You've heard of DUMBO, the formerly forbidding part of Brooklyn that's Down Under The Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge Overpasses. The Mother Borough also has its own area between the bridges. I’ve dubbed it BEMBO, or Between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge Overpasses. Manhattan's area between the bridges, unlike the well-preserved DUMBO, has been decimated through the years by demolition of the old tenements and construction of the Al Smith Houses, named for one of the region's brilliant lights.
East Broadway, looking west, looking toward the Manhattan Bridge overpass, and behind it, the Municipal Building and Woolworth Building, which from this vantage look like twin spires of the same building. In the left background is #4 World Trade Center and on the right, is #1 World Trade Center. In the foreground left is the relatively new 109 E. Broadway, the site of a devastating fire in 2010. The building exhibits the latest trend in residential architecture, featuring a boxy design with colored metal panels and flat windows. Why do so many new apartment buildings looks like this? They’re the cheapest to build.
Walking on Pearl St. under the Brooklyn Bridge approaches from South Street Seaport, you'll find a broad, wide open vista, with the Al Smith Houses on your right (bordered by Robert F. Wagner Senior Place} and the well-protected NYPD Headquarters on your left, punctuated by the Avenue of the Finest. Pearl St. seems to mysteriously change names just up ahead to St. James Pl. (a now-closed section of Pearl St. wanders northwest and then west to Foley Square).
While this is now a windswept, wide-open area, until the 1960s it was a warren of tiny streets, none of which led anywhere. The Bowery, which begins at Chatham Square, was extended south to meet Pearl St. in 1856, cutting through the heart of a tenement-dominated, tightly-packed gridiron. Of the list of streets that included Oak, Roosevelt, Batavia, New Chambers, Madison, Chestnut, Rose, Pearl, and New Bowery itself, none exist today with the exception of New Bowery, renamed St. James Pl. (for historic St. James Church on James Street) in 1947. A 1913 New York Times article goes into detail about this now-vanished corner of downtown Manhattan.
Passing James St. on St. James Pl., you find a small patch of green, locked behind a gate, with a winding path, a lone lamppost that casts a dramatic shadow on a winter afternoon. The Parks Department sign indicates that it's St. James Triangle named for the Catholic church on James St. The park was created in 1961 when a parking garage and tenement were torn down. The land was donated by financier Bernard Baruch.
Behind the far wall of St. James Triangle is something really interesting....
…That very rare Manhattan sighting, a vest pocket cemetery. Besides Trinity Church's two cemeteries, one downtown and one uptown in Hamilton Heights at W. 155th St., there are three smaller ones, all belonging to the Shearith Israel Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue. (There are many hidden and buried cemeteries around town, such as the 1990 discovery and newly renovated African Burial Ground near Federal Plaza; a previously buried tombstone was unearthed in Washington Square during its renovations in 2009.)
This, the oldest extant cemetery in Manhattan, was founded in 1682 by Shearith Israel, NYC's first Jewish congregation.
During Peter Stuyvesant's era, Shearith ("Remnant of") Israel was the city's only Jewish congregation, founded by exiled Spanish and Portuguese Jews in 1654. While the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam permitted freedom of faith, a novelty in that era, public synagogues weren’t permitted until several decades later, with Shearith founding the first of its five temples in 1730 (their present one is on W. 70th St.). Shearith Israel's first cemetery was founded at what became the Wall Street area in 1656, and while that one’s long vanished, this one, dating to 1682, is still here, and contains the oldest tombstone in the city (Benjamin Bueno de Mezquita), dated 1683.
As Shearith Israel moved uptown it established two other cemeteries. A small slice of the first, on W. 11th St. near 6th Ave., is still there, as is the second, on W. 21st west of 6th. They make surprising discoveries for people who were unaware that small cemeteries exist in Manhattan.
A two-block stretch of Oliver St. remained after the 1950s when the Al Smith Houses complex was built; Oliver was named for Oliver deLancey, brother of James deLancey, owner of most of the Lower East Side during the colonial era. The Mariner's Temple dominates Oliver St. between St. James Pl. and Henry St.. It was built in 1845 as the Oliver Street Baptist Church and became the Mariner's Temple in 1863, ministering to seamen and immigrants. Things have come full circle—it's now the Mariners' Temple Baptist Church.
The row of tenements on Oliver Street's west side—Nos. 19 through 27—appears untouched, as in unrenovated and not maintained much, since Berenice Abbott photographed them in 1937. At #25 a plaque announces that this was the house where Al Smith spent some of his boyhood years. I remember my grandmother telling me how she listened to the radio on Election Day 1928 hoping against hope that Smith would be elected the nation's first Roman Catholic President.
Turning onto Market St., I encountered one of the oldest churches in Manhattan at Henry St., the old Market Street Reformed Church, which was built in 1819. The windows are made up of multiple panels—35 over 35 over 35. This is now the First Chinese Presbyterian Church, which shared the building with the Sea and Land Church until 1972.
The brick and stone Georgian-Gothic church was constructed two centuries ago as the Market Street reformed Church on land owned by Henry Rutgers, and after changing congregations a few times over the years, it’s now the First Chinese Presbyterian Church. It’s in the top five oldest extant church buildings in New York City, the oldest is St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway and Vesey St.
Every time I’m in the area, I check on Mechanics Alley, which runs on the west side of the Manhattan Bridge anchorage for two blocks between Madison and Henry Sts. The word “mechanic” originally meant an artisan, builder or craftsman, not necessarily a machinist. No property fronts on the narrow lane, but trucks nonetheless employ it despite its narrowness to avoid heavier traffic on streets like Market.
This shabby brick building at 51 Market St. was constructed in 1824 by merchant William Clark. Its original elegant doorway, with Ionic columns, a fanlight and ornamentation, has survived nearly two centuries. A close look at the basement windows shows them surrounded with brownstone work with squiggly lines, known in the architecture world as “Gibbs surrounds.” A fourth floor, which studiously copied the original three, was added after the Civil War. The stoop and railings, however, aren’t original as they were replaced in 2010. The door’s festooned with graffiti, and though the house has Landmark status, its condition appears deteriorated.
The undulating exterior of #8 Spruce St., officially New York By Gehry, named for architect Frank Gehry, is the architect’s signature NYC building. It’s instantly recognizable from all over Lower Manhattan. After its completion in 2011, it was NYC’s tallest residential building for a couple of years, but has since been surpassed by midtown buildings like 432 Park.
I encountered an anachronistic building on Madison St. a few doors away from St. James Pl. It’s a tiny two-story dormered building—however, it’s not too small that it doesn’t have two separate doors and two separate house numbers, 47 and 49. I’ve always been curious about anachronisms and survivors, so I looked it up. Expecting a difficult or fruitless search, I found something by the historian David Freeland, who wrote about it in 2009 in New York Press:
“For years the house has been something of a mystery, but one glimpse into its colorful history is revealed through a small advertisement from the Spirit of the Times newspaper, as reprinted in the Boston Herald of March 2, 1853: “Rat Killing, and other sports, every Monday evening. A good supply of rats kept constantly on hand for gentlemen wishing to try their dogs, with the use of the pit gratis, at J. Marriott’s Sportsman’s Hall, 49 Madison Street.”
Rat baiting, setting rats against rats, or dogs against rats, was a popular betting sport in the 19th century in the days before the ASPCA. The building where another former rat baiting establishment was run by Kit Burns, the Captain Joseph Rose House, still stands at 273 Water St. in the Seaport area.
Freeland goes on:
“By the late 1850s, the house at 49 Madison Street had been taken over by English-born Harry Jennings, who ran it as a combination saloon and rat-fighting pit until his conviction on a robbery charge sent him to prison in Massachusetts. But later, after returning to New York, Jennings settled into a kind of respectability, winning fame as a dog trainer and, eventually, the city’s leading rat exterminator. By the time of his death, in 1891, Jennings’ clients included Delmonico’s Restaurant and such luxury hotels as Gilsey House and the original Plaza.”
Apparently, there’s a comeback in everybody.
The massive Chatham Green development, located along St. James Pl. between Madison St. and Chatham Square, opened in 1960, was one of the projects that eliminated much of the ancient street grid in lower Manhattan, as well as the last remnants of the Five Points slum. But on those streets were located dark, cold tenements, and Chatham Green was constructed by the City in an effort to make middle-income peoples’ lives better. That effort has had mixed results.
Chatham Green went condo several years ago, with hefty prices, somewhat belying its original purposes.
The fortress-like, business-themed Murray Bergtraum High School was built at Madison St. and Robert F. Wagner Senior Pl., adjacent to Brooklyn Bridge off-ramps, in 1976. It’s named for a former president of the NYC Board of Ed., between 1969 and 1971.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)