The Wizards of Waverly Place (or, is that Bleecker Street?)

Being in the completely wrong demographic, the Disney tween phenomenon Wizards of Waverly Place somehow escaped our attention until recently. But this summer while touring through Greenwich Village, one of our younger clients was very excited to be on the same street as the fictional Russo family. Then we saw the huge ratings numbers the Wizards movie pulled in the first week in September--at 11.4 million viewers, its premiere was the most-watched cable broadcast of 2009--making us even more curious. So we watched a few episodes from the first two seasons (season three premieres October 9) to see how Disney's fictional Greenwich Village stacked up against the real thing.

For those not in the know, Wizards revolves around star Selena Gomez, who plays Alex Russo, the middle child in a wizarding family. Her father, an ex-wizard, now runs a sandwich shop called the Waverly Sub Station, which--as the name suggests--is supposed to be reminiscent of a subway car/station. How appetizing! (It actually looks to us more like a PATH train station, if that helps.) The father is teaching the three kids magic and ultimately they will have to battle it out in some sort of wizarding comepetition: the winner keeps his or her powers; the losers become mortal.

Like so many half-hour comedies set in New York, the show is filmed entirely on a sound stage in Hollywood. Only exterior establishing shots are done in the city, and seem to consist mostly of stock footage. (Sometimes the cast is seen on Waverly Place, but that, too, is a set, which the producers have also turned into a pedestrian-only alleyway. At least the fake corner of Bedford and Grove on Friends had vehicular traffic.)

Bayard-Condict Building by B. Tse on flickr.

The most notable building seen in these establishing shots is in the opening credits; at the very end, the camera pulls back from the Waverly Sub Station to reveal.... that's its in the ground floor of the Bayard-Condict Building. Bayard-Condict is one of the city's greatest skyscrapers, not only for its elegant styling, but also because it was designed by Louis Sullivan, one of America's finest architects. Finished in 1899, it is the only Sullivan building in New York and is well worth a visit. However, you won't find it on Waverly Place: it's located at 65 Bleecker Street, where Crosby Street dead ends.

The other major location where an actual New York facade is used is the school the young wizards attend, the fictional Tribeca Prep. It took us awhile to figure out what school they were using for the establishing shots,* but it turns out to be P.S. 40, an elementary school at 320 East 20th Street, which is right on the outskirts of Stuyvesant Town and nowhere near Tribeca. Ah, Hollywood. Fun fact about P.S. 40: it's named after Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the acclaimed artist, who went to its predecessor, Grammar School 40, which stood on the same spot.

Other random New York City streetscapes are shown throughout the program and many of these appear to be in the Village: the fountain in Father Demo Square, MacDougal Street, and a random block-front that may actually be Waverly Place. (The movie, mostly set in the Caribbean, changed the sets slightly, making the Waverly Place facade of the Sub Station more generically like a diner.)

* Thanks, L!

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Waverly Place itself is a fascinating street, which we discuss in detail in Inside the Apple. The book also has a fun tour of the West Village. And while it doesn't include any tween TV show stops, you do get to visit the haunts of such celebrities as Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and many, many more.

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The Bombing of Wall Street

Today marks another tragic anniversary in New York City: on September 16, 1920, a bomb exploded on Wall Street, killing 30 people and injuring over 200 more. It was the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil before the Oklahoma City bombing and still one of the greatest unsolved crimes of the 20th century.

As we write in Inside the Apple:

At 12:01 pm on Thursday, September 16, 1920, the church bells of Trinity Church, Wall Street, finished pealing and were suddenly replaced with another noise—the horrible sound of 500 pounds of lead sash weights exploding from a horse-drawn wagon on Wall Street....

As the smoke cleared and people began to pick themselves up from the street (including Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK’s father who was then a stockbroker), they were faced with a scene of carnage and devastation. Approximately 100 pounds of dynamite had expelled the sash weights into the air, shattering windows and tearing through nearby pedestrians. The most gruesome sight was the north wall of Morgan’s Bank. Amid the gouges in the marble from the shrapnel there was also a woman’s head—severed from its body but still wearing a proper hat.

The attack took place soon after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti and strong evidence pointed to anarchists. While books and articles have been written over the years laying out a case that anarchist Mario Buda was the bomber, he was never charged at the time and the case against him is mostly circumstantial.

Today, if you go down to the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street, you can see the old Morgan Bank building on the southeast corner (now part of "Downtown by Starck," a luxury residential building). Walk along the Wall Street side of the bank and you’ll soon come to a heavily pock-marked section of wall. These are still the original shrapnel marks from the 1920 bombing, preserved as a memorial to those who died.

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You can read much more about the 1920 bombing, J.P. Morgan, and New York in the 1920s in Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City. It’s available online and at all major bookstores.

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The Takeover of New Amsterdam

Amidst all the hoopla surrounding this week's celebration of New York's 400th birthday --the quadricentennial of Henry Hudson's arrival in our harbor in September 1609 -- another anniversary is being quietly forgotten: today marks the 345th anniversary of the English takeover of New Amsterdam and, thus, the creation of New York.

The English had been eyeing Manhattan since the establishment of the first colony in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607.* When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, he began earnestly contemplating how to unite his colonial empire that ranged from Maine to the Carolinas. He was especially urged on by his younger brother, James, Duke of York, who had recently invested heavily in a slave trading venture in Africa and wanted to drive a wedge in the Dutch overseas mercantile economy. While Dutch ports in Africa, the Caribbean, and the East Indies were more important, New Amsterdam was easiest to conquer.

Early in 1664, Charles II granted his brother a "Duke's Charter," essentially putting James in control of the North American colonies. In turn, James dispatched one of his loyal soldiers, Colonel Richard Nicolls, to take New Amsterdam in the name of the king.

After a brief stop in Boston, Nicolls and his small flotilla--a total of four ships and perhaps as many as 600 soldiers--arrived in Brooklyn in August 1664. Nicolls sent word to the Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant, that the English were offering extremely favorable terms of surrender: if the Dutch gave up peaceably, they would be allowed to keep their property and their rights. They would simply need to swear an oath of allegiance to Charles II.

Stuyvesant put on a brief show of refusing to capitulate, but realizing he was outgunned, didn't have much food, and had even less water, the governor agreed to surrender without either side having fired a shot. At Stuyvesant's farm (or bowery, which is today honored in the street of the same name), the Dutch and the English signed 23 Articles of Capitulation, which guaranteed certain rights, including "liberty of their consciences in Divine Worship and church discipline" and that the Dutch people "shall still continue free denizens and enjoy their lands, houses, goods, ships, wheresoever they are within this country, and dispose of them as they please."

Once the Articles of Capitulation had been signed, all that remained was for Stuyvesant and the Dutch garrison to quit Fort Amsterdam, which happened on September 8, 1664. With great pomp, Stuyvesant led the garrison out of the fort and down to the East River, where a ship awaited to take them away. (They didn't get far; Stuyvesant was just heading to his uptown farm; where the soldiers went that day is unclear, though they did eventually make it back to the Netherlands.)

* Indeed, as we discuss in Inside the Apple, the English initially considered Manhattan to be in the northernmost part of the Virginia colony. When the Pilgrims first left on theMayflower for the New World, it was Manhattan they were aiming for, not Massachusetts, since they were required to settle in English territory. We'll talk more about that in a future blog post.

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The celebration surrounding New York's birthday are culminating this Sunday with Harbor Day, which marks the 400th anniversary of Hudson's arrival. One way you can celebrate is to join us for a special Knickerbocker's Walking Tour of New Amsterdam. James is a "Knickerbocker" (a descendant of many of the original Dutch settlers) and he will be leading a historical walk through all of New Amsterdam's history, from Hudson's arrival in 1609 to the surrender in 1664. All the details can be found at http://www.insidetheapple.net/tours.htm.

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A Knickerbocker's Walking Tour of New Amsterdam - Sunday, September 13

On Sunday, September 13, James will be leading a special public walking tour of the Financial District in honor of New York's 400th birthday.

James is a 10th-generation New Yorker (also known as a “Knickerbocker”), whose ancestors include the last city secretary of New Amsterdam, Johannes Nevius, and the first Dutch pastor of Brooklyn, Johannes Polhemus. A historian and guide, James will lead participants through the streets that once made up the capital of this strategic Dutch outpost and trading town.

Stops will include the archaeological remains of old New Amsterdam, including the stadt huis block, the site of Peter Stuyvesant's grand home and garden, the place where (perhaps) Peter Minuit bought the island of Manhattan from local natives (but not for $24 worth of beads), the former home of the Wall Street wall, and other important reminders of Manhattan's early history. And since we are celebrating the arrival of Henry Hudson in September 1609, we will also stop by the Hudson River.

September 13th will be a great day to be in Lower Manhattan. The city is celebrating “Harbor Day” in honor of Henry Hudson and the city’s 400th anniversary, the Dutch will have set up special exhibits out on Governors Island, and the new exhibit of New Amsterdam history opens that day at the South Street Seaport museum. We look forward to being a part of your celebration of Dutch heritage.

Copies of Inside the Apple will be available for sale & signing after the tour.

The tour costs $20 per person and James is offering it at three different times: 10:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., and 4:00 p.m.

Advance reservations required. Click here to sign up for this tour – you can register and pay with our e-commerce partner, Wufoo.com.

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In other news, James will also be appearing today at 4:00 p.m (on the East Coast; others adjust accordingly) on "The Bite," Eric Gordon's internet radio show about New York City travel and tourism. You can get all the details about the show -- and tune in -- at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/BTSQ/2009/09/02/The-Bite-with-Eric-Gordon.

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Tavern on the Green to Get New Management

New York's Department of Parks has announced that next year Dean J. Poll, who currently holds the license to operate the Boathouse in Central Park, will also take over the management of Tavern on the Green.

Among the changes Poll will implement is a thinning of the landscaping at the rear of the building to open up the vistas toward Sheep Meadow. What many people don't realize is that throughout most of the park's life, Sheep Meadow's official name was "the Green." Thus, when the restaurant first opened in 1934, it made sense that it was Tavern on the Green. (Perhaps techinally in should have been Tavern near the Green, since it is cut off from its namesake by the wide swath of the ring road.)

The Green came to be nicknamed Sheep Meadow because from 1864 to 1934 it housed a flock of pedigree Southdown and Dorset sheep. The removal of the sheep in 1934 is a story we tell in Inside the Apple. There are many plausible reasons why the sheep may have left, but certainly the main one is that the Parks Department (in the person of Robert Moses) had its eye on their sheepfold, an elaborate 1870 structure designed by Jacob Wrey Mould. As soon as the sheep were out, their barn was tranformed into Tavern on the Green.

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For Sale: The Narrowest House in New York

The press has been having a field day this week with the news that New York's narrowest house -- No. 75-1/2 Bedford Street -- is on the market for $2.75 million.

This is one of the most popular stops on our tours of Greenwich Village and appears in every guidebook. Unfortunately, most of those guidebooks also perpetuate the stories that Cary Grant and John and/or Lionel Barrymore stayed at the house, despite the fact that there's not a shred of evidence to connect either one to the home.

The entire property in that area was once owned by a coppersmith named Harmon Hendricks. His house, No. 77 Bedford, stands at the corner of Bedford and Commerce; built in 1799 it is the oldest home in the Village. Though No. 75-1/2 is often dated to 1873 (when it appears on tax rolls), it is stylistically older and may have been built as early as the 1850s.

The entire Henricks property was bought by the Cherry Lane Theatre in 1923, who converted a former brewery and factory space at 38 Commerce into the theater and planned to rent the rest of the property for profit. The Cherry Lane was founded by a group of refugees from the Provincetown Playhouse (which has been in the news a lot recently, too) including Edna St. Vincent Millay, who moved into the narrow house at 75-1/2 Bedford in 1924. It was Millay and her husband who remodeled the home, adding a skylight and the Dutch gabling on the front and back.

The other famous tenant to live in the house is anthrpologist Margaret Mead. What most press coverage leaves out is that Mead was living there with her sister and brother-in-law, the cartoonist William Steig (best known today, perhaps, as the creator of Shrek).

The New York Post has a feature on the house, including a photo essay in the post that doesn't necessarily reveal a lot about the interior, but does give a great view of the unique four-in-a-row burner stove. Over at Curbed, you can download the floorplan as you mull over whether or not $2.75 million is a good price for owning a conversation piece.

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We have three different tours that you can take to see the city's narrowest house.

• You can book your own private walking tour with us at http://www.walknyc.com
• You can take a self-guided tour of the neighborhood using our book, Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City
• Or you can download an audio tour of the area that we created for our partners at CityListen.com.

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And speaking of CityListen -- they are having a great contest right now to give away a free pair of Kuru walking shoes. All the details are at http://blog.citylisten.com/2009/08/favorite-walks-contest/. But hurry -- the deadline for entries is September 6th.

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E. Ridley & Sons and the Murder of Edward Ridley

The Ridley building as it appeared in 1874; it was expanded in 1886, badly damaged in a fire in 1905 after the store had been sold, and truncated in 1931-32.

As guest blogger Bowery Boogie noted on Curbed yesterday, the pink Jodamo building on the Lower East Side at the corner of Orchard and Grand streets is for sale for a cool $25 million.

In the nineteenth century, the building was home to E. Ridley and Sons, one of the biggest department stores on the Lower East Side. Though Broadway in the area we today call SoHo was home to most of the city’s high-end shops, including A.T. Stewart’s “Marble Palace,” the stretch of Grand Street east of Broadway was an important retail district in its own right. Many of the shoppers came from Brooklyn or New Jersey on the Grand Street ferry and were then transported by horse-drawn street car.

Ridley’s was founded in 1849 by Edward Ridley Sr., an immigrant from Nottinghamshire, England, in a small building at 311-1/2 Grand Street. As the shop grew over the next two decades, Ridley began acquiring nearby lots and by 1883, he had built a store that encompassed the entire street-front on Grand from Orchard to Allen. According to some sources, it was the country’s largest retail store. (Today’s building is actually slightly truncated; when Allen Street was widened in 1931-32, a portion of the building was shorn off to accommodate the expanded road.)

For the Jewish immigrants who began to flood in the neighborhood in the 1880s, Ridley’s became a destination for young Jewish women to window shop – and from which to occasionally purchase, a sure sign of upward-mobility. Understanding the need to appeal to the area’s new clientele, Ridley’s began to promote itself more to local residents, including a big push in December equating Hanukkah with the gift-giving of Christmas. The shop was also one of the first to send out a catalogue so that buyers could peruse and purchase their goods from the comfort of home. (In 1964, a request was delivered to 311 Grand Street demanding to know why the Ridley's catalgoue had not been sent out "for some time." The writer clearly didn't know the store had gone out of business--in 1901!)

Edward Ridley died in 1883 and the store was taken over by his sons, Edward A. and Arthur Ridley. They continued in business until 1901, by which time they could no longer attract a enough clientele to fill the store. The building was sold and subdivided and both brothers went into real estate.

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Now, here’s where the story gets weird.

Edward A. Ridley was a bit of an eccentric, to say the least. He operated out of the subbasement of the old department store’s stables, a dungeon-like space 40 feet below street level. (The address is variously reported as 59, 61, and 63 Allen Street.)

As the New York Times wrote in 1931:

Ridley needed to wear rubber overshoes in his dank, cellar office and ultimately took to wearing them at all times. He allowed his beard to grow out, making him look like a wild-eyed Biblical prophet (“Whitmanesque” the Times called it), and he was rarely seen outside the office except going to and from his boarding house in New Jersey, always carrying an umbrella, rain or shine.

Then, in 1931, Ridley showed up for work one day to find his assistant, Herman Moench, dead. Actually, Ridley read his mail for about an hour, then bothered to go to the other side of the 8x15 foot office and found Moench lying next to his desk. At first the police assumed that Moench, who had worked for Ridley for an astonishing 51 years (he’d started at the store when he was 9 years old) had died of natural causes. Only when the body was examined by the coroner were two bullet wounds discovered. No one who worked at the garage that surrounded the office, including its managers, Harry and Lee Weinstein (who leased the space from Ridley) had seen or heard anything and with no leads, the case soon went cold.

Just a little over two years later, tragedy struck again. Ridley had hired Lee Weinstein from the garage to be his new assistant. On May 10, Lee’s brother Harry was unable to reach them in the office by telephone; he asked a garage employee to check on his brother and the man discovered that Lee Weinstein had been shot twice and Ridley beaten to death. The similarity of the two cases led the police to reopen the Herman Moench murder and ballistics tests immediately proved that the same gun had been used to kill both of Ridley’s assistants.

At first, the police assumed Ridley had been killed trying to protect Weinstein. However, when the old man’s will was found, it showed a $200,000 bequest to Weinstein, making the police wonder if Ridley had been the intended target and if Weinstein had been involved in both murders. The next day, the police discovered that Weinstein had been secretly married and living with his wife under an assumed name at a midtown hotel. As the investigation continued, the police found an unused bootlegging room in the Allen Street garage where Ridley kept his office, but decided that illegal alcohol had nothing to do with the murders. More promising was the discovery that Lee Weinstein had purchased a $2,050 car—while only making about $40 a week. It soon became clear that the will was a fake, signed by Ridley unwittingly and “witnessed” by two fellow conspirators—both of them accountants who helped keep Ridley’s books—who had hoped to split the $200,000. Further investigation revealed that Weinstein and his accomplices had already stolen over $200,000 from his employer.

But this discovery did little to shed the light on the killings and Weinstein's fellow thieves seemed to have nothing to do with the murders (and no connection to Herman Moench). The accountants were indicted for the theft and forgery but despite a $10,000 reward, no useful information came to the police. Ridley had owned many tenements on the Lower East Side and was said to be a miserly landlord, but none of his tenants was ever seriously looked at for the murders. To this day, the case remains one of the great unsolved crimes of the Lower East Side.

The building at 59-63 Allen Street still stands – and is still a parking garage. Does Ridley’s obscure basement office still exist, as well? If you park in the building, check it out and let us know!

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Our book, Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City, has a great walking tour of this neighborhood. And while it doesn’t stop at Ridley’s, it does take you to a number of famous places on the Lower East Side, ending just a couple of blocks from the Ridley’s intersection.

The book is available from retailers across the country or online.

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The Apollo 11 Ticker Tape Parade

photo from the LIFE magazine archives on Google.com

Earlier this summer, the world celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969. Today marks another Apollo anniversary—the massive ticker tape parade for Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins. At the time, many claimed it was the largest ticker tape parade New York had ever seen, but as we researching Inside the Apple, we found that claim was made for many parades and it’s almost impossible to verify. (Four million people were said to have attended the Apollo parade—an impressive number, even if it’s not the largest.)

Certainly, it was the longest parade. The city’s traditional parade route runs from Bowling Green Park at the foot of Broadway to City Hall. The Apollo astronauts, however, after receiving the key to the city, continued up Broadway to Herald Square and then on to Times Square. As the New York Times noted, the confetti in Midtown was “made up more of paper towels and pages from telephone directories than tickertape” and that it grew “so dense that the astronauts could hardly see.”

As we write in Inside the Apple:

It was also one of the fastest ticker tape parades. The astronauts started at Bowling Green at 10:17 a.m. (about half an hour ahead of schedule) and arrived on the steps of City Hall just fourteen minutes later! Many people who showed up for the parade were disappointed to discover that the astronauts had already passed them by…. By 1:15 p.m. the astronauts were back at Kennedy airport to go to Chicago. They ended the day with festivities in Los Angeles. Having just been to the moon and back, a quick one-day jaunt across North America must not have seemed like such a big deal.

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For more on the origin of the ticker tape parade and a walking tour of the “Canyon of Heroes,” check out Inside the Apple. Or join us this Sunday for our free tour of that neighborhood, during which we’ll focus on the American Revolution.

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One Broadway

As we have written previously, we will be leading a free tour on Sunday, August 16, of Revolutionary War Lower Manhattan. (See http://www.insidetheapple.net/tours.htm for more details.)

One of the stops on the tour will be One Broadway, where the Washington Building -- later known as International Mercantile Marine -- now stands. But back in the 18th century, the base of Broadway was home to Archibald Kennedy, New York's receiver-general (i.e., the customs collector), and later the Earl of Cassilis.

Kennedy built his mansion ca. 1760; because Broadway was then much closer to the Hudson, Kennedy would have had a fine view out over the harbor and in the summer of 1776, he would have seen the massive British fleet assembling beyond Staten Island. Between June 29 and August 12, nearly 200 ships arrived, the largest naval fleet since antiquity. One observer, a soldier named Daniel McCurtin, wrote in his journal:

"[I] spied as I peeped out the Bay something resembling a wood of pine trees trimmed.... I declare I thought all of London was afloat."

During the war, Kennedy left the city and the house became George Washington's headquarters during the planning of the Battle of Brooklyn, which took place in late August 1776. When the British captured New York, the home -- which escaped the Great Fire of 1776 -- was used by the British army. After the Revolution, the house was rented by Isaac "King" Sears. A prominent member of the Sons of Liberty, Sears was was involved in the Stamp Act Protests in 1765 and the Battle of Golden Hill in 1770, a skirmish just north of Wall Street that some call the first bloodshed of the Revolution. Sears paid £500 a year, probably the highest rent in the city.

The house was later owned by John Watts, a successful merchant and founder of the Leake and Watts Orphan House in Morningside Heights.

In 1882, Kennedy's house (by then a boardinghouse) was demolished to make way for the Washington Building, which still occupies the site. When the Washington Building was erected, it had more office space than any building in New York.

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We will be talking more about One Broadway, George Washington, "King" Sears, John Watts, the Stamp Acts protests and more on our FREE walking tour on August 16.

Or you can pick up a copy of our book, Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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RIP Tony Rosenthal

EV Grieve just alerted us to the fact that sculptor Tony Rosenthal passed away last week at the age of 94.

Rosenthal is best known as the artist behind the rotating Astor Place Cube (officially, The Alamo -- so called because his wife thought it was a good name for an impenatrable object).

There are many other places in the city to view Rosenthal's public art, including:

• 5 in 1, a tribute to the five boroughs of New York City, in One Police Plaza behind the Municipal Building;
• Rondo at the New York Public Library's branch at 127 East 58th Street;
• Hammarskjold at FIT (27th Street and Seventh Avenue);
• SteelPark at 401 East 80th Street.

Also, according to the artist's website, a temporary exhibition is currently on view in the Ralph Lauren flagship store at 72nd Street and Madison.

Another interesting note: the Astor Place Alamo -- which was originally installed temporarily as part of a citywide "Sculpture in Environment" show -- is not one of a kind. Examples of Rosenthal's cube sculptures can be found in private and public collections, including Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park in Hamilton, Ohio, and at his alma mater, the University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor (where the piece is called Endover).

You can also read Tony Rosenthal's obituary in the New York Times.

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