Ephemeral New York
Chronicling an ever-changing city through faded and forgotten artifacts
is this the most wonderful sign in Soho?
November 3, 2014
Long before Soho became Soho, Fanelli’s was a no-frills bar that served up cheap food and drinks for the men who worked in the neighborhood’s factories, plus the occasional artist or stumblebum.
And at least since the 1970s, that neon sign
has been affixed to the red-brick building at the corner of Prince and
Mercer Streets, a wonderful sight on a cold New York City night.
Fanelli’s
has a long and fascinating history. The building that houses the bar
apparently has been around since 1857, when a grocery store was located
on the ground floor, according to newyorkartworld.com.
A residential building on Prince Street
adjoined the Mercer Street building. “The suspicion arises that it must
have been used as a brothel since Mercer Street was lined on its west
side, almost solidly by brothels during the 1850s and 1860s,” states the site.
By the 1860s or 1870s, depending on your source, various saloons served beer and liquor there. In 1922, former boxer Michael Fanelli turned it into a cafe/speakeasy.
By the 1970s, Soho had arrived—and you know the rest of the story.
[Middle photo: Fanelli's in 1976, NYPL Digital Gallery. Bottom: Fanelli's in 1975, MCNY]
Harpo Marx on Yorkville’s corrupt Election Days
November 3, 2014
If
you think elections are corrupt these days, listen to what Adolph
“Harpo” Marx remembers about Election Day in turn of the 20th century
New York City.
It was “the one supreme holiday held every two years,” recalled Harpo in his autobiography Harpo Speaks . . . About New York. (Until 1906, mayors were elected to two-year terms.)
“The great holiday used to last a full thirty hours,” wrote Harpo. “On election eve, Tammany forces marched up and down the avenues
by torchlight, with bugles blaring and drums booming. There was free
beer for the men, and free firecrackers and punk for the kids, and
nobody slept that night.”
Schools and business closed for the day.
“Around noon a hansom cab, courtesy of Tammany Hall, would pull up in
front of our house.
Frenchie (Harpo’s tailor father)
and Grandpa, dressed in their best suits (which they otherwise wore
only to weddings, bar mitzvahs, or funerals), would get in the cab and
go clip-clop, in tip-top style, off to the polls.”
After the cab brought them back to the Marx family tenement on East 93rd Street between Lexington and Third Avenues,
Harpo’s father and grandfather (who wasn’t even a U.S. citizen) would
wait . . . until the hansom cab came back to take them to the polls a
second time.
“About
a half-hour later, the hansom cab would reappear, and Frenchie and
Grandpa would go off and vote again. If it was a tough year, with a
Reform movement threatening the city, they’d be taken to vote a third
time.”
Festivities began on election night.
“The streets were cleared of horses,
buggies, and wagons. All crosstown traffic stopped. At seven o’clock
fireworks began to go off, the signal that the polls were closed.
Whooping and hollering, a whole generation
of kids came tumbling down out of the tenements and got their bonfires
going. By a quarter after seven, the East Side was ablaze.
“Grandpa enjoyed the sight as much as I did.
. . .He pulled his chair closer to the window and lit the butt of his
Tammany stoogie.
“‘Ah, we are lucky to be in America,’ he
said in German, taking a deep drag on the cigar he got for voting
illegally and lifting his head to watch the shooting flames. ‘Ah yes!
This is a true democracy.'”
[Middle illustration: "Election Night Bonfire," Glenn O. Coleman, date unknown]
A 1915 “hotel for hobos” opens on Worth Street
November 3, 2014
New York City has always had its homeless.
But their numbers increased here and across
the country after a recession in 1913, and again when World War I broke
out and Europe no longer placed orders for American goods.
What to do about all the hobos and tramps,
as they were called then, were a much talked-about problem. Soon an idea
was hatched: build a self-managed chain of hotels for down on their
luck, itinerant men who would pay for their room and board by working at
the hotel a few days a week.
The first “hotel de Gink” (gink was
contemporary slang for a hobo) opened in Seattle later that year. The
brainchild of Jefferson Davis, a man who dubbed himself “King of the
Hobos,” Seattle’s hobo hostel earned national attention.
By 1915, New York’s Hotel de Gink was
operating in a former button factory downtown at Centre and Worth
Streets. Davis presided over a strangely celebratory opening gala on
January 21 that was attended by vaudeville performers, politicians, and
about 100 homeless men who moved into the hotel.
“The factory building at Worth and Centre
Streets, where the Gink house was established, had lost all of its
dreariness last night,” reported the New York Times the next day.
Davis insisted that the hobos were there to
earn an honest living. “You will all be surprised when you see how we
pay our way with cash and earn cash to pay it, and not by taking
anybody’s job either,” he told a Times reporter. “We never cut the union rate and we never take a job a regularly employed person might be able to get.”
“While everybody has been shouting about
doing something for the unemployed here we have got in without anybody’s
help in the way of money and done a whole lot for ourselves.”
For a while, the Hotel de Gink seemed to run
smoothly. Residents paid $10 a month rent to the city for the building.
They took odd jobs, made mulligan stew and coffee for one another, and
even held social events. According to Davis (in photo above), 15,000 men passed through its doors.
In 1921, the Hotel de Gink had closed. The homeless were certainly still in New York City, but why they had to find other lodgings isn’t clear.
[Photos: G.G. Bain/Library of Congress]
A wet and windy night in Washington Square
October 27, 2014
Washington Square enchants in Everett Shinn’s depiction of a blustery and busy night there in 1910. A member of the Ashcan School, Shinn favored scenes of city life and social realism.
“He painted tenement fires, bread lines, and
theater scenes, but he especially liked to depict the parks and squares
of the city; Washington Square, a 13.5 acre park in the midst of New
York City’s Greenwich Village, was his favorite,” states the website for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which owns this painting.
When asked for his opinion on the most beautiful place in New York, Shinn replied,
“When I want to be sure to find beauty I go to Washington Square. . . .
No matter what the conditions may be under which I see it—no matter
what my mood may be—I feel almost sure that it will appeal to me as
beautiful.”
The rich widow haunting an uptown mansion
October 27, 2014
If you visit the lovely Morris-Jumel Mansion in Washington Heights and see a mysterious red-haired beauty, don’t be alarmed.
It’s just late-18th century New Yorker Eliza
Jumel, a notorious social climber who spent much of her adult life in
the home, shunned by society and eventually a recluse.
Born in Rhode Island in either 1773 or 1775
to a prostitute mother, Eliza spent her childhood in a workhouse before
making her way to New York City in the 1790s to become an actress . . .
and marry a rich, socially prominent man.
Young and beautiful, she began an affair with Stephen Jumel, an older French-born wine dealer.
“Eliza
became Jumel’s mistress and for four years he gave her all the material
possessions she could desire, but even those could not give her the
respectability of ‘proper’ society that she so desperately sought,”
wrote Michael Norman and Beth Scott in Historic Haunted America.
Eliza wanted to be married, so she feigned illness and begged Jumel to marry her. He agreed.
“According
to legend, no sooner had the priest married the couple and left the
house than Eliza sat up in bed and began brushing her long red hair,”
state Norman and Scott.
The Jumels moved from Whitehall Street to
the Roger Morris House, a summer home miles from the city that served as
George Washington’s temporary headquarters during the Revolutionary
War.
They redid the place with the latest
furnishings from France. But Eliza was shunned by New York’s social
scene and went back and forth to France with her husband, finally
returning to their home before 1832, the year Jumel died.
It wasn’t long before she found her next wealthy, connected man.
In
1833 she married former vice president Aaron Burr. It lasted a year,
thanks in part to Burr’s womanizing ways and desire for Eliza’s
inherited money.
For the next three decades, as New York City
grew and changed, Eliza remained in her uptown mansion, living and
dying alone in her early 90s in 1865.
Though buried five blocks away in Trinity Cemetery on 155th Street, her spirit supposedly haunts her former home, now surrounded by city streets.
“A governess for a child of one of Madame’s
nieces said dreadful rappings would occur in the floors and walls of the
old woman’s former bedroom,” wrote Norman and Scott.
“One relative said her ghost, clad in all white, actually stood by her bed.”
And in the 1960s, a group of schoolkids
reported seeing “a red-haired woman come out on the balcony and press a
finger to her lips.
“She rebuked them for their noisy behavior. Her husband was ill and not to be disturbed, she chided.”
[Top: Eliza as a young beauty; second image: the Morris-Jumel Mansion today, from morrisjumel.org; third image: Aaron Burr; fourth image: Eliza Jumel and younger relatives; fifth photo: Eliza, older]
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