Ten years ago a New York Times report on conditions in 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues said, “It is frequently asserted that it is the ‘worst’ block in town, that it has been so for many years, and that it is certainly not getting better.”
One minor problem has been solved in the decade: An arcade entrance to the IRT subway at Times Square was closed to eliminate a nest of delinquency. But a similar arcade remains on Eighth Avenue just north of 42nd Street.
The Transit Authority police, responsible for patrolling the Eighth Avenue arcade, arrested three young men there early this month, charging one with felonious assault. The city police patrol the sidewalk, but the stairway appears to be a no-man’s land. In the daytime many of the patrons are teenage boys who show little sign of aggressiveness. At night, the habitues are tougher and also drearier.
Above ground are bookstores that sell magazines of nude women and men in the most specific detail. The police say the judicial definition of pornography has been narrowed to the point where nudity is now beyond their reach.
The police also feel that judicial preoccupation with the protection of individual liberty has reduced conviction rates to a relatively low level, and consequently the doubtful characters they arrest are often released almost at once. A 1967 law that reduced the maximum penalty for prostitution to 15 days in jail has, however, increased the guilty pleas. The record for last year, according to police statistics, showed a conviction or guilty-plea rate of more than 60 percent in prostitution arrests. The penalties are considered so light that they are hardly worth fighting.
Manifestoes for the Next New York: Bring Back New Yorkers—and Sex
By FRANK RICH | November 11, 2001
LABOR DAY BROUGHT THE ROMANCE IT always does to Broadway: the whiff of a new season. In the Times Square that Disney helped build in the late 1990’s, you could squint your eyes and imagine that the crossroads of the world was as vital as ever. The blazing lights, after all, seemed even brighter than those of “42nd Street” lore, and foot traffic had become so dense that Broadway sidewalks had just been widened to accommodate it.
So the shock was real when the attack on the World Trade Center claimed Times Square’s economy and optimism as collateral damage. As tourists fled, four Broadway shows folded, and fear supplanted “The Producers” as the street’s No. 1 topic of conversation. It wasn’t idle talk when Rudolph W. Giuliani and even Colin Powell, another native New Yorker, urged Americans to partake of an activity as seemingly frivolous as seeing a play. Broadway’s survival was at stake. Though a modest bounce followed, decimated advance sales suggest it will be short-lived.
Many of the gains of the area’s redevelopment, led by the decline in crime, are undiminished, but the cataclysm of Sept. 11 revealed starkly what’s missing when the office workers go home each night: New Yorkers. It’s the paradox of the Times Square comeback in the late 1990’s that the neighborhood that epitomizes New York to the world is no longer on the map of many of its own residents. According to one good barometer—the League of American Theaters and Producers’ surveys of Broadway ticket buyers—the overwhelming majority of Broadway’s customers were metropolitan-area residents through the 1980’s. Now far fewer than half are, with less than a fifth of Broadway audiences coming from the city itself. The confirmation of these statistics could be found in the post-Sept. 11 ruins. It was the spectacles pitched at out-of-towners—typified by “Les Misérables” and “The Phantom of the Opera”—that were hardest hit. To be truly disaster-proof, Times Square, we now know, needs the New Yorkers to come back and love it too.
But the theater isn’t the whole Times Square story. The beauty of the district has always been its rude amalgam of high and low, class and crass. The street’s late-20th-century decline was in a symbolic way sealed when, in the period from 1966 to 1972, it lost its last old-time freak show (Ripley’s Believe It or Not “Odditorium”) and its last old-style showgirl cabaret (Lou Walters’s Latin Quarter) as well as its last high-culture institution (the Metropolitan Opera House). That crazy-quilt hodgepodge is missing in the new Times Square, where the nontheater entertainments and services tend to be neither high nor low, but part of the bland middle of national chains.
Sex must also be in the mix. It has always been part of the neighborhood’s DNA. Even before The New York Times moved into Longacre Square in 1904, prompting its name change, the West 40’s were overrun by “parlor houses.” In 1913, the New Amsterdam’s roof theater—right above the stage where “The Lion King” prowls now—featured Ziegfeld’s “Midnight Frolic,” where a trick of lighting on a “see-through runway” displayed the pulchritude of chorus girls. A decade later the Shubert Theater housed “Artists and Models,” a revue featuring female frontal nudity. Fiorello La Guardia stamped out the “incorporated filth” of burlesque in the 1930’s, and his successor in spirit, Rudolph W. Giuliani, tried to do the same with porn. But there must be a way to get sensible adult sexuality back into Times Square entertainment. It wouldn’t mean importing prostitution, 10-cents-a-dance halls or wretched XXX emporiums, but perhaps at least a touch of Vegas (which also tried to stamp out sex revues in favor of family entertainment in the 1990’s but this year reversed course).
Unveiling Was Rained Out
October 29, 1866
From base to torch, the statue is 151 feet high.
IT IS REALLY A PUBLIC MISFORTUNE, ALMOST A national misfortune, that the weather should have interfered to prevent the ceremonies with which the Statue of Liberty was presented and accepted from being brilliantly successful. Unhappily the unpropitious weather robbed the pageant of much of its effect. To be effective as a symbol a pageant must first of all be effective as a spectacle. That was not possible when the statue was draped in a drizzling mist that made it invisible from the Battery, and when it refused to be “unveiled” even when the bunting that covered the face had been withdrawn.
The failure of the spectacle to make its due impression is the more to be regretted because the conditions of the celebration were otherwise so favorable. The nature of the ceremony made a naval parade not only admissible but necessary, and the facilities our beautiful bay confers upon us for naval parades are such as no other great city enjoys. Even the Venetians, the most famous of all pageant makers, in the procession of the Bucentoro had no advantages over us for this purpose, except in the architectural setting of their display. Even in this respect the recent and huge structures at the lower end of Manhattan Island, at a distance from which the details are lost and the outlines and masses are alone visible, make New York a fit background for the most sumptuous aquatic spectacle.
The parade in honor and welcome of the arrival of the statue showed what capabilities the harbor had for such a purpose, and the program prepared for the final ceremony gave promise of a display more extensive and more impressive.
It is not too much to say that the monument thus finally exposed gives to the harbor what it has heretofore lacked in a single dominant feature.
Reopened Ellis Island Proves Sellout Attraction For Tourists
By MURRAY SCHUMACH | May 30, 1976
ELLIS ISLAND, WHICH CLOSED IN 1954 AFTER a 62-year run as the greatest immigration center in history, was reopened yesterday to the public to become an instant smash hit as a tourist attraction.
About three hours after the ticket window at the Battery had opened, the ticket manager, Robert Moakler, was standing in front of the closed window, announcing:
“No more to Ellis Island today. Completely sold out.”
The line for tickets had begun forming at 6 a.m., three hours before the first ticket was sold. In the first capacity boatload of 130 tourists to the island were several who had come as immigrants, many whose parents had gone through the immigrant crush, and quite a few who felt they should visit a place so important to American history.
A nun, Sister Janet O’Neill, who had come in 1922 from Ireland and had had very little trouble being cleared, said, “I felt I just
had to go through the place again.”
For those who arrived early enough to buy tickets, pleasure did not come from the usual tourist appeals. The visitors were limited almost entirely on the guided tour to the massive building where immigrants had been processed from 1900 to 1954, when the island acquired the nickname “Isle of Tears.”
They trudged through dusty corridors with peeling walls. They peered into the rubble of what were once waiting rooms. They murmured indignantly as the guides from the National Park Service told them how pipes and motors had been stripped for the copper by vandals. They were so curious about everything that, repeatedly, on the first tour the guides—most of them in their 20’s—appealed to the visitors not to linger because a schedule had to be maintained so that the boat would be free to bring other tourists from Liberty Island.
Ellis Island: Whose Gateway is it Anyway?
By JAMES BARRON | May 17, 1994
THE AREA CODE ON THE TELEPHONES ON Ellis Island is 212, not 201. But the electricity that lights the Great Hall and the water that tourists drink come from New Jersey.
Mail to Ellis Island is routed through New York, but Federal Express and United Parcel Service deliveries go through New Jersey. The National Park Service office on the island subscribes to three newspapers: one from New York and two from New Jersey.
The footbridge to New Jersey built for workers refurbishing the historic buildings on the island was fabricated at a foundry in New Jersey, not New York. But the island itself is a New York City landmark.
The dispute over which state owns Ellis Island, New York or New Jersey, has long had that kind of on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-hand-that uncertainty. The United States Supreme Court, which agreed yesterday to hear New Jersey’s claim to ownership, could end the back-and-forth barbs.
Maybe, maybe not.
“It’s a matter of common sense,” said Rita Manno, a spokeswoman for Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey. “Territory-wise, it belongs to New Jersey.”
Across the Hudson River, no one was conceding a single square inch of the 27.5-acre island.
“Of course it belongs to New York,” said Speaker Peter F. Vallone of the City Council. “Who are they kidding? When my grandfather came here in 1900, he wasn’t going to New Jersey, he was going to New York.”
New Jersey has staked its claim on a compact between the two states that was drafted in 1833 and approved by Congress the following year. The compact put the boundary between the two states in the middle of the Hudson River. It gave New York the rights to the three acres of Ellis Island that existed at the time. Now New York is concerned about losing its standing as the gateway for the tourists who visit what used to be the gateway to America.
New York? New Jersey? No one lives on Ellis Island. The Park Service employees who work there live in both states, and the superintendent, M. Ann Belkov, says their conversations betray neither Noo Yawk nor New Joizey accents. She herself is “strictly Southern,” she said, having worked in Louisiana and Tennessee before being assigned to Ellis Island in 1990.
“It doesn’ t make a difference to us,” Ms. Belkov said. “We belong to the people of the United States.” With the emphasis, she said, on united.
MANSIONS AND BROWNSTONES
The Palaces Mansions Are Almost Gone
By VIRGINIA POPE | August 10, 1930
Morris-Jumel Mansion, one of the few remaining mansions in New York, was built between 1765 and 1770.
NEW YORK’S MANSIONS ARE VANISHING. There is scarcely a porte-cochere left in the city. For one reason or another, chiefly the high cost of land, the palaces that symbolized great fortunes a generation ago are falling under the wrecker’s hammer.
At the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 66th Street stands the Henry O. Havemeyer house, a well-known landmark, soon to be torn down. With it will go its neighbors to the north, the homes of Mr. and Mrs. J. Watson Webb and Mr. and Mrs. Horace Havemeyer.
Each vanishing mansion carries with it an example of architecture that may be termed historic, so distinctive was it of its time. For instance, Stanford White, when he designed the Joseph Pulitzer home on East 73rd Street—now yielding to a skyscraper—broke away from the “château tradition” and created a beautiful house in the style of the Italian Renaissance. Its facade, with balustrades and high arched windows, was representative of the dignity of New York’s mansion era.
When the late history of social New York is written, it will probably mention the postwar years as the era of the “cooperative migration”; it will tell how New Yorkers left the ground to live in the air, taking with them all the comforts and none of the inconveniences of their former mode of living. One tenant may wish to transplant the paneling from his old home, the family mansion, to his sky-dwelling. Presto—rooms are designed to receive it. Another owning Gobelin tapestries, which require immense wall space, will demand that windows be blocked out. The cooperative has taken over the functions of the mansion in a simplified form.
A Full Block Of Elegant Houses
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | July 27, 2008
AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF LAWRENCE Salander’s Salander-O’Reilly Galleries amid accusations of fraud, the magnificent town house that Salander-O’Reilly rented at 22 East 71st Street is on the market.
The architecture of that whole block—indeed the entire city block back to 70th Street—is unusual: All but two structures were built as private houses. That peculiar situation goes back a century, when what was soon called the Frick block was sold off for development all at once.
Henry C. Frick, a steel-industry pioneer, was the first to buy, taking the entire Fifth Avenue frontage, but he could not get possession until 1911, and completed his limestone mansion there, now the Frick Collection, in 1914.
Private-house construction swept the lots behind the Frick mansion site from 1909 through 1913. John C. Moore, president of Tiffany & Company, had Charles I. Berg design the sober Renaissance-style house at 15 East 70th. Dave Hennen Morris retained Thornton Chard to design his house at 19 East 70th, with its unusual recessed loggia; it is now the entrance to the Knoedler & Company art gallery.
On the 71st Street side, William W. Cook had the bank specialists York & Sawyer design a little jewel box for his use at 14 East 71st Street. Mr. Cook was a prominent lawyer whose book “Cook on Corporations” was a standard reference work. The architects gave him a striking limestone house with a two-story-high central bay and inset balcony at the top floor, with impressive bronze entry gates.
After the Frick house, the largest house on the block is the one that Salander-O’Reilly had rented for $1.8 million a year. It was built in 1923 by a wool merchant, Julius Forstmann. He had the veteran mansion architect Charles P. H. Gilbert design a 45-foot-wide limestone structure. It went into institutional use in the 1940’s; the current owner is asking $75 million.
The Mansion-Museums Of Old New York
By CAROL VOGEL | March 8, 1985
WHEN WE THINK OF PRIVATE RESIDENCES that have become museums, the Cooper-Hewitt and the Frick Collection generally come to mind. But there also exist a handful of lesser known museums that have been preserved as period houses and are worth an expedition. These buildings are some of the last vestiges of old New York not yet swallowed up by the city’s ferocious urbanization. And half the fun of visiting them is the chance to explore the different neighborhoods of Manhattan.
The Morris-Jumel mansion at 160th Street and Edgecombe Avenue is a grand Georgian structure that was built in 1765 as a summer residence by Col. Roger Morris, who fought for the British in colonial days. The house served briefly as George Washington’s headquarters and was headquarters for the British for most of the period between 1776 and 1783. The house was converted into a tavern for a short time. Stephen Jumel, a French wine merchant, later bought the house where he lived with his wife Eliza Bowen. After Jumel’s death in 1832, Mme. Jumel married Aaron Burr in the front parlor.
The Dyckman house, on Broadway between 204th and 207th Str
eets, is the last Dutch Colonial farmhouse left on Manhattan. This relic is now a museum. While the property once consisted of 300 acres, the building now stands on a sliver of land surrounded by postwar high-rises, gas stations and an array of seedy shops.
The land chosen for what is now the Abigail Adams Smith Museum, 421 East 61st Street, was the countryside a century ago. This stone structure was the coach house and stable on a 23-acre estate built by Col. William S. Smith, husband of Abigail Adams, daughter of John Adams. The fireplaces in every room remain from the days when the building was an inn.
Two other house museums are in Victorian brownstones. One is the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, 28 East 20th Street. This building was reconstructed on its original site by the architect Theodate Pope Riddle to resemble the brownstone where Theodore Roosevelt spent his first 14 years. And the Old Merchant’s House, built in 1832 at 29 East Fourth Street, is the only 19th-century house in Manhattan to survive with its original furniture and family memorabilia. Seadbury Treadwell, a hardware merchant, bought it in 1835; his youngest daughter, Gertrude Treadwell, lived there until 1933.
Landmark Status For Sugar Hill
By NINA SIEGAL | June 15, 2000
Two apartment buildings on Sugar Hill, Harlem.
THOUGH THEIR DAYS WERE EMBITTERED BY segregation and prejudice, African-Americans in Jazz Age New York always suspected that life was sweeter on Sugar Hill.
As they gazed up the hill from “the valley,” as central Harlem was sometimes called, Harlemites saw a hub of elite black society. The names of those who lived there read like a Who’s Who of black history: Ralph Ellison, Thurgood Marshall, Joe Louis, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington and Paul Robeson, to name a few.
The New York Times Book of New York Page 18