Postcard Thursday: Snow Day

In honor of the snowstorm hitting New York City today, here are some photos from the New York Public Library's digital collection of snowstorms past. The photo above shows a stretch of Fifth Avenue ca. 1905 (the year the photo was printed) after a storm; unfortunately, there aren't enough revealing details to determine exactly where on the avenue this is.

This second card, from the same storm, shows Broadway between 29th and 30th Streets. The photographer was clearly drawn to the irony of the "Sarnoff Straw Hats" sign peeking out of a snow drift, but if you look just to the right of that you'll see the sign for Shanley's, which was a popular restaurant in that era. In operation from the 1890s to 1925, Shanley's was known as a "lobster palace," and a quick perusal of the menu makes it easy to see why: lobster appears in just about every possible preparation, along with oysters, other shellfish, and various unidentifiable dishes such as "cold corn starch."

This final photo may be from the same storm, but doesn't have an easily readable date. These children are sledding -- or "coasting" in the language of the day -- on a hill in Central Park.

Enjoy the snow and be careful out there!

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Read more about NYC history in

 

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Postcard Thursday: Joe DiMaggio's Hitting Streak

On July 16, 1941, New York Yankee Joe DiMaggio hit safely in his 56th consecutive game, setting a Major League record that has never been broken.

DiMaggio, the son of an immigrant from Sicily, hailed from San Francisco, and grew up near Fisherman's Wharf, where his father worked. As he recalled in his memoir:

Baseball to me in those days was merely an excuse to get away from the house and away from the chores of fishing. When Pop gave up trying to make me work on the boat, I gave up playing baseball in the sand patch by the Wharf, and tried my hand at selling newspapers, a job my father declared suited me perfectly since it consisted mostly of standing still and shouting. 

Vince, who had been far more successful than I in baseball, had quit high school to help support the family, although my mother’s advice was to continue his education. Two years later, I followed Vince. Up to the time my baseball playing had been sketchy. In fact, I almost stopped playing when I was 14. Our home was by Fisherman’s Wharf, close to the old North Beach playground, where I had my first baseball experience at the age of ten. I was third baseman in those days and played well enough to be on the usual teams with the kids around my block. 

Pop, having despaired of my ever becoming a fisherman, urged me to study bookkeeping. ‘It’s a job you can do sitting down,’ said Pop significantly, for he was convinced I was lazy.

After Joe became a superstar, he and his brothers Vince and Dom opened up the restaurant on Fisherman's Wharf shown in today's postcard, mostly as a way to get their father to retire. It's interesting that while DiMaggio spelled his name with no space between the "Di" and the "Maggio," there's not only a space on the marquee of the restaurant but on most of his baseball cards. It's also interesting that on his earliest cards it's "De Maggio" and that, on some, the manufacturers felt the need to put Joe in quotation marks since it was a nickname.

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Explore more NYC history in

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,

you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or

from independent bookstores across the country.

And, of course, Inside the Apple is available at fine bookstores everywhere.

What's a Gustavademecum?

As we enter the week in which Americans spend more on food than any other (including $875,840,000 on turkey alone), our thoughts turn naturally to dining. We were combing through the Inside the Apple archives the other day, when we came upon this charming little booklet from 1940: the "Gustavademecum for the Island of Manhattan," a sort of scientifically-minded forerunner to Zagat. As the cover notes, the booklet was "prepared for the convenience of mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and explorers," and it's a small wonder.

For those whose Latin is a little rusty, "Gustare" is to taste and "vade mecum" literally means "to go with me" but colloquially refers to a handbook. Thus, a Gustavademecum is a tasting handbook.

On the inside front cover, the guide has a key to its descriptions and symbols. Some are straightforward, such as C for Cafe and R for restaurant. Then comes "DATA, verifiable," including:

L=general illumination, measured in lumens per square foot or foot-candles. When L=0.1, menu is just legible. L=1, one wax candle one foot distant. L=200, north window at noon, January 1.

and

N=noise level, measured in decibels. N=20, country house, no children. N=50, conversation intelligible at 3 feet. N=70, shouting level.

For most entries in the book, all that is provided is the address, type of cuisine, and price of the least expensive meal. All the other data was to be filled in by the user. One of the most complete entries is the Greenwich Village Casino which has D50EO7x2 -- that means it had a 50-square-foot dance floor, entertainment, and two, seven-piece orchestras.

The least expensive restaurant in the guide is the Actor's Kitchen at 229 West 48th, where dinner was just 35 cents. (As the name suggests, the Actor's Kitchen existed to provide cheap meals to working actors.) The priciest entry is The Colony at 667 Madison, where the least expensive meal was a three-course dinner for $4.00. The Colony--which first became known as a gambling den--will be the subject of a future blog post.

Perusing the list of eateries, most are now gone. Some old favorites are listed such as the "21" Club, Fraunces Tavern, and Tavern on the Green, but most of these restaurants are now just a dim memory. On the page excerpted above, the only place we recognize that's still going is Marie's Crisis, the venerable West Village piano bar. However, the ghost of Moneta's at 32 Mulberry Street is still hanging around. If you go to this block of Mulberry (just north of Mosco Street, opposite Columbus Park), you can see the faint trace of Moneta's sign on the facade of 32 Mulberry, revealed when the bar Yello went out of business and its awning was removed.

In the coming weeks, we'll research some of the old restaurants in the Gustavademecum and post our findings. Is there any old New York eatery you wish you knew more about? Let us know.

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Read more about New York in the 1940s in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

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Taylor's Saloon

Yesterday, Curbed posted a short article about the renovation of 365 Broadway, which is being turned into 20-unit residential building.

The most famous tenant at 365 Broadway is undoubtedly Taylor’s Saloon, once one of the poshest restaurants in New York. As Scribner’s Magazine noted in 1911:

The founder of the business, John Taylor, established in 1851 a restaurant that was notable in its day, and later, at the corner of Broadway and Franklin Street. Taylor's Saloon, as it was then called, was looked upon as one of the most magnificent restaurants in the world.

In 1859, Norton’s Hand Book of New York City gushed:

The lofty saloon on the first floor, contains an area of seven thousand five hundred feet. The view from the two grand entrances is gorgeous. The floor is laid with beautiful marble tiles, the counters are of the purest marble; the ceilings are ornamented with bronze and gilt figures, and supported at the corners by kneeling figures of marble; the ceilings are ornamented with the most elaborate scroll work and gildings, the walls are mostly concealed by immense mirrors in rich frames, and the chairs and sofas are covered in rich cloth of crimson and gold.

(The italics, needless to say, are in the original.)

According to historian Charles Lockwood (who wrote about Taylor’s in his book Manhattan Moves Uptown), the restaurant served 3,000 people most weekends and “on Sunday afternoons and evenings people waited on line outside for an hour or more before getting a table.”

The restaurant was not only known for its sheer opulence, but for its accommodation of women. In an era when most eateries were the domain of men, Taylor’s was listed in Carroll’s New York City Directory* as one of five “saloons suitable for ladies.”            

Taylor’s, however, was more than just a place for women to dine while shopping at the fashionable Broadway stores. It was an excellent pre- or post-theater destination—back when the theater district was also on Lower Broadway—and in its basement was the gentleman’s dining room, where men could enjoy each other’s company in the absence of female distraction.

* The guide has the hilarious complete title of Carroll’s New York City Directory to the Hotels of Note, Places of Amusement, Public Buildings, Churches, Hospitals, Colleges, Libraries, Banks, Asylums, Railroads, Medical Institutions, Cemeteries, Navy Yards, Steamers, Consuls, Bankers, Physicians, Lawyers, Hack Charges, Omnibus Routes, Streets, Parks, Piers, Drives, Cattle and Horse Markets, etc., etc., etc.)

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More about Lower Broadway in its fashionalble heyday can be found in our new book, Inside the Apple, available from Amazon or wherever books are sold!

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