Archive for Old New York

No Dutch food this Dutch-built city

Andrew D. Smith | November 16, 2010 | No comments

That’s right. The Dutch founded the city, ran it for 60 years and maintained a strong presence for centuries afterward. But there’s not a single real Dutch restaurant in the city, neither of the Olde New York variety nor of the immigrant chef variety. The closest this city gets is a place with a Dutch name, Vandaag, whose chef says there’s no Dutch food on the menu.

How can this be?

Well, demographics doubtless play a role. Holland didn’t even make the top 50 when New Yorkers were surveyed about their historic ancestry back in 2000. (There are, apparently, more people of Lebanese ancestry than Dutch origin in New York today, which is sad. Nothing against the Lebanese, but the Dutch built New York and they should outnumber Lebanese here. I’d be similarly sad to learn that Dutch outnumbered Lebanese in Beirut.)

Demographics aside, there’s also the matter of culinary reputation. Holland has a lousy one, but it’s hard to believe that Dutch food worse than many others represented in the city. Holland is a fertile land that has ranked among the richest and most sophisticated places on earth for at least five straight centuries. Assuming the Dutch don’t share some genetic trait that impairs their taste buds, they must have created a tolerable cuisine. (I can’t say much from personal experience. I spent two weeks in Holland while I was in college but ate so cheap and so foolishly that I left with no conception of the food.)

I’m not arguing that good farmland and sustained wealth guarantee one of the world’s great culinary traditions, but New York abounds in restaurants that specialize in lousy international cuisines. Zagat lists 9 Australian restaurants, 10 German eateries and 15 English restaurants. There are 9 places that claim to serve Irish food, for God’s sake — and Irish food only exists so that English cooks can feel better than someone.

If there’s room in this city for 9 Irish restaurants, there’s room for at least one true Dutch restaurant. (Yes, I realize that most of the Irish “restaurants” are actually pubs that serve Irish food to intoxicated patrons who come to drink, but the Dutch have beer, too, far better beer than the Irish.)

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Movies that show the World Trade Center

Andrew D. Smith | September 30, 2010 | No comments

To illustrate the how the twin towers managed to become popular with New Yorkers, despite being hideously ugly, I note in my Wall Street & Ground Zero Walking Tour how their film appearances increased over the years. After showing up in a few films while they were under construction during the early 1970s, they featured less prominently during the late 70s and early 80s. Then, as the passage of time transformed them in the popular imagination from eyesores to icons, the started showing up more regularly.

I have always noted that they appear in virtually every movie that’s set in New York during the 90s, but I never had any idea how many movies actually showed the tower until I stumbled across this complete list. The shot above, which comes from The French Connection in 1971 and shows the towers under construction, seems to be their first appearance in the movies.

The numbers are pretty impressive, but I think the new World Trade Center buildings will do just as well, once they’re complete, because they will be as distinctive.

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The old Metropolitan Opera

Andrew D. Smith | August 29, 2010 | No comments

People who take my Grand Central & Times Square Walking Tour often laugh when I tell them about the problems with the old Metropolitan Opera House, the one that opened in 1883 on Broadway, between 39th and 40th streets.

The seats were positioned so that the rich people in the audience could easily see one another — but not so they could easily see the stage. The majority of seats required that people who wished to see the stage either sit “sidesaddle” or crane their necks. Worse, almost a quarter of the house had severely obstructed stage views, no matter how they sat.

The new opera house, which opened at Lincoln Center in 1966, has lovely sight lines. That said, it’s nowhere near as attractive from the outside as the old opera house, pictured here.

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See New York circa 1900

Andrew D. Smith | July 7, 2010 | No comments

The Library of Congress has uploaded a bunch of movies filmed on the streets of New York right around 1900. I love these guys trying to escape from a police boat by rowing. The video about digging the tunnels for Penn Station is also interesting.

People who think that New York is crowded and bustling now will be shocked to see how much faster things moved back then. New York then seemed to have the raw energy you supposedly find in Hong Kong now, a sort of energy that makes today’s Manhattan look sedate by comparison.

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A must-see church near Union Square

Andrew D. Smith | June 25, 2010 | No comments

The Wall Street Journal

I wandered in by accident a few weeks ago, just as the last of the workers were removing the stuff, and I think I actually spoke the word aloud when I thought it: Wow.

St. Francis Xavier hardly merits a mention in any of the guide books, but it’s a beautiful church on 16th Street, just west of 6th Avenue, that just got a major renovation and now demands a quick look when you’re doing the Union Square area.

The Wall Street Journal has a good piece on the building’s architecture and its history, along with a bunch of pictures, but you really have to see it for yourself. The structure is incredibly elegant. My only complaint would be the paint job. There’s way too much of one color, a cross between grey and cream, that dominates all other color.

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New York’s most famous telephone number still works

Andrew D. Smith | May 9, 2010 | No comments

Everyone has head the song Pennsylvania 6-5000, and a fair number of people realize that it refers not to a dance, or a secret code, but to the telephone number of the Hotel Pennsylvania.

City telephone numbers used to come with the name of the neighborhood up front. Pennsylvania, when used in a telephone number, referred to the area around Penn Station. (How did people dial neighborhoods? They didn’t. They dialed operators, who connected their calls.)

The Hotel Pennsylvania opened in 1919, right across the street from the old Penn Station. It was, at the time of its opening, the largest hotel in the world, and it naturally had a huge club that attracted all of the big names in Jazz. Eventually, the hotel became the subject of one of great songs of big band jazz, when Glenn Miller penned titled a song for the hotel’s telephone number.

Perhaps you knew all that, but you probably didn’t know that the old number still works, accounting for slight adaptation to modern dialing. The main number for the Hotel Pennsylvania is 212 736-5000. Dial it and you’ll hear a few seconds of the famous song before anyone picks up the phone.

The folks at Ephemeral New York think it might be the oldest working number in the city, but it probably won’t be working all that much longer. There are plans to tear down the hotel and replace it with an office building once the economy rebounds.

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Why have New Yorkers embraced historic preservation?

Andrew D. Smith | April 10, 2010 | No comments

Before World War 2, New Yorkers did nothing to preserve historic buildings and neighborhoods. These days, however, the Landmarks Commission protects everything that predates the President Clinton.

All this preservation limits new construction and makes New York’s cost-of-living far higher than it otherwise would be, which begs the question why New Yorkers are willing to pay for it.

Most preservation enthusiasts would probably explain their stance with noble phrases about preserving heritage, but that only partially explains it. There are two more big factors that rarely get discussed.

First, few New Yorkers have any idea how much historic preservation costs them. Support would fall if people started thinking about rents dropping 50 percent.

Second, and most importantly, historic preservation is the natural response to the incredible failure of modern architecture. Even people who claim to like the trends that came to the U.S. in the late 1930s support historic preservation, which is their way of demonstrating that they actually hate recent architecture.

The old Grand Central Depot (above) was replaced by the even grander and more beautiful Grand Central Terminal in 1913.

People in 19th century New York had no reason to feel this. They had no interest in historic preservation because they knew that while they’d lose some lovely old buildings, the quality of the new buildings would be higher on the whole and the extra space would improve living standards. It was a win-win, as the business books say.

Today, new construction is a trade off. The city benefits from having more space, but if the new project replaces anything that predates 1930, the quality of that space will almost certainly be drastically lower.

Like all of the places in the world that people really love, New York was mostly built before 1900. If the city was to allow so much redevelopment that buildings from after 1940 were to become a majority — or anything close to a majority — then New York would lose all that makes it special and become a more boring version of Shanghai.

No large area built primarily after 1940 is beloved by anyone — a fact that completely discredits the entire architectural profession.

The difference can be summed up thus.

When the Vanderbilt family announced plans to tear down the old Grand Central Depot and rebuild it as Grand Central Terminal, not a single person protested, even though the old Grand Central was a lovely building (as you can see from the top photo). Everyone in 1900 just assumed that society’s general progress extended to architecture, so the new Grand Central would be better than the old one. And they were right. Today’s Grand Central Terminal, which was completed in 1913, is a better building.

When the Pennsylvania Railroad announced after the war that it was going to redevelop the site of Penn Station (pictured here), people were nervous. The old Penn Station was one of the country’s great buildings and there was little reason to believe that the new station would be any better, despite the railroad’s assurances. The disaster that ensued — today’s Madison Square Garden — is why no one will ever get a chance to tear down Grand Central.

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Rules and regularity helped NYC thrive

Andrew D. Smith | July 21, 2009 | No comments

Modern people simply cannot fathom how erratic the world used to be. Different towns calculated time differently until the late 1800s. Shops opened and closed with the moods of their owners. All prices could be negotiated.

New York became the dominant American city, in part, because it was one of the first places where accepted norms regulated important aspects of life.

Here are two cool examples:

» Read more..

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Manhattan’s shrinking population

Andrew D. Smith | July 19, 2009 | No comments

For all the new construction in Manhattan over the past couple decades, the island still houses far fewer people and jobs than it did a century ago.

The island’s population is currently estimated to be 1.64 million — up from 1.53 million in 2000 but nowhere near the all-time high of 2.33 million in 1910.

What’s really amazing about the 1910 figure is that there were few buildings then that were taller than six stories and relatively little development in many of the northern reaches of the island.

Almost 900,000 people lived in the 3.5 square miles of land below 14th street. That’s almost 255,000 people per square mile.

(To provide some contrast, the population density of modern-day Manhattan is 71,000 people per square mile. The population density of the city as a whole is just 27,000 per square mile.)

Manhattan apartments seem pretty small to most people today, but the average living space per person must have been far smaller back then. Sadly, I can’t find good numbers.

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How are there enough rich people to fill all the apartments in Manhattan?

Andrew D. Smith | July 1, 2009 | No comments

That question comes up a lot when people see dumpy two-bedroom apartments at $1.4 million and mentally tally the total number of “million-dollar apartments” on the island. Quick answer: There aren’t enough rich people.

Longer answer: Manhattan real estate prices have always been well above national norms, but they haven’t always been anywhere near current levels. To the contrary, they were 75 percent lower as recently as 1996 and almost 50 percent lower in 2002.

Accounting for those price levels and a low housing turnover rate — the average property owner in Manhattan keeps the same unit for more than 15 years — and you can see that the overwhelming majority of city apartments were bought when prices far far more reasonable.

$355,000 isn’t cheap for a three-bedroom apartment — particularly accounting for inflation that makes $355,000 in 1994 equal to $509,000 today — but it’s a lot better than $1.4 million.

Click through to see the amazing table of rising prices. The data comes from Miller Samuel Inc., which has an incredible website.

nyc_medianprice

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Category: Old New York, Real Estate