Motor hotels: Manhattan's most luxurious parking garage "Your car never touched by human hands!"

If you don't already check in to the marvelous Modern Mechanix blog from time to time, then you're missing out on some retro-futuristic genius. The blog usually highlights visionary drawings from the Modern Mechanics archives. But in the case of one illustration from May 1929, one particular wacky, wondrous dream was actually carried out -- and promptly fizzled.

Automobiles had been a part of midtown Manhattan since the beginning of the 20th century, with dealerships lining the streets of the plaza that would soon take the name Times Square. But it wouldn't be until the 1920s that the city recognized a crisis that would bedevil New Yorkers into today -- where do you park your car?

Some cities outright banned curb parking during the decade. Chicago became the first city to charge motorists to park along city streets. But in New York, some private endeavors tried to solve the problem.

Perhaps seeing a bit of cross promotion, Packard Motors sold an area of property on Ninth Avenue and 61st Street (today's 43-45 W. 61st Street) to the Kent Garage Investing Corporation in 1928. the brainchild by Westchester insurance salesman Milton A. Kent, the ambitious company opened a dizzying 25-floor* mechanical parking garage in a 'flamboyant brick and terra-cotta' art deco tower,  that could accomodate 1,000 cars, using an automatic elevator system that stored cars in upper floors. The cars were rolled into and out of elevators to desired slots in the structure, in theory using few human operators.  (See the clipping from the December 1928 issue of Popular Science at the bottom of this article.)

Advertisements touted the garage as a 'motor hotel'. "Your car never touched by human hands!" went the Kent Garage slogan.

At right: The glamorous garage at West 61st Street, harkening a bit in appearance to the RCA Building, which would be completed in 1933. [source]

Kent Garages opened another location at 44th Street and 3rd Avenue and seemed to be the solution to the coming automobile boom that would fuel the ambitions of city planners like Robert Moses in the coming decade. Unfortunately, the Kent Garages were extremely inflexible, not suitable for cars of certain sizes, and employed highly defective machinery. And as you can probably gather, these were hardly swift forms of storage. It might take almost 30 minutes to retrieve your automobile during rush hour!

The garages were done in before they really got started thanks to the Great Depression. The Kents sold the 61st Street garage in 1931, although the building remained as a more conventional parking garage until 1943, when the building was refitted as a warehouse. (It's an apartment building today.)

*Advertisements of the day tout a 25 floor structure, while the building's landmark designation report lists a 24-floor building.

Top image courtesy of Modern Mechanix

'The Irish Way' to becoming American: a hard-fought history of the dockworkers, the vaudevillians and the chambermaids

The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multi-Ethnic City
part of the Penguin History of American Life series
By James R. Barrett
Penguin Group

The Irish were the first to immigrate to this country en masse in the 1840s, only to find themselves near the bottom of almost every aspect of American life. In James R. Burnett's tidy and studied cultural history 'The Irish Way: Becoming American In The Multi-Ethnic City', we found out how they fought their way into American life, transforming it, and paving the way for others.

Burnett, a professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, explores the Irish influence on American life via the collisions and conflicts which occurred between the new arrivals and nativists, and the new arrivals and the newer arrivals. A profound theme of the book is that the definition of being American Irish came not from seclusion that would define later immigrant groups, but from clashes with those groups. By the 20th century, Irish influence came from their successful entry into American life and, according to Burnett, "in strategies for dealing with newcomers."

The book is categorized into various aspects of modernity as it would have looked to a late 19th century immigrant -- The Streets, The Parish, The Workplace, The Machine. Although it purports to be a survey of American Irish urban life, it's almost wholly based on the New York Irish experience. And for good reason; by the turn of the century, more people of Irish descent lived here than in Dublin.

Many aspects of modern life trace back to more robust strains of Irish defiance. The Catholic Church may have been a powerful organizer of the Irish community, but the many Irish social reformers who pushed against it (even those among the clergy itself) helped fashion modern social reform. The roots of union organizing came from Ireland. And, with nods to the likes of "Big Tim" Sullivan, the modern political machine was essentially fueled by powerful collaborations with Irish community leaders.

If early Irish New Yorkers strived for assimilation, later generations defined their ethnicity against the grain, combating black, Italian and other immigrants in alleyways and along the docks -- for territory, for jobs, for identity. The Irish dominated the worlds of minstrelsy and vaudeville. Victimized by horrid stereotypes, Irish entertainers turned the tables with equally vulgar presentations of groups they often considered beneath them. (Those tables could be turned again; as Irish entertainers often did 'yellowface', so too could a Chinese entertainer do a broad Irish impression in those years.)

There are lovely details of New York life scattered throughout, from the birth of New York's first black Catholic Church to the final foothold of Irish dock workers in the neighborhood of Chelsea. While Burnett spends little time amid the grit of early Irish neighborhoods, there are plenty of depictions of fisticuffs and riots to indulge your pugilistic impulse. While it does beautifully illustrate the roots of Irish American pride, 'The Irish Way' is not a manual but a map, a reflection upon their path to influence on life in the United States.

A strange bridge over Canal Street

One of the more ornate features of the West Side Elevated Highway was the bridge constructed over Canal Street and opened to the public in February 1939. In November 1982, the bridge was ripped down and sold for scrap. I'm not sure of the exact date of the photography above (courtesy the Library of Congress) but it's clearly after the entire elevated highway was closed. Notice the weeds growing from the highway partition!

Sorry, notes from the podcast and regular posts will be on the way in the next few days.

The High Line: The wild, wild West Side, cowboys included, inspires an elevated railroad and a remarkable park

Joel Sternfeld's extraordinary four-seasons photographs of the High Line -- displayed in his 2002 show Walking The High Line -- revealed a ribbon of nature surrounded by urbanity and presented a peek into forgotten history. These images greatly influenced the later design of the park, a mix of seamless design and tastefully untethered flora. Courtesy Joel Sternfeld

PODCAST  The High Line, which snakes up New York's west side, is an ambitious park project refitting abandoned elevated train lines into a breathtaking contemporary park. This is the remnant of a raised freight-delivery track system that supported New York's thriving meat, produce and refrigeration industries that have defined the city's western edges.

 You can trace the footprints of this area back almost 200 years, to the introduction of the Hudson River Railroad and Cornelius Vanderbilt, who transformed the streets along the Hudson River into 'the lifeline of New York', filled with warehouses, marketplaces and abattoirs. And, of course, lots of traffic, turning 10th Avenue and 11th Avenue into 'death avenues', requiring New York's first 'urban cowboys'.  The West Side Elevated Freight Railroad was meant to relieve some of trauma on the street. That's not exactly how it worked out.

We'll tell you about its downfall, its transformation during the 70s as a haven for counter-culture, and its reinterpretation as an innovative urban playground.

FEATURING: Cows, dining cars, Russian caviar and sex clubs!

You can tune into it below, download it for FREE from iTunes or other podcasting services, or get it straight from our satellite site.

Or listen to it here:
The Bowery Boys: The High Line

More photos will be available later this afternoon. Notes, corrections, clarifications, sources, and additional information will be posted on Tuesday. 


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St. John's Freight Depot, built in 1871. The Cornelius Vanderbilt statue stood watch over the bustling activity until the building was demolished in the 1930s. Mr. Vanderbilt was then moved to Grand Central Terminal, where he still stands today. Pictures courtesy NYPL digital images

The businesses, the trains and the marketplaces of the west side created a nightmare traffic situation along 10th and 11th Avenues, resulting in dozens of death and the sinister moniker 'Death Avenue'. (Picture courtesy Friends of the High Line)

Rangers of Eleventh Avenue: A railroad cowboy marches ahead of an approaching train. Below that, many years later, another cowboy has his work cut out for him going up the avenue in 1922, the era of automobiles.

The relatively 'modern' St. Johns Terminal on Spring Street.

Building the elevated freight railroad: At Gansevoort Street, looking north. Picture courtesy the New York Historical Society

The elevated in 1934, West Street and Spring Street. This was one of the sections that was later ripped down. (Courtesy NYPL)

After the elevated railroad closed for good in 1980, the track sat abandoned, covered in natural overgrowth of the likes hardly seen anywhere else in Manhattan. 'Urban explorers' often traipsed along the mysterious rails, capturing the dichotomy between sudden natural landscape and metropolitan backdrop. (Photo courtesy wally g/Flickr)

The High Line Park opened in 2009, after almost a decade of awareness and fundraising. The linear park has helped transform the neighborhoods below it and has created a new must-see destination for tourists. (Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

Sue Simmons: A Four-Letter-Word-ing Celebration

Shake-up on the set! My favorite all-time New York news anchor Sue Simmons, a part of the WNBC news room since 1980, has been 'let go' from her long-time position, as the network won't be renewing her contract when it expires in June. One of the highest paid news anchors in New York history, Simmons is perhaps best known nationally for letting loose an expletive during a commercial news tease. I have no idea what Chuck Scarborough is going to do without her.

Here are four videos that encapsulate her resplendent, telegenic glow -- and her occasional lack thereof. Plus, I just enjoy watching '80s newscasts for some reason:

Alive at Five!


Interviewing Kate Bush in 1985 -- and getting the name of her song wrong.

Featuring Jack Cafferty and Al Roker!

And of course.....

Networked New York: This Friday at NYU!

What are the challenges of presenting the history of New York in a digital landscape? How does technology make New York history richer?

The Project on New York Writing, the Colloquium in American Literature and Culture, and the Workshop in Archival Practice at New York University is presenting an all-day conference this Friday, March 9, 'Networked New York', examining the relationships among "physical New York (the city’s buildings, streetscapes), digitized New York (its blogs, websites, tweets), or institutional New York (its archives, museums)".

I'll be representing the Bowery Boys in an afternoon panel discussion "Blogscapes and Digital Interaction," joining fellow bloggers Maud Newton, Rachel Fershleiser, and Teri Tynes of the Walking Off The Big Apple blog.  The panel will be moderated by NYU English professor Bryan Waterman, who also produces the blog Patell and Waterman's History of New York.

This discussion is begins at 4 p.m. in the Great Room at 19 University Place, right off of Washington Square Park. The conference begins at 10 a.m. All panel events are free and open to the public! There are many history-related speakers, and I think you'd all enjoy many parts of the program, so check out the schedule of events here. And read some in-depth descriptions of events at Bryan's blog.

And there's a new podcast ready for download this Friday. It's a big one!

Picture above "See Something or Say Something: New York" Caption reads: "Red dots are locations of Flickr pictures. Blue dots are locations of Twitter tweets. White dots are locations that have been posted to both."  Image courtesy Eric Fischer, who pretty much has the coolest Flickr stream ever.

Ten fabulous facts about 70 Willow Street, Brooklyn Heights, aka 'the Truman Capote house'

The strange, yellow Brooklyn Heights mansion best known as the home where Truman Capote wrote 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' has finally been sold for $12 million, after many months of humbling markdowns from its original hefty pricetag.

Located in the heart of old Brooklyn, the new owners will be winning more than a literary prize. The house has a rather unusual past full of influential inhabitants and has been used in some curious ways:

1) 70 Willow Street, in the popular Greek revival style of the day, was built in 1839 by Adrian Van Sinderen, the descendant of original Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam and a fiery Revolutionary War-era reverend from Flatbush, Ulpianus Van Sinderen. Van Sinderen's lavish urban villa -- it has almost a dozen fireplaces -- is one of the oldest houses in the neighborhood, but not the oldest. There are a few neighboring houses that are older, including 24 Middagh Street, just a couple blocks away and built in 1824.

2) The house passed to his son Adrian Jr., a prominent New York lawyer, who fell spectacularly from grace when he mishandled the family trust. He died nearly penniless and alone in New Lots, far outside the sphere of wealth, in 1864. (There's an avenue near that east Brooklyn neighborhood named for the Van Sinderen family.) His descendants appear to have done better. Another Adrian Van Sinderen has an annual book-collecting competition named for him at Yale University.

3) The 'estate of Van Sinderen', as it was often called then, was built for a single family, but by the late 1860s, the roomy floors were being split up for several tenants. From an October 1869 classified ad in the Brooklyn Eagle:"One large, handsomely furnished second floor room for gentleman and wife or gentlemen willing to room together."***

4) The primary resident during the late 19th century was the banker William Putnam, better known as a significant trustee for the Brooklyn Museum in its early years. He betrothed to the museum paintings by Rembrandt and Monet, as well as some 'Royal Copenhagen  porcelain' that rivaled that of European rulers, according to the Times.

5) The house was a pivotal location for the women's suffrage movement. Scratch that, the anti-women's suffrage movement. The newly married lady of the house, Caroline Putnam, and her sister Lillian joined other local ladies of means in organizing protests against granting women the right to vote or, in the words of their 1894 petition, to protest "the obligations of the ballot upon the women of the state." Mrs. Putnam also hosted French conservation classes and literary salons from her parlor here. [source]

The picture at top shows the house as it looked in 1922. At right, the home in 1936. (Pictures courtesy New York Public Library.)

6) After Mrs. Putnam died in 1940, the house sat entirely vacant until 1944, when it was donated to the Red Cross. They used the house as a classroom, teaching arts and crafts, Braille to the blind and cooking classes to the wives of returning soldiers from World War II.

7) In 1953, the old house landed in the hands of renown Broadway stage designer Oliver Smith, responsible for the original scenery from great American musicals like Oklahoma!, Guys and Dolls and West Side Story. In his lifetime, he was nominated for 25 Tony Awards. With some of his earnings from the musical On The Town, Smith bought 70 Willow Street and lived here until he died in 1994.

8) From 1955 to 1965, he lent the basement apartment to his friend Truman Capote. The blond Southern writer was simply wild about Brooklyn Heights and basically charmed himself into a permanent room on Willow Street. From his essay 'A House on the Heights,' Capote describes, "We [Smith and Capote] sat on the porch consulting Martinis -- I urged him to have one more, another. It got to be quite late, he began to see my point; yes, twenty-eight rooms were rather a lot; and yes it seemed only fair that I should have some of them."

9) Decked out in green wallpaper and odd knickknacks, "an atmosphere of perpetual Christmas," the house would prove a place of great inspiration for Capote. He wrote part of 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' here. Perhaps more notably, it was here that he picked up a New York Times are read about the brutal slaying of a Kansas family. Capote set about working on what became 'In Cold Blood' the next day. Although, mostly, he entertained here, including

10) I can't leave the tale of 70 Willow Street without mentioning one of its most famous lunch guests -- Jackie Kennedy. Capote conveniently left out the fact that the house was Smith's, not his. "She laughed about it, because suddenly in the middle of lunch she got the idea that it wasn't his," Smith recalled later. "I suppose I acted as if it were mine."

And here's some literary bonus points -- it's just down the street from the old home of Arthur Miller (155 Willow Street)

***A reader emailed me to say that the addresses for Willow Street were differently numbered before 1865 and that this ad probably refers to a neighbor of 70 Willow Street. In that case, I'll replace that fact with one I should have mentioned in the lede of this article -- as reported by Brownstoner, the $12 million final price tag for 70 Willow Street makes it the most expensive house purchase in Brooklyn history. Does this mean that nobody has yet bought my dream apartment in DUMBO?

Movin' out! The Bronx Zoo closes the Monkey House

The charismatic Baldy the Chimp, on display during the 1910s, was one of the House of Primates' most famous inhabitants. (Pic courtesy Wildlife Conservation Society)

The landmarked Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo was officially closed as an exhibition space this past Monday. It was really quite a throwback, a lovely fossil of a building but an artifact of antiquated zoological style. Even as the Bronx Zoo's popularity soared due to regional exhibits like the Congo Forest, Wild Asia and Madagascar, the Monkey House was kept open, displaying smaller primates like marmosets and tamarinds.

While hardly ideal for any type of primate today -- inmate or visitor -- the Monkey House is one of the few links to the zoo's beginnings.

Originally called the House of Primates, the quirky Beaux-Arts structure by Heins & La Farge was finished in 1901, making it the oldest landmark in the park. (The Reptile House, which opened in 1899, is not landmarked, presumably because most of the building has been replaced.) The zoo once kept all its apes, baboons and monkeys here, including Baldy the Chip (at top), amateur roller skater and acquaintance of President William Howard Taft. Today, you can still find baboon adornments atop the entrance, made by famed animal sculptor Alexander P. Proctor.

This building has been closed before, in 1950, when the inhabitants were shipped out to the newly built Great Apes House* (which no longer exists). It was reopened in 1959 and has housed the smallest monkeys from that date until this past Monday.

The Monkey House was also witness to the sorriest moment in Bronx Zoo history -- the exhibition of the Congolese pygmy Ota Benga at the House of Primates in 1906.

For more information on Ota Benga and the rest of the zoo, check out our podcast on the history of the Bronx Zoo.

*As evidenced by this depressing article, the Great Apes House was no great place with primates either.

'The Greatest Grid' and an even greater book

Reason to love New York No. 12,306: A museum honoring the city's history has a hit on its hands with an elaborate show about surveying and real estate.

'The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011', the smash-hit exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, is the most fully realized and in-depth show they've produced in a few years, and it's done almost entirely without the help of traditional three-dimensional objects.  (The show has also been extended, until July 15.)

The story of the Commissioners Plan of 1811 and the effects of the Manhattan grid plan are wondrously illustrated with an extraordinary collection of maps and photographs, documenting the island's almost century-long conversion into a major metropolis. The most substantial, non-printed object is a small marble surveying post.

But there's a problem with a show based on maps. You actually want to touch things, draw your finger along familiar areas, and stand staring at pictures unfamiliar landscapes, trying to find evidence of your present street corner. More than once I caught myself poking an artifact in sudden amazement. (My apologizes to the museum curators.)

This is what makes the exhibit's companion volume 'The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011', edited by Hilary Ballon, pretty much invaluable. Published in a slender landscape binding, the book condenses the exhibition but allows for unabated curiosity and imaginative wanderings over vivid prints of aged topography.

This exhibit stands in contrast with Mannahatta/Manhattan, another excellent show from 2009 which aroused New York history lovers. Mannahatta was map-based, but pure speculation, an imagining of what the island was like before European habitation. 'The Greatest Grid' starts from many of the same sources -- the Mannahatta Project was built upon early 18th century topographical maps -- but elaborates forth upon the present landscape with stunningly detailed drawings of almost every inch of Manhattan.

While the show gives nods to the original three commissioners -- and of course to John Randel, the surveyor tasked with outlining every foot of land -- it's the later applications of the grid plan that I found most fascinating. The book reprints images of country homes next to street plans that would shortly cut through the property. It's a melancholy display, I guess, the destruction of natural beauty has rarely been as fascinating.

Original surveying maps are complemented with lithographs and photography illustrating the final product, in some cases carved blocks with lonely structures, waiting for the city to catch up to them. The companion guide, stuffed with short essays and full-bodied artifact descriptions by museum staff, reprints almost every image from the show.

Many such exhibition books suffer from the transfer. As an extreme example, last year's lustrous, blockbuster Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was rendered into a diminutive curio with its accompanying companion book. 'The Greatest Grid' suffers no such problem, especially to those of us who find tinted topographical maps and black-and-white images of old New York as scintillating as haute couture.

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Our podcast on the Commissioners Plan of 1811 merely skims the surface of material presented in 'The Greatest Grid', but I think it makes for a fine introduction. And I'm not ashamed to say we spend quite a bit of time talking about Gouverneur Morris. [You can download it from here.]

Ladies, it's your day! A Leap Year tradition, New York style

 “When a woman has reached the age of thirty there is nothing left for her but to be good. I am going to make clothes for the poor. Hand me down that roll of flannel, Rachel: I mean to begin at once." 

"If it will be any comfort to you, my dear," began Rachel, soothingly, if monotonously. "I read the other day that women of thirty were all the fashion, and that girls of twenty were quite out of it." 


"That was written by a person of forty then, my dear.”

-- excerpt from 'A Woman of Thirty', New York Times, 1893

Happy Leap Day, single ladies! Put a ring on it! For four years -- 1,460 straight days -- men have been the initiators in romance. Women were to mildly express interest in a mate, her demure politeness disguising anything possibly resembling passion as she awaited a marriage proposal from the confines of her parents home. But not so on February 29, according to custom. On this day, women get to playfully assert themselves in the parlor, boldly proposing to the men they desire.

Although this Leap Day tradition allegedly dates back to the Elizabethan era and even further, the proper folk of the Victorian -- and within the societal confines of New York -- embraced it almost-seriously. But this was no mere pantomime of dating ritual, not simply a crusty poke at female status. Citing 'common law', the Independent in 1908 proclaimed, "[A]ny man refusing a woman's proposal on leap year shall give her a silk dress. Every maiden, widow or divorcee has, therefore, an opportunity this year to replenish her wardrobe even if she fails to satisfy her affections." (The advertisement at top seems to reference this detail of the ritual.)

The tradition in 19th century New York was recognized enough that an uptick in advertisements from female suitors could be found in newspapers on that particular day. A reporter for the Times peers in on "the ladies of Harlem" in 1856 to discover "the fairer half of the assemblage asserted the prerogatives which Leap Year confers upon them to the fullest extent. They selected their own partners for the dance and very probably some of them exercised their privilege of choosing a party for life."  There was even a well-received play by J.B. Buckstone which debuted in 1850 called 'Leap Year - A Ladies Privilege'.

But was this ridiculous tradition ever really taken seriously? There was doubt, even in the Gilded Age. I mean, women proposing marriage? Can you imagine? "It seems almost incredible to us that there was a time when it was considered a humorous thing for a civilized community to assume that women were in the habit of doing what no woman is known ever to have done," wrote a Times columnist in 1880

As with old customs, this might have been taken more seriously outside of major cities, as evidenced by this letter which ran in the New York Times in 1864: "A remarkable (Leap Year) courtship and marriage came off in our quiet village last week, resulting disastrously to all the parties concerned."

For New Yorkers, Leap Day does not seem to have been a 'holiday' that received serious consideration. Among the upper crust, a woman's proposal would have been scoffed at, regardless of the season, while it's doubtful certain lower class women wouldn't have waited for a calendar anomoly to do what she wished. If anything, the urban legend might have actually deterred potential marriage proposals. According to an 1884 article, "The ladies are afraid to marry this [leap] year because people will say they popped the question."

Even William Jay Gaynor, mayor of New York 100 years ago, dismissed the custom and the women of New York in a single swoop: "I do not think women care about leap year. They can propose if they want to, but bless them, leap year or no leap year, they would rather have the fellow propose to them."

Of course, I suppose some are trying to keep this weird custom alive even today.

Illustration at top from the Club Women of New York journal from 1904. Life advertisement courtesy New York Public Library.