Maria Gorshin, Author at Ask a New Yorker

Posted January 30, 2013& filed under General, Transportation.

A: The Brooklyn Bridge is usually best…even when so much of the view along the way may be blocked due to bridge repairs. The view from the tower on the Manhattan-side is wide-open and worth the walk! And make sure you look up. The web of cables above is quite a site!

One more idea: walk across the Williamsburg Bridge for unobstructed views, a panoramic look at the Brooklyn Bridge, and a dedicated walking path (no need to dodge bicyclists on this bridge!). The only drawback is the noise from the J, M, and Z subway cars that make frequent bridge crossings.

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by: Maria Gorshin

Posted May 11, 2012& filed under History.

The sunset view from the Trump World Tower at United Nations Plaza was magical and dizzying. High above Manhattan, we found ourselves eye-level with a glowing Empire State building. In the distance, the jeweled, twinkling arms of three bridges pointed the way to Brooklyn and Queens. But the lights also drew attention to a shadow in the river—a wooded island that I’d seen countless times before but which now looked especially sad and mysterious. After dinner, the conversation turned to the strange place and its most famous resident.

When Mary Mallon left Ireland at 15 in 1884, she had already survived years of poverty, loss, and disease. Every bout of suffering had brought death to those around her, but seemed to only make Mary stronger. She arrived in the city penniless and determined to make a better life for herself. Instead, she found herself in living in Lower East Side tenements in the same conditions she had struggled to escape back home. Through hard work and determination, Mary fought her way out of poverty by mastering the art of cooking. Gifted and in demand, she soon became a cook for some of the wealthiest families in New York. For twenty years she lived as a prosperous, independent woman in a city that thrilled her.

Unfortunately for Mary, typhoid fever seemed to follow her wherever she went. When the disease, associated in the public mind with slums and tenements, reached a summer estate where she was temporarily employed, it became clear to a hired investigator that Mary was the cause. He discovered that she had infected six out of her previous eight employers. When a child died of typhoid fever in yet another household where she’d recently been employed, Mary was taken to a dismal island in the East River. It was North Brother Island, the very place we spied from high atop Trump World Tower.

Mary was quarantined at North River Island’s Riverside Hospital. Tests seemed to indicate that Mary was a “healthy carrier” of the disease, and she spent the next three years alone in a cottage that faced the exciting city she loved. She passed the time writing angry, indignant letters to the press about the unfairness of her situation. When she was finally released, it was under one condition—that she never return to cooking. Her disease had made her a threat to society.

Mary kept her promise, but with no way of earning an income she was soon broke. She moved back into a tenement and laundered clothes for small wages until she couldn’t take it any longer. Convinced that she was healthy, she accepted a position at (of all places) a maternity hospital. In short order, 25 people contracted typhoid fever and two died of the disease. Mary, now known as ‘Typhoid Mary,” was reinstated at North Brother Island. The hospital staff was friendly toward her, and she was allowed to visit the city once a week. She kept a dog for company, and she lived on that small patch of land in the East River until her death 26 years later, at the age of 69. It is estimated that she infected 47 people with typhoid fever and caused the deaths of three more. North River Island was abandoned in 1963, and today it is a protected nesting area for rare and endangered birds.

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by: Maria Gorshin

Posted April 27, 2012& filed under Arts & Entertainment, History.

If walls could talk, the Naumburg Bandshell would be New York City’s fiercest chatterbox. It’s been standing between Bethesda Terrace and Central Park’s famed, tree-lined Mall Promenade for almost 80 years, collecting memories while sharing music and words.

Visit the Bandshell early in the morning and you’ll find a brief moment of quiet and stillness. During the rest of the day, you’ll find actors rehearsing lines, couples posing for wedding photos, shy folks performing dreamy American Idol numbers for empty benches and, of course, every style of music. You might even find an Upper West Side old-timer recalling the bygone era when the Bandshell attracted wayward teenagers from all over the city like a magnet. All throughout the 70s, the Bandshell sheltered a burgeoning graffiti and skateboarding scene along its curved walls, shaded steps, and hidden corners. It was quite a change from the venue’s early and illustrious beginnings.

The Naumburg Bandshell was erected in 1923, but its purpose had been imagined long before then. A music-lover named Elkan Naumburg had fallen in love with classical music at the age of 15 when he could hardly afford the cost of concert tickets. Forty years later, as a successful banker, he dedicated a large portion of his hard-earned wealth to insure that New Yorkers would always have access to the city’s finest music.

Naumburg started hosting concerts in Central Park in 1905 on a wood and cast-iron pagoda-like structure that had been created by one of Central Park’s designers, Calvert Vaux. The concerts grew in popularity over the years, drawing crowds from all facets of New York society. The very wealthy would often arrive by carriage and stay there, enjoying performances from their lofty posts above those on foot. When it became more fashionable to walk to concerts, New Yorkers began mingling more freely, strolling along The Mall during performances, picnicking on the grass, and dancing after sunset.

By 1912, free concerts were beginning to attract thousands of New Yorkers. Naumburg offered New York City $125,000 to build a larger, sturdier structure where operas and symphonies could be performed for the growing crowds. In 1923, a year before his death, plans for the Bandshell had been realized as a neo-classic half-dome carved out of Indiana limestone. Ten thousand people attended the dedication where Naumburg drew attention to the words he’d had inscribed on the building: “To the City of New York and its Music Lovers.”

Ever since then, music and spoken word have boomed from that the Bandshell almost without interruption. Irving Berlin, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington brought their performed there with their orchestras. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., E.B. White, and Fidel Castro addressed crowds from its stage. John Lennon’s eulogy was given there, the words carrying toward nearby Bethesda Terrace and Sheep Meadow.

Despite the Bandshell’s longstanding role within New York City’s cultural life, the structure almost faced the wrecking ball in 1992. Once the neo-classical dome became a congregating spot for New York City teens and assorted ‘Parkies’ during the 1970s the location began falling into disrepair. (Check out this SHORT FILM about Central Park’s most unique denizens and the Bandshell at its bohemian peak.) By the 1990s, vandals, drug dealers, and homeless New Yorkers had steadily transformed Naumburg’s gift to the city into a building that New York’s Parks and Recreation Department described as “a maintenance nightmare.”

In July of 1993, efforts to tear down the damaged and neglected Bandshell were blocked by the New York State Court of Appeals citing a city law requiring protection of municipal gifts. The building was saved but remained in a state of “demolition by neglect” until 2003 when the Central Park Conservancy and other preservation groups raised more than $2 million to see the structure restored to its former glory. Today, music plays on at the Bandshell thanks to Elkan Naumburg’s descendants and generous support from the public.

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by: Maria Gorshin

Posted March 9, 2012& filed under History, Shopping.

Early mornings along New York’s busiest avenues always fascinate me. The city may never sleep, but it does rest, and these pre-sunrise moments offer a glimpse of the city before she’s camera-ready. A diva in repose, if you will. Then the sun rises across the East River, and west-facing windows along Manhattan fracture the beams of light and cast them in every direction. In an instant, it’s as if someone has thrown a switch on a movie set and shouted “Action!” The diva roars to life.

One recent morning, shards of reflected sunrise bounced off a building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, and the effect was so beautiful that it drew my attention away from the flashy Empire State Building across the street. I recognized this shimmering 12-story building from my childhood.

In the 1970s, the building was home to B. Altman & Company, an elegant, glamorous department store that I loved to explore while my mother worked behind the counter for Christian Dior. Given only 20 or 30 minutes at a time to roam, I’d hurry along polished wood and smooth red carpet toward escalators that took me to different worlds on each floor. There were fashions by Halston and Calvin Klein, furs, enormous wedding dresses and ball gowns, and even a furniture section to play in (with each area decorated in things like classic English or chrome and shag). One of the top floors featured a children’s book department that always got me off schedule.

By the 1980s, B. Altman & Company was in decline. It was a stuffy, sad place where shoplifters and gangs of “wilding” teenagers stole merchandise off shelves. By the late 1980s, the store was bankrupt. It closed and was largely forgotten.

Buildings talk, and that morning, shimmering with broken sunlight, the impressive facade of 365 Fifth Avenue hinted at a grander history than the one I remembered. I decided to take a closer look at its past.

It’s hard to imagine now, but the intersection of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue used to be a farm with a stream running across it toward a nearby pond. It wasn’t until late in the 19th century that fashionable New York was drawn to the area by the construction of dignified new buildings. The original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel emerged on 34th Street (on the site that would eventually become the Empire State Building), and soon Fifth Avenue was recognized as New York’s most exclusive shopping district.

In 1906, the B. Altman & Company firm built a store along the east side of Fifth Avenue that stretched from 34th Street to 35th Street.

A few years later, a Madison Avenue portion was added to create a store that would occupy an entire city block. According to a company catalog, it was to be a “source of infinite resources…equipped with every device calculated to contribute to the greatest efficiency of service; in brief, a store of the highest modern order.”

B. Altman & Company interiors were as impressive as the building’s Italian Renaissance exterior.

The department store was known for its grace, proportion, and a “pervasive atmosphere of dignity and refinement.”

It was described as a “luxurious environment which every woman of taste and breeding appreciates.”

Physician’s offices and a 7-bed infirmary were located in the store for the care of employees and for customers who might be “seized with sudden illness while in the establishment.”

The store even featured a Mourning Department “generously supplied with every essential of the correct mourning outfit.”

A Delivery Department was housed in a six-story garage on 36th Street where 200 horses, 157 horse-drawn carriages and 85 motor wagons were kept.

For more than 80 years, the magnificent B. Altman & Co. served customers and employees with unequaled courtesy, professionalism and attention to detail. Since its closure in 1989, no store in New York has ever matched its excellence.

The building that once ruled New York City retail is now home to a branch of the New York Public Library and to the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).

The next time you visit either of those establishments, rewind the decades to imagine the many lifetimes lived by 365 Fifth Avenue.

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by: Maria Gorshin

Posted February 10, 2012& filed under History.

Usually, “talking to the walls” is a frustrating, unproductive endeavor. You try to get your point across, but the person with whom you’re speaking is so obstinate that you might as well be debating with masonry. Luckily, the walls in New York talk back and, like most people who live in this city, they’ve got much to say.

I didn’t always look to concrete for conversation. This odd habit began one afternoon last year during a visit to St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Little Italy. The next day the century-old church was being honored by decree of the Roman Catholic Pontiff Pope Benedict XVI as New York’s first basilica. Only 24 hours before the fanfare of the official ceremony began, the church stood empty—as glorious and elegant as it was in 1815. I’d read that St. Patrick’s had once been the scene of riots between Catholics and Protestants, battles ignited by ugly rumors involving infanticide. Openings had been carved into the walls of the church so that musket-bearing defenders could take aim at their enemies outside. But at that hushed moment, it was hard to imagine that chaos had ever plagued the building.

The Mott Street entrance at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral

Back outside on Mott Street, where cafés and shops lined the sidewalk, a small, unassuming building stood across from the church like a silent witness to all that had occurred at St. Patrick’s over the years. “If walls could talk,” I thought. It turned out that that simple building held stories of its own.

The building, 256-258 Mott Street, used to be known as the 14th Ward Industrial School. John Jacob Astor and his wife Charlotte built it in 1888 to serve, in the words of the New York Times over 100 years ago, “a district of wretchedness, poverty and squalor.” They bought the lot for $21,000, hired Calvert Vaux (the co-architect of Central Park), and paid $42,000 for the construction of the Victorian Gothic structure. It became a school, run by the Children’s Aid Society, where impoverished immigrant children could receive daily lessons in “industry, thrift and cleanliness,” as well as hot meals. The little red brick building became a safe haven for generations of children in a neighborhood that used to be part of an infamously violent district.

The former 14th Ward Industrial School, funded by John and Charlotte Astor

So was finding out that a co-op building once owned by one of New York’s grandest families the thing that got me hooked me on wall-talking? Not entirely—it was also a ghoulish story set in a building that happened to be just around the corner on Prince Street.

On the day that I visited St. Patrick’s, vendors lined both sides of busy Prince Street. Tourists moved between kiosks buying hats and sunglasses, and visitors hurried in and out of a thrift store that was, until 2010, the parochial school associated with St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral. The festive scene on that sunny day held no evidence of the tragedy that occurred there 65 years earlier.

Christina Randazzo, a born and raised New Yorker, shared her story over coffee a few days later. “Sister Monica was our teacher and she would always say to us, ‘I just want to live long enough to see you all get to make your communion.’ On the day of the ceremony we stood inside the school in line, each child on a metal step, as she checked our veils and ties. We were quiet, preparing to lead the procession into [St. Patrick’s] across the street. She stood on the first landing as she said a prayer.” Ms. Randazzo recalled what happened next as if describing a harrowing scene from a film playing in slow motion:

“She stepped back and her heel must have caught in the hem of her habit because she fell backwards, hitting all the way down along those metal steps. She died instantly.” As a priest came to read last rites to Sister Monica, another nun led the children across Prince Street into St. Patrick’s. “We were in blood splattered communion dresses. We went to our communion, walking ashen down the center of the church.”

And so, while visiting an old cathedral, I’d discovered a church’s unusual history, a building’s heroic past, and stairs with a gothic tale. I realized just how much of New York we miss as we hurry past the buildings that stand quietly around us each day. Since then I’ve been pausing to “listen” to buildings, and I’ll share what I learn here. Stop by again for a story or two—you might be surprised by what New York buildings have to say.

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