Ladies & Gents Restaurant

[56 3rd Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

On the Lower East Side, another 56 3rd Avenue. I was ready to write that as in Brooklyn, a large building now bears the 56, but this Manhattan building and its neighbors are still standing. At no. 56 today (or at least recently), Saki, a “sushi restaurant in minimalist digs.” They’d be unlikely to offer the sauerkraut cocktail that William Lins, successor to L. Reinken, offered. (Look closely.)

At no. 52, Sig. Klein’s Fat Men’s Shop. Could this be where Ed Norton bought the spats he gives Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners episode “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”?

[Click for a larger view.]

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Jack’s Diner

[56 3rd Avenue, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I like seeing a diner wherever there’s space for one. Yeah, it oughta fit. See also the Loring Grill, the Tiny Diner, and the Unique Diner.

At this address today: a large building. (What did you expect?)

[From the 1940 telephone directory. Click for a larger view.]

The WPA fellow at the placard looks as if he might have time-traveled in from the Nouvelle Vague. But I could be wrong.

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Animal house

[107 Flatbush Avenue, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Walk down Flatbush Avenue from (what I’ve dubbed) the Leaning Tower of Brooklyn, and you woul have found The House of Pets, aka Altman’s Long Island Bird Store.

I’ll let this ad speak (at length) for itself:

[Brooklyn Times-Union, May 29, 1933.]

Do click for a larger view of the tax photograph for many choice details. The capped fellows looking at the window make me think Sam (Tom D’Andrea), the cabdriver in Dark Passage (dir. Delmar Daves, 1947) who wants to buy a pair of goldfish for his room: “It adds class to the joint.” Though these guys seem to be contemplating birds. Or maybe puppies. Different scenes attracted crowds at other times:

[“Pig-Tailed Monkey Wrecks Pet Store in Berserk Spell.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 23, 1930.]

[“Snake, Loose in Pet Shop, Crawls into Window with Pups, Kittens.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 29, 1941. Click for a larger view.]

*

October 1: A reader found evidence of further mayhem. Thanks, reader.

[Daily News, May 13, 1951.]

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The Leaning Tower of Brooklyn

[113-115 Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Some serious density of signage. The camera angle makes this corner look like the Leaning Tower of Brooklyn, but in truth it’s the tip of an triangle bounded by Flatbush Avenue (to the left), Ashland Place (to the right), and Lafayette Avenue (out of sight).

Everything in that triangle, along with the El, is gone, and there’s now an Apple Store on the corner. But the Brooklyn Academy of Music is still going, on Ashland Place, Fulton Street, and Lafayette Avenue. Elaine and I saw Twyla Tharp Dance perform at BAM in 1984. And I said hello to André Gregory in the lobby.

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Just some diner?

[553 Union Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

No, not just some diner. It’s Frank’s Diner. Or (look closely) Frank’s Union Diner. As in, “Say, how’s about we grab a cup o’ java while they’re changin’ th’ erl?”

Many details to notice in the photograph. The most interesting one: the advertisement for a radio show with Joe Penner (1904–1941), a comedian in vaudeville, radio, and film. His work is well represented at YouTube. You just have to watch a bit to notice a resemblance to Pee-wee Herman. You don’t even have to read his Wikipedia entry.

Thanks, Brian, who pointed me to this photograph some time ago. Now I'm there, and the java is great. The Joe (Penner), not so much.

[Click for a larger view.]

*

September 16: As jjdaddyo suggested in a comment, that appears to be an electric truck. I’d say that that’s the most interesting detail in the photograph. Strange: both a bakery and an electric vehicle company were named Ward.

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Neon in semi-daylight

[4920 New Utrecht Avenue, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

“Neon in daylight is a / great pleasure”: Frank O’Hara, in “A Step Away from Them,” imagining what his friend and fellow poet Edwin Denby would write.

I chose this photograph for its neon in semi-daylight, vivid in the shadow of the El. The band of light between the El and the buildings looks itself a bit like neon, or at least like fluorescence.

A quick check of online sources shows that in 1909 the 4920 address housed a saloon. A neighborhood miscreant passed a bad check there. The construction of the El in 1914 led to lawsuits from the owner of 4920 and other property owners on the block over noise, darkness, and decreased rental value, with damages paid out in 1922. In 1933 4920 may have housed a delicatessen.

The property may have been undergoing an identity crisis when its tax photograph was taken. Was it a bar & grill? (Look closely.) A delicatessen? (Look closely.) A liquor store? (Look closely.) The 1940 telephone directory has it as a restaurant:

[Click for a larger view.]

Two brands of beer are advertised in the window, Breldt’s and Ox Head. The Peter Breldt Brewing Company was based in Elizabeth, New Jersey. During Prohibition, the Peter Breldt Company, minus the Brewing, brewed near beer that was too near. Ox Head was a product of the Wehle Brewing Company, West Haven, Connecticut.

In 1949, just days after a liquor license was issued to the Utrecht Restaurant (to a new owner?), this advertisement appeared in The Brooklyn Eagle:

[The Brooklyn Eagle, March 20, 1949.]

Someone was cleaning house.

The Utrecht Restaurant, still operating under that name, received another liquor license (for yet another owner?) in 1963. In 1964 the liquor license for this address went to the Boro Lounge. Today the first floor of 1420 is split between Emil’s Shoes and Zion Car Service.

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Empire of signs

[8 Columbus Circle, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Can you spot the wingback chair?

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[Post title borrowed from Roland Barthes’s book about Japan. La Marseillaise (dir. Jean Renoir) was released in 1938. I don’t know when it arrived in the States. Swanee River (dir. Sidney Lanfield) was released on December 30, 1939.]

A lost Clipper

[Doyers Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

This morning we find ourselves in Chinatown, right off the Bowery. Doyers Street has a substantial history. Here’s some more. And still more. I chose this photograph because of the strangely shallow building to the left, looking almost like a facade from a movie set. And then I noticed the sign to the right, at no. 3.

[“Real Chinese Dishes.” Click for a larger view.]

The China Clipper Restaurant has some history of its own. It was one of three restaurants owned by Wah Sun Choy, or Watson Choy, a restaurateur fascinated by aviation — more specifically, by the seaplanes or “flying boats” built in 1935 and 1936 for Pan American Airways: the China Clipper, Philippine Clipper, and Hawaii Clipper, first used for transpacific airmail service from San Francisco to Manila. Choy’s other restaurants were in Jersey City: a second China Clipper (menu included!) and the Plaza Tea Garden. It seems that the design of the Jersey City Clipper was meant to give patrons the feeling that they were aboard an airplane.

In 1938, Choy embarked on a flight from Alameda, California, headed for Honolulu, the Midway Islands, Wake Island, Guam, and Manila. Choy was — allegedly — carrying $3M in U.S. gold certificates, raised by his own efforts, to be delivered to Chiang Kai-Shek to aid China in the Second Sino-Japanese War. His plane, the Hawaii Clipper, disappeared on July 29, 1938, en route from Guam to the Philippines. No trace of the plane, its six passengers, or nine crew members was recovered. But the considerable speculation about what happened lies beyond the borders of a tax photograph.

“Distinguished Men on Board Clipper.” The New York Times, July 30, 1938.

*

A reader found a bit of film from the 1950s in which the strangely shallow building is visible, with a 7 Up advertisement on its side. Thanks, reader.

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A New Utrecht address

[New Utrecht Hand & Electric Shoe Repairing, 5515 New Utrecht Avenue, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Just another establishment in the old neighborhood, just up the avenue from Eddie’s Fish Market. The 5515 address makes several appearances in the newspapers collected at Brooklyn Newsstand. The earliest is grim:

["Wife Dies, Husband, Girl Hurt at Fire.” The Brooklyn Daily Times, June 26, 1916.]

“Unknown cause,” “empty store”: as the article says, the fire was deemed suspicious. Mary Fenis dropped her three children from the third floor to her husband George, who had jumped to the sidewalk. She then jumped, falling on her head and grievously injuring her husband. George Fenis or Feneis wrote to a civic group later in the year to plead for fire escapes on what he called “two-family firetraps”:

[“Women Ask for Fire Protection: Man's Story Leads to Request for New Laws.” The Brooklyn Daily Times, October 5, 1916.]

By 1925, the first floor was a shoe-repair business:

[The Brooklyn Daily Times, November 27, 1925.]

And in 1945 the building was for sale:

[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 28, 1945.]

By 1951, the first floor had become a liquor store:

[“Lone Thug Robs 2 Liquor Stores of $600 Total.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 10, 1951.]

In 1965, there’s another owner:

[Coney Island Times, February 12, 1965.]

After 1965 the newspapers go dark. Today 5515 is a real estate agency, Gold Realty: “List with Gold and have it sold.”

I chose this tax photograph for the “Ladies & Gents” sign. I wonder if anyone who isn’t reading this post knows of the tragedy that visited this address just over a century ago.

[“Ladies & Gents.”]

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Schrafft’s, plural

Two weeks ago I posted a tax photograph of a Childs restaurant. I realized after the fact that next to that Childs stood a Schrafft’s. You can see both restaurants, albeit at distance, in this tax photograph:

[Schrafft’s, 291-293 Broadway, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Like Childs, Schrafft’s restaurants were once ubiquitous in Manhattan: the 1940 telephone directory lists twenty-nine of them. When my mom and dad, not yet parents, worked in Manhattan, they would sometimes meet for lunch at a Schrafft’s. Noticing this Broadway outlet made me want to look for the Schrafft’s where my mom and dad may have eaten lunch.

So I called the Paul Drake Detective Agency and told what I know: my mom would walk from American Cyanamid (30 Rockefeller Plaza); my dad would walk from Johns Manville (22 E. 40th Street). Drake’s conclusion is that they must have met at the Schrafft’s at 556 Fifth Avenue: an eight-minute walk from Rockefeller Plaza, a ten-minute walk from 22 E. 40th. (Paul Drake is never wrong.)

[Schrafft’s, 556 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Wikipedia has a brief history of the chain. Vanishing New York has some good photographs. The New York Public Library has menus that take forever to load. Here’s one from 1955, when my parents, not yet my parents, may have been Schrafft’s-ing. And here’s a description of Schrafft’s from a 1964 guide to New York.

There’s a website for a revived Schrafft’s whose tone — “Where the Forward Thinkers and Life Seizers, the Night Owls and the Morning Dealmakers banter amongst the Famous and soon-to-be Famous, the Old Guard and their Tiny Titans to be” — and spelling — “fashionable not fadish” — leave me cold. The revival as yet seems to be more idea than reality.

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30-D, three letters

A clue in this past Saturday’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, 30-D, three letters, “____ king,” made me think of a food from childhood. The answer: ALA, as in Chicken à la King. I’ve always thought of Chicken à la King as a mid-century convenience food, a TV Dinner in a can, but Wikipedia tells me that the dish has a longer and more interesting history.

I found this two-page spread, which jibes with my memory of Chicken à la King — something served with crackers.

[Life, March 18, 1957.]

You can click either image for a larger view. Do click: you won’t be disappointed, though you may become nauseated. It’s always difficult to photograph (and colorize?) food.

The bakery with a thousand windows? Here’s an artist’s rendering. And a tax photograph:

[2902 Thomson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Louis Armstrong’s house

[34-56 107th Street, Queens, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901. He and his wife Lucille bought this house in Corona, Queens, in 1943. It was Armstrong’s home for the rest of his life. Here he is on the front steps, after the house had been sided. And here are many more photographs of the exterior and interior.

Today 34-56 is the Louis Armstrong House, whose virtual exhibits are many. One remarkable moment: Armstrong on a 1951 home recording, playing along with the King Oliver Creole Jazz Band’s 1923 recording of “Tears” — featuring Louis Armstrong.

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Childs

[With apologies to Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.]

[285 Broadway, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Childs restaurants were once ubiquitous in New York. The 1940 telephone directories show one in Queens (at the World’s Fair) and a handful in Brooklyn. In Manhattan, they march up Broadway and Fifth Avenue and Broadway: 47, 196, 285, 351, &c. And they were elsewhere. Like Duane Reades, they were everywhere.

From the song “Manhattan”:

We’ll go to Yonkers,
where true love conquers in the wild.
And starve together, dear, in Childs.

Wikipedia has an excellent article about “Manhattan” that makes clear something I never understood when much younger: the song’s lyrics are about a couple without much money, seeking frugal delights. The Childs chain offered inexpensive food.

Wikipedia has a detailed article about Childs, complete with menus. A search for “childs restaurant menu” will return many more. Eat up.

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Mott Street, in July

[With apologies to Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.]

[127 Mott Street, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

And tell me what street compares with Mott Street in July, sweet pushcarts gently gliding by. Please imagine the pushcarts gliding. See also Delancey Street.

Click for a larger view and see if you can see the four people at their windows.

*

July 24: A belated thought: check the WPA Guide:

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.

The WPA Guide to New York City: The Federal Writers’ Project Guide to 1930s New York. 1939. (New York: The New Press, 1992).

Notice that the exotic food pizza has to be explained.

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On old Delancey Street

[With apologies to Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.]

[6-8 Delancey Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

It’s very fancy on old Delancey Street, you know. The fixtures charm us so, as tables sit below, in the snow.

I won’t let a discrepancy in numbering between the store fronts and the tax records spoil my fun. These storefronts are in fact 191 and 193 Bowery. But let’s imagine them on Delancey Street, nos. 6 and 8.

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“Swims clings or crawls”

[Eddie’s Fish Market, 5410 New Utrecht Avenue, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click either image for a much larger view.]

I went roaming around the primal neighborhood and decided to take a look at the spot where 13th Avenue and New Utrecht Avenue intersect — at 54th Street. The car-and-train chase in The French Connection never made it that far.

I like the Eddie’s Fish Store slogan, and fortunately the second of these photographs has it complete:

If it swims clings or crawls we have it.

Commas be damned.

Bonuses: The neon fish. The kid’s hat. The face at the window. (Click for large and look closely.)

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Apples?

[70 East 102nd Street, Manhatttan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click the second image for a much larger view and some choice details.]

The vagaries of the archives: that first photograph, an outtake, misidentifies the lot number. I’m not sure how I found my way to the second photograph. I just traipsed the streets.

What’s that stand of apples doing there? Or are they tomatoes? Or plums? Did the photographer put the stand there for fun? Perhaps at the grocer’s request? I would like to know if the stand appears in a photograph from the opposite side of the street, but photographs from this street are few.

Golden Bantam is a variety of corn. I can find no evidence that it was ever a name for an apple (or tomato, or plum). The mystery deepens.

I chose these photographs for the fruit, but when I checked Google Maps, I realized that I know this location, at Park Avenue and 102nd Street, from a movie and from life.

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O Pioneer!

[263 Bowery, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for an enormous view.]

The Pioneer Restaurant makes a brief appearance in A.J. Liebling's “Bowery Boom,” in Back Where I Come From (1938):

Five cents pays for a shave at the barber college. For 20 cents the Boweryite may have “shave, massage, shampoo, singe and hair tonic,” just like a 46th Street bookmaker. Ten cents will buy “pig snouts, vegetables, potatoes and coffee, bread or rolls,” at the Pioneer Restaurant, 263, and 15 cents will buy an even more elaborate spread at Minder’s Restaurant.

If you click on the photograph, you’ll be able to read at least most of the Pioneer menu. And you’ll be able to better see three ghosts.

This tax photograph reminds me of Berenice Abbott’s 1935 photograph of the Blossom Restaurant at 103 Bowery. There’s also a 1937 Abbott photograph of a Pioneer Restaurant on West Third Street (64, not 60 as the page with the photograph says). The tax photograph of that corner shows the Pure Food Restaurant. Perhaps the Pioneer had moved to the Bowery by the time the Liebling wrote that piece. Or perhaps the Pioneer on West Third was a Bowery sibling, or an unrelated establishment.

In 2007, the building at 263 Bowery was still recognizable as itself. By 2011, everything had changed.

Here, before we leave the Bowery, is a barber school, 15¢ for a shave and a haircut.

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[Post title with apologies to Walt Whitman and Willa Cather.]

SIGNS

[135 Lawrence Street, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

If you click for the much larger view, you’ll see that this photograph is huge. Many signs to read. And there’s a guy up at the window. I’m most drawn to the painted sign and the signboard on the side of the building. That wall, now blank, remains. Half Moon Hotel, or the infamous Half Moon Hotel, built in 1927, was a Coney Island attraction. In November 1941 — most likely after this photograph was taken — the Half Moon was the site of what seems to have been a defenestration. I’m sure though that the chef would have still been offer post-defenestration shore dinners.

Davega was the name of a New York City retail chain. If you look closely, you can see that the nearest Davega outlet was at 360 Something. That would have been 360 Fulton Street, a three-minute walk away.

[Click for a larger view.]

Many signs here, too, but no sign of swim suits, at least not that I can see. There is a reflection of a Thom McAn sign in the Davega window.

If you’re wondering about the large building behind the Lawrence Street storefront, that was the headquarters of the New York Telephone Company. Today it’s the BellTel Lofts, a condo building. No sign of the NYTC.

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Bodega

[54 E. 105th Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view and many details.]

I often wish that tax photographs came with a smart-looking border all around. No soap. But you might find some for sale in that bodega, at the corner of 105th and Madison.

Here comes some history, paraphrased from the Oxford English Dictionary:

The Spanish bodega first meant a wine cellar, wine shop, or bar. Later, a warehouse. Finally, a grocery store. The word derives from the classical Latin apothēca, a storehouse.

The word’s first meaning in English (1702): a warehouse. By 1825, “a building for storing or ageing wine, sherry, etc.” or “an establishment producing wine, sherry, etc.; a wine producer; a winery.” By 1849,

esp. in Spanish-speaking countries: a bar; a tavern. In the late 19th century sometimes (with reference to establishments in Britain): a bar, shop, etc., specializing in the serving of wine.

The specific British sense may derive from the Bodega Spanish Wine Cellars, opened in 1868 in Manchester, which was soon followed by other similarly named establishments in other cities.

In Philippine English (1851), the word came to mean “a storeroom or storehouse forming part of a house or other building.

And here’s the kind of bodega I was looking for:

U.S. regional (originally New York City ). A small local shop, usually with long opening hours, where customers can buy a limited range of household goods and groceries; a convenience store.

The term was first used with reference to Puerto Rican-owned businesses in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, but is now used there more widely to refer to any local shop of this type.

It’s fair to say that the bodega has supplanted the candy store of yore, offering a wider variety of goods and groceries along with chopped cheese and other food items to go. And “ATM Inside.”

La Nacional Boedga y Carniceria is long gone, and the corner is now home to an enormous parking structure. But there’s a bodega right across the street, open from 6:00 or 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m.

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