Park’s original grand entrance on Fifth Avenue with policeman and guard house. Continue reading