The Rats of Rutgers Farm
Two Bridges - Manhattan
This week, the New York Times published a beautifully designed interactive map that displays neighborhood borders defined via crowd-sourced data. The accompanying article does a great job of illustrating the somewhat arbitrary designations of certain neighborhoods. The piece also brings up local resistance to newly rebranded or redefined neighborhoods like NoHo, Hudson Heights, or Lincoln Square.
To many New Yorkers, new neighborhoods are to be met with skepticism and, at times, contempt.1
I was somewhat surprised to see my focus this week, Two Bridges in lower Manhattan, make the list of places readers claimed were fictions. I say somewhat because I myself had never actually heard of Two Bridges until I started researching the area. I always thought it was an extension of Chinatown. It turns out that the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council was formed in 1955, so at least some people have been referring to the neighborhood by the name for nearly 70 years.
Where the name comes from is pretty easy to ascertain: the core of the neighborhood, like Michelle Pfeiffer in the Fabulous Baker Boys, is located between two bridges, the Brooklyn and the Manhattan.
Two Bridges’ borders are the East River to the south, the Brooklyn Bridge and St James Place to the west, East Broadway to the north, and Montgomery St to the east.
RUTGERS
In 1728, the Rutgers family, five generations of master brewers, built their farm on the lower east side of Manhattan on land occupying roughly the same area as that of modern-day Two Bridges. At that point, the abundant springs that dotted Manhattan were already fouled by manufacturing byproducts like chemicals and dyes, making the water unpotable. Beer was actually considered a healthy alternative to water, a fact that made Rutgers very rich. Their farm was one of several large farms that provided food to Manhattanites in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Eventually, the estate was subdivided for a growing number of Rutgers descendants.
The Commissioner’s Plan of 1811 (mentioned in the Chelsea newsletter) imposed an orthogonal grid on the blocks north of Houston Street. The area south of Houston, however, was a free-for-all. The streets of the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam had arisen organically, influenced by several factors, including the natural environment and the existing Lenape Indian paths of Broadway and Battery Place. Later, large property owners like James DeLancey and Henry Rutgers designed their own grid systems to take advantage of their property’s location. The grid of the Rutgers estate logically paralleled the coastline of the East River.
If you superimpose a map of Two Bridges on top of Rutgers Farms, the neighborhood’s borders become clear.
Over time, all the lots of the Rutgers Estate were sold off and replaced by factories and tenements. At the turn of the century, the neighborhood was almost all European immigrants: Irish, Italian, Greek, and Jewish. Today, the majority of Two Bridges residents are Chinese.
RATS!
This two-and-a-half-story red brick house with dormers at 47-49 Madison Street, tucked between a smoke shop and a barber, was built in the late 1700s.
The ground floor was used as a bar, while renters occupied the upstairs. Begining in 1850, in addition to lukewarm, murky lagers, one could entertain themselves at the J. Marriot Sportsman’s Hall by betting on how long it would take a dog to kill 100 rats, a gruesome feat that some dogs could accomplish in as little as thirty minutes.
Neighborhood boys kept the rat pits stocked, earning a few cents per captured rat. Judging from a recent visit to the neighborhood, there was plenty of money to be made.
Eventually, the rat-fighting business on Madison Street was taken over by Harry Jennings, an English gangster whose bulldog, Lady Suffolk, once killed 100 rats in 8 minutes and 23 seconds.2 He kept the beer and rat blood flowing until his arrest in 1869 for robbery, sending him to Rikers Island for four years. Jennings parlayed his experience in the rat pit into becoming something of a patron saint of exterminators. When the city’s finest hotels, like the Drake and the Plaza, had a vermin issue, Harry Jennings was their rat catcher of choice. He retired a wealthy man whose death was celebrated by the city’s rat population.
Today the building is affiliated with nearby St Joseph and St James churches.
THE LUNG BLOCK
Knickerbocker Village was the first housing development in the United States to receive federal funding. Completed in 1934, the complex is made up of twelve 13-story red brick buildings with almost 1,600 apartments. In one of the earliest examples of gentrification in Manhattan, nearly one hundred buildings, deemed unsanitary and unsafe, were torn down to make way for the new development.
The block between Cherry, Monroe, Market, and Catherine was known as the “Lung Block.” Overcrowded tenements with inadequate ventilation led to the rapid transmission of disease, most notably tuberculosis. The condition of the buildings, coupled with prejudicial attitudes towards their predominantly Italian immigrant occupants, prompted developer Fred French to seek and receive federal funding for their demolition and redevelopment.
A 2019 exhibition, co-curated by Stefano Morello and Kerri Culhane, called Lung Block: A New York City Slum & Its Forgotten Italian Immigrant Community, went into great depth on the complex history of the Lung Block.
The discourse surrounding the Lung Block illustrates a typical pattern of slum-making and gentrification, and in many ways typified the plight and perceived perils of the Lower East Side immigrant in the popular imagination.
The accompanying digital exhibition is well worth your time if you are even remotely interested in the topic.
The Knickerbocker has had some colorful residents, including:
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, an American couple executed for spying for the Soviet Union
Lefty Two Guns Ruggiero, aka Donnie Brasco of the Bonanno crime family,
Snakehead Sister Ping “one of the first, and ultimately most successful, human smugglers of all time."
One Manhattan Square
Sticking to the topic of gentrification, One Manhattan Square, a new 72-story residential development, is by far the most noticeable and controversial building in the neighborhood.
Construction of the building and the future projects affiliated with it have been decried for displacing low and moderate-income residents, irrevocably changing the character of the neighborhood. The 800-foot glass and steel monolith, complete with an adult tree house, bowling alley, and cigar bar, looms over the nearby Rutger’s public housing projects.
The Two Bridges Community Plan was put forward in opposition to the new megatower projects. Opponents pointed out that the developers circumvented an existing large-scale development plan that required City Council approval. While a New York Supreme Court judge agreed, the developers, with the backing of the DeBlasio administration, appealed the ruling, and it was overturned in 2021.
SIGHTS AND SOUNDS
FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER
Another Bernice Abbott image from her seminal Changing New York project.
NOTES
There are two malls underneath the Manhattan Bridge that I never knew existed until last week. The ground floor of 75 East Broadway is dominated by a Chinese grocery, with an open-air produce section and various discount wholesalers where you can get rolling luggage, rubber galoshes, or a box of charging cables. Upstairs is a different world - a bizarre, half-vacant warren of glass and chrome-fronted office spaces occupied by small galleries, edgy boutiques like Eckhaus Latta, and bespoke jewelry stores. Across the street is The East Broadway Mall, and it makes 75 East Broadway feel like the Mall of America in comparison. Almost every shop is shuttered, the escalators are dark and unmoving, the air thick with acrid cigarette smoke. This used to be a bustling center of commerce, full of well-stocked shops and a grand 1,000-seat dim sum restaurant on the top floor. Today, it sits mostly vacant. Curbed wrote a piece on the fate of the two malls.
The East Broadway Mall The Downtown Music Gallery is an underground record store and performance space in Two Bridges specializing in experimental and improvisational music.
The bare-boned basement space, once described as “a bomb shelter for avant-garde music fanatics,”3 is the embodiment of underground music. It’s a truly unique place, an NYC treasure, that, in addition to having an incredible experimental music selection, puts on free concerts every Tuesday evening at 6:30.
If you find yourself hungry after touring a $13 million penthouse at One Manhattan Plaza or after shopping for some vintage Albert Ayler LPs, you could do worse than grabbing a bite at Golden Diner, opened by a Momofuku Ko alum, a solid option for diner fanatics and vegans alike. They specialize in serving “classic NY diner dishes that have been influenced by the neighborhood.” Mention that you are a reader of the Neighborhoods, and you will get one free refill on your water.
As of this writing, Two Bridges is the only neighborhood in Manhattan without a Starbucks.
Recently, Kathleen Corradi was appointed New York City Rat Czar, a modern-day Harry Jennings. From the job posting:
Do you have what it takes to do the impossible? A virulent vehemence for vermin? A background in urban planning, project management, or government? And most importantly, the drive, determination and killer instinct needed to fight the real enemy – New York City’s relentless rat population? If so, your dream job awaits. The ideal candidate is highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty, determined to look at all solutions from various angles, including improving operational efficiency, data collection, technology innovation, trash management, and wholesale slaughter.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/29/upshot/new-york-neighborhood-guide.html
https://secretsofmanhattan.wordpress.com/2017/08/23/harry-jennings-rat-pit-at-47-49-madison-street/
https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/downtown-and-underground-an-outpost-of-avant-garde-music/?searchResultPosition=1
This was super interesting. I can remember a moment when everyone started talking about Two Bridges - a neighborhood I knew but had never heard referred to in that way. I wondered if it was a real estate driven re-brand!
Gorgeous photos, as always.