Happy Evacuation Day... and more

We hope you are enjoying a wonderful holiday weekend. Yesterday's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was one of the largest in the parade's history--but did you know that in the early days, the parade started all the way up at 145th Street? You can read more about that in our Thanksgiving Day blog post from a few years ago.

Today is also a holiday: Evacuation Day, which celebrates the end of the Revolutionary War. The war ended November 25, 1783, right here in New York City. More details about Evacuation Day can be found at this blog entry or in Inside the Apple.

And speaking of Inside the Apple, since today is also Black Friday, we'd be remiss if we didn't remind you of all the ways you could get a hold of copies of our book for the people on your holiday shopping list.

IN NYC:
The book is available from a number of independent bookstores, including our friends at Shakespeare & Company. Or, to find if there’s a bookstore in your neighborhood that carries Inside the Apple, use this handy Indie Bound site and just plug in your zip code.

All the Barnes & Noble stores in the city also carry the book.

OUTSIDE NYC:
Indie Bound will point you to a local indepedent bookstore or Barnes & Noble’s website will show you if the book is in stock.

ONLINE
Amazon.com carries us, of course (usually at the best price) along with B&N, but so do a host of other retailers, including Powell’s, and some you might not think of, like Walmart.com and Overstock.com.

FOR YOUR E-READER

·         Kindle

·         Nook

·         Sony E-Reader

·         Google Books

·         @ iTunes

·         @ Android Market

 

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

To subscribe to this blog, visit this link.  Or follow us on Twitter.

Pomander Walk

Photo by PilotGirl on flickr. 

Our friends over at Curbed published a nice map of New York's mews (mewses?) today, including one of our favorites, Pomander Walk. Though, as Curbed rightly notes, Pomander Walk isn't actually a mews because it never housed stables.

Pomander Walk was built in 1921-22 by Thomas J. Healy, a real estate developer and nightclub owner. When he acquired the lot between 94th and 95th Streets (near West End Avenue), Healy planned to put up a sixteen-story hotel. While waiting to raise the necessary capital for the project, Healy constructed this row of apartments (each house facade was originally designed to conceal two apartments, one upstairs and one downstairs) in a mock-Tudor style. He named it after Pomander Walk, a popular play that had opened on Broadway in 1910 and which was set on a similar, cute London Street. In truth, the Pomander Walk of the play was like many London terraces: every house was identical to its neighbor. To visualize what Pomander Walk probably should have looked like if Healy had been faithful to his source material, visit Washington Square North's "Row" between Fifth Avenue and University Place.

It was never Healy's intention to allow these apartments to stay; they were what's known as a "tax payer" -- properties designed to bring in enough revenue to pay the property taxes. As soon as Healy secured financing, these buildings were to be torn down and his hotel erected in their place. Healy, however, never moved forward with the hotel and charming Pomander Walk remains.

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Read more about New York's hidden nooks and crannies in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

To subscribe to this blog, visit this link.  Or follow us on Twitter.

Happy Birthday to Moby Dick

photo by wallyg on flickr

"There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward…. Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries."

-- Herman Melville, Moby Dick 

One hundred and sixty years ago, on November 14, 1851, Harper & Brothers published Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Now considered one of the great pieces of American literature, it was a commercial and critical failure when it came out. (A fire at the warehouse in 1853 destroyed the bulk of Melville's unsold works, making a first edition a real rarity today.)

If you happen to be downtown today, you can celebrate Melville by visiting his birthplace--or, more precisely, by visiting a plaque in the wall. Melville was born on August 1, 1819, in a boarding house at 6 Pearl Street, a building which is now gone. Melville's father, Alan, was climbing the ladder of success, but in 1819 this once-fashionable neighborhood was rapidly declining as piers and warehouses were built to accommodate New York's role as America's biggest port.

Finding the Melville birthplace can by tricky. It is tucked away in the plaza behind 17 State Street. If you are on State Street, cut through between 17 State and the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary, and you'll see Melville's bust on the far wall.

(And if you can't down to Pearl Street, you can celebrate Moby Dick in pictures here.)

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Read more about Herman Melville's Manhattan in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York

To subscribe to this blog, visit this link.  Or follow us on Twitter.

Should Tavern on the Green Be a "Casual" Restaurant?

As reported recently by DNAinfo, the Parks Department is on the verge of soliciting proposals for a new concessionaire to run the storied restaurant in the Central Park, Tavern on the Green (after an aborted attempt two years ago to install new management).

However, a number of attendees at the recent Community Board 8 meeting objected to the park's idea that the new Tavern be a "high quality casual restaurant." The problematic word in the Parks Department's presentation was "casual," which has led some to think that the new Tavern might not be fancy enough. (Or, as Gothamist succinctly put it: "NYers Worry an Olive Garden-Type Restaurant Will Open at Tavern on the Green.")

But how fancy should Tavern on the Green actually be? When the restaurant was created by Robert Moses in 1934, he promised that it would be a place where "the general public can get what it wants."

Through the early 1930s, the upscale restaurant in the park was called the Casino (where Rumsey Playfield now stands), which Moses wanted to tear down. As we write in Inside the Apple:

Moses had two primary objections to the Casino: one was that it that it catered to the city’s wealthy residents at the expense of the majority of park users. (In an era when a cup of coffee at a Horn and Hardart Automat cost a nickel, the Casino charged 40 cents.) Secondly—and perhaps more importantly—the Casino had been a favorite haunt of disgraced Mayor Jimmy Walker.... To remove the Casino, Moses needed to find an alternate spot for an eatery. And, since public sentiment opposed building anything new in the park, Moses instead came up with a clever plan to convert the 1870 sheepfold at 65th Street (constructed by Jacob Wrey Mould) into a “popular-priced” restaurant.

Scores of workers from the Civil Works Administration began converting the old sheepfold into the restaurant in February 1934. (In true Moses fashion, the conversion was well underway before the city announced what it was doing.) As the New York Times reported, the new Tavern on the Green promised "reasonably priced table d'hote luncheon and dinner and a la carte service within reach of the average purse. There will be no cover charge. A sandwich and a glass of beer will be served at a reasonable price if a more elaborate meal is not wanted."

Though it took some time for Tavern to figure out its pricing, the restaurant soon settled on a price-fixed dinner of $1.50--not the cheapest meal in town in 1934, but well within reach of many middle-class New Yorkers. The question now is whether or not the new Tavern on the Green will return to Moses's populist roots or be more like the glitzy tourist attraction of the 1970s and 80s presided over by the late Warner LeRoy. Stay tuned.....

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Read more about New York's Robert Moses and Tavern on the Green in
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York

The Black Tom Explosion: July 30, 1916

This week, the Statue of Liberty (aka "Liberty Enlightening the World," its official name) will be turning 125 years old. In celebration, the National Park Service is installing five webcams atop the statue's torch, allowing virtual visitors the opportunity to see a view that's been off limits for nearly a century.*


There are many reasons the torch has been closed since 1916: it is very difficult to access; it was never designed for tourists (indeed, none of the statue's interior was built to host millions of visitors, giving rise to many of the statue's structural problems of the last few decades); the climb from the shoulder to the torch was done in near darkness.

But the major reason the torch closed was an explosion on the night of July 30, 1916, on Black Tom Island in New Jersey, where millions of pounds of ammunition was being stored by the National Storage Company and the Lehigh Valley Railroad for eventual shipment to allied forces in Europe. It was the largest explosion in modern history--the equivalent of a 5.5 earthquake--and was felt in five states: Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.

Black Tom Island was originally a small island between Liberty (then Bedloe's) Island and Jersey City. By 1916, landfill had connected the island to the New Jersey mainland, and it was used as a major freight depot by the Lehigh Valley Railroad.

On the evening of July 30, the night watchmen noticed that there were fires on the pier where Johnson Barge No. 17 was moored. (The barge--which held 100,000 pounds of TNT--turned out to be illegally berthed there in order to avoid port charges. Even had it been legally moored, it seems like that would have made little difference.)

When it became clear that the fires were too large for the night watchmen to fight on their own, the Jersey City fire department was called in; however, it was too dangerous for them to proceed and at 2:08a.m. the first of a series of explosions rocked the island. Shrapnel and munitions were blasted in every direction; some lodged in the Statue of Liberty (which ultimately cost $100,000 to repair), some made it was far away as the Jersey City clock tower, stopping the clock at 2:12 a.m.

Almost everyone in Manhattan was awoken by the strength of the blast and there were numerous injuries, mostly from falling glass. As the head of the New York Plate Glass Insurance Company noted the next day, a million dollars of glass had rattled out of its casements in the city, mostly south of West 44th Street. (At least one person was injured from falling glass, however, at Third Avenue and 89th Street.)

At first, the guards at the pier were brought in for questioning, as it was believed that the smudge pots they'd lit to keep mosquitoes at bay had caused the fire. Soon, it became clear that the explosion was sabotage, and suspicion fell quickly on German agents living in the United States. Though the exact identities of the bombers were never known, the Mixed Claims Commission (set up after World War I to adjudicate claims against Germany) eventually decided to fine Germany $50 million for the explosion. The money was finally paid in 1979.

Meanwhile, the management of the Statue of Liberty decided that Lady Liberty's arm had been too weakened by the explosion to allow tourist traffic to continue to climb to the torch; the torch was never reopened.

The torch cams will go online on Friday, October 28, and can be accessed at http://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/statueofliberty/?cam=liberty_str.


* A handful of maintenance workers have been allowed access to the torch since 1916, but no regular visitors. Still, that doesn't stop a lot of people from reminiscing about having "gone up to the torch" in the 1940s and 50s. Unless those people were VIPs or statue staff, it is very unlikely.

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Read more about the Statue of Liberty in
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York

To subscribe to this blog, visit this link.  Or follow us on Twitter.

Thirteenth Avenue

In November 1883, a New York Times reporter took his readers on a walk along “the most peculiar of the many unique thoroughfares which lie within the limits of this City”: Thirteenth Avenue. Today, the street is even more peculiar—only one block of it remains, stranded and inaccessible on a pier in the Hudson River.

Thirteenth Avenue was created on April 12, 1837, when the New York State Legislature passed an act to “establish a permanent exterior street in the city of New-York along the easterly shore of the North, or Hudson’s River.” The act drew an imaginary line from West 11th Street to 135th Street in Harlem, and it permitted the city the rights to oversee the development of all the land that would be created by land-filling out from the city’s natural coast line.

While real estate speculators immediately began buying and selling lots in Hudson that could someday be filled to become properties that fronted Thirteenth Avenue, the new street was slow to develop. By the time the Times reporter was walking the street in 1883, only a few lots north of Thirty-Fourth Street had been acquired and the street dead-ended in a high wooden fence somewhere between Twenty-Sixth and Twenty-Seventh streets.

Despite the city having passed a measure to pave the street in Belgian block in 1874, its lower regions were still a “dreary waste” according to the Times. The street appears to have been the home mostly to lumber yards, saloons, and city dumps, where Italian women would “swoop down like a flock of vultures” when the ash cart arrived, hoping to find hot coals.

Three years later, in May 1886, the Times dispatched another reporter to write up his thoughts on Thirteenth Avenue. The article was substantially similar to the piece from 1883, though the new reporter did spend more time sampling the local saloons. He was particularly impressed with the saloon that served passengers bound to Hoboken on the ferry, which sat on the ground floor of a six-story brick warehouse.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the area was changing. The city began investing in improvements to the piers, in particular to be able to welcome the ever-growing class of luxury steamers (which would soon include the Lusitania and the Titanic). In order to build deep water piers that did not interfere with exiting navigation on the Hudson, the city began removing landfill east of Thirteenth Avenue—effectively destroying the street to make room for what today we call Chelsea Piers.

Somehow, however, one tiny block of Thirteenth Avenue never got removed from the map. If you cross the West Side Highway at Gansevoort Street, you reach a sanitation pier (and the name of the road officially changes to Bloomfield Street). If you were able to get to the sanitation parking lot along the river’s edge, you would be on the only remaining block of Thirteenth Avenue.

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Read more about New York's waterfront in
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York

The Firefighters' Memorial in Riverside Park

Today was the annual gathering of the Fire Department in Riverside Park to pay tribute to their fallen comrades at the Firefighters' Memorial at 100th Street. Thousands of fire personnel attend this ceremony each year, which shuts down Riverside Drive for a number of blocks on either side of the monument.

The memorial itself was installed in 1913 and unveiled by Mayor Gaynor--one of his last official acts before his own death. The idea behind honoring New York's firemen came from the city's Episcopal Bishop, Henry Potter, who was the chairman of the memorial committee. Potter lamented the fact that in a city that was quick to honor less deserving citizens, no one took the time to commemorate these "soldiers in a war that never ends."

Originally slated for Union Square, the memorial was ultimately landscaped by architect H.V.B. Magonigle specially for this spot at 100th Street. The carvings are by Attilio Piccirilli, who, along with his many brothers, was part of the greatest stone carving family in the city. (The Piccirilli brothers work can be seen at the USS Maine monument in Columbus Circle and the Museum of the American Indian on Bowling Green, among many other places.) On the front, a horse-drawn fire engine races to a blaze; on either side, allegories of Duty and Sacrifice flank the main fountain.

Few people who don't live in this neighborhood ever explore the statuary in Riverside Park, but this monument alone is worth a trip to the Upper West Side.

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Read more about New York's famous (and not-so famous) statuary in
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York

To subscribe to this blog, visit this link.  Or follow us on Twitter.

Showdown with the Soviets in Grand Central Terminal

This week marks the fifty-fourth anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1, the Soviet satellite that was the first to achieve a successful low Earth orbit. Sputnik was launched during the International Geophysical Year (IGY), which ran from July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958. (The IGY was supposed to foster international scientific cooperation; it did that, but it also gave the Americans and the Soviets and excuse to try to out-do each other in what would soon be known as the "Space Race.")


Both the United States and the Soviet Union had announced in 1955 that they would put a satellite in orbit during the IGY. At first, the United States backed the U.S. Army's Explorer program, which planned to use a Redstone ballistic missile to launch a satellite. When the IGY began on July 1, 1957, the United States had little to show for it. So, the Chrysler Corporation, the Redstone's manufacturer, decided it would show the American public just how impressive its products could be, and arranged to have a missile installed in Grand Central Terminal.


In the first week of July, the missile arrived by train from Detroit; the cargo was shunted onto track 16, because the entrance to that track (today partially hidden by a food vendor) was the only one wide enough for the missile to pass through. Over the next few days, the sixty-eight-foot tall Redstone was assembled in Grand Central's main hall. Though the missile was short enough to fit, it needed to be held in place by wires at the top. To achieve this, a hole was punched into the roof--and it's still visible to this day. If you look at the zodiac on the terminal's ceiling, find the fish that make up Pisces; near one of the fish is a dark circle in the roof: that's where the missile was held aloft.

The Redstone stood for three weeks, allowing thousands of commuters to see the weapon that the New York Times said could "[deliver] an atomic punch 200 miles." Which was to say--we may not have a satellite in orbit yet, but we can blow you away.

By the time the Redstone was put on the display, the U.S. had moved away from the Army's Explorer program in favor of the Navy's Vanguard program. However, when Sputnik achieved orbit on October 4, 1957, it lit a fire under the United States and government rushed back to the Explorer program. On January 31, 1958, Explorer 1 achieved orbit and began the United States' exploration of space. The Explorer program is still active to this day.

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Read more about Grand Central Terminal in
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York

To subscribe to this blog, visit this link.  Or follow us on Twitter.

Reminder: October 9 Christopher Columbus / Central Park Tour

Greetings! Just a reminder that if you want to sign up for our walking tour of Central Park and the Upper West Side next Sunday (with a focus on Columbus Day and Italian-American history), your last chance to get the discounted price of $10 per person is today. Any reservations made through midnight tonight (EST) will be just $10 per person; tomorrow the price goes up to $15 per person.

The tour is Sunday, October 9, at 3:30PM, and we'll walk for about 90 minutes, covering topics as wide ranging as the origins of Columbus Day to the anti-immigrant ideas embodied in various places along Central Park's famous Mall.

You can read more about the tour at http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2011/09/christopher-columbus-and-central-park.html, including complete instructions on how to reserve.

Hope to see you there!