All in a Day’s Work: Archival Wanderings Around SoHo

May 18, 2013 in Furthermore by Yukie Ohta | 2 comments

The Stone Bridge, from The Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York (1865)

The Stone Bridge, from The Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York (1865)

One of the many perks of working at New York Bound Books is that I get to pore through lots of rare books about New York, for research and just for fun.  I recently photographed a few for our catalog that included several image of old SoHo, and when I say old, I do not mean when Dean and Deluca on Prince Street old, I mean when Canal Street was a canal old.

Title Page of the Valentine Manual 1865

Title Page of the Valentine Manual 1865

The first image, of the Stone Bridge (see above) in 1800, is from the 1865 edition of the Valentine Manuals.  Officially titled The Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York, this series of books was commonly called the “Valentine’s Manuals” for David T. Valentine, the clerk of the Common Council who compiled the volumes that included the city’s annual reports and directories. (read more about Valentine Manuals here at New York Bound Books).

A little research produced an article entitled “The Old Stone Bridge at Canal-street and Broadway” by Capt. Walker Bicker in The New York Times about his memories of  the bridge and its environs in the early 19th century, published April 9, 1886:

Broadway was not paved beyond “the stone bridge” which stood where Canal-street now crosses Broadway.  This was a famous resort for us schoolboys.  It was considered “out of town”—all north beyond as well as the immediate vicinity was country, post and rail fences dividing the land into different sized parcels.  This bridge spanned a small stream which conveyed water from the Collect on the east side of Broadway (where now stands the Tombs) to the west side, where was an extensive meadow covering most of the ground from Broadway to the north River and from Lispenard-street to Spring-street.

Here’s another image of Broadway, just one block to the north, in 1824.

Corner of Broadway and Grand Street, 1824 from The Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York (1865)

Corner of Broadway and Grand Street, 1824 from The Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York (1865)

Perhaps even more enlightening than the Valentine Manuals is Edward W. Browning’s New York Real Estate Brochure that lists buildings, apartments, apartment hotels, tenements, and stores to be sold at public auction on June 17, 1929.

Edward W. Browning’s New York Real Estate Brochure

Edward W. Browning’s New York Real Estate Brochure

 

513-519 Broadway through to 84 to 94 Mercer Street from Edward W. Browning’s New York Real Estate Brochure

513-519 Broadway through to 84 to 94 Mercer Street from Edward W. Browning’s New York Real Estate Brochure

 

This brochure contains a lot for sale at “513-519 Broadway through to 84 to 94 Mercer Street,” a plot that contains three buildings on Broadway, two of which go all the way through to Mercer Street, that would bring in an estimated whopping $80,700.00 in rent when fully occupied, presumably annually.  I found a recent article on Curbed about a unit in this lot for rent today:

Hank Azaria, best known for doing his voices on “The Simpsons” (Moe, Apu, Chief Wiggum among others), told the Wall Street Journal that he’s renting out his loft at 84 Mercer Street for a cool $16,000 per month. For that moolah you get a 4,000 square foot loft with 3 bedrooms. He picked the place up from photographer and director Cindy Sherman for $4.25M back in 2005, but he plans to spend a lot more time on the West Coast.

If a renter will pay $16K per month for a loft, imagine how much one of those retail spaces fetches!  I pride myself on being pretty good at math, but I’m not even going to attempt to figure out the percentage of appreciation between 1929 and 2011.  (And I don’t know if Azaria is BEST known for his Simpsons voices, fantastic though they are.)

Last, but not at all least, here is a newspaper clipping from February 9, 1907 of a picture of The Hall of Science, “where the freethinkers foregathered seventy-five years ago.”

hall-of-sciencebway-central-hotel

This building on Broome Street (probably between Mott and Elizabeth)  was purchased for $7,000 by educational reformer Frances Wright in 1829. According to the Encyclopedia.com entry on Wright:

Commencing a career as a lecturer, she bought a Baptist church and renamed it the Hall of Science, housing a lecture hall, a secular Sunday school, and a bookstore for free-thinkers. Wright’s lectures challenged evolving concepts of domestic ideology when she explained the experience and ideals of Nashoba, criticized evangelical revivals, and advocated education and equal rights for women. Her favorite topic was educational reform. She proposed a “guardianship system” through which state government would establish district boarding schools, where Americans could be raised for social equality through a curriculum that instructed all children in free inquiry and the physical sciences. Wright found admirers in New York among the reformers and artisans who comprised the city’s Workingmen’s Party and who also advocated enlightened public education and such issues as the ten-hour workday, abolition of imprisonment for debt, and attacks on the privileges of banks and capitalists.

Three random items.  Three SoHo locales.  Three interesting stories.  All in a day’s work.

 

This post originally appeared on The SoHo Memory Project on December 12, 2012.

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Mad Woman: Anne Tolstoi Wallach and the Mad Men

May 11, 2013 in Profiles by Yukie Ohta | No comments

WOMEN'S WORK by Anne Tolstoi Wallach

WOMEN’S WORK by Anne Tolstoi Wallach

The name Anne Tolstoi Wallach may not immediately ring a bell today, but her story will be familiar to anyone who watches Mad Men, AMC’s popular drama series set in in the ruthlessly competitive world of New York advertising in the 1960′s.  Wallach (no relation to Leo)  was a real life ad woman in the age of ad men.  She is also the author of the best-selling 1981 Women’s Work, a semi-autobiographical novel about a woman clawing her way to the top of the male-dominated Madison Avenue advertising business that she wrote at the age of 52.  She received an $850,000.00 advance for Women’s Work, the equivalent of anywhere from $2-$4 million today, the highest advance for a first novel ever paid to a woman at that time.

The back cover of the 1982 Signet paperback edition of Women’s Work summarizes:

Domina Drexler’s scintillating ads fill the slick pages of America’s choicest magazines and the walls of her magnificent corner office are graced with the advertising industry’s most prestigious awards.  But after more than a decade of dedication and creative triumphs, she’s still not a senior top-management executive.  She aims to become one—with or without the help of the man she loves…

Women’s Work offers a fascinating view of the grit behind the glamour in the high-pressured world of advertising.  It is a novel for every woman who wonders what success costs and what success is worth, and for every man who wonders what today’s women really want.

Wallach, a native New Yorker, attended Radcliffe and wrote for the Harvard Crimson.  As a working mother, she had her children using vacation days, taking two weeks for her first son and three weeks for her second.  It took Wallach 14 months of writing all day on weekends to write Women’s Work while she held down a full-time job as an advertising executive.  According to a September 7, 1981 article in People Magazine:

Though she has long since skirted the barriers to women in her business, she admits her novel’s impetus “comes from my own battle to become a vice-president at an ad agency where I was head of a creative group. All the guys with the same job were VPs, and I wasn’t. When I started to fuss about it, somebody said, Tell her she is one. She won’t know the difference.’ “

For sure, the position of women in advertising and the workplace in general has improved some since the publication of Women’s Work, but if you consider the fact that women still make and average of 9 percent less than men, even when studies consider education level, job experience and years in the workforce, this advance is not quite large enough to declare, a la the famous 1968 Virginia Slims slogan,   “You’ve come a long way, baby!”

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NEW New York Books

May 4, 2013 in News by Yukie Ohta | No comments

9780814771549_FullHabitats: Private Lives in the Big City
By Constance Rosenblum

New York University Press
256 pages
$19.95

From the NYU Press website:

There may be eight million stories in the Naked City, but there are also nearly three million dwelling places, ranging from Park Avenue palaces to Dickensian garrets and encompassing much in between. The doorways to these residences are tantalizing portals opening onto largely invisible lives.  Habitats offers 40 vivid and intimate stories about how New Yorkers really live in their brownstones, their apartments, their mansions, their lofts, and as a whole presents a rich, multi-textured portrait of what it means to make a home in the world’s most varied and powerful city.

 

9781419706721Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers
By Becky Cooper
Foreword by Adam Gopnik

Abrams Image
120 pages
$19.95

From the Abrams website:

Armed with hundreds of blank maps she had painstakingly printed by hand, Becky Cooper walked Manhattan from end to end. Along her journey she met police officers, homeless people, fashion models, and senior citizens who had lived in Manhattan all their lives. She asked the strangers to “map their Manhattan” and to mail the personalized maps back to her. Soon, her P.O. box was filled with a cartography of intimate narratives: past loves, lost homes, childhood memories, comical moments, and surprising confessions. A beautifully illustrated, PostSecret-style tribute to New York, Mapping Manhattan includes 75 maps from both anonymous mapmakers and notable New Yorkers, including Man on Wire aerialist Philippe Petit, New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov, Tony award-winning actor Harvey Fierstein, and many more.

 

9781593720520_sq-a7241315f316a663409b50259cc79fd04e1173a3-s2New York City of Trees
By Benjamin Swett

QuantuckLane Press
160 Pages
$29.95

From Benjamin Swett’s website:

It is common to talk about how trees improve living conditions in cities by filtering and cooling the air, absorbing excess rainwater, and making neighborhoods more attractive, but little has been said about the equally important role of trees as storehouses of a city’s past. Just as trees remove carbon from the atmosphere and hold it for many years in their woody tissue, so do they sequester the shared experiences of the people who live alongside them. The growth rings of trees contain, in organized fashion, physical manifestations of the world and of the human presence in it at different times in a tree’s history. Trees also store memories through the associations they carry for the people who live alongside them and see them every day. By looking at a group of trees I have known over many years, scattered around the five boroughs of New York City, I have tried to show how much of the life of New York is contained in its trees.

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Mogen Dovid: A Delicate(ssen) Matter

April 27, 2013 in Profiles by Yukie Ohta | No comments

Rebecca Federman writes one of my favorite blogs, Cooked Books, about all things food and books.  She is the Culinary Collections Librarian at the New York Public Library and co-curator, with Laura Shapiro, of the exhibition “Lunch Hour NYC.”

Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine

by Rebecca Federman

Working in a research library has its advantages. I’ve met lots of interesting people, encountered fascinating objects serendipitously, and wandered around the deep crevices of a landmark building.

But an unusual condition can occur when you’ve worked in a library for a long time. You run the risk of becoming jaded.

First Folio of Shakespeare? Been there, done that.

Gutenberg Bible? Please. I walk by it every day.

But when you do stumble upon something new — something exciting and revelatory and unexpected — you have a tendency to appreciate it all the more.

Such as delicatessen trade journals.

I was introduced to these periodicals by Roberta Saltzman, the librarian in the Dorot Jewish Division, who has cultivated a world-class collection of Jewish cookery materials. Among the fascinating items in her collection is the Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine, published in New York from 1930 until 1939.

Firmly union (“Live and Let Live” and “In Union there is Strength” are prominently featured on each issue), and printed in both English and Yiddish, Mogen Dovid covers the world of New York delicatessen culture and features articles related to racketeering, Brooklyn elections, trade overhead and union matters.

One of the most interesting parts of each issue is their Fair Price List which lists “at which the following food should be sold in all delicatessen stores.” The March, 1931 issue, for example, proposes that roast chicken (depending on its size) should cost between $1.50 and $2.50; the Temptation Sandwich (tongue, sliced tomato, and India relish) should cost 30 cents; cream cheese and olive sandwich, 20 cents, and a sardine sandwich, 15 cents.

And needless to say the ads are priceless. From Dr. Dick’s True Fruit Drinks to Dr. Brown’s Celery Tonic (when did it start being called Cel-ray?), these periodicals document local purveyors, distributors, and restaurants that have all but disappeared from view. With the exception of old business directories, these publications are some of the only reminders we have left of these institutions.

So while David Sax writes about the demise of the physical deli in his book Save the Deli, at least he can be reassured that we’ve saved the deli periodicals.

Visit Cooked Books at http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/

The following is a post that originally appeared on Sunday, February 14, 2010 in Cooked Books.

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Marking Spaces at the Queens Museum of Art

April 20, 2013 in News by Yukie Ohta | No comments

Marking Spaces at the Queens Museum

Marking Spaces at the Queens Museum

The Queens Museum of Art‘s new exhibition, “Marking Spaces: New York City’s Landmark Historic Districts on the Panorama of the City of New York,” commemorates fifty years of the New York City Landmarks Law founded on April 19, 1965.  This exhibition kicks off a two-year anniversary celebration by placing yellow flags on the museum’s Panorama of the City of New York indicating the 109 historic districts throughout the City.

Mayor Robert Wagner enacted the city’s landmarks preservation law a year and a half after the Beaux-Arts Pennsylvania Station, designed by McKim, Mead & White was razed.  The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission was formed to protect New York City’s architectural and cultural landmarks.

According to the Queens Museum website:

The designated historic districts of New York City represent some of the oldest and most distinctive areas in the city. Designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, these neighborhoods have been singled out for their unique “sense of place”. Each one is rich with history and architectural character, and together they help tell the story of New York City and its development into the world capital it is today.

Brooklyn Heights was the first historic district designated in November 1965, followed the next year by districts in Greenwich Village, Gramercy Park and the Upper East Side. Today, there are 109 historic districts with 18 historic district extensions numbering more than 30,000 buildings across all five boroughs.

Robert Moses originally had the Panorama, 9,335-square-foot architectural model of every building in the five boroughs, built for the 1964 World’s Fair. By placing the flags on the Panorama to designate historic landmarks, the museum will highlight the work of the Landmarks Preservation Commission over the past fifty years, and, one hopes, will allow the visitor to imagine what the city would look like had the commission not existed.

This exhibition will be on view through June 02, 2013.

Read more about The Queens Panorama of the City of New York, as well as Otis Bullard’s Moving Panorama of New York in my post Struck By Wonder: The Queens Panorama of the City of New York and Otis Bullard’s Moving Panorama of New York

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Poem in Your Pocket

April 13, 2013 in News by Yukie Ohta | No comments

April 18 is National Poem in Your Pocket Day

April 18 is National Poem in Your Pocket Day

April is National Poetry Month, and this Thursday, April 18, is national Poem in Your Pocket Day, which, according to NYC.gov, originated in New York City:

The Office of the Mayor, in partnership with the New York City Departments of Cultural Affairs and Education, initiated the annual City-wide PIYP day celebration in 2003. The goals of PIYP day are to showcase talented faculty and student poets in our schools, and encourage New Yorkers to embrace literacy and poetry.

In 2008, the Academy of American Poets took Poem in Your Pocket day national, allowing individuals around the country to join in and channel their inner bards.

The idea is powerful yet simple: write a poem or choose one by your favorite poet and carry it in your pocket to share with friends and family.  To facilitate this, the Academy of American Poets has compiled two small books of collected poems Poem in Your Pocket: 200 Poems to Read and Carry and Poem in Your Pocket for Young Poets: 100 Poems to Rip Out & Read.  Bruno Navasky, editor of the latter volume writes:

Teaching poetry often feels like one of those impossible tasks, like trying to tickly yourself, or keeping a secret.  A secret needs to be secret, but it wants to be shared.  A poem is like that.  The first time you hear a poem—really hear it—you’re always in the quiet of your own mind.  Even when listening to a poem in a crowded classroom or copying the words from a book, this is how it’s heard.  The poem is mere sounds or letters on a page until they get inside, tracing that mysterious path inside of you. (from the introduction to Poem in Your Pocket for Young Poets: 100 Poems to Rip Out & Read)

Moved by the spirit of Poem in Your Pocket day, Mayor Bloomberg began writing poems inspired by New York City:

Hey there, fella! Lady, hey!
Didja hear? It’s “Poem in Your Pocket Day!”
Tenth anniversary – the bubbly’s flowing
People are cheering… yelling… Tebowing

Where best to celebrate this whole affair?
The Crossroads of the World – Times Square
Historic site of many a saga
And on New Year’s Eve… one Gaga

From across the globe, they visit here
50.5 million last year
Wanting to see all they’ve anticipated
Just follow directions – it’s not complicated

Bronx Zoo? (Take the 5 or the 2)
Rockefeller Center? (Walk 6 blocks, then enter)
Empire State? (Bus to Fifth, then go straight)
Ferry to Staten? (At the tip of Manhattan) ]
Unisphere in Queens? (Get there via several means)
NY Aquarium? (Too far for kids to walk. Just carry ‘em)
“Mamma Mia”? (Right behind you. See ya.)

So on this big birthday of PIYP
Have a fantastic day in NYC
Take in the town – there is so much here to do!
(Just have a Poem in Your Pocket when you do)

If Mayor Bloomberg, with his grueling schedule, has the time to pen a poem, we do too.  And if not, well, there are plenty out there already to borrow for the day.

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A Backward Glance: Firsthand Accounts from Diaries, Autobiographies and Memoirs

April 6, 2013 in Bibliopedia by Barbara Cohen | No comments

“St. George’s” by Gene Schermerhorn

In 1888, Gene Schermerhorn, a member of an old New York family, ended a series of letters to his young nephew in the finest spirit of personal recollections:

Now my dear Phil I have tried to tell you what this great city was like when I was a boy but little older than yourself, and I hope I have succeeded in interesting you somewhat. I have begun with my earliest recollections of New York and I will leave it now about 1856 when the population was only 629,810…It is estimated now at over 1,500,000.

I cannot help looking forward and wondering, if it can possibly be that you can tell of as great changes. It is my firm belief that you will be able to do so and that you will live to see the entire island as thickly built as it is now below 59th St. and perhaps the district above the Harlem also. Or it may be that you will see changes that I don’t even dream of, although my faith in the future of New York is unbounded…I hope you will sometimes enjoy reading what has given me so much pleasure to write for you.

Your loving Uncle Gene

First hand accounts like these are sparks of New York life.  Many writers, including Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, E.B. White and Joseph Mitchell, have illuminated the city, but the words of New Yorkers outside of literary circles, people like Gene Schermerhorn, are often equally eloquent and distinctive. Unlike histories, contemporary diary entries, letters, and other eyewitness accounts offer a view of New York life that is umblemished by the sensibilities of a later time. Read the rest of this entry »

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Memories of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies

March 30, 2013 in Furthermore by Yukie Ohta | No comments

Memories of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies by Charles T. Harris

Memories of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies by Charles T. Harris

When I first picked up the book Memories of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies, I thought to myself, oh goody, a memoir about the New York of my childhood.  I opened the book, and to my surprise and delight, this catalog of memories, written by Charles Townsend Harris, is a look back not on the twentieth century, but on the 1860′s and 1870′s.  I perused the pages of Townsend’s recollections as I sat in the New York Bound Books office here in Greenwich Village and read about the neighborhood’s origins:

I was born in the erstwhile village which in its earliest days was separated from the main city by Lispenard Meadows.  People in the early part of the last century visiting Greenwich literally went into the country, as the village was truly a rural settlement.

By the 1860′s and 70′s, however, New York had become a newly bustling metropolis, as Barbara Cohen writes in her post on 1850′s New York:

As New York City left the 1850′s behind, the nation entered into the bloodiest war in its history.  Although the battlefields were in the south, the Civil War exacerbated class tensions, culminating in the infamous Draft Riots in 1863, and left a lasting impact on life in the city.  The seeds of transformation, from a seaport town to an international metropolis in the decades leading up to the war, however, could never be unsown, and New York continued its meteoric rise, despite domestic conflict, to become the epicenter of the Western world.

Grand Central Depot, from Memories of Manhattan

Grand Central Depot, from Memories of Manhattan

Read the rest of this entry »

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Mister Dog and Miss Margaret Wise Brown

March 23, 2013 in Profiles by Yukie Ohta | No comments

Mister Dog at the Fridge

Mister Dog at the Fridge

In today’s guest post, Benjamin Feldman  writes about Mister Dog, a favorite childhood story about “a funny dog named Crispin’s Crispian. He was named Crispin’s Crispian because he belonged to himself.”  As an adult, Feldman learned that the author of his bedtime favorite was Margaret Wise Brown, famed children’s book author and New Yorker.  His profile of Brown and how her life and work intersected with his own is a shining example of how all readers intersect with books and authors and the power they have to shape our perspective on life. Read more about Feldman and his work on his blog, The New York Wanderer.

 

Mister Dog

by Benjamin Feldman
 

My father was a gentle, quiet, swarthy man, slow and decisive, both with logic and love. It was Summer-time, 1957. The day at a close, he’d read me a picture book. Sitting beside me on my trundle bed, Daddy was all mine. The four others could wait. My favorite story, for the umpteenth time.

Once upon a time there was a funny dog named Crispin’s Crispian. He was named Crispin’s Crispian because he belonged to himself. In the mornings, he woke himself up and he went to the icebox and gave himself some bread and milk. He was a funny old dog. He like strawberries.

There the dog stood on the facing page, a hairy fellow just like my father. My dad, at all of thirty-eight, seemed so old to me, a benevolent giant, telling a story that made me brave. I hung on every word, bathed myself in the colors and rhythms, headed at last for a happy ending in a five year old’s always tumultuous days. Night after night, my father’s deep voice carried me safely, softly, off to sleep.

The funny old house

The funny old house

Mister Dog’s home was a funny old house, two stories of ramshackle painted clapboard, gables akimbo, chimney perched precariously on top. Despite its obvious structural imperfections, I hadn’t a care when I stepped inside. It was me in that story, my spitting double, out in the woods behind our house. There, a hound named Crispian’s Crispian ran into a boy at the fishing pond. Five-year-old me with my new best friend.

“Who are you and who do you belong to?” asked the little boy. “I am Crispin’s Crispian and I belong to myself,” said Crispian. “Who and what are you?” “I am a boy,” said the little boy, “and I belong to myself.” “I am so glad,” said Crispin’s Crispian. “Come and live with me.”

My childhood copy of Mister Dog lacks its cover. I never knew the author’s name. But the book was precious to me for what it meant, the feeling of being special and loved so deeply by my father when I was young. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW New York Books

March 16, 2013 in News by Yukie Ohta | No comments

The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor
By Marguerite Holloway, 372 pages, W.W. Norton & Co., $26.95

I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp: An Autobiography
By Richard Hell, 293 pages, HarperCollins Publishers, $25.99

George Bellows: Painter with a Punch!
By Robert Burleigh, 48 pages, Abrams Books for Young Readers, $18.95

 

imagesThe Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor

By Marguerite Holloway

372 pages, W.W. Norton & Co., $26.95

From the book’s website:

John Randel Jr. (1787-1865) was an eccentric and flamboyant surveyor. A nineteenth century genius renowned for his inventiveness as well as his bombast and irascibility, Randel plotted Manhattan’s famous city grid but died in financial ruin. Telling Randel’s engrossing and dramatic life story for the first time, this eye-opening biography introduces an unheralded pioneer of American engineering and mapmaking.

 

images-1I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp: An Autobiography

By Richard Hell

293 pages, HarperCollins Publishers, $25.99

From USA Today review:

Richard Hell brings to his new autobiography, …more literary experience than your typical rock memoirist. Before gaining attention for his work in such seminal punk-era bands as Television, the Heartbreakers and Richard Hell and the Voidoids, he wrote verse and even published a poetry magazine (albeit a “fetal” one, he admits in these pages); and writing has been Hell’s main vocation — essays, reportage, fiction — since he retired from music back in 1984.

 

images-2George Bellows: Painter with a Punch!

By Robert Burleigh

48 pages, Abrams Books for Young Readers, $18.95

From the Politics and Prose website:

No punches are pulled in this fascinating biography that covers the life and work of the prolific artist George Bellows. Having spent most of his adult life in New York City, Bellows left behind an extraordinary body of work that captures life in this dynamic city: bustling street scenes, ringside views of boxing matches, and boys diving and swimming in the East River. Art reproductions and photographs from his youth round out the book.

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