The fascinating story of Grant’s Tomb — and a quirky history that includes an ambitious architect, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, lots of ugly raspberry paint, and strange charges of animal sacrifice.
The history of Grant’s Tomb plays an important role in the story of Riverside Park (released in 2018). Listen to that tale here:
And listen to the story of Grant’s Tomb in this very early episode of the Bowery Boys podcast from 2008.
Ulysses S. Grant – perhaps America’s most famous man in the years following the Civil War. As president of the United States, Grant would be known for important political reforms — and a series of corruption scandals.
His wife Julia Dent Grant, entombed next to him
An ominous view of the Tomb during World War I, as battleships pass by it
A great photo illustrating how somewhat barren that area of town was at the time. The silo-like building in the background is apparently a gas shell.
The website of the Grant Monument Association details some of the disasterous deterioration of the memorial during the 1970s:
Frank Scaturro, the Columbia University student who helped bring Grant’s Tomb back to life (photos courtesy the GMA website)
Grant’s Tomb today, complete with unicyclists (in foreground). Photos by Greg Young (taken in 2008)
Hudson River Bridge near Waterford, New York, 1832. Courtesy New-York Historical Society
People have schemed to put a bridge over the Hudson River for well over two hundred years. That task would prove most difficult to those in Manhattan, given the distance between its shores and those of New Jersey.
After several failed proposals, the two were linked with the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels (1910), the Holland Tunnel (1927), and finally, the George Washington Bridge (1931).
Above: A wooden bridge in Kentucky using the Burr truss, invented by Theodore Burr and first used over the Hudson River’s first bridge span. (Courtesy LOC)
But further upstate, industrious New Yorkers had an easier time of bridging the two sides, as the river became narrower in places and engineers could work upon sparsely populated lands.
The first bridge over the Hudson River rose at the village of Waterford(near Albany) in 1804, the work of inventor Theodore Burr, the cousin of Vice President Aaron Burr.
From an 1820 map of the Hudson River. You can see where Burr’s bridge was located, situated over the Hudson until the 20th century (courtesy NYPL):
While Aaron was engaging in a vituperative war of words with Alexander Hamilton, his cousin Theodore was crafting an extraordinary bridge, described in a later history by his ancestor as “four combined arch and truss spans, one of 154 feet, one of 161 feet, one of 176 feet, and a fourth at 180 feet.”
By this point, he was already a well-known, even adventurous builder, but the Waterford bridge was truly something unique. He eventually patented his design, which became known as ‘a Burr Truss,’ used in the construction of covered bridges throughout the United States.
A sketch of the Waterford bridge, as illustrated by Thomas Cooper in 1889, and an excellent view of what became known as the Burr Truss:
The bridge was coming along nicely by the spring of 1804. The local paper noted that “the erection is proceeding rapidly, the abutments, (on shore sides) and one of three piers are already near finished, and the frames of the arches are in a state of equal preparedness.
Concerning the abutments and piers, there is not the least doubt that they will render the bridge secure from ice in spring seasons.”
I’m not sure where Theordore was in July, whether at the bridge site or back at his grist mill in Oxford. The bridge was over one-third completed that month when Theodore got word that his esteemed cousin had met Hamilton in a duel at Weehawken, 150 miles down river, leading to the death of Hamilton.
But while Aaron’s reputation would quickly deteriorate, Theodore’s would briefly flower, becoming America’s most prolific bridge engineer in the early 19th century. His most impressive span, the Susquehanna River Bridge in Pennsylvania, survived until 1857.
Strangely, however, Theodore’s eventual fate would eventually mirror his cousin’s. Many of his bridges fell apart, and his finances were ruefully mismanaged.
He actually disappears from the historical record; according to author Donald E. Wolf, “[h]is heirs report that he died in 1822, but they have been unable to say what caused his death or to identify the place of his burial.”
Originally exposed to the elements, the bridge was later sheathed in a covering. It held sturdy over the Hudson River until it was destroyed in a gas fire in 1909.
The Waiting Game: Down at the White Star Line's Broadway offices near Bowling Green, anxious New Yorkers line the streets waiting for news about the sunken vessel. 1912
Over fifteen hundred people died the night the Titanic sank, April 14-15, 1912. The early reports from the New York newspapers, of course, spent their time mourning the city’s most connected figures to society.
Even from some of the most obsessive sources on the Titanic, the details on the lives of dozens of men and women who died below deck are sometimes hard to locate.
There’s always been something slightly unsettling about using primary news sources for Titanic research. The bias towards wealthy lives over poor ones — and of American and British lives to all others — can be a little unsettling.
For instance, an anecdote from an April 20, 1912, article in the New York Times: “…[I]t became known among those saved from the Titanic were six or eight Chinamen who were among the steerage passengers on the big liner. It seems that they climbed aboard one of the lifeboats without anybody making objection, despite the fact that many of the women in the steerage of the Titanic went down with the ship.“
Titanic’s Lifeboats at The White Star Lines Pier 54 in NYC after Sinking. [source]
But this was indeed a tragedy that shook most of the entire world to its core and, in particular, changed the lives of many Americans, from tenements to townhouses.
The old-family names and the wizards of business (Astor, Straus, Guggenheim) have been well documented. But here I present the fates of five well-off but perhaps lesser-known New York women who survived the sinking of the Titanic with intriguing stories of their own to tell:
Dr. Alice Farnham Leader Born in New York, May 10, 1862
Alice would have been among the second generation of women trained in medicine, and a career in pediatrics was one of the few that a women of her day could ably progress towards. As late as 1907 she was employed at Bellevue Hospital as ‘a social service nurse‘.
However she wasn’t a practicing doctor by the time she boarded the Titanic; the 49 year old had retired when her husband died in 1908.
She was rescued by lifeboat no. 8, commanded by one of the Titanic’s most famous names: Noël Rothes, the Countess of Rothes. “The countess is an expert oarswoman and thoroughly at home in the water,” Alice told the press, who sadly seemed more interested in the fate of the titled gentry than of this mysterious doctor who appears to have avoided the spotlight for the remainder of her life.
Afterwards: Dr. Leader is mentioned in a Utah newspaper in 1916, discussing the crisis of graying hair. Her solution: “A head exercise for circulation is to lie on the couch with the head projecting beyond the couch. Bend the head forward, backward, to each side, to each side, then rotate.” Died: April 20, 1944
Irene (Rene) Harris Born: June 15, 1876
A New York stage actress with some considerable credits to her name, Harris boarded the Titanic with her husband Henry Birkhardt Harris, the theater impresario and partner (with Jesse Lasky) in the Folies Bergere, which has just opened in midtown the year before.
Irene made it to a lifeboat but her beloved husband perished on the Titanic. The Times recounts her cable to the Hudson Theater: “Praying that Harry has been picked up by another steamer.”
Afterwards: Returning to the New York theater in grief, she sued the White Star Line for a large petition of damages, and perhaps with good reason; she discovered when she got home that her husband was nearly bankrupt from the Folies Bergere venture and other flops.
So she decided to make her own money, soon becoming one of Broadway’s first female producers with such shows as ‘Lights Out’ and ‘The Noose’ and buying a Park Avenue apartment.
But her wealth didn’t make it out of the Great Depression, and she spent her last days living in Manhattan hotels. In 1958, she was subjected to a screening of the Hollywood film ‘A Night To Remember‘. “I think your film title is a mistake,” she said. “It was a night to forget.” Died: September 2, 1969
Margaret Hays Born: December 6, 1887
If not for the tragic sinking of the Titanic, Margaret Hays’ fate might have made a charming family comedy. The young woman lived at304 West 83rd Street and had gone to Europe with two school friends Olive and Lily.
And there was another lady with her on the Titanic that fateful night — Margaret’s Pomeranian dog.
All three friends and her little dog too made it to a lifeboat, but Margaret’s story was just beginning.
Onboard the rescue ship Carpathia were two small frightened French boys.
The ‘Titanic orphans’, named Michel and Edmond (not Louis & Lola!).
They had been separated from their father Michel who was never found. Hays, who spoke French, took the boys into her care during the somber voyage and well after they arrived in New York. They stayed at her home on West 83rd — she distracted the distraught boys with carriage rides up Riverside Drive — until their mother arrived from France.
On her arrival, it was revealed that their father had taken the two boys against their mother’s will during a bitter divorce battle.
Afterwards: Hays married a Rhode Island doctor and lived in relative comfort, dying during a vacation in Argentina. Died: August 21, 1956
Leila Meyer Born in New York, September 28, 1886
The young socialite and daughter of Andrew Saks (founder of Saks Fifth Avenue) met aspiring Wall Street broker Eugene Meyer and married him in 1909.
While traveling, Leila was wired the tragic news that her father had died. (Later, she discovered that a sizable part of their fortune had been willed to her.) Leila and her husband boarded the Titanic to return home. She made it to a lifeboat; her husband died aboard the ship.
Afterwards: She later remarried and lived the remainder of her life at 970 Park Avenue, rarely speaking to the press about her tragedy, although her spectacular jewelry collection was frequently remarked upon in women’s magazines. Died: November, 27, 1957
Mrs. Charlotte Appleton Born in New York, December 12, 1858
Charlotte was well versed in the thrill of ocean travel. Her father, once a well-known dry goods importer, worked for the firm which operated theBlack Ball Line, one of the oldest shipping companies in New York and no stranger to a few shipwrecks of its own.
She married into the prestigious Appleton publishing family and was on the Titanic with two sisters, returning from a funeral in England.
Afterwards: Mrs. Appleton’s name is familiar with Titanic buffs as she was an acquaintance of Col. Archibald Gracie IV, the great-grandson of the man who built Gracie Mansion and one of the more notable bold-faced names on the Titanic. Mrs. Appleton lived the remainder of her life at 214-33 33rd Road, the oldest house in Bayside, Queens.
Died: June 25th, 1924
Some pictures and many of the birth/death dates above are courtesy Encyclopedia Titanica. Top picture courtesy the Library of Congress.
This story was originally published on the 100th anniversary of the Titanic and refreshed the honor the 110th anniversary.
Benjamin Franklin helped to create the modern world. His legacy is all around you — from the electricity which powers and illuminates our homes to the ideas that form our system of government.
For the past three episodes of The First: Stories of Inventionsand their Consequences (the Bowery Boys spin-off podcast from 2016-2018), Greg Young has taken you through the story of the Founding Father’s extraordinary life by way of his inventions — printing innovations, the Franklin stove, the bifocals.
In his final years, as the most esteemed member of Congress, he brought his scientific mind into service to create a new country.
All three episodes of this series are now available. You can find The First: Stories of Inventions on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Overcast or wherever you get your podcasts. (Just search for ‘The First Stories’.)
On November 19, 1895, Calvert Vaux went for a morning walk from his son’s home in Brooklyn. He never returned.
The 70 year old architect had helped to create the greatest parks in the cities of New York and Brooklyn.
His landscape collaborations with Frederick Law Olmsted had given Manhattan its Central Park and Brooklyn its Prospect Park and Fort Greene Park.
His own architectural work could be seen at Jefferson Market Courthouse, the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1895 he still retained an honorary role as the parks department’s landscape adviser, although he had mostly retired from public life.
Calvert Vaux, circa 1865-1871
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
His son Calvert Bowyer Vaux lived in a house on Twentieth Avenue between Bath and Benson Avenues in today’s neighborhood of Bath Beach. The elder Vaux often stayed with his son and was known for taking morning walks along the waterfront
On November 19, 1895, it was gray and foggy on the morning that Vaux departed his son’s home, leaving behind “a gold watch and chain and his vest” with about two dollars in his pocket.
Below: The New York Tribune made a brief mention of Vaux’s vanishing in the followingone-sentence bulletin:
At some point during the day he was spotted by a “Captain Ditmar” — possibly Captain Walter Earl Ditmar — on a pier near the water, and the two briefly spoke. Vaux is reported to have said to the captain, “I’m admiring the improvements you’ve made hereabouts.”
The two briefly talked about methods in which to make the beach area more amenable to visitors before Vaux proceeded to walk the piers by himself.
Ditmar was the last person to see Vaux alive.
The architect must have been known for taking very long walks for he was only discovered missing in the late afternoon.
By the evening his family became worried; the police were called the following morning. All the local hospitals and hotels were checked. While it was well-known that Vaux was a frail man, he was often known to walk up to Prospect Park, several miles from his son’s home. But fears that he may have fallen into the bay were already present.
Below: An 1889 map of the district Vaux’s son lived in. The elder Vaux was last seen along the shoreline depicted here.
The following day the body of Calvert Vaux was indeed found in Gravesend Bay at the foot of Bay 17th Street, very close to the site of today’s Bath Beach Park.
As described by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“A workman on Fry’s coal dock [later identified as Benjamin Butler] first saw the body being tossed about in the rough water, but when he rushed to the shore to secure the corpse it disappeared. It was some minutes later before Mr. Fry himself saw it drifting alongside the bulkhead out to sea again. With a boat hook he succeeded in bringing it close to shore.”
The police were called, bringing Vaux’s son down to the shore to identify the body. He could scarcely bring himself to look into his father’s face, recognizing his father’s well-worn suit before looking away.
“There was a bruise on the head, a slight cut over the eye, and the hat, spectacles and left shoe were missing,” reported the Times.
Given the circumstantial evidence, it seems clear as to what may have happened to Mr. Vaux. While on a walk along the shore, he may have fainted or tripped, falling into the water and drowning in the waves.
The Sun further speculated: “As he was interested in the construction of the pier, it may be that he leaned over the stringpiece to examine the foundation piles. In doing so he may have fallen into the water, as he was ill and feeble, being 70 years old.”
Most press reports of the day made it clear no foul play was suspected. Vaux Jr. brushed away any suggestions of suicide on his father’s part. “The theory of suicide has been disclaimed by his relatives who said that [Vaux] had been cheerful and mentally able the evening before he disappeared.” [source]
But not everybody was convinced, and the Tribune reported that the “theory [of suicide] prevails with some people.”
Weeks earlier Vaux had told his daughter that he wanted to live long enough to see the completion of his plans in Central Park. “If I can only manage to live until 1898, my plans for the improvement of Central Park will be completed, and I won’t worry about any other work.”
Sadly Vaux’s death did have a certain impact on Central Park. Without the dutiful eye of its co-creator, maintenance on the park gradually deteriorated, and it would not be until the installation of Parks Commissioner Robert Moses that the condition of the park would be improved.
Today, nearby the place where Vaux’s body was discovered, you may enjoy a picnic and a sunset at Calvert Vaux Park in Gravesend.
Below: Calvert Vaux Park (the former Dreier-Offerman Park) has greatly improved since the 1960s when it was essentially an undeveloped mess, linked by a pedestrian bridge. Picture courtesy the New York City Parks Archives
It was once called Dreier-Offerman Park for the former home for unwed mothers which once sat here. It was changed to honor the architect in 1998 when it was radically re-landscaped and improved. Knowing that he died close to here, I kind of think being named after an unwed mother’s home is the less depressing name.
Picture at top: A forlorn pier from 1890, located at West Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.
Photograph by Robert Bracklow. Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
And here are some photographs I took in Calvert Vaux Park from a couple years ago:
When park designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux regrouped after the success of Central Park to design another great park for Brooklyn — encompassing Prospect Hill and the Revolutionary War site Battle Pass — they preserved a greater amount of natural topography than they had in Manhattan. But that doesn’t mean that Prospect Park hasn’t gone through a few radical changes of its own since it opened between the years 1867 and 1873.
Their Grand Army Plaza has experienced few changes since it opened in those years, but the structures around it have certainly changed, presenting some surprising views at the mighty war monuments.
New York Public LIbrary
1. Women of the Wellhouse The caption for this stereoscopic view (taken sometime in the 1870s-80s) calls this a ‘well house’, although it may have also been a a coal storage shed or even an outhouse! Brooklyn’s main reservoir was on Prospect Hill, and the park was constructed partially to protect the water source from encroaching developers.
2. Prospect Park Dairy As they had done in Central Park, Olmsted and Vaux infused the landscape with various romantic, fairytale-like structures, including this dairy house, providing guests with milk straight from the cow. Central Park still has a version of their dairy, but Prospect Park’s was regrettably torn down in the 1930s to make way for the Prospect Park Zoo. (NYPL)
Library of Congress
3. Brooklyn Sheep
Sure, you many know Sheep Meadow in Central Park once had actual sheep grazing — they were considered a rustic design ornament and a natural landscaper — but what happened to the animals after Robert Moses kicked them out in 1934? Like so many trendy things, they moved to Brooklyn! They joined Prospect Park’s already thriving sheep colony (pictured below, from 1903) before moving on to other pastures. (Courtesy LOC)
New York Public Library
4. Floral Steps, 1904 The manicured flora that grace these steps predates the Brooklyn Botanic Garden by several years. The stairs are still there today, of course, though unadorned.
Courtesy Dept of Records
5. Drinking Fountains With water aplenty, Prospect Park has been dotted with drinking fountains since its inception. This rather unusual fountain, from 1938, may still be around, but I doubt you’ll see anybody drinking from it.
6. Deer Paddock The zoo also replaced the rather extraordinary Deer Paddock, where the sometimes docile creatures were allowed to wander around. This despite some of them occasionally escaping and running into the surrounding neighborhood (as one adventurous buck did in 1906).
NYPL
7. Stately Reservoir Tower High atop Brooklyn’s second highest point on Mount Prospect sits the reservoir tower, only a couple decades old (1893) but looking like a medieval ruin in this image. Date of this picture is unknown, although the ground for the Brooklyn Public Library main branch building was broken in 1912, so it was clearly sometime before then. The Brooklyn Museum is in the distance. [NYPL]
Library of Congress
8. And, yes, the Reservoir itself The reservoir was built here in 1856 and was meant to be included within the park designs. With Flatbush Avenue ultimately cleaving the hill from the rest of the proposal, Olmsted and Vaux left it out. This picture is from between 1910-1920. [LOC]
9. From high above This bird’s eye view from 1951 illustrates the plaza’s similarities to that of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
10. Library vista And this view is from two weeks ago! During the Partners In Preservation Open House, the staff at the Brooklyn Public Library main branch led guided tours to the rooftop, offering a very particular take on the plaza. And if my camera had been better, you would see off in the distance the Statue of Liberty, situated several miles away.
Pictured above is a remarkable structure that once dominated the scenery on the northern side of Central Park.
This was the Academy of Saint Vincent on a hill that bore its name. Located on the northern portion of the park, next to the charming Harlem Meer (and nearest 103rd Street), the Academy sat nestled amid a collection of hills and bluffs left over from its original pre-park topography.
Below: House on the hill: the stark and mysterious convent of Central Park, 1861
Washington Passes Through
A narrow passage next to the convent was named McGowan’s Pass after Andrew McGowan, owner of a popular tavern that sat here called the Black Horse Tavern. (It is often spelled McGown.)
It was through McGowan’s Pass that George Washington traveled on September 15, 1776.
He and a portion of the Continental Army had escaped up to today’s Washington Heights area; when hearing that part of his army had been stopped by the British, Washington rode down the pass and led the remaining troops back up to their fortification in the Heights.
He rode back through the pass again seven years later, this time as the victor.
The British and their Hessian mercenaries built forts here to cut Manhattan off from the mainland. Later New Yorkers would seize upon this idea during the early days of the War of 1812.
Not willing to become property of the British once again, Manhattan mobilized for any potential battles, building forts all over the island and throughout the harbor.
The Ghost of Old Forts
It was here at McGown’s Pass that a couple fortifications were built, including Fort Clinton (not to be confused with the fort in Battery Park, although both were named for DeWitt Clinton) and Fort Fish, named after Major Nicholas Fish, father of the New York senator Hamilton Fish.
Nothing much remains of these two old forts, which were never used as the war thankfully never made its way to the city. There are, however, two remaining structures from the early days.
A stone ledge overlooking the meer is all that remains of Nutter’s Battery, named after a farmer who owned the property. And nearby stands the Block House, its stone face still fairly solid, once armed with cannons and used to hold ammunition — that were, of course, never needed.
The Block House was fairly intact when Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux included it in their plans for the new park, incorporating the existing building as a ‘picturesque ruin’ covered in vines.
Here’s an illustration of how the Block House looked in 1860:
Holy Sanctuary
Before there was a park, however, there were nuns. In 1847 the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul arrived at the still-bucolic region of Manhattan and opened the Academy of St. Vincent, a school and convent.
The nuns left when the area was incorportated into the park, however the building remained standing and utilized for several purposes. During the Civil War, it was briefly used as a hospital; later, it was a “restaurant and hostelry,” with some certainly spectacular views for guests.
Below: Some sculptured works of Thomas Crawford in the interior of Mount St. Vincent’s Convent, Central Park, north end.]
In 1895, McGowan’s was strangely granted its own election district as, being inside the park, it lay outside normal district boundaries. “There were four voters in this territory last year,” declared the New York Times. “They are four men employed at McGowan’s Pass Tavern.” The tavern was eventually torn down in the late 1910s.
Below: McGowan’s Pass Tavern (date unknown, but possibly around the early 1910s)
This is a bit tangental, but I love this story:
A plaque was erected at the old site of Fort Clinton in 1906 and unveiled in a publicized community event for children. It was apparently difficult for some people to find the location and “several chivalrous lads” guided people through the park to the unveiling.
However, the Times reports an incident that might be the only real battle that ever occured at this storied historical spot:
“Among the boys interested in the tablet unveiling were several whose spirit of mischief overcame their sense of the proprieties. These made misleading arrow signs …. and caused a number of persons to go far afield and arrive at the exercises late and angry. These mischievous youngsters were caught at their annoying trick by boys who were more sober and serious. Then there was a short scrimmage, and the mischievous lads scurried away through the Park.”
Its dimensions are greatly distorted of course, but it lists the forts and blockhouses that stood in this area as well as those such as Fort Gansevoort and Fort Greene (click on the image to look at it more closely):
**This story originally ran in 2011. All pictures courtesy the New York Public Library except where otherwise noted
Theodore Roosevelt Park (77th and 81st Streets, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue), which contains the beloved American Museum of Natural History, is the oldest developed section of the Upper West Side, purchased by the city in 1839 as a possible strolling park to be called Manhattan Square.
Museum of the City of New York
Central Park was but a gleam in the eye back in 1839!The Grid Plan of 1811 had divvied up upper Manhattan into organized blocks but not much was properly developed in the early 19th century. There were few suitable transportation options and thus upper Manhattan was only sparsely populated.
Near this spot on the grid was the old African-American settlement of Seneca Village, which was later wiped away with the development of Central Park.
Below: A sketch by Egbert Viele from 1857 showing the remains of the small village of Seneca Village. Manhattan Square would have been off to the upper left portion of this image.
The original grid plan had no significant parks built into it so later city planners had to carve some out themselves.
Unfortunately, the city almost literally forgot all about Manhattan Square — it’s even included in an 1860 New York Times article headlined NEWLY-DISCOVERED CITY PROPERTY!
To be fair, the land had been granted to the Central Park Commission which was rather busy developing the park proper. As a result, Manhattan Square’s rugged and unpleasant terrain became an eye sore and rather dangerous for any actual visitors.
Samuel Ruggles, developer of both Union Square and Gramercy Park, once squawked, “It is a disgrace to the city. It is in some places forty feet below the grade and well characterized as a pestilential hole of stagnant water.”
Below: From the late 1870s, the solitary American Museum of Natural History building sits on the spot of Manhattan Square, now leveled out for public enjoyment, even if the lots surrounding it are quite barren.
In the early 1860s, the city proposed selling off this sorely underused area of land.
At one point, during the Civil War, some suggested it be turned into a proper military parade ground.
“Manhattan-square [has] been proposed for the parade-ground; over Manhattan-square the Commissioners have control and it is understood that they are willing to assign it, but, just now, they have not the funds which its preparation would require.” [source]
The next plan was to make a zoo!
Animals had accumulated near the Central Park Arsenal as a make-shift ‘menagerie‘ — abandoned pets, former circus animals, far-flung beasts brought over on ships. At one point it was determined to move those animals to a more formal Zoological Garden, to be built on the much abused area of Manhattan Square.
From 1865: “The Zoological Gardens are about to be commenced at Manhattan-square, and the commissioners fully expect to have this valuable garden completed before the Summer wanes.”
Below: The chaos of the Central Park menagerie, depicted in an 1866 illustration
Harpers Weekly
Those planned fell through of course. Today the Central Park Zoo marks the location of that former menagerie.
By 1872, the Central Park Commission would utilize Manhattan Square for another mission, designating it the home for the American Museum of Natural History.
Apartment developers later flocked to the park’s edges, drawn to its proximity to other fashionable apartment houses in the neighborhood like the Dakota Apartments (at 72nd Street, built in 1884).
Below: 44 West 77th Street. Manhattan Square Studio Apartment, photographed in 1910
MCNY
Of course, you may not know it by that name today either. From the New York Department of Parks and Recreation: “Neighborhood residents have traditionally referred to the parkland as Museum Park or Dinosaur Park.”
Below: The fully expanded museum as it looked in 1913
Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street, location of the post gambling den. (Detroit Publishing Company
A tantalizing stretch of New York nightlife history lies in the shadows, illegally operated, often fueled by police bribes — the opium dens of Chinatown and the speakeasies of the Village and midtown.
There were also hundreds of illicit gambling rackets, called ‘poolrooms’, throughout the city in the late 19th century, usually alongside the seediest of taverns, brothels and poolrooms.
Naturally, the pastime was not looked upon lightly by proper society. “The poolroom keeper, like the proverbial worm,” remarked one New York Times article from 1900.
But New York’s wealthy elite liked to gamble as well, and there was no need for them to step into such filthy, disreputable places. The rich had their own houses of vice.
And one, the House with the Bronze Door, which opened in 1891, would have rivaled the great casinos of the day in terms of its lush presentation.
House of Cards
The fine townhouse at 33 West Thirty-third Street sat right around the corner from the Waldorf-Astoria, so close to respectable Fifth Avenue that people certainly strolled by it with no clue of the entertainments within.
Its glorious, defining feature — and where it gets its name — was a $20,000 Italianate Renaissance, 15th century bronze door which gave the building the feel of a classic structure, or perhaps a bank vault.
Luxury greeted those who were fortunate to peer behind that door, imported old school finery, from vases to oil paintings on rich wallpapered walls, along hallways in red velvet carpeting, leading to game rooms with European oak tables hosting games of roulette, poker and baccarat.
In a place where wealth exchanged hands nightly, it was reflected in the imported banisters and marble bathrooms.
High Stakes
And it wasn’t just how it looked, but who designed it to look that way — none other than Stanford White of the city’s most prestigious design firm McKim, Mead and White, a gambling man himself who hired a team of Venician craftsman to give the gambling house its distinctive glamour.
The building next door also belonged to the casino, but was less impressively designed; its sole purpose was as an exit in case of police raids.
The owner Frank Farrell* was New York’s gambling kingpin, using profits from the Bronze Door to fund over 200 illegal gambling houses throughout the city and grease the palms of police officers to ensure they all stayed open.
If that name sounds familiar to sports fans, it’s because of a riskier gamble Farrell made in 1903 with his business partner William Stephen Devery. (Yes, the former police chief. See how it used to work back then?)
The two purchased the Baltimore Orioles, moved them to New York, lost a lot of money, renamed the team as the New York Yankees and promptly sold them to beer mogul Jacob Ruppert.
Below: Farrell with a Yankees team member in 1912. He would sell off the losing team a few years later. Courtesy Library of Congress
A Night at the Tables
The only people taking risks at the Bronze Door, however, were the rich and well connected clientele. On any given evening you could find the head honchos of Tammany Hall smoking cigars in the corner, or ‘Diamond’ Jim Brady and his entourage at the upstairs roulette wheel.
According to Lloyd Morris: “The casino was conducted with the quiet decorum of a gentleman’s club.” These men expected the royal treatment, and they got it. A midnight buffet of lobsters and steaks, open bar of the best liqueurs, fine cigars for a $1 apiece. More importantly, Farrell strictly applied a philosophy of ‘the customer is always right’. Unlike many of Farrell’s downtown dive, where the house often rigged games and marked cards, the gambling den behind the Bronze Door was straight.
There was little nickel and diming here. It’s purported that fifty thousand dollars would hit the tables each night.
Gamblers would win, and then lose, vast fortunes each night. As Luc Sante so elegantly states: “… the stories of rich men dropping enormous sums in a single evening kept topping each other, so that the phenomenon almost comes to seem like a version of potlatch, in which wealth is proven by the ability to shed it.”
Depiction of a 19th century casino. At the House of the Bronze Door, it was unlikely that women were allowed however.
Luck Runs Out
The casino stood in defiance of the law for almost a dozen years thanks to Farrell’s connections and the reputation of its clientele. However, given the New York’s waxing and waning reform movements, its time would eventually come, and it did so at the hands of one William Travers Jerome, New York’s district attorney with a particular bent for reform.
Jerome shut down casinos and poolrooms throughout the city and didn’t discriminate, successfully breaching that imposing door and raiding the club in 1908.
Although the games were gone, the place remained open for many years afterwards, as a restaurant owned by the Waldorfs according to official sources. What its true nature was in these later years is unknown.
The building is completely gone today, replaced with a condo and the shadow of the Empire State Building.
Below: District Attorney Jerome, 1915
*Farrell had other partners in the casino, including racetrack owner Gottfried Walbaum and Billy Burbridge, who later became a hotelier in Havana, Cuba.
“Such is the world, or, rather, one infinitesimal portion of the cosmos, in the year 2015, according to the ancient calendar, or 90 since the Terror.”
From the original illustrations of The Doomsman: a look up Park Row in 2015, a decrepit row of deteriorating structures. You can clearly see the ruins of old Post Office at the foot of City Hall Park. Compare this view to the photograph at the bottom of this post.
The destruction of New York City is a literary pastime that began in the late 19th century, usually in the hands of moralist writers seeking a little comeuppance upon the great evil of modern life.
By the year 1900, Manhattan had already been destroyed by nitroglycerin bombs (Park Benjamin Jr‘s ‘The End of New York,” 1880), left to waste in a future dystopia (John Ames Mitchell‘s The Last American, 1889), and cleansed with poison gas in a ‘revolutionary holocaust’ (Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century, written in 1890 by Congressman Ignatius Donnally).*
In 1906, the Episcopalian minister William Van Tassel Sutphen entered the fray with his own version of post-apocalyptic New York City in the novel The Doomsman, first serialized in Metropolitan Magazine.
What makes this book especially interesting today is that the breathless plot takes place in the year 2015. We’ve lived through that year so we can address what Sutphen got right. (The answer: nothing.)
Hole in One
Sutphen, an intellectual and New York literary sophisticate, is perhaps best known today as an early sports writer, best known for his observations on the sport of golf.
In 1898, he wrote the very Dr. Seuss-ianGolfers Alphabet. (“A is Arithmetic, handy to know/When the score figures up to a hundred or so.“) His most popular book remains 1901’s The Nineteenth Hole: Being Tales of the Fair Green, featuring humorous stories along the sporting course.
He was closely associated with Harper Brothers, writing and editing for the publishing house for most of his life. It was for Harpers that Sutphen wrote The Doomsman, his first non-golf book.
Doom and Gloom
The Doomsman is Anglo-Saxon fantasy, Game of Thrones lite, turning the New York metropolitan era into a landscape of wild vales and stockades. But its most interesting element is the depiction of a future Manhattan neglected and overcome, its ruins lorded by the vicious remnants of mankind.
Keep in mind however this is 1906 Manhattan.
This is the futuristic version of an old landscape. The novel’s version of a dismantled America should be familiar to anyone whose watched a recent disaster film or enjoyed an episode of The Walking Dead.
“For miles and miles the ruined city stretched away, a wilderness of brick and mortar. Here and there were areas of blackness and vacancy, where fire had worked its will. The business section, with its substantial shops and warehouses, and the central district, made up of the clubs, churches, theatres and the handsomer private homes, remained intact. And yet, withal, the spectacle was a singularly mournful and depressing one, for nowhere were there any signs of life.”
It’s 2015, and New York City is now called Doom. At some point in the 1920s, a Great Change occurred, so instantly that few could prepare for the aftermath.
The wealthiest New Yorkers, “seiz[ing] upon the shipping in the harbors for their exclusive use,” fled via steamships. The remaining population were ravaged by the Terror, a combination of panic and disease, and left only a handful of survivors.
Most fled to the countryside but died there. All industry, “every form of thought and progress,” ceased to be. “The relapse into barbarism was swift.”
People escaped into new walled encampments and quickly divided into medieval classes. Walled fortifications appeared over the ruins of the outer boroughs, Long Island and Westchester.
Our hero Clemens is raised at Greenwood Keep (pictured above), some kind of stockade presumably in the area of Greenwood Cemetery.
The area is constantly terrorized by The Doomsmen, inhabitants of the ruins of Doom. When Clemens’ own home is savagely destroyed in an attack, Clemens vows to venture into Doom and seek his revenge on the nefarious warrior Quinton Edge.
Days of Future Past
In 1906, the year Doomsman was published, there was not yet a Woolworth Building, but downtown Manhattan was in the midst of a colossal building boom unlike any other.
The author plays upon the fears of the day. Unusual gases seeped from the broken sidewalks. Old stone adornments fall the sky, almost killing our hero.
New York’s skyscrapers still exist in 2015, but all were empty, hollowed out and falling apart; one skyscraper on Park Row “had settled and was leaning over at a terrifying divergence from the perpendicular.”
He eventually arrives at the main branch of the New York Public Library (above)— lion-less and half-completed in 1906 — and meets the tempestuous young Esmay whom he will eventually fall in love with.
With a little detective work, you can figure out many of the real-life locations depicted here. For instance, the walled city Croye, “the principal city of this western hemisphere in the year 2015,” is actually Yonkers. Perhaps because it’s already so ancient looking, one landmark retains its name — the High Bridge.
But most of the action takes place in Citadel Square, alongside the Palace Road (Broadway).
That’s actually Madison Square, which has become the encampment of the Doomsmen, many of whom are holed up in the White Tower — most likely the medieval-looking tower upon old Madison Square Garden.
Our hero takes up a home on the fourth floor of the peculiar building to its southern side, a structure that would have been sparkling new in the mid 1900s. “The building had been constructed upon a narrow, triangular plot of land, and its ground-plan bore a fanciful resemblance to the shape of a flat-iron.” From this vantage within the Flatiron Building, Clemens is able to launch arrows upon his enemy.
But perhaps its strangest detail comes from another obsession of the late 19th century — electricity. The Doomsmen worship The Shining One, an electric dynamo in an abandoned power plant. A crazed priest has been able to reconnect the power and turn — get this — an electric chair into the central relic of worship!
The Doomsman is hardly an unfairly forgotten masterpiece. Its racial and ethnic politics are frankly repellent, its female characters mostly stock characters of helpless maidens and selfish harpies. The prose is occasionally cinematic — that’s cinema in 1906 — perfect for a silent film adaptation that regrettably never happened.
At right: The original cover of the book featured the Flatiron Building
For a modern audience, it’s most interesting for its descriptions of Gilded Age ruin, of a city that never developed to embrace automobiles.
In a book that’s so conventionally swashbuckling, it’s startling to read passages like, “Hats and garments, cash-boxes and accountbooks, littered the hallways and were piled in little heaps at the entrances of elevators.”
This classic episode of the Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast (originally released in December of 2021) is featured in this week’s episode of the History Channel podcast HISTORY This Week.
Since 2011 the Bowery Boys Podcast has revisited a few of the themes featured in this show. After listening to this episode, give these installments a try:
PODCAST The streets of New York have been lit in various ways through the decades, from the wisps of whale-oil flame to the modern comfort of gas lighting. With the discovery of electricity, it seemed possible to illuminate the world with a more dependable, potentially inexhaustible energy source.
First came arc light and ‘sun towers’ with their brilliant beams of white-hot light casting shadows down among the holiday shoppers of Ladies Mile in 1880.
But the genius of Menlo Park, Thomas Edison, envisioned an entire city grid wired for electricity. From Edison’s Pearl Street station, the inventor turned a handful of blocks north of Wall Street into America’s first area entirely lit with the newly invented incandescent bulbs.
ALSO: It’s the War of Currents, the enigmatic Nicola Tesla and the world’s first electric Christmas lights.
The home of Samuel Leggett, the first to be illuminated with gas lighting, at 7 Cherry Street. This home stood just a few blocks from the location of Edison’s Pearl Street Station (255-7 Pearl Street), which would also change the way people consider lighting their city. (NYPL)
Inside the Pearl Street Station: Direct current surged through Edison’s generators to the neighboring blocks.
Laying the electrical wires under the streets of the blocks surrounding the Pearl Street station was an arduous, potential dangerous task. It took well over a year to complete the job. (Courtesy NYPL)
‘New York The Wonder City‘, and indeed it was, thanks to electricity. Whole neighborhoods, like Times Square and Coney Island, were defined by it. Landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge, thoroughfares like the Bronx’s Grand Concourse and even Broadway itself were transformed at night by electric power. (NYPL)
Nikola Tesla, the brilliant Serbian inventor who spent his final decades in New York living at the Hotel New Yorker.
Behold! The first Christmas tree with electrical lighting, courtesy Edison employee Edward Hibberd Johnson. This tree glittered and twirled from Johnson’s home in Murray Hill. (Courtesy Jim on Light)
On the fiftieth anniversary of the invention of the lightbulb, an elderly Thomas Edison ‘reinvents’ it in 1929 at a reconstructed laboratory in Dearborn, Michigan, to the delight of Henry Ford and newly elected President Herbert Hoover.
Jacob Riis changed the world with “How The Other Half Lives.” By using the new technology of flash photography, Riis was able to capture the squalid conditions of Manhattan tenements in a way no mere paragraph, drawing or sermon could.
The startling photographs contained in this book did not originate there, however. Riis debuted them — and would continue to exhibit them — in “magic lantern” lectures, essentially the first slide shows.
But calling them magic lanterns is far more exciting, don’t you think? Wouldn’t you have gone to class a lot more had you known your professor was lighting up the magic lantern?
The magic lantern’s “real” name, the stereopticon, used a succession of glass slides (as few synthetic, transparent materials were not available at the time) transposed with a negative image that could be projected onto a hanging sheet.*
The magic lantern was created in the 1840s in Philadelphia and was originally intended for entertainment. In fact, one of Riis’s first schemes in New York used the magic lantern in a rather clever way.
He and a business partner would set up a stereopticon in a public park — a precursor to the Bryant Park film series — and project images of attractive people and international public landmarks, interspersing the pictures with advertisements from businesses nearby.
By 1888, however, Riis (pictured right) was using the technology to display the devastating images he had taken in the various slums around town. His first show was to the New York Society of Amateur Photographers, giving a vivid account according to some sources.
“Mr. Riis was so ingenious in describing the scenes and brought to his task .. a vein of humor,” according to a newspaper account quoted in Tyler Anbinder’s book Five Points.
Riis eventually took his ‘illustrated lectures’ on the road, electrifying audiences both taken with the modern marvel of the magic lantern and the images captured by the newly developed flash photography. “His viewers moaned, shuddered, fainted and even talked to the photographs he projected, reacting to the slides not as images but as a virtual reality that transported the new York slum world directly into the lecture hall.”
In essence, Riis was giving the equivalent of a show-stopping IMAX show to illuminate the plight of New York’s poorest and the unsafe conditions of their tenements. His shows could be considered the prototype of the film documentary.
The presentations would come with fiery speeches by Riis, often using the rhetoric of religious sermons in service of a more progressive, social cause. The shows were so successful that Riis grabbed a book deal and in 1890, his lectures and photographs were contained in his masterpiece “How The Other Half Lives.”
Interest in the magic lantern hasn’t waned today; in fact there’s a national organization that still revels in the wonder of the projected still image.
By the way, you can still find Jacob Riis all over the city. There are the Jacob Riis Houses on East 10th Street and Avenue D, built in 1949 on the site of a clump of tenements Riis railed on about, as well as the Jacob Riis Settlement House in western Queens and high school in the Lower East Side. And of course, there’s a huge Robert Moses park in Far Rockaway named for him.
*Read here for an interesting short history of the magic lantern and how images adhered to the glass
Below: a home on Bleeker Street (at Mercer and Greene streets), a Jacob Riis image that certainly must have popped up in one of his magic lantern shows
Above: The arm of the Statue of Liberty stood solitary in Madison Square for six years, from 1876 to 1882.
Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, one of the forgotten names in Statue of Liberty history was born in Paris. As the godfather of historical restoration, Viollet-le-Duc would rescue countless medieval structures from decay, helping to preserve the spirit of French architecture through such buildings as Notre-Dame and Mont Sant-Michel.
But it’s through his association with his student Frédéric Bartholdi that Viollet-le-Duc would make his mark in America, as the original designer of the Statue of Liberty‘s brick-laden skeleton.
Viollet-le-Duc would work with Bartholdi in creating both the head and the arm, parts that would then travel to the United States to raise funds for the completed structure.
In particular, the arm and torch would be displayed in the northwest corner of Madison Square Park, from 1876 to 1882. On July 4th, 1876, a gigantic painting byJean-Baptiste Lavastreof the completed statue was displayed on a building across the street from the arm.
Below: The arm would also make its way to the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.
Sadly, Viollet-le-Duc would never again see these portions of the statue, as he died in 1879 before the entire structure was completely built. Bartholdi then turned to another architect to complete the work — Gustave Eiffel. It’s Eiffel’s redesigned interior that supports the statue today.
In 1889, three years after the Statue of Liberty finally made its home in New York harbor, Eiffel debuted his better known work — the Eiffel Tower — at the Paris World’s Fair.
But the somewhat radical theories of restoration espoused by Viollet-le-Duc would inspire American architects and inform the direction of modern historical preservation.
In 1863, New Yorkers flocked to the waterfront to see a startling sight — Russian war ships in New York Harbor. They were here as a display of force, but not to threaten the United States.
The fleet of Russian ships, sailing into New York Harbor in September 1863, as depicted by Harper’s Weekly.
Russia’s Atlantic Squadron, as the fleet was known, was patrolling the Atlantic Ocean as a show of strength against England’s Royal Navy.
They arrived in the harbor on September 24, 1863, initially anchoring in Flushing Bay, and stayed in the city for a couple months. (A description of the various Russian vessels can be found in this 1863 New York Times report.)
The fleet was led by the massive frigate Alexander Nevski (pictured below), an American-designed ship commissioned and built by the Russian government.
A reporter for Harper’s Weekly, joining a reception onboard the vessel, praised its beauty. “A lady with the most immaculate skirts and kid gloves can move any where, on deck or below, without danger of soiling either, so perfectly clean every thing about the ship is kept.”
America was in the midst of the Civil War, and New York itself was still recovering from the Draft Riots that July.
Many Americans believed the appearance by the Russians underscored a healthy support for the Union over the Confederacy, but most scholars today believe the Russians were acting with far more self-interest.
Still, most New Yorkers embittered by war welcomed the impressive show by friendly foreign powers, kicking off “a slight craze in the public mind.”
Harper’s Weekly remarked, ” [E]very citizen felt bound to do what in him lay to testify to the Russians our sense of gratitude for the friendly manner in which Russia has stood by us in our present struggle, while the Western Powers [England and France] have done not a little to work our ruin.”
New Yorkers marveled at the mighty mast of the Alexander Nevsky, “lying almost on a line westward from Trinity Church,” as it shot off its cannons and a band on-board attempted to play ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.’
The ship officially docked on the west side at 23rd Street, and the procession, joined by city leaders, marched through the streets (pictured at left, courtesy NYPL), past Union Square and down Broadway.
“[T]he scene became splendidly animated. The moving pageant rolled in a glittering stream down the broad thoroughfare between banks of upturned human faces, the trappings of the equipages, the gold and silver epaulets of the Muscovite guests and the sabres, helmets, and bayonets of the escort reflecting back in unnumbered dazzling lines the glory of the evening sun.” In particular, New York women were captivated by the brawny Russian contingent in their handsome uniforms. “Throngs of ladies in the windows most vigorously waved their ‘kerchiefs, to the great delight of the Russian officers, who never left off bowing, smiling, and even uttering their thanks aloud, while they doffed their gold-laced chapeau.”
(Not every woman was infatuated. The following day, two Russian officers reported being robbed by three women “at a disreputable house.“)
Below: A group of Russian soldiers, taken October 1863, courtesy Library of Congress
The finest hotels of New York were adorned with American and Russian flags. Tiffany’s, at its location on Broadway between Prince and Spring Streets, unfurled a gigantic Russian banner that stretched the length of the building.
Throughout the following weeks, the Russians were continually feted by the grateful Americans. At a dinner with Mary Todd Lincoln and other American dignitaries, Mrs. Lincoln toasted the Russians for their kindness.
Russian dignitaries frequently met with Mayor George Opdyke and the Common Council and were wined and dined at virtually every hotel in town, including an opulent banquet at the Academy of Music in early November (depicted below in an illustration in Harper’s Weekly).
“They are dined, walked, driven, and are, with unconcealed gratification, availing themselves of the many opportunities of seeing us and all around and about us,” said the New York Times that October. “Yesterday, a number visited Central Park and enjoyed its fine drives and beautiful walks; others were whirled to High Bridge, and others were entertained with City sights of interest.”
The Russian ships would remain in American waters for almost seven months, darting up and down the coast, including a period of time in Washington D.C.
And it took place at a quite surprising venue — the Grand Opera House. Surprising in the sense that it seems unusual that an opera house stood at this spot at all.
Above: the opera house in 1925 as seen looking east on 23rd Street. Below: in a picture from 1895
Courtesy the Museum of the City of New York
Pike’s Place
The opera house sprang up in 1868, the project of Samuel N. Pike, who purchased the land directly from Chelsea estate owner Clement Clarke Moore himself. In fact, the original Moore estate was located only a block away.
The Pike Opera House, as it was called in those days, was Pike’s play for legitimacy in New York. A German immigrant who arrived in the U.S. in 1837, Pike lived in New York for a few years and made his fortunes in wine imports. Aspiring to upper-crust tastes, Pike fell in love with opera music after viewing performances byPT Barnum chanteuse Jenny Lind.
“Samuel N. Pike was an extraordinary man in many ways. In appearance he was rather above the middle height, and slender. He wore a heavy, full mustache, after the manner of that period, and though dark complexioned, had very piercing steel-gray eyes. He had a short, abrupt way of speaking, and though good to his employees, was not familiar with any of them. He always dressed in the height of fashion, wore a silk hat and used perfume……
He was crippled in one of his fingers, but in spite of this was accounted a fine amateur flute player.”
Pike constructed a massive opera house in his adopted home of Cincinnati in 1859 and many years later built a companion here in Manhattan at 23rd Street. It officially opened on January 9, 1868.
He was banking on the growth of the New York theater along 23rd Street. Meanwhile the wealthy preferred the Academy of Music down on 14th Street. While some stages would come to 23rd Street, it would bethe arrival of retail and Ladies Mile that would come to define this street by the 1880s.
Courtesy New York Public LIbrary
A Stage for Scoundrels
The theater was spectacular — perhaps too spectacular for the location. “A striking feature seen on entering is the grand foyer, the largest in any theater in the city, open in part to the roof. A stairway of unusual width leads to the balcony….The stage, one of the largest in New York, is eighty feet wide and seventy feet deep, and the green-room is much the most extensive in the city.” [Kings Handbook]
The following year, Pike sold his lavish hall to two rather unlikely investors — Jim Fisk and Jay Gould, grade-A robber barons, pals of Boss Tweed and the orchestrators of the Black Friday Panic of 1869. Why would these two nefarious characters want an opera house?
Below: A detail from the Grand Opera House taken in the 1930s
Photo by Berenice Abbott
The house’s upper floors doubled as the offices of their own Erie Railway venture. Fisk’s mistress Josie Mansfield was frequently installed into productions at the now-named Grand Opera House; it was even rumored her next-door apartment was connected to the opera house with an underground tunnel.
However it does seem that Fisk and Gould were legitimately aficionados of the theater, or at very least fans of the elite who would attend them, and the profits that would follow. The Grand Opera House would soon showcase a great number of theater endeavors outside of opera.
But unfortunately for Fisk (pictured below) the greatest show the Grand Opera House ever presented was his own wake.
The Murder of Jim Fisk
On January 7, 1872, Fisk was fatally shotat the Grand Central Hotelby Manfield’s new lover Edward Stiles Stokes. He died the following day. The robber baron was so associated with the Opera House that his body lay in state here, attended by thousands of mourners and perhaps tens of thousands of curiosity seekers.
“The showy coffin, liberally adorned with gold-plated ornaments, rested on two low stands, and in this, garbed in the gold-laced uniform of the colonel of the Ninth [regiment], lay Fisk, his mustache carefully waxed, white kid gloves on his hands, and his feet buried in white flowers, in various devices.” [source]
His business partner Gould would continue operating the Opera House for several years afterwards, eventually renting it out to vaudeville shows and ‘second-run’ Broadway productions, its fortunes disintegrating as theater moved uptown and the Chelsea neighborhood became more middle-class.
Changing the Scenery
Like many old stages before it, the Grand Opera House switched to films in the 1920s. RKO tried its best to rehabilitate the space, hiring Thomas Lamb to renovate the theater with modern flourishes, reopening the space as theRKO 23rd Street Theatre (seen below in 1927):
Courtesy Museum of the City of New York
Outside the opera house-turned-movie theater:
Courtesy New York Public Library
The site remained a movie house through the 40s and 50s, finally closing on June 15, 1960. In a further indignity, the Opera House was thoroughly gutted in a fire.
Today a three-story office and retail building sits on the spot of the opera house. Most New Yorkers are familiar with this corner due to the Dallas BBQ which graces the corner. Fisk might have been way into their Texas-sized margaritas.
