PrintNew York City neophytes have it hard. Achieving mildly elitist urban sophistication and New York know-how is a complex chemistry, a layering game. All at once, they’re expected to know the best dive bar in Brooklyn and the best club on the LES for the underaged, while committing recent exhibitions on Museum Mile to memory. They must avoid “touristy” landmarks as they would the plague—constantly transferring at but never exiting the Times Square subway station, save ironic excursions with stuffy relatives.
They must endlessly lament The Times’ new online-content fee, abbreviate the name of the local deli, know the name and subway stop of each ethnic enclave, and use the same dingy vintage MetroCard until it has faded into oblivion.
Knowing New York is an immense task, and, like the dynamic storefronts on Broadway, its contents are always changing. But with each new addition of contemporary New York knowledge, less mental real estate is available for New York’s past.
Although many New Yorkers can call themselves cultural authorities, New York is also home to a select few intellectual authorities: scholars who have devoted their studies to illustrating this often forgotten New York City, and its catalysts for historical change.
The Eye interviewed six of these professors, asking them which landmarks they believed are the most important and compelling—and yet most overlooked—in the recent history of New York.
Roosevelt Island
At one point in time, New York City exported most of its problems to Roosevelt Island, now a cozy off-shore town. The small strip of land in the East River—known first as Blackwell’s Island, then Welfare Island in 1921, and Roosevelt Island in 1973—housed some of the city’s most famous “undesirables” in its penitentiary: Boss Tweed, Mae West, and Billie Holiday, who served a four-month term for prostitution charges.
“The river became the place where they put all sorts of public institutions,” says Edwin Burrows, professor of history at Brooklyn College, holder of a doctorate from Columbia, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.” He adds, “It wasn’t until the early 1940s and 1950s that it became prime real estate.”
The island was also home to the New York Lunatic Asylum. The designer of the asylum initially wanted to divide patients into four classes: “noisy, destructive, and violent,” “idiots,” “convalescents,” and “…harmless and not possessed of bad habits.” Instead, only two wings were built, with the friendly neighbors at the penitentiary working as guards and attendants.
“In the old days, the idea was to get those kinds of people out of the city,” Burrows says. “Now, there’s nothing quite as isolated. The closest thing that comes to mind is Guantanamo, but that’s not in New York City.”
While the Lunatic Asylum didn’t house any famous names, the patients did achieve a local—if not cruel and uncaring—fame. In 1859, a writer for Harper’s Weekly wrote of one Ms. Buchanan, who is reported to have believed she was the wife of the president: “Strange to say, the offspring of her lofty amours are invariably cats.”
Described by Charles Dickens in 1842 as pervaded with a “lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful,” the Asylum closed in 1894.
Despite leaps in social progress made by the 1950s, the island still wasn’t a haven. Poet Julia de Burgos, shortly before her death and suffering from alcoholism after leaving her native Puerto Rico, wrote during her stay at the island’s Goldwater Memorial Hospital: “It has to be from here, forgotten but unshaken, among comrades of silence/deep into Welfare Island/my farewell to the world.”
139 East 19th Street
The aesthetic movement that has come to bear complex political implications in New York—some call it “gentrification”—can be traced to a single house in Gramercy.
Professor Andrew Dolkart, associate professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and GSAPP, class of 1977, calls it something else.
“I don’t like the word gentrification,” he says. “Whenever I use it, I put it in quotation marks because it brings with it a lot of political baggage. I would say that the idea of reclaiming deteriorated row houses begins with Frederick Sterner on this one house on 19th Street.”
Sterner, an architect, decided to remodel his own brownstone at 139 East 19th Street in 1908. He covered the brownstone brick, which was going out of fashion at the time, with cream-colored stucco. After removing the stoop and cornice, he highlighted the light coloring with multicolored Spanish tiles. His ground-breaking turn was to transform his backyard—used only for doing laundry—into an ornate Italian garden. With this, the entire floor plan of his home was reversed to reflect the garden as a centerpiece.
“He completely changed what a house could be, and it was immediately successful,” says Dolkart, who wrote a history of this aesthetic movement in his book “Row House Reborn.” “Then other architects begin taking up this idea, for the wealthy and then in Greenwich Village for less wealthy people: faux-artist housing for people who wanted to live like artists, but weren’t artists.”
The buildings that Sterner renovated, which would later include his whole block, still function as residences. Sterner’s former home sold for $13 million in 2008, according to StreetEasy.com.
“My argument about these buildings is not that they are monuments to gentrification, but they are part of an architectural movement that was very important to New York,” Dolkart says. “They had a huge impact on neighborhood development, and on housing issues in the city. It has a very strong aesthetic to it that we have not appreciated in this generation.”
Park Avenue Armory
The Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue conjures images of architectural grandeur and artistic innovation, but Columbia art history buffs may not know of the institution’s controversial history. Shamus Khan, professor of sociology, explains how the Armory was originally built as a weapon storage base for protection against uprising lower classes. After the Civil War, Italian and Irish immigrants started moving to lower Manhattan, and in the grand tradition of American nativism, the original population took precautionary measures.
“The elites saw the incoming hoards [of immigrants] as a threat, and they moved to the Upper East Side to isolate themselves from these people,” explains Khan. “It was large enough so that should there be class warfare, elite families could live there.”
As time went on, the giant building took on a new reputation as a sort of social club where big New York names could rub shoulders. Powerhouses including Sanford White and Louis Comfort Tiffany designed personal rooms as status symbols, giving the building its rich architectural history.
Today it is known as a center for New York creative life, recently housing an annual charity benefit art show and supporting prominent New York artists-in-residence, which include choreographer Kim Weild, whose work is self-defined by a focus on “radical inclusion and cross-cultural collaboration.”
Club 845
At the corner of 161st Street and Prospect Avenue, in the Morrisania neighborhood of the South Bronx, is a nondescript Spanish barbecue chicken shop. Sixty years ago, at Club 845, this same site incubated the immense power of the bebop jazz movement, hosting Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
The contrast of South Bronx today with that of the 1940s is contextualized by the area’s former reputation as a suburb of Harlem. In the 1940s, about 100,000 upwardly mobile, black Harlem residents migrated to the South Bronx in search of a different New York experience.
“They were looking for bigger apartments, better schools, better shopping, better air quality, and less crime,” says Mark Naison, professor of African-American history at Fordham University, and founder of the Bronx African-American History Project. “Today it’s unimaginable—the idea of people moving to the Bronx to escape crime, crowding, and violence.”
A serendipitous combination of factors—the area’s relative wealth and education, along with its proximity to Harlem—created an immensely successful jazz scene that had its center at Club 845. “What you have in the Bronx is a jazz scene that rivals what you had in Harlem or even the Village,” Naison says.
Hunts Point Palace
On New Year’s Eve 1953, you wanted to be in the South Bronx. At the crown of their success with their influential doo-wop hit “Crying in the Chapel,” Sonny Til and The Orioles headlined a one-night gig at the Hunts Point Palace. Tito Rodriguez, resident mambo king, got second billing, with jazz giant Thelonious Monk bringing up the rear.
The event, prophetic in its combination of rhythm and blues, Latin, and jazz artists, was a typical one for The Hunts Point Palace, which had become a major stop on the Chitlin’ Circuit. Along with The Apollo in Harlem, the dance hall and theater served as a major stop for traveling black musical acts.
While the upwardly mobile African American population of Harlem migrated to the Morrisania area of the Bronx in the 1940s, the Puerto Rican equivalent moved to Hunts Point, directly south.
“These people had some money in their pockets, which allowed all these amazing clubs to open up,” Professor Mark Naison says. “But it also created an opportunity for a place like the Hunts Point Palace to thrive, featuring Latin music as well as jazz and rhythm and blues.”
Although the venue hosted acts that would eventually attract mainstream audiences—one night’s billing included blues singer Dinah Washington and James Brown—the location’s historical importance remained largely unwritten until 2003, when Naison started the project. And despite a relative increase in recognition, the corner of East 167th Street and Southern Boulevard remains unmarked.
“There was this historic memory waiting to be tapped,” Naison says. “It wasn’t like I was prophetic and knew that there was something out there. People in the community literally grabbed me and said ‘You need to do research on this. There’s a story to be told.”
Morningside Park
For Columbia undergrads who may avoid the steep descent into Morningside Park simply because they will have to climb back up to reach the dorms, it’s easy overlook the park’s immense historical importance: to the University, and to the racial struggles in the United States.
In 1968, Columbia was on the verge of building a new gymnasium in the park as a joint project with the city. The gymnasium was to have two separate entrances: one on the west side as an entrance for the University community, and one on the east, for the Harlem community. Students immediately protested the plan, accusing it of segregating the largely white university community and the largely black Harlem community. Administrators said the entrances eased access because of the incline of the park.
The 1968 student protest of “Gym Crow,” which resulted in a several-week-long campus takeover, was possibly Columbia’s most famous political statement of the 20th century. While the event gave Columbia its standing reputation for radical student activism, it also provides an important comparison for contemporary racial relations.
At the time, the protest was divided along racial lines, with black and white students occupying different buildings on campus. Professor Mark Naison was separated from his girlfriend during the protest. He was white, and she was black.
While Naison, a Columbia College alum, says he believes Columbia students are less racially divided than they were in 1968, he has openly criticized the institutional policies of the university, writing in 2008 that although he appreciates the education he received here, “I am not proud to be an alumnus of the school.”
“The neighborhood has been gentrified to a degree that is unimaginable, in terms of the stores that are on Broadway, Amsterdam and Columbus,” he said. “While Columbia may not be actively displacing tenants, when they do development, it leads to rents going up, and existing working class families having to close their businesses or move somewhere else.”
Cooper Union
In a city where today’s treasured landmark is tomorrow’s vegetarian café, Cooper Union is as reliable as they come.
The tuition-free university was founded in 1859 by America’s Most Accomplished Multitasker, Peter Cooper, whose title can only be contested when someone else designs the first steam railroad engine, runs a profitable glue factory, founds a free university, runs for President, and invents Jell-O.
Since then, the imposing brownstone has stood in the East Village as a pillar for all that’s good and free: top-notch education (particularly strong in the arts), books (Cooper Union’s public library pre-dated New York’s), early coeducation, and Abraham Lincoln.
CUNY Professor Phil Schoenberg, who leads tours of New York City, says tourists are surprised to discover that a history-changing event took place in Cooper Union’s basement: in 1860, Abraham Lincoln gave a now-famous address opposing the spread of slavery into new states. “The Great Hall was once the largest public space on the island in the 19th century,” Schoenberg says. “You can still see the actual platform that Abraham Lincoln spoke from.”
The building also has a tendency to house events in favor of the tired, the poor, and/or huddled masses. In 1909, Jewish immigrant women working in New York garment factories gathered at Cooper Union to protest working conditions. “Labor leaders tried to tell the women not to go on strike,” says Nancy Foner, professor of sociology at Hunter College. “One woman, Clara Lemlich, got up and was very riveting in her speaking.”
Her speech rallied 20,000 women to go on strike. To top it all off, it was in Yiddish.
CBGB
In an era before Carles identified “relevant” venues and distributed this information en masse with one click, knowing about the New York music scene required effort—after all, zines didn’t staple and distribute themselves.
“Back then, when people used the term ‘cut and paste,’ they meant it literally,” said Robert Poss, who holds a masters from Columbia School of Journalism, class of 1984, of the insular 1980s New York punk scene. “Now you can learn about everything [related to music] without leaving your apartment.”
It was in this DIY culture that famed punk club CBGB (ironically, Country, Blue Grass, and Blues) thrived among junkies and punks in the dingy East Village.
“We didn’t have any grand illusions that we were going to change society, but we did have a feeling that we were going to make music our way … You bought your own clothes and you made your own posters, as opposed to being part of some corporate record company machine,” Poss says.
While today’s new hardcore hangouts pay homage to CBGB with vintage knick knacks a la Brooklyn Flea, real estate prices have prevented venues from achieving (or perhaps being reduced to) the same level of grunge that CBGB epitomized.
“It wasn’t a hipster hangout,” Poss said “The drinks were cheap. The bathrooms were filthy. There were other clubs to play at that were more upscale, but there was something really visceral about playing at CBGBs.”
“Punk has been co-opted into the culture as a fashion statement at this point, but it was originally a cultural and personal statement,” says Pat Place, guitarist for regular performers The Contortions, and later the Bush Tetras.
McSorley’s
Established in 1854 and, according to the New York Times, being the oldest Irish tavern in the city, McSorley’s is a landmark if only for its incredible persistence. Its celebrity clientele throughout the centuries is also particularly notable: famous imbibers include Abraham Lincoln, Harry Houdini, and E.E. Cummings. But before Harry Houdini linked his cuffs to the bar, the place was a tried-and-true hangout for regular New Yorkers.
“It used to be a favorite place for the common folk,” says Professor Phil Schoenberg. “Every time there’s been a war, people would collect drumstick [bones] and return them to the Ale House [for good luck]. Some are still hanging in the chandeliers unbroken.”
The old boys’ club bar may have more in common with Columbia than you think. Besides giving you a pleasantly rotund case of Frat Bloat, a trip to McSorley’s Ale House can also endow you with a history filled with famous figures, urban myth, and some good ol’ fashioned gender bias. McSorley’s didn’t let women into the bar until 1970.
But when you’re looking to get plastered and exploit your thirst for trivial historical facts? It can only be done here.
“They brew their own stuff,” Schoenberg says. “I’m not a beer drinker, but it does taste good.”
Tenement Museum
Unlike other hidden landmarks, 97 Orchard Street is not a New York building that was once graced by the presence of Abraham Lincoln. Dylan Thomas did not drink here, and Allen Ginsberg did not live in squalor here. In fact, there is nothing secretly extraordinary about 97 Orchard Street.
But in a city where the percentage of residents who are foreign-born is lower now than it was in 1910, the building currently stands as a monument to the typical New York immigrant experience. It now houses The Tenement Museum, which has restored the building to resemble a residence of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Professor Andrew Dolkart says he thinks it speaks to an experience beyond New York City’s limits. Dolkart wrote “Biography of a Tenement House in New York City,” which details the architectural history of the building and its neighborhood.
“The idea behind the project was to represent the history of most Americans, as opposed to the log cabins and Mount Vernons,” he says.
While it may be easier to find information about contemporary immigrant life, Dolkart says the diversity of immigrants and where they reside make it hard to picture a similarly-designed museum existing 100 years from now.
“People are still living in those tenements and are living some of the same experiences that the earlier generations of immigrants had, just down the block from the Tenement Museum,” Dolkart says. “But there are also immigrants living in six-story apartment houses with elevators.”
Reporting contributed by Devin Briski