A Comprehensive Guide to the Five Boroughs of the Metropolis Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Richmond Prepared by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration in New York City (1939)

Preface

This volume is a detailed description of the communities and points of interest in all the five boroughs of New York City. It attempts, also, to indicate the human character of the city, to point out the evidence of achievements and shortcomings, urban glamor as well as urban sordidness. It is intended to give both the permanent resident and the visitor an intimate, accurate knowledge of the metropolis.

The New York City Guide is the companion volume to New York Panorama and is sponsored and published under the same auspices. The two are planned to complement one another. New York Panorama draws a large-scale interpretation of the city's life and history; the New York City Guide describes the component portions of the city.

The Guide represents a collective effort of employees of the Federal Writers' Project. They have been assisted by the suggestions and criticism of many distinguished authorities. The risk of error and omission always considerable in a work of this nature, despite every precaution is slightly increased by the fact that responsible authorities sometimes disagree. More serious is the problem of keeping pace, in print, with a dynamic metropolis that overnight replaces a century-old institution with a new triumph in modernity.

Thanks must be given to the hundreds of consultants and experts who generously contributed their advice. We are especially indebted to the Weyhe Gallery and the individual artists for permission to reproduce many prints, and to the Federal Art Project for photographs, prints, and art work. We are grateful, also, for the editorial assistance of the national office of the Federal Writers' Project, and of Harry L. Shaw, Jr., former Director of the Federal Writers' Project in New York City.

The opinions expressed in this book are the opinions of the writers and the editors and are not necessarily shared by the consultants, by the sponsors of the volume, or by the Works Progress Administration.

Plan of the Guide

Under General Information is given practical information about the city and its services : transportation lines to and from New York ; motor routes ; traffic rules ; street arrangement ; transit lines ; hotel and rooming house accommodations ; restaurants; amusements; sightseeing; boat trips, etc. A map showing the principal shopping centers in Manhattan is included. A calendar of Annual Events follows. The subway and elevated systems are shown on a pocket map inside the back cover, and an outline map of the City of New York will be found on pages 6-7.

Each of the five boroughs is treated individually. Manhattan has been divided into five Sections, starting at the Battery and working generally north : Lower Manhattan, Middle and Upper East Side, Middle West Side, The Harlems, Upper West Side and Northern Manhattan. Preceding the description of each Section are given the area of the Section and the sta tions of transit lines that serve it. The Section introduction sketches the historical background and gives the contemporary description. The Sections are divided into Localities, which are described, under commonly used names, in a general south to north order. A map showing the outlines of Sections and Localities appears on pages 54-55. Transit facilities within each Locality may be readily found by reference to the directions preceding the Section introduction. In general, transit lines follow principal streets, and the names of the lines indicate their routes. Where contiguous Locali ties merge so subtly that precise definition of them is impracticable, arbi trary boundaries have been established. Points of special interest in each Locality are dealt with in order again south to north with the conditions under which they may be visited.

A number of Major Points of Interest have been singled out for separate treatment. This list is not exhaustive; rather it is representative of the many widely known institutions and buildings in Manhattan. Cross refer ence to these points is made in the stories of the Localities in which they are situated.

Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Richmond (Staten Island) boroughs are taken up in that order. An introductory essay considers each borough as a whole and traces its history ; a map indicating all the communities and main highways within the borough is included. The borough is then split into large Sections for point-by-point description. Transportation directions, boundaries, and a detailed map accompany each Sectional description. Neighborhoods and points of interest follow an order generally away from Manhattan. Hours, fees, and other terms of admission are given for points of interest that are open to visitors. Many old houses in the outlying neighborhoods are privately owned and occupied, but if such a home, or a factory, or an institution, is regularly open for inspection, that fact is noted.

The harbor, the rivers, and their islands have been grouped in one Section. The islands at the western end of Long Island Sound, however, are described with the East Bronx.

Manhattan
Introduction 49
Facts About Manhattan 52
LOWER MANHATTAN
Introduction 57
Battery and Whitehall District 60
West Street and North (Hudson) River Water Front 68
Lower West Side 73
South Street 80
Wall Street District 84
City Hall District 94
Chinatown 104
Lower East Side 108
Greenwich Village 124

MIDDLE WEST SIDE
Introduction
Chelsea
Hell's Kitchen and Vicinity
Garment Center and Vicinity
Times Square District

MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE
Introduction
Gashouse District
Stuyvesant Square District
Gramercy Park District
Union Square District
Madison Square District
Kip's Bay and Turtle Bay
Murray Hill
Fifth Avenue Shopping District
Grand Central District
Beekman Place and Sutton Place
Central Park South, The Plaza, and Fifty-seventh Street
Upper Fifth, Madison, and Park Avenues
Yorkville

THE HARLEMS
Introduction
Negro Harlem
Spanish Harlem
Italian Harlem

UPPER WEST SIDE AND NORTHERN MANHATTAN
Introduction
Central Park West District
Riverside Drive
Morningside Heights and Manhattanville
Washington Heights
Inwood
Marble Hill

Brooklyn
Introduction
Downtown Brooklyn
North Brooklyn
West Brooklyn
Middle Brooklyn
East Brooklyn

The Bronx
Introduction
West Bronx
Middle Bronx
East Bronx
Queens
Introduction
North Queens
Middle Queens
South Queens
Richmond
Introduction
East and South Richmond
North and West Richmond

NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR 1939

New York City, chartered in 1898, consists of five boroughs, each also a county: Manhattan (New York County), the Bronx (Bronx County), Brooklyn (Kings County), Queens (Queens County), and Richmond, or Staten Island (Richmond County). Manhattan, the original New York City, founded 1626, is an island; population 1,684,543, area 22.20 square miles. Brooklyn (settled 1636), on Long Island, was formerly an independent city; population 2,798,093, area 80.95 square miles. The Bronx (settled 1641) is on the mainland north of Manhattan; population 1,499,090, area 41.41 square miles. Queens (settled about 1635) is on Long Island; population 1,346,659, area 121.12 square miles. Richmond (settled about 1638) is in the southwest corner of New York Bay; population 176,683, area 57.15 square miles.

The metropolitan area of New York City is the district within a radius of approximately 40 miles of City Hall and includes parts of New Jersey, Westchester County (N.Y.), Connecticut, and Long Island (see map on page 17). The population of the area in 1930 was nearly 11,000,000.

The city is governed by a mayor and a city council, the latter elected by a system of proportional representation. A president, with certain local duties and powers, heads each of the five boroughs. The county affairs of the various boroughs are conducted independently of the municipal government.

TRANSPORTATION

There are four types of urban transit in New York City: subways, elevated railways (els), busses, and surface cars. The fare is 50 on all lines, except the Fifth Avenue Coach Co. (io0) and certain routes in outlying parts of the city. Subways link all the boroughs except Staten Island, which is accessible only by the municipal ferry (5$). Three el lines serve Manhattan and the Bronx, and five serve Brooklyn and parts of Queens; all points in Queens are also reached by the Long Island Railroad. In Manhattan, surface lines, mostly bus, are the chief means of cross-town travel.

Staten Island has a bus system and a railway, the Staten Island Rapid Transit Co. (see map on page 599), both with terminals at the St. George Ferry. The Hudson and Manhattan Railroad (Hudson Tubes) is a rapid transit service between New York and Newark, N. J.

YACHT AND BOAT BASINS

Anchorages, marinas, and landing stages are available for pleasure craft.

ANCHORAGES. About 40 anchorages in port of New York. For permits and information apply to Captain of the Port, Barge Office, Battery Park. LANDING STAGES. PIER 9, foot of Wall St., East River; PIER A, Battery Park, Hudson River. For information apply to Department of Docks, New York City. MARINAS. 26TH ST., East River; j^rn ST., 96TH ST., and ENGLEWOOD, N. J., Hudson River; JACKSON'S CREEK BOAT BASIN, Flushing Bay, Queens, Long Island Sound. For information apply to General Superintendent, Department of Parks, New York City; for New Jersey marinas apply to Palisades Interstate Park Commission, 80 Centre St.

Manhattan

Manhattan

THE liner steams through the Narrows (the Normandie, Queen Mary, Bremen; the dozen greatest ships of the world, sailing from Liverpool, Southampton, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Havre, Genoa, head for that narrow strip of water and steam dexterously through it, turn precisely toward the slender island toward the north). Out of an early morning fog come brooding, ghostly calls. A dark blotch appears, takes form an anchored tramp: coffee from Brazil, rubber from Sumatra, bananas from Costa Rica and slowly disappears; another liner is suddenly moving alongside, also steaming northward, and then dissolves into the white nothing. Invisible ferries scuttle, tooting, across the harbor.

The Limited, bearing a sight-seeing family (there are 115,000 of them daily from Waco, Mobile, Los Angeles, Kansas City), the literary genius of Aurora High School, the prettiest actress in the Burlington dramatic club, a farm boy hoping to start for Wall Street, and a mechanic with an idea, pounds across the state of New Jersey. They cross the meadows, see far off the great wall of the city and dive into the darkness beneath Jersey City and the Hudson River. Or perhaps the train comes from Winnipeg, Gary, Erie, and follows the Hudson toward its mouth or crosses the Hell Gate from New England.

In the city, night workers, their footsteps sharp, irregular on the quiet streets, return home. A water wagon rolls by. Bands are still playing in half a dozen night clubs. In the Upper East Side, in the Upper West Side, in the Gashouse and Hell's Kitchen, in Chelsea and Greenwich Village, the faint and broken ringing of alarm clocks comes to the empty street. Another day, another dollar. Don't forget to tell the laundryman not to starch my shirts! Slowly the air between the buildings fills with light.

The crowd increases with the light, a black moving mass, workbound; a million pale faces; a clicking of heels that swells to one sustained roll of thunder. The roar of the city shoots up to encompass it. A rivet overhead pierces the sultry sky; another shakes the earth. He took me to the Paradise. He's been to college. We came home in a taxi. The voice is lost in the rumble of an elevated train jammed with work-going clerks gazing at a woman leaning out of the window at 124th Street.

The morning sun picks out an apartment house, a cigar store, streams through the dusty windows of a loft. The racket swells with the light. These shoes are killing me, she said, taking the cover off the typewriter. Main Central is up to jorty-six. Did you read about the earthquake? Looms, shears, jackhammers, trolley cars, voices, add to the din. And in the quieter streets the hawker with the pushcart moves slowly by. Badabadabada O Gee! Hawkers of vegetables, plants, fruit. Badabadabada O Gee!

In half a million rooming-house rooms the call penetrates ill-fitting windows. The boy who came to be a writer is waked in his mid-town room and dresses for his shift on the elevator. In Chelsea the girl who came to be an actress launders her stockings. The boy who was going to Wall Street sprawls on his bed, wincing as each cry cuts into his dream of the smell of fresh hay and warm milk. A deep blast rises, drowning the sound of hawkers, children, automobiles. The Conte di Savoia steams up the river; wine from Capri, olive oil from Spain, figs and dates from North Africa.

Shouting screaming kids fill the streets, playing baseball, football, hopscotch, jump-rope, dodging swift-moving trucks and taxis. Down Fifth Avenue marches a May Day parade sixty thousand strong. Solidarity forever, solidarity forever, the portentous tramp, tramp of regimented feet; slogans called, banners flying. Up lower Broadway an open car moves slowly through the yelling throng and on its pulled-back hood, laughing, waving into the snowstorm that flutters thickly downward from high-up windows, sits a returned aviator, explorer, movie actor, champion chess player, the first man to walk the length of Manhattan backwards.

The late afternoon sunshine glitters on windshields, chauffeurs' caps, on Parisian gowns, Chinese ivories, ebony from Africa, Mexican pottery, and furs from Siberia. Driving back from Southampton in the fall we used to sit up in front with the chauffeur. Aunt Helen had a staircase in her house that cost fifteen thousand dollars. He died right in the middle of the depression. Smells of cooking fill the corridors. The lights go on in a loft on a side street, in an office on the thirty-fourth floor of the Empire State Building, along the streets and the bridges. The tugs are riding with port and starboard lights.

The sun leaves the highest of the city's buildings. There are no steamship blasts but loud now are the hoarse pipings of tugs, the yap of ferries with homeward-bound crowds. I've worked overtime three nights in a row. Two martinis. Did you see the way he looked at me when I put on my hat and walked out? The light burns out at the foot of 23d Street, 22d Street, 2ist, 2Oth, ipth . . .

The light leaves the flat roofs of the ghetto along the river. Here is the greatest city of the Jews. Here, all unconscious of exoticism, thousands of persons celebrate bar mitzvah, sit shiva for their dead. Streets littered with papers, bags of garbage shooting out of windows, lines of pushcarts selling food, neckties, pictures, bric-a-brac.

East Side, West Side, all around the town, boys and girls together hanging around shop doors; whispering, giggling in tenement hallways, in courtyards smelling of backhouses. The world's most populous Italian city outside of Italy spends the sultry night on doorsteps, standing, sprawling on sidewalks of broken cement. So with the world's third Irish city. The world's Negro metropolis is the most crowded of all. Home has scarcely room to hang one's hat, which instead is hung in churches, club rooms, rent parties. And in the Upper West Side fifty thousand families will be reading the newspaper by the sitting room table; fifty thousand Upper East Side families will be finishing a quiet game of bridge or sitting at the library table; and among the thousand already asleep on the Lower East Side will be a large number of old timers who have never seen Broadway.

With final blast, quivering over the harbor, a liner moves out of its docks; southern cotton for Liverpool, northwestern wheat for Bordeaux, Kansas City hides for Brazil, Virginia tobacco, Massachusetts shoes, Chicago canned meats, lumber from the Pacific Coast.

The ship moves along the path of a thousand living steamers, past the ghosts of ten thousand sailing vessels and steamships; vessels that brought the Dutch, the English and their goods, Negro slaves, West Indian rum, British textiles, Australian wool, German machinery.

Night draws to a close. Bands are still playing behind the closed doors of half a dozen night clubs. The river wind lifts yesterday's paper the length of a block. A water wagon rolls by. A solitary taxi tracks the wet paving. Goodnight darling, goodnight, goodnight.

A blast from the far-off Narrows whispers through the dead streets; spruce from Norway, asbestos from South Africa, German, Austrian, Polish, Italian refugees.

FACTS ABOUT MANHATTAN

It's a tight little island, 12 l/ 2 miles at its longest, 2 l/ 2 at its widest, covering 14,211 acres, rising from its surrounding rivers to a height of about 268 feet near Fort Tryon Park, and standing at about latitude 40 N., longitude 73 W. 1,688,769 persons were listed as living here in 1938. 217,976,370 commuters in 1936 traveled into and out of town by way of Manhattan's 20 bridges, 18 tunnels, and 17 ferries, while an average of 115,000 noncommuting visitors are said to pour into town daily through the great railway terminals. For the accommodation of these visitors there are 326 hotels which have a total assessed valuation of $47979350.

Transportation within Manhattan is furnished by rapid transit systems of subways and elevated lines (owned by the city but operated both municipally and privately), which in the year ending June 30, 1938, carried 1,038,499,269 passengers; by street surface railways, which in the same year carried 70,936,650 passengers; by busses carrying 312,426,522 and by the 6,893 taxicabs licensed to operate in the borough in 1938.

Two districts, the first lying between the Battery and City Hall, the second bounded by Twenty-third and Fiftieth Streets and lying approximately between Ninth and Park Avenues, contain a high percentage of blocks in which a population of more than 5,000 work during the day. It was estimated in 1936 that 62.6 per cent of Manhattan's land was used for residential purposes and 22.9 per cent for nonresidential. Nearly all the remainder, 14.25 per cent, is given over to parks, of which there are 93 with a combined area of 2,303.897 acres.

In 1937, 24,550 Manhattanites were born, 29,441 couples were married, and 25,228 died. The number of church members was estimated as 853,972. The foreign-born white population was set at 641,618 in 1930. In 1927 there were 465,000 Jewish residents, or 25.71 per cent of the total population. Negroes in 1930 numbered 224,670; Italians, 117,740; Free State Irish, 86,548; Russians, 69,685; Germans, 69,111; Poles, 59,120. These were the principal race and language groups in Manhattan. The borough lost 170,821 of its residents between 1930 and 1938, and this shifting of population represents a trend that is likely to continue as a result of the development of cheap transportation to the suburbs. Though realtors have been shaking their heads, Manhattan land was assessed at $3,962,738,145 in 1938. The largest rental group of tenants, 36.5 per cent, paid from $30 to $59 a month in 1936, while 20.7 per cent paid $19 a month or less and 18.6 per cent, $60 or more. In 1937, 297 new buildings were erected at an estimated total cost of $60,775,^50.

297,446,059 shares of stock, worth $1,859,525,825, changed hands at the New York Stock Exchange in the year 1938. Retail trade amounting to $1,462,499,000 was carried on in 41,233 stores in 1935. 18,694 manufacturing establishments in 1935, employing throughout the year an average of 288,036 workers and paying them $359,893,432 in wages, added $1,322,533,066 to the worth of materials which had already cost them $1,110,223,156. Manhattan docks received a large percentage of the 3,547 vessels of a net tonnage of 20,291,204 which entered the port of New York in the year ending June 30, 19^8, while a proportionate share of the $650,252,600 in gold and silver and $1,160,726,960 in merchandise imported, and of the exports amounting to $50,780,694 in gold and silver and the $1,238,331,380 in merchandise was handled here.

In 1937 there were 231 homicides in the borough. In 1936, 78 were convicted of homicide; 274, felonious assault; 485, burglary; 422, robbery; 493, grand larceny; 94, forgery; 8, arson, and 76, rape. Fire Department engines and trucks in 1937 went shrieking to 9,042 fires and kept the losses down to $2,647,970. Seventy-three hospitals looked after the islands' sick and incapacitated. The home relief case load as of October 22, 1938, was 68,121. 243,899 students were enrolled in various public institutions of learning, of whom 126,375 attended elementary school; 39,284, junior high school; 55,231, high school; and 23,009, vocational schools.

Of the city's water supply gushing down from 22 reservoirs, Manhattan and the Bronx consumed in 1937 545,400,000 gallons a day. 2,794,445,326 kilowatt hours of electricity and 20,530,875,700 cubic feet of gas were used in Manhattan in 1937, and in 1938, 897,579 telephones were in active operation.

The 40 to 50 legitimate theaters in Manhattan are patronized yearly by about 8,500,000. It is reported that 218 motion-picture houses were doing business as of April, 1937, and 1938 saw something like 300 night clubs in more or less continuous operation. Twenty-nine museums and a zoological garden furnish educational recreation for the more serious-minded, and 73 art galleries were listed in December, 1938.

OUTLINE MAP

MANHATTAN LOCALITIES AND SECTIONS

SECTION BOUNDARIES

LOCALITY BOUNDARIES

LOWER MANHATTAN

Battery and Whitehall District

West St. and North (Hudson) River Water Front

Chinatown
Lower East Side
Greenwich Village

Lower West Side

South Street

Wall Street District

City Hall District MIDDLE WEST SIDE

Chelsea

Hell's Kitchen and Vicinity

Garment Center and Vicinity

Times Square District MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

Gashouse District

Stuyvesant Square District

Gramercy Park District

Union Square District

Madison Square District

Kip's Bay and Turtle Bay

Murray Hill

Fifth Avenue Shopping District

Grand Central District

Beekman Place and Sutton Place

Central Park South, the Plaza, and Fiftyseventh Street

Upper Fifth, Madison, and Park Avenues

Yorkville

THE HARLEMS
Negro Harlem
Spanish Harlem
Italian Harlem

UPPER WEST SIDE AND NORTHERN MANHATTAN

Central Park West District
Riverside Drive
Morningside Heights and Manhattanville
Washington Heights
Inwood
Marble Hill

"It is as beautiful a land as one can hope to tread upon," said Henry Hudson.

Lower Manhattan

BATTERY AND WHITEHALL DISTRICT
WEST STREET AND NORTH (HUDSON)
RIVER WATER FRONT LOWER WEST SIDE
SOUTH STREET WALL STREET DISTRICT
CITY HALL DISTRICT CHINATOWN
LOWER EAST SIDE GREENWICH VILLAGE

Area: Battery on the south to i4th St. on the north; Hudson River to East River. Map on pages 54-55 Principal north-south streets: Broadway, West St., Hudson St., Varick St. (and 7th Ave.), 6th Ave., Chrystie St. (and 2d Ave.), Allen St. (and ist Ave.). Principal cross streets: Fulton St., Chambers St. (and New Chambers St.), Canal St., Broome St. (and Delancey St.), Houston St., and i4th St.

Transportation: IRT Broadway-yth Ave. subway (local), South Ferry to i4th St. stations; IRT Lexington Ave. subway (local), Bowling Green to i4th St. stations; BMT subway (local), Whitehall St. to Union Square stations; 8th Ave. (Independent) Grand Concourse or Washington Heights subway, Broadway-Nassau St. to 1 4th St. stations; 8th Ave. (Independent) Queens-Church Ave. subway, East Broadway to i4th St. stations; 2d, 3d, or 9th Ave. el, South Ferry to i4th St. stations; busses on all principal north-south and cross streets except West St., Fulton St., and Broome St.

THE FLAT lower end of Manhattan, between the Battery and Fourteenth Street, is the oldest section of the city and the richest in historical associations. Today it has become a commercial, financial, and industrial center where steamship docks crowd one another, and ferries, subways, elevated lines, bridges, and traffic arteries converge and spread fanwise, distributing people and merchandise to every section of the Nation.

In the extreme south is the Battery and Whitehall district, in whose skyscrapers, overlooking the Goddess of Liberty and the ships that pass out to sea, are concentrated the executive offices of transatlantic lines, of exporters and importers, and of consular representatives of foreign nations. West Street, fronting the Hudson River, and edged with busy docks, is the main highway for the city's incoming and outgoing supplies. On the Lower West Side are the produce markets, the dark streets of Manhattan's Syrian colony, and numerous warehouses interspersed with tenements.

Broadway, the nation's foremost thoroughfare, starts at the Battery and bisects lower Manhattan. Below Chambers Street it reflects the varied character of the downtown neighborhood ; then it becomes a street of bare lofts and garment factories, whose aspect has changed little in half a century. East of Broadway, above the Battery, the tall buildings of the financial district surround Wall Street ; skirting them to the east is South Street, the city's maritime center in the days of sailing ships where now railroad and freight barges are warped into dock by puffing tugs, and the smell from anchored fishing boats drifts inland.

City Hall Park and Foley Square, with their municipal, State, and Federal buildings, lie to the north of Wall Street; and beyond is little, crowded Chinatown. The Bowery, sinister street of lurid fiction and drama, starts below the eastern edge of Chinatown and runs northward beneath the rumbling elevated. Stretching approximately from Broadway to the East River and north to Fourteenth Street is the Lower East Side, crowded slum area of many nationalities, but noted chiefly for its concentrated Jewish population. Greenwich Village, with meandering streets, tenements, and charming old houses, marks the northwest terminus of lower Manhattan.

Prior to the completion of the Erie Canal, the story of Lower Manhattan was largely that of the whole city. In contrast to Boston, Philadelphia, and other Colonial settlements, New Amsterdam, belonging to the Dutch West India Company, was founded in 1626 mainly for commercial reasons. As time passed, the little trading post became the market place and financial capital of the rapidly expanding colony. Almost from the first, commercial establishments began a ceaseless march northward, encroaching upon steadily retreating residential districts. The Wall Street stockade, built in 1653 by the Dutch at the town's northern limit, was removed by the British in 1699; by I 77 I tne c ity> w * tn 22,000 population, extended to Grand Street; and after the Revolution the movement northward reached Greenwich Village, accelerated by the yellow fever epidemics at the turn of the century.

Under English rule, following New Amsterdam's surrender in 1664, two great steps toward freedom were taken here. A free press was assured in 1735 as a result of the trial of John Peter Zenger, editor of the NewYork Weekly Journal, and liberty of worship was firmly established early in the eighteenth century.

The history of New York during the Revolution is less notable than that of Boston and other large towns, since the British occupied Manhattan for almost the entire duration of the war. Early in the conflict, however, liberty poles had been erected on the Common (now City Hall Park), and the lead statue of George III in Bowling Green had been melted into bullets for the Colonists' cause. After the Revolution, New York (the city still consisted of the lower part of the island) boasted of being the first capital of the United States of America. Though suffering temporary setbacks, New York, like several other major American cities, grew rapidly in the next fifty years. In 1792 an embryonic stock exchange was modestly inaugurated under a Wall Street tree. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the expansion of the West began the process which soon made New York the market place and banker of half a continent, and the primary gateway to Europe. By 1830 the population was 202,589; by 1860 the rising tide of immigration, which was to sweep the city in successive waves for another half-century, had helped to raise the total to 813,669. After the Civil War the Erie Canal lost much of its importance, but by this time New York, with its superb harbor formation, had already attracted a tremendous foreign commerce, and it now became also a railroad center, with many of its freight terminals located across the Hudson.

The more spectacular side of nineteenth-century New York history is associated with lower Manhattan. As early as the i83o's Tammany Hall had discovered the advantages to be derived for itself from the vote of the unassimilated immigrant, and City Hall became the pawn of a group of men whose main object was to deplete the public treasury. The infamous operations of the Tweed Ring in the i86o's and early 1 870*5, and of other early Tammany politicians, belongs to the past of this older part of the city. Following the Civil War, Wall Street, only a few short blocks south of City Hall, began its more ambitious career as financial controller of the nation.

The history of Lower Manhattan has, however, another side. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries "Newspaper Row" was situated on Park Row. Here James Gordon Bennett, Joseph Pulitzer, and William Randolph Hearst fought their sensational battles. Lincoln Steffens discoursed on political corruption, and Richard Harding Davis and O. Henry spun their tales O. Henry finding in this exciting, chaotic, sordid section of the city much material for the stories of "Baghdad on the Subway."

With increasing rapidity, the residential areas receded northward. About the 1850*5 aristocratic St. John's Park began to yield to commerce, and the well-to-do were to be found only in the purlieus of Lower Manhattan, around Greenwich Village. By the time the World War was declared, only a small number of the city's more prosperous residents remained below Fourteenth Street, chiefly in mansions around Washington Square and lower Fifth Avenue.

Beginning in the i88o's Greenwich Village was occupied by the Irish and Negroes, and later by Italians. At approximately the same time, the Germans and Irish of the Lower East Side were supplanted by Italians, Russians, Poles, and to an even greater extent by East European Jews, who, despite poverty, filth, and overcrowding retained their native gaiety and hope. Today, a change is appearing in the Lower East Side; though it is still a slum area, the old "lung" blocks are slowly giving way before widened avenues and new apartment houses.

The settlement there of an increasing number of artists and painters in the 1910*5 gave Greenwich Village national prominence as an artistic and literary center.

Except for the East Side and Greenwich Village, lower Manhattan is now almost entirely devoted to commerce and finance. In the Wall Street district skyscrapers multiplied rapidly after the turn of the century until building was halted by the stock market crash of 1929. Park Row is no longer Newspaper Row, but an adjunct to the commercial district. Old landmarks were erased by the postwar building boom ; and a solid wall of giant structures, almost unbroken from the Battery to Fourteenth Street, hides the busy traffic of the Hudson River.

BATTERY AND WHITEHALL DISTRICT

Area: South of Battery Place, Beaver St., and Old Slip. Map on page 63.

The Battery, threshold of Manhattan, spreads in a decided arc along the North River shore at the southernmost extremity of the island, where East and North rivers empty their sediment into the Upper Bay. West Street (see page 68), rumbling with the trucks that serve almost a hundred North River docks, extends northward from the Battery. Massive blocks of office buildings and the structure that carries the final stretch of the Ninth Avenue el fill the rest of the northward view until, at the northeast corner of the park, Bowling Green opens out in an irregular plaza; from here Broadway cuts a clean northbound way through the towering stonework of the lower island. Squared ponderously against Bowling Green, south, is the U.S. Custom House. North, nearest the river, is the Whitehall Building. The name "Battery" derives from a British fort built along the river in 1693.

The curve of the present el on the park's east border and Pearl Street, extending east, mark the original shore line. The rest of the area is filled-in land. Beyond the el structure are State Street and the conglomerate skyscraper contours that mount toward Broad and Wall Streets. At the southeast corner of the park opens the great plaza of South Ferry, where all forms of Manhattan's transportation subway, el, ferry, bus, and taxi have a compact major terminus, and where the heavy traffic artery, South Street (see page 80), opens out opposite, bordering the docks to the east.

The BATTERY is as attractive to water gazers now as when Herman Melville wrote of "Men fixed in ocean reveries. . . . Landsmen: of week days pent up in lathe and plaster tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite."

But the park is more than a Sunday and holiday attraction ; it is a welcome breathing space in an area dominated by marine commerce. From the sea wall that bounds its twenty-one acres can be viewed the busy traffic of the North River liners, tugs with tows of barges and scows, lowriding Diesel cargo boats from the Barge Canal, passenger steamers of the Hudson lines, and ferries plying cross-river and cross-harbor from the row of terminal rail and marine docks on the Jersey shore. Only one railroad has entry for its freight into Manhattan by land; the bulk of the railroad freight must be transshipped by tug and barge.

Southwest appears the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe Island (see page 411), and beyond it is Ellis Island and the great immigrant station (see page 415). Five miles down the bay rise the abrupt hills of Staten Island. South by southeast lies Governors Island (see page 413), military reservation, with Castle Williams, twin fort to Castle Clinton the present Aquarium standing grimed and grim on its highest headland. Between Staten Island and Brooklyn is the Narrows, the strait connecting the Upper Bay with the Lower Bay and the sea. Plans for a suspension bridge, between the Battery and Hamilton Avenue, Brooklyn, were approved by the City Council early in 1939. The estimate of the cost was $41,200,000.

Central in popular attraction as well as in prominence among the buildings of Battery Park is the Aquarium (see page 307), set close beside the river. At one time it served as an immigration station.

Some immigrants are still landed at the Battery after examination at Ellis Island. A Government (Department of Labor) ferry disembarks them at the BARGE OFFICE, at the southeast extremity of the park. A second ferry, operated by the Army, plies between the Barge Office and Governors Island. From Colonial times to the Civil War a barge served as transport between the office and the island, and it was this circumstance that gave the office its name. The original Barge Office was a charming Colonial structure surmounted by a tall cupola from which a beacon shone at night. The present building is an exceptionally interesting work in the style of the Venetian Renaissance, and it is one of the few buildings in Manhattan with a street arcade. The Barge Office building contains branch offices of the Customs Service, Coast Guard, and Immigration Service. Here, too, ship-news reporters gather to meet incoming liners, for it is from the Barge Office that Customs cutters leave to meet those ships that heave to at Quarantine for sanitary inspection on entering the port. A TABLET at the western end of the building bears the names of radio operators lost at sea.

Southeast of the Barge Office is the bow-roofed, painted building of the SOUTH FERRY TERMINAL, its upper deck invaded by the el structure. From here, powerful steam ferries carry trucks, pleasure cars, and passengers to St. George, Staten Island, in about twenty minutes (see page 410).

At the north end of the park is PIER A, second oldest structure on the water front, occupied by the Department of Docks and the Police Department's Harbor Precinct. A clock tower at the edge of the pier is a memorial to soldiers and sailors killed in the World War. The clock sounds the signals for the watches kept on shipboard, and also shows the time by dial. Adjacent is a boat basin where police boats are tied beside pleasure craft. At the end of the sea wall is the two-story city FIREBOAT STATION, its tower overlooking the harbor. This is the headquarters for a fleet of ten fireboats protecting about 771 miles of New York and New Jersey waterfront. The i3O-foot Fire Fighter, powerful enough to throw a stream over George Washington Bridge, is berthed beside the building.

Midway along the sea wall is a squat building used as a TICKET OFFICE for excursion boats. Craft bound for the Jersey side of the Lower Bay and steamboats fo/ Coney Island leave from this point. The Battery boatmaster, Peter (Buck) McNeill, who has his office here, keeps a sharp watch for would-be suicides to whom this is a favorite spot.

BATTERY

AND WHITEHALL DISTRICT

KEY TO BATTERY AND WHITEHALL DISTRICT MAP

1. Whitehall Building U.S. Weather Bureau

2. Department of Docks Police Harbor Precinct

3. Fireboat Station

4. Aquarium

5. Statue of Giovanni da Verrazano

6. Statue of John Ericsson

7. Flagpole (Evacuation Day)

8. Oyster Pasty Battery Cannon

9. Barge Office

10. South Ferry Terminal Staten Island Ferry Slip

11. South Ferry Building

12. Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary

13. U.S. Army Building

14. U.S. Custom House

15. Statue of Abraham de Peyster

16. Cunard Building

17. Standard Oil Building

18. New York Produce Exchange

19. Fraunces Tavern

20. Site of First Tavern and City

Hall in New York

21. Site of the First Printing Press

It was on the original rocky finger of land that the first Dutch colonists built their huts and a simple breastwork later called Fort Amsterdam. In 1626 Peter Minuit, governor of the new settlement, "bought" the island from the Manhattoes for cloth and fripperies worth about twentyfour (gold standard) dollars. Administered by the Dutch West India Company, New Amsterdam was the scene of frequent disputes between its inhabitants and its governors. Englishmen, Jews, and other colonists, traders, and adventurers from many lands, had, however, settled there among the Dutch by 1664, when a British war fleet appeared to demand the surrender of the town to the Duke of York, who had received from his brother, Charles II, a grant embracing the present state of New York, the islands off the New England coast, and part of the present state of Maine. Despite the efforts of Director Peter Stuyvesant, the burghers refused to defend New Amsterdam, and the English flag was run up without opposition. It remained there until the Revolution, except for one year, during which the armed naval forces of the Dutch Republic retook it and undertook to carry on under Dutch rule; the settlement was returned to England under a treaty made in the Old World.

Names, plaques, and statues in the park recall the early history of the Battery. A bronze STATUE OF GIOVANNI DA VERRAZANO, Florentine navigator who is said to have entered the harbor in 1524, stands in the park. On a granite FLAGSTAFF base, Minuit is shown making his deal with the natives. A CANNON believed to have been part of the armament of the Oyster Pasty Battery (1695-1783) has been preserved. A FLAGPOLE commemorates the one greased on Evacuation Day, November 25, 1783, to prevent the hauling down of the British flag by the American troops. And a bronze FIGURE OF JOHN ERICCSON honors the memory of the designer of the Monitor, first turreted battleship, and the screw propeller. The street bordering the park on the north is Battery Place.

From the Battery, streets wind their way in erratic angles. Colonial brick, nineteenth-century sandstone, and modern steel- skeletoned office buildings stand side by side. Clerks, maritime employees, Custom House officials, stenographers, sailors on shore leave, Army and Navy men, South Street lodging house indigents, commuters to Staten Island and Brooklyn, and tourists move along together.

The sea dominates this virile neighborhood. Sou'westers, sea boots, pea jackets, and dungarees are displayed in the shop windows along the side streets. Model ocean liners and colorful posters advertise offices of the great STEAMSHIP AGENCIES along Broadway, while sandwich men mutely call attention to passport photo studios.

State Street, bordering Battery Park on the east, was the town's most fashionable thoroughfare until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the wealthy residents began moving uptown. Here were the homes of the merchant princes, known as the "Peep-o'-Day Boys," because they arose at dawn to peer across the harbor at Staten Island where signal staffs flashed news of ships sighted beyond the Narrows. One residence, No. 7, between Pearl and Whitehall Streets, survives, almost merged with the contemporary drabness of neighboring buildings under the winding el. Its tall white columns and delicate ironwork balcony still suggest the opulence of another day. The interior, with its fine old hand-carved mantelpieces, may be seen by permission of the Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary, which for many years has maintained the dwelling as a HOME FOR IMMIGRANT GIRLS. The house, it is believed, was built according to plans drawn by John McComb, one of the architects of the present City Hall. On the site of the South Ferry Building near by, at i State Street, once stood the homes of Peter Stuyvesant and Robert Fulton, the inventor. Opposite the main entrance of the South Ferry Building, is the U.S. ARMY BUILDING, 39 Whitehall Street. This red-brick structure with a two-story granite foundation, conservatively built in 1886 in the style of a generation earlier, houses many Army departments of the New York district, such as the recruiting, information, and pictorial services, and an engineers' unit.

Facing Bowling Green, between State and Whitehall Streets, is the CUSTOM HOUSE, in which are the offices of the Collector of Customs of the Port of New York, and the headquarters of Custom Collection District No. 10 (which embraces the sub-ports of Albany, Newark, and Perth Amboy). Other offices in the building are those of the Comptroller of Customs, the Surveyor of Customs, the Collector of Internal Revenue for the Second New York District, the Coast Guard, the Tariff Commission, the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office, the Bureau of Statistics of the Department of Commerce, and Station P of the New York Post Office.

The building, somewhat ponderous in its neoclassic treatment, was designed by Cass Gilbert. It was completed in 1907 at a cost of more than seven million dollars, including the price of the land. Seven stories high, the masonry is Maine granite, heavily embellished with dolphins, tridents, and other nautical symbols. On pedestals advancing from the front of the building are four heroic sculptured groups by Daniel Chester French, representing Asia, America, Africa, and Europe. Across the sixth story are twelve statues dedicated to commercial centers of the world: Greece and Rome, by F. E. Elwell; Phoenicia, by F. W. Ruckstull; Genoa, by Augustus Lukeman; Venice and Spain, by F. M. L. Tonetti; Holland and Portugal, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens ; Denmark, by Johannes Gellert ; Germany, by Albert Jaegers ; England and France, by Charles Grafly. A cartouche by Karl Bitter, on the seventh floor, depicts two winged figures bearing the shield of the United States. Ten paintings by Elmer E. Garnsey, representing world ports as they appeared in 1674 when the Dutch flag last floated over Fort Amsterdam, are on the walls of the reception room in the main corridor.

The Custom House occupies the site of Fort Amsterdam, whose four bastions, corresponding to the points of the compass, commanded both the North and East rivers. The fort, including a governor's house built for Peter Stuyvesant, was demolished in 1790. On its site a mansion, known as the Government House, was erected. At the time, ambitious New Yorkers, hoping their city would become the nation's capital, intended the mansion for the President's home. It was used by Governors Clinton and Jay, and later did service as a customhouse until destroyed by fire in 1815.

In Colonial days Battery Place, which bounds Battery Park on the north, was a much wider street and was known by its Dutch name, Marcktveldt; later this was anglicized to Marketfield. This thoroughfare was the site of New Amsterdam's first cattle market. The WHITEHALL BUILDING at No. 17, which occupies the entire block between West and Washington Streets, comprises two buildings. The original twenty-story edifice, facing the park, was built in 1900; a thirty-two-story addition was completed in 1910. Many leading shipping companies and a number of consulates have their offices in this building. Above these is the office of the U.S. WEATHER BUREAU, with an instrument shed on the roof.

Standing at the foot of the deep sunless canyon of lower Broadway is BOWLING GREEN, probably the city's oldest public park. Here, according to the legend, astute Peter Minuit made the bargain that gave Manhattan to the white man. In 1638-47 this oval spot was part of the hog and cattle market of Marcktveldt. Later, it served as a parade ground for the Dutch militia. The English fenced off the plot and in 1732 leased it to three citizens for use as a private bowling ground. The rent was set at one peppercorn a year. During the Revolution, the royal crowns ornamenting the fence pickets disappeared. A bronze STATUE OF ABRAHAM DE PEYSTER, merchant and one-time mayor of the city (1691-5), by George Bissell, has stood here since 1896.

East of Bowling Green is the dark red-brick and terra-cotta building of the NEW YORK PRODUCE EXCHANGE erected in 1881-2 from plans by George B. Post. The design of the exterior bearing walls is derived from that of a Roman aqueduct: the arched openings, arranged in long orderly lines, double in number as they rise. Inside, the produce brokers busy themselves trading and watching the quotation boards from the floor. The boards display Chicago, Winnipeg, Minneapolis, Duluth, St. Louis, and Kansas City grain prices, and New York and New Orleans cotton prices as well as those of foreign markets. The Produce Exchange is the oldest incorporated exchange in the country, having been chartered in 1862 by special act of the State Legislature. Its trading floor is the largest in the world, measuring 220 feet long, 144 feet wide, and 60 feet to the skylight.

The STANDARD OIL BUILDING, 26 Broadway, incorporates two structures of different age and height. It is surmounted by a massive pyramidal tower, once one of the most imposing of the New York sky line. A bust of the first John D. Rockefeller by Jo Davidson is on the left side of the corridor. Crowds swarming through the building and along the street in the daytime are in the main unaware of its existence, but at night the lighting of the marble gives the bust a strange appearance, and people passing through the now deserted region often stop before the entrance and gaze curiously inside.

The CUNARD BUILDING, at 25 Broadway, is still one of the city's most luxurious structures. Its interior, with its vast domed hall, is decorated with murals by Ezra Winter, depicting the voyages of Leif Ericson, Sebastian Cabot, Christopher Columbus, and Sir Francis Drake.

Beaver Street, east of Bowling Green, is lined with commercial and maritime houses, and restaurants. The original Delmonico's, which eventually moved to Madison Square, is part of the neighborhood's tradition. At the end of Beaver Street is Pearl Street, so named because of the sea shells found there in the days when the East River almost reached this street. The inlet, filled in more than a hundred years ago, was known as Coenties Slip, a corruption of the Dutch nickname Coentje, a combination of the given names of Conraet and Antje Ten Eyck, whose home was near by. At the head of the slip, on what is now the northwest corner of Pearl Street and Coenties Alley, Governer Kieft, tired of playing host to traders in his own home, built in 1641 the Stadt-Herberg, or City Tavern, a five-story stone structure with an unobstructed view of the East River. Twelve years later, when the community rose to the dignity of a municipality, New York's first hostelry was converted into the Stadt Huys, or City Hall. A TABLET high on the wall of 73 Pearl Street marks the site of the building, demolished in 1790. Near by at No. 81 another TABLET marks the site where William Bradford established in 1693 the first printing press in New York, "At the sign of the Bible." A quaintly carved female figure is set above the street in the building at No. 88 over a TABLET commemorating the great fire of 1835 which destroyed most of the buildings of Coenties Slip. The blaze, which raged for nineteen hours, destroyed 650 buildings with a loss of twenty million dollars. Ten years later a fire in the same neighborhood destroyed 345 buildings and caused property damage amounting to six million dollars. '

At the corner of Pearl and Broad Streets is FRAUNCES TAVERN, one of Manhattan's most cherished landmarks and a notable restoration of early Georgian Colonial work. The relatively square proportions, regular window spacing, brickwork, white portico, hipped roof with its light balustrade, and the interior paneling, are all characteristic of the style, but Dutch influence is echoed in the shape of the dormers, which differ from the gabled English type. It was erected in 1719 as a residence by Etienne de Lancey, a wealthy Huguenot. The merchant firm of his grandson Oliver (De Lancey, Robinson, and Company) turned it into a store and warehouse in 1757. The building was bought in 1762 by Samuel Fraunces, a West Indian of French and Negro blood, who opened it as the Queen's Head Tavern. Washington bade farewell to his officers in 1783, in the tavern's Long Room, faithfully restored in 1907 by the Sons of the Revolution (not to be confused with the Sons of the American Revolution). A museum, exhibiting Revolutionary relics, is 01 the third floor, and on the fourth is a small historical library with paintings by John Ward Dunsmore. (Open daily except Sunday 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; admission free.) Headquarters of the Sons of the Revolution occupy much of the building; a restaurant patronized by Wall Street bankers and shipping and business men is on the ground floor.

WEST STREET AND NORTH (HUDSON) RIVER WATER FRONT

Area: Battery Place to y2d St. along North River. Maps on pages 75, 127, and 149.

Although the western rim of Manhattan is but a small segment of New York's far-flung port, along it is concentrated the largest aggregate of marine enterprises in the world. Glaciers of freight and cargo move across this strip of North (Hudson) River water front. It is the domain of the super-liner, but it is shared also by the freighter, the river boat, the ferry, and the soot-faced tug. Great trunk line railroads from the hinterland, barred from the city by the Hudson, transship their passengers to ferries at the Jersey railheads and their freight cars to scows. In consequence, the railroads use nearly as many North River piers as the steamship lines.

The broad highway, West Street and its continuations, which skirts the North River from Battery Place to Fifty-ninth Street, is, during the day, a surging mass of back-firing, horn-blowing, gear-grinding trucks and taxis. All other water-front sounds are submerged in the cacophony of the daily avalanche of freight and passengers in transit. Ships and shipping are not visible along much of West Street. South of Twenty-third Street, the river is walled by an almost unbroken line of bulkhead sheds and dock structures. North of Twenty-third, an occasional open spot in the bulkhead permits a glimpse of the Hudson and the Jersey shore beyond. Opposite the piers, along the entire length of the highway, nearly every block houses its quota of cheap lunchrooms, tawdry saloons and waterfront haberdasheries catering to the thousands of polyglot seamen who haunt the "front." Men "on the beach" (out of employment) usually make their headquarters in barrooms, which are frequented mainly by employees of lines leasing piers in their vicinity.

In Revolutionary days what is now West Street was under water. About 1811 the bank was extended and raised to allow the building of docks. A number of water grants, or permanent leases, were given at nominal rentals to individuals and corporations who later profited greatly when the city reclaimed the property. Not until 1870, however, did this western water front come into considerable use, and it was 1890 before West Street displaced South Street as the main gateway for water-borne traffic. Today it is worth $470,000 an acre, with a pier value of $1,500 per linear foot, and is the most lucrative water-front property in the world.

Passenger lines use many North River terminals. Transatlantic, South American, West Indian, and intercoastal ships dock north of Fourteenth Street, while the terminals of the coastwise and Long Island Sound lines are scattered between this point and the Battery. The most notable exception is the "Great White Fleet" of the United Fruit Company, whose steamers, engaged in the West Indian fruit and passenger trade, are berthed at the famous "banana docks," Piers 2, 3, 7, and 9, near the foot of West Street.

In this section, water-front shipping operates literally in the shadow of Manhattan's downtown sky line. Opposite the United Fruit terminal, two red-brick structures, the thirty-seven-story DOWNTOWN ATHLETIC CLUB at 1 8 West Street and the thirty-one-story OFFICE BUILDING ad joining it at No. 21, both designed by Starrett and Van Vleck, contribute peaks to the architectural sierra. Their modern appearance is accentuated by the more conventional aspect of the near-by Whitehall Building (see page 66). Not far to the north, somewhat more modest heights are reached by the NEW YORK POST and WEST STREET BUILDINGS. The former, a seventeen-story structure of buff -colored brick at 75 West Street, houses the daily paper which was founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1 80 1. The twenty-three-story West Street Building, at No. 90, was designed by Cass Gilbert and completed in 1905. Its elaborate pinnacles, decorative chimneys and gables disclose the late French Gothic influence.

Just north of the West Street Building, a pedestrian footbridge provides safe passage from the foot of Liberty Street to the ferry terminal of the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Between this point and Fortysecond Street, the railroads maintain eleven ferry services to Jersey City, Hoboken, and Weehawken. These are used by more than sixty million passengers, and between ten and eleven million vehicles, annually.

In the block between Liberty and Cortlandt Streets, at 107 West Street, is the WATCH MUSEUM of Fred W. Jensen and Son, managed by three generations of the Jensen family. Its collection contains timepieces of every known variety, the most intricate being a mechanism that splits seconds and records the passing minutes, hours, days of the week and month, and phases of the moon.

In 1807, Robert Fulton's Clermont cast off from a pier at Cortlandt Street and steamed up the Hudson to Albany, demonstrating the practicability of steamship transportation.

The NEW YORK TELEPHONE COMPANY SKYSCRAPER at No. 140 is an unusually successful attempt to obtain the maximum spatial benefits under the restrictions of the zoning law. Designed in 1926 by Ralph Walker of the office of McKenzie, Voorhees, and Gmelin, it is the largest telephone building in the world, thirty-two stories high and covering an area of 52,000 square feet. Despite difficulties raised by its irregularshaped site, the building masses are exceptionally well related, endowing the structure with a silhouette of great strength. The exterior, of buff brick and limestone with a granite base, is enriched by ornamental flowers and elephant heads. This building is the headquarters for the largest of the component companies of the Bell Telephone System, serving New York State and part of Connecticut.

From the World-Telegram Building, between Barclay Street and Park Place, to the great Pennsylvania Railroad pier for perishable freight, between Hubert and Watts Streets, West Street bounds the Washington Market (see page 74). At 260 West Street stood the Phoenix Foundry where Captain John Ericsson in the late 1830*5 constructed America's first iron sailing boats and steamships with screw propellers. Opposite Duane Street, the ramps of the newest extension of the WEST SIDE (Elevated) HIGHWAY slope into West Street. A 35O-foot parabolic bridge over the wide intersection at Canal Street links this segment with the fourand-one-half-mile elevated roadway that follows the water front to the Henry Hudson Parkway (see page 284) at Seventy-second Street. This magnificent express drive, which provides the motorist with an unexcelled view of the Jersey water front, the mid-town sky line, and the liners berthed along the North River, leads by means of Canal Street ramps directly to the Holland Tunnel (see page 19). Eventually the highway will be extended south, curving around the Battery and South Street to the East River Drive.

ST. JOHN'S PARK FREIGHT TERMINAL, a three-story structure covering three city blocks between Charlton and Clarkson Streets, marks the southern terminus of the New York Central's West Side line. The terminal, which was opened in 1934, is the principal delivery station for dairy freight in the city.

In a group of buildings which occupy the block around 463 West Street and a portion of the adjoining block are consolidated the RESEARCH LABORATORIES OF THE BELL TELEPHONE SYSTEM. Here scientists have made many contributions to the telephone and to allied means of communication, such as sound films, picture transmitters, and public address systems. To visit these laboratories special permission must be obtained.

GANSEVOORT MARKET, or "Farmers' Market," as it is generally known, occupies the block between Gansevoort and Little West Twelfth Streets. Farmers from Long Island, Staten Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut bring their produce here at night for sale under supervision of the Department of Public Markets. Activities begin at 4 A.M. Farmers in overalls and mud-caked shoes stand in trucks, shouting their wares. Commission merchants, pushcart vendors, and restaurant buyers trudge warily from one stand to another, digging arms into baskets of fruits or vegetables to ascertain quality. Trucks move continually in and out among the piled crates of tomatoes, beans, cabbages, lettuce, and other greens in the street. Hungry derelicts wander about in the hope of picking up a stray vegetable dropped from some truck, while patient nuns wait to receive leftover, unsalable goods for distribution among the destitute. The market closes at 10 A.M. and is not open Sundays or holidays.

In a wharf at the foot of Gansevoort Street, Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, once served as customs inspector. Across West Street is the WEST WASHINGTON MARKET, comprising ten quaint red-brick buildings which house a live poultry market patronized mostly by kosher butchers. Since poultry requires ample heat in winter, every stall is equipped with a furnace, so that each roof adds more than a dozen chimneys to its picturesque architecture.

From this point to Twenty-second Street, Eleventh Avenue (as the water-front street is here called) skirts the weather-beaten CHELSEA PIERS designed by Warren and Wetmore. These nine great docks, built by the city between 1902 arid 1907 for the transatlantic ships of that period, serve such lines as the United States, Grace, Cunard White Star, Panama Pacific, and American Merchant, and are among the busiest on the river. SEAMEN'S HOUSE, an eight-story Y.M.C.A. building at the corner of Twentieth Street and Eleventh Avenue, furnishes up-to-date living and recreational facilities for more than 250 sailors.

Because of the heavy concentration of shipping at the Chelsea Piers, this area has been a strategic sector in the industrial conflicts that break out periodically between maritime labor and shipowners. During the 1936-7 strike, when rank and file seamen tied up the ships in their struggle for a better agreement, Eleventh Avenue was the scene of frequent clashes between pickets and scabs, "goon squads" (thugs) and defense squads, strikers and police. The NATIONAL MARITIME UNION OF AMERICA, established after the termination of the strike, has its headquarters at 126 Eleventh Avenue.

Unlike their sea-going brothers, the port's "dock-wallopers" (longshoremen), thousands of whom live in slum areas adjoining West Street, have been quiet in recent years, although they steadily oppose the hiring system, called the "shape-up," whereby the boss stevedore selects his working force several times daily from crowds of longshoremen massed before the dock gates.

At Twenty-second Street the North River shore line bends sharply westward. The highway is called Thirteenth Avenue from this point to Thirtieth Street, whence it extends northward to Fifty-ninth Street as Twelfth Avenue. Not far beyond the great Twenty-third Street ferry terminal, in the block between Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh Streets, the STARRETT LEHIGH BUILDING dominates the water front. The building, erected in 1931, represents an effort to solve the problem of freight distribution in a congested metropolis. It comprises a huge railroad yard, loading platforms for trucks and trailers, and facilities for the storage, repacking, redistribution, manufacturing, and display of goods. Although the first three floors and central portion are steel- frame in construction, the rest of the building follows a cantilevered concrete design. The great horizontal bands of concrete floor, brkk parapet, and continuous windows sweep majestically to meet the service portion, which rises, framed in steel, near the center of the block. The building has unusual power and constitutes an important step in the development of contemporary architecture. The architects were Russell G. and Walter M. Cory.

The railroads have burrowed deeply into the water front between Twenty-fifth and Seventy- second Streets, pre-empting most of the piers and nearly all the property opposite. The New York Central's THIRTIETH STREET YARD straddles ten city blocks, and its SIXTIETH STREET YARD, thirteen blocks, constituting two of the largest privately owned areas in the city. The latter is the main receiving, classification, and departure yard for the only all-rail freight line on Manhattan Island. Both yards were being arranged in 1939 to provide for building construction over the tracks (see page 157 ).

Sandwiched among this welter of railroad sidings are the piers of the Hudson River lines and the terminals of many of the world's greatest liners. The new TRANSATLANTIC DOCKS of the Cunard White Star, French, Hapag Lloyd, Italian, Swedish American, and Furness Bermuda lines extend from Forty-fourth to Fifty-seventh Street, and were especially designed to handle luxurious ships like the Queen Mary, Normandie, Europa, Rex, and other greyhounds of the Atlantic. Piers 88, 90, and 92, each of which is 1,100 feet long, make this terminal the largest in the world.

LOWER WEST SIDE

Area: Battery Place on the south to Spring St. on the north; from West St. east to Trinity Place, Church St., and Broadway (Franklin to Spring St.). Maps on pages 75 and 127.

Though this district has a few modern skyscrapers with impressive marble fagades, the character of the neighborhood is derived from produce sheds, crates, smells of fruit and fish of Washington Market, and the amazing variety of retail shops selling radios, pets, garden seeds, fireworks, sporting goods, shoes, textiles, and church supplies. There is an endless flow of traffic through the streets, whose buildings, grimy with age, reveal their pre-Civil War glory in carved lintels, arched doorways, and ornate cornices.

Five streets Washington, Greenwich, Hudson, West Broadway, and Church form the main north and south thoroughfares, but the narrow, transverse streets leading to the Hudson River carry the burden of the traffic, much of which heads for New Jersey through the ferries at the end of Chambers, Barclay, Cortlandt, and Liberty Streets, or via the Holland Tunnel. Beneath the streets roar the subways and above them hurtles the Ninth Avenue el, which creates an atmosphere like Milton's "darkness made visible."

Tunnels, railroads, ferryboats, subways, and road traffic have made this section one of the most important transit centers. Close to the river and harbor, it is also easily accessible to all parts of the city, making it a natural site for the largest fruit and produce market in the world. Location, too, accounts for the flourishing retail trade: New Jersey commuters returning home after a day's work in the city often find it practicable to buy their necessities here.

The markets inject a rude vitality into the district. While most of the city sleeps, WASHINGTON MARKET, north of Fulton Street and spreading to many side streets between West and Greenwich Streets, reaches the peak of its activity. Perishable products must be distributed quickly; in this concentrated market they pass from jobbers to wholesalers and retailers. Streets free of daytime traffic are taken over by trucks of dealers and farmers. Freight cars discharge their burdens; produce is moved, stored, stacked, boxed, and crated. A weird spatter of lights provides illumination, and in the glow truck drivers, farmers, tally-keepers, and inspectors work at a swift pace. In winter the streets are lined with bonfires around which the men warm themselves.

The name Washington Market is used to designate the entire wholesale produce section and the city-owned RETAIL MARKET, a block-square building between Washington, West, Fulton, and Vesey Streets. The Bear Market, established in 1812, was the predecessor of the original Washington Market. The latter, built in 1833, was also known as Country Market, Fish Market, and Exterior Market. The present Retail Market building was reconstructed in 1914. Its interior is split into stalls that are leased. An entrancing array of food is offered including caviar from Siberia, Gorgonzola cheese from Italy, hams from Flanders, sardines from Norway, English partridge, native quail, squabs, wild ducks, and pheasants; also fresh swordfish, frogs' legs, brook trout, pompanos, red snappers, codfish tongues and cheeks, bluefish cheeks, and venison and bear steaks.

In the vicinity of Cortlandt and Greenwich Streets, two blocks east and south of Washington Market, is the retail radio district. Seed and pet shops, largely patronized by suburban commuters, are south of Barclay

LISPENARD

LOWER WEST SIDE WEST STREET

KEY

(Also see maps on pages 127 and 149)

1. United Fruit Company Piers

2. Syrian Quarter

3. Downtown Athletic Club

4. 21 West Street Office Building

5. New York Post Building

6. Recreation Training School

7. Planters

8. West Street Building

9. Church of St. Nicholas

10. Watch Museum

11. Retail Radio District

12. Hudson Terminal

13. Washington Retail Market

14. Washington Wholesale Produce

Market

15. New York Telephone Company

Building

16. Ecclesiastical Supply Stores

17. Federal Office Building

18. St. Peter's Church

19. Fireworks Stores

20. Sporting Goods Shops

21. Seed and Pet Shops

22. World-Telegram Building

23. West Side Highway

24. Cosmopolitan Hotel

25. Western Union Telegraph

Building

26. New York Mercantile Exchange

27. Long Distance Building

28. Site of the Phoenix Foundry Street, on West Broadway and Greenwich Street. Barclay Street has a number of ecclesiastical supply stores, originally attracted there because of the presence in the neighborhood of old St. Peter's Church.

Dealers in fireworks who also stage the pyrotechnic spectacles Niagara Falls, Flying Eagles, Pyramids of Fire, and the like for carnivals and celebrations throughout the country and in South America, have stores near Church Street and Park Place. Their factories are in New Jersey, and the proximity to the ferries has been a factor in the location of the business here since the i88o's. On the south side of Chambers Street between Broadway and West Broadway, are many sporting goods shops. Wholesale grocery houses line Greenwich Street near Beach Street.

The trading center for the 7,500,000 cases of eggs and 3,500,000 tubs of butter which New Yorkers consume each year is the NEW YORK MERCANTILE EXCHANGE at Hudson and Harrison Streets. Prices are based upon daily receipts and open market conditions. The dairy and poultry commission houses are near Reade Street and a little farther north are huge warehouses from which emanate a pungent aroma of coffee, tea, and spices.

Not far away from the Exchange, in the vicinity of Church, Reade, and Duane Streets, is the shoe jobbing center, and east of West Broadway from Thomas to Franklin Streets, the wholesale textile market.

In the market section, comprising a world of its own, is the SYRIAN QUARTER, established in the late i88o's at the foot of Washington Street from Battery Place to Rector Street. A sprinkling of Turks, Armenians, Arabs, and Greeks also live here. Although the fez has given way to the snap-brim, and the narghile has been abandoned for cigarettes, the coffee houses and the tobacco and confectionery shops of the Levantines still remain.

Using the same methods and types of implements as native Syrian bakers, the confectioners make delicious sweets such as baclawa (chopped walnuts or pistachios, wrapped in forty layers of baked dough of gauzelike thinness flavored with goat's milk butter and drenched in honey), knafie (twisted hank of fried dough with a core of chopped pistachios flavored as baclawa), sweet-sour apricot paste sprinkled with pistachios, strings of walnuts dipped in grape syrup, and "Syrian delight" scented with attar of roses. Restaurants feature shish kebab (spit-broiled lamb) and rice cooked in salted vine leaves, and furnish narghiles upon request. Other neighborhood stores sell graceful earthen water jars; brass, silver, and pewter trays; tables inlaid with mother of pearl; brass lamp shades fringed with variegated beads, and Syrian silks of rainbow hues.

LOWER MANHATTAN SEEN BENEATH BROOKLYN BRIDGE

THE BATTERY, 1679

THE BATTERY, 1939

LINER NIEUW AMSTERDAM IN THE HUDSON

EAST RIVER DOCKS BELOW BROOKLYN BRIDGE

SOUTH STREET PIER AND WALL STREET TOWERS

FRONT STREET

OLDEST HOUSE IN MANHATTAN, II PECK SLIP

NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE, BROAD AND WALL STREETS

NUMBER ONE WALL STREET AND STATUE OF JOHN WATTS

WALL STREET CANYON

The tiny CHURCH OF ST. NICHOLAS (Greek Orthodox), at 155 Cedar Street, between Washington and West Streets, was built in 1820. Each January 6, on the Day of Epiphany, the chapel observes the colorful ceremony of the Rescue of the Cross but not as in the old days, when a small wooden crucifix was thrown into the harbor from the Battery landing to be rescued by the most agile Greek youth. The waters proving too cold, the custom was changed in 1937, and now the cross may be drawn ashore by a white ribbon attached to it.

Near the Syrian Quarter stands the RECREATION TRAINING SCHOOL at 107 Washington Street. Organized in 1936 under the direction of the WPA, it gives instruction in more than one hundred courses, and has an enrollment of about twelve hundred.

Greenwich Street, as Greenwich Road, skirted the shore of the Hudson until about the nineteenth century when the river was pushed back by dumping fill. Now heavily walled with merchandising warehouses, it is cast into shadow by the Ninth Avenue el, New York's first elevated rapid transit system.

A relic of the old days, the PLANTERS, at Albany and Greenwich Streets, was established as a hotel in 1833. It closed when the Civil War broke out, but after being remodeled in 1922 was opened as a restaurant. In its heyday the hotel was patronized by Southern planters, its location I being convenient to the Perth Amboy ferry, and thus to the Washington Post Road and the railroads connecting with the South. Near by, at 113 Greenwich Street, is the rear entrance to the New York Curb Exchange Building (see page 86).

The twin twenty-two-story structures connected by a bridge at 30 and 50 Church Street, were among the first skyscrapers. Designed by Clinton and Russell, these red tapestry-brick buildings were erected in 1908 at a cost of $12,000,000. Their name, the HUDSON TERMINAL, derives from the downtown station of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad (the Hudson Tubes) underneath the buildings. The station is connected by way of tunnels with BMT and IRT subways. A block north, on the east side of Church Street, is the graveyard of St. Paul's Chapel (see page 98), a subsidiary of Trinity Parish.

The imposing FEDERAL OFFICE BUILDING, a $7,697,000 structure of limestone, occupies the block from Church Street to West Broadway, and from Vesey to Barclay Street. Cross and Cross, and Pennington, Lewis, and Mills, associate architects, designed the heavy fifteen-story structure, a pretentious example of the "classic-without-columns" style of some recent public buildings. It houses branches of the New York Post Office, the Foreign and Domestic Commerce Bureau of the Department of Commerce, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Treasury Department.

Hemmed in by modern business structures, ST. PETER'S, on the southeast corner of Barclay and Church Streets, is the oldest Roman Catholic church building in Manhattan. The edifice was erected in 1786, three years after the congregation was organized, and was rebuilt in 1838. Steps lead to the six massive columns supporting a pediment in whose center stands a figure of St. Peter holding the keys of heaven and hell.

Old Columbia College, founded in 1754 as King's College (see page 383), stood until 1857 between Barclay and Murray Streets, and West Broadway and Church Street. West Broadway, then Chapel Place, was a wandering lane which led from Canal Street to the college chapel.

During the early eighteenth century, the vicinity of Greenwich and Warren Streets was the site of Vauxhall Garden. A reproduction of a contemporary London resort, it flourished about forty years, and was the rendezvous of most fashionable Colonials.

The COSMOPOLITAN HOTEL, at Chambers Street and West Broadway, the oldest hotel in the city, was opened in 1850 as the Gerard House, drawing steady patronage from near-by steamship piers and the first Grand Central Terminal, then across the street. Among the patrons were bearded 'Frisco gold miners who staggered into the lobby after a trip around the Horn, dumped their gold-dust, went out to the barber, and came back "unrecognizably clean." The hotel survives, a ramshackle building, with stores crowding its entrance, and an incongruous neon sign flashing from its fagade.

Many buildings on the block between Church Street and Broadway, and Thomas and Worth Streets represent the florid architectural style of the post-Civil War period when decorative feats, structurally impossible in stone, were accomplished in cast iron. These white buildings were erected by Griffith Thomas in 1869 for the flourishing textile trade, in which many of the town's wealthiest citizens were engaged.

This block was the first site (17731870) of the New York Hospital (see page 246). One of the great riots in the city occurred here in 1788 when a mob stormed the hospital to attack medical students and doctors who, it was claimed, had used for dissection the cadavers of "respectable people, even young women of whom they made an indecent exposure." The militia, summoned by the governor and mayor, removed the students to a near-by jail for safekeeping, and when the crowd gathered in front of the prison, the troops fired, killing five and wounding scores.

The WESTERN UNION TELEGRAPH BUILDING, at 60 Hudson Street, rises twenty- four stories high in thirteen shades of brick, like a huge red rock projecting out of the city; Voorhees, Gmelin, and Walker were the architects. The LONG DISTANCE BUILDING of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 32 Sixth Avenue, near Walker Street, designed by the same firm, is the world's largest communication center and the junction point of many important telephone trunk routes. It has direct circuits to important cities and radio telephone circuits to points in every part of the world. All private wires from New York to other cities, whether telephone, telegraph, or teletypewriter, lead through the building, which is also the main control point for the great radio broadcast series. The land west of Broadway to the river, between Fulton and Christopher Streets, was once known as the Queen's Farm. In 1705 Queen Anne granted it to Trinity Church. Since 1731 descendants and alleged descendants of Annetje Jans, an early owner of the farm, have sued Trinity, either for the return of the land or for pecuniary compensation. William Rhinelander in 1794 obtained ninety-nine-year leases of a large part of Trinity land; the Common Council in 1797 augmented these holdings by granting him all rights to the water front adjoining his property. With the rapid northward expansion of the city in the nineteenth century, the area became the site of large commercial structures and yielded millions in rent annually to the Rhinelander family.

For many years Trinity land was ignored by builders because of its leasehold status, and not until the Lower East Side of Manhattan had been built up did they turn to this section. In 1803 the streets from Warren to Canal were laid out. Four years later, St. John's Church, a chapel of Trinity parish, was erected on Varick Street near Beach, and St. John's Park, named for the chapel, was set up on the block bounded; by Varick, Hudson, Laight, and Beach Streets. The park was open only to residents of the houses facing it. From 1825-50 this district was the home of the city's wealthy aristocrats. When the plebeian population encroached upon it the wealthy moved northward. The park was razed in 1869 to make way for the freight terminal of the Hudson River Railroad which later was merged with the New York Central Railroad; in 1936 the terminal was moved to West Houston and West Streets.

Canal Street, named for and following the course of a stream that ran from Collect Pond (the site of the present Foley Square district) to | the Hudson, is the main traffic artery connecting New Jersey and Long Island by way of the Holland Tunnel and the Manhattan Bridge.

The HOLLAND TUNNEL, named for its chief engineer, Clifford M. Holland, begins at Watts Street, between Hudson and Varick Streets, a block north of Canal, and bores underneath the Hudson River to Twelfth Street, Jersey City, New Jersey (toll: passenger cars 50$). A spacious and impressive plaza leads to a narrow tunnel entrance, whose dingy masonry lacks the exciting quality of the glistening interior. The tunnel is made of cast iron lined with concrete and the side walls are inset with white vitreous tiles, with markers at -quarter-mile points. East- and westbound tubes are separate, each two lanes wide, together carrying a traffic of 12,000,000 cars a year. (The exit of the eastbound traffic tube is on Canal Street.) Catwalks in each tube are paced by guards who keep vehicles at the required speed of thirty miles an hour. The tunnel was constructed by the states of New York and New Jersey at a cost of fifty million dollars. Work was begun on October 12, 1920, and the tunnel opened on November 13, 1927. It is operated by the Port of New York Authority.

Old SPRING STREET PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, founded in 1811, stands at Varick and Spring Streets. In 1834, a mob spurred by prominent politicians, almost destroyed the original frame building because Dr. Henry G. Ludlow, the pastor, was a firm advocate of abolition. Two years later, the present brick structure was erected.

The firearms firm of FRANCIS BANNERMAN AND SONS, still active at 501 Broadway, near Broome Street, was founded in 1865 by a former naval officer in the Civil War. It has a remarkable collection of military arms and war relics. (Open Monday to Friday 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday 8:30 a.m. to 12 m.; admission free.) Chronological arrangements of the exhibits lucidly indicate the stages in the development of modern lethal weapons. Prized possessions include such objects as the headquarters flag of Major General "Light Horse" Harry Lee, famous Revolutionary cavalry leader and father of General Robert E. Lee; a doublebarreled flintlock shotgun that belonged to Napoleon I, and the guidon of the Seventh U. S. Cavalry used in the battle of Little Big Horn (General Custer's last stand).

SOUTH STREET

Area: South Ferry to Corlears Hook along the East River. Map on page 91.

The bowsprit of many a clipper Baltimore, California, McKay and Liverpool packet once jutted over South Street, now visited by ungainly scows, fishing smacks, lighters, and car floats from Long Island and Jersey City. This famous "street o' ships," a two-mile stretch of bumpy stones skirting the East River from the Battery to Corlears Hook, is historically associated with New York's development as a great port; though today but few ocean-going craft breast the piers that once berthed whole fleets of gallant windjammers. The Lightnings and Comets and Flying Clouds of a later day, requiring deeper water, steam up the broad fairway of the North (Hudson) River, leaving South Street to the traffic of the ten-ton truck. Viewed, from the piers near the Battery end of South Street, the East River bridges Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg form a superimposed pattern of steel and stone, like a photograph from a camera that was jarred during exposure. Across the river, on a bluff overlooking the plebeian harbor activities, are the staid residences of Brooklyn Heights, for more than a century the center of wealthy conservative society.

The rumble of speeding trucks, the blasts from near-by steam shovels, and the intermittent whistles from passing river traffic join in crescendos of dissonance. Sailors in pea jackets and dungarees, workmen in overalls, neat office clerks and shabby drifters throng the highway. On mild sunny days the drifters sit along the docks with their "junk bags," share cigarette butts, and stare endlessly into the water. In winter they cluster in little groups about small bonfires; many sleep at night in doorways with newspapers for covering. Others join the homeless men who sleep in the MUNICIPAL LODGING HOUSE, ANNEX No. 2, in the old ferry shed at the foot of Whitehall Street, which can accommodate about 1,200 nightly.

The majority of the piers along South Street are leased or owned by railroad companies. Pier 4, at the foot of Broad Street, marks approximately the site of the first dock built by the Dutch on Manhattan Island. What is now South Street was then under water, so the exact location is inland. The NEW YORK STATE BARGE CANAL TERMINAL occupies Pier 6 where arklike, weather-beaten Erie Canal barges are moored. Many of the barge captains are married, and their families live on board the year round. In winter the boats sometimes lie for months along the river banks farther north.

At 6 1 Whitehall Street is the old EASTERN HOTEL, now used as an office building. In 1822 the owner, Captain John B. Coles, remodeled the original structure, a warehouse, and named it the Eagle Hotel. It was renamed the Eastern in 1856. The frame of the building reputedly contains mahogany beams that were used as ballast in eighteenth-century merchantmen. Among the hotel's guests were Robert Fulton, Jenny Lind, P. T. Barnum, and many of the illustrious entertainers who appeared in Castle Garden, now the Aquarium (see page 307).

The two blocks between Whitehall and Broad are typical of the lower length of South Street. Here, dilapidated brick and brownstone structures crowd the sidewalks, upper floors forlornly vacant, street floors occupied by cut-rate "drink and food" stores, low-priced barber shops, secondhand clothes stores, sail lofts, and chandleries.

Broad Coenties Slip, which was filled in about 1835, encloses JEANETTE PARK, a rendezvous popular with South Street's army of beached seamen and homeless unemployed. The, park was named for the ill-fated vessel of the Jeanette Polar Expedition, promoted in 1880 by the elder James Gordon Bennett. The concrete and chromium structure within the park houses the famous OYSTER BAR, established in the neighborhood in 1849. ^ s founder, Robert Peach, opened up shop by the simple device of setting three planks across two barrels. In 1898, Patrick O'Connor, age twelve, became his assistant, and, five years later, his partner. Peach retired in 1917, but O'Connor carried on. He now operates the park bar.

The SEAMEN'S CHURCH INSTITUTE OF NEW YORK occupies a thirteenstory brick and stone-trimmed structure at 25 South Street (latitude 40 42' 10" N, longitude 74 oo' 35" W). Surmounting the roof is a small lighthouse tower erected in 1913, by public subscription, as a memorial to the passengers, officers, and crew of the S.S. Titanic, luxury liner that sank April 15, 1912, after striking an iceberg on her maiden voyage to America. Standing guard over the main entrance of the building is a gilded figurehead of Sir Galahad, reminiscent of the carvings on the prows of the clipper ships which docked near by during the nineteenth century. Above the figurehead is a ship's bell rescued from the S.S. Atlantic which foundered off Fisher's Island on Thanksgiving Day, 1846, with a loss of seventy-eight lives. The bell, connected with a clock, rings ship's time every half -hour. The institute was founded in 1834, and in 1843 established churches on the water front. In 1854 activities were expanded to include provision for sailors' lodging and entertainment. Several missions, floating churches, and boarding houses were operated throughout the port until 1913 when the present building was opened as the institute's center. An annex with accommodations for a thousand guests making a total lodging capacity of about fifteen hundred at the institute was completed in 1929. Seamen are charged moderate rates for lodging and meals; privileges include admission to moving pictures and other entertainment, and the use of libraries, club, game, and writing rooms. A merchant marine school, conducted by the institute, is the oldest surviving school of its kind in New York. It was founded in 1916.

In the middle of Old Slip is the FIRST PRECINCT POLICE STATION, a grim, solid structure reminiscent of a fortified Florentine Renaissance palazzo. North, across the street, is the UNITED STATES ASSAY BUILDING, a five-story granite building with a massive chimney. The public is not admitted to this sanctuary where scrap gold and silver are melted into bullion.

The thoroughfare's only skyscraper is at Wall and South Streets, 120 WALL STREET. It is a huge, white, thirty-three-story building, uncompromising in its literal conformance to the setback ordinance. Ely Jacques Kahn was the architect. A bronze PLAQUE identifies the site as that of Murray's Wharf, where George Washington landed April 23, 1789, on his way to Federal Hall for his inauguration as President. Private seaplanes of Wall Street commuters land at the MUNICIPAL DOWNTOWN SKYPORT between Piers n and 12.

The squat fortress-like WAREHOUSE on the corner of De Peyster Street is one of the oldest buildings on the street. It was built of rough-hewn granite blocks more than one hundred years ago by the Griswold brothers, East India merchants.

FULTON MARKET, largest wholesale fish mart on the Atlantic Coast, was established in 1821 as a retail market to "supply the common people with the necessities of life at a reasonable price." The market covers an area of six city blocks bounded by Fulton, Water, Dover, and South Streets, and includes two large markets on the South Street docks near Fulton. Before daybreak tons of fish are unloaded from the holds of stubby-sticked trawlers and draggers and from refrigerated trucks from New England and New Jersey. Six days a week, from 2 to 9 A.M., the section is a bedlam as rubber-booted men in the street and in narrow stalls clean, bone, ice, unpack, and repack approximately one hundred varieties of fish. After a section of the market structure collapsed in 1936, the city undertook the modernization of this landmark. Three new market buildings have been planned (1939).

SWEET'S, a restaurant established almost a century ago, is on the southwest corner of Fulton and South Streets. In old days it was especially popular among shipmasters and South Street merchants, and from 1850 to 1860, when "blackbirders" flourished along the East River, many nefarious slave-running deals were transacted in this South Street "Delmonico's."

From a pier near the present Peck's Slip, the first licensed Brooklyn ferry began operations in 1654. Fares were three stivers for whites, and six stivers for Indians. Between Dover and Roosevelt Streets, South Street passes under the Brooklyn Bridge (see page 313). Near by, at 174 South Street is the BIRTHPLACE OF FORMER GOVERNOR ALFRED E. SMITH.

Almost the entire block between Catharine Slip and Market Slip is occupied by the HEARST PUBLICATION PLANT which houses the editorial and press rooms of the New York Journal and American and the Sunday American. The American Weekly is also printed here.

The stretch of shore from Catharine Slip to Corlears Hook was occupied by the shipbuilding industry during the War of 1812 and in the decade preceding it. Many of New York's privateers that harassed British sea-traffic during the war were constructed in the local shipways. And from these yards was recruited Noah Brown's heroic band who fashioned Commodore Perry's fleet for the Battle of Lake Erie.

South Street gradually assumes a quieter tempo at Market Slip as trucks and pedestrians become less frequent. Farther on, at Rutgers Slip, there is a pathetic little park more liberally supplied with benches than with shade. From Clinton Street to Corlears Hook Park the East River is walled from view by a continuous line of railroad pier sheds, and only an occasional blast from an unseen tug reminds one that water-borne traffic is passing.

WALL STREET DISTRICT

Area: Battery Place, Beaver St., and Old Slip on the south to Fulton St. on the north; from Trinity Place and Church St. east to South St. Map on page 91.

Wall Street, financial heart of the nation, is itself but little more than a third of a mile long from its head at Broadway to its foot at the East River, although its name is applied to a small district lying to the north and south. Functionally, Wall Street is a complex mechanism developed to provide the centralized banking and credit facilities and the efficient securities market place that modern industry and commerce demand. Walled in by towering structures, the street, by historical coincidence, is well named.

At this place in 1653, Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Amsterdam, ordered a protective wall built across what was then the colony's northernmost limit. It was not long before the city had pushed past this barrier, and under British rule the district flourished as a center of government and fashion. Following the Revolution, Wall Street became for a year the seat of the Federal Government, and here were located the establishments of such statesmen and leaders of commerce as Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.

The four buildings of the famous NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE cover the area between New, Wall, and Broad Streets and Exchange Place one block east of Broadway. The original building, designed by George B. Post, was finished in 1903, and the twenty-two-story addition, in 1923, from the plans of Trowbridge and Livingston. The adjoining BLAIR BUILDING and COMMERCIAL CABLE BUILDING were bought in 1928. The Exchange building proper, with its well-proportioned Corinthian order and sculptured pediment, shows an expressive use of the "temple" form of facade. The Exchange is owned and administered by 1,375 member brokers, each of whom possesses a "seat." In the boom year of 1929, seats sold for as much as $625,000; the top price in 1938 was $85,000. During 1937, the Exchange had on its trading list some 1,200 stock issues, valued at almost sixty billion dollars, as well as 1,400 bond issues valued at more than forty-two billion dollars.

The Exchange was established shortly after the formation of the United States. In 1790, the first Congress authorized the issue of eighty million dollars in bonds. Three large banking institutions were incorporated about this time, and for the public sale of their stock, a market was developed under a buttonwood tree at what is now 68 Wall Street. Here, in 1792, a group of twenty-four brokers drew up a trading agreement. Financing the next war, in 1812, gave the exchange a new importance and the New York Stock and Exchange Board was organized with offices at 40 Wall Street. It was as a result of financing the Civil War, however, that the board began to approach its full power. The organization was combined with the Open Board of Brokers and the Government Bond Department to form the present New York Stock Exchange early in 1863.

There followed a half-century of unprecedented expansion. Money was needed for railroads, telegraph lines, factories, for building cities over night and exploiting the resources of the West. Financial titans arose: Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Daniel Drew, Jim Hill, E. H. Harriman, and the elder J. P. Morgan. After Gould, Fisk, and Drew, with the help of bribed New York legislators, had succeeded in their struggle with Commodore Vanderbilt for the control of the Erie Railroad, Gould and Fisk conceived the plan of cornering the gold market, counting on the United States Treasury not to sell from its gold reserve. But when the price of gold reached 162 on Black Friday (September 24, 1869), President Grant ordered the Treasury to sell, breaking the corner. The panic of 1869 resulted, followed by a depression which lasted ten years. Banks, brokers, merchants suspended business; nearly one hundred railroads failed, and the Stock Exchange closed its doors.

With the fall of men like Fisk came the rise of Morgan, Harriman, and others, unbridled expansion, larger fortunes, and further battles for personal financial dictatorship. It was in this period that Morgan's and Harriman's struggle over the great Northern Pacific Railroad was followed by the collapse of the market and the nation-wide panic of 1901. Again, in 1907, Morgan's struggle with the Knickerbocker Trust Company brought about the failure of that and other institutions.

The World War brought further prosperity to the Exchange and necessitated the erection of a twenty-two-story addition to its building. After the war, except for the depression of 192022, the market rose to new heights, and with it the expectations of an expanding nation. The panic of October, 1929, and another depression were the inevitable reactions.

One radical result of this depression was the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1934, which for the first time attempted governmental regulation of the influential Stock Exchange.

The function of the Exchange is to provide a liquid market where securities can at all times be disposed of or acquired virtually without delay. Trading in America's greatest securities market is conducted on the floor of the Great Hall, one of the largest rooms in the world. Orders to buy or sell, telegraphed and telephoned from all over the world, are relayed through brokerage houses to their active members on the floor, who transact business orally with traders stationed at numerous horseshoe trading posts. Despite the informal nature of these transactions, they are quickly recorded in meticulous detail on the Exchange's ticker tape and are communicated by telegraph and cable to other markets.

Trading operations may be viewed from the visitor's gallery. Admission was comparatively easy until 1933, when a visitor unkindly deposited a tear gas bomb in the ventilating system. Today admission is available only to guests of an Exchange member firm.

The visitor, standing in front of Trinity Church (see page 310), Wall Street and Broadway, shortly before nine o'clock in the morning, will see the empty "street" fill suddenly with swift-moving clerks, tellers, stenographers, and office boys pouring from subways, ferries, and elevated trains ; while bankers and brokers arrive almost as promptly in chauffeured automobiles or by planes landing at a ramp near the foot of Wall Street.

Directly behind Trinity Church, is the NEW YORK CURB EXCHANGE, 78 Trinity Place, second largest securities market in the nation. Here certain other securities not listed by the New York Stock Exchange are traded. The Curb Exchange's two buildings, designed by Starrett and Van Vleck, were opened in 1921 and 1931 respectively. The 550 regular and more than four hundred associate members include many members of the Stock Exchange.

Before 1921, the Curb conducted transactions in the open street, from which comes its name. The brokers, known originally as "Curb brokers" in Wall Street, met at the northern end of Broad Street and communicated by violent gesticulations with their colleagues in the windows above. In 1908 the New York Curb Agency was organized, and reorganized in 1911 as the New York Curb Market, with fixed trading hours. The present name was adopted in 1929. The lowest price accepted in 1929 for a Curb seat was $150,000; the 1938 minimum was $8,000.

At the entrance to Wall Street are two skyscrapers, the IRVING TRUST COMPANY, at No. i, and the FIRST NATIONAL BANK, at No. 2. The former, completed in 1931, from the plans of Voorhees, Gmelin, and Walker, is fifty stories high, and resembles a solid shaft of stone. Fluted walls and chamfered corners (an expensive device on land worth $520 a square foot) help create this illusion. The site is about 180 by no feet and is assessed at $10,250,000 without improvements. The twenty-onestory First National Bank, erected in 1933 from a design by Walker and Gillette, is marked by a flat, unimaginative use of classic precedent. At No. 14, is the entrance to the thirty-nine-story BANKERS TRUST COMPANY, designed by Trowbridge and Livingston, and erected in 1911. The twenty-five-story addition, facing Pine Street, was completed in 1933. Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon designed the addition.

Opposite the Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Nassau Streets is the SUBTREASURY BUILDING, a dignified structure designed in GreekRevival style by Ithiel Town and A. J. Davis. Built in 1842 as a Custom House, it was remodeled in 1862 for use as a Subtreasury. The Federal Reserve Bank used it until 1925. Now the building houses the New York Passport Agency of the Department of State, several departments of the U.S. Public Health Service, and the Bureau of Accounts of the Interstate Commerce Commission. It stands on the site of the Colonial City Hall, built in 1699 and torn down in 1812. Here, in 1735, John Peter Zenger, imprisoned editor of the New-York Weekly Journal, was. tried on charges of libeling the administration of the royal governor, William Cosby, and was acquitted after the country's first major battle for freedom of the press. The Stamp Act Congress met here in 1765, and the Continental Congress in 1785. In the expectation that New York would be the national capital, Major L'Enfant, who later planned the city of Washington, was commissioned to remodel the building in 1788 as the Federal Hall, and here Washington took oath, April 30, 1789, as President of the United States. The place above the steps where it is claimed he stood on this occasion is marked by J. Q. A. Ward's STATUE OF WASHINGTON erected in 1883. The actual stone on which Washington stood is preserved in a glass case within the building.

Near the Subtreasury, in front of the adjoining old Assay Office, a horse-drawn wagon, loaded with explosives, blew up shortly before noon, September 16, 1920. Thirty of the noonday crowd were killed and one hundred wounded. Scars of the explosion are still visible on near-by buildings. Occurring during a period of anti-radical hysteria, the disaster was said by some to have been a protest dynamiting of this important financial corner. Others held that the wagon had belonged to an explosives company and had been using a prohibited route when its load of dynamite was accidentally discharged. Neither theory ever was proved.

At 23 Wall Street, across from the Stock Exchange, is the diminutive MORGAN BUILDING, home of America's most powerful private banking firm. Erected in 1914, the gray five-story building is impersonal to an almost forbidding degree. It was designed by Trowbridge and Livingston.

East, at 40 Wall, is the BANK OF THE MANHATTAN COMPANY, the city's second oldest bank. By-product of the feud between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Manhattan Company was organized by Burr in 1799, and though chartered as a water company, the bank was opened almost immediately. The water service ceased in 1842. The present building, called the Manhattan Company Building, was designed by H. Craig Severance in association with Yasuo Matsui. Seventy-one stories in height, it was intended to be the world's tallest structure when construction was begun in 1929, but the last-minute addition of a spire to the Chrysler Building (see page 224) defeated the plan. Within five years it had dropped to fifth place in height. The observation tower stands 830 feet above the street. (Open daily 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; admission free.) Solid glass automatic doors in the lobby are an unusual feature.

Hamilton's bank, the BANK OF NEW YORK AND TRUST COMPANY, the city's oldest, is just east, at No. 48; it was organized in 1784. The present thirty-two-story structure was erected in 1928, from the plans of Benjamin Wistar Morris III.

The NATIONAL CITY BANK, the second largest bank in the country, has offices at No. 55. The building's lower part, with its four-story colonnade, was built in 1842, and served- as customhouse from 1862 until 1907, when it was taken over by the bank, and the second tier of four stories and another colonnade were added under the direction of McKim, Mead, and White, architects. The simple power of the composition of the north fagade is most effective. The bank, chartered in 1812, was an outgrowth of the First Bank of the United States, established in Philadelphia in 1791.

A block to the north, at 18 Pine Street, is the CHASE NATIONAL BANK, the nation's largest bank since its merger with the Equitable Trust Company in 1930. At its Cedar Street entrance is a free exhibit of more than forty thousand coins. (Open weekdays 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m. to 12 m.)

The tallest building in lower Manhattan, and third highest in the city, is SIXTY WALL TOWER (the Cities Service Building), at 70 Pine Street. An underground passage and a bridge connect with older quarters at 60 Wall Street. Sixty-seven stories (965 feet) high, it was designed by Clinton and Russell, and erected in 1932. A complicated play of overlapping forms emphasizes long vertical lines that accentuate the height of the building. There is an observation room in the tower. (Open weekdays 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; admission 400, children under eight, free.)

The TONTINE BUILDING, northwest corner of Wall and Water Streets, is on the site of the Tontine Coffee House, erected in 1794, a favorite meeting place for merchants and political groups. The Merchants' Coffee House, erected about 1737 on the southeast corner of Wall and Water Streets, was a rendezvous for Revolutionary plotters, and is memorialized by a bronze plaque on the present building.

Hanover Square, where Hanover, Stone, Pearl, and William Streets converge on OM Slip, south of Wall Street, was a public Common as early as 1637. On the southwest side of the square is INDIA HOUSE, built in 1837 by Richard Carman, and headquarters since 1914 of a group of foreign traders. Ship models, prints, and other relics are housed here. Nicholas Bayard built a house on this site in 1673, while across the square (119-21 Pearl Street) in about 1691 lived his friend Captain William Kidd. The Bayard House, together with a greater part of the square, was destroyed in the great fire of 1835.

The lower end of William Street has probably undergone more changes of name than any other street in the city. It has been known as: The Glass Makers' Street, The Smith Street, Smee Street, Smit Street, Suice Street, De Smee Street, Burghers Path, Burger Jorisens Path, King Street, Berger Joris Street, and Borisens Path.

The NEW YORK COTTON EXCHANGE, at 60 Beaver Street, two blocks south of the Stock Exchange, is the most important cotton market in the world; it was organized in 1871. Its present building, designed by Donn Barber, was erected in 1923. Other exchanges in the vicinity include the MARITIME EXCHANGE at No. 80 and the COMMODITY EXCHANGE at 81 Broad Street, three blocks south of the Stock Exchange; and the NEW YORK COFFEE AND SUGAR EXCHANGE at 1 1 3 Pearl Street. The New York Produce Exchange (see page 66) is at 2 Broadway.

KEY TO MAP OF SOUTH STREET, WALL STREET DISTRICT, CITY HALL DISTRICT, AND CHINATOWN

SOUTH STREET

1. Hearst Publication Plant 9. First Precinct Police Station

2. Birthplace of Alfred E. Smith 10. Seamen's Church Institute

3. Fulton Market 11. Jeanette Park

4. Sweet's 12. State Barge Canal Terminal

5. The Old Griswold Warehouse 13. Site of the First Dock

6. 120 Wall Street Building 14. Municipal Lodging House

7. Municipal Downtown Skyport 15. Site of the Eastern Hotel

8. U.S. Assay Building

WALL STREET DISTRICT

16. Maritime Exchange 32. New York Curb Exchange

17. Commodity Exchange 33. New York's Oldest Restaurant

18. India House 34. Trinity Church

19. Cotton Exchange 35. First National Bank Building

20. Coffee, and Sugar Exchange 36. Bankers Trust Company Building

21. Site of Merchants' Coffee House 37. Chase National Bank Building

22. Tontine Building 38. Equitable Building

23. Sixty Wall Tower 39. New York Clearing House

24. Bank of N.Y. and Trust Company 40. Mutual Life Insurance Company

25. National City Bank Building 41. Federal Reserve Bank

26. Manhattan Company Building 42. Chamber of Commerce

27. U.S. Subtreasury Building 43. Singer Building

28. Morgan Building 44. Site of John Street Theater

29. New York Stock Exchange 45. Golden Hill

30. Irving Trust Company Building 46. Old John Street Church

31. Aldrich Court Building 47. Washington Irving's Birthplace

CITY HALL DISTRICT

48. St. Paul's Chapel 61. City Court Building

49. Woolworth Building 62. Stewart Building (The Sun)

50. Statue of Nathan Hale 63. Hall of Records

51. Civic Virtue 64. Court Square Building

52. Statue of Benjamin Franklin 65. St. Andrew's Church

53. Newspaper Row 66. U.S. Court House

54. Tribune Building 67. Site of Tea Water Pump

55. Old Beekman (Tavern) 68. Supreme Court Building

56. Pulitzer Building 69. State Office Building

57. Brace Newsboys' House 70. Health Department Building

58. Municipal Building 71. Tombs

59. Statue of Horace Greeley 72. Criminal Courts Building

60. City Hall

CHINATOWN

73. Chinese School 77. Tom Noonan's Rescue Society

74. Wall Newspaper 78. Bloody Angle

75. On Leong Tong 79. Hip Sing Tong

76. Joss House

SOUTH STREET

WALL STREET DISTRICT

CITY HALL DISTRICT

CHINATOWN

At 45 Broadway, between Morris Street and Exchange Alley, is the ALDRICH COURT BUILDING, housing the United States Shipping Commission, the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation and other Federal agencies. A TABLET in the building's fagade marks what is said to be the site of the first residence of white men on Manhattan. In November, 1613, the ship Tyger burned offshore, and the captain and crew landed here and built four huts.

Running north of the Stock Exchange, Nassau Street, known originally as "the Street that Runs by the Pye Woman," a continuation of Broad Street, is the retail shopping center of the financial district. Here in low old buildings are shops and restaurants catering to the noonday crowd.

At 77 Cedar Street, between Nassau and Broadway is the NEW YORK. CLEARING HOUSE, a five-story building with a marble front, erected in 1896. R. W. Gibson was the architect. In this important institution many millions of dollars in checks and drafts drawn on member banks are cleared daily. Although constant mergers have reduced member banks from a maximum of sixty-seven to twenty, the volume of business has expanded enormously since it was organized in 1853.

New York's oldest restaurant, YE OLDE CHOP HOUSE, is located at 118 Cedar Street, and for more than 1 30 years has catered to men in the Wall Street area. At 120 Broadway, between Cedar and Liberty Streets is the EQUITABLE BUILDING, planned by E. R. Graham. Erected in 1914, before the setback law, it shoots up forty-one stories, unrelieved and formidable. Its total of 1,200,000 square feet of rentable floor space makes it the second largest building in floor area in the city. The MUTUAL LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY of New York is at 34 Nassau Street, between Cedar and Liberty Streets. Chartered in 1842, it is the oldest organization of its kind in America. The insurance section of the financial district is now largely concentrated in the neighborhood of Fulton and William Streets.

The FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF NEW YORK, 33 Liberty Street, occupies the block bounded by Maiden Lane, Nassau, Liberty, and William Streets. The fourteen- story building, completed in 1924 from plans by York and Sawyer, is constructed of heavy limestone blocks. It strongly suggests the fortified palaces of the Florentine Renaissance. The rusticated stone exterior is almost without ornament except for iron lanterns, and the iron grilles of the great arched windows complete the picture of a building ready for a siege. Five stories are below street level. Subterranean vaults are barred by doors weighing as much as ninety tons.

The NEW YORK CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, 65 Liberty Street, occupies a five-story building designed by James B. Baker and completed in 1902. This, the oldest commercial organization of its kind in the world, was founded in 1768 in the Long Room of Fraunces Tavern (see page 68) and chartered by George III in 1770 with the aim of encouraging commerce and supporting industry. Its resident membership, limited to two thousand, includes many of the city's prominent bankers and industrialists.

Maiden Lane, one block north of Liberty Street, was so named when, as Maagde Paatje (the Dutch equivalent), it was a footpath used by lovers along a rippling brook. Once the city's noted retail jewelry center, the street is now given over to wholesale trade and manufacturing. A TABLET in the Jewelers' Building, 17 Maiden Lane, marks the location of the John Street Theater, built in 1767, and frequently attended by President Washington.

One block north, John Street, center of insurance and jewelry business, was known before the Revolution as Golden Hill and was the scene of the "Battle" of Golden Hill where, in January, 1770, two men were wounded in a skirmish between citizens and British soldiers. A TABLET at the northwest corner of John and William Streets marks the site of this early encounter. The SINGER BUILDING, 149 Broadway, at the head of John Street, was built in 1908 and remained the city's tallest edifice for eighteen months ; forty-one stories (612 feet) high, today (1939) it ranks sixteenth. Ernest Flagg, the architect, gave it the first slender skyscraper tower. At 46 John Street is the OLD JOHN STREET METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, mother church of American Methodism. The present edifice, Federal in style, and erected in 1841, is the third on the site since 1768.

In 1783, Washington Irving was born at 131 William Street, corner of Fulton an appropriate birthplace for the man who coined the phrase "the Almighty Dollar." One block east, at the corner of Pearl Street, Holt's Hotel, later known as the United States Hotel, was erected in 1833. It was considered "the pioneer of the 'great' hotels of New York City and of America." The roof contained a promenade and an observatory whence the city's traders could watch for incoming vessels.

CITY HALL DISTRICT

Area: Fulton St. on the south to Franklin St. on the north; from Church St. east to Pearl St. Map on page 91.

One mile north of Battery Landing, the imperfect triangle of CITY HALL PARK is wedged into Broadway's steep eastern wall. Here is the venerable seat of the municipal government, and the scene of important historical events. Broadway clips the park precisely on the west as does Chambers Street on the north and hems it in with a palisade of commercial buildings whose architectural distinction, except for the Woolworth Building, lies mainly in their renovated store fronts. The apex of the park's ten-and-one-half-acre triangle points to St. Paul's Chapel, the oldest church in the borough and probably the only building that presents its back to Broadway. The eastern boundary of the park is fixed by two streets: Park Row, which slants northeast from Broadway past old "Newspaper Row," and Centre Street, which runs north from the end of Brooklyn Bridge (see page 313) through the new civic center at Foley Square.

Paved walks subdivide the park into small grassy areas set with trees. Rows of benches bordering the walks accommodate strollers and idlers who pause to rest, to read, to have their shoes shined, to feed the pigeons, or to enjoy the transient sunshine. This is a restless park: six days a week crowds of office workers stream to and from the IRT subway kiosks on both sides; elevated trains rattle and screech in a rambling shed at the approach to Brooklyn Bridge; well polished automobiles bearing low license numbers nudge into a parking space "For Official Cars Only"; policemen ceaselessly patrol the grounds; lunch-hour crowds, released from near-by office buildings, fill the paths at noontime.

There are but two buildings in the park proper, although a third, the triangular post-office building that was called "Mullett's monstrosity," occupied the southern segment until 1938. In the north central section of the park is City Hall, and to the rear and fronting Chambers Street is the City Court Building, formerly known as the Old County Court House.

CITY HALL houses the offices of the Mayor, chief executive and magis.trate of the city, and his staff; the City Council, the municipal legislative body; the Board of Estimate, the general administrative body; and the Art Commission, the agency that passes on the designs for all public buildings and works of art.

Architecturally, City Hall is an exceptionally well-executed design of the post-Colonial period showing clearly the fact, noteworthy in its day, that professional rather than amateur architects planned it. The design, a beautiful adaptation of French Renaissance and American Colonial influences, was essentially the work of Joseph F. Mangin, a Frenchman, but his partner and co-winner of a competition for the commission, John McComb, a Scotsman, supervised the work in New York and received most of the contemporary credit. He was paid six dollars a day, a very good salary at the time. Construction was under way for nearly a decade; it took three years to settle on the plan alone. To save $15,000 the city fathers, tempering their recklessness in spending a half million dollars for the structure, insisted that brownstone be used for the rear. City Hall was completed in 1811.

Reminiscent of the Hotel de Ville of the eighteenth century, the dignified marble structure, chastely embellished with Louis XVI pilasters between arched windows, is noteworthy for its unusual grace and delicate scale. The two wings are balanced on either side of a central portico that is surmounted by a cupola. Its finial is a figure of Justice, said to have been executed by John Dixey. The interior is marked by McComb's fine attention to detail, especially in the rotunda, in the superb double curve of the self-supporting marble stairway with its delicate wrought-iron railings, and in the slender columns of the upper gallery.

Portraits of former governors crowd the walls of the corridors, and mayors' portraits are hung in the mayor's antechamber and reception room on the first floor. Over the mantelpiece in the mayor's office is a portrait of Lafayette, painted by Samuel F. B. Morse on the occasion of the general's visit to America in 1824. The Governors' Suite, on the second floor, was originally intended for the official use of the State's chief executive when in New York, but its three rooms have been converted into a museum. (Open Monday to Friday 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m. to 12 m.) A mahogany writing table used by George Washington during the first days of his Presidency is exhibited along with other historic pieces of furniture. In the Governors' Room of the suite are Trumbull's portraits of such noted personages as John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington (valued at more than a quarter of a million dollars), and in the other two rooms are hung paintings by John Wesley Jarvis, Henry Inman, John Vanderlyn, Thomas Sully, George Catlin, and others. The portrait of Henry Hudson is the work of Paul van Somer, a seventeenthcentury Flemish master; the identity of the subject is doubtful, however, for there is no authenticated portrait of the navigator. This valuable collection is under the care of the Art Commission.

The mahogany- lined City Council chamber, once the aldermanic chamher, on the second floor, contains portraits of Henry Clay and George Washington, a statue of Thomas Jefferson by Pierre Jean David (d' Angers), and a pretentious ceiling mural, New York City Receiving the Tributes of the Nations, by Taber Sears, George W. Breck, and Frederic C. Martin. The adjoining committee room is decorated with portraits of General George B. McClellan, by William H. Powell, and of William Bainbridge, by John Wesley Jarvis. The former Common Council chamber, on the second floor, is now the meeting place of the Board of Estimate. Corinthian columns and pilasters give the room an atmosphere of dignity. A bust of John Jay, on the north side, is the work of John Frazee; that of John Marshall, on the south side, is by an unknown artist.

The steps of City Hall are worn smooth by official public receptions and ceremonies. Here the mayor welcomes distinguished visitors, awards promotions to members of the fire, police, and sanitation departments, and makes contributions opening charity campaigns.

The CITY COURT BUILDING is a white marble structure with Corinthian columns and pilasters. Built (1861-72) by the Tweed Ring at the cost of more than $12,000,000, it provided the opportunity for one of the most gigantic steals in the city's history.

City Hall Park is New York's approximation of a courthouse square or village green. This little plot of land is all that survives of one of New York's earliest municipal gathering places. The site was once part of the common lands. Whenever the community peace was threatened or cause for celebration arose, the populace gathered there. An oak planted near City Hall in 1911 does honor to the memory of Jacob Leisler, who fought against the tyranny of English rule and was hanged for treason in 1691 close to this spot. Near the front of the building the Sons of Liberty erected five successive "liberty poles" between 1766 and 1776. In 1776 the Declaration of Independence, brought by courier from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, was read here, for the first time in New York, in the presence of George Washington.

On February 13, 1837, the "Flour" or "Bread Riot" took place during a financial panic then threatening the country. The price of flour had advanced from six dollars to fifteen dollars a barrel amid widespread speculation. A placard was carried through the streets announcing a meeting at the park, and declaring: "All friends of Humanity, determined to resist Monopolists and Extortionists are invited to attend, rain or shine. Bread, Meat, Rent, Fuel the voice of the people shall be heard." The six thousand who attended vented their anger by breaking into the flour stores, dispersing only after the militia had been called out. The distressed gathered again in ominous protest during the lean days of the 1850's.

The park was the scene of a peculiar riot in 1857 when opposing bands of policemen cracked one another's heads. The Municipal Police, venal and inefficient, had been abolished by an act of the State Legislature and a new body, the Metropolitan Police, established under State control. The Municipals refused to disband, however, and when a large force of Metropolitans attempted to serve warrants for the arrest of Mayor Fernando Wood, the two groups clashed in a savage battle that stormed through the corridors of City Hall and was finally checked only by a show of bayonets by the Seventh Regiment of the National Guard.

During the Civil War, food for the soldiers went out across the park from the supply base at City Hall. A ceremony held here on March 24, 1900, marked the commencement of construction of the subway transit system.

A STATUE OF NATHAN HALE, the work of Frederick MacMonnies, is on the west side of the park. The FIGURE OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, near the east side of the park, was sculptured by E. Plassman and was erected in 1872 as the gift of Albert de Groot to the press and printers of New York. Another journalist, Horace Greeley, is honored by a heroic STATUE in bronze by Henry Bonnard. But the MacMonnies statue, Chic Virtue, erected in 1922, is the one generally associated with City Hall Park. Said to be the largest piece carved from a single block of marble since Michelangelo's David, the central figure is a gigantic muscular youth, nude except for a dash of foam (or seaweed) encircling his middle: a sword over his right shoulder, he fixes his gaze forward, seemingly unaware that he is trampling on two sirens writhing at his feet. In summertime children splash in the basin of the monument. Protests against the unembarrased nudity of the group and the conception it presents of virtuous man's chivalry have brought a promise of removal to Foley Square, where, presumably, criticism is less stringent.

The region north of City Hall Park is a district of wholesale commerce, where caps, pants, and woolens are manufactured and sold.

For almost a score of years before 1930 the sixty-story WOOLWORTH BUILDING, erected in 1913 west of the park's apex, at Broadway and Park Place, was the world's tallest building; its architect was Cass Gilbert. Intended as a huge "sky sign" to advertise Frank W. Woolworth's chain of five-and-ten-cent stores, it was acclaimed a masterpiece, the first "cathedal of commerce." Its tower rises without a setback from the center of the Broadway front to 792 feet above the curb. The lower and broader section of the building mounts thirty stories to a height of about four hundred feet. This section has been criticized as being too high in comparison with the tower, when seen from the west. All the horizontal elements of the building are subdued in color to strengthen the soaring quality of the vertical lines.

The color is as delicately graded as the modeling. The chief effect is a glistening white, set off by the weathered green of the copper peak and copper roof; but as many as six different colors were used on a single terra-cotta ornamental detail. Pinnacles, carved canopies, and gargoyles soften the silhouette and impart an atmospheric lightness.

Crisp and delicate terra-cotta surface ornament drops over the building like a veil. All the details are Gothic, even to the tourelles that surround the peak, the finial that surmounts it, and the flying buttresses.

Despite its Gothic decorations, the Woolworth Building was a genuine contribution to the development of an American skyscraper style. It represents one of the earliest attempts to express the steel- frame structure a departure from the "immobility of mass and weight of masonry" that characterized the classic type of building.

Below the Woolworth Building, on Broadway between Vesey and Fulton Streets, is ST. PAUL'S CHAPEL OF TRINITY PARISH, the oldest church building in Manhattan. Its cornerstone was laid May 14, 1764, in a field sloping to the Hudson River. The architect, James McBean, a Scot, is said to have been a pupil of James Gibbs. Gibbs designed the Renaissance church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, in London, which greatly influenced the design of St. Paul's.

The church was constructed of stone quarried from the site which is now the graveyard. Its original, lovely warm color has been greatly dulled by age. The church is surmounted by a tower at the west end, to which a wooden spire, more elaborate than the rest of the church but of excellent design, was added in 1794. At the east end, facing Broadway, is a carriage portico with a pediment and slender but well-proportioned Ionic columns. The light, spacious interior is handsomely decorated, with a barrel vault carried on slender columns, and a gallery on each side. On the north side of the interior a painting of the arms of the United States marks George Washington's pew; opposite, on the south, the arms of New York State mark Governor Clinton's pew. Immediately after Washington's inauguration, April 30, 1789, both houses of Congress accompanied him to St. Paul's, where Bishop Samuel Provoost conducted a service.

On the Broadway side is a monument to Major General Richard Montgomery, killed in the attack on Quebec, December 25, 1775. It was executed by J. J. Caffieri, French sculptor, on order from the Continental Congress. Montgomery's grave is beneath the monument. Among the memorials on the west wall of the interior is a bust of John Wells (17701823) by John Frazee, the first known portrait bust by a native American sculptor.

The graveyard, which flanks the church on three sides, is a favorite noonday retreat of office workers in the neighborhood. It contains the weatherbeaten tombs of many historic personalities. The churchyard gates are closed during the two days preceding the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, as they have been since the chapel's founding, to remind the public that the property belongs to Trinity Parish, and that it is open only by the courtesy of that body.

Newspaper Row

Across Park Row from City Hall Park, near the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge, stands the brownstone PULITZER BUILDING, once the proud home of the World; its gilded dome makes it one of the section's most imposing buildings. George B. Post designed the structure in 1890; it was enlarged in 1908. This was an early example of buildings whose walls carry only their own weight; the floors are supported by columns. Nevertheless, the exterior walls are, in places, more than nine feet thick.

Today the World is dead, the dome in which Joseph Pulitzer had his office is deserted, and the structure has become merely another office building a relic of New York's NEWSPAPER Row. In the late decades of the nineteenth century Park Row and northern Nassau Street constituted the publishing center for the great metropolitan dailies. Today only the Sun, housed in the Stewart Building, flanking City Hall Park on the northeast corner of Chambers Street and Broadway, remains in the vicinity.

A little to the south of the Pulitzer Building, at Spruce and Nassau Streets, is the red-brick, clock-towered TRIBUNE BUILDING, former home of the Tribune and one of the earliest elevator buildings. Dana's Sun was once next to the Tribune in the same building, incidentally, which for a time housed Tammany. The modest building that housed the Times in the days of its humble beginnings occupies the site of the old Brick Presbyterian Church at Park Row and Nassau Street. The nonpartisan CITIZENS UNION, founded in 1897 for the purpose of obtaining honest, efficient municipal government, is now one of the tenants of the building. A little off the Row, on near-by William Street, were quartered Hearst's Evening Journal and American. The Evening Post, edited by William Cullen Bryant, had its home at Broadway and Fulton Street. James Gordon Bennett's Herald had its workshop on the southeast corner of Ann Street and Broadway, site of the old Barnum Museum.

Long a familiar feature of the Row was the i2O-year-old building of the Roman Catholic CHURCH OF ST. ANDREW, famed for its 2:30 A.M. Mass for night workers, most of them printers from the great dailies. In 1938 a new church structure was erected on the original site at Duane Street and Cardinal Place, behind the Municipal Building. The site also includes 15 Cardinal Place, birthplace of Patrick Cardinal Hayes.

On New Chambers, corner of William Street, is the BRACE MEMORIAL NEWSBOYS' HOUSE, founded in 1853 by Charles Loring Brace and now one of five shelters maintained by the Children's Aid Society. It provides food and lodging at low cost for homeless boys. Horatio Alger is said to have found material for his rags-to-riches stories there.

This section was New York's Rialto before it became the domain of the Fourth Estate. Its theaters presented the first American dramas as well as the most famous stars of the English and American stage. Through the Park Theatre's stage entrance the narrow lane still known as Theatre Alley, parallel to Park Row and connecting Ann and Beekman Streets passed such celebrated stars as Edwin Booth, Edmund Kean, Edwin Forrest, and Fanny and Charles Kemble. In 1825 the first formal opera presented in America, Rossini's Elisabetta, was performed here.

Other playhouses in this section were the Anthony Street Theatre, Anthony Street (now Worth Street) near Broadway, which presented Joseph Jefferson, the elder, and James Wallack; the Old Broadway Theatre at Broadway and Pearl Street, which opened in 1847 with Sheridan's School for Scandal; and Palmo's Opera House, 39 Chambers Street, renamed Burton's, which opened in 1844 and presented opera intermittently during two decades.

South of the Brooklyn Bridge and east of Park Row is the "Swamp," center of the city's wholesale leather market since the late 1690's. When the tanning industry was expelled from Broad Street, the mart followed it to Beekman Swamp the site bounded approximately by Frankfort, William, Beekman, and Cliff Streets. During the nineteenth century, an encroaching population gradually drove the tanneries from the neighborhood, but the leather merchants remained.

Beekman Street, southern boundary of the "Swamp," is the center of downtown New York's job printing industry, which took root in this section when most of New York's newspapers were published on near-by Newspaper Row. (The printing and publishing industry is the second largest in the city.)

On the northeast corner of Beekman and Gold Streets is THE OLD BEEKMAN, a tavern and coffee house where General Grant is said to have imbibed his favorite Peoria whisky.

The Chic Center

Despite the northward expansion of the city, the vicinity of the City Hall has remained the center of governmental activities in New York. This concentration of official business municipal, State and Federal occurs in an impressive group of buildings erected within the past decade in and around Foley Square, the neighborhood northeast of City Hall Park.

On the two triangular blocks bounded by Park Row, Centre, and Duane Streets, and looking down on City Hall, is the forty-story MUNICIPAL BUILDING, designed by McKim, Mead, and White. It straddles Chambers Street, forming an arcade through which flows west-east vehicular traffic; this passageway has been called the "Gate of the City," the title of an oil painting of the scene by William Jean Beauley. The building has a flattened U-shaped plan, with its open side toward Centre Street. It gains dignity through the bold treatment of the intermediate stories, despite the poorly related tower and the disturbing character of the Corinthian colonnade at the base. In themselves the elements are well designed, but their combination lacks unity. It is surmounted by a heroic figure of Civic Fame, by Adolph Alexander Weinman, who was also the sculptor of the relief on the lower part of the building.

The building, opened in 1914, cost about twelve million dollars. Despite its size (650,000 square feet of floor area), it has proved inadequate, and several departments have been housed in buildings on Foley Square proper. The municipally owned and operated RADIO STATION, WNYC, on the twenty-fifth floor, broadcasts no commercial programs; performers are supplied by government agencies and educational institutions. The MUNICIPAL REFERENCE LIBRARY, on the twenty-second floor, a branch of the New York Public Library, contains documents, pamphlets, maps, directories, and reports from all important cities. On the second floor, across the hall from the marriage license bureau, is the MARRIAGE CHAPEL, a sunny room decorated with flowered wallpaper and potted palms.

The seven-story granite structure at Chambers and Centre Streets is the HALL OF RECORDS, repository for all legal records relating to deeds of Manhattan real estate and to court cases some of the documents were drawn as early as 1653. It contains offices of the New York County Register, Surrogates' Court, and Commissioner of Jurors. Designed by John R. Thomas and opened in 1911, it is New York's best example of the eclectic baroque style used in French nineteenth-century municipal buildings. Heroic statues of distinguished New Yorkers on the ornate granite fagade and symbolic figures representing such conceptions as Philosophy, Poetry, and Industry are by Philip Martiny and Henry K. Bush-Brown. The interior is sumptuously decorated.

Beyond the Municipal Building and the Hall of Records lies Foley Square proper, a plot of land' shaped somewhat like a hatchet head, around which several public buildings have been grouped to form a civic center. Unfortunately, this group lacks a unifying architectural design. Several city departments are housed in the COURT SQUARE BUILDING at 2 Lafayette Street, a commercial office building.

Across, on Centre Street between Duane and Pearl, is the new UNITED STATES COURT HOUSE, last architectural work of Cass Gilbert, and completed in 1936 by his son, Cass Gilbert, Jr. The architects attempted the difficult task of harmonizing their work with the neoclassic structures on either side. The tower, thirty-two stories high, is crowned by a pyramidal roof covered with gold leaf. The offices of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York as well as the United States District Court and Circuit Court of Appeals are in the building.

A block east, at Pearl Street and Park Row, was the famous Tea Water Pump, which was the chief source of water supply for the city until 1789. Its water, so housewives declared, was excellent for brewing tea. Carted about in casks, it was sold from door to door.

North of the United States Court House on Centre Street is the eightstory, neoclassic SUPREME COURT BUILDING, designed after the drawings submitted in competition by Guy Lowell, of Boston, in 1912. Skillfully planned for a difficult site, the hexagonal building has a refreshing robustness. Unlike the other columns of Foley Square, its great Corinthian order presents a real portico of convincing form and scale. It is approached by a sweep of granite steps one hundred feet wide. The elaborately decorated central rotunda is three stories high. The building houses one of the country's finest law libraries.

Various New York State departments centered in Albany have offices in the granite-faced, nine-story STATE OFFICE BUILDING which stands on the northeast corner of the square (Worth and Centre Streets). Built (1928-30) under the supervision of W. E. Haugaard, State commissioner of architecture, it is of "chastened classic" design. Its walls are relieved by flat carving and at its four entrances are black granite lighting standards. The offices are grouped around two large courts. The main floor halls are finished in gray marble with green marble pilasters and bronze capitals, and plaster cornices and ceilings decorated with gold leaf.

The building to the west, occupying an entire block and with its main entrance on Worth Street, contains offices, laboratories, and clinics of the CITY HEALTH, HOSPITAL, AND SANITATION DEPARTMENTS. It was designed by Charles B. Meyers to conform with the State Office Building, and was completed in 1935. It is ornamented with metal grilles and lanterns, and a series of panels depicting medical subjects.

Occupying the two blocks between Centre and Lafayette Streets, a few steps north of Foley Square, are the bleak structures of the TOMBS and the CRIMINAL COURTS BUILDING connected by the famous BRIDGE OF SIGHS. The Tombs, a prison for men awaiting trial, derives its funereal name from its predecessor on this site, which resembled an Egyptian tomb. The present huge gray pile, with its rounded ends and high pitched roof, is more suggestive, however, of a gloomy medieval fortress. Notorious criminals have been incarcerated within these somber walls before being led across the enclosed bridge for trial in the Criminal Courts. The long career of both structures neared an end in 1938, when the State Legislature authorized the expenditure of $15,000,000 for the erection of modern buildings. The new site is directly across Centre Street from the old one.

This entire area in the eighteenth century comprised marshland and a pond known as the Collect. It was on this pond that John Fitch, in 1796, conducted experiments with a steamboat. In the depression of 1808, municipal authorities established a work relief project to drain the section. It became a recreational center for holiday-making laborers, sailors, and oystermen. But when the land began to sink into the imperfectly drained swamp, the houses and taverns of the region were abandoned to freed slaves and hapless immigrants.

Such was the origin of the historically infamous Five Points section. The territory derived its name from the intersection of five streets forming a triangular area, with Paradise Square, now the southwest corner of Columbus Park (opposite the State Office Building at Baxter and Worth Streets), in the center. It reached its peak in disorder and debauchery about the middle of the ninetenth century when the first gangs of New York made their appearance in the congested slum with such picturesque names as the "Forty Thieves," "Kerryonians," "Chichesters," "Plug Uglies," "Shirt Tails," and "Dead Rabbits." The most unsavory place was the "Old Brewery," a converted tenement swarming with thieves, prostitutes, and degenerates. In one room called the "Den of Thieves" more than seventyfive men and women made their home. This warren was vividly described by Charles Dickens in his American Notes.

CHINATOWN

Area: Baxter St. east to Park Row and New Bowery; south of Bayard St. Map on page 91.

New York's Chinatown is trying to live down a myth ; a myth kept alive by the sight-seeing companies that pile tourists into Chinatown busses, transport them to prepared points of interest, and frequently prime them with tales of mystery and crime. The truth is (and the policemen on the beat will verify it) that no safer district is to be found in New York City. Yet guides have been known to warn tourists to "hold hands while walking through the narrow streets."

Tourist trade, which supplies a small part of its income, is but a secondary concern of the Chinese quarter; for though its population is only 4,000 the district serves as "home town" for the 18,000 Chinese of New York City and for the 30,000 in the metropolitan area. Laundrymen, restaurant workers, servants, shopkeepers, and professionals come here, especially on Sunday, to meet their friends, do their shopping, see a Chinese movie, eat a holiday dinner, play fan-tan, or arrange a marriage or burial.

The first Chinese known to have visited New York was Pung-hua Wing Chong, who arrived in 1807, the year the embargo on foreign trade was established. Later he became known as John Jacob Astor's mandarin because Astor got permission from President Jefferson to send out a ship, despite the embargo, on the pretense of taking "this prominent mandarin" home.

Historians differ as to the identity of the first Chinese resident of New York City. Some say it was Quimbo Appo, who came to San Francisco in 1844 and arrived here a few years later; others state it was Ah Ken, a Cantonese merchant who made his home on Mott Street in 1858. Still others contend it was Lou Hoy Sing, a sailor who shook off his wanderlust and settled in New York in 1862. (He married an Irish lass who bore him two stalwart sons, one of whom became a policeman and the other a truck driver.) From 1875 until shortly after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese migrated in large numbers to the city, displacing wellto-do families in the neighborhood of Mott and Pell Streets. The colony soon overflowed into Bayard and Canal Streets, and at its peak numbered 6,000 residents.

For many decades Chinatown kept intact the religious and cultural customs of old China. The younger generation, however, like that of other immigrant groups, no longer adheres strictly to the traditional mores; changes in China have been an added factor in the weakening. Though the joss houses, shrines of Buddhist worship, still exist, they are rarely attended by Chinese, certainly not by the youth. The Chinese New Year is still celebrated in traditional paper-dragon-and-firecracker style but the more rigid ethical customs, such as suicide because of failure to pay debts, are being ignored or abandoned. No longer is American citizenship frowned upon ; and mixed marriages cause little comment. So far has the process of assimilation progressed that in the 1936 Democratic National Convention Wong Lee was seated as a New York delegate.

The tongs, Chinese equivalent of American fraternal societies, which for so many years ruled the quarter with iron discipline and fought each other with hired gunmen, now share influence with newer groups. The Chinese Journal and the Vanguard, recently established liberal-progressive newspapers, are steadily gaining in circulation, and the Chinese Republic News and the Nationalist Daily reflect the new trend.

Since the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, a new spirit of unity has developed in Chinatown which has eliminated social and political friction and discouraged tong wars. Old and young, conservatives and moderns, have joined in raising funds for the homeland and in promoting the boycott against Japanese goods.

One custom, however, the devout Chinese still retains ; he arranges that when death comes his remains shall be sent to China for interment. This is accomplished with characteristic patience and thrift. The deceased is first buried in this country, an identification tag sealed in a bottle being placed in the casket. Ten years later the grave is opened and the remains, removed to a zinc-lined box two feet by one, are shipped to China for reburial. Freight charges are thus brought within the means of the dead man's family.

A leisurely stroll at sundown through Chinatown's winding streets is an interesting experience. Throughout the neighborhood Chinese importing houses and groceries, like the New England "general stores," offer a wide variety of goods. Neatly stacked in the windows are Chinese vegetables (grown on Long Island) tender green Chinese cabbage, blanched bean sprouts, fibrous brown lily roots, crinkly bitter melons, great squashes resembling watermelon covered with a white bloom, water chestnuts, young pods of peas with smoked squid, shark fin, blubber, roast ducks, and roast pork hanging from hooks.

In these shops, patronized almost exclusively by Chinese, many articles for use and decoration may be purchased: hexagonal and fluted green bowls, native spoons of China, simple brown paper fans, packets of joss sticks, sturdy black cotton slippers without backs, strangely shaped but unusually durable toothbrushes, kites shaped like butterflies or dragons, wooden flutes, beautiful green-leaved Chinese lilies, wall pockets for flowers, long-handled wooden back-scratchers.

Mott Street, entered from Worth Street, which extends west of Chatham Square, gives the first colorful view of the quarter. The large Chinese signs of a native temple at No. 5 emphasize the oriental style of the facade of the adjoining PORT ARTHUR RESTAURANT BUILDING (No. 7). The CHINATOWN EMPORIUM in the Port Arthur Building attracts souvenir buyers, and near by at No. 13 the Joss HOUSE presents for curious passers-by and the herded throngs from the "rubberneck wagons" an inaccurate but highly dramatic lecture on Chinese religious customs. At No. 37 the oldest JEWELRY STORE in Chinatown offers gold objects hammered according to the design requested by the customer. The headquarters of the powerful ON LEONG TONG are at No. 41, and beyond is the LIQUOR STORE of Wing Lee Quon at No. 53, where authentic Chinese wines and cordials, medicated with snakeskin and tiger bone, are available.

At No. 58, Wah Kue sells Chinese books, brushes, and writing material ; at No. 64 is the CHINESE SCHOOL where, after regular public-school hours, children are taught Chinese culture and language according to the traditional method. Just qprth of Pell Street on Mott hangs the WALL NEWSPAPER. Sheets of brilliant red and orange paper flecked with gold are covered with characters which inform knots of readers that a business is for sale or has been sold, that a job is available or is wanted, and of the latest war news from China.

At 32 Pell Street, the MEE TUNG COMPANY announces "Ladies Dresses Made to Order in Chinese Styles." The ESTABLISHMENT OF MAN GAR CHUNG at No. 26 offers an assortment of Chinese drugs and ingredients for an assortment of love potions: dried sea horses, blanched snakes, preserved bears' testicles, neat slices of deer's horn, and ginseng root. The last-named sells for as much as a hundred dollars an ounce.

The headquarters of the HIP SING TONG are situated appropriately near the corner of Pell and Doyers Streets, for just beyond is the BLOODY ANGLE, the bend in Doyers Street where henchmen of this tong fought the On Leongs in the early i9oo's. The Hip Sings, led by Mock Duck, a gambler, battled the On Leongs, captained by Tom Lee, for control of the lucrative gambling and opium rackets. At this bend, occupying the quarters of the old Chinese theater, is Tom Noonan's famous RESCUE SOCIETY. The ex-convict sponsored the mission for twenty-three years, until his death in 1935. Near by, at 6 Doyers Street, is a building once occupied by the Chatham Club, where a young singing waiter, Isadore Baline (Irving Berlin), 'occasionally performed. Here, too, Chuck Connors, whom the movies years later made king of Chinatown lobbygows, Bowery thespian and philosopher, served as bouncer.

Each night the Chinese take over the ten-cent movie house on Chatham Square just north of Mott Street, and Chinese pictures made either in China or in San Francisco replace the customary Westerns. At 8 Chatham Square the old-fashioned TOBACCO EMPORIUM of Seckler Brothers is crowded with smokers' oddities. The next building houses the establishment of Rocks Grille, the artist who makes "black eyes" look normal. Two doors north is the studio of Charlie Wagner, "champion tattooing artist in the world."

A visit to Chinatown should include dinner at one of the numerous restaurants, declared by the Board of Health to be among the cleanest in the city. Some of the less prominent places, many of which are on the second story or in unpretentious basements, are as good as the larger ones. The food in most of the quarter's restaurants is authentically Chinese and of a uniformly high quality, and most places specialize in one or more native dishes.

Chop suey came into existence in Chicago in 1896 during the visit of Li Hung Chang, famous "ambassador of good will." Literally translated the name means "hodge-podge." As prepared by the restaurants in Chinatown the dish is far superior to that served in drug stores and cafeterias. A good Chinese meal consists of soup, fish, and of preparations of sea food, pork, or chicken, served with Chinese vegetables and sauces. When a group dines together it is advantageous to order "by the table," fixing a price beforehand with the waiter.

The most delicious soups are won ton soup, made with little dumplings filled with duck ; water-cress soup, tart with quantities of fresh water cress ; chop suey soup, rich with chicken gizzards, livers, and oddments. Shrimp is usually fried and served with egg or lobster sauce or with steamed Chinese vegetables, or combined with chopped lobster and seasoning as the filling for the fried dough cakes known as egg rolls. Stuffed crab, served in deep-sea crab shells, is a pungent and exotic delicacy, and fishballs covered with delectable sauce and with native vegetables is a favorite dish. Roast pork prepared by Chinese chefs is famous. Soft noodle chow mein, Canton style, and chicken diced with almonds and fresh peas with a Chinese white sauce, are two other appetizing dishes. A Chinese meal is not complete without one sweet and pungent dish, preferably spareribs prepared with a rich sauce of ginger, pineapple, and spices.

LOWER EAST SIDE

Area: Fulton St. (South St. to Pearl St.) and Franklin St. (Baxter St. to Broadway) on the south to i4th St. on the north; from the East River west to Pearl St. and Broadway; excluding Chinatown. Map on page in.

The dramatic, intensely human story of the Lower East Side is a familiar chapter in the epic of America; a host of writers some seeking out the Lower East Side and others originating there have described its people. Here have dwelt the people whose hands built the city's elevateds, subways, tubes, bridges, and skyscrapers. Its two square miles of tenements and crowded streets magnify all the problems and conflicts of big-city life. The inhuman conditions of its slums and sweatshops brought about the first organized social work in America. Crowded, noisy, squalid in many of its aspects, no other section of the city is more typical of New York.

The district is best known as a slum, as a community of immigrants, and as a ghetto ; yet not all of the district is blighted, not all of its people are of foreign stock, and not all are Jewish. From its dark tenements, generations of American workers of many different national origins and an amazing number of public figures have emerged ; politicians, artists, gangsters, composers, prize fighters, labor leaders.

One of the first New York tenements designed for multifamily use was erected in the Lower East Side in 1833, on Water Street near Corlears Hook. The most notorious "modern" slum, however, was Five Points centered at the intersection of Baxter, Worth, and Park Streets flourishing when Charles Dickens described it in 1842. The southern part of the Lower East Side soon shared the conditions if not the notoriety of Five Points and, thanks to potato rot, political oppression, and pogroms, the northern part took on the same character, as the last great waves of the "old immigration" and the first great waves of the "new immigration" surged in. The overwhelming majority of the tenements still standing are of the kind banned in 1901. Many antedate the Civil War, but most were built in the i88o's and 1890*5.

Two million Irish, fleeing famine, migrated to America between 1846 and 1860, and many of them settled, at least temporarily, in the Lower East Side. It was the Lower East Side that produced Alfred E. Smith, fourtime Democratic governor of New York State, Democratic candidate for President in 1928, and a founder of the American Liberty League; and three of the best-known sachems of the originally anti-Irish Tammany Hall: "Boss" Tweed, leading figure of the infamous Tweed Ring, "Honest John" Kelley, and Charlie Murphy. From 1811 to 1867 the Tammany Wigwam was located at Chatham and Frankfort Streets. Large numbers of Irish workers went into the shipping and building trades, and later into the police, fire, and other city departments.

The first of thousands of Germans came to the Lower East Side at the middle of the nineteenth century. Many of them were skilled workers with a background of labor organization, and they played an important role in the trade union movement in New York: they formed the General German Workingmen's Union, which in 1867 affiliated with the International Workmen's Association (The First International) ; they founded the Free Workers' School (housed in Faulhaber's Hall on Second Avenue), one of the first of its kind in the United States; they established labor and progressive newspapers. German Jews became traders, professionals, clothing manufacturers, furriers, jewelers. By 1880 they were the dominant element in New York's Jewish community of eighty thousand.

In 1881 the great influx of Italians, Russians, Rumanians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Greeks, Poles, and Turks, into the Lower East Side began. Between 1 88 1 and 1910, 1,562,000 Jews came to America. Many of these Jewish emigrants, chiefly from Russia, settled on the Lower East Side, forming the world's largest Jewish community. The Jews, like other peoples in the region, grouped themselves in more or less compact colonies determined by language, customs, country or province of origin. Little Rumania, for instance, centering around Allen Street, was one of the most distinct and interesting quarters during the 1890's.

Most of these new Jewish immigrants worked as peddlers or entered the expanding needle trades. Workshops, established in the tenements, enslaved entire families, and the sweatshop era began, with its disease and degradation. Many of these workers succeeded after a time in improving their position, and a few became large-scale employers themselves. Through appalling sacrifice, some Jewish families realized their fondest aspiration: a son became a doctor, teacher, or lawyer. Those who rose above poverty moved to more desirable localities, but "greenhorns" -new and bewildered immigrants, Jew and Gentile continued to augment the population of the East Side until the third decade of this century, when quota laws severely restricted further immigration. During that decade the population remained between five and six hundred thousand.

An East Side family was often divided against itself by the conflict of the old and the new. "Many of us were transient, impatient aliens in our parents' home," Samuel Ornitz records 'in Haunch, Paunch and Jowl (1923), a semi-autobiographical novel of the Lower East Side. There were almost no play areas. Boys formed themselves into gangs, roamed the streets in search of mischief and money ; many became gangsters. One of the toughest thugs in the city's history, "Monk" Eastman, rose at the turn of the century, commanding hundreds of gunmen. From his headquarters on Chrystie Street came in a later period, Johnny Torrio, "Legs" Diamond, and Jacob ("Little "Augie") Orgen.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century the writings of Jacob Riis and others stimulated the housing reform movement and socialwelfare work. The Neighborhood Guild, first of the many settlement houses established in the Lower East Side, was founded in 1886 at 147 Forsythe Street. Two years later East Siders themselves took an important step toward combating their intolerable living conditions by forming the United Hebrew Trades, a trade union body. Today such centers as Christadora House, the Church of All Nations, the Educational Alliance, Grand Street Settlement, Henry Street Settlement, Stuyvesant Neighborhood House, and University Settlement are invaluable community agencies.

KEY TO LOWER EAST SIDE MAP

1. Lavanburg Homes 16. Secondhand Clothing Market

2. Bed Linens Market 17. Manhattan Bridge Plaza

3. Orchard Street Pushcart Market 18. Bowery Outdoor Jewelry Market

4. Henry Street Settlement Play- 19. Mott Street Pushcart Market

house 20. Police Headquarters

5. Amalgamated Dwellings 21. "Thieves' Market"

6. Henry Street Settlement (Main 22. Salvation Army Hotel

House) 23. Bowery Mission

7. Educational Alliance 24. First Houses

8. Jewish Daily Forward 25. Condict Building

9. Division Street Shopping Center 26. Old Merchant's House

10. Knickerbocker Village 27. Colonnade Row

11. Oldest House in Manhattan 28. Statue of Peter Cooper

12. Franklin Square 29. Cooper Union

13. Spanish-Portuguese Cemetery 30. Secondhand Book Market

14. Columbus Park 31. St. Mark's In-The-Bouwerie Mulberry Bend 32. Jewish Theater District

15. Olliffe Pharmacy

Unionism, anarchism, capitalism, socialism, and communism have been thoroughly discussed in the streets and parks of the East Side. Yet Tammany Hall has reigned almost uninterruptedly over the actual political life of the area. Anarchist and Socialist papers and periodicals, some shortlived, others continuing to appear for many years, have been issued in many languages. Johann Most published Freiheit, and later (1906) Emma Goldman founded Mother Earth. Under the editorship of Abraham Cahan, the Jewish Daily Forward, a labor paper in Jewish, has been most influential, and still has a circulation of about 170,000. The Socialist Party's work was rewarded when Meyer London was elected to Congress in 1914, and again in 1918 when three Socialist assemblymen were elected. Morris Hillquit, leader of the Socialist Party for many years after the war, was from the locality. B. Charney Vladeck, of the Forward, was elected majority leader of the City Council in 1937, the year the East Side assembly districts cast 14 per cent of their votes for the American Labor Party as against 8.5 per cent in the rest of Manhattan.

The intellectuals among the immigrants brought with them their oldworld avidity for culture, and their influence on the East Side provided thousands with their first contact with art and literature. A lunch hour at a garment factory would find many of the workers absorbed in Tolstoy, Kropotkin, or Heine. Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Gorky, and other European dramatists had their American premiers in the ghetto. While Broadway was receiving Ibsen coldly, the East Side was enthusiastically applauding Nazimova in Ghosts. The ghetto has produced a remarkable Jewish literature of its own, much of it mirroring the harsh life of sweatshop and slum. The Yiddish poet, with his relatively small public, ordinarily sells many more copies of his works than a poet who writes in English. Probably the two most widely read books in English about the East Side by East Siders are Abraham Cahan's novel, the Rise of David Levinsky (1917), and Michael Gold's autobiographical Jews Without Money (1930). Fannie Hurst, born in St. Louis, lived in the East Side while gathering material for her stories. "Humoresque," dealing with this locale, is perhaps the best known.

Jo Davidson and Jacob Epstein, sculptors, and Max Weber, the painter, are from the East Side, as are scores of younger artists whose works have gained wide recognition. Jazz owes much to the district where George and Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin started their careers. The wise-cracking brand of humor, and much language which has become part of popular speech, have roots in the Lower East Side. Such expressions as gabfest, plunderbund, it listens well, bum, dumb (in the sense of stupid), come from the Germans; the Jews have given words like kibitzer, kosher, mazuma, p hooey; and the Irish, shillelagh, smithereens, ballyhoo, and shebang. The district's environment has influenced Jimmy Durante, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Fannie Brice, George Jessel, Lionel Stander, Milton Berle, and the Marx brothers.

Immigration quotas at the beginning of the 1920's brought a great change to the district. No longer maintained by new arrivals, the population dropped from well over a half million in 1920 to less than a quarter million in 1938. Land values have declined and many of the rookeries are no longer profitable. Some have been condemned and demolished, leaving vacant lots used as playgrounds. The building of the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges (opened in 1903 and 1909) cut swaths through the close-packed dwellings; and recently Chrystie, Allen, and part of East Houston Streets have been widened, removing blocks of tenements. The East River Drive and its park have transformed the water front north of the Williamsburg Bridge. The Amalgamated Dwellings, built in the 1920*5, and Knickerbocker Village, built in the 1930*5, replaced some of the worst houses.

But throughout most of the section the smothering heat of summer still drives East Siders to the windows and fire escapes of their ill-ventilated dwellings, to the docks along the river or to the crowded smelly streets, where half -naked children cool themselves in streams from fire hydrants. In winter, basement merchants sell coal and kindling in minute portions for the stoves of unheated cold-water flats.

In 1939 a $19,500,000 Federal-financed housing project was considered for the Lower East Side. Other changes are in prospect and even the pushcarts may yet be housed in respectable markets. But the tenements that have been home to so many generations will probably be home to many more. Shored up with great beams against their sagging walls or vacant and crumbling, they still seem defiant. Great slums die hard.

East Side Neighborhoods

Several well-defined neighborhoods, with different backgrounds, distinct populations, and varied street plans, make up the Lower East Side. Along the East River above Fulton Street, bounded on the north by Division and Grand Streets, and roughly corresponding to the outlines of the old Fourth Ward, lies the oldest of these neighborhoods. Between Division and Houston Streets, and from the Bowery to the East River is the Jewish quarter with its small shops and markets. The Little Italy district lies west of the Bowery as far as Broadway, bounded on the north by Houston, and on the south by Franklin and Bayard Streets. Its Italian population now occupies only those four streets closest to the Bowery, the rest being given over to prosaic small businesses. Northward, from Houston to Fourteenth Street and between Broadway and Third Avenue, the Astor Place district retains, among second-rate commercial buildings, a few relics of its aristocratic days in the early i88o's. Lastly, between Third Avenue and the river, and between Houston and Fourteenth Streets, lies a district populated by a mixture of many nationalities (which for convenience will be named for its large park, Tompkins Square). The Lower East Side is connected with Brooklyn by the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges. Automobiles bound for Holland Tunnel cross the neighborhood in great numbers by way of 'Canal and Delancey Streets.

Old Fourth Ward District

Four blocks east of City Hall, an abandoned building at n Peck Slip (near Pearl Street) is reputed to be the oldest house in Manhattan. It was built in 1725. Constructed of roughhewn stone and faced with plaster, the structure is still in good condition. At No. 7 is a tumbledown clapboard house, now serving as a junk shop, which was the farmhouse in which David Thomas Valentine, famous editor of Valentine's Manual, lived during his youth.

In Revolutionary days the rich and influential built their mansions on fashionable Cherry Hill. The center of this section, Franklin Square, originally called St. George Square, at the junction of Pearl, Frankfort, Dover, and Cherry Streets, was named for Walter Franklin, a wealthy importer in whose home President Washington resided, from his inauguration on April 30, 1789 to February 23, 1790. One of the piers of the Brooklyn Bridge covers the site of the house.

Near by, at 326 Pearl Street, stood the Walton House, home of William Walton, one of the city's richest merchants. The display of wealth at Walton House was cited in the British Parliament as incontestable proof of the Colonists' ability to pay higher taxes. The house was destroyed by fire in 1853, an d its site is now occupied by a warehouse.

John Hancock lived at 5 Cherry Street, and Captain Samuel Chester Reid, a hero of the War of 1812, made his home at No. 27, now the site of a parking lot. Here Mrs. Reid is said to have sewed the first American flag in its present-day design, with a star for each state. The house was the first (1823) in America to have gas lighting. The old mansions, gradually abandoned by their owners, became tenements in the early iSoo's and the district degenerated into a slum area.

At 36 Cherry Street, in 1850, was erected Gotham Court, hailed as a private venture in model housing. It covered an entire lot, with only two narrow alleys for sunshine and air, the wider of which the neighbors ironically nicknamed Paradise Alley. In cholera epidemics the death rate in this house was highest in the city. It was torn down in 1896, but the name Paradise Alley lingers on in one of the sentimental songs of the period, the Sunshine of Paradise Alley, which, like the Sidewalks of New York, and Maggie Murphy's Home, was written about life among the Irish immigrants in this district in the 1 890*5. Near by, at 25 Oliver Street, lived Alfred E. Smith. The population of this former Irish district is chiefly Italian and Russian; a Greek colony occupies the lower end of Madison Street, while a small group of Spaniards lives in the neighborhood of Roosevelt and Cherry Streets. Today Cherry Street itself for the most part is a dismal- looking quarter of lumberyards and many abandoned tenements.

Among rancid tenements, at Cherry and Catharine Streets, stands the immense KNICKERBOCKER VILLAGE, a housing project completed in 1934 by a limited-dividend corporation with assistance from the Federal Government's Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Built on the site of a notorious "lung" block, it rents 1,600 apartments for an average of $12.50 a room a month to better-paid white-collar workers. The average rental elsewhere in the district is nearer five dollars and the former occupants of this site have moved to other slums. With a total of twelve floors, the buildings form an overcrowded group whose essential monotony is barely relieved by the sparse planting which differentiates it from hundreds of equally undistinguished apartments farther uptown. At the fourth floor level a projecting band of bricks hints at the parapet that should have marked the termination of the buildings.

Four blocks north of Cherry Street, at 175 East Broadway, standing head and shoulders above its neighbors, is the building housing the liberal Jewish Daily Forward, founded in 1897. It is the largest Yiddish daily newspaper in the world. On the next corner, East Broadway at Jefferson Street, the EDUCATIONAL ALLIANCE, a non-sectarian social settlement maintained by Jewish societies, organizes educational and recreational activities for the neighborhood.

The famous HENRY STREET SETTLEMENT, at 265 Henry, a block south of East Broadway, still maintains its modest main house. Opened in 1893 by one of the great pioneers in social work, Lillian Wald, the settlement has attracted world-wide attention through its work in nursing the sick, aiding in the solution of domestic and social problems, and striving for better housing, recreation, and education facilities in the slums of the Lower East Side. Buildings at 301 Henry Street and 8 Pitt Street have been acquired and the settlement employs 265 nurses working from sixteen branches throughout the city. During the depression of the early 1930*5, before public relief was taken over by the Federal Government, the settlement issued thousands of food tickets, gave aid, and directed relief. Lillian Wald retired in 1933 and the work is being carried on under the guidance of Helen Hall.

Three blocks north, at 466 Grand Street, is the Henry Street Settlement's PLAYHOUSE, once famous as the Neighborhood Playhouse. Organized in 1915 for the purpose of staging productions of the settlement's dramatic groups, it branched out into professional production under the leadership of Alice and Irene Lewisohn. The Playhouse saw the American premieres of The Dybbuk and of James Joyce's Exiles. Yvette Guilbert; Roshanara, the Hindu dancer ; Ratan Devi, the Hindu singer and musician ; Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet; and the Isadora Duncan dancers appeared here. A satiric revue, the Grand Street Follies, was such a success that in 1927 it moved uptown. The theater now serves its original function.

Jewish Quarter

Here tiny shops huddle between wide-fronted chain shoe stores and clothing establishments. Housewives carrying shopping bags walk to the dimly lighted food stores; shriveled old women sit on the steps before the tenements; an occasional elder in beard and yarmalka (skull cap) climbs the steps to a tiny synagogue maintained by some struggling congregation; a Jewish passerby may be solicited to come into the synagogue to make up a minyan (quorum of ten) so that the service may start. In this district may be found some of the marriage brokers who advertise "rich and professional connections" in the Jewish newspapers.

At 504 Grand Street, between Columbia and Sheriff Streets, stands AMALGAMATED DWELLINGS, a co-operative apartment house sponsored by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. The architecture diverts the eye with parabolic archways, and a surface patterning of brick designs and stucco inserts. An early development, it has a certain charm and human quality notably lacking in its more famous neighbor, Knickerbocker Village. Designed by Springsteen and Goldhammer, and completed in 1930, it was the first housing development built in Manhattan under the State Housing Law of 1926. Rents average $12.23 a room a month, and it is said that few clothing workers can afford to live there. Four blocks north at Goerck and Stanton Streets are LAVANBURG HOMES, a semi-philanthropic venture, built in 1927 and administered by the Fred L. Lavanburg Foundation to furnish modern housing at reasonable cost to families with small children.

Two blocks south of Stanton is Delancey Street, the district's main traffic and shopping artery. The WILLIAMSBURG BRIDGE, a steel suspension structure, runs through its center as far as Clinton Street. It was opened in 1903, the second to span the East River. Its designer was L. L. Buck. The bridge has a i,6oo-foot over-water span and cost $23,278,000, including land. With its two roadways, two sidewalks, and six tracks for surface and elevated cars, it carries more than fifty thousand vehicles a day.

A number of interesting markets lie west of Clinton Street. In the famous ORCHARD STREET PUSHCART MARKET, which stretches for several blocks above and below Delancey Street, fruits, vegetables, bread, hot knishes (boiled buckwheat groats or mashed potatoes, wrapped in a skin of dough and baked), bagel (doughnut-shaped rolls), and hot arbes (boiled chick-peas) are offered for sale; also tools, hardware, work clothes, and many odd types of merchandise. It may not be long before this and other open-air pushcart markets will disappear, for the Department of Markets, more interested in sanitation than in the picturesque, plans to house them all indoors.

A block west, on Allen Street, under the elevated tracks, red, green, and purple quilts hanging on poles advertise a market for bed linens between Stanton and Grand Streets. A few Rumanian restaurants and night clubs contrast with these surroundings. South of Delancey on Allen Street, the little shops feature copper coffee urns, silver vases, and candlesticks, ornate Victorian lamps and mantel clocks, and an occasional porcelain shepherdess. Antique metalware is sold here as well as the shoddiest machine-made articles. The brass and copper market ends at Grand Street. The three blocks south on Division Street, from Eldridge Street to the Bowery, are occupied by an unbroken series of women's apparel shops with gleaming plate-glass windows. In the doorways schleppers (pullers-in, a recognized profession on the East Side) stand ready to draw prospective customers into the stores. Some nationally known clothing firms started here.

One block west is Chatham Square, a jagged confluence of streets over which clatter two old elevated lines. South a block on New Bowery, between James and Oliver Streets, is the oldest JEWISH CEMETERY in Manhattan. The plot, once covering all of Chatham Square, was purchased in 1682 by a band of Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had fled to New Amsterdam from the Inquisition. Gershom Mendez Seixas, one of the great rabbis of early America and a patriot during the Revolution, is buried here. The little triangle is owned today by the uptown SpanishPortuguese congregation of Shearith Israel.

Little Italy and the Bowery

According to a 1932 survey, 98 per cent of the heads of households in this area were of Italian birth or parentage, mainly from Sicily and the south of Italy. During church festivals the streets are festooned with colored electric lights, the sidewalks lined with booths selling souvenirs and delicacies, and there is music, along with dancing, and a parade in the streets.

The old Mulberry Bend on Mulberry Street between Bayard and Park, two blocks west of the Bowery one of the worst slums in the city, was torn down in 1892 and replaced by Columbus Park, after drawing the fiery criticism of the reformer, Jacob Riis. However, many five-story tenements remain decked with cluttered fire escapes, washlines, and crowded stoops. The pushcarts on Mott Street from Canal to Broome, a block east of Mulberry Street, are relics of a thriving market that once embraced the four streets west of the Bowery. They sell ripe and green olives, artichokes, goats' cheeses, finochio (sweet fennel), and ready-to-eat pizza, an unsweetened pastry filled with tomatoes and cheese, meat, or fish.

At 240 Centre Street, between Grand and Broome Streets, is NEW YORK POLICE HEADQUARTERS, a large stone building designed by architects Hoppin and Koen in the French Baroque manner of the nineteenth century. A profusion of carved ornament gives it a somewhat pretentious aspect. Until thi$ building was completed in 1909, headquarters was at 300 Mulberry Street.

From offices on the second floor, the Police Commissioner and his deputies direct the activities of 19,346 police officers operating from eighty-three precinct houses scattered throughout the five boroughs. Detectives, patrolmen, policewomen; a great fleet of radio cars, three motorcycle divisions, twenty emergency squads, two mounted squads, thirteen traffic and two bridge traffic units, and a flotilla of launches are controlled from this building by means of an intricate system of telephone, telegraph, teletype, and radio communication. Three short-wave radio stations, WPEE, WPEF, and WPEG, provide almost instantaneous contact with all units.

The daily "line-up" of arrested criminals takes place in a large, semidarkened room on the fourth floor. Offenders parade across a brilliantly lighted stage to be questioned through a public address system, while detectives memorize their appearance and mannerisms. Criminologists from many countries come to witness the procedure. The building also houses the Traffic Division, the Surgical and Medical Bureau, the Traffic Safety Bureau, the Legal "Bureau, the Missing Persons Bureau, the Headquarters Detective Division, a law library, and a disciplinary trial room.

In the Police Academy, directly across Broome Street, police specialists give elementary training to rookies and advanced instruction to veterans of the force. Also housed in this building are the Criminal Identification Bureau (fingerprints and photographs), the Technical Research Laboratory, and the offices of a number of specialized detective squads. The Bureau of Equipment is maintained on the ground floor where members of the Department may buy all kinds of police equipment, from guns, nightsticks, and "nippers," to uniform caps, shirts, and shoes.

THE BOWERY, dividing line between the Jewish Quarter on the east and Little Italy on the west, was once an Indian trail used by aborigines in their expeditions against New Amsterdam. In the days of the Dutch it became known as "the road to the bouwerij (farm)," Peter Stuyvesant's country estate. The street was later part of the highroad to Boston and figured in many a Revolutionary incident as the only land entrance to New York City.

From 1860 to 1875 the city's theatrical life centered here. At the Bowery Amphitheatre (37 Bowery), the first blackface minstrel group made its appearance. At the National Theatre (104 Bowery) Frank S. Chanfrau, actor-manager, appeared with his brother in a long series of plays about Mose, the Bowery Paul Bunyan, an epic slugger, eye-gouger, and hobnailstamper in New York's rowdy history. The legendary Big Mose was eight feet tall, with hands as big as hams. In his belt was thrust a butcher's cleaver, and in summer a keg of beer hung there for his refreshment. He loved to lift a streetcar off its track and carry it on one hand as a waiter carries a tray, the horses dangling from their harnesses; and Big Mose laughing thunderously at the terrified passengers. Another of his favorite jests was to stand in the East River, and blow back approaching vessels with a few puffs from his mighty lungs. The first stage version of Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared at the National on August 23, 1852.

Harrigan and Hart with their idealized pictures of East Side life, Weber and Fields, George M. Cohan, and Eddie Cantor are a few of the many actors who first succeeded in Bowery theaters. The Jewish theater in the United States had its beginnings here, and the well-known Eli, Eli by Jacob Sandier was first sung in a Yiddish play at the old Windsor Theatre in 1896.

After 1870 came the period of the Bowery's celebrated degeneration. Fake auction rooms, saloons specializing in five-cent whisky and knockout drops, sensational dime museums, filthy and rat-ridden stale-beer dives, together with Charles M. Hoyt's song, "The Bowery, the Bowery! . . . I'll never go there any more!" fixed it forever in the Nation's consciousness as a place of unspeakable corruption.

The Bowery today is chiefly given over to pawnshops, restaurant equipment houses, beer saloons, and miscellaneous small retail shops. Here flophouses offer a bug-infested bed in an unventilated pigeonhole for twentyfive cents a night, restaurants serve ham and eggs for ten cents, and students in barber "colleges" cut hair for fifteen cents. Thousands of the nation's unemployed drift to this section and may be seen sleeping in all-night restaurants, in doorways, and on loading platforms, furtively begging, or waiting with hopeless faces for some bread line or free lodging house to open. No agency, at present (1939), provides adequate food, shelter, and clothing for these wanderers. Missions furnish food and lodging for a few, and try by sermon and song to touch the souls of the downand-outers and the sympathies of generous tourists.

The Bowery begins at Chatham Square, and at No. 6 stands the OLLIFFE PHARMACY, established before 1803 and reputed to be the oldest drugstore in America. At No. 15 is the twenty-five-cent lodging house where Stephen C. Foster, author of Swanee River and My Old Kentucky Home, lived in 1864. To the west of the Bowery is Chinatown (see page 104). West for a block on Bayard Street to Elizabeth Street is a secondhand clothing market occupying the basements. A suit or overcoat hangs out on the street by way of a sign, and the proprietor stands halfway up the cellar steps, peering eagerly for customers.

Two blocks north, at Canal Street, is the MANHATTAN BRIDGE, opened in 1909. The approach was designed by Carrere and Hastings, and the bridge proper, by Gustav Lindenthal, the engineer. The triumphal arch and curved colonnade are combined in a vigorous baroque composition, inspired by the Porte St. Denis, a gateway in Paris, and the Bernini colonnade that forms the Piazza of St. Peter's in Rome. Beginning here, and for several blocks north, the Bowery is a row of jewelry stores displaying diamonds. On the sidewalks, braving the weather, stand diamond dealers whose whole stock in trade may consist of one diamond, wrapped in tissue paper and carried in the vest pocket.

-The stretch between Delancey and Houston Streets is jocularly known as the THIEVES' MARKET. Those who have any small objects to sell or exchange congregate here. At No. 227, between Rivington and Stanton Streets, stands the BOWERY MISSION, which has been in existence for more than fifty years. It is now guided by Dr. Charles St. Johns, who conducts a radio broadcast from his chapel every Sunday afternoon. Guest singers perform and men from the audience appeal for jobs and testify to their conversion. At No. 225 is the SALVATION ARMY HOTEL, which runs a buttermilk bar where beef stew, oatmeal, and coffee sell for five cents.

Astor Place District

This was quite an aristocratic neighborhood in the early i88o's. William Cullen Bryant lived here, as well as Isaac M. Singer, improver of the sewing machine. Five blocks north of the Salvation Army Hotel and west of the Bowery, at 29 East Fourth Street is one of the old mansions, a redbrick structure in late Federal style, known sometimes as OLD MERCHANT'S HOUSE. Built about 1830 by the nephew of the Reverend Samuel Seabury, first Bishop of the Episcopal Church in America, it has a richly detailed interior that shows the dominant influence of the Greek Revival. The house was purchased in 1936 by the Historic Landmark Society and reopened as a museum. (Open weekdays 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday 1 to 5 p.m.; admission 500.) Bronze whale-oil mantel lamps, old gaslight fixtures, and Duncan Phyf e furniture are on view.

On Lafayette Street, south of Astor Place, the Greek Revival style finds expression in COLONNADE Row, formerly La Grange Terrace. Only four out of the eight original houses remain, but they serve to give some idea of the handsome proportions of a fashionable residence of the 1830*8.

The CONDICT BUILDING, 65 Bleecker Street (near Lafayette Street) is New York's sole example (1898) of the work of Louis H. Sullivan, whose buildings in Chicago and the Middle West counted among the leading structures in the development of modern architecture here and abroad. A minor example of his work, it displays some of Sullivan's clarity of expression and inimitable ornament.

The department store of JOHN WANAMAKER (see page 136) consists of two buildings between Broadway and Lafayette Street, separated by Wanamaker Place (Ninth Street). Across Lafayette Street and slightly to the south, is COOPER UNION, founded in 1859 by Peter Cooper, philanthropist, reformer, and inventor. His purpose was to establish a center where all public questions might be openly and freely discussed, and where young people might receive the technical education which he had been denied, and which was becoming increasingly important in that era of industrial expansion. Cooper Union Forum has often been the meeting hall of reformers gathering their forces against corrupt city administrations. Henry Ward Beecher, William Cullen Bryant, William Lloyd Garrison, and others thundered there against slavery and in defense of the Union, and Lincoln, in 1860, made the speech that is credited with winning for him the nomination for the Presidency. Cooper Union today offers to students, irrespective of race, creed, or color, courses in engineering and other technical subjects, secretarial training, and art. It has about ten thousand applicants a year, of whom only 3,500 can be accommodated. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Adolph A. Weinman, and Leo Friedlander are three illustrious graduates of the art school. The main library, open to the public, contains 67,000 books; the art library, 17,000. The MUSEUM FOR THE ARTS OF DECORATION includes textiles, drawings, and designs, and musical instruments. (Open weekdays 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., from the day following Labor Day to June 30; 6:30 to 9- '30 p.m. from October 1 to May 1 ; admission free.) The institution was supported entirely by the Cooper family until 1900; since then other philanthropists have helped. The innovations used by Peter Cooper in the construction of the school were important developments in the history of building. To support the flooring, he used rolled, wrought-iron beams arranged in a light grid; and by replacing heavy stone arches with thinner piers, he increased the usable space. In the tiny green triangle south of the building is a STATUE OF PETER COOPER by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Just east of Third Avenue, at 15 East Seventh Street, is McSor ley's Old Ale House, which was established in 1854. No women are served at McSorley's. Fourth Avenue, from Eighth to Thirteenth Streets, is faced with the longest row of secondhand bookstores in the city. The outside tables, displaying bargain items, attract browsers at all hours.

Tompkins Square

The population here is composed of Italians, Slavs, and East European Jews. Some of the Greek Orthodox churches are under the guidance of priests who wear long beards, according to the custom of the Slavic countries. The grocers, merchants, and mechanics of the district are Russian; and their language is heard in a dozen basement cafes where men sit drinking tea. Politically, the colony is violently divided between pro- and anti-Soviet.

On Avenue A and Third Street, three blocks east of the Bowery, rise the FIRST HOUSES, the first project of the New York City Housing Authority, opened in 1935. Of the old slum tenements which formerly occupied this space, some were torn down and others were completely rebuilt by WPA labor, using the old materials. Unfortunately the attempt to utilize old structures has forced the new ones into a dull scheme. Bathrooms, sound-proofed partitions, gardens, and playgrounds promote the health and comfort of the occupants, who pay five dollars to seven dollars a room a month.

Four blocks north is TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK. Within the park, near the East Tenth Street side, a small MONUMENT depicting a boy and girl looking at a steamboat commemorates the tremendous loss sustained by this district, in the sinking of the excursion steamer, General Slocum, on June 15, 1904. Most of those who lost their lives, more than a thousand in number, came from this neighborhood, then predominantly German, and the disaster changed the character of the district. A large number of German families, overwhelmed by painful memories, moved to other parts of town.

Second Avenue, from Houston to Fourteenth Street, is known as the JEWISH RIALTO. The theaters specialize in melodrama and musical comedy, leaning heavily on success themes in which the immigrant makes good. Bertha Kalich, Jacob Adler, Molly Picon, David Kessler, Boris Thomashefsky, Sigmond Mogulesco, Jenny Goldstein, Morris Moscovitch, and Ludwig Satz are famous Jewish players who have performed here. Two of Adler's children, Luther and Stella, now famous on Broadway, had their start on Second Avenue. This Rialto is also famous for its foreign restaurants. Just below Fourteenth Street several Russian eating places offer entertainment and dancing to balalaikas, and a menu including borscht, pirojski (pastry), and shashlik (chunks of roasted lamb). There are Polish restaurants near St. Mark's Place that serve stuffed pig and bigos my si iw ski (cabbage and game). And there are many reasonably priced Hungarian-Jewish and Rumanian-Jewish restaurants where a meal includes chicken soup with mandlen (a kind of crouton) and stuffed kishkes (intestines).

In the incongruous setting of the theater and restaurant district is ST. MARK'S IN-THE-BOUWERIE, Second Avenue and Stuyvesant (East Tenth) Street. Erected in 1660, as a Dutch chapel, on the farm of Governor Peter Stuyvesant, it was rebuilt in 1799. The steeple and portico were added in 1826 and in 1858. Pagan-looking frescoes fill the pediment above the porch. They recall the pastorate of Dr. William Norman Guthrie. In an effort to make the church attractive to progressive parishioners, Dr. Guthrie worked out a ritual based on the theory of the essential unity of all religions, which included Greek folk dancing, American Indian chants, and many other things which the conservative element in the diocese heatedly declared to have no place in an Episcopalian church. A Body and Soul Clinic was attached to the church with the aim of combining physical and spiritual treatment.

In the graveyard lie buried Governor Stuyvesant and Commodore Matthew C. Perry. A statue of the Dutch governor, presented by Queen Wilhelmina of Holland in 1915, stands near his grave. In 1878 the graveyard was the scene of a sensational body snatching when the remains of A. T. Stewart, well-known merchant and owner of a store which is now part of Wanamaker's, were stolen and held for $20,000 ransom. They were not returned till two years later.

On Second Avenue at Twelfth Street is the CAFE ROYAL, forum and meeting place of the Jewish intelligentsia. Behind the box hedges that make it a sidewalk cafe in summer, or in the big inside room on Friday nights, vehement arguments are carried on for and against a new play, book, or art movement. Managers on the road telephone the cafe by long distance to fill some sudden need, and unemployed actors eat there in the hope of attracting the eye of some impresario.

GREENWICH VILLAGE

Area: Spring St. on the south to i4th St. on the north; from West St. east to Broadway. Map on page 127.

A nation, coming into its own artistically after an era of ruthless industrial expansion, of materialism and strait-laced conventionality, seized upon Greenwich Village as a symbol of revolt in the ferment of postwar years. The "Village" was the center of the American Renaissance or of artiness, of political progress or of long-haired radical men and short-haired radical women, of sex freedom or of sex license dependent upon the point of view.

Greenwich Village, actually, is a cross section of American urban life. Here are old families in their gracious mansions ; bankers and clerks in tall apartment buildings; and a foreign-born population of some twenty-five thousand, largely Irish and Italian, in tenements. If in 1939 there were more serious artists and writers, more "bohemians" in renovated old houses, more colorful tea rooms and wild night clubs than in other American centers, the number each year was lessening.

In the years just preceding and following the World War the political, artistic, and literary rebels who flocked to the Village gave it a character unique in this country. The literary history of Greenwich Village, however, begins much earlier. Here Tom Paine spent the last years of his life. Poe lived, drank, and worked at several Village addresses. Walt Whitman lived in the vicinity, Henry James was born near Washington Square (he named one of his books for the square), and Mark Twain adopted the neighborhood for his city home. In 1896 John Masefield, English poet laureate, made his living here by scrubbing the floors of a saloon.

BROOKLYN BRIDGE

HANOVER SQUARE

CHERRIES 5C

CHATHAM SQUARE EL

SALVATION (A Bowery Mission)

RAIN (The Bowery)

ST. PAUL'S CHAPEL

But the story of Greenwich Village is the rounded story of an old and lively American community, at once typical and individual. Here exploring parties were entertained by the natives of the hamlet of Sapokanican; and, in return, with the earliest settlement of lower Manhattan, the Dutch drove the Indians from this neighborhood. In 1633, while most of the island north of Wall Street was still a wilderness, Governor Van Twiller was cultivating here a large tobacco plantation Bos sen Bouwerie (Farm in the Woods) and built his home at the foot of the present Charlton Street. During the fall of 1679, the Labadist missionaries, Danckaerts and Sluyter, visited what had grown to be a small village, where they drank "some good beer." In 1740, Sir Peter Warren, vice admiral of the British Navy and at that time commander of the fleet in New York, chose the locality for his home.

The Village grew throughout the Colonial period as a community of the wealthy. Here was the great Brevoort estate, sold in 1762 to one John Smith, a large slaveholder; the Bleecker farm; and the mansions of the Bayards, the Jauncys, and the De Lanceys. A popular drive for New York's fashionable reached the Village by way of Greenwich Street, which then ran along the river; when wet weather rendered this route impassable, the drive was made along the Bowery to an extension of what is now Greenwich Avenue, with a monument erected to General James Wolfe, hero of the French and Indian War, as its goal.

A spurt was given to the growth of the community following the Revolution, particularly in the neighborhood of the State prison, erected at the foot of Tenth Street; that institution, like the Bedlam Madhouse of Elizabethan days, was considered a residential attraction.

An epidemic of smallpox in 1739 in the Battery region gave impetus to the first hasty migration of the well-to-do to the healthier climate of the Village; scourges of yellow fever in 1797, 1799, 1803, and 1805 resulted in similar stampedes northward in crowded stages, and goods-piled carriages and pushcarts. Some drifted south again when conditions became normal, but others remained in their new homes. The greatest of all the yellow fever plagues, in 1822, brought such a rush of refugees that the Brooklyn ferry changed its course from New York to a point opposite the Village. Makeshift dwellings and business houses were thrown up almost overnight; lanes and cowpaths winding haphazardly through the neighborhood became busy streets. One of these lanes, during the 1822 epidemic, quartered temporarily the counting houses of Wall Street, and still bears the name Bank Street.

From 1825 to 1850, the population of Greenwich Village quadrupled, its inhabitants being largely of middle-class and well-to-do American stock. But for the next half-century, its growth, although steady, was slower than that of New York as a whole. While the city moved steadily northward, along Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and other great arteries, the Village, with its narrow erratic streets, remained a quiet backwater. As late as 1875, since only 32 per cent of its population was foreign-born unusual for Manhattan the section was known as the "American Ward."

An area so central, however, could not escape the ever encroaching poorer classes. Already numbers of Irish immigrants had moved into the neighborhood, and later a Negro invasion, starting at the southeastern edge of the Village and moving north to Washington Square itself, heralded the first major change in the district. Property values decreased. Save for the families in the aristocratic stronghold of Washington Square and north of it, and a few tenacious ones scattered throughout the southwest, the older and wealthier inhabitants joined the continual migration uptown.

Salmagundi Club

First Presbyterian Church

Church of the Ascension

Grace Church School

Grace Episcopal Church

Hotel Lafayette

Home of Mark Twain

Hotel Brevoort

One Fifth Avenue

Clay Club

Whitney Museum of Art

A.C.A. Gallery

MacDougal Alley

The Row

Rhinelander Mansion

Washington Mews

Wanamaker House

Washington Arch

Bust of Alexander Lyman Holley

Judson Memorial Baptist Church

World War Memorial Flagpole

Statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi

New York University

Museum of Living Art

Broadway Central Hotel

Bannerman Museum

26. Holland Tunnel

27. Spring Street Presbyterian Church

28. St. John's Park Freight Terminal

29. Hudson Park Playground

30. Little Red School House

31. Narrowest House in New York

32. Cherry Lane Theater

33. St. Luke's Chapel

34. Grove Court

35. Greenwich House

36. Site of Tom Paine House

37. Statue of General Sheridan

38. Northern Dispensary

39. House of Detention for Women

40. Jefferson Market Court

41. Patchin Place

42. Rhinelander Gardens

43. Milligan Place

44. Spanish-Portuguese Cemetery

45. New School for Social Research

46. St. Vincent's Hospital

47. Downtown Gallery

48. Bell Telephone Laboratory

49. Gansevoort Market

50. West Washington Market

GREENWICH VILLAGE

Then, in the 1890's, came another invasion of Irish lower in the economic scale than the compatriots who preceded them. The Italians displacing the Negroes who left their last stronghold in Gay Street in the early 1920*5 moved up from the south in even greater numbers than the Irish, meeting them in the neighborhood of Sheridan Square.

By 1910, the transformation of Greenwich Village had been completed. The American Ward had become Ward 9, a foreign ward, leading its life of pushcart, cafe, fiesta, and bar, its land values as cheap as in nearly any settled section of the city, its people faithful followers of the Roman Catholic Church and of Tammany.

A second change of a different nature began in Greenwich Village shortly before 1910. It had a slow, quiet beginning, scarcely perceptible to the neighborhood itself; yet it was to make that dingy backwater celebrated wherever the English language is spoken. At that period materialism had assumed an unprecedented importance in American life. Ambition not directed toward the goal of a large bank account was almost alien to thought and education, and, like most things alien, was regarded with distrust and scorn. Above all was this attitude adopted toward the struggling artist seeking satisfaction from completion of a poem or picture.

A natural result was the withdrawal of the rebel artist into protective groups. Many of these groups gravitated to the larger cities Kansas City to St. Louis, St. Louis to Chicago and finally, from all over the country to the metropolis.

In Greenwich Village the earliest rebels found comparative quiet, winding streets, houses with a flavor of the Old World and cheap rents. The local people existed largely to be traded with; otherwise they were passed unnoticed as the Villager moved from group meeting to group meeting.

These meetings after a day of hard work or of grandiose planning at first took place in their homes, in a back room in Washington Square South, in an attic on West Fourth Street. The room was often sparsely furnished, partly for lack of funds to buy furniture, partly as a revolt from overfurnished, late- Victorian backgrounds. Often candles replaced electricity. A few pictures of their own or of their friends' painting and a batik hung on the walls. They talked of their work, of the arts, or of sex and Freud; and were secretly thrilled at doing so in mixed company.

GREENWICH VILLAGE 129

They discussed Socialism, the I.W.W., woman's suffrage, and the philistinism of the folks back home. The conversation ranged from brilliant to silly, but always, instinctively or consciously, it was unconventional. And throughout, they drank endless glasses of tea for these were the days before Prohibition and bath-tub gin.

As their numbers grew, they found outside meeting places of their own, places more esoteric than the Italian restaurants they first frequented, such as Bertolloti's on West Third Street, Renganeschi's on West Tenth Street, Gallup's on Greenwich Avenue. The first of these new meeting places was Polly Holliday's, on the north side of Fourth Street, between MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue. Here commercialism, even on the part of the proprietress, scarcely existed. Meals were written on the cuff, never to be erased; but all "true" Villagers were welcome so long as they kept the conversation flowing well into the night. The Mad Hatter was another such eating place; with Polly's it entertained many who were later to become noted in art, science, and politics. There was the Samovar, Sam Swartz's TNT, the Purple Pup, the Pirate's Den, and Romany Marie's, the last-named still in existence. For drinks, at the corner of Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, there was the Golden Swan, popularly known as the "Hell Hole," frequented by Villagers and toughs alike, and on Greenwich Avenue, Luke O'Connor's bar, where John Masefield worked. Finally, as a degree of affluence came to many of the Villagers, the cafes of the Brevoort and Lafayette hotels continental in flavor and esteemed by cosmopolitans were invaded, for drinks, cards, chess, and for discussion. Always the line between groups was sharply drawn; there were as yet no big business neighbors, no white-collar workers, no respectable well-to-do drawn here by the love or the glamor of the arts. There were only the Villager and Ward Niner, and the former walked from home to Polly's and from Polly's to the Brevoort through a little world of his own.

In the theater, from modest beginnings, the Villagers all but revolutionized the American stage. A group, loosely organized at first, gave performances in a converted stable at 133 MacDougal Street. Its members, sometimes actors, sometimes playwrights, called themselves the Provincetown Players, after their so-titled wharf theater in Cape Cod's Provincetown, and included such people as George Cram Cook and his wife, Susan Glaspell, Eugene O'Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, her sister, Norma, and Robert Edmond Jones. And if this group gave the country modern playwrights, the group that preceded it for a short while at the same address the Washington Square Players with Helen Westley,

130 LOWER MANHATTAN

Philip Moeller, Lawrence Langner and others gave America an organization, which, moving uptown as the Theater Guild, taught the incredulous Broadway producers that living art could bring box-office receipts. A later venture, Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory, in the old Theatre Frangais, 105 West Fourteenth Street, carried on the tradition of a "different" theater until 1933, when it gave way to the Theater Union, which produced plays with a pronounced social theme.

Literature, in group form, found expression in a number of papers and magazines of varying worth. They ranged from purely literary to primarily political, and lasted from one issue to several years. Two of them, the Seven Arts and the Masses, were forced to discontinue publication because of their opposition to the World War. The former, edited by Louis Untermeyer and James Oppenheim, with a number of now noted contributors, was revolutionary in content. The Masses was radical politically; following its suppression in 1918, Max Eastman, Art Young, John Reed, and Floyd Dell, were placed on trial, charged with a conspiracy to obstruct recruiting and prevent enlistment. The trial was an event of nation-wide interest, the tension of which on the climactic day was disturbed only by the snoring of the defendant Young. The Masses reappeared in 1919 as the Liberator, and later, after another lapse, as the present New Masses.

First, however, among organized groups expressing the revolt of the Villagers was the "A" Club, at One Fifth Avenue, with the writer, Mary Heaton Vorse, Rose O'Neill, creator of the Kewpies, and Frances Perkins, later Secretary of Labor under Franklin D. Roosevelt, among its leaders a group devoted to the advancement of woman's suffrage and social reforms. The Liberal Club, with a similar membership, followed, moving from East Seventeenth Street to 133 MacDougal Street, at which address it gave houseroom and financial aid to the Washington Square Players and, later, to the Provincetown Players.

The liberals were beginning to exert an influence not only on New York but on American thinking, when the entrance of the United States into the World War altered radically the intellectual aspects of the Village. Repression of liberal and radical activities during and for several years following the war was, of course, the major cause of the change. Some Villagers had been ardent supporters of the war; the nebulous liberalism and radicalism of many others were dissipated. Meanwhile, however, fame had come to some of these early rebels, success to many others, maturity to all. Many of the successful moved, with their families, to Connecticut, Westchester County, and farther afield; the unsuccessful trekked back home to take up their old life where they had left off a

GREENWICH VILLAGE 131

decade earlier. A nucleus remained to greet the postwar rebels attracted to a now celebrated Bohemia.

By 1939 there were more Greenwich Villagers than in the days preceding the war, but these young people were leading a life not greatly dissimilar to that of many of their contemporaries throughout the country. The Village tearooms and night clubs, for the most part no longer the haunts of the Bohemian, were patronized largely by out-of-town tourists and sensation seekers from outlying boroughs. Large apartment buildings and rents were rising as the well-to-do and white-collar workers, attracted by the central location, by vastly improved transportation facilities, and, perhaps, by the glamor associated with the address, moved in.

And as the foreigner had for two decades retreated before the advance of the Villager, so already the Villager had begun to retreat to outlying districts before the wealthier newcomer. The passionate individualism of the Village was giving way to community singing and similar neighborhood activities. Bobby Edwards' erratic, "villagy" Quill was replaced by the highly successful commercial Villager, which exalted the conventional, small-town aspects of the district. If such institutions as the semiannual open-air art show in Washington Square where three-quarters of the exhibitors have been non-Villagers still exist, they are inspired by the legend rather than by the actuality of the community.

Much of the old aspect, and many of the old people, such as Theodore Dreiser and Vilhjalmur Stefansson, returned, however. Papa Strunsky still rails at the tenant in arrears in his West Third Street building and at times lets the promising writer or painter stay on, the bill unpaid. Literary teas (with tea scarcely in evidence) are still popular. The easy unconventionality, the charming old houses, comfortable as an old shoe, still invite the Villager, emerging from the subway after a visit to more formal neighborhoods, to drag off his or her hat and swing along home.

Washington Square

The district roughly known as Greenwich Village has two focal points: Washington Square and Sheridan Square, each the center of a neighborhood fairly distinct in architecture, in the character of its activities and in the type of its people. Sheridan Square can best be described as the "Times Square" of Greenwich Village. WASHINGTON SQUARE, on the other hand, is striking for its dignity, still undestroyed by the commercial and tenement advances that swept around it, while many of the streets to the north, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, have scarcely changed through the decades. Although some of the private homes have been con 132 LOWER MANHATTAN

verted into rooming houses, large numbers of charming dwellings are still occupied by their owners.

The site of the square served as the city's potter's field in 1789, and the use of its trees some still standing as the public gallows during that period was an attraction drawing large crowds of holiday makers on execution days. In 1823, however, the potter's field was closed. Four years later a park was laid out and the first of the impressive mansions which give the square its present character was erected.

The square today is well shaded by trees: pin oaks, oriental planes, yellow locusts, ash, and American elm. Benches line its paths, and here meet Italian workers, mothers and their broods from the south, apartment dwellers from the north, university students from the east, and young Villagers from the west.

Dominating the park is the white marble WASHINGTON ARCH, eightysix feet high, with a span thirty feet wide, designed by Stanford White. Rising at the foot of Fifth Avenue, it forms an imposing gateway to New York's most imposing thoroughfare. It was completed in 1895 at a cost of $128,000, and commemorates the first inauguration of George Washington. Two statues of the first President, one in the uniform of commander-in-chief, by Hermon A. MacNeil, the other in civilian garb, by A. Sterling Calder, face the north on bases projecting from the east and west piers, respectively.

On the east side of the square is a bronze STATUE OF GARIBALDI by Giovanni Turini, erected in 1888 and presented by the Italians of New York. Directly south of the arch is a WORLD WAR MEMORIAL FLAGPOLE, forty-five feet high, and near by is a bronze BUST OF ALEXANDER LYMAN HOLLEY, Bessemer steel pioneer. It is the work of J. Q. A. Ward and was erected in 1890.

Annual events in Washington Square include the folk festival and the open-air art and pottery exhibits. The first, an outdoor pageant of folk dancing and singing, is held on Labor Day. Art exhibits, inaugurated in 1931, are held in May and September, with pictures lining the building walls on the blocks near the western half of the square Thompson, Sullivan, and MacDougal Streets, and Washington and Waverly Places. Painters living within the confines of the city may exhibit their wares free, and receipts from sales range from less than a dollar to several hundred dollars. In May, the Ravens tack their verses on a fence along Thompson Street the Fifth Avenue extension south and sell them for quarters and half dollars.

Washington Square North, part of the old Warren estate, retains

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almost intact its line of fine early nineteenth-century Greek Revival homes of red brick with white limestone trim. Each mansion was built on a generous plot with a ninety-foot garden in the rear. One of the earliest of these was the RHINELANDER MANSION, designed by Richard Upjohn, architect of Trinity Church, and built at the west corner of Fifth Avenue in 1839.

Across Fifth Avenue is the WANAMAKER HOUSE, built in 1833-7 as two separate houses by James Boorman, a merchant, and purchased by Rodman Wanamaker, a merchant's son, in 1920. The twelve houses extending between Fifth Avenue and University Place are known as THE Row, one of New York's most elegant residential areas, and occupy land owned by Sailors Snug Harbor, an organization to aid indigent seamen. Once part of the Minto farm of twenty-one acres, which included most of the land between Washington Square North and Tenth Street, from Fifth Avenue to the Bowery, the area was acquired by Captain T. Randall, a privateer, in 1790. His son, appropriately and sentimentally, gave it to men of the sea, and stipulated in his will that none of the land was ever to be sold. The sailors benefiting from the income live in a home on Staten Island (see page 618). These houses, among the most lavish of the 1830's, with brick, ivy-covered walls, fine doorways, and quaint and carefully tended front yards, did not acquire their extraordinary harmony by accident. Though built by lessees, and with varying interior schemes, their exteriors were controlled by a master plan dictating the cornice and window heights. Some of the city's leading families and some of the country's best-known writers and artists have occupied the houses. Among the latter were Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, and Francis Hopkinson Smith. In No. 3, a studio building, lives Frederick W. Stokes, the artist, who went to the North Pole with Peary; some of his paintings of the Arctic regions are in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, but many are in his studio, which, like others in the building, is still heated in winter by pot-bellied stoves.

Waverly Place, running east and west of Washington Square North, honors through its name Sir Walter Scott. At No. 108 Richard Harding Davis lived during his early newspaper days.

The beauty of the square is marred on its east side by the tall drab buildings of NEW YORK UNIVERSITY. The Main Building, erected in 1894, replaced the original building of the university, which was founded in 1830. Albert Gallatin, Jefferson's Secretary of the Treasury, was one of the leaders in the move to establish this nonsectarian institution for the dissemination of practical as well as classical education among the middle

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and poorer classes. The use of stone cut by Sing Sing convicts for the buildings precipitated one of New York's first labor demonstrations the Stone Cutters' Riot. Masons, parading in protest, were dispersed by the Seventh Regiment. At the school Morse conducted successful experiments with telegraphy, Draper made the first daguerreotype of the human face, and Colt perfected the revolver. The first two men were faculty members. Morse, a portrait and landscape painter, was professor of art ; George Inness was one of his pupils. Colt was one of the lodgers in the Gothic tower of the university. Others who had rooms there were Brander Matthews, Winslow Homer, and Walt Whitman. New York University has another campus in the Bronx (see page 521).

On the ground floor, right, of 100 Washington Square East is the MUSEUM OF LIVING ART. (Open Monday to Friday 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.) Founded in 1927, the gallery contains works of Man Ray, Lachaise, Cezanne, Brancusi, Matisse, Picasso, and Juan Gris, owned by Albert E. Gallatin, a descendant of the New York University's first council chairman. Three of the paintings are critically acclaimed as being among the most important of this century: The Three Musicians, by Picasso, The City, by Leger, and Composition in White and Red, by Mondrian. The exhibits also include the work of American artists such as Marin, Demuth, Sheeler, Hartley, and Knaths. Near the university, at 22 Washington Place, was the Triangle Waist Company, where in 1911 occurred a disastrous fire which took a toll of 150 lives. As a result of the investigation that followed, State laws were enacted to improve working conditions in the factories.

Washington Square South, with its remodeled and newer studio buildings, is far less elegant than the north side. Beginning shortly before the war, many Villagers who later became noted lived on this street. Adelina Patti, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Gelett Burgess, John Dos Passes, James Oppenheim, Pierre Matisse, Guy Pene duBois, and Alan Seeger were tenants at No. 61, Madame Branchard's Rooming House. At the west corner of Thompson Street stands the $450,000 JUDSON MEMORIAL BAPTIST CHURCH, of amber-colored brick, with slender Lombardian campanile surmounted by a lighted cross. The church was designed by Stanford White ; its twelve stained-glass windows were executed by John La Farge.

Tall, modern apartments pre-empt Washington Square West, a threat to the old open atmosphere that attracted them. In the court of the Holley Chambers spouts a fountain fed by the subterranean Minetta Brook. Its

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winding, erratic course beneath Greenwich Village has been a repeated cause of distress to apartment builders and subway constructors.

MacDougal Street, bordering the west side of Washington Square, swarms with tearooms, night clubs, and Villager memories. The Liberal Club and the Provincetown Players occupied No. 133 a half block south of the park a building now used as a WPA training theater.

Around Washington Square South and extending west to Sheridan Square are numerous Village night clubs, patronized mostly by outsiders. Many of them, such as the Black Cat, established in 1888, between the square and Third Street, were early meeting places of Village intellectuals.

One-half block north of Washington Square, the blind MACDOUGAL ALLEY, a lane of century-old mews converted into studios, runs east from MacDougal Street. Privately owned, the Alley is lit by New York's only remaining gas street lamps.

Fifth Avenue and University Place

On Fifth Avenue, north to Twelfth Street, rise tall, modern apartment buildings and hotels, along with a few old renovated mansions. In the summer a number of sidewalk cafes give this quarter-mile the flavor of a South European boulevard. At Christmas time it is ablaze with lighted trees and decorations.

ONE FIFTH AVENUE, built in 1927, is the twenty-seven-story apartment hotel by Helmle, Corbett, and Harrison in association with Sugarman and Berger. The structure is interesting for its cut corners and setback, a change from the rectangular massing of the period. An amusing attempt was made to simulate vertical piers by the use of "shadow brick." Below the skyscraper, running east, is WASHINGTON MEWS, a row of converted stables, now the homes of the well-to-do, resembling a secluded lane in the Chelsea district of London with cobblestones, door shrubbery, and green shutters. Half a block north is the HOTEL BREVOORT, at Eighth Street. Built in 1854, it is noted for its distinguished intellectual and cosmopolitan clientele. New York's first marble house, at No. 8, was built in 1856 by John Taylor Johnston, first president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On the southeast corner of Ninth Street stands the house where Mark Twain lived during the early years of the twentieth century. This three-story brick house betrays the largely ecclesiastic practice of its architect, James Renwick.

The CHURCH OF THE ASCENSION (Protestant Episcopal) is on the northwest corner of Tenth Street. Built in 1841 in English Gothic style after the design by Richard Upjohn, it was redecorated about 1888 from

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the plans of Stanford White, the chancel being the work of well-known artists of the late nineteenth century. John La Farge's mural, The Ascension (behind the altar), is considered his finest work. Here, on June 26, 1844, President John Tyler was married to Julia Gardiner. Between West Eleventh and Twelfth Streets is the FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, an example of English Gothic architecture, built in 1845 from plans of Joseph C. Wells.

The SALMAGUNDI CLUB, at 47 Fifth Avenue, was founded in 1871 as a sketch class. Its members are artists and sympathetic "amateurs of art." The name recalls the interest in the "Salmagundi Papers" published by Washington Irving. The club occupies the last surviving high-stooped brownstone (built in 1854) of the block. The gallery, just beyond the spacious entrance hall, exhibits work by Salmagundi members, and the library has a valuable collection of costume books. The club's auction exhibition the Mug Sale is held annually in January; a summer show is usually held from May to October.

Paralleling Fifth Avenue to the east, University Place runs from Washington Square to Fourteenth Street. The HOTEL LAFAYETTE, founded in 1883, at the southeast corner of Ninth Street, is known for its French cuisine, while its cafe, like that of the Brevoort, is a meeting place of intellectuals, American and foreign. The district to the north is given over largely to auction rooms for the sale of antique and modern furnishings.

Broadway

Broadway, a block east of University Place, is at its drabbest in this sector. At Tenth Street and Broadway rises the lacelike GRACE EPISCOPAL CHURCH consecrated in 1846. It was designed by James Renwick, architect of St. Patrick's Cathedral. Typically English are the square east end, the elaboration of the ribbing of the vaulting, and the arrangement of tracery in the windows. The carved ornament of the exterior is crisp and incisive. The adjoining GRACE CHURCH SCHOOL, organized in 1894, was New York's first institution for training choir boys. In 1934 a day school was also inaugurated which now offers a complete secondary school curriculum.

The swerve of Broadway at this point attests to the stubbornness of Hendrick Brevoort, whose tavern stood on the present church site and who refused to allow the street to be cut through (1847) because it would mean the destruction of a favorite tree. One block south is JOHN WANAMAKER, one of the oldest and foremost department stores in New York. It passed into the hands of its present owners in 1896. The original

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(north) store, erected by A. T. Stewart in 1862, is believed to be the first building in the city with a cast-iron front. A skylighted "open well" in the center of the old store recalls the days before electricity made good illumination possible. Upon the completion of the new building in 1905, the two were joined by a bridge similar in design to the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. Attractions offered by the store include Christmas concerts by famous choirs, exhibits by the American Artists Congress in May, and marionette shows.

At No. 673 stands the BROADWAY CENTRAL, built in the 1870*5 to be "America's most palatial hotel." The National Baseball League was organized here in 1876. In this hotel Edward S. Stokes shot and killed James Fisk, president of the Erie Railroad, in January, 1872, in a quarrel over Josie Mansfield, actress.

Little Italy

South of Washington Square and stretching to Spring Street lies a section of LITTLE ITALY. Numerous Italian cafes and restaurants, some small and wholly native, several particularly on West Houston Street having city-wide fame, cater to the needs of the residents and visitors. Here are held minor fiestas, with streets strung with lights, with singing and dancing, and the sale of candies and ices. On Bleecker Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues is a pushcart market displaying fruits and vegetables, many, such as finochio and zucchini, exotic to Americans. Fortunio, a proprietor of a restaurant on this street, is said to have imported the first broccoli in the country. The LITTLE RED SCHOOL HOUSE, an experimental school for children, is at 196 Bleecker Street.

Eighth Street and the Art Galleries

Eighth Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, with its bookshops, antique shops, food shops, tearooms, bars, and art galleries, has been called the "Main Street" of Greenwich Village. At No. 4 is the CLAY CLUB, working headquarters and gallery for a group of sculptors. The building, originally the stable belonging to the marble house on Fifth Avenue (see page 135), was remodeled by the owner, John Taylor Johnston, as an exhibition gallery for his private collection. Impressed by his success, a group of wealthy collectors organized the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see page 368) in 1870. At Nos. 8-12 is the WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, founded in 1931 "to help create rather than conserve a tradition." (Open Tuesday to Friday 1 to 5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 2 to 6 p.m.; closed during August.) It exhibits the works of Whistler,

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Ryder, Homer, Eakins, and La Farge, as well as the works of living American artists of greater and lesser fame, including the painters Sloan, Cropper, Davis, and Kuniyoshi, and the sculptors Davidson, Lachaise, Noguchi, Robus, and Zorach. Murals by Thomas Benton decorate the library. The museum was founded and endowed by the sculptor, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney). The building, remodeled from three residence's, has a pink stucco facade. The A.C.A. GALLERY (American Contemporary Art), at No. 52, exhibits the work of contemporaries who have concerned themselves with present-day life. Among artists represented are Cropper, Evergood, Tromka, Joe Jones, and Harriton.

Sixth Avenue

Sixth Avenue, the dividing line between that part of Greenwich Village dominated by Washington Square and that dominated by Sheridan Square, is an uninspiring thoroughfare. The old Sixth Avenue elevated structure, which darkened the street, was removed in 1938-9; and with the completion of the Sixth Avenue branch of the municipal Independent Subway, the character of the street may change. Running east, between Sixth Avenue and MacDougal Street, is Minetta Lane, with Minetta Street leading south from it. Considered in the latter part of the nineteenth century one of New York's most notorious slums, it has been improved through the renovation of some of its houses, which form an interesting group.

In the triangle formed by West Tenth Street, Sixth Avenue, and Greenwich Avenue are the HOUSE OF DETENTION FOR WOMEN and JEFFERSON MARKET COURT, which handles cases of women's delinquency. The jail, which in 1932 replaced the picturesque Jefferson Market, resembles a bleak apartment building. Modern in all its equipment, probably its most striking feature is the turntable altar in the chapel, one sector fitted for Protestant service, the second for Catholic, and the third for Jewish. The court itself was designed by Frederick C. Withers and Calvert Vaux, in 1876. The fantastic Victorian Gothic building with its array of weird turrets, traceried windows, and its patterns of brick and carved stone is an exceptionally interesting work of its period.

The oversized, odd-shaped block just north of the court, bounded by West Tenth Street, Sixth Avenue, West Eleventh Street, and Greenwich Avenue, is the result of the meeting at a slight angle of two gridiron systems of streets. To utilize the interior of the property the owners developed the land in an unusual way. From West Tenth Street and from Sixth Avenue blind alleys PATCHIN PLACE and MILLIGAN PLACE run

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into the block at right angles to the street, and give access to the houses which front on them. Patchin Place resembles a bystreet in Old London. In its modest little brick houses, only recently modernized, have lived Theodore Dreiser, John Masefield, Dudley Digges, John Reed, John Howard Lawson, and e. e. cummings. Milligan Place, whose houses were built in the 1850*5, was named for Samuel Milligan, who acquired the property, part of the Warren farm, in 1799. His granddaughter married Aaron Patchin, to whom was deeded what became Patchin Place in 1848. George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell lived here, and Eugene O'Neill came frequently when the three worked on his play, The Emperor Jones. Here, as throughout the Village, grows the ailanthus the "back-yard" tree, indigenous to India. It is a city tree, one that flourishes with little soil, water, and light. In the days of the pestilence it was believed that the tree absorbed "bad" air.

On Eleventh Street, a few doors east of Sixth Avenue, is the tiny second SPANISH-PORTUGUESE JEWISH CEMETERY OF NEW YORK, opened in 1805 and closed in 1829. West of the avenue, from 112 to 124 West Eleventh Street, is RHINELANDER GARDENS, part of the Rhinelander estate, which utilizes the deep lots on the north portion of the block by setting the buildings far back from the street line and thus getting a pleasant front garden. Built in the 1850's, this distinctive line of houses with castiron balconies reminiscent of New Orleans is the only remaining example of its type in the city.

The NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH, founded in 1919 by James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard, is at 66 West Twelfth Street, just east of Sixth Avenue. Thorstein Veblen was a faculty member. It is devoted chiefly to adult education in political and social sciences and psychology, but advanced courses in the arts are also given. Here, in 1934, was organized the "University in Exile," its teachers being drawn from the brilliant political and racial exiles from Nazi Germany. The building, designed by Joseph Urban and erected in 1931, illustrates in striking fashion some of the characteristics of modern architecture. The central portion of the exterior is cantilevered out to form a shelter for the entrance doors below and is accented by continuous horizontal windows. An interesting feature is the progressive narrowing of the space between windows as the building rises and the inward inclination of the front wall; seen in perspective these tend to give the building additional height. On the first floor of the interior is a small auditorium of skillful design. Murals by Thomas Benton and Camilo Egas, Ecuadorean artist, and the only frescoes in New York City by the Mexican, Orozco, decorate other parts of the

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interior. Benton's work, the artist's first important mural decorations, are in the reception room on the third floor. The three on the west wall depict the old agricultural South, lumbering, and the growth of the West ; the three on the east, phases of the coal and iron industries ; the one facing the entrance, power; and those on either side of the entrance, phases of city life. Egas' work is in the Caroline Tilden Bacon Memorial Room on the mezzanine floor and in the foyer. Those in the foyer depict the harvest festivals of the Indians of Ecuador ; the two panels on the mezzanine floor, harvests in South America and Minnesota (Mrs. Bacon's native state). The Orozco Room is on the fifth floor. The fresco on the south wall is entitled The Table of Universal Brotherhood and embodies the theme of the group. Those on the west wall are concerned with attempts to achieve this brotherhood, one in the Soviet Union, the other in Mexico. A portrait of Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution, is in the first, and in the second, one of Felipe Carillo Puerto, Yucatan hero. On the north wall is a representation of the Universal Family, the worker and his wife. Gandhi is portrayed in the painting on the east wall, which depicts the plight of India and its enslaved masses.

The DOWNTOWN GALLERY, 113 West Thirteenth Street, always has examples of the work of six outstanding painters on view: Marin, O'Keeffe, Sheeler, Karfiol, Laurent, and Kuniyoshi. (Open weekdays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; closed July and August.) An excellent collection of folk art is exhibited on the upper floors.

Sheridan Square

SHERIDAN SQUARE, at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and West Fourth Street, is reached from Washington Square by Waverly Place. This is the focal point for tourist night life in Greenwich Village; revelers from the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens arrive, as evening approaches, on the IRT subway, by bus, taxi, and private car to visit night clubs and bars that abound in the square itself, line West Fourth Street to Washington Square, and dot the neighborhood north and west. This, too, is a center for Villagers who frequent more modest establishments unpretentious saloons, lunch wagons, and cafeterias. A cafeteria, curiously enough, is one of the few obviously Bohemian spots in the Village, and evenings the more conventional occupy tables in one section of the room and watch the "show" of the eccentrics on the other side.

The square, named for General Philip H. Sheridan, though a blaze of light by night, is, by day, an uninteresting hodgepodge of buildings of varying sizes and ages, suggesting little of the charm that lies beyond its

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limits. At the northeastern end is a small park, containing a bronze STATUE OF GENERAL SHERIDAN, sculptured by Joseph P. Pollia and erected in 1936. Beyond the park is the NORTHERN DISPENSARY, a simple triangular brick building, erected about 1830, and curious for the fact that two of its sides are on one street (Waver ly Place) and the third side on two streets (Christopher and Grove Streets). A block south of the square at 27 Barrow Street is GREENWICH HOUSE, a seven-story structure of Georgian Colonial design, a settlement house. Its social and educational activities and its powerful influence for civic improvement have given it a national reputation. Among its experiments in education and sociology is the Nursery School, founded in 1921 to provide a place for working mothers to leave their children.

Wide Seventh Avenue, running north, offers little of interest. On the northeast corner of Eleventh Street is ST. VINCENT'S HOSPITAL, established 1849, New York's first charity hospital depending on voluntary contributions. Across the avenue a PLAQUE on the Sheridan Theater designates the site where Georges Clemenceau, who later became the wartime premier of France, lived in 1870 practicing and teaching medicine. At the juncture of West Twelfth Street and Eighth Avenue is ABINGDON SQUARE, named for a daughter of Vice-Admiral Warren, Charlotte, who married the Earl of Abingdon. This large, irregular square is surrounded by tall, modern apartment buildings and older warehouses and business establishments.

At Sheridan Square Fourth Street turns northwest, and to the bewilderment of visitors, crosses all the westbound streets, from Tenth to Thirteenth. In the late 1890's the region thus traversed was the domain of a notorious but colorful gang of thugs known as the Hudson Dusters. A high percentage of them were cocaine addicts and thus especially vicious and ferocious. Their exploits were favorite grist for the journalists' mill and the Dusters became one of the best-known gangs of the time.

It is perhaps in the district southwest of Sheridan Square that one finds best the atmosphere of Greenwich Village. Along winding streets, interspersed with ugly tenements and occasional apartment buildings, are the age-worn dwellings of the burghers of the early nineteenth century who fled from the pestilence-ridden city houses with steep roofs, often of slate, with old chimney pots; old brass knobs on handsome doors; highceilinged rooms, small-paned windows; carved mantels over huge fireplaces; "ship carpenter's" woodwork, and gates and area-fences with Georgian ironwork. Informal gardens in the rear are much in use, as are the Italian garden restaurants that thrive throughout the Village.

On narrow Grove Street, just west of the square, at No. 59, a bronze

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PLAQUE memorializes the site where Tom Paine, greatest literary force of the Revolution, died in 1809. It was then the home of Mme. Nicolas de Bonneville, whose husband had befriended Paine after his release from prison in France. When the De Bonnevilles came into disfavor with the Napoleonic government Paine invited them to America. He provided for them as best he could but, toward the end, impoverished himself, he lived in a rooming house on Herring Street (now Bleecker Street) until Madame de Bonneville brought him under her care. His last days were made miserable with the importunings of religious fanatics who wanted the old deist to recant his "atheistic" teaching. His last request, that he be buried in a Quaker churchyard, was refused.

GROVE COURT, entered from the bend in Grove Street, is used for access to the houses around it. Of charming scale and simplicity are the frame and brick houses of the 1830*5. At the corner where Grove Street intersects Bedford, there is a bizarre group a farmhouse remodeled with high twin gables, a stable converted into a small house, and a prosaic old threestory frame building.

Facing the foot of Grove Street, on Hudson Street, on land that was part of Trinity Church farm, ST. LUKE'S CHAPEL was opened in 1822. It is a simple low building .of yellow brick with an effective square tower. Under the approach to the baptismal font, reminiscent of old England, is a wooden figure of Saint Christopher, brought from South America in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The vicarage to the north is the oldest existing in the city. The Leake Dole of Bread, distributed every Saturday after ten o'clock service, was provided for in the will of John Leake, who, in 1792, bequeathed one thousand pounds for "sixpenny loaves of wheaten bread" to be distributed to "such poor as shall appear most deserving."

Barrow Street, below Grove, was originally named Reason Street, in honor of Paine's famous Age of Reason. The street's name was corrupted to "Raisin Street," and some time later it became Barrow.

Commerce Street, a block south, is a short, backwater street, hardly deserving of its name. Near the bend of Commerce Street is the CHERRY LANE THEATER, a converted barn, which, in the postwar period, served the experimental New Playwrights group. A group of two-story-anddormer houses, near Bedford and Commerce Streets, dates from the early nineteenth century. Said to be the narrowest house in New York, 751/2 Bedford Street is nine and one-half feet wide, thirty feet long, and three stories high. Its stepped gable recalls the old Dutch architectural detail. Among the tenants of the building have been John Barrymore and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

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The HUDSON PARK PLAYGROUND, south of St. Luke's Place, was converted from a graveyard in the 1890*5. Here, it is claimed, was buried the oft-found lost Dauphin of France, above whose body was placed a stone bearing the simple description Leroy (The King).

On Varick Street (continuation of Seventh Avenue) at the corner of Charlton Street, stood Mortier House, one of Washington's headquarters during the Revolution. While Washington was living here Thomas Hickey, one of his bodyguards, was hanged for his participation in a Tory plot that involved firing the city, inciting the troops to mutiny, and feeding the general a dish of poisoned peas. Aaron Burr later lived in the house and in 1831 it was opened as the Richmond Hill Theatre. It was razed in 1849 to make room for business, which today dominates this neighborhood with tall loft and office buildings. Only south of Charlton Street does an occasional dingy red-brick house now serving as a tenement remain as a vestige of the old village.

Middle West Side

CHELSEA HELL'S KITCHEN AND VICINITY GARMENT CENTER AND VICINITYTIMES SQUARE DISTRICT

Area: i4th St. on the south to 59th St. on the north; from the Hudson River east to 6th Ave. (i4th to 42d St.) and 5th Ave. (4zd to 59th St.) ; excluding area east of Broadway, between 57th and 59th Sts. Maps on pages 54-55 and 149. Principal north-south streets: Broadway, yth, 8th, 9th, loth, and nth Aves. Principal cross streets: i4th, 23d, 34th, 42d, and 57th Sts.

Transportation: IRT Broadway-7th Ave. subway (local), i4th to 59th St. stations; 8th Ave. (Independent) Grand Concourse or Washington Heights subway (local), i4th to 59th St. stations; 9th Ave. el, i4th to 59th St. stations; BMT subway, 34th to 57th St. stations; bus lines on all principal north-south and cross streets except on nth Ave. and 42d St.; 42d St. crosstown and Broadway surface cars.

IHE HUDSON RIVER water front (see page 68) of the Middle West Side, an important sector of the New York port, includes the docks of the transatlantic luxury liners. In the adjoining localities, Chelsea on the south and the Hell's Kitchen district on the north, live the largest group of underprivileged families in the city. The Times Square area, east of upper Hell's Kitchen, contains the showrooms of cafe society and the auditoriums of night clubs as well as the famed congeries of legitimate theater houses and motion-picture palaces. Below the Rialto lies the Garment Center, the home of the cloak-and-suit, women's dress, and fur trades. The Thirty 144

INTRODUCTION 145

fourth Street zone houses some of the great department stores of the city Macy's, Gimbels, Saks and the eastern terminus of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Clustered around the station are skyscraper hotels which are frequently used by the garment industry for fashion shows and business transactions.

The most characteristic feature of the Middle West Side section is the residential belt extending from the Twenties through the Fifties between Eighth and Tenth Avenues. Row after row of three-, four-, and five-story grimy brick tenement houses proclaim one of New York's worst slum areas. Significantly, the city health center district that includes the Middle West Side area has the highest general mortality rate in the city and ranks first in pneumonia and cancer, second in tuberculosis, and third in infant mortality.

A large number of brownstones, originally built as private residences, have been converted into lodginghouses, particularly in Chelsea and in the eastern part of upper Hell's Kitchen. Many others have been extensively altered and remodeled into apartment homes for families of moderate means, and here and there, notably in the Times Square district, in Hell's Kitchen above Forty-second Street east of Tenth Avenue, and in Chelsea near Seventh Avenue between Fourteenth and Twenty-first Streets, modern apartment houses have been erected. These, however, serve to accentuate rather than relieve the surrounding drabness.

Ethnically the section is a typical metropolitan melange. Since the late 1840's, the Irish have been the predominant group in Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen. Not so numerous perhaps, but constituting a sizable minority in each of these localities, are the Italians. The northern part of the Hell's Kitchen district also contains small French, German, and Negro groups, while Chelsea also houses Spanish, Puerto Rican, Greek, and Balkan colonies. On the whole, however, the long process of assimilation, accelerated by immigration restrictions, is rapidly transforming the Middle West Side into a native American community. According to the 1930 census, nativeborn residents of the district outnumbered the foreign born by nearly two to one.

Eighth Avenue, in the throes of a minor boom that was stimulated by the construction of the Independent Subway system, may be termed the Middle West Side's "Main Street." Broadway, which enters the district at Herald Square, Thirty- fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, cuts northwesterly across the Garment Center and Times Square, and meets Eighth Avenue at Columbus Circle.

In the days of the Dutch, what is now the Middle West Side comprised

146 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE WEST SIDE

the southern section of Bloomingdale (the area between i4th and 12 5th Streets) fertile, rolling fields, for the most part free of crags or clumps of underbrush. For nearly two hundred years successive generations of Dutch farmers tilled the land and provided garden truck for the thriving town at the lower end of the island.

In 1667, soon after English occupation, Governor Nicholls issued a patent to several citizens, among whom was Jans Vigne, probably the first white child born on Manhattan, granting them "a certain tract or parcel of land on the Island Manhattans lying and being to ye North of ye Great Creeke or Kill alongst ye River commonly known and called by ye name of Hudson's or ye North River." The Great Kill was a small stream that emptied into the Hudson at the foot of what is now Forty-second Street; the territory north of this stream was subsequently called the Great Kill region. By the end of the eighteenth century most of the upper Great Kill region had been acquired by the Hopper family and was known as Hopper ville. The original Hopper farm in the lower Great Kill district was called the Hermitage; the name is perpetuated by a hotel at Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue which occupies part of the site of the farm. The land between Forty-first and Thirty-second Streets in the second half of the eighteenth century belonged to the famous Glass House Farm it contained a glass bottle factory while most of the territory to the south, now Chelsea, was the property of Captain Thomas Clarke, veteran of the French and Indian wars. Within twenty-five years following the adoption of the City Plan in 1811, all these estates were subdivided into lots.

Manhattan's early railroads and the natural Hudson River water-front facilities played major roles in the development of the Middle West Side. In 1851, when Broadway between Twenty-third and Forty- second Streets was but a winding road through pleasant countryside, the Hudson River Railroad was opened to traffic, with a station at Thirtieth Street and Eleventh Avenue. A year later, the Eighth Avenue Railroad announced the opening of a line between Fifty-first and Chambers Streets.

When friends cautioned Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt against building the Hudson River Railroad through sparsely settled country, he curtly rebuked them, declaring, "Put the road there and people' 11 go there to live." Vanderbilt's assertion proved correct. In the 1850*8, lumberyards, brickyards, lime kilns, stables, warehouses, and distilleries moved into the old farm land north of Chelsea, crowding the malodorous slaughterhouses in the upper Thirties; and with the industrial plants came the workers, swarming into wooden shacks and shanties and, during the i86o's, into

INTRODUCTION 147

the jerry-built tenements of Chelsea and what is now Hell's Kitchen. As early as 1864 public indignation at these housing conditions resulted in a vigorous but ineffectual reform movement.

Throughout the i86o's and 1 870*5 the industrial influx into the westerly half of the Middle West Side section continued, pushing northward. Gashouses, swill-milk cow stables, glue manufactories, freight yards, stockyards, piano factories, new slaughterhouses, and dozens of other establishments employing unskilled labor took advantage of the cheap swampy land near the foot of Forty-second Street and the drier and even cheaper land beyond. By 1850 a cotton factory had been established as far north as Fiftyfirst Street. In 1871 the Ninth Avenue el, the first rapid transit system in the city, began operating north to Thirtieth Street, destroying the charm and property values of Chelsea's most sedate avenue, but making possible additional profits for successful speculators engaged in building tenements. Five years later the system was extended northward.

Shackled by low-wage industry to desperate poverty and barbarous living conditions, the early Hell's Kitchen residents resorted at times to violence and crime. Occasionally, the spirit of protest assumed mass proportions, as in the Draft Riots of 1863 when thousands of workers marched down Eleventh Avenue and destroyed property of the Hudson River Railroad. More generally this spirit found expression in such organizations as the Gophers, the Parlor Mob, and the other predatory West Side gangs.

During the heyday of Mayor Fernando Wood and the Tweed Ring, organized vice had completely taken over the area between Twenty-fourth and Forty-second Streets and from Fifth to Seventh Avenue. The district, known later as the Tenderloin, became the scene of such wickedness that one crusading minister, the Reverend T. DeWitt Talmage, denounced the city that tolerated it as "the modern Gomorrah." So ineffectual were law enforcement agencies that in 1866 Bishop Simpson of the Methodist Episcopal Church complained that prostitutes were as numerous in the city as Methodists. The Tenderloin, however, continued to prosper. As late as 1885 one-half of all the buildings in this district were reputed to cater to vice.

Retail trade, rather than industry, started the development of the eastern half of the Middle West Side. During and following the Civil War, the northward march of the fashionable residential and trading district had reached Fourteenth Street and Union Square, and by 1875 these neighborhoods were well-established trading centers for prosperous contiguous East and West Side communities. When the aristocracy moved into the Madison

148 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE WEST SIDE

Square section, the merchants followed. During this period Sixth Avenue, Chelsea's eastern border, replaced Broadway as the principal street for stores, mainly owing to its newly built elevated. Before the turn of the century, Twenty-third Street, which had already become famous as the city's theatrical center (Jim Fisk's Grand Opera House, Proctor's, etc.), was the retail shopping center as well.

In the 1900's the Rialto began shifting to the Herald Square vicinity. Chelsea's great department stores soon followed, finding quarters hard by the newly constructed (1910) Pennsylvania Station. The converging rapid transit systems here rendered the stores accessible to an unlimited market, and the shopping center rapidly expanded to its present proportions. The theaters did not remain long in Herald Square and moved with the Tenderloin to the "Roaring Forties" of the Times Square area. The original Tenderloin, abandoned by vice as well as commerce, stagnated forlornly for many years until the World War period, when the needle trades took possession of the Thirties.

KEY TO MIDDLE WEST SIDE MAP

TIMES SQUARE DISTRICT

1. Merchant's Gate Maine Memorial

2. Statue of Christopher Columbus

3. General Motors Building

4. Broadway Tabernacle

5. Park Central Hotel

6. Mecca Temple

7. Grand Street Boys' Club House

8. Rockefeller Apartments

9. Manhattan Storage Warehouse

10. Fifty-second Street Night Clubs

11. American Federation of Musi cians, Local 802

12. St. Malachy's Church

13. Madison Square Garden

14. Union M. E. Church

15. Statue of Father Duffy

16. American Federation of Actors

17. Church of St. Mary the Virgin

18. Variety Building

19. Actors' Equity Association

20. Harvard Club

21. General Society of Mechanics

and Tradesmen

22. New York Yacht Club

23. Twelfth Night Club

24. New York Bar Association

25. Hotel Algonquin

26. City Club

27. Criterion Theater Building

28. Astor Hotel

29. Ascension Memorial Chapel

30. New York Times Annex

31. Paramount Building

32. Police Information Booth

33. Lambs' Club

34. Town Hall

35. Times Building

36. Bush Terminal Sales Building

37. Herald Tribune Offices

38. Metropolitan Opera House

39. Site of the New York Casino

Continued on Page 150

150 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE WEST SIDE

Continued from Page 148

GARMENT CENTER AND VICINITY

40. Garment Center Capitol

41. Hotel New Yorker

42. New York General Post Office

43. Pennsylvania Station

44. Hotel Pennsylvania

45. Herald Square Hotel

46. Old Herald Building

47. Statue of William E. Dodge

48. McAlpin Hotel

49. Statue of Horace Greeley

50. Hotel Martinique

51. Hotel Governor Clinton

52. Wholesale Flower Market

CHELSEA

53. Church of St. Vincent De Paul

54. Old Proctor's 23d Street Theater

55. Spartacus Greek Workers Edu cational Club

56. Greek Quarter

57. Old Grand Opera House

58. Central High School of Needle

Trades

59. Y.M.C.A., 23d Street Branch

60. Hotel Chelsea

61. Spanish-Portuguese Cemetery

62. Church of the Holy Communion

63. International Ladies Garment

Workers Union

64. Spanish Church of Our Lady of

Guadalupe

65. Port Authority Building

66. Spanish-American Workers Al liance

67. National Biscuit Company's

Plant

68. Catholic Youth Organization

69. Straubenmuller High School

70. Seamen's House (Y.M.CA.)

71. National Maritime Union

72. General Theological Seminary

73. Church of the Guardian Angel

74. Chrystie Street House

75. Site of Birthplace of Clement C.

Moore

76. London Terrace

ficole Maternelle Francaise

77. Starrett-Lehigh Building

78. Hudson Guild

79. Chelsea Park

80. Model Tenement House

81. French Hospital

HELL S KITCHEN AND VICINITY

82. New York Central Railroad,

Thirtieth Street Yard

83. WPA Federal Theatre Project

Workshop (Bethany Church)

84. Lincoln Tunnel

85. West Side Children's Center

86. Schermerhorn Playground SI. McGraw-Hill Building 88. Church of the Holy Cross S9. Troupers' Club Association 90. Vitaphone Building

91. Paramount Pictures Building

92. Twentieth Century Fox Films

93. Film Center

94. 18th Precinct Police Station

95. Polyclinic Hospital

96. Church of St. Benedict the

Moor

97. 7th District Magistrates' Court

98. Fox Movietone News

99. American Women's Association 100. Roosevelt Hospital

CHELSEA 151

CHELSEA

Area: i4th St. (6th to nth Ave.) on the south to 25th St. (6th to 8th Ave.) and 3oth St. (8th to 1 3th Ave.) on the north. Map on page 149.

Chelsea is known as a conservative Irish Catholic community despite the presence of Spanish, French, Scottish, and other national groups. Although typical Manhattan tenements, small business establishments, and apartment houses make up most of the district, here and there an old theater or cafe reminds Chelsea of its past as an amusement center in the i88o's, and a relatively large number of local ancients helps give the neighborhood a "preserved" quality.

In 1750 Captain Thomas Clarke established his home on what is now the block from Ninth to Tenth Avenue between Twenty- second and Twenty-third Streets and named it for a soldiers' hospital (near London) called Chelsea. The house, which was rebuilt by his widow, Mistress Molly Clarke, was the birthplace of his grandson, Clement C. Moore (17991863), compiler of the first Hebrew and Greek lexicons published in the United States, and author of the perennially favorite poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas. Moore broke up his patrimony, selling it in building lots, and on the site of the old estate the village of Chelsea grew. In 1831 streets were cut through.

The English-village character of the neighborhood began to change in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Hudson River Railroad laid its tracks along Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in 1847. Industrial plants moved in. People of many nationalities settled here, including a large number of Irish, many of whom came here as a result of the potato famines of 1845-8 in Ireland. The votes of these immigrants increased Tammany's strength and Chelsea gave the "Wigwam" a number of leaders including Richard B. ("Slippery Dick") Connolly, of the Tweed Ring. The neighborhood is still a Tammany stronghold.

Among the immigrants were Spaniards, who gathered in the vicinity of Fourteenth Street. Since 1920 the SPANISH COLONY has declined, but bodegas (grocery stores), carnicerias (butcher shops), Spanish benefit societies, the SPANISH-AMERICAN WORKERS ALLIANCE at 349 West Fourteenth Street, and the SPANISH CHURCH OF OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE at 229 West Fourteenth Street still preserve the Iberian flavor.

The NATIONAL BISCUIT COMPANY'S PLANT on Fourteenth Street near Tenth Avenue is the largest factory in the neighborhood. It has about forty-six acres of floor space and employs several thousand workers.

152 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE WEST SIDE

The Port of New York Authority, which owns and operates the three bridges between Staten Island and New Jersey (Bayonne, Goethals, Outerbridge Crossing), the George Washington Bridge, the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, erected in 1933 the PORT AUTHORITY COMMERCE BUILDING, a fifteen-story, block-square structure between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets. It was designed by Aymar Embury II. The ground floor and basement make up Union Inland Freight Station Number i, the first of a projected series of strategically placed truck terminals for the collection and distribution of freight. Eight trunk railroads jointly operate the station. The upper fourteen floors are used for general commercial and manufacturing purposes ; Commerce Hall, on the second floor, is used for large exhibitions. Four great elevators carry loaded trucks weighing as much as forty thousand pounds to any upper floor.

The MANHATTAN CENTER OF THE CATHOLIC YOUTH ORGANIZATION, 353 West Seventeenth Street, also serves as a neighborhood settlement house for lower Chelsea. In 1890 Father John C. Drumgoole opened a boys' club on near-by West Fifteenth Street, which eventually led to the establishment in 1936 of the C.Y.O., an influential youth group.

The STRAUBENMULLER TEXTILE HIGH SCHOOL at 351 West Eighteenth Street trains its students in modern industrial arts. The school's museum has extensive collections of wool, silk, rayon, cotton, and lace fabrics. A Federal Art Project mural in the library thirteen panels by Paul Lawler illustrates the history of the textile industry. Groups interested in visiting the museum may obtain permission from the school office.

The GENERAL THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY occupies the entire block between Twentieth and Twenty-first Streets, Ninth and Tenth Avenues. When Clement C. Moore left his old apple orchard to the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1817, he did so on the condition that the church build a seminary on the site. Of the original group only the west building, erected in 1835, still stands. Most of the other existent structures were erected in the i88o's and were designed by Charles C. Haight. Of red brick with brownstone trim, they form a simple and charming Collegiate Gothic group. The seminary has in its possession one of the priceless Gutenburg Bibles.

The CHURCH OF THE GUARDIAN ANGEL (Roman Catholic), 191 Tenth Avenue, is an interesting architectural adaptation based on the Romanesque style of churches in Lombardy. It was designed by John V. Van Pelt and built in 1930. This church is called the Seamen's Institute, and its pastor, the Reverend John J. O'Donnell, is the Port Chaplain of the Archdiocese.

The little brownstone CHURCH OF THE HOLY COMMUNION (Protestant

CHELSEA 153

Episcopal), Sixth Avenue and Twentieth Street, was built in 1846 through the efforts of William Augustus Muhlenberg, who was its first pastor. The building shows a harmonious proportioning of its tower and wings, windows and doors. The pleasing stone interior contains finely carved church furniture and a sturdy timber ceiling, and is lighted by well-designed stained-glass windows. The first "boy choir" in America and the first Sisterhood in the Anglican Communion were established here.

On Twenty-first Street near Sixth Avenue is the third CEMETERY OF THE SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE SYNAGOGUE , Congregation ShearithIsrael (the oldest Jewish congregation in New York).

Edwin Forrest, famous actor of the pre-Civil War period, who did much to stimulate interest in the development of native American drama, resided at 436 West Twenty-second Street.

Along Twenty-third Street, the main cross-town street of Chelsea, and in the i88o's the Times Square of the city, are found hotels, movie houses, dignified apartment buildings, restaurants, and residence houses for young men, such as the CHRYSTIE STREET HOUSE at No. 456 and the Y.M.C.A. at No. 215. The HOTEL CHELSEA, at No. 222, has been a landmark since 1882. Its boldly placed wrought-iron balconies are conspicuous among less venerable facades.

Near Sixth Avenue Edwin Booth's theater was opened in 1869. Booth played Shakespearean roles to an admiring public there until 1873. PROCTOR'S TWENTY-THIRD STREET THEATRE, now a motion-picture house, was also popular, first as a legitimate playhouse, and later for its vaudeville. Beautiful Lily Langtry, "the Jersey Lily" who was a friend of Edward VII, lived near by. Three restaurants, famous in the i88o's and 1890*5, are still operating in the neighborhood: CAVANAGH'S at 258 West Twenty-third Street, GUFFANTI'S at 274 Seventh Avenue, and PETITPAS at 317 West Twenty-ninth Street.

The RKO theatre at Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue, built in 1868 at a cost of a million dollars, was known as Pike's Opera House. James Fisk and Jay Gould bought it in 1869 and changed the name to the Grand Opera House. Fisk extended the repertoire to include plays, light opera, and vehicles for his sweetheart, Josie Mansfield. Her neighboring mansion was connected to the theater by an underground tunnel. When the abortive attempt of Fisk and Gould to corner the gold market resulted in the panic of Black Friday in 1869, Fisk barricaded himself behind the doors of the opera house. Later when Fisk's partner, Edward S. Stokes, shot him in a quarrel over Mansfield's favors, "Jubilee Jim's" body lay in state in the opera house lobby.

154 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE WEST SIDE

Several early cinema companies had studios in this part of Chelsea, and by the time of the World War the locality was considered a center of the industry. Some of Mary Pickford's first pictures, including Good Little Demi (1913) and Tess of the Storm Country (1914), were made on the two top floors of an old armory building at 221 West Twenty- sixth Street. In the World War period, the Reliance and Majestic studios of Adam and Charles Kessel and Charles Baumann occupied a building owned by Stanford White at 520 West Twenty-first Street, and such well-known players as Wallace Reid, Florence Hackett, and Henry Walthall worked there. Alice Joyce began her career with the Kalem Company at 235 West Twenty-third Street.

The sixteenth-story LONDON TERRACE building, one of the largest apartment houses in the world, occupies the full block between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Streets. Designed by Farrar and Watmough, and built in 1930, the project contains 1,670 apartments, a swimming pool, solarium, gymnasium, and a central garden. Its doormen are costumed as London "bobbies." This block was the site of the original London Terrace and Chelsea cottages, both groups of fashionable homes in the middle-nineteenth century.

In London Terrace is the SCOLE MATERNELLE FRANCHISE, partly supported by the French government, and directed for forty years by Mme. Anna Fregosi, whose original pedagogical methods have won the attention of many educators. Other evidences of the once large French population of Chelsea are the CHURCH OF ST. VINCENT DE PAUL (Roman Catholic) at 127 West Twenty-third Street, the oldest French church in the city (founded in 1841), and the FRENCH HOSPITAL at 330 West Thirtieth Street.

On Twenty-fourth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues is the new CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL OF NEEDLE TRADES, being completed in 1939 at an estimated cost of nearly three million dollars. It represents the renewed interest of educators in skilled occupations and may indicate a trend away from the professions.

The GREEK QUARTER centers about Twenty-fifth Street and Eighth Avenue. On the northeast corner is the SPARTACUS GREEK WORKERS EDUCATIONAL CLUB. The walls of its building bear bullet scars sustained in a riot in 1871 when a procession of Orangemen escorted by the Sixth, the Ninth, and the Eighty-fourth Regiments were sniped at as they marched down Eighth Avenue. A battle involving police, infantry, rioting Hibernians, and parading Orangemen resulted in fifty-four deaths.

The best-known social agency in Chelsea is the HUDSON GUILD, at 436

HELL'S KITCHEN AND VICINITY 155

West Twenty-seventh Street since 1905. It was founded in 1895 by its present head, Dr. John L. Elliott, Senior Leader of the Society for Ethical Culture and a descendant of Elijah P. Lovejoy, the abolitionist. Its model tenement house, built in 1916 at 441 West Twenty-eighth Street, helped to focus attention upon the need for adequate low-rent housing.

The MORGAN ANNEX, New York Post Office, with its huge parcel-post station, fills the block from Ninth to Tenth Avenue, between Twentyninth and Thirtieth Streets. A railroad spur enters the western end of the building at the third-floor level.

HELL'S KITCHEN AND VICINITY

Area: 30th St. (9th to i2th Ave.) and 4ist St. (8th to 9th Ave.) on the south to 59th St. (8th to 1 2th Ave.) on the north; from i2th Ave. east to 9th Ave. (3otk to 4ist St.) and 8th Ave. (4ist to 59th St.). Map on page 149.

Freight yards, factories, garages, warehouses, stock pens, and tenements today cover the area of Hell's Kitchen, a district that bears one of the most lurid reputations in America. The neighborhood's proximity to Manhattan's railroad and water terminals still fixes its industrial working-class character. Indeed the only characteristic of the traditional Hell's Kitchen that has completely disappeared is the organized hoodlumism, which, according to one authority, made the locality "one of the most dangerous areas on the American continent." To the north is a drab region of tenements, churches, factories, and garages deriving a little color from near-by Times Square. Scattered throughout the district are modern apartment houses and renovated brownstone dwellings.

Hell's Kitchen acquired its reputation as one of the toughest areas in the city shortly after the Civil War. According to Herbert Asbury, who recorded many exploits of Hell's Kitchen hoodlums in his book, The Gangs of New York, the section deserved its notoriety. Its name, originally applied to a dive near Corlears Hook on the East Side, came from the Hell's Kitchen Gang, organized in about 1868 by Dutch Heinrichs. Although this gang specialized in raids on the Thirtieth Street yard of the Hudson River Railroad (now part of the New York Central), its repertoire included extortion, breaking-and-entering, professional mayhem, and highway robbery. It merged with the Tenth Avenue Gang, which had held up and robbed a Hudson River Railroad express train, and for decades terrorized the neighborhood. From its ranks rose the desperadoes who organized the Hudson Dusters and the Gophers.

156 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE WEST SIDE

After the decline of the Hell's Kitchen Gang, the Gophers achieved hegemony in the Hell's Kitchen underworld. They made their headquarters in saloons such as one on "Battle Row" (Thirty-ninth Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues) operated by "Mallet" Murphy, who won his pseudonym by bludgeoning disputatious customers with a mallet. Leaders of the Gophers included "Happy Jack" Mulraney, "Goo Goo" Knox, "Stumpy" Malarkey, and "One Lung" Curran. Besides the Gophers, whose membership numbered nearly five hundred men, several smaller affiliated gangs such as the Gorillas, the Rhodes Gang, and the Parlor Mob waged consistent warfare against what was left of law and order in the neighborhood.

Gangster rule of Hell's Kitchen continued until 1910, when a special police force organized by the New York Central Railroad launched a counter-offensive. Clubbing, shooting, and arresting indiscriminately, they soon had most of the Gopher leadership in hospitals or behind the bars and a majority of the lesser lights in flight. Remnants of the mobs functioned throughout the Prohibition era, but the backbone of Hell's Kitchen gangsterdom had been effectively broken.

Two developments, the Lincoln Tunnel and the New York Central Railroad West Side Improvement, have altered the appearance of the Kitchen. In the construction of a seventy-five-foot wide approach to the tunnel Dyer Avenue buildings midway between Ninth and Tenth Avenues from Thirty-fourth to Forty-second Street were demolished; and in the execution of the grade crossing elimination project of the railroad, structures midway between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues from the Thirtieth Street freight yard to the Sixtieth Street yard were razed.

The LINCOLN TUNNEL, owned and operated by the Port of New York Authority, connects Thirty-ninth Street and Weehawken, New Jersey (passenger automobile toll 500). On the Manhattan side its approaches permit easy access to and from six transverse streets and the ramps of the West Side Highway (see page 71) that leads by way of the Henry Hudson Parkway to US 9 and the Westchester County Parkway system. A projected cross-town roadway underneath Manhattan will eventually link the Lincoln Tunnel with the Queens Midtown Tunnel (see page 209) now under construction (1939). On the Weehawken side, an express highway joins the Lincoln Tunnel with US i and 9W and important New Jersey arteries.

The south double-lane tube of the Lincoln Tunnel, 8,218 feet long, was opened to traffic in December, 1937, and now carries east- and westbound vehicles. When the north tube is completed, it will take over the westbound

HELL'S KITCHEN AND VICINITY 157

traffic. An approach lane to this tube will run between Thirty-seventh and Forty-second Streets over the depressed New York Central right of way previously mentioned. The cost of the project, including ventilation, buildings, equipment, approaches, and real estate, is estimated at $75,000,000.

For nearly ninety years the tone of the community has been determined by the New York Central Railroad's THIRTIETH STREET YARD, which includes all the property between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues from Thirtieth to Thirty-seventh Street and the two additional blocks bounded by Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, Thirtieth and Thirty-second Streets. Prior to the completion of the company's West Side Improvement Plan, the Thirtieth Street yard was linked to the Sixtieth Street yard by means of surface trackage on Eleventh Avenue; a "cowboy" would ride in advance of the train to warn pedestrian and vehicular traffic. The endless movement of freight trains through the neighborhood added hazards, congestion, noise, and dust to surroundings that were already grim, and Eleventh Avenue became known as "Death Avenue." Now the tracks between the two railroad yards have been dropped below street level, and south of Thirtieth Street the line has been elevated. Most of the New York Central's costly new right-of-way will be covered over eventually as the "air rights" are utilized for the construction of modern industrial plants. Several warehouses already have risen over the tracks.

SCHERMERHORN PLAYGROUND, on Thirty-eighth Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, is the only recreation center in the lower part of Hell's Kitchen. Although pathetically inadequate in equipment and open space, it provides children with a safe play area. Intelligent adult direction is provided by the WEST SIDE CHILDREN'S CENTER, an affiliate of the Children's Aid Society, which occupies the four-story brick building at 419 West Thirty-eighth Street.

The vari-hued fagade of the BETHANY CHURCH, 455 Tenth Avenue, contributes a splash of color to the area. This building, formerly occupied by the Salvation Army, serves as the workshop of the WPA Federal Theatre Project.

Thirty-ninth Street, west of Ninth Avenue, was popularly known as "Abattoir Place" when the slaughterhouse industry was concentrated here.

For nearly fifty years a large pushcart market known as PADDY'S MARKET was maintained under the Ninth Avenue elevated between Thirtyninth Street and Forty-second Streets. It supplied a variety of foodstuffs to the poor of the Middle West Side and became one of the best-known landmarks in the Kitchen. Then the Lincoln Tunnel was built, and it became necessary to clear and widen streets for the increased traffic. In

158 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE WEST SIDE

1937 the Department of Public Markets, co-operating with the Port of New York Authority, ordered the pushcart merchants to move. They refused, and took their case to court, but in 1938 they were finally evicted. The disgruntled hucksters split into two groups; one group moved to West Thirty-ninth Street, the other to West Forty-first Street. Business slumped in the new locations, however, and early in 1939 the merchants petitioned the Commissioner of Public Markets for an enclosed market building.

The thirty-three-story McGRAW-HiLL BUILDING, 330 West Forty-second Street, built in 1930 from Raymond Hood's design, is the Middle West Side's most imposing edifice. It is notable for an experimental use of exterior materials, for the simplicity of its main outlines, and especially for its alternation of horizontal bands of blue-green terra-cotta tile with bands of windows. The horizontal accent contrasts strongly with the vertical emphasis of Hood's Daily News Building (see page 210) at the other end of Forty-second Street.

The adjoining amusement district has influenced the character of many of the blocks north of Forty-second Street. The CHURCH OF THE HOLY CROSS, opposite the McGraw-Hill Building, arranges special services and masses for the theatrical people and entertainers in its congregation, as well as for workers in mid-town factories, offices, and shops. The church is popularly known as "Father Duffy's Church," in memory of the Reverend Francis P. Duffy who was Roman Catholic chaplain of the "Fighting Sixty-ninth" during the World War, and pastor here until his death in June, 1932. Father Duffy's rehabilitation work among the survivors of the old gangs and their successors was a considerable factor in reforming the Kitchen's folkways.

The TROUPERS' CLUB ASSOCIATION at 327 West Forty-third Street is run by stagehands "to foster and cultivate social relations and aid one another in sickness and distress, free of politics and religion." Unemployed members who live at the club pay nothing, but share in the housework and cook their own meals.

Seventy-two motion-picture distributors occupy the FILM CENTER on Forty-fourth Street and Ninth Avenue. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation has its sales and distribution offices at 345 West Forty-fourth Street, and on the same street, at No. 331, is the Paramount Pictures Building, and, at No. 315, Warner Brothers' ten-story Vitaphone Building. Farther uptown at 420 West Fifty-fourth Street are the headquarters of Fox Movietone News where newsreels are edited for release. Shots taken in the afternoon can be made ready for a Broadway showing on the same evening.

HELL'S KITCHEN AND VICINITY 159

The ugly, yellow-brick EIGHTEENTH PRECINCT POLICE STATION, 345 West Forty-seventh Street, was put into service January i, 1862, in good time to play a part in the Draft Riots of 1863. The district was not densely settled then, and most of its crimes were unspectacular; the single blotter entry for the first day recorded the return of a lost child to her parents. By the early 1900*5, however, the gambling dives and the gangsters of the West Side had. made the station house one of the busiest in New York. Later, following occasional raids on theaters and night clubs, such names as Texas Guinan and Mae West would appear among hundreds of underworld aliases on the blotter. Before the advent of the police radio car, reporters maintained headquarters in a basement across the street from the station. Among the newspapermen who worked this coveted "fly-beat" were David Graham Phillips, Charlie Somerville, Richard Harding Davis, and Louis Weitzenkorn.

In 1939 the WPA was building a new station house for the precinct beside the Men's Night Court on West Fifty-fourth Street, and the old Forty-seventh Street building was destined to be abandoned at a time when its force of more than 500 men are issuing 30,000 summonses and making 15,000 arrests a year.

Whenever a heavyweight boxer in Madison Square Garden (see page 330) takes too many right-hand punches, or a circus trapeze performer misses his safety net, or a rodeo rider falls under the hoofs of a steer, the victim is carried across the street to POLYCLINIC HOSPITAL, 345 West Fiftieth Street. The 346-bed hospital serves the ordinary people of the neighborhood, for the most part, but because of its location it receives an unusually large number of well-publicized patients. During the Prohibition era the bullet wounds of such notorious figures as Arnold Rothstein and Jack "Legs" Diamond were treated here.

One of the city's oldest Negro communities is concentrated on West Fifty-third Street near Ninth Avenue. It was first settled by Negroes who worked on the Croton Aqueduct (1840-42). The CHURCH OF ST. BENEDICT THE MOOR, a small white-brick building, stands at 342 West Fiftythird Street, in the shadow of the Ninth Avenue el. The original church building, the first for Negro Catholics north of the Mason-Dixon Line, was erected on Bleecker Street in 1883.

Although every block in this neighborhood contains a broad mixture of nationalities, in the West Forties and Fifties there is a French population large enough to form a true FRENCH QUARTER. Bastille Day and other French national holidays are celebrated here and many restaurants serve Gallic dishes. French cultural, professional, social, sporting, educational,

160 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE WEST SIDE

and culinary organizations have their headquarters in the building at 349

West Forty-fourth Street.

The Seventh District Magistrates Court, better known as the MEN'S NIGHT COURT, occupies the gray stone building at 314 West Fifty- fourth Street. Petty offenders in Manhattan and the Bronx are brought before a magistrate who presides here from eight o'clock in the evening to one in the morning. Before rubbernecking was officially discouraged, Park Avenue in evening dress used to drop in to gape at the tragic parade of drunks, panhandlers, pickpockets, wife beaters, and brawlers.

The clubhouse of the AMERICAN WOMEN'S ASSOCIATION, 353 West Fifty-seventh Street, was completed in 1929 from designs by Benjamin Wistar Morris at a cost of eight million dollars. This imposing twentyseven-story structure is open to transients and non-members. Miss Anne Morgan heads the board of governors of the association, one of the most influential women's organizations in the country.

ROOSEVELT HOSPITAL, which occupies a group of red-brick buildings along Ninth Avenue from Fifty-eighth to Fifty-ninth Street was founded in 1871. Nationally known for its surgical work, the hospital has 387 beds, and treats in its clinics some fifty thousand patients a year. A monument stands on the grounds, erected to the memory of James Henry Roosevelt (1800-1883), "the generous founder of the hospital."

A Negro community, west of Columbus Circle, has been popularly known since the turn of the century as SAN JUAN HILL, a folk tribute to the exploits of Negro soldiers in the Spanish- American War.

GARMENT CENTER AND VICINITY

Area: 25th St. (6th to 8th Ave.) and 3oth St. (8th to 9th Ave.) on the south to 39th St. (6th to 7th Ave.) and 4ist St. (yth to 9th Ave.) on the north. Map on page 149.

New York's garment center, housing the city's foremost industry, and America's fourth largest, crowds the middle of Manhattan between Sixth and Ninth Avenues, from Thirtieth to Forty-second Street. Here are produced three out of four of the ready-made coats and dresses, and four out of five of the fur garments worn by American women. Immediately north of Twenty-fifth Street, between Sixth and Eighth Avenues, are the quarters of the fur industry. The wholesale flower market borders Sixth Avenue from Twenty-sixth to Twenty-eighth Street. In the mid-section of the district are the Pennsylvania Station, hotels, and the city's most concentrated

GARMENT CENTER AND VICINITY l6l

shopping market, the hub of which, at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street (Greeley and Herald Squares), is dominated by three famous department stores: Macy's, Gimbels, and Saks- 34th Street.

The location of major industries fur and garment in the heart of Manhattan near the passenger terminals and the hotels is dictated to a considerable extent by their need for being easily accessible to both resident and out-of-town buyers. Moreover, the peculiar character of the garment industry, with its constant, intimate contact between selling and manufacturing departments, apparently makes it difficult to move the workrooms to less congested districts.

The garment industry, which concentrated on the Lower East Side late in the nineteenth century, followed the city's every move northward and westward until it reached its present location in the World War period.

Garment Center

Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Avenues, main routes for heavy-duty traffic, are packed with trucks and busses. The curbs of side streets are lined with trucks unloading bolts of materials and loading finished garments while other trucks wait for an opening. Through narrow traffic holes along the curbs, "push boys" guide handtrucks with garments swaying from racks made of metal pipes. Into these crowded streets at noon, thousands of workers, East and South European by origin, Italians and Jews mostly, descend for food, fresh air, and sun. (Few women workers appear in the noonday crowd, for most of them bring food from home and eat in the workrooms.) They pour from the buildings, congregate in groups, jam into lunchrooms and cafeterias, and gather around pitchmen. A few minutes before one they take a final puff at the cigarette, look fondly once more at the warming sun, throw away the butt, and crowd the doors to the buildings.

The garment trade, as represented in this area, may be divided into tv/o main parts: the cloak-and-suit business and the women's dress business. Cloak-and-suit firms are centered above Thirty-fourth Street and Seventh Avenue, while the dress houses, for the most part, are farther to the north, although the geographical division is general, not sharp. While other branches of the trade are represented in the district, they are concentrated, in the main, in other parts of the city.

Almost every building in the district is filled with shops, most of which employ no more than thirty workers. Three tall buildings at Nos. 498, 500, and 512 Seventh Avenue, from Thirty-sixth to Thirty-eighth Street, form the GARMENT CENTER CAPITOL. Constructed as a co-operative venture by

162 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE WEST SIDE

leading manufacturers, the structures cover a ground area of 38,000 square feet and contain the most modern manufacturing facilities. Nos. 498 and 500, built in 1921, were designed by Walter M. Mason; No. 512, tallest of the three and built in 1929, was designed by Sugarman and Berger.

The average shop has two main sections: showroom and workroom. The former is generally long and ornately decorated, with one side partitioned into booths. In these, buyers for stores sit and appraise the latest fashions displayed by mannequins.

Refinements of the showroom are totally lacking in the workroom. Walls and ceilings are whitewashed; floors are bare. Placed close to the many windows are long cutting tables where a motor-driven blade can cut through as many as four hundred thicknesses of some materials in a single operation; and rows of electric sewing machines can needle fabrics at the rate of three thousand stitches a minute. The workers are Negro and white, native and foreign-born ; women outnumber men three to one.

The great number of independent shops in the garment center is illustrative of the industry's peculiar make-up. The process of centralization and monopoly that shaped other large industries has not operated to any great extent in the garment trade, largely because the style factor makes it an extremely speculative business. Instead of the assembly-belt system that obtains, for example, in the automobile industry, garment production is relatively dependent on the skill of the operator, who in most cases sews the entire garment. The so-called manufacturer, or jobber, may do only a portion of the actual manufacturing. Contractors assume the responsibility for the sewing and finishing of whatever "cut work" the various manufacturers send to them. This subdivision of the industry has increased competition all along the line, among manufacturers, contractors, and workers. The result has been a chaotic system of production, reflected each year in the amazing rate of bankruptcy that has been as high as 20 per cent among "inside" manufacturers, and 331/3 per cent among contractors.

A strong stabilizing force, admittedly, is the INTERNATIONAL LADIES GARMENT WORKERS UNION, whose union halls stud the district and whose main New York office is at 3 West Sixteenth Street. It has established wage levels tending to halt ruinous price competition at the expense of the workers. The union, founded in 1900, has a firm hold upon the affection and loyalty of its members. To it is attributed the eradication of the sweatshop conditions forced upon the immigrant workers during the rapid rise of the needle trades, which had their origins in the invention of the sewing machine in 1846 and of the cutting machine twenty years later. The union's general strikes in 1909 and 1910 against sweatshop conditions was a milestone in the American labor movement. It has consistently fought for higher wages and better working conditions and has developed a remarkable educational program economic, cultural, and political in nature. The social life of many garment workers also centers around the union. The ILGWU maintains a million-dollar summer camp for its members; in the fall of 1937, the union produced a musical comedy success, Pins and Needles, with a cast of garment workers, in its own Labor Stage Theater on Thirty-ninth Street. Less spectacularly the union serves the workers daily through its business agents. Even more than manufacturers' groups, it functions as the "chamber of commerce" for the industry, maintaining research and statistical divisions. Highly respected by employer groups, it often initiates policies generally accepted as beneficial to the industry as a whole.

Fur District

Although the street scene of the fur district Twenty-fifth to Thirtieth Street, between Sixth and Eighth Avenues is less turbulent than that of the garment center, the neighborhoods are similar in many respects : trucks backed to the curb, loading and unloading ; scurrying delivery boys carrying pelts dangling from hangers ; salesmen, buyers, and union agents bent on business. Pelts are piled high behind dealers' windows, frequently reinforced with iron grillwork. Sometimes a tiger skin is displayed among mink and ermine.

The dealer acquires the furs directly from trappers or at the auctions held here quarterly, and he sells them in turn to the manufacturer for fabrication into wraps, scarves, trimmings, and accessories. Unlike the highly mechanized garment industry, fur manufacture consists, in large part, of work done by hand. Fur and fur products valued at $195,000,000 were handled in New York City in 1936, retail prices ranging from about a dollar for an undyed rabbit "choker" to several thousand for a sable wrap. Of the ninety varieties of pelts used, muskrat is most common, with rabbit and fox next in commercial importance.

There are approximately two thousand shops in the district, employing 15,000 workers. The trade is a seasonal one: during June and July shops operate at top speed to meet the demand of the winter sales and in November there is a short spurt to supply the needs of the Christmas trade. All in all the fur worker averages twenty weeks of employment a year. Eighty per cent of the workers are members of the powerful International Fur Workers Union (CIO).

164 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE WEST SIDE

Flower Market

Millions of flowers some of rare species are sold annually in the wholesale flower market in the vicinity of Sixth Avenue between Twenty-sixth and Twenty-eighth Streets. Seventy per cent of these flowers are grown within one hundred, miles of the city, although about thirty thousand tulips are imported annually from Holland, and from one-quarter to one-half million Easter lilies from Bermuda.

The market had its origin before 1870, when Long Island growers gathered each morning at the foot of East Thirty-fourth Street to sell their blossoms to both retail and wholesale trade. In 1873 a commission business was started at Third Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street. Before long, wholesale commission merchants had set up stores in the present location, chosen for its proximity to the retail flower market and to the center of business, then at about Fourteenth Street.

In the i88o's and 1890's the area between Twenty- fourth and Fortieth Streets, from Fifth to Seventh Avenue, was notorious as the wickedest and gayest spot in the city. Reformers of the day referred to it as "Satan's Circus." On the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street flourished the Haymarket, a post-Civil War variety theater remodeled into a combined dance hall and cafe. Sisters' Row, near here, was run by seven sisters of reputedly great physical charm. On certain nights only gentlemen in evening dress were admitted, and all the proceeds taken in on Christmas Eve were donated to charity. This district was known as the "Tenderloin" after Captain (later Inspector) Alexander C. Williams, newly transferred there, was quoted as saying, "I've had nothing but chuck steak for a long time, and now I'm going to get a little of the tenderloin."

Pennsylvania Station and Vicinity

The large-scale production of the garment industry has its counterpart in the retail selling of department stores in the shopping sector around the intersection of Broadway, Sixth Avenue, and Thirty-fourth Street. The amount of retail business transacted yearly in this neighborhood far exceeds that of any comparable area in the city.

MACY'S, founded in 1858 by a Nantucket whaling captain, describes itself as the largest department store in the world. Its ten acres of selling space have a daily capacity of 137,000 customers, who may buy anything from diamonds to raspberries. Macy's, GIMBELS, and SAKS are giants in the midst of scores of small specialty shops devoted to women's or men's

GARMENT CENTER AND VICINITY 165

wear. Thirty- fourth Street is almost entirely a woman's precinct, while Broadway has the men's shops.

The intersection of Broadway and Sixth Avenue at Thirty-fourth Street creates two triangles: GREELEY SQUARE on the south and HERALD SQUARE on the north. The former contains a STATUE OF HORACE GREELEY by Alexander Doyle ; the latter, named for James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald, contains a STATUE OF WILLIAM E. DODGE, noted New York merchant, by J. Q. A. Ward. In 1894 the publishing plant and offices of the Herald were moved into a handsome building a McKim, Mead, and White reproduction of an Italian palace on the irregular block directly north of Herald Square. The northern part of the structure has since been replaced by an office building ; the original southern portion is occupied by a men's clothing store. Plans for the renovation of the two squares, announced in 1939 when the Sixth Avenue el was removed, include shifting the statues and surrounding them with trees. The great Bennett clock, whose two figures (nicknamed Stuff and Guff) had long struck the hours from the front of the Herald Building until they were exiled to New York University, was to be returned to a place of honor. Until about 1910 Herald Square was the city's Rialto, and diners-out frequented hotels such as the MARTINIQUE, Broadway and Thirty-second Street, and the HERALD SQUARE, 116 West Thirty- fourth Street, and ordered lobster in the neighborhood's sea-food restaurants. The McALPiN HOTEL, Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway, carries on the tradition in the modern manner.

At Herald and Greeley Squares a maze of transit lines subways, interstate busses helps to feed this congested district. Latest addition to the underground tangle is the Sixth Avenue subway, under construction in 1939, which lies fifty-two feet below the street, sandwiched between the BMT subway and the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels. New Jersey crowds enter and leave the square by the Hudson Tubes.

The south side of Thirty-second Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, has become a center for dealers in cameras and photographic equipment.

PENNSYLVANIA STATION, Seventh Avenue between Thirty-first and Thirty-third Streets, is one of the city's two great passenger transport centers. It is the terminus of the Pennsylvania and Lehigh Valley railroads, which reach Manhattan by way of tunnels under the Hudson River, and of the Long Island Railroad, which enters through tubes under the East River. Both sets of river tunnels, a cross-town link sixty feet underground, and the station itself were completed in 1910. A connection with the New York, New Haven and Hartford, over the New York Connecting Rail 166 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE WEST SIDE

road (Hell Gate) Bridge, enables trains to run from Maine to Miami

the only continuous direct rail route from New England to the South.

The design of the station, by McKim, Mead, and White, was inspired by Roman Classical architecture. For the two-block fagade on Seventh Avenue the architects chose the most monumental of compositions a great central element flanked by colonnaded wings and end pavilions. The central portion is the main pedestrian entrance ; the end pavilions are used by passenger vehicles.

The interior is a sequence of tremendous spaces. From a long, barrelvaulted arcade, lined with shops, a marble stairway and escalators lead to the floor of the main hall. In this vast hall, which is a copy of the Tepidarium of a Roman bath, are ticket booths and the information desk. Six murals by Jules Guerin depict scenes of the area served by the Pennsylvania Railroad. Along the west side are twin waiting rooms. Beyond them a great glass-roofed concourse gives access to the track platforms. The Long Island Railroad waiting room and ticket offices are on a lower level.

The station yard, part of which is beneath the concourse floor, covers three hundred thousand square feet and accommodates a network of twenty-seven tracks. Six hundred and fifty steel foundation columns support the building.

Directly across Eighth Avenue from Pennsylvania Station, the NEW YORK GENERAL POST OFFICE, the largest in the country, rests on steel and concrete stilts above the railroad yard. It was designed by McKim, Mead, and White. The simplicity of the main outline is beautifully enriched by the well-proportioned Corinthian colonnade above a two-block sweep of granite steps. Across the frieze a quotation from Herodotus is inscribed: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."

The main lobby ceiling, subtly arched to avoid the illusion of sagging, is decorated with the coats-of-arms of nations that belong to the postal union.

Forty-five per cent of the city's mail is handled here. In the basement, belts, chutes, and other mechanical devices transfer mail to and from trains directly beneath. An intricate system of underground pneumatic tubes, the first units of which were installed in 1896, carries mail between the New York General Post Office and branches in Manhattan and the Brooklyn General Post Office.

Around the Pennsylvania Station are grouped several large satellite hotels, to two of which, the Pennsylvania and the New Yorker, it is connected by underground passages. The huge HOTEL PENNSYLVANIA, facing Seventh Avenue between Thirty-second and Thirty-third Streets, is the scene of frequent fashion shows, for it is the New York headquarters of buyers for many out-of-town department stores. The architects were George B. Post and Sons. The HOTEL GOVERNOR CLINTON, two blocks south, was designed by Murgatroyd and Ogden. On Eighth Avenue between Thirtyfourth and Thirty-fifth Streets is the forty-three-story NEW YORKER, the second tallest hotel in the city. Completed in 1930 from plans by Sugarman and Berger, the structure is a fine example of setback design, conforming to the zoning law without loss of artistic effect.

TIMES SQUARE DISTRICT

Area: 42d St. (5th to 6th Ave.), 39th St. (6th to jth Ave.), and 4ist St. (jth to 8th Ave.) on the south to 57th St. and Columbus Circle on the north; from 8th Ave. east to 5th Ave. Maps on pages 149 and 169.

A belt of white electric bulbs girds the Times Building at Forty-second Street and Broadway, spelling out spot news in moving letters that can be read several blocks away. And to the north a wall of light and color, urging the onlooker to chew gum, drink beer, see the world's most beautiful girls, or attend the premiere of a Hollywood film, lights the clouds above Manhattan with a glow like that of a dry timber fire.

This is the Great White Way, theatrical center of America and wonder of the out-of-towner. Here midnight streets are more brilliant than noon, their crowds on ordinary evenings exceeding those of large town carnivals. Scarcely a day passes that does not inaugurate some notable event, and in these theaters, cafes, and hotels, personages mentioned daily in the newspapers are everywhere at hand. It is the district of glorified dancing girls and millionaire playboys and, on a different plane, of dime-a-dance hostesses and pleasure-seeking clerks. Here, too, in a permanent moralizing tableau, appear the extremes of success and failure characteristic of Broadway's spectacular professions: gangsters and racketeers, panhandlers and derelicts, youthful stage stars and aging burlesque comedians, world heavyweight champions and once- acclaimed beggars. An outer shell of bars and restaurants, electric signs, movie palaces, taxi dance halls, cabarets, chop suey places, and side shows of every description covers the central streets.

By day, Times Square is a jumble of skyscrapers, antiquated and remodeled commercial structures, and shabby taxpayers topped by the huge skeletons of electric signs. Without the beneficent flood of light descending from above, the area exhibits greater variety and at the same time a certain drabness. Adjoining elaborate hotel and theater entrances and wide-windowed clothing shops are scores of typical midway enterprises: fruit juice stands garlanded with artificial palm leaves, theater ticket offices, cheap lunch counters, cut-rate haberdasheries, burlesque houses, and novelty concessions. Streams of shoppers, movie-goers, and tourists move across the sidewalks, and members of the theatrical professions congregate on favorite street corners.

KEY TO TIMES SQUARE

(The following are theaters,

1. Labor Stage

2. Maxine Elliott

3. Empire

4. Metropolitan Opera House

5. National

6. Mercury

7. Cameo

8. New Amsterdam

9. Sam H. Harris

10. Liberty

11. Eltinge

12. Wallach

13. Selwyn

14. Apollo

15. Times Square

16. Lyric

17. Republic

18. Rialto

19. Henry Miller

20. Town Hall

21. Hippodrome

22. Belasco

23. Hudson

24. Loew's Criterion

25. Paramount

26. Forty-fourth Street

27. Nora Bayes

28. Little

29. St. James

30. Majestic

31. Broadhurst

32. Shubert

33. Shubert Alley

34. Booth

35. Plymouth

36. CBS Radio Theater No. 1

37. John Golden

38. Martin Beck

39. CBS Radio Theater No. 2

40. Imperial

41. Music Box

42. Morosco

43. Bijou

44. Astor

45. Loew's State

46. Lyceum

THEATER DISTRICT MAP

except Nos. 20, 33, and 89.)

47. Gaiety

48. Fulton

49. Forty-sixth Street

50. Mansfield

51. Central

52. Globe

53. Embassy

54. Palace

55. Cort

56. Vanderbilt

57. Loew's Mayfair

58. Strand

59. Ethel Barrymore

60. Biltmore

61. Longacre

62. Forty-eighth Street

63. Ritz

64. Rivoli

65. Windsor

66. Playhouse

67. Belmont

68. Center

69. World

70. Translux

71. Forrest

72. Cinema 49

73. CBS Radio Theater No. 4

74. Capitol

75. Winter Garden

76. Roxy

77. Music Hall

78. Continental

79. Hollywood

80. Alvin

81. Guild

82. Cine Roma

83. Loew's Ziegfeld

84. Adelphi

85. CBS Radio Theater No. 3

86. New Yorker

87. Fifty-fifth Street Playhouse

88. Little Carnegie Playhouse

89. Carnegie Hall

90. Filmarte

91. Yiddish Art

The name Times Square District designates the rectangle extending from Thirty-ninth Street to Fifty-seventh Street and from Fifth to Eighth Avenue. Below Forty-second Street the Metropolitan Opera House and a handful of theaters hold out against the intrusion of the mid-town business section. Times Square proper is the core of the neighborhood; it includes the roughly triangular area bounded by Forty-second Street, Broadway, Seventh Avenue, and Forty-seventh Street. The side streets east and west of Broadway between Forty-second and Fiftieth Streets are lined with hotels, theaters, restaurants, and boarding houses. In the upper Forties between Sixth and Seventh Avenues are many well-known eating places. Sixth Avenue, conditioned until 1939 by the el structure, was the dark border of the district. Eighth Avenue on the west takes its character from the sporting world attracted by Madison Square Garden. From Fiftieth to Fifty-seventh Streets between Fifth and Seventh Avenues are expensive night clubs, a number of substantial residential hotels, and a scattering of garages and parking lots. Northward from Fiftieth to Sixtyfirst Street west of Broadway, the area rapidly changes character. The theaters, restaurants, and crowds thin out, the hotels become smaller and shoddier, and the rooming houses multiply. The intersection of Fiftyseventh and Broadway is the focal point of a great cluster of automobile sales rooms. To the north is windy Columbus Circle.

Since early in the nineteenth century when New York could count but five playhouses, the theatrical district has kept close to Broadway, following it uptown with the changing city. By 1902, the theater had begun to concentrate itself about Times Square. The district was then occupied chiefly by old brownstones, carriage and harness shops, and livery stables. The northern end of this quiet quarter was called Longacre Square after the street in London.

The phrase, the Great White Way, is supposed to have been coined in 1901 by O. J. Gude, an advertising man, who is said also to have been the first to see the tremendous possibilities of electric display. A modest sign at

TIMES SQUARE DISTRICT 171

Broadway and Twenty-third Street advertising an ocean resort was New York's first experience with this phenomenon. The present show of light has never been dimmed in the evening, except for a brief period during the World War.

Rapid transit reached Times Square in 1904 with the opening of the first IRT line to i45th Street, and since then the growth of the city's transportation has played a vital part in the development of the district. Every twenty-four hours, two hundred thousand passengers emerge from the IRT and BMT subways to the cement passageways of the underground stations extending from Fortieth to Forty-third Street. A shuttle connects the East Side IRT lines at Grand Central with Times Square, and the Eighth Avenue (Independent) subway has a station from Fortieth to Forty-fourth Street on Eighth Avenue. Forty-second Street surface cars carry riders from the New Jersey ferries; north- and southbound Manhattan busses cross the square; interstate busses arrive at many terminals in the Forties; Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal are near by all the city's boroughs, every state, and many foreign countries contribute to the crowds that overflow the sidewalks and gape enchantedly at the tall buildings, the shop windows, and the gyrating sky signs.

Once a year sees the Times Square district as jammed as a rush-hour subway train. On New Year's eve crowds fill the bars, restaurants, and theaters of the square and block the streets and sidewalks. Prices in restaurants soar to premiums. A tremendous wave of joviality and good will, in which even the police participate, carries the crowds along. At midnight a lighted globe on the roof of the Times Building falls, and a shout goes up from the square. Boat whistles, tin horns, rattles, and klaxons swell the racket until it can be heard all over the island.

Election night is a milder and less jubilant occasion. On other nights the lights and noise of the Rialto begin to dim at four o'clock (at three on Saturday), the official closing hour for bars. By six, in the gray light of morning, Broadway is momentarily empty of life. Soon the flow of workers begins; and at high noon the sun beats down upon the heads of the first matinee-goers.

Times Square

At the southeast corner of Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street a modern office building marks the SITE OF THE NEW YORK CASINO, the theater that introduced the "Florodora" girls to New York on November 10, 1900. Occupying the entire block across the street behind a rather dingy

172 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE WEST SIDE

front of dark buff brick is the Metropolitan Opera House (see page 322). On Broadway at Fortieth Street the old-fashioned lobby of the EMPIRE THEATRE, decorated with portraits of the many stars who played there under Charles Frohman, is a reminder of the years when this stretch of Broadway was the northern outpost of the amusement center. More recent is the building housing the PUBLISHING OFFICES OF THE NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE on Forty-first Street near Eighth Avenue. This paper was formed in 1924 by the combination under Ogden Reid of the New York Herald and the New York Tribune. The latter was founded by Horace Greeley in 1841 several years after he had rejected the offer of James Gordon Bennett to join the Herald staff. At Forty-second Street and Broadway is the KNICKERBOCKER BUILDING, formerly the Knickerbocker Hotel, where Enrico Caruso lived and entertained.

The austere, white TIMES BUILDING, erected in 1903 at Forty-second Street and Broadway, now seems an intruder in the area that was named for it. The architects, Eidlitz and MacKenzie, surfaced the tall wedge with glazed terra cotta, designed in an eclectic combination of Gothic and Renaissance details. A weather observatory surmounts the tower. The publishing offices of the paper have moved to Forty-third Street and the building is leased for offices.

At the north end of the building is a newsstand where home-town newspapers may be purchased; and foreign papers are sold at a stand in the subway entrance on the Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue corner. The Police Department maintains an INFORMATION BOOTH north of the Times Building. Within Times Square proper a traffic fence runs north and south from the booth to Forty-sixth Street, discouraging jaywalkers.

The west side of the square has undergone many changes in recent years. The RIALTO at Forty-second Street, a small movie house and the only one with a separate entrance in the subway, occupies the site of Hammerstein's Victoria Theatre, the leading vaudeville house in the 1900's.

The PARAMOUNT BUILDING, which houses the palatial Paramount Theatre, extends from Forty-third to Forty-fourth Street on the west side of Broadway. Its thirty-five stories rise upon the site of the Putnam Building, in which was Shanley's, a famous restaurant in the early years of the century. The NEW CRITERION THEATER BUILDING between Forty-fourth and Fortyfifth on the east side of the street commands attention because of its showy fagade and the sign on its roof, the largest animated sign in the world.

The ASTOR HOTEL, whose French Renaissance facade has been a New York landmark since 1904, occupies the block from Forty- fourth to

SOUTH STREET

MUNICIPAL BUILDING FROM CHATHAM SQUARE EL STATION

CITY HALL

HOLLAND TUNNEL

MANHATTAN BRIDGE ENTRANCE

WEST WASHINGTON POULTRY MARKET

RADIO ROW, CORTLANDT STREET

PATCHIN PLACE, GREENWICH VILLAGE

ST. MARK'S IN-THE-BOUWERIE

BACKYARDS, LOWER EAST SIDE

POLICE HEADQUARTERS

Forty-fifth Street on the west side of the square. Headquarters and convention center of many organizations, from national political parties to beauticians' associations, it has been the scene of many picturesque and significant events.

LOEW'S STATE, north of Forty-fifth Street, is now the only theater in the square regularly presenting vaudeville. The PALACE, at Broadway and Forty-seventh Street, was until recently the nation's leading vaudeville house and headliners like Pat Rooney, Eddie Leonard, Elsie Janis, and Sophie Tucker played two-a-day here. The theater now shows motion pictures. BILLBOARD, a publication devoted to the amusement world, has offices in the building, and the street corner is still a camping ground for minor members of the theatrical profession. Owners and managers of carnival shows also meet there. In the building at 1560 Broadway are the OFFICES OF THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF ACTORS, a union of variety entertainers.

At the base of a small triangle of pavement at Forty-seventh Street is the bronze STATUE OF THE REVEREND FATHER FRANCIS DUFFY, dressed in his uniform as chaplain of the 69th Regiment (now i65th Infantry). The figure, the work of Charles Keck, stands in front of a granite Celtic cross. Father Duffy, who died in June, 1932, was a familiar character on Broadway. His church was the Holy Cross on Forty-second Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues.

Broadway North of Forty-seventh Street

North on Broadway a row of low drab buildings becomes at night, when the signs on the roofs light up, an extension of the Rialto. Seventh Avenue with the elaborate supper clubs and dine-and- dance palaces also stretches the white way northward; at Forty-seventh Street is the halfblock marquee of LOEW'S MAYFAIR where until 1929 the Columbia "Wheel" (circuit) presented the great comedians of burlesque.

LINDY'S RESTAURANT, a contemporary landmark of black and red, set off by yellow, is at 1626 Broadway. Like the PARADISE, a night club diagonally across the street at Forty-ninth Street, it has acquired a national reputation through the Broadway columnists Lindy's for the gossip and celebrities, the Paradise for the genuine blue-eyed blondes in the chorus line. JACK DEMPSEY'S BROADWAY BAR, near Forty-ninth Street, is the Churchill's of 1939, a favorite with the sporting crowd. The old Churchill's was near the spot in 1900, as was also Rector's after it had moved out of the square proper.

Built at a cost of more than a million dollars, the STRAND THEATRE, near Forty-eighth Street on the west side of Broadway, claimed the record

174 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE WEST SIDE

for opulence when it opened in 1914 with a motion-picture version of Rex Beach's The Spoilers. The COTTON CLUB, the former Harlem night club made famous by Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, is opposite the Strand between Broadway and Seventh Avenue. At about four o'clock every afternoon the swing musicians gather on the west side of Broadway near Forty-eighth Street to gossip and to exchange ideas for new variations in hot music.

The RIVOLI, north of Forty-ninth Street on the east side of Broadway, revolutionized theater architecture when it opened in 1917 with a cooling system and balconies without posts. "Roxy" (S. L. Rothafel), who initiated the lavish presentation of a motion picture, was managing director, a position he held at one time or another at the old Rialto, the Strand, the Capitol, the Roxy, and the Radio City Music Hall.

The WINTER GARDEN, its long marquee still advertising the wares of legitimate show business, is near Forty-ninth Street. The leg-shows once presented here were as famous as any in burlesque. Al Jolson was in the show that opened this theater in 1911, and in 1913 New Yorkers had a foretaste of New Orleans music when the original Creole Band played here.

One block east, at Fiftieth Street and Seventh Avenue, is the CASA MANANA, a lavish night club, directed by Billy Rose, creator of stage and outdoor spectacles. Prior to 1935, Earl Carroll's Vanities was located here, advertising that "Through These Portals [the stage door] Pass the Most Beautiful Girls in the World." The BRASS RAIL, 745 Seventh Avenue, was opened during Prohibition years as a counter sandwich shop. The restaurant has grown until it occupies four floors with a seating capacity of more than one thousand. The ROXY, Seventh Avenue and Fiftieth Street, is the most elaborate of the first-run motion-picture houses in the Broadway district. The huge oval lobby, highly ornate in its decorations, can accommodate three thousand patrons, about half as many as the auditorium itself. The Roxy opened in 1926, representing an investment of fifteen million dollars.

The dome sign of the CAPITOL on Broadway at Fifty-first Street identifies the first-run house of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. On the opposite side of the street is the CONTINENTAL, formerly the Warner, where on October 6, 1927, the sound film was introduced by the Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson. At Fiftyfirst Street on the east side of Broadway is ROSE LAND, largest of the dance halls and since the 1920's the downtown headquarters for hot music and such urban dance steps as the cake and collegiate, the Lindy and the Shag.

The BROADWAY TABERNACLE at Fifty-sixth Street was built in 1903. The Gothic structure of brick and terra cotta is dominated by the heavy tower at the rear of the building. A progressive factor in the church life

TIMES SQUARE DISTRICT 175

of today, the congregation was an Abolitionist center when it was located downtown a century ago. Nor is this church's preference for a theatrical atmosphere a recent development: "It is but a few years," wrote Asa Greene in 1837 (A Glance At New York), describing its early Chatham Street chapel, "since it was captured from the Arch Enemy; and it still bears evidence of its profane origin: for the boxes, tier above tier, remain precisely as in the days of its theatrical glory; the pit and the stage only being changed into something more of a churchlike appearance."

Side Streets, Forty-second to Fifty-sixth

The depression emphasized the midway side of the Times Square district. Theaters closed one after the other, and contract bridge games, chess tournaments, and side shows occupied the vacant stores and restaurants. Long before, however, the decisive factor of popular support had shifted from dramas and musical plays to motion pictures. Hollywood had taken over the most desirable locations, relegating the legitimate theater business to the side streets. Only two legitimate houses remain on Broadway.

On Forty-second Street west of Broadway, once the show place of the district, famous theaters have been converted into movie "grind" houses devoted to continuous double feature programs or burlesque shows. Among cut-rate haberdasheries, cafeterias, and bus stations are tokens of a not-so-distant past the photographs of the Ziegfeld Follies in the lobby of the New Amsterdam, the exterior of the Republic, and the names above the brightly lighted marquees: Eltinge, Wallack's, Sam H. Harris, Liberty, Times Square, the Selwyn, the Lyric. . . .

Forty-second Street east of Broadway has only one theater, the CAMEO, now used as the American first-run house for Russian films. The hotels and bars of this block have been replaced by office buildings, retail stores, and restaurants. Impressive architecturally is the BUSH TERMINAL SALES BUILDING, designed by Helmle and Corbett in 1917. Thirty- two stories high and only fifty feet wide, the building gives an impression of greater height because of the sheer lines of its unbroken piers. The chamfering at the corners and the treatment at the top are notable as antedating the setback laws.

On Forty-third Street east of Sixth Avenue at No. 51 is the stage door of the HIPPODROME, the architectural pachyderm of the amusement world. It was built in 1905 by Frederick Thompson and Elmer S. Dundy, who also built Coney Island's Luna Park. For many years theatrical extravaganzas were produced there under the management of Charles B. Dillingham, among whose famous presentations were the diving girls who mys 176 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE WEST SIDE

tified thousands when they walked down a flight of stairs into a huge tank and slowly disappeared beneath the surface of the water. Tenanted by opera companies, prize fighters, elephants, and chorus girls, the theater has also served as a jai alai court where Cuban, Spanish, and Mexican champions gave exhibitions of "the fastest game in the world."

Restaurants and hotels crowd Forty-third Street between Sixth Avenue and Times Square. TOWN HALL, designed in the Georgian Colonial style, was opened in 1921 as a civic concert auditorium. Its weekly radio forums have achieved national importance. A large panel on the front of the building bears the inscription: "You Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free."

In the quiet block of Forty-third Street west of Times Square the stage doors of the Lyric and other formerly legitimate theaters have a ghostly air. On the north side of the street is the NEW YORK TIMES ANNEX, a white terra-cotta office building where all the publishing activities of the newspaper are carried on. Under the management of Adolph S. Ochs, the dignified and encyclopedic Times grew from a daily circulation of 19,000 to 490,000 and took its position as the foremost American newspaper. Distinguished for its foreign news coverage and its superior reliability, the Times today is as sedate and exhaustive as it was in the earlier years when Ochs described it as "the sort of paper which no one needs to be ashamed to be seen reading." Guides are provided on application to groups who wish to tour the building.

ASCENSION MEMORIAL CHAPEL, a plain, steeple-less building of darkred brick, lies in the shadow of modern office buildings on the north side of Forty-third Street near Eighth Avenue. In 1911 the late Reverend Dr. John Floyd Steen told the press: "I now have as regular churchgoers many chorus girls." The interior of the chapel, Colonial in design, may be seen only by special permission.

At Forty- fourth Street the true "west of Broadway" theater area begins. It was to these side-street theaters that the legitimate shows retired when they were driven from Times Square itself by the movies. Here, surrounded by medium-price hotels, they seem to have found a more or less permanent sanctuary. The heart of the area is the famous SHUBERT ALLEY which splits the block between Eighth Avenue and Broadway from Fortyfourth to Forty-fifth Street. Here are the executive offices of J. J. and Lee Shubert, who together with their brother, the late Sam Shubert, broke the hold of the theatrical trust headed by Klaw and Erlanger which controlled legitimate theaters throughout the country in the decade 1900-1910. Actors and chorus boys and girls still throng the alley when shows are

TIMES SQUARE DISTRICT 177

being cast. Across Forty-fourth Street at No. 234 is SARDI'S RESTAURANT, a favorite of stage stars, writers, and their agents. In the near-by building are the offices of the GROUP THEATRE, founded in 1931. J. Edward Bromberg, Frances Farmer, Clifford Odets, and Franchot Tone have been associated with this theater which represents both a vigorous social outlook and the acting traditions of Stanislavsky.

On Forty- fourth Street east of Times Square a marquee with hanging lanterns extends across the front of the BELASCO THEATRE where David Warfield appeared in 1907 in A Grand Army Man. Belasco of the clerical collar and white hair lived in a magnificently furnished apartment above the theater.

At 128 West Forty-fourth Street is the LAMBS CLUB, a select actors' club known widely for its private and public shows, the Gambols.

The HOTEL ALGONQUIN, associated with the theatrical and literary life of the city, is east of Sixth Avenue on Forty-fourth Street. Under the management of Frank Case this French Renaissance structure has served as headquarters for the Round Table, the Thanatopsis and Literary Inside Straight Clubs, and the Forty- fourth Street Chowder and Marching Club. A tiny annex to the Hotel Iroquois, farther east in the same block, is maintained by the TWELFTH NIGHT CLUB, which admits visitors only by special permission. The parlor walls are crowded with signed photographs of such distinguished persons as Booth, Modjeska, John Drew, Daniel Frohman, and Lily Langtry.

The block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is crowded with landmarks. The CITY CLUB is at No. 57 ; at No. 42 the BAR ASSOCIATION OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK, with a law library of more than two hundred thousand volumes, occupies a heavy classical building. The facade of the NEW YORK YACHT CLUB at No. 37 is highly characteristic of the work of the Parisian Beaux Arts Academy at the turn of the century. The fagade, frankly treated as a piece of sculpture, is carved to symbolize yachting. Three curious bay windows represent the sterns of eighteenthcentury sailing ships, complete with waves and dolphins.

The HARVARD CLUB at No. 27 is in Colonial red brick, designed after the early American buildings of the college itself. But what is probably the oldest organization in the block is the GENERAL SOCIETY OF MECHANICS AND TRADESMEN OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK in an undistinguished building at No. 20. The society was founded in 1785.

Forty-fifth Street west of Broadway has been called the "street of hits," because of the many long-run shows in its theaters. The MARTIN BECK THEATRE is the newest and most impressive of the numerous legitimate

178 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE WEST SIDE

theaters on this street. Beck's business is the theater; his hobby, painting. Van Dyck's Samson et Delilah hangs in the lobby. The old-fashioned LYCEUM THEATRE east of Broadway was put up for Daniel Frohman. He maintains an apartment in the building, reached by an elevator which barely admits his tall spare body.

The polished brass/ white paint, and evergreen shrubs of "DiNTY" MOORE'S, as famous for its Broadway celebrities as for its corned beef and cabbage, front on Forty-sixth Street west of Times Square. Farther up the street is the CHURCH OF ST. MARY THE VIRGIN where the rites of the Anglican Communion are observed. At No. 154 are the offices of VARIETY, trade paper of show business, known to the public chiefly for its peculiar jargon. Typical of this writing is the headline, "Stix Nix Hick Fix," once used to designate a crisis in the film industry.

The ACTORS EQUITY ASSOCIATION, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, and the first union organization in the American legitimate theater, maintains headquarters at 45 West Forty-seventh Street, east of Sixth Avenue. In 1919 when Frank Bacon led his company out, during Equity's struggle for the Equity shop, the newspapers headlined it: "Lightnin' Has Struck!" It was at the BILTMORE THEATRE on Fortyseventh Street that the first living newspaper, Triple-A Plowed Under, had its premiere under the auspices of the WPA Federal Theatre Project.

On Forty-eighth Street west of Times Square are three theaters. The UNION METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, midway in the block, dates from 1894. Civic, social, and union meetings are frequently held here and the church has an attic theater. The name Actors' Church was given to it in 1920-21 when the Professional Children's School had quarters in the building. During the depression unemployed actors and actresses were fed in the basement restaurant.

In the block west of Broadway on Forty-ninth Street is ST. MALACHY'S CHURCH (Roman Catholic), whose chapel was one of the first in the country for actors. At Forty-ninth Street and Eighth Avenue is the new Madison Square Garden (see page 330), which extends up to Fiftieth Street and midway to Ninth Avenue. Gymnasiums, managers' offices, and the bars and restaurants of the sporting crowd Jack Dempsey's, Mickey Walker's, Jack Sharkey's cluster around the Garden.

On the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, a plain office building houses LOCAL 802, AMERICAN FEDERATION OF MUSICIANS, whose 25,000 members represent every phase of the city's musical life.

Fifty-second Street gained some prominence in the 1920*5 when the THEATRE GUILD set up house near Eighth Avenue. The Theatre Guild, for TIMES SQUARE DISTRICT 179

merly the Washington Square Players, moved uptown under the present name in 1919 when Otto Kahn leased them the old Garrick on Thirty-fifth Street for a nominal rental. The present theater, Florentine in character, was built in 1925 from plans by C. Howard Crane, Kenneth Franzheim, and Charles H. Bettis in consultation with Norman Bel Geddes and Lee Simonson, stage designers. An invigorating force, the Guild has produced plays by known and unknown dramatists, and some of the finest acting talent in the contemporary theater has appeared in them.

The long block of Fifty-second Street lying in the shadow of Rockefeller Center (see page 333) between Fifth and Sixth Avenues has won recent renown for its night clubs. This block is the swingman's Rialto and the source of much of the gossip of columnists and radio commentators. At No. 72 is the LITTLE CLUB at the address of the original Onyx Club, already famous for its jam sessions during the Prohibition era. "I'd rather drink muddy water, Lord, sleep in a hollow log," Jack Teagarden sang here, "than be up here in New York treated like a dirty dog." The FAMOUS DOOR, with its glass brick vestibule, is at No. 66. At No. 62 is the black and white of the ONYX. Out-of-towner's favor LEON AND EDDIE'S where Eddie packs them in with his shady ballads. The TWENTY-ONE CLUB, behind the grilled fence of the old Hockstader estate, and TONY'S, a once famous speakeasy, are culinary high spots where celebrities go to see and be seen. The HICKORY HOUSE, noted for swing music and steaks, is west of Sixth Avenue.

The MANHATTAN STORAGE WAREHOUSE extends from Fifty-second to Fifty-third Street, fronting on Seventh Avenue. The plain brick building, designed by McKim, Mead, and White, is undecorated save for the fortresslike machicolations at the top. The new ROCKEFELLER APARTMENTS, built in 1936 from designs by Harrison and Fouilhoux, run through the block from Fifty-fourth to Fifty-fifth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. For decoration the architects have relied upon the interesting shapes of circular dining-bays and upon the play of light on many surfaces of glass. Despite the juxtaposition of windows differing in height, the buildings are distinguished for their simplicity and clarity of design.

At the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street is the ZIEGFELD THEATRE, the bulging limestone of its facade intended to suggest a proscenium arch. The theater was designed by Joseph Urban. Built for the Follies, it has been reduced to showing motion pictures.

The GRAND STREET BOYS ASSOCIATION, on Fifty-fifth Street west of Sixth Avenue, sponsors many civic and philanthropic activities, and claims many famous New Yorkers in its membership. MECCA TEMPLE, the largest

i8o MANHATTAN: MIDDLE WEST SIDE

Masonic Shrine in the city, is at 135 West Fifty-fifth Street. The mosquelike facade is framed with shallow-arched recesses in blue, green, and orange mosaic. The hall itself, which seats 3,500, is crowned by a tiled dome surmounted by the Scimitar and Crescent.

Columbus Circle

Broadway enters Columbus Circle at Fifty-eighth Street, crossing it diagonally. The GENERAL MOTORS BUILDING towers above the Circle taking up the entire block on the west side of Broadway between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth Streets. It was designed by Shreve and Lamb and completed in 1928; it includes the original three-story Colonnade Building. The structure, with its simple piers, has a directness of expression evident in few commercial buildings.

The imitation Corinthian pillars above the dime store on Eighth Avenue, opposite the General Motors Building, recall Reisenweber's Restaurant, which brought the cover charge and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band to Broadway in 1916.

At the center of the Circle is a seventy-seven foot granite column supporting a marble STATUE OF COLUMBUS, completed by Gaetano Russo in 1894. Three bronze ships' prows, representing the ships in Columbus' fleet, ornament the shaft, and before the pedestal is the figure of a winged youth, studying a terrestrial globe. Until the United States entered the World War, Times Square was the scene of many outdoor forums. When the square became too crowded these activities shifted northward; now in the open space below the monument impromptu discussions are held and groups listen to oratory on every conceivable subject from Thomas Paine and the Age of Reason to the advantages of a vegetable diet. At night advertising signs on the near-by buildings light the scene.

Columbus Circle gives an impression of monuments and space, the expanse of Central Park (see page 350) spreading north and east beyond the Merchant's Gate, with towering apartment hotels on Central Park West, and Broadway the old Bloomingdale Road stretching north. Boomed for a time as an outpost of Times Square, the Circle gradually took on a somewhat abandoned appearance. The western arc of the Circle is dominated by a huge old-fashioned theater, originally the Majestic, now called the Park and showing motion pictures. Beside this theater stood Pabst's Grand Circle, a prewar restaurant famed for its free lunch, orchestra, and oyster bar.

The MERCHANT'S GATE to Central Park is an imposing pylon of marble, set between two roadways flanked by smaller pylons. The center pylon serves as a background for the heroic bronze and marble of the

TIMES SQUARE DISTRICT l8l

MAINE MEMORIAL, unveiled in 1912 in honor of those who lost their lives on the battleship Maine. In the basin, where neighborhood children duck for pennies in summer, figures grouped on the prow of a wooden battleship symbolize Courage awaiting the Flight of Peace, the Feeble supported by Fortitude, and the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts. The whole is topped by a robed figure of Columbia Triumphant, riding in a shell drawn by three sea horses. Members of the City Art Commission were forced to come to the defense of Attilio Piccirilli's sculptural group when a high wind ripped the burlap off before the official unveiling and artists living near by questioned its artistic merit.

Middle and Upper East Side

GASHOUSE DISTRICT STUYVESANT SQUARE DISTRICT GRAMERCY PARK DISTRICT UNION SQUARE DISTRICT MADISON SQUARE DISTRICT KIP'S BAY AND TURTLE BAY MURRAY HILL FIFTH AVENUE SHOPPING DISTRICT GRAND CENTRAL DISTRICT BEEKMAN PLACE AND SUTTON PLACE CENTRAL PARK SOUTH, THE PLAZA, AND FIFTY-SEVENTH STREET UPPER FIFTH, MADISON, AND PARK AVENUES YORKVILLE

Area: i4th St. on the south to 96th St. on the north; from 6th Ave. (i4th to 420!

St.) and 5th Ave. (420! to 96th St.) east to East River. Maps on pages 54-55, 193,

and 237.

Principal north-south streets: 5th, Madison, 4th, Park, Lexington, 3d, 2d, and

ist Aves.

Principal cross streets: i4th, 23d, 34th, 42d, 57th, 59th, 72d, 86th, and 96th Sts.

Transportation: IRT Lexington Avenue subway (local), i4th to 96th St. stations;

2d or 3d Ave. el, i4th to 96th St. stations; BMT Broadway subway (local),

Union Square to 34th St. stations; bus lines on all principal north-south and cross

streets.

IN THE Middle and Upper East Side, virtually every facet of cosmopolitan life is represented in famous hotels, churches, clubs, department stores, shops, skyscrapers, apartment houses, and amusement centers.

182

INTRODUCTION 183

Perhaps the contrast between wealth and poverty is more heightened in the Middle and Upper East Side than in other parts of the city. The Gashouse District on the East River front above Fourteenth Street, for example, has been a slum area since the 1840's, while Stuyvesant Square, adjoining on the west, has maintained a middle-class calm which is accentuated by the presence of several hospitals. Slightly farther to the west, the children of exclusive Gramercy Park play behind a high fence that is locked against the public. South and west of this lies the popular lowprice shopping center of Fourteenth Street, from Union Square to Sixth Avenue. Union Square itself is used as a rallying point by New York's labor and radical organizations.

As in all Manhattan, the narrow cross streets of this district are cut by broad avenues. Broadway, coming in from the south, shoots north and west from Union Square, crossing Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third Street, where the Flatiron Building looks down upon the tangled traffic of Madison Square. Broadway leaves the district at Thirty-fourth Street, having contributed few reminders of its lurid past in the i88o's.

Above Twenty-third Street the land begins to rise and reaches a summit between Thirty-second and Forty-second Streets, where Murray Hill, once a center of large private residences, now rears its sky line of expensive apartment buildings.

The Fifth Avenue shopping district also begins in Murray Hill. It is paralleled on the east by Madison Avenue, lined with shops specializing in men's wear and interior decoration, and by wealthy Park Avenue, a continuation of Fourth Avenue. Impressive skyscraper hotels, Rockefeller Center, and a number of fashionable churches, such as St. Patrick's and St. Thomas, stand in this mid-town area. On and near Fifty-seventh Street are gathered many of the art galleries that make Manhattan the art center of the country. North of its intersection with Central Park South (Fiftyninth Street) at Grand Army Plaza, Fifth Avenue still retains a few of the millionaires' villas and castles that faced the park before the apartment house boom. In fact, there are more single-family residences in the neighborhood of upper Fifth, Madison, and Park Avenues than remain in any other part of Manhattan.

The eastern flank of this entire mid-town section is of less prepossessing character. Along the East River, north of the Gashouse District, the Kip's Bay-Turtle Bay neighborhood presents a welter of depressing tenements and small stores that follows the shore to Forty-eighth Street, breaks west around the low bluff of small, opulent Beekman Place and Sutton Place, and then turns north again to Fifty-ninth Street. Forty-second

184 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

Street, with its clean-lined News Building, injects almost the only distinctive element in this strip ; at the end of the street the tall apartment buildings of Tudor City surround large gardens.

The region east of Third Avenue between Sixtieth and Ninety- sixth Streets is known as Yorkville, a crowded section of tenements and brownstone houses, invested with a diluted Old World flavor by people from Middle Europe. Also in Yorkville, beside the East River between Sixtythird and Seventy-first Streets, are the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and the New York Hospital and Cornell University Medical College.

In the seventeenth century, the estate of Peter Stuyvesant extended into the southern part of this section, the region now known as Stuyvesant Square. Gramercy Park was a swamp. Along the East River shore the area that is now the East Thirties was the property of Jacob Kip, while the East Fifties was the Spring Valley Farm.

In pre-Revolutionary days the Eastern (later called Boston) Post Road ran north from the Bowery past what is now Union Square, crossed the Madison Square region diagonally to Fourth Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, and there branched into two roads. The east one, bound for Boston, followed irregular Indian trails, crossing the intersection of present-day Park Avenue at Eighty-second Street and continuing north to a junction with Kingsbridge Road near Ninety-first Street. The western branch, called Middle Road, in 1811 became Fifth Avenue. A road known only as Cross Road connected the two thoroughfares in the neighborhood of what is now Forty-second Street. There were two "kissing bridges" across Saw Mill Creek (or Saw Kill) at'Fifty-second and Seventy-seventh Streets, on which gentlemen were privileged to salute chastely the ladies in their company.

The Quaker Robert Murray held title to almost all of Murray Hill. In 1776, the fleeing Continentals streamed up this way after the British landed on Manhattan, and it was at the Murray mansion (Thirty-seventh Street and Park Avenue) that Mary Lindley Murray detained General Howe for tea while Putnam's army made good its escape. British frigates were stationed in near-by Kip's Bay for the duration of the war. After the evacuation of the British in 1783, the Common Council voted to have the Murray Hill region surveyed and divided into lots for sale by the acre, and as the nineteenth century began, this section took its place alongside Bloomingdale and Harlem as an area for summer homes and country estates. Jones' Wood, part of an estate that extended from Sixty-sixth to

INTRODUCTION 185

Seventy-fifth Street, was owned prior to 1803 by Samuel Provoost, the first Protestant Episcopal bishop of New York.

In 1834 the village of Yorkville, which then occupied the territory on- the Boston Post Road in the middle Eighties, was brought within commuting distance of the city by the partial completion of the Harlem Railroad. Its engines chugged (or, when the boilers had blown up and demolished the engines, its horses galloped) from Prince Street, along the Bowery and what is now Park Avenue, to Yorkville and later to Harlem, through miles of rocky wasteland overrun by pigs and goats. There, after 1850, unemployed Irish immigrants squatted in great numbers, picking up a hand-to-mouth existence in wretched hovels by milking the goats and salvaging coal out of the ashes dumped by the railway engines.

When Commodore Vanderbilt erected the Grand Central Depot at Forty- second Street in 1871, it was considerably north of the center of the city. But Manhattan was growing rapidly if irregularly. Businesses requiring water transportation (brick, stone, and lumberyards; factories, and machine shops) were first established on the river front. Soon the adjacent streets inland were filled with tenements for workmen and their families. Then, the leading avenues on each side of town, such as Third and Eighth Avenues, became great marts, selling the necessities of life to the workmen. Lastly, in the center of town, shifting occasionally, but in general taking the same northward trend, came the four-story brownstones of the well-to-do.

The development of the mid-town came to a standstill during the Civil War. On Saturday, July n, 1863, the opening of the first conscription office on the corner of Forty-sixth Street and Third Avenue precipitated the famous Draft Riots among the impoverished residents of the neighborhood, who resented the ease with which more fortunate conscripts could buy exemption.

Postwar prosperity set the stone masons to working again. The buildings they created, though substantial enough, showed a singular lack of imagination. Mrs. Trollope in her Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832, said, "The great defect in the houses [of New York] is their uniformity when you have seen one, you have seen all." This was equally true of subsequent decades. Builders were contractors, and journeymen were underpaid handymen. The brownstone fronts, which appeared by the hundred in the last half of the century, may still be seen on nearly all the side streets of mid-town Manhattan, but the cast-iron fronts which were greatly in vogue for the business buildings clustering

186 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

around Union Square and its environs in the i86o's, 'yo's, and '8o's have

now vanished almost entirely.

Fifth Avenue during these decades saw building on a scale of elaborate ' grandeur never before known in the city. In the early i88o's the brownstone tradition was broken by a desire for French chateaux. The frenzied search for art works, for the epidermis and entrails of medieval castles and cathedrals, made it difficult to tell a fashionable mansion from a museum. By the 1900*5 commerce had crept up lower Fifth Avenue largely in stores disguised as baronial dwellings, country villas, and medieval castles.

The Squatter Town where some five thousand people were said to have lived in the i88o's, extended up Park Avenue (so named in 1888) and upper Fifth Avenue as far as Mt. Morris Park (i2oth St.). The squatters yielded gradually to the steam shovel, a new tool which made it profitable to level the rocky terrain for building sites. The opening of the Third Avenue elevated in 1878 also effected a change. With the electrification and roofing over of the New York Central tracks, which ran along Park Avenue, in the first decade of the present century, the boulevard was ready to become the new home of the Fifth Avenue residents driven out by the intrusion of commerce. Land had become so valuable, however, and transportation between the city and the suburbs so swift owing in part to the development of the automobile that large town houses went out of favor. Many of the new Park Avenue buildings were luxurious apartment houses, whose managerial staffs assumed some of the responsibilities of housekeeping.

The eastern fringe of this entire section will undergo drastic changes in the near future, when the Queens Midtown Tunnel, and the East River Drive are completed. By 1941 the water front will be beautified by the projected East River Drive, part of a continuous express highway around the edge of Manhattan, which will pick up traffic from the West Side Highway at the Battery and route it to South Street and through Corlears Hook Park and then along the river. By widening existing streets, cutting new ones, and building highways where necessary, the Drive will be extended up the irregular water front to the Triborough Bridge, and beyond to the Harlem River Driveway, in order to connect by means of tunnels with the George Washington Bridge and the Henry Hudson Parkway. As on the West Side, this program includes an extensive parkway development, with appropriate landscaping and recreational facilities. With this development may come demolition of slum tenements and construction of riverside apartments similar to Tudor City and Beekman Place.

GASHOUSE DISTRICT 187

GASHOUSE DISTRICT

Area: i4th St. on the south to 27th St. on the north; from ist Ave. (i4th to i8th St.), 3d Ave. (i8th to 23d St.), and 4th Ave. (23d to 2yth St.) east to East River. Map on page 193.

The "gashouse district" today is largely a reminiscent term. Though four large tanks still rise near the East River, their domination of the neighborhood is passing, and the notorious gashouse gangs have gone. The area now is a drab extension of the Lower East Side, a district of "... powerful ugliness and devastation . . . with its wasteland rusts and rubbish, its slum-like streets of rickety tenement and shabby brick, its vast raw thrust of tank, glazed glass and factory building . . . lifted by a powerful rude exultancy of light and sky and sweep and water such as is found only in America." So Thomas Wolfe remembered this neighborhood, particularly that part near the East River.

The first of these great gashouses was raised in 1842 at the foot of East Twenty-first Street ; and before long a cluster of giant structures, the skyscrapers of their day, overshadowed the landscape. "Their tracery of iron, against an occasional clear lemon-green sky at sunrise," writes Lewis Mumford, "was one of the most pleasant aesthetic elements in the new order."

Another element in the new order, however, was its disregard for human comfort and health. Gas, leaking from the tanks, made the neighborhood a pesthole. Only the poorest families at first predominantly Irish, later joined by Germans and Jews could be drawn into the district, and flimsy tenements were built to accommodate them. The young men reared in this slum environment formed gangs that terrorized the Gashouse district for half a century. In their lighter moments they organized courageous volunteer fire companies and dallied with "the girls with the swinging handbags" who inspired the song, the Belle of Avenoo A.

One of the original plants now called the O'CoNNELL PLANT in honor of an employee of seventy-two years service is still standing, though bigger units have been built in other parts of the city. Slovaks and other East Europeans have largely replaced the earlier settlers. Although old-law tenements are still in the majority and the public baths at Avenue A and Twenty-third Street are still the only bathing facilities available to many, an increasing number of modern apartment houses are being erected and many of the more substantial older buildings are being renovated.

This district, like the adjoining Stuyvesant Square (see page 189), con 188 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

tains many important hospitals. WILLARD PARKER HOSPITAL for contagious diseases, at the foot of East Sixteenth Street, has made several contributions to medical science, including the now universally accepted suction treatment for diphtheria. COLUMBUS HOSPITAL, 227 East Nineteenth Street, is patronized largely by Italians. At 303 East Twentieth Street is NEW YORK POST-GRADUATE MEDICAL SCHOOL AND HOSPITAL, affording study to physicians in the latest medical practices; its NEW YORK SKIN AND CANCER UNIT, 301 East Nineteenth Street, ranks among the foremost in the country. The hospital and shelter of the AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO ANIMALS has quarters at Avenue A and Twenty- fourth Street.

Twenty-fourth Street, between Second and Lexington Avenues, is known as "OLD STABLE Row." Here, before the advent of the automobile, a horse mart flourished. The street was littered with straw, oats, and manure. On auction days, the strength of draft horses was demonstrated by hitching the animals to wagons with locked wheels and then whipping them up the block and back. Only two stables remain, along with H. KAUFFMAN AND SONS SADDLERY COMPANY, at No. 139, where the tiny coach of General Tom Thumb, P. T. Barnum's famous dwarf, is exhibited.

At 432 East Twenty-fifth Street is the MUNICIPAL LODGING HOUSE, established in 1908 to accommodate homeless men. It has a capacity of 2,500. The covered pier at the foot of East Twenty-fifth Street serves as an annex. Here are the dining room, where three free meals are served daily ; two recreation rooms ; and facilities for washing and drying clothes.

The i65TH REGIMENT INFANTRY ARMORY, headquarters of the former "Fighting 69th," fronts on Lexington Avenue between Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Streets. This regiment draws its recruits from the neighborhood. It carried through the World War a distinguished tradition begun in the Civil and Mexican wars. A statue to its noted World War chaplain, Father Duffy, stands in Times Square (see page 173).

Since 1915 Butler Davenport has operated a small THEATER at 138 East Twenty-seventh Street. Productions of Moliere, Racine, Maugham, and Galsworthy have been given. General admission is free, and only the few reserved seats are paid for.

Many of Manhattan's ten thousand Armenians one of the largest groups in the country live in the upper Twenties, between First and Lexington Avenues. At 221 East Twenty-seventh Street is ST. ILLUMINATOR'S ARMENIAN APOSTOLIC CHURCH, American see for Armenian Gregorian Catholics. This section of Lexington Avenue has a number of

STUYVESANT SQUARE DISTRICT 189

Near Eastern restaurants, serving dishes such as shish kebab (skewered lamb), pilaff (steamed rice), stuffed grape leaves, and Armenian wines and spirits.

STUYVESANT SQUARE DISTRICT

Area: i4th St. on the south to i8th St. on the north; from ist Ave. west to 3d Ave. Map on page 193.

Staid old Stuyvesant Square, although its neighborhood has changed drastically, is still the quiet park it was in its opulent days of the i86o's. It was originally part of the farm owned by "Pegleg" Peter Stuyvesant and the Dutch were most numerous in the section until 1700. The Germans and Irish came during the last half of the nineteenth century, to be followed later by Italians, Jews, and Slavs. In the early 1900*5 it was the bailiwick of Charles F. Murphy, Tammany chieftain and overlord of the adjoining gashouse district.

The pleasant four-acre park, bisected by Second Avenue, is landscaped with elms, catalpas, ginkgos, sycamores, hawthornes, and ailanthuses. Walks follow the pattern of two elongated ellipses. In the center of each half is a small flower-bordered pool.

Bordering the park are several hospitals: the WILLIAM BOOTH MEMORIAL HOSPITAL of the Salvation Army, 314 East Fifteenth Street; BETH ISRAEL, Stuyvesant Park East; MANHATTAN GENERAL, 307 Second Avenue; ST. ANDREW'S CONVALESCENT HOSPITAL, 237 East Seventeenth Street; and NEW YORK INFIRMARY FOR WOMEN AND CHILDREN, 321 East Fifteenth Street. The infirmary, staffed entirely by women, was founded in the early 1850's by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, pioneer woman physician. At Second Avenue and Fifteenth Street is the CONVENT OF THE LITTLE SISTERS OF THE ASSUMPTION, a nursing order. From 1902 until 1928 the Lying-in Hospital, now a part of New York Hospital (see page 247), occupied a building on Second Avenue between Seventeenth and Eighteenth Streets. Doctors occupy many of the brownstones facing the park. In early days unscrupulous midwives and medical quacks had their quarters in this vicinity, conducting a lucrative business among gullible immigrants.

Wedged between weathered brownstones is the GERMAN MASONIC TEMPLE, 220 East Fifteenth Street, a building of blue-gray cast stone designed in neoclassical style.

Rutherford Place, the west side of the square, long associated with the

190 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE Society of Friends, retains its peaceful character. In the FRIENDS MEETING HOUSE, between Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets, monthly meetings are held, and at Easter, large sectional and national gatherings; in the adjacent FRIENDS' SEMINARY, a private school, with courses from kindergarten through college preparatory, is conducted. To obtain quiet for their annual meetings, the Friends used to spread tanbark, six inches deep, in the streets to muffle the noise of horses' hoofs. A granite hitching post that once stood in front of William Penn's home in Philadelphia is at the southeast corner of the house.

The charmingly simple buildings, constructed in 1860, are reminiscent of the post-Colonial style. The two-story meeting house, at the south end, is of red brick, trimmed with gray sandstone lintels. The details the wide cornice of simple Greek profile, the broken pediment with louvred segmental openings in the tympanum, the high window frames, the wooden porch of slender Doric columns are painted white. The seminary, a two-story building with a three-story extension, is of similar design.

At the northwest corner of Sixteenth Street is the ivy-covered ST. GEORGE'S CHURCH (Protestant Episcopal). It was erected in 1847. A fire gutted the structure in 1865, but it was rebuilt two years later according to the original plans of Blesch and Eidlitz. The pleasant brownstone building is highly eclectic in style, with its northern French Romanesque, two-towered facade, its heavy, unnecessary buttresses that belie the English timber roof within, its basilica-like plan with French Gothic chevet in place of the circular apse, and its Renaissance balconies. Dr. Tyng, the rector at the time the church was rebuilt, insisted that the effect of the interior should be evangelical, and this tradition has always been maintained: in place of the usual altar and reredos there is a simple table; on the west wall of the vaulted chancel the Lord's Prayer is printed in large plain lettering. Adjoining the church on the north is the Centennial chapel, designed in a modified Byzantine Romanesque style by M. L. and H. G. Emery. To the west is the dignified and well-composed parish house, by Eidlitz. St. George's was originally a Chapel of Ease of Trinity Church, but in 1811 its connection with the latter was severed. When J. P. Morgan the elder was senior warden the church was sometimes known as "Morgan's Church."

One door north of St. George's Chapel is ST. DUNSTAN'S HOUSE, a rest house and city headquarters of Old Catholics, a monastic sect. Its two-story porch in Italian Renaissance style has a frieze of garlands and Delia Robbia cupids. Among the sect's treasures are a fourteenth-century statue of St. Francis, an Italian Bible of 1477, and part of the original English Coverdale Bible. Chapel and reception walls contain tiles from Glastonbury Abbey in England.

The UNITED HOMING PIGEON CONCOURSE, one of the largest racing pigeon organizations in the city, meets at Teutonia Restaurant, Third Avenue near Sixteenth Street, a block west of the square. A block north is the GERMAN-AMERICAN RATHSKELLER, known in riper days as Scheffel Hall and later as Allaire's. Many noted writers quaffed its foaming pilsener, among them James Huneker, H. C. Bunner, Bayard Taylor, and Brander Matthews. O. Henry called the place Rheinschlossen and wrote some of his best stories in the old taproom. Taylor and Oliver Herford lived near by on Eighteenth Street, while Bunner and Matthews had quarters with other writers at 330 East Seventeenth Street, an early apartment house.

GRAMERCY PARK DISTRICT

Area: i8th St. on the south to 23d St. on the north; from 3d Ave. west to 4th Ave.

The "golden keys" to Gramercy Park, symbol of the exclusiveness guaranteed by a real-estate operator about a century ago, are still required to open the gate to New York's most important privately owned park. A forbidding eight-foot iron fence encloses this oblong tract two blocks square that is "forever" locked to the public.

The park's creator, Samuel B. Ruggles, was among the first of New York's early real-estate operators to offer for sale a development with building restrictions. He caught the fancy of the rich by guaranteeing to a selected group those who bought his property the exclusive use of a private park as a permanent privilege. Keys no longer golden to the iron gates are distributed to owners and tenants under the close scrutiny of the trustees of Gramercy Park. Residents in near-by streets who have been approved by the trustees are given keys for annual fees. All others must be satisfied with a glimpse through the gate.

The Dutch named the locality Krom Moerasje, meaning "little crooked swamp," which also designated the brook that used to twist from Madison Square to the East River near Eighteenth Street. Later, in 1692, the section was called Crommashie Hill. By the usual process of corruption the name became Gramercy.

Gramercy Park was a marsh in 1831 when Ruggles drained it, laid out the green and the streets on the model of an English square and offered

UNION SQUARE DISTRICT 1. Lincoln Building

2. Amalgamated Bank Building

3. Bank of Manhattan Company

4. Union Building

5. Hartford Building Consolidated Edison Building

6. Statue of Abraham Lincoln

7. Liberty Pole

8. Statue of Lafayette

9. Statue of George Washington

10. Luchow's

11. Site of old Academy of Music

12. Irving Place Theater

13. Tammany Hall

STUYVESANT SQUARE DISTRICT

14. United Homing Pigeon Concourse

15. Scheffel Hall

16. St. Andrew's Hospital

17. Manhattan General Hospital

18. St. Dunstan's House

19. St. George's Church

20. Friends Seminary

21. Friends Meeting House

22. German Masonic Temple

23. Convent of the Little Sisters of the Assumption

24. William Booth Hospital

25. New York Infirmary for Women and Children

26. Beth Israel Hospital

GASHOUSE DISTRICT

27. Willard Parker Hospital 32. Municipal Lodging House

28. Columbus Hospital 33. St. Illuminator's Armenian

29. New York Skin and Cancer Apostolic Church

Unit 34. Davenport Theater

30. New York Post-Graduate Med- 35. "Fighting Sixty-ninth" Armory

ical School and Hospital (165th Regiment Infantry)

31. American Society for the Pre- 36. Old Stable Row

vention of Cruelty to Animals (Hospital and Shelter)

GRAMERCY PARK DISTRICT

37. City College (School of Civic 44. National Arts Club

Administration and Business) 45. Netherland Club

38. Children's Court 46. Calvary Episcopal Church

39. Home of Peter Cooper 47. Russell Sage Foundation

40. Statue of Edwin Booth New York School of Social Work

41. Friends' Meeting House 48. Madison Square Station, New

42. 112 East 19th Street Building York Post Office

43. The Players 49. United Charities Building

MADISON SQUARE DISTRICT

50. Theodore Roosevelt House 53. Site of old Fifth Avenue Hotel,

51. 900 Broadway Office Building Franconi's Hippodrome, and

52. Flatiron Building Madison Cottage

54. Memorial to General William

Jenkins Worth

55. Eternal Light

5"6. Metropolitan Life Insurance

Building 57. Building of the Supreme Court

Appellate Division

58. Statue of Admiral Farragut
59. American Society for the Pre vention of Cruelty to Animals (Offices)

60. New York Life Building

Site of old Madison Square Garden

MURRAY HILL AND GRAND CENTRAL DISTRICT

61. Little Church Around the Cor ner (Church of the Transfiguration)

62. Textile Building

63. Two Park Avenue Building

64. One Park Avenue Building

65. Furniture Exchange Building

66. Seventy-first Infantry Armory

67. Vanderbilt Hotel

68. Empire State Building

69. Residence of Mrs. Robert Bacon

70. Amherst Club

71. Advertising Club

72. Union League Club

73. Dartmouth College Club

74. Williams Club

75. Morgan Library

76. J. P. Morgan Home

77. Midston House

78. Princeton Club

79. Engineering Societies Building

80. National Republican Club

81. Engineers' Club

82. New York Public Library (Cen tral Building)

83. Lincoln Building

84. Chemists' Club

85. Murray Hill Hotel

86. Architectural League

87. New York City Information

Center (Pershing Square)

88. Bowery Savings Bank Building

89. Chanin Building

90. Chrysler Building

91. Hotel Commodore

92. Grand Central Terminal

93. Graybar Building

94. Grand Central Station, New

York Post Office

95. Lexington Hotel

96. Shelton Hotel

97. Belmont Plaza Hotel

98. Barclay Hotel

99. Grand Central Palace

100. New York Central Building

101. Hotel Roosevelt

102. Yale Club

103. Hotel Biltmore

FIFTH AVENUE SHOPPING DISTRICT 104. 500 Fifth Avenue Building

105. Fifth Avenue Bank Building

106. Ruppert Building

107. Fred F. French Building

108. Hotel Ritz-Carlton

109. Finley J. Shepard Home

110. Robert W. Goelet Home

111. Collegiate Church of St. Nich olas

112. St. Patrick's Cathedral

113. Grand Central Galleries

114. Cornelius Vanderbilt III Home

115. Museum of Modern Art

116. St. Thomas Church

117. University Club

118. Hotel Gotham

119. Hotel St. Regis

120. Steuben Glass Co. Building

GRAMERCY PARK DISTRICT 195

sixty-six lots for sale. The privacy of Gramercy Park was violated only once, when troops encamped within this sacrosanct area during the Draft Riots in 1863. In 1890 the State Legislature passed a bill embodying plans for bisecting the square by the extension of a cable car line down Lexington Avenue, but it was vetoed by Governor David B. Hill. Again in 1912 the park was threatened by a proposal to extend Irving Place northward into Lexington Avenue ; the Gramercy Park Association, however, defeated the plan, as it has defeated many such threats to the neighborhood's quiet.

While skyscrapers in adjacent streets and tall apartment houses, erected recently on the north and east sides of the park, cast shadows over the sunlit patch of greenery, a majority of the square's houses, built in the nineteenth century, remain outwardly unchanged although remodeled into apartments. On Gramercy Park West is an old row of prim red-brick houses enlivened by some lacy wrought-iron entrance porches, and on the south, a group of staid brownstone and brick dwellings stands firmly against time. The rooms are spacious; windows often reach from floor to ceiling. In many of the cellars the silver and plate vaults felt-lined rooms with ponderous iron doors remain intact.

Well-known families lived in Gramercy Park and they entertained notable visitors. At i Gramercy Park West, Dr. Valentine Mott, a distinguished physician, played host to the Comte de Paris during the Civil War. (House numbers begin at Gramercy Park West and East Twenty-first Street and run from 1-61 in a counterclockwise direction.) Two houses of

BEEKMAN PLACE AND SUTTON PLACE

121. Riverview Terrace 125. One Beekman Place

122. East Fifty-third Street Dock 126. Beekman Tower Hotel

(Dead End) 127. Site of Beekman House (P.S.

123. River House '135)

124. Hale House

KIP'S BAY AND TURTLE BAY

128. Kip's Bay Boys Club 137. Tudor City

129. New York Cancer Institute 138. Consolidated Edison Company

Clinic Waterside Station

130. Turtle Bay Music School 139. Daily News Building

131. Morris Sanders' House 140. Queens Midtown Tunnel

132. Michael Hare's House 141. Site of St. Gabriel's Church

133. William Lescaze's House 142. St. Gabriel's Park

134. Abattoir Center 143. New York Steam Corporation

135. Nathan Hale Commemorative Station

Tablet 144. Bellevue Hospital

136. Beaux Arts Apartments

196 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE Greek Revival style, No. 3 and 4, are joined architecturally by an exquisite cast-iron balcony that runs across both red-brick fronts. No. 3 is occupied by the NETHERLAND CLUB, whose members are descendants of the Dutch settlers. A pair of iron mounted lamps at the entrance of No. 4 was placed there by the city in honor of James Harper, the occupant who was mayor in 1844-5. (At the mayor's request such lamps are placed near the entrance of his home. This custom arose because the early chief executives wished to be immediately available for nocturnal emergencies.) Mayor Harper was one of the founders of Harper and Brothers, publishers.

Two distinguished clubs, the NATIONAL ARTS CLUB at 15 Gramercy Park South, and THE PLAYERS at No. 16 are on the south side. Samuel J. Tilden, who lived at No. 15, constructed an underground passageway to an exit on Nineteenth Street, so that he might escape boors and political enemies. The Players, an actors' club, was founded in 1888 by Edwin Booth who employed Stanford White to remodel the building. Booth lived here for many years ; the furnishings in his room remain intact, and his portrait by Sargent hangs over the fireplace in the main room. A bronze STATUE OF BOOTH in his role as "Hamlet" is in Gramercy Park. It was designed by Edmond T. Quinn and erected by the club. Each year, on the actor's birthday, November 13, a memorial wreath is placed on the statue by the members.

Number 19 was the home of Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish in the 1890*5, when she ruled the "Four Hundred" and society watched the antics of Harry Lehr, its bad boy. David Lamar, the "Wolf of Wall Street," Edward Sheldon, the playwright, and William C. Bullitt, ambassador to France in 1939, were later occupants. A descendant of Samuel Ruggles, Mrs. John A. Vanderpoel, lives at No. 22. Stanford White, Robert Ingersoll, and John Bigelow once had homes on the park. Cyrus Fields' old house stood on the northeast corner of Lexington Avenue and Gramercy Park North. Richard Watson Gilder died at No. 24.

The FRIENDS' MEETING HOUSE, Nos. 27-30 (144 East Twentieth Street), houses one of the oldest active Quaker groups. The simple onestory building was erected in 1859. ^ ts austere interior is still illuminated with gas lamps. A service for distressed travelers, established by the congregation, led to the formation of the Travelers' Aid Society in 1905.

Two studio apartment buildings are on the east side of the park: No. 34 AND No. 36 GRAMERCY PARK EAST. The design of No. 34 the arabesque panels of foliated details, the bay windows, and the octagonal turret, roofed with a conical cap follows Richard M. Hunt's adaptation of the French Empire style. The facade of the adjoining building, No. 36, is a

GRAMERCY PARK DISTRICT 197

veritable gallery of decorative detail: terra cotta with elaborate Gothic motifs, bay windows, traceried heads, and balustrades. Cast stone figures of armored knights holding spears and flame lamps guard the entrance court of the building.

In a group of remodeled houses in East Nineteenth Street, a block south of the park, lives a small colony of artists and writers, including Ida Tarbell, writer, Cecilia Beaux, painter, Clara Fargo Thomas, muralist, and George Julian Zolnay, sculptor.

The office building at 112 East Nineteenth Street houses many liberal organizations; among them are the American Student Union, City Affairs Committee, International Labor Defense, League for Industrial Democracy, and American League for Peace and Democracy.

At Fourth Avenue and Twenty-first Street, a block west of the park, is the CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH. The congregation was organized in 1836, and communicants have included members of the Roosevelt, Astor, and Vanderbilt families. The pastor, Dr. Samuel M. Shoemaker, is a prominent leader of the Oxford Group, and the nine-story Calvary House is accepted as Group headquarters in America.

North of the park, at 9 Lexington Avenue, was the HOME OF PETER COOPER, founder of Cooper Union (see page 121), well-known engineering and arts school. Like the Harper home, the residence has two lamps in front of the doorway, mementoes of the administration of Mayor Abram S. Hewitt, a son-in-law of Cooper. The building was occupied by Cooper's descendants until 1938.

On the southwest corner of Lexington Avenue and Twenty-second Street is the BUILDING OF THE RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION, a dignified edifice suggesting a Florentine Renaissance palace, where the diversified sociological research and educational activities financed by the Sage bequests and endowments are administered. The Foundation has one of the largest social welfare libraries in the world. The NEW YORK SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK, a Foundation-sponsored group, has its quarters in the building. It is the oldest and one of the outstanding institutions of its kind in the country.

The CHILDREN'S COURT, a part of the Domestic Relations Court, is at 137 East Twenty-second Street. The work of the Court, and its adjunct, the Probation Bureau, is primarily with delinquent and neglected children and has effectively reduced the number of child offenders. A block west, at 105 East Twenty-second Street, is the UNITED CHARITIES BUILDING, the headquarters of more than forty-five social welfare agencies.

The SCHOOL OF Civic ADMINISTRATION AND BUSINESS, a co-educational division of City College (see page 294), occupies the seventeen-story

198 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

building on the southeast corner of Twenty-third Street and Lexington

Avenue, the original site of the college.

The MADISON SQUARE STATION, NEW YORK POST OFFICE, 149 East Twenty-third Street, opposite the school, is a significant example of an evolving American style, a new classicism free of dependence on the works of antiquity. It was built in i93y-after plans by Lorimer Rich.

UNION SQUARE DISTRICT

Area: i4th St. on the south to i8th St. on the north; from 3d Ave. west to 6th Ave. Map on page 193.

Union Square district belongs to the working people of New York. It is an amusement center, but its ornate moving-picture theaters, glittering marquees, and gaily lighted buffets are fewer in number and less persuasive than those of Times Square. It is a shopping mart, but few of its stores have the fine goods and appointments of the Fifth Avenue fashion center: instead, their bare floors may be filled with racks holding scores of garments, many models of a kind, and their show windows, in many cases, are packed with cheap merchandise. The movie houses, likewise, offer the most for the money double features and "screeno" ; the dining places are cafeterias and lunchrooms, where large portions of plain food are dispensed for nickels, dimes, and quarters.

Before these cheap stores, cheap movies, cheap restaurants passes a ceaselessly moving crowd of men, women, and many children, of all nationalities. Hawkers and pitchmen find this street easy pickings among customers who can afford the little luxuries of Union Square pretzels, sliced cocoanut, gloves, scarves, neckties, and popular song sheets. They buy magic "roots" which sprout fullblown artificial gladiolas, peonies, or regal lilies ; prophecies from a turbaned seer ; risque cartoons ; or a dozen low-quality socks for fifty cents. Many beggars legless beggars on rollerskate platforms, footless, handless, or blind beggars; playing the saxophone, the guitar, singing move slower-paced through the crowd. The poor, they know, give to the poor. Passers-by stop at the busy newsstands for political literature, and along the curb newsboys hawk the Daily Worker and other radical newspapers of every shade. Youths and girls rattle collection boxes for the benefit of many causes the Chinese people, Jewish refugees, political prisoners, or workers on strike.

Touched with a bit of Coney Island, democratic, with a robust and loquacious vitality, Union Square derives its peculiar identity from its in UNION SQUARE DISTRICT 199

ternational reputation as the center of America's radical movement. The tradition of Union Square as a forum for mass protest was not born until the first decade of the present century. The Flour Riots of 1837 centered about City Hall; in the iSyo's the battleground moved north to Tompkins Square. During the Civil War, Union Square took on significance when the Union cause was commemorated in meetings, reviews, and parades of departing troops and in the torchlight processions of the proLincoln "Wide Awakes," the Young Republicans of that day. In 1873 unemployment protests were staged, but it was not until the numerous meetings of Anarchists, Socialists, and "Wobblies" (members of the Industrial Workers of the World) were held there during the years preceding the World War, that the square began to assume its importance as a gathering place.

Meetings and occasional clashes with the police continued with increasing frequency. On August 22, 1927, the night set for the execution in Boston of the anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a shoemaker and a fish peddler, machine guns were mounted on the roof of the six-story building now occupied by Klein's famous dress emporium, at 28-30 Union Square East, and were trained on a compact mass of more than five thousand tense, silent men and women, part of the angry crowd that had packed the square throughout the day. A little after midnight a sign was thrust outside the Daily Worker windows: "Sacco Murdered." Some minutes later another sign appeared: "Vanzetti Murdered." A throaty wail of anguish arose. A small procession that immediately formed was dispersed by police, and several marchers were injured.

On May 18, 1929, the Communist Party led an "anti-police brutality" demonstration and again the police charged. Many heads were broken and twenty-seven demonstrators, including nine children, were arrested.

With the mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of October, 1929, the square became the gathering place for the jobless. On March 6, 1930, the largest gathering ever held in Union Square occurred: more than thirty-five thousand unemployed workers and sympathizers crowded around a number of speakers' stands. When the demonstrators started to march toward City Hall, the police broke up the parade. A hundred persons were injured and thirteen arrested.

This mass meeting ushered in a new period in the history of labor demonstrations in Union Square. Public reaction against police interference won the right of assembly in this park. It became accepted in New York City that the May Day Parade was privileged to be reviewed at the north end of the square.

200 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

Recent years have seen the development of many protest centers throughout the city, diminishing the former concentration of such activities in Union Square. The soapbox speaker's old stamping grounds, the traffic triangles at the corners of the square, are now islands of verdure. Nonetheless, Union Square is likely to continue as the heart of the city's radical activities, for in its neighborhood- are headquarters of many of New York's radical and progressive groups and labor organizations: the Socialist Party and its newspaper, the Socialist Call, the Communist Party and its newspaper, the Daily Worker, the Rand School of Social Science, the International Workers Order, the International Labor Defense, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American League for Peace and Democracy, the League for Mutual Aid, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and a host of others.

It would seem that Union Square was appropriately named ; the aptness of the title, however, was accidental. The square was laid out in 1811 as Union Place, the name deriving from the connection of the extended Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway) and Bowery Road (now Fourth Avenue). Shortly after the neighborhood became one of New York's most sedate and exclusive suburbs, inhabited by the city's wealthiest citizens. Among its residents were James Roosevelt, Robert Goelet, and Daniel Drew. The small park was surrounded by a heavy iron fence, the gates of which were locked at sundown. The fence was not removed until the iSyo's when Union Place had become Union Square.

Union Square as a theatrical district had its beginning in 1854, when the Academy of Music was audaciously opened as the home of grand opera on the north side of Fourteenth Street near Irving Place. The land between Second and Third Avenues on Fourteenth Street was at that time occupied by a truck farm. Seven years later, when James Wallack built his theater at Thirteenth Street and Broadway, his friends considered him a madman for moving so far uptown from the Bowery. Irving Hall, erected at Irving Place and Fifteenth Street in 1859, is now known as the IRVING PLACE THEATRE. Subsequently, the Union Square Theatre was built on Fourteenth Street and Broadway, and Tony Pastor's opened on Fourteenth Street near Third Avenue, next to the old headquarters of Tammany Hall.

During the iSyo's theaters, hotels, and fine restaurants, reflecting the exuberance of the growing city, made this neighborhood the center of good living and gaiety. In the late i86o's Delmonico's restaurant moved from the City Hall section to Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. LuCHOW'S, still one of the most famous eating places in New York, was established in 1882 in its present quarters on Fourteenth Street near Irving

UNION SQUARE DISTRICT 2OI

Place. Italian, French, Hungarian, and English restaurants were available to the gourmet.

On the west side of Union Square, at Fifteenth Street, stood Tiffany's great jewelry shop in the building which now houses the AMALGAMATED BANK, the first labor bank in New York and the largest institution of its kind in the United States. Between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets Brentano's Literary Emporium sedately served the elite. Farther west and north toward Sixth Avenue, the shopping center included Hearn's, B. Altman's, Siegel-Cooper, and farther south on Broadway, Stewart's (now Wanamaker's), and Daniel's.

By 1900, with the city's steady growth northward, the character of the district had definitely changed. Some of the restaurants and theaters had moved to Madison Square; the business center had shifted, or rather split, leaving a great gap between uptown and downtown New York, into which, during the next decade, the young needle trades rushed like a tide. Besides cheap rents real-estate values had fallen rapidly the neighborhood offered two great advantages to the industry: it was on the outskirts of the fashionable shopping center, and it was near a plentiful and cheap labor supply the immigrant families of the Lower East Side. The old Union Square homes were soon converted into tenements to house thousands of needle trade workers.

Artists made studios of the great attic rooms in the few mansions still standing, and the south side of Fourteenth Street became virtually an extension of Greenwich Village. Such men as Max Weber, Walt Kuhn, Reginald Marsh, Emil Ganzo, Joseph Stella, Ernest Fiene, Walter Pach, Alfred Dehn, and Art Young made their homes here. In the 1920*5 came Raphael Soyer, Morris Kantor, Louis Lozowick, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi; and in the 1930*5, William Gropper, Arnold Blanch, William Zorach, and Doris Lee. Ambrose Bierce wrote some of his famous short stories on Fourteenth Street. Later Michael Gold, Joseph Freeman, and Albert Halper, author of Union Square, came there to live and write.

The years 1910 to 1921 saw this district at its most depressed level. It was an area of burlesque houses, shooting galleries, and shoddy businesses. Real-estate values sank to a new low and in 1921 many parcels of property were sold at foreclosure. S. Klein, operator of a dress establishment, bought three of these dilapidated buildings on the east side of the square and began a program of expansion. (The ground floor of the one at the Fourteenth Street corner had been occupied by Joe's, a saloon that was used by Hugh A. D'Arcy as the setting for his sentimental poem, The Face on the Barroom Floor. The verse first appeared in the New York Dispatch,

202 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE August 7, 1887.) OHRBACH'S followed suit and these two establishments, dealing in women's apparel, gave the impetus from which developed today's substantial shopping center.

As a retail district Union Square, more strictly Fourteenth Street, is perhaps the city's largest outlet for low-priced women's merchandise. KLEIN'S, doing a tremendous business in women's apparel, employs a minimum of sales people, and customers help themselves in cafeteria fashion. The presence of store detectives inhibits shoplifting. HEARN'S DEPARTMENT STORE, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues on Fourteenth Street, has shared in the general retail rejuvenation of the section. The stores of Fourteenth Street no longer draw their clientele exclusively from the East Side. Women from near-by cities, from the suburbs, and from every part of New York come bargain hunting here. In line with the district's labor character, most of its business houses are either unionized or in process of becoming so. The shoppers here are probably the most union-conscious consumers in the country. An everyday sight on Union Square is the picket line, whether it be in front of a restaurant, an orangedrink stand, or a shoe shop.

UNION SQUARE PARK, after years of neglect, was landscaped in 1935-6. The level of the ground was raised several feet above the street in order to allow for the construction of an underground concourse connecting the various subway routes below. At the north end a colonnaded bandstand was constructed, overlooking a large plaza where automobiles are parked unless a mass meeting is scheduled.

A number of monuments and pieces of sculpture of high merit are in the square. The most commanding of these is a bronze equestrian STATUE OF WASHINGTON near the southern end of the park facing Fourteenth Street. The work of Henry Kirke Brown, it was one of the earliest equestrian statues in America. J. Q. A. Ward designed the base. The statue, dedicated on July 4, 1856, was originally placed at the southeast corner of the square, where Washington was said to have been received by the citizens of New York following the evacuation of the city by the British on November 25, 1783.

Other monuments include a heroic bronze STATUE OF LINCOLN, also by Brown, and a bronze FIGURE OF LAFAYETTE by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, designer of the Statue of Liberty. From the center of the square rises an eighty-foot LIBERTY POLE, erected in 1924. It commemorates the Declaration of Independence and honors the Tammany leader, Charles Francis Murphy. In the sculptured, drum-shaped base, designed by Anthony de Fransisci, are engraved Jefferson's words: "How little my coun UNION SQUARE DISTRICT 203

trymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of and which no other people on earth enjoy."

The diverse architecture of the buildings surrounding Union Square does not supply the unified feeling of enclosure implied by the word "square," but it does offer an interesting record of architectural styles that have been popular in past years. The LINCOLN BUILDING, erected at i Union Square in 1889, is an example adapted from Romanesque work; at No. 33 the Union Building, built in 1893, has richly framed windows inspired by Spanish Moorish design. The cast-iron front widely popular in the last quarter of the nineteenth century is exemplified by the AMALGAMATED BANK BUILDING at 11-15 Union Square, erected in 1870-71.

Most of the recent buildings, however, are faced with stone. Three divisions of each facade are clearly marked : a base ornamented with classical details, an intermediate portion of undecorated masonry pierced by regular windows, and a crowning element at the top consisting of arched windows and an elaborate cornice. The BANK OF THE MANHATTAN COMPANY at 31 Union Square and the HARTFORD BUILDING at No. 41 are typical.

The decreased demand for industrial floor area and the increased number of vacancies, in the years following the financial crisis of 1929, led to the popularity of a new type of structure the taxpayer. This was designed to yield rent that was sufficient to pay the real-estate taxes ; it could be replaced by a larger building during a more prosperous period. Such an example is at 31 EAST SEVENTEENTH STREET, a two-story structure of lightcream brick and panels.

In the northeast corner of the square Seventeenth Street and Fourth Avenue is TAMMANY HALL, the headquarters of the city- wide system of Democratic political clubs. Here the inner council of sachems meets to set Tammany's policies and to plan campaigns. When the organization wins at the polls, club leaders and district workers swarm to the Hall for a rousing election night celebration, but such joyful gatherings have been infrequent in recent years. The building, erected in 1929, has some resemblance to the old Federal Hall that stood at Broad and Wall Streets.

Although the CONSOLIDATED EDISON BUILDING is one block east of the square Fourteenth Street and Irving Place it is already part of the square's tradition. The building, completed in sections between 1915 and 1929, occupies the site of the old Academy of Music. The mausoleum-like tower rises 531 feet above the square; its bright lights, visible for miles, and the illuminated dial of the great clock below, are welcome landmarks.

204 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

MADISON SQUARE DISTRICT

Area: i8th St. on the south to 27th St. on the north; from 6th Ave. east to 4th Ave. Map on page 193.

The "Flatiron" Building, whose very name has to be explained to a younger generation, is the only tangible evidence that there ever was a Madison Square a glamorous Madison Square. Here Ward McAllister's "Four Hundred" dined and danced at Delmonico's, and the old aristocracy, including the Roosevelts, lived in brownstone mansions following a pattern of life preserved only in the pages of novels about "little old New York."

Here, too, were some of Stanford White's most beautiful buildings : the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, with its pillared portico, columns of green granite, and Pantheon-like dome; old Madison Square Garden (see page 331), with its copy of the Giralda tower of Seville surmounted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens' statue of the glorious Diana.

On the site of the old Garden, at Madison Avenue and 26th Street, rises the New York Life Insurance Building. Two blocks south, on the east side of the park, is the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building. The paths that crisscross the park seem to have been expressly laid out for the convenience of the thousands of office workers hurrying from subways and busses to these great skyscrapers. Lesser buildings flank the Broadway side. Factories and sales rooms of the toy, novelty, silk, woolen, and men's clothing industries and headquarters of benevolent and welfare organizations are scrambled throughout the Madison Square district; on Fourth Avenue, a block east of the park, many of the nation's well-known publishers have their offices.

In the acute-angled triangle made by the scissors-like intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, at Twenty-third Street, is the old twentyone-story FLATIRON BUILDING, completed in 1902 from plans by D. H. Burnham and Company. Its exterior walls as well as floors are supported at each story by the steel frame. This was a logical advance over the structural system used in the World Building on Park Row. Previously, the area of the base and the thickness of the exterior walls were the main technical factors in determining the height of a building; the development of the new principle made possible greater heights.

It was christened the Fuller Building, but because of its shape became known as the "Flatiron." Pictured on postcards, stamped on souvenirs, its image was familiar to American minds, young and old. Standing on what

MADISON SQUARE DISTRICT 205

was traditionally the windiest corner of the city, it was facetiously considered a good vantage point for the glimpse of a trim ankle, in the longskirted, prewar era; policemen used to shoo loungers away from the Twenty-third Street corner, and the expression "twenty-three skidoo" is supposed to have originated from this association.

Completion of the Fuller Building presaged the end of Madison Square as a social center. Within less than a decade (1908), "the skyscraper" was outclassed by a neighbor, the METROPOLITAN LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING. Designed by Le Brun and Sons, it fronts the park on Madison Avenue, between Twenty-third and Twenty- fourth Streets and rises seven hundred feet (fifty stories) above street level. While the bold simplicity of the design gives the tower great strength, the faulty scale of the details make it look much smaller than it actually is. The tower clock has four faces each twenty-six and a half feet in diameter with minute hands weighing a thousand pounds each and hour hands seven hundred pounds. The four enormous chimes, the largest of which weighs seven thousand pounds, sound a measure by Handel every quarter-hour from seven in the morning until ten at night, when a beacon light takes over the watch, flashing red for the quarter-hours and white for the hours. The building is connected to a smaller annex by a covered bridge high above Twenty-fourth Street.

In the shadow of the Metropolitan Life, at the north corner of Twentyfifth Street and Madison Avenue, is the marble BUILDING OF THE APPELLATE DIVISION OF THE SUPREME COURT, a work of considerable harmony and delicacy. It was designed by James Brown Lord and erected in 1900. Above the roof balustrade is a galaxy of statuary, including allegorical representations of Justice and Peace, together with figures of famous lawgivers. Sculptors represented include Philip Martiny, Karl Bitter, Herbert Adams, and Edward C. Potter. The interior, profuse with veined yellow marble, gilt plaster relief, carved woodwork, and murals, recalls High Renaissance decoration.

The NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING occupies the block from Twenty-sixth to Twenty-seventh Street, from Madison to Fourth Avenue. This 6iy-foot structure was completed in 1928 from plans by Cass Gilbert, designer of the Woolworth Building. Although the Gothic ornament is similar to that of the Woolworth Building, it lacks the powerful upward movement embodied in the latter. From the 1830*5 to the early iSyo's the site was occupied by the New York and Harlem (Railroad) Union Depot.

At the northwest corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street is the home of the AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY

206 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

TO ANIMALS, founded in 1866 by the humanitarian Henry Bergh. It also houses a dispensary and hospital. The MANHATTAN CLUB, at the southeast corner, was prominent in the late nineteenth century as headquarters of Democratic leaders. The Manhattan cocktail is said to have originated there.

The Fifth Avenue Building, northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street, occupies the. SITE OF THE OLD FIFTH AVENUE HOTEL, a center of the city's social and political life in the Gilded Age. When it was completed in 1859, the Fifth Avenue Hotel was dubbed "Eno's Folly," because people doubted a hotel so far uptown could succeed. It prospered, however, and became a meeting place for Republican politicians. In one of the downstairs sitting rooms of the hotel was the "Amen Corner," so named because Senator Thomas Platt, Republican boss, there gave orders to his henchmen. Around the corner from the Fifth Avenue Building, at 55 West Twenty-third Street, was the Eden Musee with its Chamber of Horrors, containing waxwork representations of notorious crimes. It remained here from 1884 until 1915, when the wax figures were sent to Coney Island.

Delmonico's, one of New York's most famous restaurants, moved to Fifth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street in 1876. It reached the peak of its glory at this location: the great dining salon was a favorite haunt of such notables as Berry Wall (King of the Dudes), John Drew, Richard Mansfield, Charles and Daniel Frohman, and a host of other prominent actors, sportsmen, financiers, and social leaders. Then O. Henry could say of this district, "Here is the fly-eye of New York. Spin it on a pivot and you would see the world."

Fifty years later (1939) a new generation got an inkling of the district's former glory when one of its grimy buildings, an office BUILDING AT 900 BROADWAY, emerged from a scrubbing as an architectural challenge to the modernists. The structure, which was built in 1887 after plans by Stanford White, was far ahead of its time in its subtle use of brick and terra-cotta color and in the originality of its structurally expressive design. Four stories have been added to the original six.

Madison Square has changed with the growth of the city, but the sixacre park, the only break in the wall of Fifth Avenue blocks between Washington Square and Fortieth Street, has kept its shady walks and its statues. The FARRAGUT STATUE, in the park, was designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens ; its base by White. It was unveiled in 1881 by John H. Knowles, the sailor who had lashed Farragut to the mast in the historic naval engagement of the Civil War in Mobile Bay. An obelisk-shaped monument west of the park is a MEMORIAL TO GENERAL WILLIAM JEN MADISON SQUARE DISTRICT 2OJ

KINS WORTH, Mexican War hero whose body lies under the shaft. The ETERNAL LIGHT, an ever burning star atop a lofty flagpole on the Fifth Avenue side, commemorates the valor of the American Expeditionary Forces in France during the World War. At Christmas a great evergreen, brilliant with colored lights probably the first community Christmas tree in the city sheds a glow over the park. Carols are sung and "good will toward men" rings out in the usually workaday atmosphere. The tree celebration, conceived by Orlando Rouland, artist, and his wife, has been held in the square every Christmas since 1911.

The early days of this section are recalled by the ROOSEVELT HOUSE, 28 East Twentieth Street, birthplace and boyhood home of Theodore Roosevelt. (Open weekdays, except Monday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday and holidays 1 to 5 p.m.; admission 25$ Wednesday and Friday, other days free.) It is furnished in the style of the 1870's and contains a collection of diaries, letters, manuscripts, cartoons, and other mementos of the President. The square was named, indirectly, for President Madison. Early in its history the park site was a pauper's burying ground. The area accommodated, successively, an arsenal and the House of Refuge. The latter, said to be the first such institution in the country, was opened in 1825 under the auspices of the Society for the Reformation of Youthful Delinquents. It was destroyed by fire in 1839.

When the land around the arsenal was used as a parade ground in the first half of the nineteenth century, a Corporal Thompson operated a tavern here which was a rendezvous for the sporting crowd. The inn was known as both Corporal Thompson's Roadhouse and Madison Cottage. It was razed in 1852 and on its site was built Franconi's Hippodrome, a circus, and later the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Madison Square Park was officially opened in 1847. It was here that baseball as a national sport was given its original impetus. In 1845, a group of "gentlemen who had been playing the game since 1842 as a means of exercise" organized the Knickerbocker Club and drew up the elementary rules of the game. The improved sport spread rapidly through the country, becoming known as the "New York Game." During the next decades, the sportsmen who gathered in the near-by inns were supplanted by the aristocrats who wined and dined at the many restaurants and hotels that were established around the square the Cafe Martin, the Holland House, the Albemarle, St. James, Victoria, Brunswick, Hoffman House, and others. (The bar in the Hoffman House was the most popular on Broadway, owing perhaps to the scandalous painting by Bouguereau of a nude nymph surrounded by satyrs.) These establishments flourished until comparatively recent times.

208 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

KIP'S BAY AND TURTLE BAY

Area: 27th St. on the south to 59th St. on the north; from 3d Ave. east to East River (excluding Beekman and Sutton Places). Map on page 193.

Kip's Bay-Turtle Bay neighborhood, sometimes known as the mid-town East Side, is a riverside back yard for the more imposing mid-town section west of it. Huge industrial enterprises breweries, laundries, abattoirs, power plants along the water front face squalid tenements not far away from new apartment dwellings attracted to the section by its river view and its central position. The numerous plants shower this district with the heaviest sootfall in the city 150 tons to the square mile annually.

The area near Second Avenue and East Thirty-fifth Street was the site of Jacobus Kip's farm, "a goodly estate, covering one hundred and fifty acres, and comprising meadow, woodland and stream." It extended eastward to a bay subsequently named for Kip. In 1655 he built a mansion of imported brick for his young bride, Marie de la Montagne; the house stood on the farm for almost two hundred years. A sixty- acre tract, one mile north, was settled in 1677 by the De Voors who called it the Spring Valley Farm. Through it ran the Saw Kill to a rocky indentation of the East River. Because of its shape, the indentation was called Turtle Bay.

Important events of the American Revolution took place in this district. A British military storehouse at the foot of East Forty-fifth Street was stormed by the Liberty Boys in a midnight raid in 1773. It was in Kip's Bay that British men-of-war anchored September 15, 1776, to take over Manhattan Island. The Revolutionary army, wearied and disheartened after the disastrous defeat on Long Island, broke before broadsides from these vessels and fled toward Harlem Heights. George Washington tried to stem the rout. "It was said that he drew his sword and threatened to run the cowards through," wrote Rupert Hughes in his biography of Washington, "he used the cane whip he carried, and he beat his people over the shoulders in an insane hatred of their shameless cowardice. He flogged not only private soldiers but officers as well. He lashed colonels across the shoulder blades ... He flailed a brigadier general." The next day Washington succeeded in rallying his troops and defeated the enemy at Harlem Heights. Before the Battle of Long Island the Americans had thrown up redoubts at Kip's and Turtle bays, which were subsequently captured, and for the duration of the war British frigates were stationed there. During the War of 1812 the shores were again fortified.

Early in the nineteenth century this region was the site of the country

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estates of many prominent New Yorkers, among them Horace Greeley, the editor, and Francis Bayard Winthrop, bank director and poet. By the i88o's, however, the estates had been broken up into lots upon which rows of brownstones were built. Today much of the district is a slum. El trains of the Second and Third Avenue lines thunder by constantly, and First Avenue, an important commercial traffic artery, brings an endless, noisy procession of trucks. Kip's and Turtle bays have long been filled in, and their names have vanished from maps. A scrawny ledge of rock at the foot of Forty-fifth Street marks the approximate location of Turtle Bay, while of Kip's Bay nothing remains but the name, used by a few local organizations and business firms. For convenience, Forty-second Street may be taken as the dividing line between the two sections.

Bellevue Hospital (see page 316), one of the oldest in the country, occupies the blocks between Twenty-sixth and Thirtieth Streets, east of First Avenue to the river.

On the site of the old bay is the KIP'S BAY STATION OF THE NEW YORK STEAM CORPORATION, First Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street, which supplies steam to midtown skyscrapers, such as the New York Central, Chrysler, Lincoln, Chanin, and Empire State buildings. This service has made possible in large buildings the elimination of heating equipment and the utilization of additional rentable floor area. The steam is forced through underground conduits at a speed of two hundred miles an hour. The huge WATERSIDE STATION OF THE CONSOLIDATED EDISON COMPANY at Thirty-eighth Street and the East River, near the load center of the city, can generate 367,000 kilowatts of electricity. (Visitors admitted.)

ST. GABRIEL'S PARK, on First Avenue, opposite the steam plant, is one of the few recreational areas in the neighborhood. The near-by St. Gabriel's Church, at 310 East Thirty- seventh Street, is distinguished for having provided two of the seven American cardinals in the history of the Roman Catholic Church : the late Archbishop of New York, Patrick Cardinal Hayes, and his predecessor, James Cardinal Farley.

The entire block on which the church stands is scheduled (1939) to be razed to make way for an approach to the QUEENS MIDTOWN TUNNEL, construction of which commenced in October, 1936. The vehicular tunnel's twin tubes will extend 7,750 feet from Second Avenue at Thirtyseventh Street to Borden Avenue near Vernon Avenue in Long Island City. The tube for westbound traffic will be 7,785 feet long, and the one for eastbound traffic, 7,500 feet. These are being constructed by the New York City Tunnel Authority with the aid of a PWA loan and grant of more than $58,000,000. By the time the tunnel is completed in 1940, about two

210 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE whole blocks of substandard dwellings and small parts of ten others will have been demolished, and more will go as the East River Drive is extended through the neighborhood. Eventually, a passageway will be burrowed underneath Manhattan, connecting the Queens Midtown Tunnel with the Lincoln Tunnel (see page 156).

Dominating the entire district from a high bluff over First Avenue is TUDOR CITY, a $25,000,000 group of apartment houses built in the 1920's. It stretches east of Second Avenue from Fortieth to Forty-fourth Street. Forty-second Street runs through a tunnel under the development. The twelve buildings, decorated with details of English Cottage design, vary in height from ten to thirty-two stories and contain some three thousand apartments. A private park, which the main buildings face, is reserved for the use of Tudor City residents. Part of this rocky site was known as Corcoran's Roost in the i88o's, when it was the lair of the Rag Gang and was ruled by Paddy Corcoran and his sons.

A block west rises the thirty-six-story NEWS BUILDING, 220 East Fortysecond Street, one of the city's most distinctive skyscrapers. The lucid expression of its unbroken vertical stripes distinguishes the building from the surrounding humdrum architecture. The stripes, which begin as alternating bands* of white piers, and dark window and spandrel, end abruptly at the top of a forty-foot blank wall. The parapet hides from view roof tanks, elevator bulkheads, and stair towers. The structure was designed by John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood and cost $10,700,000, including printing machinery. Since their completion in 1930, the building and the adjoining nine-story annex on Forty-first Street have housed the various departments of the New York Daily News, the tabloid that has a larger circulation than any other newspaper in the country. The News Information Bureau, a general service covering a great variety of subjects, served about 625,000 persons in 1938; the same year more than 81,000 visitors inspected the ultramodern printing plant. (Guide service daily at 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 :45 and 8:45 p.m.)

Another striking design by Raymond Hood is that of the near-by BEAUX ARTS APARTMENTS, two expensive residence buildings aj: 307 and 310 East Forty-fourth Street. Built in 1929, the houses face each other and are slightly set back to suggest a court. To some critics the use of dark brick between windows achieves an effect of horizontality that appears forced.

The NEW YORK MIRROR, a Hearst tabloid, is published at 235 East Forty-fifth Street. The ABATTOIR CENTER extends along First Avenue from Forty-second to Forty-sixth Street. In order to reach these eastern plants of the large meat packers, cattle and sheep are detrained at

KIP'S BAY AND TURTLE BAY 211

New Jersey terminals on the Hudson River and transported in livestock barges to unloading piers on the East River. Here they are rested and fed for twenty-four hours before slaughter. The entire output of these plants is consumed by inhabitants in the metropolitan area.

With the development of modern sanitation, many of the most objectionable aspects of the slaughterhouse neighborhood disappeared. To the past belong such features as dilapidated shacks, runaway livestock, and strong, unpleasant odors. Still employed, however, is the Judas bellwether, the sheep that leads a flock to slaughter. At the turn of the century the slaughterhouses played an important role in the life of the city's immigrants. They strongly believed in the medicinal value of blood, and when illness came they went to the abattoirs and bought blood for five cents a glass.

On the wall of the Wilson meat-packing plant, on the southeast corner of First Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, is a TABLET commemorating the execution of Nathan Hale (September 22, 1776), which is supposed to have occurred near here.

The combined residence-and-omce of three architects in Turtle Bay area represent interesting developments in building design. WILLIAM LESCAZE'S HOUSE, 211 East Forty-eighth Street, is air-conditioned and insulated with glass brick to keep out noise of the street and near-by els. The exterior is designed so as to lead the client into the office and the social visitor into the home. The brownstone treatment of MICHAEL HARE'S HOUSE, 212 East Forty- ninth Street, agrees admirably with that of neighboring buildings. The facade is set back slightly between party walls. MORRIS SANDERS' HOUSE, 219 East Forty-ninth Street, excites interest because of its vertical alternation of windows and open porches. The interiors of the three buildings achieve striking effects through the imaginative use of color, texture of materials, and the sequences of wellrelated spaces.

Two of the many alert social agencies in the neighborhood maintain headquarters on Fifty-second Street. At No. 244, the TURTLE BAY Music SCHOOL, established in 1924, provides free music instruction for talented children of the poor, while at No. 301, the KIP'S BAY BOYS CLUB, founded in 1913, conducts organized educational and recreational activities.

The northern part of the district, sandwiched between Park Avenue and Sutton Place, borrows a little of the character of those wealthy neighborhoods. Many better-class dwellings occupy the side streets, and on Third Avenue are a great many antique shops.

Fifty-ninth Street, the northern boundary of this district, leads to the entrance of the QUEENSBORO BRIDGE at Second Avenue. The crossing, a

212 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE balanced cantilever structure with a marked angular appearance, lacks the graceful continuity and flow of line of the East River suspension bridges. It was designed by the municipal department of bridges and completed in 1909 at a cost of about $20,800,000, including land and construction. The bridge crosses Welfare Island (reached by elevators descending from the bridge's roadway) to Long Island City. About 7,450 feet long (including approaches), it has a west channel span of 1,182 feet, a Welfare Island span of 630 feet, and an east channel span of 984 feet.

The New York Cancer Institute of Welfare Island (see page 423) maintains a clinic at 124 East Fifty-ninth Street.

MURRAY HILL

Area: 2jth St. on the south to 426. St. on the north; from 6th Ave. east to 3d Ave. (excluding 5th Ave.). Map on page 193.

The district known as Murray Hill, now bordered by many of the world's tallest buildings, recalls to the sentimental New Yorker a vision of baroque brownstone mansions, crinoline and lavender, hoop skirts and trailing gowns, hansom cabs and four-in-hands. In the last decades of the nineteenth century Murray Hill harbored the ample dwellings of many of New York's "Four Hundred." A few of these remain and reinforce the contrast between the leisurely magnificence of Victorian days and the dynamic austerity of twentieth-century New York a contrast which, as time passes, will be found chiefly in old prints or such novels as those of Edith Wharton, who so scrupulously evoked the flavor of Murray Hill's opulent past.

At the southern edge of this locality stands the PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF THE TRANSFIGURATION, i East Twenty-ninth Street, better known as the "Little Church Around the Corner." More marriage ceremonies are performed here, perhaps, than in any other church in the city. The edifice gained its more popular name in 1870 when the pastor of a fashionable Madison Avenue congregation refused burial services to George Holland, an actor, and suggested to Joseph Jefferson, a friend of the deceased, that he "try the little church around the corner." The ensuing publicity made the church a shrine for theater people. The EPISCOPAL ACTORS GUILD OF AMERICA, of which Otis Skinner is head, has headquarters in the church building.

The grouping of small stone buildings around a garden dominated by a magnificent English elm is exceedingly picturesque, and without doubt

MURRAY HILL 213

the church is one of the most painted and etched religious edifices in America. Among the notable features of the interior are the fine use of wood in vaulting, arches, and screens; the Bride's Altar, with carved oak reredos incorporating old Scottish panels ; the St. Faith window, partly of fourteenth-century Belgian glass; the old paintings used as stations of the cross ; and Saint Mary's Chapel.

The area from Twenty-ninth to Thirty-fourth Street and Third to Fifth Avenue, with Lexington Avenue as the main artery, is devoted chiefly to the wholesale furniture and allied trades. At 206 Lexington Avenue is the FURNITURE EXCHANGE, erected in 1926, owned co-operatively by the tenants and operated for the trade. Performing a similar function for the rug and carpet industry is the TEXTILE BUILDING at 295 Fifth Avenue, erected in 1921.

South of Thirty-second Street, Fourth Avenue is lined with large office buildings, many of which are occupied by publishing firms, notably those at Nos. 432 and 386. The design of the 2 PARK AVENUE BUILDING represents a considerable break with past styles. The ornamental detail consists of geometric patterns formed by variations in wall surfaces and by the colored terra cotta at the top of the building. The structure was designed by Ely Jacques Kahn and erected in 1927.

On the southeast corner of Park Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street stands one of New York's most impressive armories, used as headquarters for three National Guard (New York) units: the 8yth Infantry Brigade, the yist Infantry Regiment, and the loist Signal Battalion. The building was completed in 1904 from a design by Clinton and Russell. Its lofty tower was copied from that of the town hall in Siena, Italy. The main drill hall, 190 by 205 feet, is used for drills, reviews, social events, and exhibitions.

Opposite the armory, on the southwest corner, is the VANDERBILT HOTEL, built in 1912 after plans by Warren and Wetmore. The structure is an example of the eclectic use of Italian Renaissance, Mexican, and Adam influences. The Caen stone walls of the main lobby bear sculptured panels by Beatrice Chandler ; the Delia Robbia Room in the basement has decorations by Smeraldi in the spirit of French eighteenth-century chinoiseries.

The northeast corner of the same intersection, formerly known as One Park Avenue, is occupied by the mid- Victorian RESIDENCE OF MRS. ROBERT BACON, widow of an ambassador to France. When Park Avenue was extended two blocks south to Thirty- second Street, Mrs. Bacon sued the city, asking to retain the original address. Despite the fact that she lost the

214 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE suit, and that the office building at the northeast corner of Park Avenue and Thirty-second Street is now known as One Park Avenue, her residence is listed in the telephone directory as "i Park Avenue."

Business has almost completely usurped the once exclusive Murray Hill section of Madison Avenue. The last remaining residence of importance is the J. P. MORGAN HOME at 231 Madison Avenue, a large brownstone edifice bearing in its exterior details a slight suggestion of French Renaissance influence. The two buildings of the MORGAN LIBRARY on East Thirty-sixth Street creation of J. P. Morgan the elder and his son, the present J. P. Morgan are among the most luxuriously appointed private museums in the world. The main building at 33 East Thirty-sixth Street, a fine example of early sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance style, was designed by McKim, Mead, "and White and erected in 1913, on principles associated with the Acropolis, the unpierced white marble walls being built without the use of mortar. The annex at No. 29, completed in 1928 by the younger Morgan on the site of the elder's home, was intentionally subordinated to the main building by the architect, Benjamin W. Morris, and while the most expensive materials have been used throughout, the impression is one of simplicity and severity. Although both edifices are outstanding architectural monuments in themselves, they are hardly suited to the display of the treasures they house because of their basically poor lighting.

The library, established in 1924, contains a valuable collection of sculpture, paintings, prints, objets d'art, and rare manuscripts and books. Among the most notable items in the art collection are the Infant Hercules, ascribed to Michelangelo; a sixteenth-century Madonna and Saints of the school of Giovanni Bellini; a fifteenth-century mantel sculptured by the Florentine, Desiderio Settignano; a Donatello terra-cotta bas-relief of a Madonna and Child; a seventeenth-century Chinese vase once the possession of Emperor K'ang Hsi; and the Morgan ruby. The collection of manuscripts and books includes the Mainz Psalter of 1465 and the Ashburnham Gospels of the ninth century, two of the rarest volumes in the world, and the first printed editions of Caesar, Virgil, Plutarch, Dante, Cicero, Tasso, and many others.

The buildings are open to sightseers (Main: Tuesday and Thursday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Annex: weekdays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; closed Sunday and legal holidays). To make use of the library one must have a card, obtained by writing to the director.

Of the many professional, political, and social clubs in this section, the most famous is the UNION LEAGUE CLUB, which occupies spacious

MURRAY HILL 215

quarters in a modern building at 38 East Thirty-seventh Street. Stronghold of Republican conservatism, the club was organized in 1863 by Professor Wolcott Gibbs as the Union League of America to combat secession sentiment then rife in the city; together with similar organizations in Philadelphia and Baltimore, it aided in recruiting and equipping a regiment of Negroes in 1864. During Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose insurgency the club signified its displeasure by banishing his portrait from the library, but after his defeat restored it to its original place.

Business and professional associations in the vicinity include the ADVERTISING CLUB at 23 Park Avenue; the AMHERST CLUB at 273 Lexington Avenue; the ARCHITECTURAL LEAGUE OF NEW YORK at 115 East Fortieth Street; the ENGINEERS' CLUB, 32 West Fortieth Street; the CHEMISTS' CLUB, 52 East Forty-first Street; and the TECHNOLOGY CLUB, 22 East Thirty-eighth Street. Midston House, on Madison Avenue between Thirtyseventh and Thirty-eighth Streets, houses the UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA CLUB, MILLS COLLEGE CLUB, and the AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY WOMEN. The DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CLUB is at 30 East Thirty-seventh Street, the WILLIAMS CLUB at No. 24, and the PRINCETON CLUB at 39 East Thirty-ninth Street.

Spreading northward from Thirty-sixth Street, Murray Hill encompasses a number of houses belonging to New York's aristocracy. Several of these brownstones with their elaborately carved detail, enormous bays, and impressive vestibules, date from the post-Civil War era. From 1870 through the 1890's, the Hill, restricted since about 1850 to residential purposes, attracted many of New York's leading families, among them the Belmonts, Rhinelanders, Tiffanys, and Havemeyers. Around the turn of the century the neighborhood gradually began to lose ground in its effort to restrict commercial establishments, and with the opening of Grand Central Terminal in 1913 it could no longer remain exclusively residential.

From the 1830*5 to the 1890's, what is now Park Avenue and its southern extension, Fourth Avenue, held the tracks of the New York and Harlem Railroad. After 1842 the use of steam-power was forbidden below Thirty-second Street, and horsecars of the New York and Harlem Railroad and later of the New York and New Haven, supplanted the downtown trains. As early as 1833 a cut was made through Murray Hill between Thirty-second and Forty-second Streets, and in 1846 the Common Council ordered the cut to be bridged; subsequently it was converted into an arched brick tunnel. A group of young hoodlums, known as the Fourth Avenue Tunnel Gang, made their headquarters here about the time of the

216 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

Civil War. Richard Croker, later Tammany chief, was said to have been

one of the leaders.

In 1854 an order of the Common Council further restricted the use of steam-power, and the horsecar lines were extended to Forty-second Street. Here, in 1871, the Harlem Railroad Company opened the Grand Central Depot. Horsecars were replaced in the late i88o's by cable cars and in 1896 the Harlem road leased the lines below Forty-second Street to the Metropolitan Street Railroad Company. Streetcars were replaced by motor busses in 1933 and the use of the old Fourth Avenue tunnel was limited to private motor vehicles. At Fortieth Street the tunnel gives access to the ramp around the new Grand Central Terminal.

The venerable MURRAY HILL HOTEL, crowning glory of the elegant 1890*5, fronts Park Avenue between Fortieth and Forty-first Streets. This hostelry was patronized by such diverse celebrities as Mark Twain, Senator George Hearst, Jay Gould, "Diamond Jim" Brady, and Presidents Cleveland and McKinley. Completed in 1884 after plans by Stephen Hatch, the hotel with its red and white marble floors, carmine plush, giltframed mirrors, and rococo walls and ceilings, has been little changed. It is eight stories in height, and has six hundred rooms, many of which retain the original furniture. The exterior is faced with a conglomeration of granite, brownstone, and red brick that was considered in its day the acme of architectural raiment. Fine circular fire escapes of wrought iron grace the bays of the Fortieth Street facade. The lobby, entered from Park Avenue by a double stairway, is decorated in red and gold in the best Victorian tradition. At the southwest corner of Forty-second Street and Park Avenue formerly stood the Hotel Belmont, famous for the magnificence of its bar and the cuisine of its French chefs; and at the southeast corner the popular Grand Union Hotel, headquarters for visting officers during the Civil War. The latter 's host for many years was Simeon Ford, bon v'tvant and prince of after-dinner speakers.

FIFTH AVENUE SHOPPING DISTRICT

Area: 34th to 57th St. Map on page 193.

At Thirty-fourth Street, Fifth Avenue abruptly emerges from a street of buildings housing wholesale clothing, textile, and bric-a-brac concerns to become the aristocrat of shopping thoroughfares. Some of New York's most exclusive hotels and clubs and fashionable churches as well as many nationally known retail establishments front its broad sidewalks. The top

FIFTH AVENUE SHOPPING DISTRICT 2IJ

of a Fifth Avenue bus provides one of the best views of the avenue, with its endless flow of well-dressed pedestrians and its conglomeration of architectural styles and signless show windows.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Fifth Avenue was a street of fine residences. Its transformation into a retail center in the 1900's aroused such opposition that echoes of protest are still audible. One of those mainly responsible for the invasion of trade was Benjamin Altman, whose store stands on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, diagonally opposite the Empire State Building (see page 319)- Like many merchant princes who elevated counter trade to a major business, Altman originally opened shop in modest quarters on Third Avenue near Tenth Street and moved on as the flood of population swept gradually northward ; in 1906 he came to the present address. Opposite stood the old WaldorfAstoria Hotel (the site of the Empire State Building) ; to the north marched a double file of baronial homes, citadels of the social peerage.

In order to appease protesting residents, Altman erected a building whose mundane function was decorously hidden by a facade resembling a Florentine palace ; until recently not even the owner's name appeared on the exterior. As commerce having thus crept in disguise into the avenue appropriated most of the district, residents moved farther up the avenue.

Within about a decade ALTMAN'S was joined by OPPENHEIM COLLINS (1907) and McCREERY's (1913), both on West Thirty-fourth Street, and BEST AND COMPANY (1910), Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street. Charles Tiffany commissioned McKim, Mead, and White to build his great jewelry store at 409 Fifth Avenue in the style of the Palazzo Vendramini in Venice, while opposite, at Thirty- sixth Street, rose another palatial shop designed by the same architects for the Gorham Company, silversmiths, jewelers, and stationers. The latter building is now occupied by RUSSEKS (women's apparel). The construction of LORD AND TAYLOR in 1914 at Thirty-eighth Street marked a break with tradition (Starrett and Van Vleck were the architects) ; the avenue now had a building that was frankly commercial as well as dignified. Many of the smaller stores, eclipsed as show places by the graceful candor of the Lord and Taylor edifice, hastily incorporated large display windows and arched entrances. When FRANKLIN SIMON'S (1922) arose at Thirty-eighth Street, a new trend in department store architecture, which was to exert considerable influence on American main streets, was definitely established.

About the time of the World War, Fifth Avenue became the country's leading fashion center: the Fifth Avenue label represented the best in

218 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE American taste. Real-estate values and rents on the avenue reached astronomical figures, and under merciless competition only the wealthiest and most firmly entrenched establishments survived. The avenue catered exclusively to the wealthy until the 1930's, when medium- and low-price stores gradually appeared. The Fifth Avenue hallmark, however, has lost little of its aura.

Symbolic of the newer trend is the granite-faced home (opened in 1935) of S. H. KRESS AND COMPANY, at the northwest corner of Thirty-ninth Street, which boldly faces the terra-cotta edifice of its competitor, F. W. WOOLWORTH AND COMPANY (1939). The simple lines of these buildings, two of the most sumptuous dime stores in America, undoubtedly will influence future fronts along the avenue. At the southeast corner of Fortieth Street is the store of ARNOLD CONSTABLE AND COMPANY, an organization founded in 1825.

From Fortieth to Forty-second Street, on the west side of Fifth Avenue, where the Croton Reservoir was once located, is the Central Building of the New York Public Library (see page 325J. Behind it are the 9.603 acres of BRYANT PARK, the site from 1822 to 1825 of Potter's Field, and of the 1853 World's Fair. The huge Crystal Palace (an inferior copy of the London structure), which dominated that fair, was gutted by fire in 1856. In 1871 the land, which had been acquired by the city in 1822, was reserved for a park and called Reservoir Park. Thirteen years later it was renamed for the New York editor and poet, William Cullen Bryant, but not until 1933, after the park had been torn up many times, was the present landscape plan adopted. One of its interesting features is the library's outdoor "reading room," maintained in summer under the trees.

Across West Fortieth Street, at No. 40, are the black and gold peaks of the AMERICAN RADIATOR BUILDING. The structure, designed by Raymond Hood and built in 1924, was an early attempt to clothe a skyscraper in bold colors. The unusual tower design of the building permits window light on all sides, the tall shaft merging at the top into a complexity of setback forms. The NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CLUB and the ENGINEERS' CLUB have quarters at 54 and 32 West Fortieth Street, respectively. Around the block, at i West Thirty-ninth Street, is the gown shop of LANE BRYANT, INC., noted for its maternity-clothing department; the ENGINEERING SOCIETIES BUILDING, with its library and auditorium, is at No. 29.

At the intersection of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue stands the 699-foot building known as 500 FIFTH AVENUE, designed by Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon, architects of the Empire State Building. The architec FIFTH AVENUE SHOPPING DISTRICT 219

ture of the RUPPERT BUILDING, 535 Fifth Avenue, was the cause of a publicized controversy. H. Craig Severance, its designer, sued the New Yorker for stating that "the central tower . . . has the grace of an overgrown grain elevator." The suit was settled by publication of a satisfactory retraction. Nevertheless for about a decade it put a damper on architectural criticism. In retrospect the magazine's comments seem more unusual than the design of the building. The FIFTH AVENUE BANK on the northwest corner is an interesting landmark made of three brownstone residences. The bank has occupied the premises since 1890.

The thirty-eight-story FRENCH BUILDING, 551 Fifth Avenue, was erected in 1927 by the Fred F. French Company, who were also the architects. The use of the maximum volume permitted by setback laws resulted in an awkward massing of the tower in comparison with the lower part of the building. An unusual element in the design is the somewhat questionable faience polychromy.

The building at 575 Fifth Avenue is occupied by the firm of W. AND J. SLOANE, a furniture house of note. The FINLEY J. SHEPARD RESIDENCE at the northeast corner of Forty-seventh Street, and the HOME OF ROBERT W. GOELET at the southeast corner of Forty-eighth, brownstone houses typical of the old Fifth Avenue, are two of the very few remaining residences on Fifth Avenue south of Sixtieth Street. Opposite the Goelet home is the nationally known jewelry establishment of BLACK, STARR, AND

FROST-GORHAM, INC.

The brownstone edifice on the northwest corner of Forty-eighth Street houses the COLLEGIATE CHURCH OF ST. NICHOLAS, the oldest congregation in Manhattan, dating from 1628. Theodore Roosevelt was a member of this church, and his pew is marked by a tablet. The first Collegiate church to bear the name St. Nicholas was built in 1642 inside Fort Amsterdam. The present building, erected in 1872, was designed by W. Wheeler Smith. The dark silhouette of its sharp spire is in dramatic contrast to the flat gray walls of the massive RCA Building in Rockefeller Center beyond.

SAKS FIFTH AVENUE, Forty-ninth to Fiftieth Street, was the first of the larger stores to be built on the upper avenue. Saks, Bergdorf-Goodma^, Bonwit Teller, and a few other avenue shops are widely known for their striking window displays, mounted with the care of a Belasco stage-set. Rockefeller Center (see page 333), across the street, supplies an effect of rare architectural unity to this section of the avenue. In the RCA Building of the Center is the popular New York Museum of Science and Industry (see page 342).

220 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

Across the street, Fiftieth to Fifty-first Street, the needle-pointed Gothic towers of St. Patrick's Cathedral (see page 344) rise 330 feet above the surging traffic of the avenue. Two blocks away, on the northwest corner of Fifty-third Street, stands ST. THOMAS CHURCH (Protestant Episcopal), founded in 1823. The present edifice, the work of Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson, was completed in 1913, and replaces one on the same site destroyed by fire in 1905. The symmetrical main portal appears to call for twin towers, although the building has but one. Consequently the structure lacks the sense of balance of a frankly unsymmetrical design. The interior, of soft yellow sandstone, has great distinction. The beautifully ordered mass of statuary in the great reredos over the altar is the work of Lee Lawrie ; and the delicate wood carvings on the pulpit, choir stalls, lectern, and organ case, representing both historical and contemporary subjects, were executed under the supervision of the late Bertram G. Goodhue.

For several generations St. Thomas Church has been noted for its fashionable weddings, and in the ornamental work above the Bride's Door the entrance to the south of the main portal the sculptor chiseled a dollar sign next to a "true-lover's-knot," a comment that has been left unmolested. From St. Thomas, as from the other churches in the neighborhood, come the worshippers who form the Fifth Avenue Easter parade, an event that has attracted thousands of sight-seers since the days of bonnets and bustles. Directly behind the church is the new home of the Museum of Modern Art (see page 347), n West Fifty-third Street.

Another great city house of the i88o's surviving in this neighborhood is the brownstone RESIDENCE OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT III, near the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first Street. Adjoining it on the north was a more famous dwelling designed by Richard M. Hunt which was razed in 1926. Both were built by W. H. Vanderbilt, and were known as the "twin mansions." The former home of the patrician Union Club on the northeast corner of Fifty-first Street now houses the GRAND CENTRAL GALLERIES, sponsors of the more academic tradition in American art. (Open weekdays 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; admission free.)

The building occupied by the UNIVERSITY CLUB, northwest corner of Fifty-fourth Street, was completed in 1900, the work of McKim, Mead, and White. Reminiscent of a fifteenth-century Italian palazzo, it is one of the handsomest structures on the avenue. Decorating the exterior are eighteen college shields carved in marble. The interior has colorful Renaissance frescoes, and murals by H. Siddons Mowbray.

The HOTEL ST. REGIS on the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street, and the GOTHAM HOTEL on the southwest corner, are

GRAND CENTRAL DISTRICT 221

the first of the group of luxurious hotels clustering around the southern end of Central Park and the Grand Army Plaza (see page 229). Both were built at the beginning of the century. In the bar of the St. Regis is Maxfield Parrish's well-known painting, Old King Cole. The Gotham has for years been popular with foreign (particularly English) visitors, and is notable for its cuisine. The press of the expanding Fifth Avenue shopping trade is evident in the installation of stores on its Fifth Avenue abutment, space formerly occupied by a large dining room.

ELIZABETH ARDEN'S at No. 691 and HELENA RUBINSTEIN'S at No. 715, are among the most luxurious beauty salons in the country. The facades exemplify the current trend toward simplicity in retail shop design.

Two of America's best-known jewelry firms are CARTIER'S at the southeast corner of Fifty-second and MARCUS AND COMPANY at No. 68 1. These establishments, together with Black, Starr, and Frost-Gorham, carry on the avenue's luxury-trade tradition that was started by Tiffany.

On the southwest corner of Fifty-sixth Street, fine crystal ware is displayed in the five-story HOME OF THE STEUBEN GLASS COMPANY, a division of Corning Glass Works. The building, designed by John Gates, has walls chiefly built of glass bricks. The BONWIT TELLER store, dealing exclusively in women's apparel, on the northeast corner of Fifty-sixth Street, has the distinction of being headed by a woman, Mrs. Hortense Odium. Another fashionable store is Bergdorf-Goodman (see page 230), on the southwest corner of Fifty-eighth Street.

GRAND CENTRAL DISTRICT

Area: 42d St. on the south to 47th St. on the north; from 3d Ave. west to 5th Ave. Map on page 193.

Huge GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL, set squarely athwart Park Avenue on the north side of Forty-second Street, is one of the great railway passenger terminals of the world. Around it, inevitably, have gathered skyscraper office buildings, large hotels, clubs, stores, and restaurants, until the Grand Central zone has become one of those inner cities that characterize a metropolis.

As the New York end of two important railroads the vast New York Central system, which reaches to the Mississippi, and the New York, New Haven, and Hartford, which serves Boston and New England the terminal is one of the city's two principal gateways, the other being Pennsylvania Station (see page 165). Not only long-distance travelers use the

222 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

terminal ; many of the more than five hundred trains that enter and leave daily carry commuters who live north and northeast of the city, while on an average of every four seconds during the day three IRT subway lines (Lexington Avenue, the Times Square-Grand Central shuttle, and Queens) discharge and receive passengers in stations connected with the terminal. The number of people who pass through Grand Central in a year approximates the total population of the United States. Considerable numbers of these, however, use the building as a "short cut," as a refuge from bad weather, or for other purposes not connected with travel.

The terminal covers three blocks between Forty-second and Forty-fifth Streets, but the double-deck railroad yard extends under Park Avenue to a point near Fifty-ninth Street. There the forty-one tracks on the upper level and the twenty-six on the lower level finally narrow to the single-level, fourtrack line that stays underground until it reaches Ninety-sixth Street. Through trains use the upper level ; most suburban trains, the lower ; it is only by using two levels that the tremendous volume of traffic can be handled on the forty-eight acres of available land. Trains must be moved out, in most cases, almost as soon as they are unloaded, for Grand Central is a dead end with limited space. Deep under the thirty-four miles of yard track is a power plant.

The monumental Forty-second Street front of the terminal is surmounted by Jules Coutan's massive statuary group, forty-eight feet high, in which figures representing Mercury, Hercules, and Minerva are arranged about a clock thirteen feet in diameter. Park Avenue, blocked by the building, mounts to the second-story level by a bridge over Forty-second Street, divides right and left near the heroic bronze figure of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, to encircle Grand Central, then tunnels through the New York Central Building immediately to the north, and returns to grade at Forty-sixth Street. This highway is an integral part of the terminal's structure. The space beneath it on the Forty-second Street and Vanderbilt Avenue sides is occupied by stores. The area beneath the highway bridge over Forty-second Street is named Pershing Square in honor of General John J. Pershing. Free information about the city is provided by a municipal office in a building that runs from Forty-first to Forty-second Street beneath the viaduct. This steel and glass-brick structure was built by the city in 1939 to serve visitors to New York.

Although the main entrance is the one directly facing Pershing Square, the corner entrance at Forty-second Street and Vanderbilt Avenue is probably used by most people. Indoor ramps lead from both entrances to the impressive main concourse, 125 feet wide and 385 feet long, that is de GRAND CENTRAL DISTRICT 223

pressed more than a story below street level. Around the sides, great square piers rise 125 feet to support a vaulted blue ceiling in which illuminated constellations of the zodiac twinkle. The ecliptic of the zodiac, by an error in painting, runs the wrong way. The enormous size and lavish use of marble on floors as well as walls give the concourse an aspect of grandeur that is emphasized by shafts of sunlight pouring through the seventy-fivefoot windows. The effect is heightened at Christmas and Easter by soft organ music from one of the surrounding balconies.

Ticket windows line the south wall, while directly opposite are the gates to the track platforms. The circular information booth in the middle of the open floor is one of New York's most popular meeting places.

During the nine o'clock and five o'clock rush hours, this great hall swarms with scurrying crowds in which the red caps of the porters there are 495 of them stand out. Shortly before the Twentieth Century Limited leaves for Chicago at six in the evening, a gray and red carpet is unrolled between the gate and the platform.

The lower level concourse is similar to the upper in floor plan, but is prevented by its necessarily lower ceiling from achieving a like grandeur. The two are connected by stairways and broad ramps, and are surrounded on three sides by interconnected passages along which run rows of stores: food, liquor, flower, apparel, book-, and barbershops; restaurants; newspaper and magazine stands; telegraph and theater ticket agencies; lunch and milk bars. A newsreel theater, an art gallery, Travelers' Aid service, and recreational exhibits are available in the building. All these facilities, reached by underground corridors from adjacent hotels and office buildings, make Grand Central also a neighborhood shopping center.

The terminal was opened by the New York Central Railroad in 1913 to replace the old depot on the same site. The architects, Warren and Wetmore, Reed and Stem, used the available space with such economy that Grand Central is rightly considered an engineering marvel. A plan considered at one time provided for the addition of a third concourse, at street level, to accommodate casual pedestrian traffic; but this has never been built.

The NEW YORK CENTRAL BUILDING, directly north between Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Streets, houses offices of the railroads using the station. Its ornate dormer-studded peak, overlooking Park Avenue, is an architectural curiosity. Applied columns that support inverted brackets, and are themselves supported by brackets a questionable use of architectural motifs as sculptural decoration appear below the roof.

The din of motor and streetcar traffic on Forty-second Street, the shunt

224 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE and shuffle of pedestrians, the upward thrust of the buff and yellow skyscrapers around the terminal, produce an impact not easily forgotten. Among the towering buildings in this area is the thirty-story GRAYBAR, facing Lexington Avenue between Forty-third and Forty-fourth Streets, and connected with the terminal by a broad passageway. Designed by Sloan and Robertson, it contains more than a million square feet of rentable floor space and when constructed in 1927 was rated as the largest office structure above ground in the world. It houses many nationally prominent advertising agencies.

North of the Graybar is the GRAND CENTRAL POST OFFICE, which, except for the General Post Office and the Church Street Annex, handles a greater volume of mail than any station in the city.

Most conspicuous of the Forty-second Street towers is the CHRYSLER BUILDING, completed in 1929 at the northeast corner of Lexington Avenue. This building's seventy-seven stories, terminating in a needle-like spire, make it the second tallest structure in the world. It was one of the first skyscrapers to use exposed metal as an integral part of its design. At the fourth setback the building corners flare outward, projecting great metal discs resembling 1929 Chrysler radiator caps.

The building represents a "modernistic" movement in architecture to avoid historical precedent in an effort to achieve freshness, originality, and a striking effect. Sharp contrasts of color and line appear in the tower treatment. The lower portion of the wall is noteworthy for the basket pattern of the stone veneer.

William Van Alen, architect of the Chrysler Building, and his former partner, H. Craig Severance, became rivals when each was commissioned to design the world's tallest building. When the Chrysler tower seemed likely to terminate at 925 feet, the builders of the Bank of the Manhattan Company (see page 88) structure at 40 Wall Street (designed by Severance and Yasuo Matsui) decided to halt their operations at 927 feet. Meanwhile, steel workers were secretly assembling the rustless steel sections of the Chrysler spire which, when lifted through the dome and bolted into place, brought the building to its triumphant height of 1,048 feet. Subsequently the Empire State Building (see page 319) stole the laurels.

The angular Chrysler lobby is finished in sumptuous African marble. On the ground floor, a revolving motorcar display can be seen from the street through reflectionless windows. In the building are located many advertising agencies, the eastern headquarters of the Chrysler Company, and the "Cloud Club," composed of advertising, aviation, steel, and rail GRAND CENTRAL DISTRICT 225

road executives. There is an Observation Room at the base of the metal spire. (Open daily 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.; admission 550.) The view during clear visibility encompasses a fifty-mile radius.

Diagonally opposite the Chrysler Building at 122 East Forty-second Street is the fifty-six-story CHANIN BUILDING, designed by Sloan and Robertson and built in 1929. A wide bronze band decorated with figures of birds and fishes runs along the entire front above the first story windows. On the fiftieth floor is a completely equipped little theater, designed by Jacques Delamarre.

The largest of the Grand Central hotels is the COMMODORE, Fortysecond Street and Lexington Avenue, with two thousand rooms. Although only twenty-eight stories high, the Commodore has five additional stories underground, through two of which run railway and subway tracks, insulated from the foundation columns to prevent vibration.

The BOWERY SAVINGS BANK BUILDING, no East Forty-second Street, is well known for its cast-bronze doors, made by William H. Jackson and Company, and for its great banking hall, lavishly finished in mosaic and marble. Among the symbols represented in the rich architectural detail of the building are the bull and bear of Wall Street, the lion for power, rooster for punctuality, and the squirrel for thrift. The structure was completed in 1923 and is considered the masterpiece of York and Sawyer, architects.

The fifty-three-story LINCOLN BUILDING, 60 East Forty-second Street, with nine hundred thousand square feet of rentable area, was erected in 1930.

Within the immediate vicinity of Grand Central are the ticket offices of eleven air lines serving the entire country. Their sleek, elongated, black limousines convey passengers almost hourly from ticket offices to Long Island and New Jersey airports.

Narrow Vanderbilt Avenue, extending along the west side of the terminal from Forty-second to Forty-seventh Street, is fronted by the YALE CLUB at Forty-fourth Street. Charles and Company, for ninety years dealers in fine domestic and exotic foods, occupied a store at 48 East Forty-third Street, near Vanderbilt Avenue, until 1938.

Along Madison Avenue, the Bond Street of America, are many of the outstanding men's shops in the city. The avenue is also a street of hotels: the BILTMORE, at Forty-third Street, national headquarters of the Democratic Party; the ROOSEVELT at Forty-fifth Street, named for Theodore Roosevelt; and the RITZ-CARLTON at Forty-sixth Street, one of an international chain of hostelries whose name has become a slang term connoting exclusiveness.

226 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

(The cost of the food and drink for an average debutante supper for some six hundred guests at the Ritz was about $4,750 in 1938.)

To the east, on Lexington Avenue between Forty-sixth and Fortyseventh Streets, is somber GRAND CENTRAL PALACE, where annual automobile, flower, and motorboat shows, and numerous industrial exhibitions are held. It was built in 1912 from designs by Warren and Wetmore.

On the northeast fringe of the Grand Central area, along Lexington Avenue, is another group of hotels, including the LEXINGTON at No. 511, the SHELTON at No. 527, the BARCLAY at No. 530, and the BELMONT PLAZA at No. 541.

The thirty-four-story Shelton, when completed in 1924, was one of the earliest setback structures in the city. The architect, Arthur Loomis Harmon, sensed the great aesthetic possibilities inherent in a studied proportioning of the huge masses of the modern skyscraper, and created a composition of forms which exerted a profound influence on later buildings. It is unique among tall buildings in that the walls slope in toward the top to avoid the optical illusion of overhanging. Italian Romanesque details are placed where they tend to accentuate the main forms. The structure was a favorite subject of Georgia O'Keeffe, noted New York artist, whose paintings helped make it one of the best-known buildings of the 1920's. Both the Architectural League of New York and the American Institute of Architects awarded medals for its design.

BEEKMAN PLACE AND SUTTON PLACE

Area: 48th St. on south to 59th St. on north; from ist Ave. east to East River. Map on page 193.

The small area centering around Beekman and Sutton Places offers an extreme example of New York's flair for making Mrs. O'Grady and the Colonel's Lady close if uncommunicative neighbors. Here drying winter flannels are within fishpole reach of a Wall Street tycoon's windows, and the society woman in her boudoir may be separated only by a wall from the family on relief in a cold-water flat.

The neighborhood extends for eleven blocks along two East River bluffs grooved by dead-end streets. The narrow channel between Welfare Island and the bluff brings freighters within hailing distance. Millionaires' yachts dock close to gravel barges. Gulls skimming the surface mark the sewage outlets into the river; but from a penthouse window, at night,

BEEKMAN PLACE AND SUTTON PLACE 227

there is only the impressive stretch of dark water and the lights of the metropolis.

Beekman Place, which runs for two blocks along the south bluff (from Mitchell Place, the north side of East Forty-ninth Street, to East Fiftyfirst Street), was named for a descendant of William Beekman, who came from Holland with Peter Stuyvesant. Sutton Place, which extends from East Fifty-seventh to Sixtieth Street along a similar high, rocky formation over the river, was named in 1880 for a family owning a line of clipper ships. In 1875, Effingham Sutton and James Stokes had purchased property in the vicinity for a real-estate development. Sutton Place South, a later extension, runs from Sutton Place to East Fifty-fourth Street, and is separated from the Beekman Place neighborhood by the blocks in the valley between East Fifty-fourth and Fifty-second Streets.

In the brownstone decades of the last century the district was the home of the well-to-do, but as the slums moved northward, tenements were erected and most of the brownstones were abandoned to the poor, many of whom worked in the packing and slaughterhouses and coalyards along the river. The wealthy, drawn by the river setting, began to reclaim the neighborhood in the 1920*5, in large part through the initiative of the late Elisabeth Marbury, internationally famous literary agent, Miss Anne Morgan, and Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt.

Mitchell Place climbs from First Avenue to Beekman Place on a cutstone ramp. The twenty-six-story BEEKMAN TOWER HOTEL, at No. 3, formerly the Panhellenic Hotel, was built in 1928 as a residence and meeting place for women belonging to national Greek-letter college sororities ; it is now a hotel for men and women. The structure's distinction is attained through its purity of form. The tower walls are of tan brick and tan mortar. The four corners are beveled, and their deep- set windows accent the verticality inherent in the shaft. The architect was John Mead Howells.

The docks at East Forty-ninth and East Fifty-third Streets offer a comprehensive view of the rear of Beekman Place as well as the hospitals on Welfare Island. ONE BEEKMAN PLACE, a huge apartment building with a series of terrace gardens on its river side, is occupied by many families prominent in society and the theater.

A plaque sundial is set in the house wall on the north side of the dead end of East Fiftieth Street. Since the sun strikes here only between seven and two, other hour markings are omitted ; but the time it marks is about two hours late because the gnomon is bent. Behind a terrace on East Fiftyfirst Street is a building called the HALE HOUSE. The East Fifty-first Street wall of this residence has two faded frescoes: one depicts the trial and

228 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE execution of Nathan Hale; the other, a "kissing bridge" of old Manhattan. A stone wall, topped with broken, multicolored glass embedded in cement, encloses the terrace.

On the northwest corner of East Fifty-first Street and First Avenue, Public School 135, erected more than fifty years ago but still in use, occupies the SITE OF BEEKMAN HOUSE (1763-1874), headquarters of General Charles Clinton and Sir William Howe during the Revolution. Major Andre slept there one night and the next morning "passed out to dishonor" ; the drawing room was another of the numerous places where Nathan Hale is alleged to have been tried and sentenced. An original mantel of this room is in the galleries of the New York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West.

The dock off East Fifty-third Street is said to have inspired Sidney Kingsley's play, Dead End, which dramatizes the contrast of wealth and poverty in a single district. Rising sheer from the river shore between East Fifty-second and Fifty-third Streets is RIVER HOUSE, one of the most palatial structures in the city. It was designed by Bottomley, Wagner, and White as a co-operative dwelling. The building's towers and the general mass of its twenty-six stories impose a conspicuous design on the sky line of the Middle East Side. The RIVER CLUB occupies the lower floors. It has squash and tennis courts, a swimming pool, ballroom, and floating dock for pleasure craft. Vincent Astor's white Nourmahal frequently drops anchor off East Fifty-second Street.

Near the shore at Fifty-third Street a man named Youle in 1821 built a tall shot tower that toppled during construction, but was replaced and served as a landmark until the Civil War. The rocky land that juts into the river at the end of East Fifty-fifth Street used to be known as Cannon Point.

On the east side of Sutton Place South, between East Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth Streets, is a renovated apartment unit. Ten years ago it was known as the "Ark" and housed a colony of writers and artists paying minimum monthly rentals of eleven dollars. An enterprising real-estate firm acquired the property; the interiors were remodeled, the old brick exteriors were painted black, trimmed in white, with scarlet, green, and canary-yellow doors and rentals rose. Most of the block to the west is occupied by the abandoned red-brick buildings of the Peter Doelger Brewery. Attached to the old brewery is the more recently vacated Brewery Restaurant, well-known speak-easy during Prohibition.

New apartment buildings line East Fifty-seventh Street, "front entrance" to Sutton Place. East Fifty-eighth Street ends at Sutton Square, so named

CENTRAL PARK SOUTH 229

in 1920 when the surrounding houses were remodeled. North of the square, facing the river, is RIVERVIEW TERRACE, a single row of brownstones occupied by old residents of the neighborhood. An iron fence, fronted with shrubbery, flowers, and ten evenly spaced maple trees, extends along the edge of the bluff. The imperturbable atmosphere of this small court is unrivaled by the synthetic environment of larger, more carefully planned real-estate developments. On stormy days the waves breaking against the rocks on the river shore can be heard above the rumble of traffic crossing the great Queensboro Bridge overhead.

The scene changes abruptly to the north. The huge smokestack of a New York Steam Corporation plant adjoins Riverview Terrace. At Sixtieth Street Sutton Place passes under the Queensboro Bridge and into the more plebeian world of York Avenue.

CENTRAL PARK SOUTH, THE PLAZA, AND FIFTY-SEVENTH STREET

Area: 57th St. on the south to Central Park South on the north; from Broadway east to Fifth Ave. Map on page 277.

From Columbus Circle's whirlpool of noisy workaday confusion, presided over by a statue of Isabella's adventuresome ambassador, Central Park South emerges as a resplendent thoroughfare. Terminating at Grand Army Plaza and Fifth Avenue, it traverses three long blocks from the Circle to Fifth Avenue, with smart hotels some of them more than forty stories high on one side, and the two-and-a-half-mile vista of the park on the other (see page 350). Central Park South's sister-street in importance, Fifty- seventh, is one of opulent shops and stores, concert halls and schools of art, dancing, and music. Fifty-eighth Street is the comparatively poor relation.

The plaza from Fifty-eighth to Sixtieth Street provides a formalized entrance to the park; it also serves as an impressive forecourt for the stately hotels surrounding it. The official name, seldom used, is Grand Army Plaza. In the northern half is the STATUE OF GENERAL WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN, and in the southern half, the PULITZER MEMORIAL FOUNTAIN. The Sherman statue, which brought fame to Augustus SaintGaudens when it was unveiled at the Paris exposition in 1900, was placed in the plaza in 1903. Modeled with fine precision, this bronze and gilt equestrian statue is one of the city's most impressive monuments. The Pulitzer Memorial, called the Fountain of Abundance, consists of two

230 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE shallow pools and four basins rising in steps to a height of more than twenty feet. In the top basin is a pedestal that supports the bronze figure of a young woman holding a basket of fruit. The symbolism of abundance is further carried out by two marble cornucopias at the base. The sculptor was Karl Bitter, and the architects were Carrere and Hastings. Funds were provided by the will of Joseph Pulitzer.

The buildings around and near the plaza display an extraordinary unity, growing out of a harmony of color, material, and scale. Their roofs are picturesque, some tiled, others copper, but nearly all in various shades of green. This harmony extends to architectural treatments. The PLAZA HOTEL (opened in 1907) on the west side was designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh in French Renaissance style, and the later buildings, east and south of the plaza, were carefully related to it: the HECKSCHER BUILDING (1921 ) by Warren and Wetmore; the SHERRY-NETHERLAND HOTEL (1927) by Schultze and Weaver; the SAVOY-PLAZA HOTEL (1928) by McKim, Mead, and White; the HOTEL PIERRE (1930) by Schultze and Weaver; the BERGDORF-GOODMAN and DOBBS BUILDINGS (1928) by Buchman and Kahn; the SQUIBB BUILDING (1930) by Ely Jacques Kahn; and the NEW YORK TRUST COMPANY BUILDING (1930) by Cross and Cross.

All the hotels of the plaza group are alike in their luxurious appointments, yet each attracts a special clientele. The Plaza Hotel is patronized by the well-established older groups of society, though to a war generation it was a rendezvous of youth, as recorded in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby. The Hotel Pierre has become popular with the Park Avenue crowd for coming-out parties. The Savoy-Plaza and Sherry-Netherland are residential hotels. In the walls of the entrance of the latter are two sculptured panels from the W. H. Vanderbilt mansion. They were designed by Richard M. Hunt.

At Sixtieth Street and Fifth Avenue, the METROPOLITAN CLUB, a stronghold of late nineteenth-century exclusiveness, occupies a dignified Florentine palazzo that was designed by McKim, Mead, and White and was completed in 1893.

Central Park South, in character, is an extension of the plaza. Its skyscraper hotels, seen from the park, have a magnificent quality as a group. The ST. MORITZ, at No. 50, is noted for its continental atmosphere, and its Cafe de la Paix, a sidewalk restaurant, is reminiscent of its Parisian prototype. The BARBIZON PLAZA, on the northwest corner of Fifty-eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, extends to Central Park South. Another of the street's leading hotels, HAMPSHIRE HOUSE, at No. 150, was opened in 1937. When three-quarters finished, its construction was halted by the depression of the

CENTRAL PARK SOUTH 231

early 1930*8, and for six years the thirty-seven-story building was a derelict with boarded-up windows. ESSEX HOUSE, at No. 160, is an imposing structure forty-three stories high. Like other hotels in this neighborhood, it is patronized by Hollywood stars.

On the southeast corner of Central Park South and Seventh Avenue is the NEW YORK ATHLETIC CLUB. The building was completed in 1928 from designs by York and Sawyer. Cold formality characterizes both the exterior and the public rooms of this twenty-one-story structure. Founded in 1868, the club has 4,700 members, including many prominent social and political figures. Its teams frequently have been the leading pointwinners for the United States at the Olympic games.

The GAINSBOROUGH STUDIOS, at No. 222, is one of the oldest studio apartment buildings in the city. A frieze, extending across the second story, represents a festival procession and in its center is a bust of Gainsborough. Along Fifty-eighth Street, one block south of the park, are small but exclusive hotels, studios in old brownstone houses, a theater, art shops, and garages. The rooming houses on this street are patronized by careerbent girls of genteel background and slender purses the type depicted in the play Stage Door, by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman.

Fifty-seventh Street is America's Rue de la Paix. The names of some of the shops are in letters so small as to seem merely a grudging identification. Here, amid fashionable women's specialty shops, are some of the city's oldest galleries and probably the greatest concentration of art dealers in America. The Fifty-seventh Street establishments exhibit works of virtually every period and phase in the history of art as well as examples of all contemporary movements.

CARNEGIE HALL, at Seventh Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, extending through to Fifty-sixth Street, is a six-story building, reminiscent of Italian Renaissance architecture, with a fifteen-story tower in which are studio apartments. The auditorium, with a seating capacity of 2,760, is unusually plain, the only relief being provided by the rose and gilt furnishings of the two tiers of boxes around three sides. Although it was constructed in the early days of acoustical engineering, few auditoriums have such excellent acoustics. It was designed by William B. Tuthill, assisted by several consultants, including Messrs. Hunt, Adler, and Sullivan. The hall was built as a new home for the Oratorio Society and was opened May 5, 1891, with a five-day music festival, at which Tchaikovsky conducted several of his own works. That same season Paderewski gave his first American performance. Subsequently Joseph Lhevinne and Mischa Elman made their American debuts here, and Efrem Zimbalist his

232 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

New York debut. The Philharmonic Orchestra made its first appearance in the Hall in 1892, with Anton Seidl as conductor. Toscanini came as guest conductor of the orchestra in 1926 and 1927, and as regular conductor thereafter until his farewell performance April 29, 1936. One evening in 1938, "jitterbugs" crowded the auditorium to hear Benny Goodman's swing orchestra. Many notables in fields other than music have appeared on the Carnegie stage.

When Andrew Carnegie was persuaded by Walter Damrosch to invest two million dollars in the enterprise, he did so in the belief that a patron of the arts could profit financially. Continuing operating deficits dispelled his hope of profit. Despite crowded houses, the hall never paid its way and had to depend upon private subsidization in order to survive until, in 1925, a syndicate purchased the property and made extensive alterations. Among other changes, a banquet hall was converted into an art gallery for the use of the tenants of the 150 studios in the building.

The completion of Carnegie Hall in 1891 established the district as the foremost musical center of the country. Manufacturers of musical instruments, especially pianos, opened impressive showrooms along Fiftyseventh Street. In 1925 STEINWAY HALL, No. 113, was built. Its lower stones are devoted to displays; the remainder house sales offices, headquarters of musical organizations, shops of specialized instrument manufacturers, studios, and a concert hall. The dignified sixteen-story structure with its limestone front was designed by Warren and Wetmore.

Complementing the section's national importance as an art center are its influential art schools. Among these is the ART STUDENTS LEAGUE, in the FINE ARTS BUILDING, 215 West Fifty-seventh Street. Designed by Hardenbergh and built in 1898, it is an excellent imitation of the graceful style of architecture of Francis Fs reign. The annual shows of the National Academy are held here. Near by, at No. 225, the FEDERAL ART PROJECT GALLERY exhibits the mural and easel paintings and sculpture of WPA artists.

One sentimental detail of this area is unique in New York. Near the plaza, along the north side of Central Park South, hansom cabs, gracious relics of a more leisurely epoch, wait for revelers who finish off the night with a ride around Central Park.

UPPER FIFTH, MADISON, AND PARK AVENUES 233

UPPER FIFTH, MADISON, AND PARK AVENUES

Area: 47th St. on the south to noth St. on the north; from 5th Ave. east to Lexington Ave. (excluding area east of 5th Ave. between 96th and uoth Sts., and 5th Ave. between 47th and 6oth Sts.). Maps on pages 237 and 277.

Elegant bluebloods and solid burghers, tycoons and ne'er-do-wells, social arrivistes and just plain people (or New Yorkers a little more affluent than the average) these are the residents of this district. It is a quarter of old mansions, air-conditioned apartments, exclusive clubs, luxurious hotels, fabulous penthouses; of great churches and museums; of art galleries, antique shops, and specialty stores; of high-priced cafes, cocktail lounges, night clubs.

In the face of an advancing business district the core of the city's fashionable residential section moved northward from Washington Square in the i86o's. It retreated steadily up Fifth Avenue until the startling development of Park Avenue in the 1920's deflected its course eastward. About ten years ago the exact geographical center of the addresses contained in the Social Register was determined painstakingly by realtors: it was near Sixty-eighth Street on Madison Avenue. It remains near the same spot to-day.

By 1872 Fifth Avenue was lined with residences as far as Fifty-ninth Street. Edith Wharton in "A Little Girl's New York," a posthumous magazine article, recalls that "the little brownstone houses, all with Dutch 'stoops' . . . and all not more than three stories high, marched Parkward in an orderly procession, like a young ladies' boarding school taking its daily exercise." She remembers when Fifty-seventh Street was a "desert" and new construction on Fifty-ninth Street was regarded as a "bold move which surprised and scandalized society." When Central Park was completed (1876) the movement northward continued and the dwellings erected were pretentious and rococo, with limestone supplanting the brownstone fronts. Not until the twentieth century, however, did the long stretch of the avenue facing the park achieve its fame as "Millionaires' Row."

When, in 1905, Andrew Carnegie built his mansion at Ninety-first Street his nearest neighbors were inhabitants of a shanty. Soon one commodity king after another in the company of the Astors, Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Belmonts, and Fishes erected sumptuous dwellings on the avenue. Among these industrialists were Henry Phipps (iron), Daniel G. Reid (tin plate), Charles T. Yerkes (rapid transit), James B. Duke (tobacco), O. H. Havemeyer (sugar), Edward S. Harkness (oil), Sir Roderick Cameron (ships), and F. W. Woolworth. Senator William A. Clark

234 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE of Montana, a copper magnate, erected at Seventy- seventh Street one of the costliest private homes ever built in New York, with material brought from every country in the world.

Charles A. Beard, in The Rise of American Civilization, described the dwellings of millionaires as "chateaux of French design, mansions of the Italian renaissance, English castles of authoritative mien a riot of periods and tastes with occasionally a noble monument to the derivative genius of some American architect trained in Europe and given freedom to create." This description of the architecture of the Gilded Age (the late nineteenth century) was equally true of the 1900*5. Today, as in the past, heavily curtained windows and drawn blinds contribute to the museumlike atmosphere of Millionaires' Row.

Fifth Avenue, as well as the other streets on the upper East Side, has been affected greatly by the postwar trend toward apartments. Its doom as Manhattan's last stronghold of single-family homes seems certain. Some of the wealthiest families have closed or sold their homes and moved into apartments; many have their mansions on Long Island or elsewhere and maintain more modest quarters in the city.

The growth of Madison Avenue and the cross streets followed that of Fifth Avenue. Park Avenue, as the railroad back yard to the sector, lagged far behind. Between 1890 and 1910 old twenty-foot flats were replaced by seven- and nine-story elevator apartments, but it was not until after the World War, when it was demonstrated that skyscraper apartments could be constructed on stilts free from the vibration of the New York Central Railroad yards hidden below, that Park Avenue became fashionable. Today a double row of tall apartments, broken by an occasional church or single-family dwelling, stretches from the Grand Central Terminal at Forty-sixth Street to the uncovered railroad tracks at Ninety-sixth Street, where the avenue abruptly changes into a slum tenement area Spanish Harlem.

One of the broadest of New York's thoroughfares, Park Avenue is divided by a fenced-in parking of well-tended grass, flower beds, and shrubbery. As the main artery of this locality, it is constantly filled with fast noncommercial traffic busses, drays, and trucks being banned. On the scrubbed sidewalks sedate housemen exercise dogs ; under the marquees uniformed doormen stand guard, ready to aid top-hatted men and begowned women in their journey from foyer to car, car to foyer.

No other street in the world approaches Park Avenue in its residential concentration of wealth. Apartment rentals average as much as $1,500 per room annually, yet it has been termed a "super-slum" by authorities on

UPPER FIFTH, MADISON, AND PARK AVENUES 235

modern housing and city planning. Its architecture is noteworthy for its lack of imagination, one building resembling another like peas in a pod. Although the apartments have all modern conveniences and luxuries, adequate provision for light and air and view was generally neglected.

Madison Avenue is one of the world's most opulent marts. Its recent development as a smart shopping center is due largely to its situation between wealthy Fifth and Park Avenues. Below Fifty-ninth Street, among the hotels and office buildings, the shops more intimate than those on Fifth Avenue feature one or two specialties, domestic or imported : period furniture, luggage, millinery, pets, flowers, paintings, perfumes. Lexington Avenue, while still serving the tenement district to the east, is becoming another street of fine shops.

The HOTEL MARGUERY, a luxurious apartment hotel, occupies the west side of Park Avenue between Forty-seventh and Forty-eighth Streets.

The WALDORF-ASTORIA, on the block between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets, Park and Lexington Avenues, is successor to the old WaldorfAstoria that stood on the site of the present Empire State Building (see page 319)' Opened in 1931, it continues the traditions of the old hotel: the celebrated Oscar is still host, and it still maintains the Peacock Alley, the Empire Room, and Astor Gallery. So many of the city's important social functions take place in the Waldorf-Astoria that it has been called New York's unofficial palace. Flags denoting the visit of foreign dignitaries are flown frequently.

The massive building, designed by Schultze and Weaver, is of limestone and light-colored brick, with a granite base. Above the first eighteen stories, which rise sheer, a well-proportioned series of setbacks is surmounted by twin chrome-capped towers that bring the building's height to 625 feet (forty- seven stories). The figure over the main entrance on Park Avenue, designed by Nina Saemundsson, represents the Spirit of Achievement.

In the interior, rare marbles, matched woods, selected stones, and nickelbronzes are employed with exceptional skill. The furniture is eighteenthcentury English and early American in design. Decorations were executed by noted artists: the murals in the Sert Room are by Jose Maria Sert; the rug (The Wheel of Life) and the paintings in the main foyer, by Louis Rigal; the murals in the Starlight Roof Garden, by Victor White. Tony Sarg decorated the Oasis, a popular rendezvous at the cocktail hour.

There are more than 2,200 rooms in this hotel in which more than forty million dollars was invested. About two thousand people are on its staff. The towers are reserved for residential suites, some of which have garden

236 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

terraces. Eighty per cent of the building is over the tracks of the New York Central, and private railroad cars may be shunted to a special entrance.

Just south of the Waklorf, at 299 Park Avenue, is the PARK LANE HOTEL, completed in 1924 from plans by Schultze and Weaver. Louis SHERRY'S at 300 Park Avenue, is one of the most select restaurants in the upper East Side.

ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S CHURCH, on the east side of Park Avenue between Fiftieth and Fifty-first Streets, has had since its founding in 1835 one of the city's wealthiest congregations. The monumental mass of the WaldorfAstoria Hotel and the slender tower of the General Electric Building provide an impressive setting for this elegant church. The present building, of Byzantine architecture, completed in 1930, cost $5,400,000 and is on a site valued at approximately $1,500,000. The original architect was Bertram G.

KEY TO UPPER EAST SIDE MAP

UPPER MADISON AND PARK AVENUES

(For Upper Fifth Avenue see map on page 277.)

1. Waldorf-Astoria Hotel

2. Park Lane Hotel

3. Hotel Marguery

4. Louis Sherry's

5. Villard House

6. St. Bartholomew's Church

7. Hotel Ambassador Dutch Treat Club

8. Columbia Broadcasting System

9. Racquet and Tennis Club

10. Ritz Tower (Hotel)

11. Grolier Club

12. Home of Mrs. James Roosevelt

13. Church of St. Vincent Ferrer

14. Hunter College

15. Union Club

16. Residence of Former Senator Ar thur Curtiss James

17. Residence of George Blumenthal

18. New York Society Library

YORKVILLE

19. New York Labor Temple

20. Yorkville Casino

21. Gracie Mansion

22. Doctors' Hospital

23. Welfare Island Ferry Slip

24. New York Public Library, Web ster Branch

25. Parsonage of the Jan Hus Pres byterian Church

26. Bohemian National Hall

27. Kip's Bay- Yorkville Health and

Teaching Center

28. Church of St. Catherine of Siena

29. German Reformed Church

30. St. Catherine's Park

31. Memorial Hospital for the Treat ment of Cancer

32. New York Hospital and Cornell

University Medical College

33. Rockefeller Institute for Medical

Research

34. Model Tenements

35. Smith's Folly

36. L'E*glise Francaise du Saint-Esprit Sixty-first Street Methodist Episcopal Church

37. First Swedish Baptist Church

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238 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE Goodhue; his designs were later revised by Mayers, Murray, and Phillips, his associates, to include the terraced community house and the muchdiscussed dome. The whole group is built of salmon-colored brick and Indiana limestone, with tile and marble of various colors.

Outstanding, on the exterior, is the famous portico by McKim, Mead, and White, an academic copy of Southern French Romanesque work. With its three bronze doors, it is a memorial gift of the family of Cornelius Vanderbilt, which was part of the earlier edifice at Madison Avenue and Forty-fourth Street. The doors are decorated with elaborate bas-reliefs by Andrew O'Connor, associated with Daniel C. French (main door), Philip Martiny (north door), and Herbert Adams (south door), depicting scenes from the Old and New Testaments. The interior of the entrance portico, rich in marbles and mosaic, sets the color tone for the church a golden brown. The unrelieved brilliance of the decor prevents it from achieving full effectiveness.

St. Bartholomew's has always been famous for the dignity and beauty of its service, for its preaching and its music. Among its art treasures is the Angel Font by the Scandinavian sculptor, Thorwaldsen.

The HOTEL AMBASSADOR, on the east side of Park Avenue between Fifty-first and Fifty-second Streets, was designed by Warren and Wetmore, and erected in 1921. A residential hotel, it is popular in diplomatic circles and has been called the "social embassy of two continents." The DUTCH TREAT CLUB, membership in which is limited to those prominent in the creative arts, holds its meetings here.

The clubrooms and athletic facilities of the RACQUET AND TENNIS CLUB, 370 Park Avenue, are housed in a building erected in 1918, designed in the Italian Renaissance style by McKim, Mead, and White. The club, one of the most fashionable sports associations in the city, has two tennis courts built of a special composition on slate foundations, each costing about $250,000.

VILLARD HOUSE, a group of mansions surrounding a court, occupies the east side of Madison Avenue between Fiftieth and Fifty-first Streets. Built in 1885 McKim, Mead, and White, architects these houses were among the first American buildings to follow a style derived from the Italian Renaissance palaces. Their masonry is a mellow brown sandstone. Cornices, windows, court arcade, and general scale are reminiscent of Italian prototypes. One of the first owners was Henry Villard, German-American railroad magnate, whose wife was the daughter of William Lloyd Garrison; a son, Oswald Garrison Villard, was formerly publisher and editor of the Nation. The largest house of the group, formerly occupied by the

UPPER FIFTH, MADISON, AND PARK AVENUES 239

Villards, and later purchased by Whitelaw Reid, former ambassador to England, costs about $750,000. It contains works of Saint-Gaudens, La Farge, and Abbey. At present only two houses of the group are tenanted. The court, in recent years, has been dubbed New York's most exclusive parking space. The block to the south, where the New Weston Hotel now stands, was the site of Columbia University from 1857 to 1897.

At 485 Madison Avenue are the HEADQUARTERS AND STUDIOS OF THE COLUMBIA BROADCASTING SYSTEM, the second leading national network.

A belt of night clubs stretches across the upper East Side in the Fifties. Among the most noted are the STORK CLUB, 3 East Fifty-third Street, and EL MOROCCO, 154 East Fifty-fourth Street, where cafe society idles away the night and newspaper columnists gather much of their material.

Fifty-seventh Street is celebrated for its women's style shops, as well as for shops dealing in art work of all kinds. The forty-two-story RITZ TOWER, Park Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, was erected in 1925 as part of the Hearst apartment hotel chain from plans by Emery Roth, architect, Carrere and Hastings, associates. Arthur Brisbane, popular columnist for Hearst newspapers, had a duplex apartment in the tower.

On congested, narrow East Fifty-ninth Street there are a few secondhand bookstores and -stalls. The GROLIER CLUB, 47 East Sixtieth Street, named for the sixteenth-century French bibliophile, Jean Grolier, was established in 1884 for the promotion of bibliophily and the bookmaking craft. (Visitors may examine its collection upon application to the librarian.)

The small but very valuable BACHE COLLECTION, housed in the fivestory former residence of Jules S. Bache, at 814 Fifth Avenue (Sixty-second Street), was opened to the public in 1937. (Open Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., closed from ]une through September; admission by ticket, obtained by telephoning or writing the custodian.) The collection contains no American pieces and no works later than the eighteenth century. There are paintings by Rembrandt, Titian, Botticelli, Petrus Christus, Watteau, Goya, Velasquez, Raphael, Gainsborough, Romney, Reynolds, and Holbein. Also in the collection are reliefs by Luca della Robbia, sculpture by Donatello, Flemish and French tapestries, early Italian and English furniture.

The entrance hall contains the works of Italian masters, while in the dining room are English paintings. French paneling in the salon at the front of the second floor provides a background for works of that country. In a richly decorated room in the rear are the Dutch masterpieces. Watteau's The French Comedians is historically one of the most interesting items of

240 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE the Bache Collection. Voltaire presented this picture to Frederick the Great and it was claimed as personal property by the former Kaiser at the time of his abdication. Perhaps the painting that is best known to the public is Raphael's portrait of the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the Duke of Nemours, once owned by the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia.

Temple Emanu-El is at i East Sixty-fifth Street (see page 356). The COLONY CLUB, a rendezvous for women in the Social Register, is housed in a six-story Georgian building of red brick, at 564 Park Avenue (Sixtysecond Street), designed by Delano and Aldrich, and erected about 1915. The RESIDENCE OF MRS. JAMES ROOSEVELT, 47 East Sixty-fifth Street, is used by the President on his visits to New York City.

HUNTER COLLEGE, the women's branch of the College of the City of New York, occupies the block between Sixty-eighth and Sixty-ninth Streets, Park and Lexington Avenues. A new five-million-dollar building (under construction 1939), replacing one on Park Avenue burned in 1936, will be of limestone and brick, sixteen stories in height. The architects are Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon, and Harrison and Fouilhoux. The building will accommodate more than five thousand students. Meanwhile classes are held in the six-story stone building on Lexington Avenue. The college was established in 1870 as the Normal College of the City of New York, the name being changed in 1914 in honor of Thomas Hunter, the founder. The institution, which has annexes in other parts of the city, offers a fouryear course leading to an A.B. degree. Since 1934, emphasis has been shifted from pedagogical training to a general liberal arts education.

The old and fashionable UNION CLUB occupies a handsome building, completed in 1933, on the northeast corner of Park Avenue and Sixtyninth Street. Across the avenue is the RESIDENCE OF FORMER SENATOR ARTHUR CURTISS JAMES, copper and railroad magnate. On the southwest corner of Seventieth Street and Park Avenue is the RESIDENCE OF GEORGE BLUMENTHAL, financier and president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The FRICK COLLECTION, consisting of fourteenth- to nineteenth-century paintings and other works of art housed in the former home of Henry C. Frick, at i East Seventieth Street, was opened as a museum in 1935. (Open weekdays, except Monday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday and holidays 1 to 5 p.m.; closed August; admission free.) The mansion, completed in 1914 on the site of the Lenox Library, was designed by Carrere and Hastings in the Louis XVI manner. The sculptured lunettes over the front door and the Fifth Avenue portico are by Attilio Piccirilli. The steel industrialist left the house in trust, stipulating that his wife should enjoy the right of

UPPER FIFTH, MADISON, AND PARK AVENUES 241

residence for life. After Mrs. Prick's death in 1931 the house was remodeled and enlarged under the architectural supervision of John Russell Pope.

The lobby leads to a glass-roofed court of greenery and splashing water. The Oval Room (between two galleries on the north side of the house), entered from the court, contains Velasquez' magnificent Philip IV . In the new East Gallery where chairs of Beauvais tapestry stand against old-rose walls paintings by Piero della Francesca, Tintoretto, Vermeer, Ingres, and Cezanne constitute a harmonious group. The dull green velvet of the West Gallery forms an unobtrusive background for Renaissance furniture and bronzes as well as for pictures. The painters represented include Bronzino, Veronese, El Greco, Goya, Hals, and Rembrandt. The primitives of the collection are in the small room at the end of this long suite, with Limoges enamels and French Renaissance furniture.

Not the least distinguished of the front rooms is the central one, where a vibrant El Greco and two Holbeins face a Giovanni Bellini and two Titians. The remainder exhibit largely eighteenth-century works. In the library and the dining room, together with French and Italian sculpture, Chinese porcelains, and some Georgian silver, are most of the English pictures of the collection. Two small rooms overlooking Seventieth Street contain a group of fanciful Bouchers. The Fragonard Room owes its name and its character to four panels painted for Madame Du Barry which she rejected but which are now considered masterpieces. Seven smaller panels by Fragonard are there also, with a lovely marble by Houdon, and furniture by famous French cabinetmakers of the period.

The neighboring halls contain several of the most notable pieces of furniture, a rare early portrait by Boucher of his wife, and nineteenthcentury pictures by Corot, Daubigny, Turner, and Whistler. On the main stair landing is an organ designed by Eugene W. Mason. Chamber music concerts and frequent lectures by members of the staff and well-known critics of the fine arts are given in the circular music and lecture rooms which adjoin the court and are hung with Italian brocade.

The remodeled residence at 53 East Seventy-ninth Street has been since 1937 the home of the NEW YORK SOCIETY LIBRARY. Founded in 1754 with 650 volumes many of them having been sent to New York by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts the library received a charter in 1772 from George III. For a time it occupied part of the old City Hall on Wall Street, and from 1856 to 1937 it was located at 109 University Place. Members have included Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, Washington Irving, George Bancroft, and many figures famous

242 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

in the arts. At present the library has more than 150,000 volumes and is rich in Americana and belles-lettres. The library is open to the public for serious research, but circulation of books is limited to members.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (see page 368) fronts Fifth Avenue between Eightieth and Eighty-fourth Streets, and just across the avenue, at 3 East Eighty-third Street, amid a row of mansions, is an incongruous, two-story frame house, with a horseshoe nailed above its door. The ANDREW CARNEGIE MANSION at Fifth Avenue and Ninety-first Street is a red-brick Georgian structure of four stories, with limestone base and trim and a copper mansard roof. Babb, Cook, and Willard were the architects. The HOME OF THE LATE FELIX N. WARBURG, banker, an ornate structure in French Renaissance style, occupies the northeast corner of the avenue and Ninety-second Street.

A number of institutions cluster at the end of Millionaire's Row. MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL with its many buildings occupies the blocks between 99th and loist Streets, Fifth and Madison Avenues. At the southeast corner of iO3d Street stands the imposing new building of the NEW YORK ACADEMY OF MEDICINE, which was organized in 1847 to raise the standards of the medical profession, and which has since admirably devoted itself to the public weal. One block farther to the north is the pleasing Museum of the City of New York (see page 377). Between 104:!! and io5th Streets is the building which houses the HECKSCHER FOUNDATION FOR CHILDREN and the NEW YORK SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO CHILDREN ; the former is devoted to recreational work for underprivileged children, the latter to the care and education of abused and delinquent children. The NEW YORK MEDICAL COLLEGE, FLOWER, and FIFTH AVENUE HOSPITALS group occupies the block between io5th and io6th Streets. The hospital structures are built in the form of a St. Andrew's Cross.

North of io6th Street the character of Fifth Avenue changes, but not as suddenly as does the rest of the upper East Side, which merges with Spanish and Italian Harlems at 96th Street. In the top floor of the unpretentious apartment house at 1274 Fifth Avenue lives Fiorello H. LaGuardia, mayor of the city of New York.

YORKVILLE 243

YORKVILLE

Area: 59th St. on the south to 96th St. on the north; from Lexington Ave. east to East River. Map on page 237.

Popularly synonymous with the German quarter, Yorkville in reality is a much more inclusive section. The names on newsstands, shop windows, restaurants, bars, and many travel bureaus indicate that Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Irish also live in this locality. However, in the vicinity of East Eighty-sixth Street, Yorkville' s Broadway, Germans and Austrians overwhelmingly predominate.

German families have settled in Yorkville since the original hamlet was established in the 1790's. The village centered around the old Boston Post Road (Third Avenue) between what is now Eighty-third and Eighty-ninth Streets. In the vicinity were the river and country estates of Manhattan's early aristocrats the Astors, Primes, Rhinelanders. In 1834 the New York and Harlem Railroad was extended to the village ; a year later a stagecoach line was established. These two events signalized the breaking up of the old homesteads and accelerated the hamlet's development as a suburban community. During the i88o's and 1890*5 solid blocks of stereotyped brownstones were constructed as homes for the well-to-do ; but they were rapidly taken over by families who had moved away from the congested "Little Germany" in Tompkins Square. In the years following, the Germans, unlike many other foreign-born groups, adopted American mores, and Yorkville began to lose its Germanic quality. During the 1920*5, however, the postwar poverty of Germany together with the comparatively high German immigration quota of the United States gave impetus to a new influx. The district again became the home of New York's German colony.

First Avenue is the most central route through Yorkville. Marie Curie Avenue and its extension, East End Avenue, skirt the district's water front. Behind the Rockefeller Institute and the New York Hospital, Marie Curie Avenue has a pleasant park-promenade to Seventieth Street, furnishing a good view of the East River and Welfare Island. East End Avenue leads to the charming Carl Schurz Park on the river bank between Eighty-fourth and Eighty-ninth Streets. Beginning in the northern part of this district is the East River Drive, which also has a walk along the water's edge.

The FIRST SWEDISH BAPTIST CHURCH, a block and a half west of First Avenue at 250 East Sixty-first Street, is an interesting modern building developed from Swedish architecture. Cornerstones of black granite contrast with the light brick facade. Doors, set at an angle to the street line,

244 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE are placed next to the cornerstones in an arrangement similar to that used in old churches in Sweden. The two steeples are reproductions of towers in Sweden. The warm interior represents an outstandingly successful integration of decoration and architectural design. Martin Hedmark was the architect. The church, which was built in 1930, is attended by Swedes from all parts of the city.

Diagonally across East Sixty-first Street, at No. 229, L'EGLISE FRAN^AISE DU SAINT-ESPRIT, a Huguenot (French Protestant) church, shares its quarters with the SIXTY-FIRST STREET METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH.

A half-block east of First Avenue, at 421 East Sixty-first Street, is SMITH'S FOLLY, one of Yorkville's few remaining historic houses. This simple Colonial stone structure, enclosed by a white picket fence and with a wellkept lawn and garden, nestles close to a garage and three gas tanks in the shadow of the huge cantilever Queensboro Bridge. It was built in 1799 by Colonel William S. Smith, son-in-law of President John Adams, and was originally the stable on his estate. He lost the property, allegedly through gambling, before his ambitious "Mount Vernon on the East River" was completed. The house burned down in 1826 and was not rebuilt. The stable later became a tavern. In 1830 it was sold to Jeremiah Towle, city surveyor, whose family occupied it until 1908. Since 1924 it has been the clubhouse of the Colonial Dames of America. The interior is furnished in typical Colonial style but has no museum pieces. (Permission to visit must be obtained -from the Colonial Dames of America.)

The block between First and York Avenues, and Sixty-fourth and Sixtyfifth Streets, is occupied by MODEL TENEMENTS erected (1900-1915) by the City and Suburban Homes Company, a limited-dividend housing enterprise organized in 1896 with the object of providing sanitary homes for wage earners. Thirteen of the buildings, on First Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street, constructed in 1900, constituted the second modern model tenements built in Manhattan. (The first was erected two years earlier on the West Side by the same firm.) The company still operates these and other tenements it built in Yorkville. The average rent is $6.50 a week for two rooms with bath.

Annually on the first Sunday afternoon in October the CHURCH OF ST. VINCENT FERRER, 869 Lexington Avenue near Sixty-sixth Street, holds the Rosary Procession which ends with the blessing of roses and their distribution among the congregation. Father Tom Burke, one of the greatest nineteenth-century Roman Catholic pulpit orators and one of the bestknown members of the Order of Preachers, delivered sermons at this church.

YORKVILLE 245

The present building, erected in 1917, was designed by Bertram G. Goodhue. It reveals Goodhue's deep understanding of Gothic architecture, and in the handling of materials, the preciseness of proportions, and the religious feeling embodied, it ranks as a masterpiece. The church is the earliest example in New York City of the architect's characteristic treatment of molding and sculpture: they seem to grow directly out of the structural stone without the use of brackets and bases. Lee Lawrie, who did the sculpture, subsequently collaborated with Goodhue on many other buildings.

The monumental, yellow and gray buildings overlooking the East River from a cliff between York and Marie Curie Avenues, Sixty- fourth and Sixty-eighth Streets, belong to the ROCKEFELLER INSTITUTE FOR MEDICAL RESEARCH. The principal structures, beginning with the powerhouse at the southern end of the row and proceeding north, are the sixty-bed hospital, the nine-bed isolation pavilion, Central Laboratory, Middle Laboratory, and North Laboratory. The smaller buildings are the library and animal houses. Service tunnels connect all these units.

Well over a hundred scientists, including many with international reputations, devote their time to research. Two research divisions are housed here: the Department of Laboratories and the Department of the Hospital. The Department of Animal and Plant Pathology has its own establishment near Princeton, New Jersey. Only patients suffering from diseases under investigation are accepted by the hospital; they are given treatment free.

The institute was founded in 1901 by John D. Rockefeller. Three years later the first laboratory was opened in a small building at 127 East Fiftieth Street with a scientific staff consisting of Simon Flexner, pathologist and director; Hideyo Noguchi, Eugene L. Opie, and J. E. Sweet, pathologists ; Samuel J. Meltzer, physiologist and pharmacologist; and P. A. Levene, biological chemist. In 1906 the present Central Laboratory was opened. The hospital was completed in 1910, and in the same year Mr. Rockefeller provided an endowment. The institute also administers a legacy from Henry Rutherford for the promotion of cancer research.

The value of the institute's research is indicated by the work of Dr. Noguchi, who obtained the first pure cultures of spirochete, established the syphilitic nature of general paralysis, and discovered the parasite of yellow fever.

The Rockefeller Institute was built on ground belonging to the Schermerhorn family. Their imposing farmhouse, once the summer home of Governor George Clinton, was intact at the time the- Rockefellers purchased the property. The Schermerhorns' neighbors were the Joneses, Winthrops,.

246 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE Dunscombs, Kings, and Hoffmans. Jones' Wood was north of Seventieth Street, part of a ninety-acre farm owned before 1803 by the Provoost family. Samuel Provoost was the first Protestant Episcopal bishop of New York, while his cousin, David, was a famous smuggler. Near his landing place, now occupied by the New York Hospital, David Provoost hid his contraband in what came to be known as Smugglers' Cave. Jones' Wood subsequently became a popular picnic resort; its purchase for a municipal park was considered in the 1850's, but the site of Central Park was chosen instead.

The MEMORIAL HOSPITAL FOR THE TREATMENT OF CANCER occupies the block bounded by Sixty-seventh and Sixty-eighth Streets, York and First Avenues. When completed, the hospital will be one of the finest cancer research centers in the world. The construction was partly financed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The twelve-story main structure, with a penthouse, facing Sixty-eighth Street, was designed by James Gamble Rogers and Henry C. Pelton. The ornamental treatment is based on the use of applied modern details: long horizontal lines suggest balconies; color designs imitate corner windows.

Across Sixty-eighth Street is the CHURCH OF ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA, erected in 1930-31, whose interior as well as the exterior is of brick. Wilfrid E. Anthony was the architect. On the same side of the street, just west of First Avenue, is the GERMAN REFORMED CHURCH, facing small St. Catherine's Park. A monument within the church honors an active member of the congregation, Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, the doughty baron who drilled the Continental Army. About 1800 John Jacob Astor was clerk and elder as well as treasurer of the church. The present edifice, a combination of Romanesque and early Gothic styles distinguished by its simplicity, was erected in 1897. Its bell was presented in 1908 by Kaiser Wilhelm II, in honor of the church's i5Oth anniversary.

Just east of First Avenue, at 411 East Sixty-ninth Street, is the KIP'S BAY-YORKVILLE HEALTH AND TEACHING CENTER opened in 1938. The center, associated with the Cornell University Medical College, is used to train students in preventive medicine and public health administration. The building houses a number of public health services and clinics.

New York Hospital and Cornell University Medical College

Covering the three blocks (ten and a half acres) between Sixty-eighth and Seventy-first Streets, York and Marie Curie Avenues, the glazed whitebrick buildings of the NEW YORK HOSPITAL AND THE CORNELL UNIVER YORKVILLE 247

SITY MEDICAL COLLEGE form one of Manhattan's most striking architectural groups. (Guide service available to visitors Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 2 to 3:30 p.m.; Tuesday and Thursday to 3:15 p.m.) For the design, the architects, Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch, and Abbott, of Boston, received the 1933 gold medal of the New York Architectural League. The fifteen buildings, which cost more than thirty million dollars, are so placed and subordinated to the main tower that they give the effect of a single vast structure. At first glance the mass of this powerful group is reminiscent of the Palace of the Popes at Avignon. Pointed arch windows that rise to the full height of the eight-story pavilions flanking the main entrance establish a Gothic motif ; yet actually the group is an outstanding example of modern architecture, for its beauty grows out of its functional organization and the aesthetic counterplay of its parts. In contrast to the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, the windows here are skillfully used to express the function of each division of the hospital. The interior lacks the forbidding features associated with older hospitals and is, instead, filled with sunshine and decorated in color.

The second to the ninth floors are given over to pavilions patterned after the wards in the Royal Hospital in Copenhagen. The largest pavilions have no more than sixteen beds and even these are divided into four-bed sections by glass partitions. Each pavilion has a spacious lounge overlooking the East River with Vitaglass windows on three sides.

The adjoining buildings house the Women's Clinic (which includes the Lying-in Hospital), the Children's Clinic, the Psychiatric Clinic, the OutPatient Building, Cornell University Medical College, staff quarters, a 250-car garage, and a nurses' residence with a capacity of five hundred. The Lying-in Hospital, now the maternity division of the New York Hospital, was organized in 1789 following an epidemic of yellow fever that brought the plight of widowed expectant mothers to the public attention. After many vicissitudes, in 1892 the hospital society joined forces with a Midwifery Dispensary serving the tenements. Through the interest of J. P. Morgan, the society acquired its own hospital in 1899 in the Stuyvesant Square neighborhood, which it occupied until the move uptown was made.

This newest of Manhattan's medical centers (completed in 1932) shelters the city's oldest hospital. In 1769 Dr. Samuel Bard of King's College (now Columbia University) pleaded for "an hospital for the sick poor of the colony," which incidentally would serve as a medical training school. King George III granted the charter in 1771. While anatomical instruc 248 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE tion was given during the early years and the building was used as an army hospital during the Revolution, the hospital was not opened for civilian service until 1791.

Many prominent men have served as governors of the institution. Among them have been John Watts, John Jay, Robert Livingston, Philip Hone, Aaron Burr, Lindley Murray, John Jacob Astor, Joseph H. Choate, and Isaac Roosevelt.

Cornell University Medical College, founded in 1898, first occupied a building at Twenty-eighth Street and First Avenue. After 1912 the college co-operated with the New York Hospital, and in 1927 the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical College Association was formed. At that time both institutions obtained additional funds, including a gift of more than twenty million dollars from Payne Whitney, two million dollars each from J. Pierpont Morgan and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, and one million dollars each from George F. Baker and George F. Baker, Jr. The hospital, with eleven hundred beds, is one of the largest in the city; the college is one of the smallest in number of students. Both exemplify the highest standards of the medical profession.

The New York Hospital annually treats more than twenty thousand bed-patients and more than forty thousand out-patients, accepting, as it has since 1791, "patients who need its help, without regard to race, creed, or ability to pay." Sixty-five per cent are pavilion patients. Modern equipment and a distinguished medical staff have given the hospital one of the lowest surgical mortality rates in the country.

Unlike many general hospitals, the New York Hospital has always treated mental disorders. As early as 1821 Bloomingdale Asylum was established by the hospital on the site of the present library of Columbia University. It moved to White Plains in 1894 and is now known as the New York Hospital Westchester Division. The Payne Whitney Clinic, an important unit of the center itself, treats only psychiatric cases.

Public interest in the hospital found expression in an unusual way in 1938 when more than one hundred anonymous donors of all denominations contributed a total of one thousand dollars for the removal of swastika designs from the 325-foot chimney. The ancient symbol that had been given a new significance by Chancellor Hitler's rise to power in Germany was replaced by Greek crosses.

"Little Bohemia"

In addition to the great New York dailies, the newsstands along First Avenue in the lower Seventies carry the two dailies, New Yorkske Listy

YORKVILLE 249

(Czech), and New Yorksky Dennik (Slovak), for here between Seventyfirst and Seventy-fifth Streets east of Second Avenue is New York's "Little Bohemia." After Czechoslovakia became an independent nation in 1918 many Slovaks from downtown moved up into the Czech quarter, and the two groups have combined many of their interests. Pride in their languages and traditions, however, has prompted them to maintain separate sokols where after public-school hours the children can be taught their native speech and history. Their societies present native dramas, folk songs, and dances. On Decoration Day the Czechoslovaks parade in colorful native costume. The largest meeting place is BOHEMIAN NATIONAL HALL, between First and Second Avenues at 319 East Seventy-fourth Street, where nearly a half hundred organizations, the oldest having been formed by the Czechs in 1863, meet regularly. In the PARSONAGE OF THE JAN Hus PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, 351 East Seventy-fourth, are fourteen rooms appointed in typical Czechoslovak peasant style. Excellent restaurants in the neighborhood serve tripe soup, stuffed cabbage (zeli or kapusta), and roast goose, Bohemian style.

The Hungarians, in the upper Seventies, aid in giving Yorkville its Central European atmosphere. The Hungarian daily, Amerikai Magyar Nepszava, is found on the newsstands in this vicinity; Tokay wine is featured in the liquor stores; and in the delicatessens are sold goose livers and the famed Hercz, Pick, and Drossy salamis from Budapest. The Hungarian cuisine is noted for its variety and savory sauces; in this neighborhood, particularly on East Seventy-ninth Street between First and Second Avenues, are many restaurants whose specialties are chicken paprikas, rostbraten, and strudel. On Hungarian Independence Day, March 15, the Hungarians hold a celebration; they usually parade to the statue of Louis Kossuth, hero of the 1848 revolution in Hungary, on Riverside Drive.

The WEBSTER BRANCH OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, 1465 York Avenue near Seventy- eighth Street, is popularly known as the "Czech Library" and has a Czechoslovak collection of about 15,000 volumes. A group of MODEL TENEMENTS erected by the City and Suburban Homes Company, between York and Marie Curie Avenues, Seventy-eighth and Seventy-ninth Streets, represents one of the most significant Manhattan housing developments prior to the building of the Amalgamated Dwellings on the Lower East Side. At the foot of East Seventy- eighth Street is a WELFARE ISLAND FERRY SLIP. Contributions from 180 of New York's richest families helped to finance the construction of the DOCTORS' HOSPITAL at Eighty-seventh Street and East End Avenue. Its elegant furnishings match those of a Park Avenue hotel.

250 MANHATTAN: MIDDLE AND UPPER EAST SIDE

Beautiful CARL SCHURZ PARK extends along the river from Gracie Square (East Eighty-fourth Street) to East Eighty-ninth Street. Adjoining it on the south and west is a fashionable residential section, with tall new apartment buildings and renovated old homes and tenements. Built on two