In 2009, the Department of Transportation posted a Lincoln Highway sign in the maroon color generally used to denote NYC Landmarked districts at W. 42nd St. and Broadway in Times Square. The old Lincoln Highway has mostly been decommissioned or goes by different names now, but it was once the sole vehicular roadway in the United States connecting the East and West Coasts.
Times Square was originally the eastern terminus of the transcontinental highway, which was privately constructed by an association formed by Indiana businessman Carl Fischer beginning in 1913. The 3389-mile road originally traveled through 13 states: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California; a 1928 realignment took it through a 14th state, West Virginia. The route can be retraced along existing roads today, mostly along US 30; the government-sponsored state numbered system of roads was instituted in the 1920s, and the US Interstate system in the 1950s. Today the main cross-country Interstate is I-80. The Lincoln was developed before many of today’s bridges and tunnels were constructed, and was carried by ferry across the Hudson River from Manhattan to Weehawken, NJ. The road ended at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, San Francisco, where there’s a memorial to it.
Along the route, statues of Lincoln were installed as well as hundreds of markers, some of which are still in place. NYC unveiled its sign in 2009, the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. This is the second sign—originally in capitals, it was changed out for a sign in upper and lower case a few years ago.
Sometime in 1998 or 1999, I was crazed from heat, stumbling down the Coney Island boardwalk, when I noticed some smashed-up bits of wood suggestive of former buildings that had long been abandoned, all arranged on an alleyway between W. 32nd and 33rd Sts. They alley was unmarked but was lit by a single standard-issue Department of Transportation lamp on a telephone pole. I suspected I was looking at an ancient discovery.
In the Coney Island history website Amusing the Zillion, Coney-area historian Charles Denson, who grew up in Coney Island in the 1950s and 1960s, revealed that the Lincoln Baths were built around 1900 and were part of a “Presidential series” of Coney Island bathhouses along with the Jefferson, Roosevelt and Washington Baths.
According to Coney Island historian Charles Denson, “The bathhouses were where people rented lockers and changed from street clothes to swim suits. You could also rent swimsuits and beach chairs and umbrellas. They were very social places and generations of families and friends from the same neighborhoods patronized the same bathhouses for years until the last one (Brighton Beach Baths) was demolished in the early 1990s.”
In 2019, there were still traces of Lincoln Baths to be found, such as some stone foundations, and a couple of wooden shacks According to Denson, the Lincoln Baths houses were abandoned in 1982 and have slowly broken down since. Development has since eliminated them.
I was in Bay Ridge when I passed a huge bank building at 5th Ave. and Bay Ridge Parkway (called by all Bay Ridge-ites “75th St.”) when I recalled I’d been past this building likely thousands of times without going inside, while I resided in Bay Ridge from birth in 1957 until March 1993, when I moved to Queens. It hadn’t been “my” bank—however, I did apply at the Manufacturers Hanover on the opposite corner in 1984, and I’m still with that bank today—now JP Morgan Chase, after a series of mergers. Presently, this bank building is a Chase branch, so I assumed I wouldn’t be given the bum’s rush if I showed them my Chase bank card. As it happened, that strategy was moot as no one either noticed my presence or cared about it.
The building was constructed beginning in 1934 as a branch of the Lincoln Savings Bank of Brooklyn, which was incorporated as the German Bank of Brooklyn in 1866 and then changed to the new name in 1917, no doubt World War I influencing that decision. According to the Brooklyn Eagle, June 11, 1934, ground was scheduled to be broken on or about July 1, 1934, with a facade of Indiana granite limestone with a black polished rosetta base. The banking room was to have a ceiling height of 30 feet, eight inches and the walls and pilasters (half columns attached to the walls) of San Quentin stone. The floors were to be of terrazzo with brass dividers. The windows were to be 22 feet high (they still are and are one of the bank’s most enduring features).
However the greatest feature the article didn’t address were the large wall murals. Bear in mind that the bank was constructed in 1934, a few years before the Belt Parkway was constructed along the waterline. These large panels depict the Bay Ridge shoreline along the Narrows, close to how the shoreline appeared in the early-20th century. Unfortunately, some bank offices obscure parts of the murals.
Another mural shows Abraham Lincoln giving a speech to a crowd, with another speaker seated on the platform. This likely depicts the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates in which Lincoln opposed Stephen Douglas for a senate seat in Illinois, the main issue being slavery in that state. Lincoln lost the election.
One of the jewels of the bank’s interior is this beautifully-lettered plaque, featuring Lincoln’s signature, presenting Lincoln’s thoughts on capitalism and the pursuit of it, given while he was accepting an honorary membership in The Workingmen’s Association of New York on March 21, 1864.
Of the station renovations along the IRT Broadway Line done in the late-1990s and early-2000s my favorite may be the 66th St.-Lincoln Center station, one of the original 28 stations opened by Interborough Rapid Transit in 1904. The “travertine acropolis of music and theater” as the AIA Guide to New York City puts it, occupies three blocks between W. 62nd and 65th Sts. and Columbus and Amsterdam Aves. It was begun with a turn of a spade by President Eisenhower on May 14, 1959 and cost $165 million, almost all of it in private contributions.
When subway engineers ran the line up Broadway to what became the Lincoln Square neighborhood in 1904, it was inconceivable there would be a grand entertainment mecca this far north. Block after block of tenements lined the streets, which could be mean ones by the time West Side Story, set in the neighborhood, was written. NYC’s “power broker” Robert Moses was to raze a total of 18 square blocks to create Lincoln Center and public housing at the site, displacing 7000 low-income apartments and replacing them with only 4400, according to Robert A. Caro’s book that gave Moses his title.
A complete overhaul in the early-1990s gave completely new signage and wall decoration. Designers cleverly matched the type fonts and plaque design to original Grueby Faience specs. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s the original signage, but “Lincoln Center,” spelled out on the station ID tablets, gives it away.
—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)