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The scene of the crimes Now with much more about Joseph Magnasco’s family history.

The scene of the crimes

Last week’s photograph of a Gowanus diner led me to a story about its proprietor, Michael Tolopka, being robbed of $240 at 4th Avenue and Union Street. My friend Slywy snagged the Daily News article with more details:

[Daily News, November 11, 1941.]

Tolopka was robbed outside a bar and grill. There was only one such establishment at the intersection of 4th Avenue and Union Street: the College Restaurant.

[224 4th Avenue, Gowanus, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Between 1930 and 1944, at least five other Brooklyn restaurants had the word college in their names, each establishment apparently independent of the others. My guess is that the name of the College Inn restaurant in Chicago’s Hotel Sherman inspired copycats.

In 1961, the College Restaurant on 4th Avenue was the scene of a crime far more spectacular than the Tolopka robbery.

[Brooklyn Daily, October 6, 1961. Click for a larger view.]

In June 1961, Joseph Magnasco (b. 1925), was among those convicted of hijacking a truckful of linen. He was shot and killed before being sentenced. A Getty-owned photograph shows a priest administering last rites to the dead Magnasco on the sidewalk. All the hijacking convictions were later reversed.

This Wikipedia article, though it doesn’t mention Magnasco, gives some context for his killing: a battle between the Gallo and Profaci crime families. A 1961 newspaper article calls Magnasco a “top level Gallo mobster.” A 1963 article identifies Magnasco as a “Gallo henchman”; another calls him a “Gallo mobster.”

And there’s a complication: Magnasco seems to have defected from the Profaci family.

[Newsday, October 5, 1961. Click for larger views.]

Magnasco’s killing appears to have gone unsolved.

Joseph Magnasco previously made the news in 1947, when he attempted to rob a railroad-station safe in Lynnbrook, Long Island. An May 19 article from the Nassau Daily Review-Star reports that “Woman Routs Thug Saving $1,600 At Railroad Station.” Magnasco attempted to take money from an open safe and fought with a female ticket agent before fleeing. A May 20 article reports that a police officer noticed a man walking along a road with a bloody handkerchief around one hand. That was Magnasco. The officer was rewarded with a day off to go fishing. Magnasco later pleaded guilty to possession of an automatic pistol. It’s not clear that he faced any other charges.

[Nassau Daily Review-Star, May 20, 1947.]

Here’s a better likeness, most likely a mug shot from a later arrest:

[Joseph Magnasco, n.d.]

There’s just one Joseph Magnasco in the 1940 census who was born in 1925. He was a fifteen-year-old resident of The Children’s Village, a home for orphans and troubled boys in Dobbs Ferry, New York. From the Children’s Village website:

1958: The Children’s Village was officially designated a Residential Treatment Center. This came as the culmination of the evolution from an orphanage to a residential school for troubled boys to a true clinical program capable of meeting the needs of seriously disturbed children.

I wonder if this Joseph — who must be the one I’m writing about — was the son of Pietro Magnasco, a Brooklyn union organizer and racketeer who was arrested for murder in January 1930 and was shot to death in May 1930. With each man, a five-month gap between arrest and murder. Pretty eerie.

On a happier note, notice the sign over the College Restaurant: the Scuola Gratuita di Italiano e di Musica. I hope I’m reading the small words correctly.

Also on a happier note, Taheni, a Mediterranean grill, now occupies the first floor at 224.

I would still like to know what Michael Tolopka was doing with $1240 in cash in his pockets.

Thanks to Brian, Slywy, Brooklyn Newsstand, and NYS Historic Newspapers.

*

A few more details: There’s just the one Joseph Magnasco in the Social Security Death Index. Find a Grave reveals an interesting detail: Magnasco served as a corporal in the Marine Corps Reserve in World War II.

A little more: I found Joseph Magnasco in the 1950 census (it’s impossible to link directly to the relevant page). He was then living in a basement apartment at 100 Garfield Place, Park Slope, Brooklyn, with Urbano DeSantis, sixty-three, a bricklayer; Christine DeSantis, forty-five, Urbano’s wife; and Angelo DeSantis, thirty, their son, a photographer. Magnasco, twenty-five, also identified as a son, is listed as unemployed but looking for work. My guess for now is that Christine is his mother, remarried. The distance from the College Restaurant to Garfield Place: three-tenths of a mile.

*

Here’s Christine Magnasco in the 1940 census, thirty-five, widowed, neither working nor looking for work, living in an apartment at 59 Lincoln Place, Park Slope. A puzzle: she’s listed as the head of a household of nine, yet she’s the only person listed at this address. Perhaps she was managing a household of several generations.

*

Just one more bit, again moving backwards: this article identifies the body found on a New Jersey farm in May 1930 as Peter Magnaro. At least that was the name on his driver’s license.

[“Brooklyn Man Is Found Slain on Jersey Farm.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 23, 1930. Click for a larger view.]

So: Peter Magnaro, killed in a bootlegging war, was Pietro Magnasco, husband of Christine, father of Joseph. I’m closing the case.

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

Messrs. Zip

[“Stamp of Approval.” Zippy, September 2, 2023. Click for a larger view.]

I like Mr. ZIP. In the depths of the pandemic, I would sometimes draw his image on the envelopes of our outgoing mail, alongside “Thanks, USPS.”

I’ll borrow something I wrote in a post with a 1968 advertisement about ZIP codes and “snail mail”: “Mr. ZIP retired in 1986. He later died of a broken heart.”

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Stella Zawistowski, seems to be available only as a file to print. I thought I’d sail through until I hit the southwest corner. 45-A, four letters, “Thatcher’s undergrad major”? Who knows? Who cares? I had to look it up, which made that corner fall into place.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

3-D, nine letters, “Forms for fun facts.” I saw it right away, but I’d want to add quotation marks for fun.

6-A, nine letters, “Generously spread.” I knew it had to be.

23-A, five letters, “Legal ability.” I was thinking something like SMARTS.

23-D, six letters, “Three-legged duelers.” Pretty far-fetched.

26-A, eleven letters, “They have lots to talk about.” REALESTATEAGENTS doesn’t fit.

34-D, nine letters, “Anticipation.” I can’t recall seeing the answer in a crossword before.

45-D, five letters, “Alternative to <.” From the southwest corner, and just fiendish.

46-D, five letters, “Charming one.” Also southwestern, and tricky, even with the middle letter in place.

56-A, nine letters, “Certain predictive tools.” Happy to have caught on.

59-A, nine letters, “Narrowly confined.” A nice clue.

My favorite in this puzzle: 30-A, six letters, “Send cloudward.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“HOIT”

[Nancy, August 19, 1950. Click for a larger view.]

Re: today’s yesterday’s Nancy : see “Hert is hoit.” See also Grammarphobia’s discussion of er and oi trading places.

[My Brooklyn grandparents heated their house with erl.]

A pocket notebook sighting

[Alain Delon as Robert Klein, from Mr. Klein (dir. Joseph Losey, 1976). Click for a larger view.]

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : The Bad and the Beautiful : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : The Case of the Howling Dog : Cat People : Caught : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Deep Valley : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : The Fearmakers : The Flight That Disappeared : A Foreign Affair : Foreign Correspondent : Four in a Jeep : Fury : The Girl in Black Stockings : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : I See a Dark Stranger : If I Had a Million : L’Innocent : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Lost Horizon : M : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : What Happened Was . . . : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once : Young and Innocent

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, DVD, TCM, YouTube.]

Company Business (dir. Nicholas Meyer, 1991). When a spy swap goes wrong, a retired CIA agent (Gene Hackman) and a KGB agent (Mikhail Baryshnikov) find themselves on the run from both agencies. Great location filming in Berlin and Paris, but the plot complications are just tiresome. Elaine once rode in a Juilliard elevator with Baryshnikov; as she recalls, every woman in the car stood without saying a word, and other men, if there were any, were rendered invisible. I think that ride must have been a zillion times more memorable than this movie, even if this one includes an elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower. ★★ (DVD)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Eurothrillers feature

Mr. Klein (dir. Joseph Losey, 1976). We like Losey, having seen Accident, The Big Night, Blind Date (aka Chance Meeting), The Intimate Stranger, M, The Prowler, and The Servant, but none of those films prepared us for what we found here. It’s Paris, 1942, and Robert Klein (Alain Delon) is a art dealer, buying on the cheap from Parisian Jews desperate to sell before leaving the country. A chance mistake places Klein under suspicion: is he himself Jewish, or is he being confused with someone else? This Kafkaesque story is brilliant and compelling, imbuing scenes of beauty and splendor with utter dread. ★★★★

*

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (dir. Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014). Filmed in stylish, murky black-and-white with minimal dialogue (in Farsi), and set in the (fictional) industrial wasteland of Bad City, Iran (actually Taft, California), it’s the story of The Girl (Sheila Vand), a vampire who roams the streets looking for victims. In her nightly travels she makes the acquaintance of a drug dealer, a prostitute, and Arash (Arash Marandi, sometimes described as an Iranian James Dean), a lonely young man with a heroin-addicted father. Can Arash and The Girl make a life together? Strong overtones of David Lynch in this movie, where atmosphere is everything. ★★★★ (DVD)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Hip-Hop feature

Wild Style (dir. Charlie Ahearn, 1982). I’m not sure how it’s possible: it was forty years ago that I saw this movie, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Massachusetts, on its first run outside New York. Fab 5 Freddy, Lady Heart, Lady Pink, and Tracy 168 came to town and created a mural on the side of the theater, which was painted over after the city threatened fines. As a narrative, with abysmal non-acting and plot threads that vanish, the movie doesn’t hold up; as a document of early hip-hop culture — DJs, MCs, b-boys, graffiti artists — it’s invaluable. So throw your hands in the air, and wave ’em like you just don’t care. As a narrative: ★★ / As a document: ★★★★ (CC).

Style Wars (dir. Tony Silver, 1983). An hour-long PBS documentary with graffiti artists talking and making art, b-boys breakdancing, and various figures of authority (Ed Koch, among others) talking about how terrible graffiti is (and really, if you ever were in an NYC subway car in the 1970s or ‘80s, you know they have a point). What this documentary makes clear is the artists’ seriousness of purpose: sketchbooks, discussions of letter forms, a writers’ bench at the Grand Concourse subway station, the dream to go “all-city” and have one’s work on trains in every borough. One surprise: the presence of white prep-school kids among the writers. My favorite scenes: Skeme talking about his art as his mother berates it, asking what the trains ever did to him. ★★★★

[Skeme still makes — and sells — art.]

*

Street Scene (dir. King Vidor, 1931). Life before air-conditioning, with the residents of a Lower East Side inferno talking to one another on the stoop or from their windows. Gossip, infidelity, poverty and eviction, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, sexual exploitation of worker by boss, and calls for a socialist revolution: it’s a pre-Code world of astonishing frankness. Sylvia Sidney and William Collier are the nominal stars, but it’s an ensemble movie, with Beulah Bondi and John Qualen, among others, reprising their roles from Elmer Rice’s 1929 play. With unusual camera angles from Gregg Toland, and the Gershwinesque theme “Street Scene” from Alfred Newman, soon to be a staple of movie music. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Two of a Kind (dir. Henry Levin, 1951). The elaborate, preposterous scheme in this movie reminded me of the elaborate, preposterous scheme in The Man with My Face, also from 1951, in which a man accuses a woman’s husband of impersonating him. In this movie a cocky gambler (Edmond O’Brien) agrees to the loss of his left-pinkie tip so that Lizabeth Scott and Alexander Knox can pass him off as the long-lost son of a wealthy capitalist, a wealthy capitalust whom they’re going to kill in a boating “accident.” There’ll be plenty of money for all. The movie begins as noir, turns into light comedy, and ends up just bizarre. ★★ (YT)

*

Portland Exposé (dir. Harold Schuster, 1957). “Honey, I’m mad!” The rackets move into Portland, Oregon, with pinball (and concomitant betting), slot machines, B-girls, and “illegal surgeries.” Edward Binns is the tavern owner who gets wired up to get the goods on the bad guys; Virginia Gregg (a regular in the Dragnet world) is his wife; Russ Conway (a retired police officer in Lassie !) is a crime boss; Lawrence Dobkin and Frank Gorshin are among the sadistic underlings. A solid B-movie with opening and closing travelogues and surprisingly brutal and lurid interludes. ★★★ (YT)

[Here’s an article from Life (March 21, 1949) that characterizes Portland as “wide open and fairly happy about it.”]

*

Miami Exposé (dir. Fred F. Sears, 1956). Fred F. Sears was a busy man: he directed nine movies in 1956 (Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Don’t Knock the Rock, Teen-Age Crime Wave among them), along with several episodes of television shows. Which might explain the poverty of plot and characterization in his movie, with Lee J. Cobb pretty unconvincing as a grizzled detective with a much younger girlfriend, whom he brings, along with her young son, to a cabin where a witness the mob wants dead is being kept in hiding). The best moments have Alan Napier and Edward Arnold (in his last role) scheming the introduction of legalized gambling in Florida. “I hope you realize this is a mistake on your part”: that line from the film sums up my feelings about having chosen this one. ★★ (YT)

*

Till We Meet Again (dir. Frank Borzage, 1944). Ray Milland is John, a downed American pilot in occupied France; Barbara Britton is Sister Clothilde, the novice who sets aside her rejection of the world beyond the convent to help him escape the Nazis. The story is notable for three female characters of authority and courage: Clothilde, the Mother Superior (Lucile Watson), and Resistance organizer Mme. Sarroux (Marguerite d’Alvarez). A story of great pathos and unspoken but unmistakable eroticism, with a shocking ending. Theodor Sparkuhl’s camerawork has moments that are Caravaggesque. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Desperately Seeking Susan (dir. Susan Seidelman, 1985). I remembered only three things about this movie, which I last saw thirty-eight years ago: Rosanna Arquette plays a New Jersey housewife; Madonna dries her armpits with a bathroom hand dryer; and “Into the Groove” plays over the closing credits. What I didn’t understand in 1985 is that Desperately Seeking Susan is a screwball comedy in bohemian drag, with amnesia, mistaken identities, and film canisters and liquor bottles for conking people over the head. And cross my heart, I thought screwball comedy before reading that Robert Ebert thought so too. Great fun in a gone world. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Eva (dir. Joseph Losey, 1962). Humiliation and self-abasement in Venice and Rome. Stanley Baker is Tyvian Jones, a writer from a Welsh coal-mining background, basking in the success of his first novel and a movie adaptation. He meets and marries the director’s assistant Francesca (Virna Lisi) but is drawn again and again to the courtesan Eva (Jeanne Moureau), who humiliates him at every opportunity. Super-stylish, with startling camera angles and plenty of diegetic and non-diegetic music: Billie Holiday records and a Michel Legrand score.★★★★ (CC)

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

Sad songs

“Sad songs, that was life”: Rita Forrester, granddaughter of A.P. and Sara Carter of the Carter Family.

[From a 2002 New York Times article. Found in an old file.]

The Daily Tar Heel front page

[The Daily Tar Heel, August 30, 2023. Click for a much larger view.]

I sent a copy of this front page to my member of Congress, Mary Miller. She won’t read it, but perhaps an aide will. Miller is, of course, what they call a “staunch defender” of the Second Amendment. I hope this page gives someone in her office reason to think about the culture of fear and violence their boss fosters.

Today’s newspaper is here.

Goodbye, Fine Arts elevators

Sad news from the Chicago Sun-Times: so-called modern elevators will soon replace the manually operated elevators in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building:

“We have been holding on to them as long as humanly possible and the time has finally come. Truly, it’s harder to get the parts and it’s far more expensive to maintain,” said Jacob Harvey, managing artistic director for a building that first opened in 1898 and was built to display and repair Studebaker carriages and wagons. . . .

But it’s going to mean the loss of something the tenants — puppet makers, piano teachers, yoga instructors, dancers, luthiers (not to mention countless tourists and architecture enthusiasts) — have held dear for decades.

Those elevators are a wonder. You step inside, and there’s an operator to talk to. It’s a strangely intimate form of travel. Here, from The Columbia Chronicle, is a brief tour.

The last time Elaine and I were in the building, we were deeply under the spell of Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart, whose protagonist visits the building several times:

Exactly at ten o’clock she went into the Arts Building and told the hall porter she had an engagement with Mr. Sebastian. He rang for the elevator, and she was taken up to the sixth storey.

*

She always started very early for Michigan Avenue, and had an hour or so to walk along the Lake front before she went into the Arts Building.

*

The city was very sloppy on the morning after the snow-storm, and Lucy did not take her usual walk along the Lake; she was afraid of splashing her new dress. She went straight to the Arts Building. How glad she was to greet the hall porter, and to step into the elevator once more!

And so on.

Elaine and I took the elevator to the tenth (top) floor and walked down, looking at door after door. And at the tile. And at a radiator. And at the elevator button.