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.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard) : C. O. Bigelow : https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2010/09/minetta-tavern.html : Saratoga Bar and Cafe

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.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

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.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Bob Newhart (1929–2024)

The New York Times has an obituary. From a 2019 interview with the Times (both gift links):

Do you ever think about death?

I think I know what’s on the other side, but I’m not sure. Maybe it just ends. Some people think you come back. Maybe I’ll come back as Shelley Berman and be pissed off at myself.

What do you think happens on the other side?

I think if you lived a good life, some people say it is rapture. You spend the rest of your life in a state of rapture. That’d be nice. What I’m actually hoping is there’s the Pearly Gates and God’s there and he says to me, “What did you do in life?” And I say, “I was a stand-up comedian.” And he says: “Get in that real short line over there.”

[Context: Shelley Berman wrongly accused Newhart of stealing the use of a telephone in stand-up comedy from him.]

Eleven movies, one series

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Disney, Max, Netflix, a movie theater, YouTube.]

Live Fast, Die Young (dir. Paul Henreid, 1958). No one dies, and the movie is far better than the lurid title suggests. Kim (Mary Murphy) and Jill Winters (Norma Eberhardt), a hashslinger and a high-school senior, are sisters living with their unemployed drunk of a father (Gordon Jones, Mike the cop of the Abbott and Costello world). When Kim leaves home for a career of petty and more serious crime (lived to a jazz and rock ‘n’ roll score and featuring Mike Connors), Mary follows to search for her sister and bring her back. Eberhardt, who affects a breathy Marilyn Monroe voice, has the best line: “Nothing’s against anything until you’re caught!” ★★★★ (YT)

*

So Young, So Bad (dir. Bernard Vorhaus, 1950). Life at a “corrective school” for girls, with a know-nothing administrator, a sadistic matron, and Dr. John Jason (Paul Henreid), a newly hired psychiatrist intent on making a better life for the school’s inmates, who spend their days doing laundry and tending potato fields. A second administrator (Catherine McLeod) doubts he can make any changes. Sparks fly. Three actors make their first major appearance in movies here: Anne Francis as an unmarried mother, Anne Jackson as a butch gal, and Rosita (Rita) Moreno as a social isolate who finds refuge in dreams of escape. ★★★ (YT)

*

Lonelyhearts (dir. Vincent J. Donehue, 1958). A loose adaptation of Nathanael West’s novella Miss Lonelyhearts. Montgomery Clift is Adam White, Miss Lonelyhearts, writing an advice column for a big-city newspaper; Robert Ryan is Shrike, the paper’s editor-in-chief, a man given to tormenting and tempting Adam; Myrna Loy is Mrs. Shrike, an alienated wife who likes the company of younger men (including Adam). Maureen Stapleton seems terribly miscast as a newspaper reader intent on seducing Adam. Adam’s backstory and the movie’s happy ending would have been enough to make West say “Look what they’ve done to my novella, ma.” ★★★ (YT)

*

Gun Crazy (dir. Joseph H. Lewis, 1950). I’ll watch this movie whenever it shows up. A delirious crime spree, with Bart Tare (John Dall), an army vet fascinated by guns but horrified by killing, and Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) a sideshow sharpshooter who’s even crazier than Bart. Dominance, submission, and weirdness abounding. Look at Bart and Laurie lying next to each other after making an escape: they’re panting like partners who have just made love. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Beach Boys (dir. Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny, 2024). This documentary is most valuable as a visual history, with photographs, news footage, and what look like home movies. It’s telling that the first member of the group seen and heard in a non-archival interview is Mike Love, who’s given considerable screen time to talk (about how he was not given enough credit and how Murry Wilson sold the rights to his songs) and to choke up about what he would like to say to Brian Wilson (“I’ll see you in court”?). The documentary omits the deaths of Dennis Wilson and Carl Wilson, Brian’s late-career renaissance, the completed SMiLE, and much more, and things end on a strange note: an intertitle reports Pet Sounds going gold and platinum in 2000 as “Kokomo” (gah!) begins to play over the credits. Endless Harmony (dir. Alan Boyd, 1998) is a much better introduction to the group’s history. ★★ (D)

*

Touch (dir. Paul Schrader, 1997). An American story of commerce and religion, from a novel by Elmore Leonard. Juvenal (Skeet Ulrich) is an ex-monk and stigmatic whose touch heals people. Bill Hill (Christopher Walken) is an ex-evangelist who sees Juvenal as a potential star and gets Lynn Faulkner (Bridget Fonda) to push him in that direction, even as a religious fanatic (Tom Arnold) is enraged by Juvenal and Lynn’s relationship. “Juvenal”: yes, it’s satire, but it’s meandering and sleepy. ★★ (CC)

*

The FBI Story (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1959). It starts out well, as a police procedural, with file cabinets, magnifying glasses, and switchboards, but it slowly goes downhill. James Stewart is FBI agent Chip Hardesty, whose peripatetic career finds him investigating Klan violence, murders of Native Americans, famous gangsters, a mass murder, Nazi conspirators, and Communist agents. It’s all set against a Capraesque story of marriage and family, with Stewart and Vera Miles as George and Mary Bailey 2.0, trading lines of creaky, corny dialogue. Best segment: the story of the hollow coin. ★★ (TCM)

*

Hilda Crane (dir. Philip Dunne, 1956). “In case you didn’t know, courtesan is a fancy word for tramp !”: so says Hilda Crane (Jean Simmons), back home with her mother (Judith Evelyn, Miss Lonelyhearts in Rear Window) after being let go from a job in New York. Hilda, whose years away include a spell of cohabitation and two divorces, finds herself pursued by two men: the louche professor (Jean-Pierre Aumont) who has pronounced her a courtesan, and a noble architect (Guy Madison) whose mother (Evelyn Varden, Icey Spoon in The Night of the Hunter) has definite ideas about her son’s future. But what does Hilda want as her future? Stagey in the extreme (from a play by Samuel Raphaelson), loopy in its lurch to a conclusion, and highly revealing of at least some people’s ideas about gender and sexuality at mid-century. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Human Comedy (dir. Clarence Brown, 1943). It began as a screenplay by William Saroyan that proved far too long for a movie. Life in wartime in the fictional Ithaca, California, with a high-school student, Homer (!) Macauley (Mickey Rooney), who works nights as a postal-telegram delivery boy to help his widowed mother get by. The movie moves from vignette to vignette, taking in the Macauley family (Ray Collins is the spirit of the dead father; Fay Bainter is the mother; Donna Reed is their daughter), the telegraph office (Frank Morgan is a hard-drinking but indefatigable operator), townspeople young and old, and visiting servicemen, with shifts now and then to Homer’s elder brother Marcus (Van Johnson), already away from home in military service and preparing to go overseas. For all its unabashed sentimentality, this human comedy makes considerable room for tragedy, and I can only imagine what it must have felt like to watch in 1943. ★★★★ (TCM)

[A well-known leading man made his uncredited debut in this movie.]

*

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, second season (dir. Andrew Jarecki, 2024). The second (final?) season of the The Jinx covers Robert Durst’s trial, conviction, and sentencing in the murder of his friend Susan Berman and his death four months later. The people on camera are an array of heroes and villains: a dedicated cold-case prosecutor, long-suffering members of Durst’s first wife’s family, Durst family members who did nothing when Durst’s first wife disappeared, friends who display a bewildering allegiance to a killer, and a second wife of convenience determined to keep Durst’s assets from going to his first wife’s family. And above all, Durst himself, quick and conniving on telephone calls, whiny and defiant in the courtroom, avoiding justice again and again (remind you of anyone?). As the credits for the final episode roll, the Jeff Beck/Joss Stone cover of “I Put a Spell on You” plays — aptly, aptly. ★★★★ (M)

*

Wicked Little Letters (dir. Thea Sharrock, 2023). Post-Great War in Sussex, with pious unmarried Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) receiving bizarrely obscene anonymous letters. Suspicion falls on her free-spirit neighbor Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), and an arrest and trial follow. An assiduous constable, Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan), has doubts about Rose’s guilt and enlists the help of other neighborhood women to set things straight. Wonderfully comic, at times suspenseful, with handwriting at the center of things, and based on a true story that seems like something out of Dickens. ★★★★ (N)

*

Inside Out 2 (dir. Kelsey Mann, 2024). Late in the film, we heard a young audience member ask a grown-up, “Why is Riley sad?” In this (not really for kids) sequel, Riley Andersen, now thirteen, is beset by Puberty, which arrives in the form of a wrecking ball that destroys her Sense of Self (capitals are fitting for this allegorical tale), after which a new array of emotions take control: Anxiety, Embarrassment, Ennui, and Envy. That old Sense of Self was a beautiful, symmetrical, silver structure, the work of a mind that could say “Mom and Dad are proud of me” and “I’m a good person”; the new one is a jagged, asymmetrical, fiery mess, whose main theme is “I’m not good enough.” But — and because it’s a Disney movie, it’s no spoiler — the kid is going to be all right, and more complicated. ★★★★ (T)

Related reading
All OCA “12 movies” posts (Pinboard)

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.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Another Lassie–MTM connection

[Florence Lake as Martha Dudley. Click for a larger view.]

I somehow discovered that Florence Lake played Martha Dudley in the Mary Tyler Moore Show episode “Lou’s First Date” (November 3, 1973). A mix-up pairs her with Mr. Grant for a broadcasters’ dinner.

“Who is Florence Lake?” you may ask. None other than the actor who played Jenny, the Calverton telephone operator on the television series Lassie. Lake appeared in eighteen Lassie episodes between 1954 and 1962 and was the only cast member to serve for the duration of the show’s Calverton years. Her off-screen character was spoken to in many, many more episodes: “Hello, Jenny? This is Ruth. Would you ring Doc Weaver?” Jenny’s most prominent Lassie appearances: “Party Line” (December 23, 1956) and “The Phone Hog” (April 3, 1960).

[Florence Lake and, of course, Lassie, in “Party Line.” Click for a larger view.]

Florence Lake started in pictures in 1929. Her last appearance was in television’s Most Wanted in 1977. Here’s her IMDb page. Two fun facts via IMDb: Lake appeared with Ed Asner (who played Lou Grant) in The Girl Most Likely to ..., a 1973 made-for-TV movie, and

In a mid-70s interview, Mary Tyler Moore remembered the cast becoming exasperated with Florence Lake. It seems she didn’t see the character as elderly and feeble as written. Moore said Valerie Harper took special time with Ms. Lake to get the performance needed from her.

“Why another Lassie-MTM connection?” you may ask. Because Ted Knight (Ted Baxter) appeared as a traveling entertainer and World’s Greatest Ventriloquist in an episode of Lassie. And the dog-puppet from that episode showed up in a Mary Tyler Moore episode.

Related reading
All OCA Lassie posts (Pinboard)

[I loved Lassie in boyhood and love Lassie now. Straight outta Calverton.]

EXchange names fill the screen

[From Larceny (dir. George Sherman, 1948). Click for a much larger view.]

American primitive realism: the page fills the screen. Otherwise, you might not believe that someone is really looking at a telephone directory.

The page is a slapdash creation (“aYtes”), but CHina and UNderhill were authentic Los Angeles County exchange names.

Related reading
All OCA EXchange name posts (Pinboard)

David Shapiro (1947–2024)

The poet David Shapiro has died at the age of seventy-seven. The New York Times (gift link) has an obituary.

I met David by telephone in 1995. I had written a review of his After a Lost Original, and he (somehow) looked me up and called me at home one night to thank me. That was maybe an hour-long, wildly exhilarating call, with me listening to a rapid-fire discourse of endless quotation and reference and putting in an occasional comment. Lucy Sante’s description of David’s talking (in the Times obituary) is exactly right.

I met David in person in 2002 at the Museum of American Folk Art, where he was introducing a reading by John Ashbery and A.N. Homes (an event tied to an enormous Henry Darger exhibit). David introduced me to his wife Lindsay like so: “He’s a poet, journalist, professor, and bon vivant. He has a wife and two kids.” How did he know that I have two kids? I have no idea.

Here are a handful of lines from “The Foot Speaks,” in New and Selected Poems (1965–2006):

Quoth the raven: I am language.
I am language,
And nothing in language is strange, to me.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is a “Lester Ruff” (Stan Newman) puzzle that truly is less rough. I started with 26-A, four letters, “Lobster Telephone artist (1936)” and sailed smoothly. When I hit 14-D, eight letters, “Bridge builders,” I knew that I would have this puzzle licked.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

12-D, eight letters, “Labor leader Oscar role.” The layout of the online print version of the puzzle pushed role to the next column of text, and thus I was struggling to think of a labor leader named Oscar.

13-D, eight letters, “Net income recipients.” A clever clue, but this answer needs to be retired.

15-A, eight letters, “Churchill wore one at Yalta (2/45).” This clue feels both strangely arbitrary and strangely specific. 2/45: as opposed to some other Yalta Conference?

16-A, six letters, “Hoffman title role.” Sneaky.

17-A, eight letters, “Euphoric state.“ Me, I think of the answer as disparaging euphoria.

23-A, four letters, “Mixed, in a way.” Good grief — the 1950s want their answer back.

26-D, seven letters, “It’s signed, sealed and delivered.” Very nice.

28-D, five letters, “Type of transfer.” I was thinking of buses and subways.

35-A, seven letters, “‘Who put the ape in ____?’ (Cowardly Lion line).” Wonderful.

51-A, five letters, “Model from the Latin for ‘first.’” Represent!

51-D, five letters, “Whom Nietzsche called ‘boring.’” C’mon, he was doing his best.

59-D, three letters, “Daily deliverer of light.” The Across answers filled it in, but I imagine this clue will stymie at least some solvers who drop in a three-letter word.

My favorite in this puzzle: 63-A, eight letters, “Historic High Court decision (7/24/74).” Because no one is above the law.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Harts, Keen’s, WIsconsin

Kevin Hart of harvest.ink shared a photograph of a letterhead from his father’s correspondence. It was 1973, and Keen’s English Chop House still had its WIsconsin exchange name.

[Click for a larger view.]

Kevin’s father was a newspaperman and a member of Keen’s Pipe Club. When Kevin sent me a link to a page with Keen’s history, I realized that I’d read about the restaurant somewhere. And I could think of only one possibility.

[Harold H. Hart, Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964). Click for a larger view.]

There seems to be no family relation, but the synchronicity of Hart and Hart is not lost on me.

Keens has lost its apostrophe, and though the restaurant still serves mutton chops, it now calls itself a steakhouse. And though the restaurant has dropped the WIsconsin, the telephone number remains the same: 212-947-3636.

Thanks, Kevin, for letting me share this piece of history here.

BILLI RDS

[232–234 West 37th Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Back in the Garment District. When I first spotted those windows, I thought the ascended letter might be a B. Billi Bros., wholesale fabric distributors? After all, it’s the Garment District. Then I looked more closely.

Google Maps shows a fifth floor added to the building. In August 2022 the first floor housed two fabric companies, one or both now defunct. The second and third floors, which once housed Kay-Atkin Co. (buttons) and BILLI RDS, were available to rent: 929-434-7018.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[Kay-Atkin: so spelled in the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory.]

Castorini and Cammareri

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

That’s the Castorini family’s house in Moonstruck (dir. Norman Jewison, 1987). It’s a wow of a house, with considerable history in the world of non-fiction.

And here’s the Cammareri Bakery, which became the corner bakery in Moonstruck. It didn’t even have to change its name. “Cammereri’s Bake Shop,” Chrissy (Nada Despotovich) says when she answers the phone.

[502 Henry Street, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

In 1940 Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Cammareri lived at 502. I’d like to think that’s Mr. Cammareri out in front.

[Click for a larger view.]

[Click for a larger telephone directory.]

And look: another bakery, in Boro Park. Any relation? That’s a rabbit hole down which I will not go. But you can see Cammareri’s Bakery (as its sign says) in the Municipal Archives.

A 1943 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about the 11th Avenue bakery mentions Angelina and Grace Cammerini, “handsome Italian girls,” originally from Palermo. A plaque in the bakery marked their brother Andrew’s second year in military service.

In 1998, the Henry Street bakery, by then known as the Cammereri Brothers Bakery, closed after nearly eighty years. No. 502 today houses MozzLab, a cheesemaker and food purveyor. No. 5910 is now a residential behemoth.

A wonderful bit of TV from when the bakery was flourishing: WABC-TV’s Chauncey Howell went to Carroll Gardens and interviewed residents about Moonstruck. Priceless stuff.

*

April 1: A reader sent links to the Daily News articles with the bakery: one and two. “Cher, she goes crazy when she eats the lard bread.” Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

In the Garment District

[592 8th Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Today we’re in the Garment District. The first floor of no. 592, formerly the 8th Ave. Remnant Store, is waiting for a new tenant, still with a display of ties in the window. The barber shop, Ben Klein, Louis Jacoby, Benjamin Sklar, Sam Kupferman are now long gone. As the poet said, there is no permanence.

Benjamin Sklar was a name in buttonholes and eyelets as early as 1918 and as late as 1958. What does it mean to manufacture buttonholes anyway? Are they little pockets of nothingness, to be sewn onto garments? Did Benjamin Sklar spend his life making nothing? No, of course not.

The Simplex name — “since 1918” — is still around, attached to machines for cutting rubber and other materials. And no. 592, that small building between giants, is still there. Today it houses a Western Union outlet.

Here’s a better view of the no. 592 and the giants.

[No. 592 in a larger context. Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[Google Books gave me Benjamin Sklar’s first name. The 1940 telephone directory gave me the rest of Jacoby’s and Kupferman’s names. Kupferman sold woolens and dress goods.]

James Van Der Zee’s studio

[2077 7th Avenue, now Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, Harlem, New York City, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Just a storefront among storefronts, but this storefront was one location for the studio of the celebrated photographer James Van Der Zee (1886–1983). There he is in the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory:


[Click for a larger view.]

In front of the store stands a display case full of photographs. The sign suggests an enterprise with several parts: PICTURE FRAMING / PHOTOS / HEMSTITCHING NOTARY. You can see the sign with greater clarity in a photograph by Van Der Zee himself, accompanying this New York Times article (gift link).

Three choice sources for Van Der Zee browsing:

~ A 2019 exhibition at the Howard Greenberg Gallery (click on Thumbnails)

~ A 2022 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art

~ The Metropolitan Museum of Art

No. 2077 today: Delhi Masala, an Indian restaurant.

I’ll add one more detail: a 1926 Van Der Zee photograph was the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992). The photograph appears in The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978), a collection of Van Der Zee’s funeral portraits, for which Morrison wrote the foreword. Van Der Zee’s caption for the photograph:

She was the one I think was shot by her sweetheart at a party with a noiseless gun. She complained of being sick at the party and friends said, “Well, why don’t you lay down?” and they taken her in the room and laid her down. After they undressed her and loosened her clothes, they saw the blood on her dress. They asked her about it and she said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow, yes, I’ll tell you tomorrow.” She was just trying to give him a chance to get away. For the picture, I placed flowers on her chest.

You can see the photograph in this New York Times article (gift link).

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Billie Holiday’s residence

[286 West 142nd Street, Harlem, New York City, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

“At the height of her career she lived at 286 West 142nd Street”: The Encyclopedia of New York City (2010). And there she is in the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory:



Those buildings are gone now.

*

February 13: An assidious reader found the apartment number: 2E. And found Billie and her mother Sadie in the 1940 census. Also in 2E: a lodger, Irene Wilson, née Kitchings, co-composer of “Some Other Spring” and other songs. Thanks, reader.

Related reading
All OCA Billie Holiday posts (Pinboard) : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Upper Manhattan, with clam broth

[505–501 West 207th Street, Inwood, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

With the exception of the Cloisters, Upper Manhattan is a mystery to me, as are the 1940s. So I went exploring at 1940s.nyc and came back with the photograph above. I chose it for the shadow of the El, the rugged brick street, and the delightful unexpectedness of the commercial sequence: the Tally-Ho, a bar and grill with various prohibitions (click to enlarge and notice the NO on the sign), followed by Roy’s Clam Broth House and City Tire Stores. Clam Broth House was once a thing: Hoboken had a celebrated one. Here, have a menu. And a New York Times article. And some more history.

And now back to Upper Manhattan.

The 1940 telephone directory lists the Tally-Ho Bar and Restaurant at 505 West 207th. No listings for Roy or City Tire. Today Google Maps now shows the entire block as no. 501. It’s a similarly shaped building that houses a clothing store and a barber shop. Cole Thompson at My Inwood has written the surprising history of this block from 1911 to 2016.

Before leaving Upper Manhattan, I have to mention Billy Strayhorn’s “U.M.M.G.,” named for the Upper Manhattan Medical Group, the home of Duke Ellington’s physician Arthur Logan.

And I have to wonder: when I found this photograph last night, after about two minutes of browsing, how did the Internets know that Elaine and I had bought a bottle of Snow’s Clam Juice (juice is just another name for broth) earlier in the day? We used our clam juice in a pot of gumbo that will see us through the next two or three days.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

A prisoner of Gowanus

[58 2nd Avenue, Gowanus, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I thought of the old KENTILE FLOORS sign and found myself once again in Gowanus. It’s a Brooklyn neighborhood that I’ve visited many times in these pages. I am a prisoner not of 2nd Avenue but of Gowanus.

In Brooklynite memory, the KENTILE FLOORS sign that stood atop the Kentile, Inc. building is a beloved landmark, though the Kentile name is now associated with mesothelioma. There’s no trace of the sign in the WPA tax photographs, but I did find this coffee shop, whose address for some reason is listed as that of the now-defunct manufacturer.

Life, September 1, 1952. Click for a larger view.]

If you click the tax photograph for the larger view and look closely, you’ll see the name Gowanus Coffee Shop on the window. Notice too the Schaefer Beer sign in the window: this (former?) coffee shop must have had a liquor license. And notice not just one but two Bell Telephone signs: signs of civilization. It’s not easy to ignore the figure standing in the doorway. Whoever she is, she is not amused. I imagine her speaking in comic-strip Brooklynese: “Whaddaya gonna do, just stan’ there all day takin’ my pitcher?”

[Click for a larger view.]

Today 58 2nd Avenue is home to the Achim Importing Co. and is unrecognizable as its former self.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

SUITS PRESSED

[1441 Broadway, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The white arrow (barely visible) on the address sign points to the large building, the Bricken Textile Building. The New York Times noted its January 20, 1930 opening. The building still stands. What I like in this photograph though is the small stuff: those clashing planes of signage. I can decipher almost everything in front of LIQUOR:

[SUITS PRESSED / while you wait / FRENCH DRY CLEANING / SKILLFUL TAILORING / We guarantee to / (?) CLOTHES / (?) SPECIAL PROCESS / CURTAINS & DRAPES / for home office (?) / QUALITY DRY CLEANED / BERGER SERVICE / 151. Click for a larger view.]

Aha: Berger Service Cleaning & Dyeing Corp. has listings and advertisements for Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens locations in the 1940 telephone directories. And there’s 151, at 151 West 41st Street. “E. of Broadway,” says an advertisement that runs across the tops of three columns in the Manhattan directory.

[Click for a larger view.]

[Click for a larger view.]

Alas, there is no tax photograph for 151, at least not that I can find, and no tax photographs of adjacent addresses. So this glimpse of the sign is the only glimpse I’ve got.

Yelp lists one address for Berger Service Cleaning & Dye Corporation — 4 W. 63rd Street — with three reviews, the most recent from 2018. Google Maps has the same address, with the most recent review from last month. In other words, there’s still a Berger in Manhattan, apparently in an apartment building.

As for other details in the photograph:

The light-colored car says RADIO — it must be a cab, no doubt yellow. The van alongside it: METROPOLITAN NEWS CO., a distribution service for newspapers and magazines. Robert B. Cohen acquired the company in 1985. Cohen also ran the Hudson County News Company, precursor of the now-ubiquitous Hudson News outlets. Which brings us back to the present.

*

December 26: A reader suggests that the words below “CURTAINS & DRAPES” might be “for home office.” Thanks, reader. And then there’s a third word. What? Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[Hudson County: a county in northern New Jersey. My dad grew up there, which brings us back to the past.]

Some Automats

[155 W. 33rd Street, 250 W. 42nd Street, 611 W. 181st Street, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click any image for a much, much, much larger view.]

There are thirty-eight Horn and Hardart Automats in the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory. This has been some of them.

Related reading
All OCA Automat posts : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[“There are thirty-eight”: I’m channeling The Naked City and Naked City. There were also eighteen Horn and Hardart retail outlets in Manhattan, one Automat and two retail outlets in Brooklyn, eight retail outlets in the Bronx, and “some” (three) retail outlets in Queens.]