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With its stolid municipal buildings, 1990s-era academic-industrial park, and crowded commercial corridor, Downtown Brooklyn feels more like a civic center than a residential one. But ever since a 2004 rezoning, the area, surrounded by the brownstone belt of Fort Greene, Boerum Hill, and Brooklyn Heights, has transformed into the city’s fastest-growing neighborhood, accounting for roughly 5% of all new housing built citywide. In the first six months of 2025 alone, a record-breaking 3,700-plus units were added to the neighborhood, a growth spurt that prompted Justin Davidson to call it “the Olive Garden of New York real estate, offering a mediocre product and plenty of it.”

All of that growth has been vertical, the borough’s once modest skyline rewritten in gleaming slabs of glass and steel. Every new tower seems intent on outdoing the last in terms of height, amenities (did someone say hammock lounge?), and price, a luxury condo arms race that has reached its apotheosis in Brooklyn’s very own supertall, the 1,066-foot-tall Brooklyn Tower.

The omnipresent black and bronze monolith draws frequent comparisons to Sauron’s fortress in the Lord of the Rings. With a penthouse apartment listed for $16.75M, Brooklyn’s version of the Dark Lord probably runs a tech startup.

Far below, cutting diagonally through the neighborhood, are the roughly eight blocks of the Fulton Mall, the third most profitable shopping district in the city, after Fifth and Madison Avenues. Decidedly less upscale than either of those, Fulton Mall is a mix of sneaker stores, discount retailers, cell phone dealers and wig shops. Outside the storefronts, a parallel sidewalk economy of street vendors hawk everything from essential oils and gold chains to roasted nuts and mix CDs. This week saw a particularly brisk business in orange and blue Knicks merchandise of dubious origins.

In many ways, the mall feels like a holdout, an unsanitized corridor of pre-gentrification Brooklyn, the land of “the soft sell and the hard bargain.”1 But the discount stores and luxury condominiums alike are merely the latest layer in a neighborhood that has spent two centuries reinventing itself. After all, “New York,” in the straightforward assessment of Rem Koolhaas, “is a city that will be replaced by another city.”

THE CORNERSTONE KING

In 1834, the village that had grown up around the bustling Fulton Ferry Landing officially became a city. The Remsen and Pierrepont families, already major players in Brooklyn affairs, donated a parcel of land roughly a mile inland for a new city hall. Architect Calvin Pollard won the competition to design the building and, in 1836, the cornerstone was set in place. Then the Panic of 1837 brought everything to a screeching halt.

A few years later, after a cadre of disgruntled stone brokers sitting on piles of cut Tuckahoe marble threatened to sue over unpaid bills, city leaders abandoned Pollard’s ambitious plan in favor of a more modest design. Construction resumed in 1845 using a proposal submitted by the competition’s runner-up, Gamaliel King.

By then Pollard had turned his attention to an even grander project, a 435-foot monument to George Washington to be built in Hamilton Square, Manhattan. Walt Whitman dismissed this proposal as “a mixture without uniformity, without apparent design, and certainly without the least appropriateness.” Like Pollard’s original City Hall design, the monument never rose beyond its cornerstone.

At the time, the peripatetic Whitman, whose biography contained multitudes of different addresses, lived in a modest wood-frame building at 106 Myrtle on the edge of Downtown Brooklyn. His move into the building coincided with his firing as the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle after the paper’s owner took issue with Walt’s anti-slavery stance.

Whitman was hardly alone in his reformist convictions. By the mid-19th-century, Downtown Brooklyn and nearby Brooklyn Heights were centers of abolitionist activity, home to churches, activists, and organizations dedicated to ending slavery.

ABOLITIONIST PLACE

In 1818, African American members of the Sand Street Methodist Episcopal Church formed their own congregation after having to pay to sit in a segregated rear upper gallery where they were often subjected to pro-slavery sermons. Soon they moved into a new church housed in a Greek Revival temple with Doric columns at 311 Bridge Street.

The Bridge Street Methodist Church was Brooklyn’s first independent Black church and became a major stop on the Underground Railroad. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman both spoke here, and on New Year’s Eve 1862, hundreds of Black and white Brooklynites gathered for Brooklyn’s original “watch party” in anticipation of Abraham Lincoln’s promise to sign the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day.

Besides the Bridge Street Church, the small red brick home at 227 Duffield is one of the few surviving buildings with ties to the neighborhood’s abolitionist history. The house was once home to Harriet and Thomas Truesdell — he a founding member of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society, she the treasurer of the Providence Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, both close associates of William Lloyd Garrison. The house is believed by many to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad, possibly connected to the Bridge Street Church and other buildings on Duffield by a network of tunnels.

In 2007, the city tried to invoke eminent domain to seize several properties on the block to build two hotels and a parking garage. Activists succeeded in stopping the demolition. The block was renamed Abolitionist Place and 227 Duffield received landmark status in 2021. Today, the three-story structure sits between the new Abolitionist Park and the massive One Willoughby Square, Brooklyn’s tallest office tower, which looms over the modest home.

While churches and reform societies shaped the neighborhood’s moral life, City Hall shaped its civic one. A cluster of government buildings including the old Federal Courthouse and Post Office went up to accommodate a booming population that was, by 1894, the fourth largest in the country. Then, in 1898, in a referendum decided by a margin of just 277 votes, Brooklyn was consolidated into the City of New York. City Hall was now Borough Hall, and just a few years later, it almost burned to the ground.

JERRY FOX

On May 22, 1904, Jerry Fox wandered into an office inside Borough Hall that belonged to Judge Almet F. Jenks. The judge, an “inveterate cigarette smoker,” had piles of matches lying around and, it was suspected that one of those matches ignited and set his desk on fire.

Jerry raced out of the room and roused a dozing policeman named Harry States who called the fire department. After a fire had destroyed the roof nine years earlier, every floor had been equipped with an emergency hose. States grabbed the nearest one, dragged it into the room, and turned the spigot. Not a drop came out.

Judge Jenks, checking in to see what all the hubbub was about, returned to his office and was shocked to find his desk in flames. He leapt to action:

You may think the most remarkable part of this story is a judge pouring water from a stolen hat, but the real kicker is that Jerry Fox, who first alerted the police, was a cat. At the time of the fire, Jerry was an estimated 26 years old and nearly blind, though a custom pair of spectacles made by a local optometrist helped him navigate the steps of Borough Hall, which he called home.

Though I couldn’t find any historical references to Jerry’s fire-saving exploits (or any reasonable rationale for outfitting a cat with spectacles), a New York Times obituary published a year after the fire paints a vivid picture of Borough Hall’s favorite feline, who was described as “an epoch in himself” and as “a student as well as a great cat” by his optometrist. Jerry was there when City Hall became Borough Hall and witnessed the invention of the telephone, trolley, and the electric light. He was said to have crossed paths with everyone from Henry Ward Beecher to John “The Boss” McKane, not to mention the hundreds of judges, lawyers, firemen and city officeholders who frequented Brooklyn’s seat of power. Where the “strange tongued subway workers” found his lifeless body in the Borough Hall subway shaft, the obituary recounted, “there could not have been sorrow more profound than that which greeted the news of his death.”

While Borough Hall anchored Downtown Brooklyn’s civic life, Fulton Street was becoming its commercial heart. During Jerry’s long tenure in Borough Hall, a stretch of Fulton Street had evolved into one of the busiest shopping districts in America.

WHEELER’S FOLLY

The man who first identified the potential of this stretch of Fulton was a developer named Andrew Wheeler. In 1873, he built a massive French Second Empire palace in the middle of what was then nowhere, anticipating a bidding war between prospective high-end tenants. Wheeler’s instincts were good; his timing was not. The only tenants he could attract for what the press dubbed Wheeler’s Folly included a saloon and Bunnell’s Dime Museum, where ten cents bought admission to see Baron Littlefinger and Count Rosebud, “the most talented dwarves in existence.” Upstairs was converted into a roller-skating rink.

Finally, a decade later, roughly three months before the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, a dry goods merchant with a repetitive name, Abraham Abraham, and his partner, Joseph Wechsler bought Wheeler’s Folly.

Despite claims that they were “cutting their own throats,” the two men left their successful storefront half a dozen blocks down Fulton and transformed their new building into a temple of commerce, complete with a five-story rotunda topped by a glass dome.

A full-page advertisement in the February 14, 1885 edition of the Brooklyn Eagle announced the opening and described the store towering above its neighbors “like a Lebanon pine over the hillside shrubs, visible from many points.” It was the Brooklyn Tower of its day. It was also the Amazon, where shoppers could browse more than forty departments selling everything from jewelry and furniture to custom shoes and imported fabrics. Soon the business was attracting more than 40,000 customers a day. Seeing the success, competitors such as Loeser’s, Oppenheim & Collins, and Namm’s soon followed.

In 1893, Abraham bought out Wechsler and joined forces with the Strauss brothers of Macy’s fame. The company was renamed Abraham & Strauss. By 1896, A&S employed 2,000 people who enjoyed unusually generous benefits, including in-house medical care and summer Saturdays off. By 1900, the workforce had more than doubled. Interpreters speaking 23 languages helped serve Brooklyn’s increasingly diverse population, while the store continued expanding, adding neighboring buildings until it occupied the entire block.

When the Brooklyn subway system opened in 1908, an exit at Hoyt Street led directly into the store’s basement, the first private entrance to the New York subway system. For decades, A&S remained the heart of Fulton’s shopping district, drawing customers from across Brooklyn and beyond.

In the 1970s, the store made headlines for pioneering the use of live mannequins, hiring Brooklyn high school students to stand motionless in the windows wearing the latest Pierre Cardin while customers stared, pinched, and tickled them, which really doesn’t sound worth the $1.85 an hour the job paid. As Fulton Street gradually devolved into what one observer called a “clamorous midway of discount shops,” the store lost ground. In 1995, A&S became Macy’s, which lasted another thirty years before finally closing in 2025.

THE BLACK SPIDER

For more than half of A&S’s existence, shoppers approaching the store first had to pass beneath one of Brooklyn’s most notorious landmarks, the tangled, sooty web of elevated train tracks known as the Black Spider.

Almost as soon as the line opened in 1888, local officials and merchants complained about the “Medusan tangle of rapid transit and streetcar lines” that became known as the Black Spider.

Several proposals were put forward to beautify what was, for many visitors, their first impression of Brooklyn, including a particularly ambitious plan centered on an obelisk rising from a circular plaza with avenues radiating toward the two bridges.

It wasn’t until the completion of the East River subway tunnels, however, that anything substantial could be done. The slaying of the Black Spider finally began in 1941, and culminated in the demolition of the Brooklyn Bridge terminal at Sands Street two years later.

With the elevated tracks gone, work began on what would become Cadman Plaza. Several blocks of what architecture critic Lewis Mumford called “dingy buildings that had long begged for demolition” were cleared away, along with more significant structures such as the former headquarters of the Brooklyn Eagle.

The man behind the transformation was, of course, Robert Moses, who predicted that Cadman Plaza would become “what the great cathedral and opera plazas are to European cities.” While the project arguably created much-needed open space in the civic center, the resulting architecture, in the words of historian Thomas Campanella, “devolved into a loose assembly of dull modernist buildings, each more forgettable than the next, all orbiting Cadman Plaza like space junk about a star.” Particularly offensive is the massive Shreve, Lamb & Harmon-designed Supreme Court Building, which looks as though it could serve double duty as a jail.

METROTECH

In the early 1990s, a similar cycle of demolition and mediocre design played out a few blocks west with the creation of the 16-acre MetroTech campus, a bland collection of 11 office buildings organized around a pedestrianized superblock. At its center sits a grove of weathered honey locust trees and bright red Adirondack chairs arranged in a setting that feels more corporate office park than urban piazza. The square is dotted with several sculptures, including an extremely realistic Stray Dog by sculptor Tony Matelli, which always manages to catch me off guard. That was especially true this week when, doing a double take at the ersatz labrador, I stepped into a very real pile of dog shit.

Though MetroTech never quite delivered on the promise of turning the area into the next Silicon Valley, it was a major catalyst for the 2004 rezoning of Downtown, which, for better or worse, ushered in a new era of condominiums and coffee shops.

Perhaps the most revealing barometers of the neighborhood’s fortunes are two of its best-known restaurants. At the corner of DeKalb and Flatbush, a two-story building with red-striped awnings and a fleet of double-parked cars out front is home to Junior’s, purveyors of the “World’s Most Fabulous Cheesecake.”

Locals and cheesecake lovers breathed a sigh of relief when, in 2014, Alan Rosen, grandson of the man who opened the restaurant in 1929, turned down a $45 million offer for the property from developers hoping to build a skyscraper on the spot. Of course, the Brooklyn Tower went up right next door, but Junior’s, once described as being “as synonymous with Brooklyn as Whitman himself,” remained.

On the other end of the culinary spectrum, further down Fulton Street, is what was once one of the city’s most celebrated restaurants, Gage & Tollner. Opened in 1892, Gage & Tollner was Brooklyn’s answer to Delmonico’s. With its gas lamps and cherrywood arches, the restaurant remained in business for more than a century before closing in 2004. It then began a slow descent, reopening first as a TGI Friday's, then an Arby's, and finally a store selling discount phone cases and scrunchies.

Then, in 2021, Gage & Tollner reopened, the original gas lamps and arches still intact thanks to the 1975 landmarking of its interior. Once again, hungry patrons could sit at the bar and enjoy dirty martinis and dozens of little neck clams presented on platters of pebbled ice followed by grilled lamb chops and flaming Baked Alaska.

Rem Koolhaas may be right that New York is a city that will be replaced by another city, but look closely and traces of its former selves remain. A subway entrance beneath a department store, a church wedged into an office park, a restaurant resurrected from decades of decline, its gas lamps, now electric, glowing softly in the evening light.

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

This week's field recording starts at a World Cup watch party in MetroTech, then follows a mob of teenagers who tore through the plaza and into the side streets, eventually prompting an NYPD response. It ends with the sounds of Fulton Mall.

FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER

Photographer Gus Powell was born and raised in New York City, which serves as the backdrop for his first monograph, The Company of Strangers, featuring photographs taken on his lunch break during four years as a picture editor at The New Yorker. Other books include The Lonely Ones (2017), inspired by William Steig’s book of the same name, and Family Car Trouble (2019), described as “a new classic of the Automotive Bereavement Parenting genre.”

His work has been exhibited extensively, including a solo show at the Museum of the City of New York and group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and FOAM in Amsterdam. He teaches at the School of Visual Arts and is represented by Micamera Gallery (Milan) and Lee Marks Fine Art (Indiana).

The photographs here are spreads from Brooklyn Brief, published by ROMAN NVMERALS in 2019 — a project documenting the flow of legal documents through downtown Brooklyn via battered briefcases, accordion folders, and manila envelopes. The book is stitched into a file folder, slipped inside a manila envelope, and features an essay by Robert Sullivan.

Be sure to check out all of Gus's work at his website, including his most recent project, Mise en Scene.

ODDS AND END

Supposedly, one of the live mannequins in the A & S window would later go on to star in the music video for Cyndi Lauper’s 1984 hit, Girls Just Want to Have Fun as the “chick with the blue streaked hair.”

You can sign a petition in support of hanging a plaque honoring Jerry Fox at Brooklyn Borough Hall. The petition which was started by Dan Rimada, founder of Bodega Cats of New York, has over 1000 signatures.

A picture of downtown Brooklyn from 1966 by William Gedney (1932-1989) (thanks Gus!)

When browsing Reddit for Downtown Brooklyn information I came across this recently posted picture of a pile of bagels outside the CVS on Flatbush.

Several Redditors chimed in to answer the original poster’s question, “what’s with the bagel piles in downtown bk?”

Here are some of their explanations, any one of which seems plausible:

“When a Jewish man complains the perfect complaint, he is sent straight to heaven, leaving behind his earthly form in a pile of everything he’s complained about.”

“Bagels in the wild often flock together for safety”

“bagel cairns”

“It’s mating season”

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Last week I got an email from photographer Rowland Scherman with a suggestion. Rowland has worked for publications like Life, Look, and Time, documenting everything from the March on Washington to Woodstock. He has even won a Grammy for his photography, which is a little like winning an Oscar for painting. Needless to say, when someone like Rowland gives you advice, you take it. His email simply read:

Though the prospect of wandering around a neighborhood asking complete strangers if they knew someone named Randall held a certain masochistic appeal, I decided to instead focus on the first part of his email and revisit what has to be one of my favorite neighborhoods in the city.

The 18,000 acres of Jamaica Bay are the largest open space in the city and the only national park in the United States you can reach by subway. Every year, a birder’s bucket list of more than 325 species, nearly a quarter of North America’s migrating birds, passes through the estuary’s tidal creeks and salt marshes. Congregations of Snowy Egrets, Great Blue Herons, and Glossy Ibises stalk the mudflats for fiddler crabs and crayfish, while seabirds like ospreys and terns dive-bomb the bay’s shallow waters, gorging themselves on a steady diet of peanut bunker and silverside minnows. In the distance, the spires and supertalls of the city are just visible through the haze.

In the middle of all this sits the small community of Broad Channel on the only inhabited island in Jamaica Bay, the last of the informal settlements that arose alongside the train tracks that first connected mainland Queens to the Rockaways. The Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge occupies the northern portion of the island, which is actually a conglomeration of what were once several smaller hassocks, salt marshes, and sandbars with evocative names like Goose Pond, Big Egg Marsh, and Rulers Bar Hassock.

Broad Channel’s main residential streets are laid out like the tines of a comb: eight parallel dead-end streets separated by channels of water along which locals store their boats, kayaks, and paddle boards.

It’s sometimes easy to forget New York is a seaport, but not here, where the air smells like wet cordgrass, mud, and the sea. Boats outnumber cars, flags are mandatory, and lighthouse mailboxes abound, making the whole island feel more like Cape Cod than Queens.

This proximity to the water also makes it one of New York City’s most flood-prone neighborhoods. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy devastated the community, submerging nearly the entirety of the island under six feet of water. Power and other utilities were out for more than a month. Recently, the city completed a $97 million project that raised streets by three feet, installed new storm sewers, reconstructed bulkheads, and upgraded water mains. According to a recent study, the neighborhood has the highest resident-retention rate of any neighborhood in the city.

THE NEW UTOPIA

In 1880, the New York, Woodhaven, and Rockaway Railroad built a five-mile-long wooden trestle across Jamaica Bay, connecting the Rockaways to the mainland and giving rise to a constellation of small trestle settlements along the sides of the tracks.

Once solely the province of oystermen, clam diggers, and bait fishermen, these informal settlements soon began to attract tourists, and hotels and boathouses sprang up alongside the fishing shacks that lined the tracks. Besides Broad Channel, the other settlements, each of which had its own train stop, were Goose Creek, Beach Channel, and the Raunt.

At the turn of the 20th century, shortly before Queens became part of New York City, Frederick Dunton, a member of the Jamaica Board of Supervisors, placed a discreet announcement advertising the upcoming auction for leases on land surrounding the bay in a local newspaper. Of the exceedingly small number of people who actually saw the announcement, one was (big surprise) a Dunton associate who happened to win the lease. Soon after, Dunton began selling shares in a venture he called the Industrial Federation of America, promising to transform Jamaica Bay’s “ill-smelling mud flats” into a place where “myriad slim white minarets and chimney pipes rise in majesty above forty thousand new city lots.” This new utopian city, it was promised, would be home to 200,000 of “the city’s downtrodden proletariat.”

When the Long Island Rail Road, which owned the land on either side of its tracks, learned of the scheme (which included a trolley line across Jamaica Bay that would compete with the railroad) it took Dunton to court, where the leases were invalidated.

The city then took over, grandfathering in the fishing shacks and other existing structures while offering leases to interested parties. In 1915, the city leased the entirety of Big Egg Marsh to a developer named Pierre Noel on the condition that the land be improved. Noel formed the Broad Channel Corporation, which began filling marshland, laying out a formal street grid, and dividing the 150 acres into buildable lots. The company also dug a well and built a small power plant.

Realtor Marcel Peysson built dozens of bungalows that could be rented for $50 a year or purchased outright for $375 offering “all the fun and healthful outdoor life that the blue bloods spend thousands to enjoy.” These photos were used to draw people to the new community.

RUM ROW

When Cross Bay Boulevard was completed in 1923, Broad Channel was finally reachable by car. The community, far enough removed to avoid much scrutiny from the police but now accessible by automobile, quickly became a favorite destination for those city residents who were not particularly devoted to the tenets of the Volstead Act. Rum flowed freely at local speakeasies, yacht clubs, and places like the Enterprise Hotel, giving rise to Broad Channel’s nickname, “Little Cuba.”

That same combination of accessibility and isolation made it not only an ideal spot to consume alcohol, but also the perfect place to import it. During Prohibition, massive flotillas of ships anchored in international waters just beyond U.S. maritime limits became known as Rum Row. Stretching from Nantucket to Long Island Sound, the line of ships served as a floating marketplace where local suppliers could comparison shop. Operating small boats sometimes outfitted with surplus aircraft engines to outrun the underpowered Coast Guard vessels, the rum runners would make their purchases and then, under cover of darkness, speed their illicit cargo back to shore. The liquor was then loaded into cars and trucks with false bottoms and driven into the heart of the thirsty city.

Captain William “Bill” McCoy is often credited with coming up with the Rum Row idea and prided himself on his high-quality liquor, which was marketed as the “real McCoy.” One of McCoy’s suppliers was a woman named Gertrude Lythgoe, aka “The Bahama Queen.”

When Prohibition was declared, she convinced the British shipping firm she worked for, which handled timber exports, to get into alcohol. Setting up at the Lucerne Hotel in Nassau, she became the only woman in the Bahamas to hold a wholesale liquor license. When her male competitors conspired to ice her out of the trade, she loaded 5,000 cases of whiskey aboard one of McCoy’s ships and accompanied him to Rum Row, staying aboard for several weeks until all the whiskey was sold. Lythgoe retired in 1925 and moved to Detroit, Michigan, where she started her own rent-a-car business.

Despite Prohibition’s unintended boost to the local economy, Broad Channel wasn’t immune to the effects of the Depression. The Health Department had shut down the city’s oyster and clamming industry after hundreds of cases of gastroenteritis and typhoid fever were traced back to Jamaica Bay, putting a serious damper on the local economy.

By 1939, the Broad Channel Corporation had gone bankrupt and the city took over its leases. The neighborhood had seen an influx of permanent residents during the Depression, many of them former summer visitors who had winterized their bungalows for year-round occupation. Now those new residents faced the prospect of losing the land beneath their homes. For more than forty years, the citizens of Broad Channel engaged in a series of legal battles with the city until, in 1982, Mayor Ed Koch concluded negotiations that finally allowed residents of the island community to own their land.

THE RAUNT

The Raunt, now submerged beneath East Pond in the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, was the second-largest settlement along the train tracks. In 1897, there were only six structures at the Raunt. By 1913, there were over 100. Hotels like Sehey’s East Side and O’Sullivan’s offered bay dinners and accommodations for recreational anglers who, for 50 cents a day, could rent a rowboat and head out to the calm waters of the bay teeming with seemingly endless numbers of flounder, fluke, porgies, skates, eels, and bluefish. At the Raunt’s third hotel, Paschke’s, it wasn’t just the fish that were blue.

The structures of the Raunt were all built on pilings and connected to each other by a crooked and elevated boardwalk. The community was described as a retreat for men who wished to be forgotten while remaining within sight of the familiar New York skyline. Those who really wanted to be forgotten could pull in the planks connecting their house to the boardwalk, the ultimate introvert’s drawbridge.

In the 1940s, The New Yorker sent out one of their reporters (Our Man Stanley aka Philip Hamburger) to check out The Raunt and he returned, “smelling slightly of fish and kelp.” Though most of the buildings in the settlement had burned in a 1931 fire, he still found some locals to interview including a “plump old man” named Eddie Bozett, and Martin Pfannkuchen, who everyone called Pancake and was, at the time, the island’s oldest living inhabitant. The main topic of conversation was the Watt family who had built the first house on The Raunt. According to Stanley, “Old Mrs. Watts (said to have met with a fatal accident on the mainland) was a great one for shooting sea gulls and making a medicinal juice out of them. When her husband unaccountably fell sick once, she killed and eviscerated seven cats, wrapped the cats’ contents in cheesecloth, and applied them to Mr. Watts’ bared stomach. He was up and about again in an hour or two.”

Seagull juice and cat poultice could not, however, stave off the Power Broker, Robert Moses. In the 1950s, the last of the Raunt's residents were evicted by Moses who, years earlier, had blocked a proposed large industrial port by placing Jamaica Bay under Parks jurisdiction. When the city wanted to replace the wooden train trestle across Jamaica Bay for use by the subway system, Moses, who as Parks Commissioner had jurisdiction over any construction in the bay, stipulated that they would have to build two freshwater ponds, effectively submerging the Raunt. These two ponds, the 117-acre East Pond and 45-acre West Pond, are at the heart of the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. At low tide, the last vestiges of the Raunt, the mossy, shipworm-eaten pilings that once held up its ramshackle buildings, still emerge from the mud.

In his park building efforts, Moses had also tried to evict Broad Channel’s residents, but the community was too well established and organized to let that happen. While the Raunt slipped beneath the waters of the refuge without a fight, Broad Channel survived and developed an identity all its own.

STARS AND STRIPES

Broad Channel has to be the most patriotic neighborhood in the city, with more bunting per capita than even the deepest Staten Island neighborhood. The Fourth of July isn't for another month yet, but on a recent visit, I found the neighborhood festooned with enough Stars and Stripes to make Betsy Ross blush.

I considered that all the patriotic flair could be in anticipation of this weekend's UFC cage fight set to take place on the White House lawn as part of the country's 250th anniversary, but later, when flipping through the pages of the book put out by the Broad Channel Historical Society, I realized that this overt patriotism can be traced back to the community’s founding.

In 1908, Broad Channel held its first annual Mardi Gras celebration which, counterintuitively, has nothing to do with marking the beginning of Lent, but instead is a celebration of the end of summer. The tradition was started by the Volunteer Fire Association, who used the event to raise money to build their first firehouse. It was a multi-day affair that included a boat parade, a land parade, a king and queen, and so much bunting. The elaborate floats, which in more recent years have been built on flatbeds and boat trailers, are awarded prizes in a variety of categories.

On Labor Day, September 7, 1998, the parade made national news after a group of men in blackface rode a float titled “Black to the Future: Broad Channel 2098” and threw watermelon and fried chicken, while one man dragged himself behind the truck in a parody of the June 1998 dragging murder of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas. Footage of the float prompted then Mayor Rudy Giuliani to declare it a “disgusting display of racism." When Giuliani is calling you out…

Police Officer Joseph Locurto and firefighters Jonathan Walters and Robert Steiner were fired in October 1998. They sued, arguing their off-duty speech was protected by the First Amendment. During the trial, lawyers for the city cited the trio's participation in previous floats like "Hasidic Park" and "The Gooks of Hazard" (which won the Funniest Float prize in 1996) as evidence of a pattern of behavior.

Among those who testified on their behalf was Al Sharpton, who had led a protest march through Broad Channel just days after the incident. Sharpton argued that it was hypocritical for the city to punish three rank-and-file employees for a racist float while ignoring broader racism within the NYPD and FDNY. A federal judge initially ruled in the men’s favor, but the decision was later overturned on appeal.

Floats in the most recent parade were thankfully controversy-free and included “Crazy ‘A’ Train,” “CHANNEL RAT-tatouille,” and a Jaws-themed float called “This Is The Bigger Boat.”

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

It was windy both times I visited Broad Channel this week. The audio I did manage to capture features the sound of waves hitting the bulkhead at one of the neighborhood’s many dead-end streets, along with the rumble of a distant A train, the hum of planes departing JFK, and the persistent song of a Northern Mockingbird.

FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER

Maureen Drennan first noticed Broad Channel on her way to photograph the Rockaways, where she had been shooting pictures of surfers. In 2012, just a few months before Hurricane Sandy, she embarked on a four-year project documenting the lives of the neighborhood’s residents.

From a 2017 interview:

Through my photographs, I seek out the vulnerability and fantasy of living in a small island community seen through the eyes of the young women and girls who reside there. The community is Broad Channel, Queens and it’s a lifestyle conditioned by water, vulnerable to storms, tides, changing weather, and yet, in close proximity to one of the largest urban centers, New York City. Broad Channel is a multi-generational, mostly blue-collar neighborhood with a rich history of being resistant to change. There is this enduring fantasy of living near the water that is in direct opposition to the reality. The residents love living by the water, but there exists a delicate balance between the community and the natural environment. As the effects of climate change shake this balance, the community has been confronted with the harsh reality that their home and community may not be as secure and idealistic as they think it to be.

Drennan, who teaches at LaGuardia Community College in New York City, has published two books, Meet Me in the Green Glen and the sea that surrounds us. Both are available on her website.

Here is an interview with the Camera Club of New York.

ODDS AND ENDS

• Daniel Lombroso’s 2022 documentary “Greywater,” looks at the poaching that takes place in the waters just off Broad Channel. Earlier this week I saw tubs full of crabs freshly pulled from the muddy bottom of the bay.

• When the proprietor of Broad Channel’s Enterprise Hotel died in 1931, he left his daughter $5 to buy a book on Filial Etiquette, because “she has been wholly negligent In her duty as daughter for many years.”

  

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Sorry again for last week’s misfire! If for some reason you only saw the half complete draft, you can see the complete Gramercy writeup here:

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Note: I mistakenly sent out an unfinished version of this piece earlier this morning. If you received that one, apologies for the confusion—this is the complete version.

The Manhattan neighborhood of Gramercy Park was once described as one of the last bastions of Victorian architecture and Victorian thinking, a haven for “well-heeled people who cling to days past.” Since its founding, Gramercy’s charms (and exclusivity) have attracted an illustrious cast of residents, from Stuyvesant Fish to Jimmy Fallon. Too genteel for rats, the neighborhood’s pristine streets, lined with meticulously preserved nineteenth-century architecture and filigreed balconies, belong instead to the noble black squirrel.

The adventure travel company Explore Worldwide recently declared Gramercy the most interesting neighborhood in the most interesting city in the world, a conclusion its "data experts" reached after analyzing 1.2 million Wikipedia articles. By their count, Gramercy served as the primary setting for nearly 2,700 of them.

These past two weeks, I have been painstakingly poring over those 2,700 articles to find the most fascinating and insightful stories to get to the true essence of the neighborhood.

Well, not really, but I did come across plenty of stories. Many of them contradictory, demonstrably false, or plainly fabricated. But, in the words of George Santayana, history is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.

The neighborhood, which runs from 14th Street to 23rd Street, between First Avenue to the east and Park Avenue South to the west, takes its name from the two-acre private park tucked into its northwest corner, one of only two private parks in the city, the other being Sunnyside Gardens in Queens. To get past the imposing wrought iron fence that encircles the park you need to have one of the 383 keys that open one of four gates, reserved for the 39 buildings overlooking the park. Today, those keys (once made out of solid gold) may be the only objects in New York more coveted than tickets to a Knicks playoff game. Then again, if you happen to live in one of those eligible buildings, there's a good chance you could also afford the six-figure price tag for courtside seats.

RUGGLES

Samuel Bulkley Ruggles was only fourteen when he graduated from Yale College in 1814. Over the course of his career, Ruggles served twice as New York State Canal Commissioner, sat in the State Assembly, and became a trustee of Columbia University. He published papers on subjects ranging from agriculture and burial laws to transatlantic telegraphs and cereal grains. He even produced the first grammar guide to the Hawaiian language.

Identifying the inevitable northward progression of the city long before many of his contemporaries, Ruggles began acquiring large tracts of Manhattan real estate including the twenty-one-acre estate known as Gramercy Seat, formerly owned by James Duane, New York’s first post-Revolutionary mayor. Despite its decidedly anglophilic air (an effect reinforced by the private, gated park), the name “Gramercy” derives from the Dutch Krom Moerasje, meaning “little crooked swamp.”

The source of that crookedness was a small winding creek running from roughly 23rd Street to the East River near 18th Street which had carved a gully nearly forty feet deep through the property. To make the land suitable for development, Ruggles spent approximately $180,000 moving more than a million cartloads of earth.

He then created a private park and laid out streets, offering 66 lots for sale. To improve access to his developments at both Gramercy Park and nearby Union Square, he successfully lobbied the city to create a new north-south avenue between Third and Fourth Avenues. The street was named Lexington Avenue in honor of the Revolutionary War battle. Ruggles also named the short six-block stretch of the new road that sat south of Gramercy Park Irving Place, after his friend, Washington Irving, author of Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the satirical A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, which he wrote under the pen name Diedrich Knickerbocker.

A red brick Greek Revival house on the corner of 17^th and Irving Place has an impressive bronze plaque proclaiming “This House was Once the Home of Washington Irving,” a claim that is almost certainly false.

PLAYERS

Though most passersby would be hard pressed to identify the statue at the center of Gramercy Park, distantly visible through the park’s iron fence, it depicts the greatest American actor of the nineteenth century, Edwin Booth.

Unfortunately for Edwin, he is remembered less for his own accomplishments than for the actions of his younger brother, John Wilkes Booth, who shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865.

An actor of considerable renown in his own right, JW had no problem accessing the VIP suite. There he waited for what was considered the play’s biggest laugh line, hoping the report of his .41-caliber Derringer would be drowned out by the audience’s laughter. As Asa Trenchard called Mrs. Mountchessington “a sockdologizing old man-trap,” Booth pulled the trigger.

The ensuing tussle and screams put a serious damper on Booth’s attempt to fly under the radar so he took an opposite tack. The actor turned assassin jumped from the president’s box to the stage (breaking his leg in the process), raised his knife and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis,” Latin for “Thus always to tyrants” before limping out the back of the theater to a waiting horse.

Back in New York, Edwin was devastated. The brothers had already become estranged, and after the assassination, he publicly disowned John. In a letter published in newspapers across the country, Edwin apologized for his brother’s actions and announced his retirement from the stage. “For the future-alas; I shall struggle on in my retirement bearing a heavy heart, an oppressed memory and a wounded name - dreadful burdens to my too welcome grave.”

The retirement lasted less than a year. In 1866, Booth returned to the stage at the Winter Garden Theatre, reprising his celebrated role as Hamlet, a part he would perform hundreds of times to enormous acclaim.

In 1888, Booth bought a building at 16 Gramercy. He moved into the upper floors and transformed the remainder into a private clubhouse for actors, writers, artists, and musicians called The Players. He hired starchitect Stanford White, who lived on the opposite side of the park, to design the interior. Among the club’s founders were Mark Twain, General William Tecumseh Sherman, and Stephen H. Olin, son of the man for whom Olinville is named.

Not to be outdone, the building next door became home to the National Arts Club, founded in 1898 to “stimulate, foster, and promote public interest in the arts and to educate the American people in the fine arts.” Housed in the former residence of New York mayor Samuel J. Tilden, the club assembled an equally impressive roster of founders and early members, including Robert Henri, Frederic Remington, Daniel Chester French, Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt.

Both clubs are still in operation.

PETE’S

Two blocks south of the park, Pete’s Tavern, at 129 East 18th Street, is one of several bars that claim to be New York City’s oldest, a crowded field that includes venerable watering holes like McSorley’s, The Ear Inn, and Neir’s in Woodhaven. Pete’s claim rests on its status as the city’s oldest continuously operating bar. It first opened in 1864 as a “grocery and grog store” in the basement of the Portman Hotel.

The tavern continued serving alcohol during Prohibition thanks to its proximity to Tammany Hall headquarters in nearby Union Square. The dining room was converted into a flower shop, and thirsty Tammany members reportedly accessed the bar through a hollowed-out refrigerator in the back. It is often said that O. Henry wrote Gift of the Magi in the second booth from the front, but, even though he lived nearby and patronized the bar, there is no proof that he actually wrote anything there.

THE EIGHTEENTH STREET TERROR

In September 1893, Frank Bostock, the recently arrived proprietor of a traveling menagerie, rented space in a two-story stable connected to the Portman Hotel for several of his animals, including five lions, a handful of wolves and three kangaroos.

What the Booths were to the theater, the Bostocks were to wild animals. Frank, a third-generation lion trainer known as “The Animal King,” had pioneered the use of a chair as a lion taming device and was the first person to think putting boxing gloves on kangaroos was a good idea.

For the denizens of Gramercy Park, none of whom had ever “permitted themselves a moment’s uneasiness by the thought that their stables might shelter anything more terrible than an overfed poodle or pug,” the arrival of the menagerie was unsettling. Across the street from the stable, workers at Huyler’s Candy Factory complained that the constant roaring made it impossible to concentrate on their bonbon boxing.

Parents at a nearby kindergarten considered keeping their children home rather than risk a sucker punch from an escaped kangaroo. Apartment dwellers and, presumably, guests of the Portman Hotel were unnerved by the “strange roars and howls at midnight,” proving that “even if you live in the neighborhood of Gramercy Park you have not achieved the chief advantage of Utopia; that is, an absolute choice of neighbors.”

Eventually, the Board of Health intervened and gave Bostock twenty-four hours to relocate the animals. While getting the animals ready for the move, the largest lion, Wallace, “The Monster of the Jungle,” somehow escaped his cage. The liberated lion immediately headed for the nearest available source of meat, a prize-winning racehorse Bostock had recently purchased and intended to ship back to England. He promptly ate it.

With the lion happily munching away, one of the menagerie’s trainers, Pauline Nana, described as a “sturdy young woman with a nose too short to be severe and not short enough to be saucy,” rushed from the stable and managed to secure the doors behind her.

Bostock, who had been in the middle of getting a haircut, hurried back to the scene accompanied by fellow lion trainer Bronco Boccacio, reportedly the only man ever to enter Wallace’s cage and survive. Two of his predecessors had not been so fortunate.

Bronco volunteered to enter the stable through a hatch in the roof, but Bostock deemed the plan suicidal. Instead, he proposed placing a cage on the sidewalk with its door facing the stable and then opening the stable doors in hopes of enticing Wallace inside.

By then, a large crowd of “cranks, frantic mothers, and populists” had gathered outside. The police promptly (and wisely) rejected the idea of releasing a man-eating lion onto East 18th Street. The crowd, however, was not short on alternative solutions:

Nearly a full day later, reinforcements arrived from Barnum & Bailey’s circus. Using an elaborate system of hooks and pulleys, they removed what remained of the horse from the stable. Then, armed with pistols loaded with blanks and various prods, working alongside Bostock and Bronco, they managed to lure Wallace, now so stuffed with horseflesh that he could barely be bothered to resist, back into his cage.

Most newspaper accounts celebrated the dramatic capture, but The New York Times took a decidedly more cynical view. The paper suggested the entire episode had been an elaborate publicity stunt, a theory supported by the sudden appearance of flyers across the city advertising an upcoming exhibition featuring a certain “untamable man-eating lion” at a local dime museum.

Deploying a veritable blitzkrieg of scare quotes, the Times reported that the “escaped” lion had virtually no teeth and the only thing it had going for it was its roar. When Wallace was finally “captured,” the paper reported, he “lay on his back, with his legs straight in the air, like an upturned table, while his rheumy eyes blinked reflectively, as if he were thinking: ‘Dyspepsia is what I am going to get out of this racket.’”

THE GLAMERCY

By 1909, the Times reported that the neighborhood was “beginning to lose the quiet, secluded look which has made it a favorite residential quarter for so long,” and predicted that after a flurry of new businesses and buildings the old residences will, “begin to look like mere survivals of an older and quieter age.”

Several of those old residences didn't make it, demolished to make way for larger buildings. One of those was Stanford White's former home, replaced by the 18-story Renaissance Revival Gramercy Park Hotel, built in 1925 by the developer brothers Bing & Bing.

From the start, the hotel and its bar were successful, attracting movie stars like Humphrey Bogart, sports legends like Babe Ruth, and political dynasties like the Kennedys, who occupied the entire third floor for a few months when John was 11. In the 1970s, the hotel became synonymous with the rock and roll lifestyle, the hotel of choice for touring bands like David Bowie, Bob Dylan, The Clash and Led Zeppelin.

In a 2002 piece for New York Mag, Sarah Bernard detailed the hotel’s appeal:

One year after the piece was published, Ian Schrager bought the hotel. He brought in Julian Schnabel to create a “fantasy land in crimson, velvet, leather, and wood.” Covid forced the hotel to close, but the new owners, who are also behind the High Line Hotel and the TWA Hotel at JFK, are planning to reopen by the end of this year.

Though the modern flatscreen TVs will be far less satisfying to throw out the window than their cathode ray predecessors, booking a room in the hotel will, temporarily at least, grant you access to the most exclusive park in the city. I’d still prefer Knicks tickets.

Max Weissberg’s family owned the Gramercy Hotel for nearly 50 years. Earlier this year he published a book on the building’s history: Gramercy Park Hotel

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

The area around the park is predictably hushed. A few blocks away, Stuyvesant Square offers a similar arrangement of iron gates and manicured paths, though it is open to the public. This week’s recording coincided with school recess, a welcome antidote to Gramercy’s rarefied air.

FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER

Some photos of Gramercy Park from November 27, 1935 by the great Berenice Abbott.

NOTES

• The National Arts Club has an exhibition of the great Harry Benson on now through June 26th.

  

• Though Samuel Ruggles modestly declined to name any part of the neighborhood after himself, in 2009, the Gramercy Park Block Association held a naming contest for a resident Red Tailed Hawk who may have been red-tale hawk celebrity Pale Male’s grandson. The winning entry? Ruggles.

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Quick note: I’m out of town next week, so no new neighborhood until two weeks from today.

The most unique aspect of the neighborhood of Grasmere, near Staten Island’s northeastern shore, is the large 15-acre pond at its heart. According to The Encyclopedia of New York City, Brady’s Pond (sometimes known as Grasmere Lake) is the only freshwater pond within city limits considered to be “fit for swimming,” though the “fit for swimming” designation doesn’t seem to take into account the abnormally high number of people who have died there over the years. The private Cameron Club, which was formed in 1930 and initially only available to residents who lived within a certain proximity to the pond, maintains a small sand beach, dock, and a flotilla of rowboats and pedal boats. Their website says, “as you look offshore across the lake you might imagine you are in Vermont or the Adirondacks,” an illusion slightly undermined by the constant stream of traffic from the adjacent Staten Island Expressway.

Back when the woods of Staten Island really did resemble those of Vermont, the ponds of Grasmere were mere boggy marshes known as the Haunted Swamp. The name supposedly came from the swamp’s proximity to Roguery Hill, once the site of a murder and a favorite haunt of local thieves and miscreants. At some point, it was rebranded Fingerboard Road, which, while no Roguery Hill, is still no slouch when it comes to evocative street monikers. Theories about Fingerboard’s origins are split into two camps: either it references an old sign in the shape of, or adorned with, a pointing finger, or it refers to the row of long, narrow boards once used to traverse the swamp. Besides the Expressway, the neighborhood’s other borders are Hylan Boulevard and Mosel Avenue.

SIR RODERICK

In the late 19th century, undeterred, or perhaps unaware, of the area’s roguish reputation, a shipping magnate named Roderick William Cameron bought 130 acres of land in the area which included Haunted Swamp.

Cameron was born in Glengarry County, Upper Canada, and moved to New York in 1852 during the Australian gold rush, chartering the first ship to carry passengers and supplies from New York to Australia. Over the next two decades, that single ship became a fleet that dominated the trade route between New York and Melbourne. Apparently, running a successful shipping business is grounds for a knighthood, which, frankly, seems like a pretty low bar, especially for a Canadian living in New York City, but in 1883, Roderick Cameron became Sir Roderick Cameron. Sir Roderick invested some of his profits into an estate on Staten Island, where he built a house he named Clifton Berley.

He dubbed the surrounding area Grasmere after the village in England’s Lake District where William Wordsworth and his sister spent fourteen years. Wordsworth called his Grasmere “the loveliest spot that man hath ever found.” Lord Byron, meanwhile, called his fellow Romantic poet, “Turdsworth.”

Since there is no better way to show people how much disposable income you have than horse breeding, Sir Roderick established “one of the most noted” stud farms in the country on the property. He hosted lavish society parties at Clifton Berley and hired Frederick Law Olmsted to do the landscaping.

Cameron’s epic parties, dubious knighthood, and studly horse breeding landed him a coveted spot in Ward McAllister’s “Four Hundred,” the Gilded Age’s definitive index of New York’s best families.

HARDWARE FOR WET PLACES

In the 1880s, Sir Roderick sold a portion of his land, including the swamp, to the Brady Brothers, major players in the Island’s booming ice trade. They dammed the swamp and created Brady’s Pond and a smaller pond downstream which, in honor of the previous owner (and in blatant disregard of hydronymic norms), they called Cameron Lake.

In 1909, Brady retired and sold his property, which eventually ended up in the hands of Charles Durkee, whose marine supply company sold everything from ropes, propellers, and anchors to compasses and capstans. Durkee’s “Frenzied Yachting” ad campaign featured the memorable slogan: “Hardware for Wet Places.”

Known as the “Tiffany of the Trade,” Durkee supplied equipment for the construction of the Panama Canal. He built a factory in Grasmere and a home overlooking Brady’s Pond that he called “Durkee Manor.”

Durkee gradually sold parts of the estate off to developers and, by the time of his death in 1930, several large houses lined the shores of the two ponds.

DEATH POOL

When the Brady brothers owned the pond, they spent a good portion of their time chasing off kids who would misjudge the thickness of the ice and fall through or, in the warmer months, drown in alarmingly large numbers in the pond’s waters.

A 1900 article in the New York Herald, which labeled Brady’s as Staten Island’s “Death Pool,” stated the pond held “the wretched record in Richmond for the drowning of children,” a claim it substantiated by detailing a litany of increasingly awful drowning incidents.

There was the ten-year-old who got a cramp while swimming. His seven-year-old friend jumped in to save him, and both drowned. Then there was the boy who disappeared one winter night on his way home from school. The next morning, “a hole in the ice, a few floating school books, and a little cap told the story.” When the fifteen-year-old son of a lawyer from nearby Arrochar broke through the ice while crossing the pond, his St. Bernard, Bob, dove in after him. The dog’s body was found first, one of the boy’s gloves still clenched in its teeth. The father had Bob stuffed and kept him in a glass case in his home. You would think that by this point someone would have at least put up a fence, but the Grasmere drownings continued showing up in the headlines for at least the next seventy years.

While most of the incidents involved children who died when nobody was around to help them, one drowning occurred in front of a crowd of sixty people who, instead of jumping into the water to save a drowning man, cheered as he slowly sank to the bottom of the pond.

ORDER NOW!

In July 1911, actor Albert Brighton was filming a scene at Brady’s Pond for the Belmar Photoplay Company.

The scene featured the hero, played by Brighton, getting knocked out of a rowboat while attempting to rescue a damsel in distress. At the appointed time, Brighton, by all accounts a strong swimmer, jumped from the rowboat and swam out into the pond. He made it barely fifteen feet before stopping abruptly and starting to flail his arms and call for help. The crowd of fifty or sixty onlookers, along with the film crew, assumed it was all part of the performance and applauded. Brighton went under, came back up, went under again, then sank a third time. This time he did not come back up.

One of the crew members finally caught on and dove after him. When he reached the submerged thespian, he grabbed his hair, but only succeeded in pulling off his toupee. The body wasn’t recovered for another five hours after workers dredged the bottom of the pond with grappling irons.

In a particularly macabre twist, the film’s producer, a real lemonade out of lemons type, decided to release the footage anyway.

He placed an advertisement that read:

“Film actor’s sensational fight for life! Hair-raising act shown in detail before and during fatal plunge, in which Al Brighton lost his life to make drowning scene realistic. A marvelous picture film, containing 41 scenes, 1000 feet of film, and in which 100 actors are employed. The noted picture player plunges to his death while hundreds applaud his death struggles, appreciating, as they thought, his usual great efforts to make a scene real. Order now!”

Subscribe now

ANTE UP

Sir Roderick may have given Grasmere its name, but the award for most influential former Grasmerian would have to go to Cassius Marcellus Coolidge.

Coolidge was born in Antwerp, New York, and grew up in the adjacent town of Philadelphia also, confusingly, in New York. After studying bookkeeping, math, and commercial law, he founded Antwerp’s first bank. He also started the town’s first newspaper, owned multiple drug stores, collected maple sap, and painted caricatures. It was around this time that he patented an invention he called Comic Foregrounds.

Though he is often cited as the inventor of the classic boardwalk or fairground staple where you stick your head through a hole and assume the form of a bikini clad sunbather or a muscle bound strongman, Coolidge’s design was slightly different.

True to his caricature roots, Coolidge’s foregrounds featured drastically smaller bodies in relation to the real heads and could even be held by the subject of the portrait.

A true polymath, Coolidge also found the time to write a three-act comic opera based on a mosquito epidemic called King Gallinipper. Besides writing the play, he designed the costumes and scenery for the 60-cast-member show, which received positive reviews upon its debut in 1894.

By far Coolidge’s most impactful artistic contribution, mosquito opera notwithstanding, was a series of anthropomorphic dog paintings used to promote cigar smoking.

Between 1903 and 1910, Coolidge created sixteen oil paintings for the advertising firm Brown & Bigelow. While the poker paintings have all been lumped under the “Dogs Playing Poker” umbrella, there are nine distinct variations on the theme, including Pinched with Four Aces, Post Mortem, and perhaps the most famous, A Friend in Need, which features a stogie-chomping bulldog slipping an ace under the table to his canine pal. Notably, none of the paintings are actually called Dogs Playing Poker.

In the years since, the Dogs Playing Poker oeuvre has become part of the zeitgeist, “indelibly burned into … the American collective-schlock subconscious through incessant reproduction on all manner of pop ephemera.”1 The images have been reproduced millions of times. I vaguely remember having one hanging on my wall sophomore year of college. There are Dogs Playing Poker mugs, mousepads, hats, shirts, and underwear. The paintings spawned infinite variations and have been referenced everywhere from album covers to The Simpsons.

In 1928, Cassius and his wife Gertrude (thirty five years his junior) sold their house in Bay Ridge and moved to a home on Radcliff Road in Grasmere.

Coolidge died on January 13, 1934, just short of his 90th birthday. His obituary simply read: “He painted many pictures of dogs.”

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

A rather uneventful field recording this week, captured on Fingerboard Road, the former Roguery Hill where the thieves and murderers have long since moved on.

FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER

William Wegman has a lot in common with Cassius Coolidge. Besides their alliterative names, both artists worked in several different mediums and explored different subjects before settling on dogs. Wegman earned his M.F.A. in painting from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1967. He came to his canine epiphany via his pet, a Weimaraner named Man Ray. The dog initially featured in Wegman’s video art and gradually became the principal subject of his photographic work. After Man Ray’s death in 1982, Wegman eventually acquired another Weimaraner, Fay Ray, whose offspring became regulars in his increasingly elaborate photographs. Beginning in 1978, Wegman was invited to use Polaroid’s massive 20x24 camera, which he put to great effect creating thousands of unique portraits of his dogs.

Wegman’s work is held in the permanent collections of several institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney.

A couple of good links:

William Wegman's Wilderness: An Artist and His Dogs at Home | The New York Times

Artist William Wegman and his Weimaraner muses PBS New Hour

ODDS AND END

• Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson once said his biggest regret was not bothering to look up the actual artist behind the Dogs Playing Poker series, attributing the paintings instead to Gus Nickerson.

I was working on a cartoon based on that famous-for-being-kitschy painting, Dogs Playing Poker. I had to come up with a name for the artist. No use in checking the painting’s history, I decided – Dogs Playing Poker is just one of those artifacts in American pop culture that’s always been around, right? It’s just Dogs Playing Poker by the standard “artist unknown.”

So I came up with the name “Gus Nickerson” for the long-forgotten artist. The cartoon gets published, years go by, and one morning I’m having breakfast and reading The New York Times, and wham! – there it is, front page: a human interest story about the life and times of Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, creator of A Friend In Need, the painting’s real title.

• Archduke Franz Ferdinand posing as a mummy in a Cairo photo studio around 1894-1896

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Historian Dr. William A. Tieck opens his 1968 history of the Kingsbridge area with a quote from Rudolf von Jhering: “Geography is latent history.” Few places in New York City embody that idea better than this corner of the northwest Bronx, where creeks and marshes have been drained and diverted, streets and houses raised, and bridges buried. The ground beneath Kingsbridge is a kind of urban stratigraphy, each layer revealing another stage in the city’s transformation.

Tieck describes Kingsbridge as “a rocky hummock in the form of a sawed-off isosceles triangle with (roughly speaking) 230th Street as its base, 238th Street as its top, and Irwin Avenue and the Major Deegan Expressway as its sides.” Both Kingsbridge and neighboring Kingsbridge Heights (on the other side of the Deegan and, as its name suggests, on higher ground) take their names from the progenitor of all Manhattan crossings: King’s Bridge.

Over the centuries, the bridge was destroyed, relocated, and rebuilt several times before disappearing altogether in 1917, buried beneath the fifteen feet of landfill that fused the recently created Manhattan island of Marble Hill to The Bronx.

THE BRIDGE

Until 1693, the only way to get on or off Manhattan was by boat or by swimming. The one exception was a spot in the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, just west of 230th Street and Broadway, shallow enough at low tide to be crossed on foot. The "Wading Place," as it was called, had been used since time immemorial by the Lenape as part of the Weckquaesgeek Trail, which ran from the Bowery to the Mohawk region of interior New York and would later become the spine of New York City: Broadway. Once European settlers discovered the spot, it didn't take long for them to start charging for it.

In 1667, Johannes Verveelen, proprietor of the first inn in Harlem, won the government contract to run the ferry between 123rd Street and the mainland. Anyone with enough time to kill simply headed farther north and, once the water was low enough, crossed for free. To discourage this, Verveelen was instructed to fence off the approach to the Wading Place, but the barriers were torn down almost as soon as they went up. In 1669, the whole operation was moved directly adjacent to the crossing. Now, leaving Manhattan would cost one silver pence, plus six more if you wanted to bring your horse or a cow. And if you wanted to cross with your animals the old fashioned way, over the Wading Place, you still had to pay a two-pence-per-animal fee to open Verveelen's gates.

This all changed in 1693, when Frederick Philipse, the first lord of Philipseburgh Manor, offered to build a bridge at his "own proper cost and charge" in exchange for the right to collect tolls.

Philipse was born in a small Dutch town in 1626 and, when he came to America in the 1650s, worked as a carpenter for the Dutch West India Company. Like Jesus and Harrison Ford, his humble beginnings as a carpenter belied his future success. By the time he died in 1700, at the age of 74, he was the richest man in New York City.

Unlike Jesus and Harrison Ford, he built his fortune trafficking enslaved people. He also married two wealthy widows, both of whom contributed to his vast 92,000-acre estate, which stretched from northern Manhattan to the Croton River.

The new bridge put the ferry out of business. British soldiers were allowed to cross without paying the toll (it was the King's Bridge, after all), but everyone else had to pay, and rates doubled after sundown.

Eventually, locals decided they were sick of feeding the coffers of the already obscenely rich Philipse family every time they crossed the river. Throgs Neck resident Benjamin Palmer launched the eighteenth-century equivalent of a Kickstarter, soliciting donations for an alternative to the bridge, which served only to "increase the private fortune of a particular subject."

In case there was any confusion, it would be named the Free Bridge. Since the Philipses would never allow it to be built on their land, the Free Bridge had to be constructed farther down the river, making it twice as long and twice as expensive. Colonel Frederick Philipse, the third and last lord of the manor, twice tried to have Palmer conscripted so the bridge could not be built, but Palmer managed to pay two men to take his place and, at great personal expense, finished the bridge in 1758, effectively ending the monopoly.

On August 9, 1776, by order of George Washington, Philipse was arrested, and in 1779 Philipseburgh Manor was seized and later sold off. Two hundred tenant farmers who had previously worked the land, some of whom had once paid for the privilege of crossing the bridge to reach their own property, were given the first right to purchase lots.

By the early twentieth century, both bridges were gone, buried under tons of landfill that fused Manhattan’s Marble Hill to the Bronx.

RACE

In 1874, Kingsbridge became part of the City of New York and besides the occasional outburst from the resident belligerent tinker, things were relatively quiet.

Then, in a cloud of dust and exhaust, the future arrived. On Memorial Day, 1896, the second automobile race in the country departed from King's Bridge, with a $3,000 prize sponsored by Cosmopolitan magazine.

It’s hard to believe that a magazine whose headlines have included “SIZE MATTERS: DO WOMEN CARE ABOUT POOP SIZE? IT TURNS OUT THEY DO!” and “The Undiscovered Joys of Having a Chinese Lover,” and which once featured Jeffrey Epstein as its “Bachelor of the Month,” has lasted so long, but then again, it makes perfect sense.

At the time, rather than relying on salacious headlines, Cosmopolitan did things like sending a reporter to compete against Nellie Bly in her race around the world or sponsoring the Kingsbridge race to promote itself.

The course ran from King’s Bridge to the magazine’s printing plant in Irvington-on-Hudson, with a stop at the Ardsley Country Club, where a panel of judges including John Jacob Astor IV and Chauncey Depew would evaluate the horseless carriages on speed, simplicity, durability, safety, ease of operation, and cost. The $3,000 purse would go to the highest-scoring car that completed the course.

Though entries had been numerous, by race day the field had dwindled to twenty-six. Only six made it to the ceremonial starting line at City Hall. On the way up to King’s Bridge — the official start of the race — one of the drivers hit a cyclist and was arrested.

The remaining drivers raced over the bridge and through Yonkers, reaching speeds of nearly thirty miles per hour.

Their arrival at the country club was, in the words of E. P. Ingersoll, editor of The Horseless Age, a “fitting though unexpected climax to the whole comedy of errors.” The club’s driveway, covered in loose stone, descended steeply to a blind turn. Unbeknownst to the drivers, who crept down cautiously, the driveway rose again at an equally steep angle on the other side, requiring spectators to help push the cars back up.

On the return trip, to avoid a repeat embarrassment, the racers opted to “detour” across the newly seeded lawn, where their wheels immediately sank into the soft earth once again requiring drivers and race enthusiasts to push the vehicles back onto the road.

In the end, only three cars completed the course. Ingersoll called it a “wretched fiasco… It was humiliating, it was worse — it was criminal.”

BEARS OUT ON BAIL

As exciting as the car race must have seemed in the sleepy community, it paled in comparison to what transpired just a few months later. On September 18, Jacques Faure and two of his partners were arrested for exhibiting bears on the highway without a permit. Apparently, you actually can get a permit for such things. The three bear trainers were sent downtown to the Tombs while the two bears, Billee and Marianne, were sent to the presumably less crowded jail at the Kingsbridge police headquarters, where they spent the night “roaring and tearing around,” destroying two cells, including the beds, sinks, and pipes.

According to Tom Delaney, who was given the unenviable task of overseeing the ursine inmates, they ate thirty porterhouse steaks, forty loaves of bread, one policeman’s shield, a helmet, and a five-foot-long piece of rope. The situation deteriorated to the point that the officers went downtown and bailed Faure out so he could take the bears back.

When Faure arrived, much to the policemen’s relief, he easily coaxed Billee and Marianne onto a waiting wagon. He took off his cap and sang a farewell to the large crowd that had assembled to see the bears off before the horses set off at a canter, accompanied by a throng of enthusiastic cyclists.

The whole entourage had traveled less than a hundred yards before the wagon hit a bump, sending Marianne bouncing into the road. The cyclists scattered and the police grabbed their guns and billy clubs, but Faure quickly jumped off the wagon, got a rope around Marianne, and started dragging her back. The bear tried to bite him but, since she was wearing a muzzle, only succeeded in knocking him over a few times.

After twenty minutes he had managed to get her next to the wagon, but not into it. That was when John Hoffman, the local undertaker and taker of no shit, “ran up behind the bear, grabbed her hindquarters with an iron grip, and before she recovered from her astonishment at the attack, lifted her bodily into the truck.”

The crowd erupted in applause, and Undertaker Hoffman “promptly offered to lick Faure and his companions for putting such an obstruction in his way.”

With the bear secured, the wagon took off again. Everything was going fine until a girl in bloomers caught up and began “deriding the bears.” Despite a warning that the bears “don’t like bicycles and bloomers,” she continued mocking them, prompting Billee to launch himself off the wagon.

“There was a dizzy whirl of spokes, sprockets, and fur,” but the girl survived. Her bloomers did not. Billee was eventually recaptured, and the wagon swept “through Harlem and down to Herald Square, where they were effusively greeted.”

The bears weren’t alone in their distaste for women biking in bloomers. Just a year earlier, in an article called “Bicycling for Women,” one author argued that “this tendency [wearing bloomers while cycling] must be deprecated… to avoid the enormous loss of the gracefulness which every woman should religiously consider.” The article appeared in, where else, Cosmopolitan.

GAELIC PARK

The twentieth century arrived in Kingsbridge by subway. When the IRT extended the Broadway line to 231st Street in 1908, Italian and Jewish working-class families moving up from Manhattan tenements joined the neighborhood’s already established Irish community.

In 1926, Gaelic Park was built at the northern end of the neighborhood to cater to the Bronx’s significant Irish population. Besides hosting hurling and Gaelic football matches, the 2,000-seat stadium was “the place where New York’s Irish went to make connections and to meet potential spouses, to mingle with friends from the old country and to discover new ones.” There was also a dining room and banquet hall where wedding receptions, christenings, and wakes were held.

The stadium later hosted some of the biggest rock acts of the seventies, including Cat Stevens, Carly Simon, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, and Yes.

On August 26, 1971, the Grateful Dead played to 15,000 people in the stadium, marking the last performance by the band’s original five members and the only time they played within view of the subway.

In 1991, Manhattan College purchased the stadium.

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

This week's audio starts outside Gaelic Park, though I could not see through the fence to ascertain what exactly was going on inside. Whatever was happening, the fans were really into it. The second half brings the temperature down with the sounds of the berimbau and pandeiro as students gather for a capoeira class in Van Cortlandt Park.

FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER

The mass migration to the Bronx in the early twentieth century, precipitated by the expansion of the subway, necessitated massive investments in public works like sewers, parks, and roads. Lehigh University has an archive of 696 photographs documenting those efforts. The images, prepared by the Wheeler Engineering Company, offer an incredible look at a nascent Bronx and the infrastructure that enabled its transformation. Both George C. Wheeler and Albert Rothschild are credited, though I suspect Rothschild, who is listed in the 1920 census as a photographer for a railroad company, was the principal photographer.

1,4,5, and 9 were all taken in Kingsbridge. You can browse the whole archive here.

ODDS AND END

• For McSweeney's, Julia Shebek imagined what Cosmopolitan's headlines from the 1880s would have looked like if they followed the same editorial standards as today. Highlights include: "Ten Steamy Tips That'll Blow His Mind and Cure His Polio," "How to Ask for the Right to Vote Without Seeming Naggy," "Thirteen Exercises to Bounce Back After Giving Birth, So You Can Do More Birthing."

• The Punch Bowl, underneath the 238th stop on the 1 line, has been in continuous operation for over 125 years.

  Though surrounded by remnants of a century’s worth of bar life, and the old IRT rumbled outside, as it has for all but seven years of the tavern’s life, the crowd was very much alive and in the moment. I’ve rarely seen the years melt together as seamlessly as they do at The Punch Bowl.
  —Robert Simonson

  

• Kingsbridge native Daniel Hauben has been called the “Bruegel of the Bronx.” Working in oil paint and chalk pastel, he has spent decades setting up his easel en plein air, capturing the street corners, water towers, subways, and overpasses of his home borough. “I’m a landscape painter,” he says. “It just so happens that the landscape I paint is encrusted with the Bronx.” There is a current exhibition of his work at Edgehill Church in Spuyten Duyvil, open Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays from 11am–3pm through June 30th.

  The exhibition is sponsored by the Kingsbridge Historical Society, which was invaluable in this week’s research and is a great resource if you want a much more in-depth look at the area’s history.

  

• This documentary from 1980 takes a look inside the Fuhrman Department Store, which opened in Kingsbridge in 1910.

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The neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay sits at the far end of Brooklyn’s alphabetical grid of east–west avenues, stretching from Avenue U to Avenue Z before giving way to Emmons Avenue, which Joseph Mitchell once called “the most attractive waterfront street in the city.”

For much of the twentieth century, Sheepshead Bay was largely a middle-class Jewish and Italian neighborhood.

Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, like neighboring Brighton Beach, it saw a major influx of Russian and other Soviet immigrants. A trip along the marina, past creaking fishing boats and waterfront restaurants serving seafood towers and bottomless Aperol spritzes, feels less like a walk through Southern Brooklyn than a stroll in a small town on the Baltic.

Sidewalk conversations are often in Russian. Storefronts advertise caviar and smoked fish, while boutiques display mannequins that feel distinctly Eastern European. Grocery stores stock jars of black cherry varenye and sprawling salad bars devoted almost entirely to pickled foods, while in-house bakeries turn out hundreds of loaves of dense dark bread each day.

The farther you get from the water, the more residential the neighborhood becomes, with rows of brick homes and tidy front yards.

Near the neighborhood’s northern edge, Russian gradually gives way to Cantonese, as Avenue U borders Brooklyn’s second-largest Chinatown.

TEETH

Until this week, I assumed that the neighborhood got its name either from its resemblance to a sheep’s head or, perhaps, from some apocryphal tale involving the ovine byproducts of the glue factories that once operated nearby. The borders of the neighborhood roughly form a rectangle, so unless we are talking about Minecraft, the sheep resemblance is out. And sheep bones, compared to horse bones at least, make lousy glue. As it turns out, the name is an homage to perhaps the most ridiculous-looking fish on the planet, Archosargus probatocephalus, aka the sheepshead fish.

The creature’s large, squared-off teeth invited comparisons to sheep, hence the name. Sheep, like all ruminants, don’t even have upper teeth, so whoever came up with the name was clearly not much of a biologist.

Though it was part of Gravesend, one of the six original towns of Kings County, founded in 1643, Sheepshead Bay remained largely unsettled except for a jumble of fishermen’s cottages near the shore. In 1844, Benjamin Freeman opened a hotel to accommodate a small but steady stream of intrepid tourists. Freeman decided to name his place The Sheepshead because so many of the prominently toothed creatures could be found in local waters.

In the 1870s, a large farm was sold and subdivided, and soon the sleepy fishing village had over 400 homes, dozens of shops, a handful of churches and a post office. One of the early residents of this nascent settlement was the notorious “boss” of Gravesend, John McKane, whose construction company was credited with building nearly two-thirds of all buildings in Coney Island and Gravesend. Before going to jail for election fraud in the 1890s, McKane oversaw the expansion of several rail lines that connected the coast of Brooklyn to the rest of the city.

THE BIG APPLE

This new, improved accessibility sparked a racetrack building boom that, for a brief period, made South Brooklyn the horse racing capital of the world. The 1821 repeal of a law banning horse racing had ushered in a golden age of the sport, which dethroned competitive speed walking as the country’s number one spectator attraction. Tracks were built in Woodhaven and Morris Park and especially the vast flat expanses of South Brooklyn where racecourses in Gravesend, Brighton Beach, and Sheepshead Bay drew tens of thousands of racing enthusiasts.

The craze for horse racing even gave rise to the city’s most enduring nickname, “The Big Apple.” The phrase reportedly originated in a conversation overheard in New Orleans between two stable hands discussing a trip to the tracks up north to compete for racing’s richest prize, or biggest apple. The expression was picked up by a local sports reporter who popularized the nickname in his weekly column.

In 1880, a group of prominent and wealthy New Yorkers, including August Belmont and William Vanderbilt, opened the Sheepshead Bay Race Track, which quickly became the "pearl of New York racing," hosting the sport's most prestigious events, attracting the city's largest crowds, and outgrossing every other track in New York.

One of the course’s most well-attended annual events was the Futurity Stakes, first run on Labor Day 1888 and won by a horse named Proctor Knott for a purse of $41,675, then the richest prize in horse racing. Proctor Knott, in case you were wondering, was named after a Kentucky congressman whose chief claim to fame, beyond sharing a name with a prizewinning thoroughbred, was the savage thirty-minute takedown of Duluth, Minnesota he delivered on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. The speech, an argument against government subsidies for westward railroad expansion, is a masterclass in late nineteenth-century sarcasm:

Roasted Duluth.

The racetrack attracted New York’s elite, many of whom built docks for their yachts and sprawling homes along Emmons Avenue, earning the strip the nickname “Millionaire’s Row.” It also drew thousands of seasonal, highly specialized workers like farriers, stable hands, trainers, grooms, and hotwalkers. The vast majority were African Americans, many of them formerly enslaved people or their descendants, who came north from states like Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

One of those transplants, Maria J. Fisher, had moved from Virginia in 1885 and supported herself selling pies at the nearby Brighton Beach Race Course. Fisher petitioned track owner William Engeman to donate land for a church, and on October 21, 1901, the First Baptist Church of Sheepshead Bay became the first Black house of worship south of Prospect Park.

VIN FIZ

Passage of the Hart–Agnew Law in 1908 outlawed sports betting and spelled the end for the racetracks of southern Brooklyn. Though the law was repealed in 1913, the tracks at Brighton Beach, Gravesend, and Sheepshead Bay never reopened. The Sheepshead Bay Race Track was converted into an automobile racetrack.

Over three million feet of pine was used in construction of the laminated wood track and the grandstand was greatly expanded, now able to accommodate a crowd of 175,000. The track was used for car races and aviation shows, sometimes simultaneously.

The speedway also served as the launching point for the first transcontinental flight attempt. On September 17, 1911, just a week after earning his pilot’s license, which consisted of a single ninety-minute training session with Orville Wright, Calbraith Perry Rodgers took off from Sheepshead Bay in a bid to claim William Randolph Hearst’s $50,000 prize for the first coast-to-coast flight completed in under thirty days.

Processed meat conglomerate Armour & Company, which had recently begun dabbling in beverages, sponsored the attempt, foreshadowing Red Bull's fusion of extreme sports and carbonated beverage marketing by a century. They named the plane after their new grape drink, Vin Fiz, and painted the logo in large green letters on the underside of the wings.

Reviews of the beverage were not encouraging. One critic described it as “a cross between river water and horse slop.” Another documented the drink’s “laxative effect.” A third concluded, “You have to sneak up on it to get it down.”

Reviews of the flight were not much better. With a top speed of roughly fifty miles per hour, the Vin Fiz made more than seventy-five stops and crashed sixteen times during the journey west. Rodgers finally reached California on December 10, several weeks after the contest deadline.

In 1919, in one of the largest real estate deals in New York City history, real estate developer Max N. Natanson bought the speedway and thousands of surrounding lots in a deal ultimately valued at more than $20 million.

A few years later, the demand for the now subdivided land was unprecedented. In a 1923 auction, 2,000 lots were sold in the first two days. At one point, a parcel was sold every ten seconds for half an hour. 1

Sheepshead Bay’s transformation from elite playground to middle class residential had begun.

LUNDY’S

Right around the time all this buying and selling was taking place, Frederick William Irving Lundy (who went by Irving) opened what would become one of Brooklyn’s most famous restaurants on a rickety pier off Emmons Avenue.

Lundy was born in Sheepshead Bay in 1895, the oldest of seven children. By the time he came along, his family had built the region’s dominant wholesale seafood operation, supplying the grand hotels that lined the Atlantic shore. Irving got his start early, selling hot chowder and coffee from a pushcart on the docks at the age of nine. Both his parents died in the 1918 influenza pandemic while he was serving overseas. When he came home, he picked up where he had left off, selling clams from a barge moored in the bay.

Irving handled the business side while his brothers Clayton, Allen, and Stanley worked the oyster beds and fishing boats. In 1920, on a foggy winter day, Clayton and Stanley drowned in Jamaica Bay when their rowboat hit a block of ice and sank. Irving never swam or set foot on a boat again.

By 1923, the seafood business had made him a millionaire. He purchased the pier where the family fish operation was based and, in 1926, opened the first F.W.I. Lundy Brothers restaurant, bringing in his surviving brother Allen and their three sisters to help run it.

Lundy’s success, however, did not go unnoticed. One evening, soon after the restaurant’s opening, Irving and his manager and lover, Henry Linker, were kidnapped and driven out to a shack in Maspeth. The thieves managed to get $4,000, but when Irving refused to reveal the location of his diamond ring, the kidnappers relented. Clearly not criminal masterminds, they told their captives how much they’d enjoyed the restaurant, and even forked over the $9 cab fare back to Sheepshead Bay. A few days later, Conrad “The Bull” Bulto, James “Hot Air” McNulty, and “Two-Gun Texas Bill” Maag were arrested for the kidnapping.

Lundy began carrying a gun and became increasingly reclusive. When the city announced plans to widen Emmons Avenue, Lundy purchased a prime site across from the soon-to-be-demolished pier and constructed a sprawling Spanish Colonial building to house the new incarnation of F.W.I. Lundy Brothers Restaurant.

The new Lundy’s seated nearly 2,000 diners, and by the mid-1950s it employed 385 people and served more than a million guests a year. On busy weekend days, upwards of 10,000 patrons lined up for steamed lobster, butter-soaked clams, chowder, biscuits, and huckleberry pie.

When Henry Linker died of a heart attack, Lundy retreated even further from public life. He moved into a small apartment above the restaurant annex where he rarely entertained visitors. His closest companions were sixteen Irish setters and his chauffeur, Ciro Autorino, who cared for the dogs and gradually became Lundy’s personal attendant, bathing and dressing him each morning.

The 1970s brought an escalating series of violent episodes. In September 1972, two managers, including Lundy's nephew, George Higgins Jr., were shot and wounded in the restaurant parking lot. Two years later, during an armed robbery, Higgins barricaded himself in a second-floor apartment with a hunting rifle and a twelve-gauge shotgun. When police arrived, he mistook them for the robbers and opened fire through the door, injuring three officers. One of them had tried to calm him down by pretending to be an Irish Catholic priest. "Apparently, he's a Protestant Irishman and he doesn't like priests," the officer later remarked.

Then in 1975, Lundy’s sister and brother-in-law were found murdered in their home in Forest Hills. As with the previous incidents, Lundy refused to speak to police. The killings were never solved.

When he died in 1977, Ciro Autorino, who was described by Lundy’s lawyer as his lover as well as his attendant, was found to have conspired with four other men to defraud the restaurateur of approximately eleven million dollars in property and securities.

Lundy's shut down in 1979. A smaller portion of the dining room, "a mere eight hundred souls," reopened in 1995 but closed again in 2007. Today the former Lundy's is home to Cherry Hill, a gourmet grocery offering Russian delicacies, a Turkish restaurant, and, until last month, the hibachi steakhouse MOMO.

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

This week’s audio captures the sounds of a Sunday softball game and a particularly rambunctious recess at the Yeshiva of Kings Bay, before winding things down at the edge of the marina.