Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  GILLES LARRAÍN: Although the buildings in the area were blackened with age and covered with dirt and decay from years of neglect, I was intrigued by their unique character, their majestic volume, their cast-iron, Doric and Corinthian columns that architects of the 1800s had ordered from catalogs of manufacturing companies located in Pittsburgh. It was such an innovative idea at the time to construct these small buildings by ordering parts from a catalog.

  MARGOT GAYLE: The area had the greatest concentration of cast-iron architecture in New York. A lot of second-rate commercial and industrial activities on a small scale were going on. But here and there you saw a little box with geraniums on a fire escape—a dead giveaway that artists were living there. They were illegal occupants who paid rent for spaces not zoned for residential use, and so they had to be very furtive. The fire department called the section “Hell’s Hundred Acres.” If ever there was fire, they wouldn’t know where the people were.

  Robert Moses wanted to build an elevated expressway along Broome Street from the Holland tunnel to the Manhattan Bridge. Many of the cast-iron buildings are on both sides of Broome Street. The most famous is the Haughwout Building, which had been a furniture and china shop. Mrs. Abraham Lincoln owned a set of china from the Haughwout shop.

  Jane Jacobs led the fight against the expressway. At the hearing in 1968, Jane and her little coterie were seated in the room looking very innocuous. Then to the surprise of everyone, they walked up on the platform, and Jane grabbed the tape of the stenotypist, hauled it out, and tore it up. She announced since there were no records, there could not have been a hearing. The whole event was disrupted.

  At the same time, people were pushing to have that area, which was a very amorphous section by the way, urban renewaled—in other words, turned into housing projects or an industrial park. But Jack Felt, the planning commissioner, and Mayor Wagner had the good sense to hold off. They commissioned Chester Rapkin of Princeton University to go through it and do a very thorough study and analysis.

  Chester and his students went through the area building by building. They found the artists living in the lofts and concluded the neighborhood was worth saving. They put out an interesting report called “South of Houston,” which was the basis for the acronym “SoHo”; it had never had anything to do with the British Soho.

  In 1965, a New York City Landmarks Commission had been created from an act signed by Wagner and supported by a lot of people who were interested in preservation. It was now nine years later, and SoHo was designated a historic district. But the people at the Landmarks Commission were pussyfooting around; they were scared of their shadows. They thought that the real estate interests might sue them, and the Supreme Court might let them be put out of existence. “Let’s just designate two streets of iron-front buildings,” they said.

  But our little organization, Friends of Cast Iron Architecture, asked for twenty-six square blocks. We sat on corners and got signatures, especially on weekends when people were walking around to see this weird area. Our petitions had one signature per petition, which we put into attractive patent-leather boxes. I had a friend who worked at city hall. Day after day, she put a box filled with petitions on Mayor Lindsay’s desk. He told the Landmarks Commission, “Do what these people want.” He was our hero. Wagner started the battle to save what became SoHo, and Lindsay picked it up.

  CAROLE RIFKIND: SoHo was drawn as a historic district from Canal to Houston Streets and from Broadway to West Broadway. But that was just a convenience. The area is remarkably cohesive, but if you start looking at it, there’s also a lot of variety. You can also zigzag the line and see a beautiful cast-iron building on Lafayette and Crosby.

  MARGOT GAYLE: Our opponents didn’t see the value of the area. No one dreamed it would become what it became.

  MARCIA TUCKER: I can remember the sculptor Richard Serra standing on the street corner of West Broadway and Spring Street back in the 1970s and saying to me, “One day all this will be boutiques!”

  And I said, “Oh, Richard, you’re such a pessimist.”

  There were people living in the neighborhood that became SoHo all through the sixties, but they were living in rough circumstances. Once you got below Houston Street into the warehouse district, it wasn’t the Village anymore. It was dark; it was nothing.

  GILLES LARRAÍN: In 1967, when my wife and I bought a loft in a building on the corner of Wooster and Grand, hardly anyone lived in the neighborhood. It was very, very empty. There were no traffic lights, only stop signs. The streets were dimly lit with maybe one streetlight per square block. In the winter, by five o’clock at night it would be dark; people walked around with flashlights.

  The first ones to come to SoHo were the artists who needed the big spaces. They would get together with one another, have parties, and arrange showings of their works.

  The only hangout in the neighborhood was the Broome Street Cafe on the corner of Broome Street and West Broadway, where you could play pool, have a hamburger and a salad.

  For fifteen hundred we got a floor of twenty-eight hundred square feet. Our building was the first co-op in SoHo. It was nothing but walls and beams, no insulation, no bathrooms, not even a complete floor. You could overhear the most intimate conversations. But the sun shone through the front window, so I could grow my avocados, and the spaces were fantastic.

  MARCIA TUCKER: The way SoHo grew was that little groups would hear about the spaces and that it was relatively inexpensive, and they would band together and buy a building.

  Our group tried to get a building on Greene Street that fell through. Then my upstairs neighbor asked if I would he interested in this building on Sullivan Street that originally was a paint factory. It cost ten thousand.

  We moved to Sullivan Street in 1970 when it was almost all Italian, with a few Portuguese starting to come in. The Mafia was very strong. There were two social clubs right on Sullivan Street. One was right next door, and it was really big. About four o’clock one morning, we heard a giant explosion: the whole front window of the club had been blown out. The next day I went over to the grocery store across the street. “What happened?” I asked.

  And they said, “Nothing.”

  Still, it was a wonderful neighborhood. I grew up in Brooklyn, where my landlord and landlady were Italians, and I loved them to pieces. I gravitated to a place that was similar to the place where I had grown up. They had a tradition at Christmastime where all the merchants had little paper shot glasses and a bottle put out for their regular customers. The grocery store would give you stuff on credit, cash checks. It was like a small-town atmosphere. People looked out for each other; it was totally safe. By 1973, ’74, it was clear that this area was going to provide the spaces that artists needed at relatively reasonable prices, and it began to fill up.

  GILLES LARRAÍN: In 1973, I bought the six-story building at 95 Grand Street for ninety thousand dollars. Once it had been a warehouse for the Vanderbilts. By then, SoHo had been transformed from a rundown neighborhood of warehouses and small manufacturing companies to an exciting artistic community. People like Leo Castelli, who had opened up the art world uptown, began opening galleries in the area. Buildings had been cleaned, new windows installed. With their details now visible, one could see their simplicity and beauty.

  But although the artists originally discovered the place, when it became popular, the money people came in back of them. And then the rents went up and up and up. People who are renting in SoHo today are from Wall Street. The kind of community SoHo was in the 1960s and ’70s is gone. It’s no longer the experimental human laboratory it used to be. All my friends, all the artists I knew, have moved. Today it’s a tourist destination. I cannot get out of my house on the weekends; the crowds are tremendous.

  There used to be so much space. Now there is not an empty square inch in the entire neighborhood. But it is all boutiques and high-class fashion stores. What they call galleries are in actuality boutiques. There are so many of them, but how many
great artists are there? You may walk in the street and see broken glass. It’s pretty, it sparkles, but it’s not a diamond.

  This kind of thing happens over and over again. For young people, maybe the East Village is the place to hang out, maybe that is the place for artists of the future. As for me, I had the best part of SoHo. I was here at the beginning when it was so wonderful because it was so free.

  MARGOT GAYLE: I’m glad to see the buildings are still there. I’m glad it’s rich and bountiful. If the current occupants move on, the buildings will remain and be put to some other use. I think saving SoHo is the best thing I did; I also raised a couple of nice daughters.

  Reprise

  If You Live Long Enough . . .

  MICKEY ALPERT: Manhattan used to be filled with all these ethnic enclaves. The West Village, Bleecker Street was home to all Italians. Yorkville, up to the middle ’70s, had so many German delicatessens and restaurants—Café Geiger, the Bremen House, the Jaeger House on 85th and Lexington that had a live oom-pah band and seated a couple of hundred people.

  MICHAEL GEORGE: On the Lower East Side, it was amazing to see the different alphabets—Hebrew, Chinese, Russian too. You’d see Catholic churches side by side, the Irish church and the Italian church.

  I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen—today they call it Clinton—just behind the garment district. It was a neighborhood where poor people lived. Yes there was crime, but you could grow up there, you could live there. You could eat cheap, you could sleep cheap.

  A few blocks away, the Hudson River was all docks and ships and longshoremen loading and unloading. On the East River, the docks ended just below Sutton Place. What you saw were people working and lots of trucks moving about everywhere. If you look at Tudor City, which was built in the 1920s, you’ll notice there are not too many windows facing the East River. At that time, the land was junk, soap factories. Tudor City faced into its own court, an island removed from everything else. This was very much an industrial city.

  JOHN TAURANAC: There was quite a bit of light industry in Yorkville during the postwar years. The Fink Bakery on 76th Street was a commercial bakery that supplied restaurants. Their slogan was “Fink means good bread,” but their smell was nothing like the aroma of baking bread. You could also get a whiff of beer when the wind was right, byproducts from the Ruppert Brewery up in the 90s.

  There were sidings along the East River. The coal barges would tie up to the bank on 74th Street, scoop up great chunks of coal in a gigantic shovel, lift them up over the East River Drive, and dump them into the Con Edison plant. Coal was being burned in apartment houses, and the trucks went up and down the streets stopping to make coal deliveries through big chutes that went down into cellars.

  The East River was at the end of our block. In the late forties, kids used to dive in and swim. On 78th Street, a ferry ran to and from Welfare Island. There’s still a walkway over the East River Drive at 78th Street that leads to where the ferry used to dock.

  ANDY BALDUCCI: The produce market used to be on Washington Street, which runs parallel to the West Side Highway in lower Manhattan. It was shut down in the 1960s when the city decided to upgrade the downtown West Side area, clean it up. Hunts Point took over, and the whole landscape, the entire mechanism of the produce business, changed. Today Washington Street is nothing but big office buildings.

  But from where the Twin Towers were up to Canal Street—that all used to be part of the Washington Market. Most of the produce came by truck, but it also came up the Hudson in barges and boats. Rolling freight arrived from the New Jersey side; the trains would roll right onto the barges, which crossed the river and emptied out on the west-side docks. There were all these open warehouses on the Hudson River, where auctions took place of citruses and other fruit that came from California and Florida.

  The main street was Washington Street, but all the adjacent side streets were part of the market as well. There were no fancy platforms, only stores off the sidewalks with basements that were used for bananas, tomatoes, and tropical fruits because they didn’t need refrigeration. People came from throughout the metropolitan area, as far as Philadelphia. It was a real market, every inch of the way.

  I remember like it was yesterday. Ten o’clock at night, my Uncle Frank would close the store in Flushing, and we would go up to the produce market. Even though I wasn’t old enough to have a license, he let me drive his ten-wheeler, dark green Chevrolet with the canvas top while he slept.

  Once we got to the market, my uncle would say, “You go downstairs to the banana house and sleep a couple of hours while I walk the street. When I’m done with most of the purchasing, I’ll come and call you.” That was how I began in the business, serving my apprenticeship with Uncle Frank.

  SAUL ZABAR: There used to be a coffee district on Front Street. That’s downtown on the East Side, south of the Fulton Fish Market, very close to the South Street Seaport. There were slips; the docks came right up to Front Street. When the boats came in, the brokers would go on the boats to see what their coffee looked like. The longshoremen would unload the coffee onto the docks. A broker bought your coffee. It would get shipped to a trade roaster who would roast it for you, and then a trucker would pick it up and bring it to you. Zabar’s used to buy coffee from a Front Street supplier called the Beacon Coffee Company.

  All up and down Front Street were the coffee merchants’ offices and small roasting operations. The brokers and importers met daily. They’d see each other on the street, exchange conversation, samples. This was thirty-five, forty years ago.

  I have a letter dated 1973 from a company that did our roasting when we got into specialized coffees. It’s a copy of a contract for them to roast my coffee and the prices they were going to get. But by that time, the coffee district no longer existed. The area had been razed to make way for high-rise and office buildings; the slips had been filled. The brokers’ offices got moved to Wall Street, the trade roasters to Brooklyn. South Street Seaport was saved just by a fluke, and anyway it’s only the façades of buildings. The coffee district was destroyed, and in the process, a whole piece of New York City history that was two hundred years old was destroyed as well.

  Dock stevedore at the Fulton Fish Market, 1940s.

  LEONARD KOPPETT: In the years after the war, New York was still the major port. The Hudson River was lined with piers. Below 14th Street were a lot of ferries going across to Jersey and Staten Island. From 14th to 59th Streets were the piers for the ocean liners. I was on a lot of those ships saying good-bye to people who were going away to Europe. The custom was if you had your own stateroom, you had a little going-away party for two or three hours before they announced “All ashore who is going ashore.” Until the jets came in regularly in the late sixties, the ocean liners were the way to go to Europe.

  Israeli ocean liner Shalom arriving in New York in 1964. Soon airliners would replace ships as the preferred way to cross the Atlantic, and a passenger ship would be a rare sight in New York Harbor.

  KEN LIBO: By the time I was living in Chelsea, the wharves were no longer used for ocean liners, and the piers were falling apart. I would walk down to the docks quite frequently and very much had the feeling of walking into a movie set of Great Expectations, particularly Miss Haversham’s house.

  The West Side Highway was still there. It was no longer used by cars as it was unsound, but it functioned as a pedestrian walk. You could walk for a mile or two and see the Hudson River from an elevated position, an advantage for residents of the area. It was a place where you could get away from the hustle and bustle of the city. I thought there was something very romantic about it.

  JULIE ISAACSON: New York City used to be a manufacturing town. The garment industry once had seven hundred thousand workers; there was even a shoemaking industry in Manhattan. I watched as the scene changed.

  After the war, I got a job putting eyes in dolls at the Imperial Crown Doll Factory for twenty-two dollars a week. It was unskilled work; you did it by the feel of
your hand. The center of the toy and novelty industry was in New York, and it averaged about twenty-six thousand workers. Ideal Toy alone, for example, had seven thousand workers. The shops were mainly in the boroughs, but the showroom was in Manhattan at 200 Fifth Avenue. Every February there was a show for all the new toys, and every year they invented new dolls: League of Nations dolls, Shirley Temple dolls, Barbie dolls—all made in the USA. They tried to blame the unions for manufacturing dying out. It was really the imports.

  MICKEY ALPERT: Fifth Avenue from 14th to 23rd was where they made men’s clothing. Gone. The fur industry was south of where Madison Square Garden is now, buildings like 330 Seventh Avenue, 370 Seventh Avenue. No more. The garment district: you used to walk down Seventh Avenue and guys would be pushing racks of clothing—we called them Jewish airplanes. There are very few garment manufacturers here anymore.

  Barney’s was on 17th and Seventh Avenue. It was a fat boys’ store: “short and portly.” There were cheap men’s clothing stores all over: Ripley, Crawford, Bonds, Howard Clothes—they had a singing ad: “I’m the little Howard label. . . .” Rogers Peet, Weber and Heilbrook were a little better. Union Square was Klein’s, Orbach’s, Franklin Simon. SoHo was warehouses and small factories where they made buttons and zippers and envelopes.

  We used to have so much live television in New York. The Tonight Show was here, Merv Griffin broadcast from 44th next to Sardi’s, Arthur Godfrey was here, and his program was the beginning of the talk show.

  The movie theaters in the Broadway area were phenomenal palaces seating thousands of people. Radio City, the Roxy, Paramount, Capitol—they all showed first-run movies followed by live shows. A ticket cost a buck and a half. The movie would go on at nine o’clock in the morning. At 10:45 a band like Benny Goodman would come out and play. At noon the picture would go back on. At 1:45 the band would play again. This went on till midnight. There were headliners: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Johnny Ray, preceded by an opening act. I remember Georgia Gibbs opening for Danny Kaye.