104 E. 10th

The last bohemian has been booted from the most elegant block of E. 10th Street. A TOWNHOUSE FOR SALE sign has gone up on 104 E. 10th and the listing states: "Now delivered vacant, this four story 18.5-foot wide frontage home can be rebuilt into a jewel that matches its setting."



"Vacant" means that there's no Edgar Oliver inside anymore and that's a pity. I guess the realtors didn't think 104 was a jewel with Mr. Oliver residing there, though many would disagree.

A beloved playwright, poet, and performance artist, Oliver has been called "the kind of legend that inspires people to move to New York" by the Village Voice. He lived in the house, formerly a rooming house, for many years. He wrote and performed about his life there in the acclaimed theatrical memoir "East 10th Street: Self Portrait With Empty House," which the Times called "sweet and sinister." (And there's an extensive interview with him in Goodie from our friend Romy, who also informs us that Mr. Oliver has been relocated to an apartment further down the Lower East Side.)

Watch him talking about the house and its strange and amazing tenants in his hypnotic monster-movie voice:



(Here's another video, reading "Donuts Luncheonette" at home, and the trailer for The Hermit.)

I don't know Mr. Oliver, but I liked walking that block of fussy, recently renovated beauty queens, seeing the one shabby old survivor, and looking up at its only inhabited windows, lit by Oliver's strings of Christmas lights, knowing he was up there writing, or doing whatever he did, just not being someone humdrum.

It was a comfort.

Now I suppose some god-awful heiress will move in with her zombie husband and hollow-eyed children to fill the place with their flat-screen lives. This is how it goes.


Edgar Oliver on 10th, by Andrew Lachance

"On one of the finest blocks in the East Village," says the realtor's listing, "this building is located at the epicenter of this vibrant neighborhood." Of course, the neighborhood is less vibrant without Mr. Oliver in it.

The owner is asking $5,600,000.00.

64 E. 7th

As Grieve pointed out, folks are wondering what will go into the former Tokio 7 spot at 64 East 7th St. What used to be there is an interesting story.



In 1889, the building began serving as the parsonage for St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church, now the Community Synagogue on East 6th Street. Here lived the family of Reverend George Haas. Tragically, Haas' wife and daughter perished in 1904's General Slocum disaster, in the steamboat that Haas chartered to take his congregation on a church picnic. With 1,021 dead, it was known as the worst disaster in New York's history until 9/11.

After the Slocum fire, many Germans left the East Village for Yorkville, unable to bear the sorrows the neighborhood brought to mind.


1904: Haas funeral procession at 64 E. 7th

Sometime in the early 1900s, the newspaper Russky Golos ("Russian Voice") moved in to the first floor of #64. It's possible that this was the first business to occupy what had been purely a residence.

At this point in time, the invaluable New York Songlines sums up #64's history quite nicely, explaining that Russky Golos was "a left-wing newspaper reportedly associated with Soviet intelligence." It was also here in 1920 that suspected terrorist Alexander Brailovsky was found by police after being spotted at a Wall Street bombing that killed 33 people.


Russky Golos, 1930s

Writes Songlines: "Later it was Les Deux Megots coffeehouse ("The Two Cigar Butts"--a pun on the Parisian cafe Les Deux Magots); the poetry reading series here, which included such poets as Allen Ginsberg, Paul Blackburn and Carol Berge, eventually became the Poetry Project at St. Marks-in-the-Bowery. There were also current events speakers, who ranged from Paul Krassner and Tuli Kupferberg to William F. Buckley."

Author Daniel Kane writes about Les Deux Megots in his book All Poets Welcome, saying it was a "poetry scene based on inclusiveness or what might romantically be termed a gathering of the avant-garde tribes."

Bergie Lustig remembers many details of life at Les Deux Megots in her blog memoir Drop In the Bucket. It was the early 1960s and, as Lustig recalls, "Coffee houses were very popular at the time, but not on the Lower East side. Les Deux Megots was the only one of its kind in the area. The Lower East side was still predominantly Jewish and eastern European and blue collar. Various Slavic groups lived alongside Italians and a few 'others' in relative harmony. The shops and restaurants reflected the makeup of the neighborhood."



Songlines continues: "Then it was The Paradox, said to be the world's first macrobiotic restaurant; Yoko Ono and folksinger Loudon Wainwright III both worked here, and Abbie Hoffman described it as 'a neat cheap health joint that will give you a free meal if you help peel shrimp or do the dishes.'"

Paul Krassner recalls one of Yoko Ono's conceptual pieces at The Paradox, "People would climb inside these huge black burlap bags, singly, or with a partner, and then do whatever they wanted, providing a floor show for patrons while they ate their brown rice and sprout salad."

Here's a snippet of a typical scene at The Paradox from the New York Times in 1971:



After Paradox, it became the final home of Books 'N Things, according to the wonderful history Book Row, by Mondlin and Meador. The bookstore opened in 1940 on 4th Avenue and closed in the 1990s on 7th Street. In its many years, it became a landmark destination for book lovers, intellectuals, and radicals.

In 1988, the bookstore proprietor remarked to the Times that the East Village was "still a place where you can be free. For a lot of kids, coming here is way to get away from the choking atmosphere of suburbia." One of her customers described the shop, saying, "The flyers, the posters, the cracking peeling walls--it's a glimpse of Old Amsterdam, of Old New York."



Trotskyites, agitators, bohemian poets, radical macrobioticists, conceptual artists, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, Abbie Hoffman. This was the history of 64 East 7th Street for 100 years. You might say it encapsulates the way the neighborhood has always changed, and yet the spirit remained the same. Anarchists gave way to punks, lefty Jewish actors made room for queer performance artists, beatniks became hippies.

And then the century came to an end.

#64 was recently sold as a single-family townhouse for $5,700,000. It's being gutted now. My guess is that there won't be a business on the first floor, and it will go back to being part of the residence, as it was in 1889. It won't be housing for a clergyman, either. It will be a luxury, 13-room mansion, and it won't be nearly as interesting as all that came before.

Read about other interesting histories:
35 Cooper Square
169 Bowery
185-191 Bowery
111 2nd Avenue
1551 Broadway
Doyers Street

169 Bowery Suicide

Back to the Bowery, where I seem to be inadvertently collecting suicide tales. First, there was a hanging in the attic of 35 Cooper Square, aka 391 Bowery. Then there was Karl Hutter, inventor of the Lightning bottle-stopper and proprietor of 185 Bowery.

Now comes a Bowery suicide tale from #169. This time, it's a lovelorn Italian musician with a pistol back in 1886. He was "so poor that life had no longer any charm for him":


new york times

The address at which the musician died was on a Bowery filled with theaters, including many Italian and vaudeville theaters. He had played at Miner's Bowery Theater, which opened in this location, 165-169 Bowery, in 1878. It was known for its "questionable burlesque productions" and amateur nights (Eddie Cantor won many here), where bad performers were hauled offstage by a hook. Some claim this is where the expression "Get the hook!" was born.

In 1922, Miner's nearly burned down and later became a Chinese opera house.


miner's posters on bowery, new york wanderer

More recently, 169 was the home of Weiss Hardware, with the most excellent signage and can-do spirit--"If You Can't Find it. We have it"-- along with questionable punctuation and capitalization.


photo: Michael Dashkin


photo: my flickr

Last week, on my walk down the vanishing Bowery, I took a couple pictures of this creamy, pistachio-colored sign, afraid it might soon disappear. Last night, photographer and fellow sidewalk pounder RK Chin informed me it was gone.

Here's what might be coming, should the real-estate agents' dream come true. Unless, of course, they just tear it down and put up another glass box. Somebody, get the hook!


listing page

35 Cooper Square

As the Cooper Square Hotel has risen and spread, it has engulfed the block of Bowery between 5th and 6th Streets. Two original buildings remain: the tenement home of poet Hettie Jones and 35 Cooper Square, a building with a long and interesting history.

That history has been painstakingly uncovered by artist and East Village resident Sally Young in an attempt to get #35 landmarked, thus saving it from the wrecking ball. Rumor has it, the hotel developers plan to have the building demolished. And Landmarks has turned Sally down, stating, "the property does not meet the criteria for designation."


photo: sally young, 2008

Originally called 391 Bowery, #35 was owned in the early 1800s by Nicholas William Stuyvesant, great-grandson of Peter Stuyvesant. When he died in 1833, the building passed through several hands, including an undertaker, a teacher, a hotelier, and a saloon owner.


my flickr

In the 20th century, it became a home for artists. Painter and photographer J. Forrest Vey lived there after WWII. He rented the upstairs dormer rooms for $5 apiece to people like Joel Grey, star of Cabaret, and Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land.

Mr. Vey once broke into the attic, which had been sealed ever since a man hanged himself there. He found Civil War newspapers, a stove-pipe hat, a sign that said "5-cent Hot Whiskey," and a noose.


found in the attic

Beat poet Diane DiPrima moved into #35 in 1962. There she wrote many poems, and her memories of the place can be found in her memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman. She writes to Sally, "We were visited there by probably hundreds of artists and art patrons, including William Burroughs, Cecil Taylor, Frank O’Hara," John Weiners, Herbert Huncke, and Warhol Superstar Billy Name, who lived with DiPrima for a time.

Billy Name recalled in an email to Sally, "wooden broad plank floors and a very comfortable homey feeling from all the wood and open space and kitchen. and, as opposed to all the tenement buildings in its surrounds it actually looked like a 'house' from earlier america. looked and felt like it might have been the perfect home for walt whitman...it should be designated a historic site and have a nice bronze plaque on the front."

Finally, the building made it into the news in 2004 (The Villager and the Times) when owner Cooper Union opted to paint over a 9/11 memorial mural and make room for advertising, against protests from the locals.


photo: hubert j. steed, 2004

The memorial has been erased and there won't be any bronze plaques. There probably won't even be a building to hang it on. #35 is one of a few lots on the block bought last year by a group of Cooper Square Hotel investors. One investor told The Observer, “These lots were to become, possibly, a restaurant-lounge and/or expansion to the Cooper hotel so we (Cooper investors) would be able to leverage the brand, amenities and staff of the Cooper Hotel next door."

In her memoir, DiPrima wrote, "From the moment when I first laid eyes on 35 Cooper Square, I knew it was the fulfillment of all those fantasies of art and the artist's life, la vie de boheme, harking all the way back to my high school years or before."

What will happen to such fantasies--and their dreamers--when all the 35 Cooper Squares of our city have been demolished and New York fails, again and again, to fulfill them?

Bowery Stories

Something gigantic is coming to Bowery and Delancey. With the New Museum arrival and the protested EV/LES rezoning, the Bowery has become more valuable, and therefore more threatened, than ever before.

Now Rob Hollander of Save the LES sends notice of a Real Deal report that condo/hotel developer Brack Capital just bought a townhouse at 185 Bowery, adding to their clustered purchases of 187, 189, and 191. Like dominoes in a row, all four are expected to fall.


photo: dylan stone, nypl

Brack is responsible for 15 Union Square West, a boutique hotel on Grand St., and other developments in the city. It is rumored they will demolish the four low-rises for a luxury hotel. Here comes yet another giant tower, to go with the one right behind it and all the rest.



Today in #187, resident since 1980 Roberta Degnore still hangs on, the only one left and a possible roadblock to the wrecking ball. She recently told The Observer, "I’m alone in this freaking building on the Bowery, and if I scream, nobody will hear me.” (Take the money and run, Roberta--look what they're doing to Hettie Jones.)

Assuming these buildings are as old as they look, there are more stories here. #189 once had a saloon in the front and a German men's keno parlor in the back. In 1867, it was raided by the police in a "Descent upon a Bowery Keno Hell."

The Illustrated New York of 1888 tells us that #191 used to be R.H. Luthin's wholesale and retail drug house (formerly Cassebeer's drugstore) where they carried Vitalized Cordial, Wild Cherry Syrup, and Sarsaparilla. There was also "a small cigarstand and a place for the sale of hot-corn" on the site.

By the 1930s, these were all flop hotels--The Puritan at #183, The Savoy at #185--with beds and rooms from 20 cents to 50 cents apiece.


photo: nypl

It's the townhouse at #185 that is clearly the architectural gem of the bunch. It also has the most tragic story.

According to the 1884 edition of New York's Great Industries, this address was the home of Karl Hutter's Lightning Bottle-Stoppers, Lightning Fruit-Jars, and Bottlers' Supplies. Here you could see a "full assortment of his stoppers and attachments, also siphons made of French glass, with pure metal heads, bottle-filling machines, lightning bottle-washers, siphon-filling machines, corking machines," and more.

Mr. Hutter made a fortune on his lightning bottle-stopper, which "revolutionized beer bottling." You can see its descendant today on bottles of Grolsch.


photo: robert k. chin

Even with all his wealth, prized Oriental rugs, and society club memberships, Mr. Hutter could not overcome the "acute melancholia" that led to his suicide in 1913. The Times reported that Mr. Hutter filled his bathtub with water, removed his clothing, got inside, and shot himself in the head--all in his "sumptuously furnished apartment" on Central Park. He left a note, saying, "The pain and agony endured in this world cannot be more than that to be endured by the soul in the next."

There are eight million stories in the naked city. These four buildings about to vanish from the Bowery have been some of them.

Ratner's of 2nd Ave

I briefly reported recently that NYU may push the Met Foods grocery store out of its spot on 2nd Avenue between 6th and 7th Streets. A CB3 meeting will be held on April 15 to give the community a chance to speak out against this act of aggression. (Read The Villager for the full scoop and sign the petition here.)

In my post, I mentioned that Ratner's used to occupy the spot. A commenter wondered if there was, indeed, a Ratner's at 111 2nd Ave and if it was connected to the 97-year-old restaurant on Delancey. I began wondering about it myself and decided to do a little research--discovering a New York family mystery in the process.



Ratner's 2nd Ave was next to the Fillmore East (now a bank) and as such became a nighttime hangout for rock-n-roll legends like Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and The Grateful Dead. The "R" is still embedded in Met Foods' floor.

It's hard to find images of this long-lost Ratner's, but if you search for the better-memorialized "Fillmore East" you will see its neon sign shining next door. In this photo, you can see Ratner's awning--and that's Block Drugs on the far left.


photo link

My search led me to street photographer Tony Marciante's amazing flickr page featuring many photos of New York in the 1960s and 70s, including a set from 1969 of a fire across the street from Ratner's. The fire is in a place called Hoagie's and So Forth, which is now the defunct Bamboo House (also check out the pet shop, Fish and Cheep's!).


photo link

The Met Foods/Ratner's site is located in the Saul Birns Building, seen in the photo below as the big, white building with many windows, bookended by Fillmore East and little Moishe's Bakery. Saul Birns, also known as Saul Birnzweig, ran the Atlantic Talking Machine Company where he sold record players, many in the shape of baby grand pianos.

He was indicted in 1915 as a "phonograph swindler" for running a fraudulent mail order scheme that, according to the Times, "promised foreigners an opportunity of hearing their native songs produced on a talking machine, which would be sent them on free trial." But after Mr. Birns got his deposit money, he would pull a switcheroo, sending a cheap phonograph to the foreigners instead of the quality machine he'd promised. The Saul Birns Building is now part of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.


photo link and click for close up

But back to Ratner's of 2nd Ave and the question of why it's been mostly forgotten and was it connected to the Delancey place.

It was owned by Abraham Harmatz, who died on May 29, 1974, the very day after his landmark dairy restaurant closed. In the Times article it says that "Ratner's had been a Second Avenue fixture for more than 50 years, a gastronomic diadem in the crown of what years ago was called the Jewish Rialto." It also states that "it is not connected" with the one on Delancey, "although they share common ancestors and have been run by different branches of the same family."

The first Ratner's opened on Pitt Street in 1908 under brothers Jacob and Harry Harmatz and brother-in-law Alex Ratner. Ratner left the shop and "The brothers went their separate ways as the business expanded" -- Jacob opened the Delancey Ratner's in 1918 (yes, this year would have been its 100th birthday, had it survived hipsterification) and Harry went to 2nd Ave around the same time. Harry begat Abraham, cousin to Jacob's son Harold who continued to run the Delancey location and who considered reopening the 2nd Ave site after Abraham's death, but this did not come to fruition.


Ratner's Delancey, similar neon typeface

In the extensive 2004 obit for Harold Harmatz, there is no mention of uncle Harry, after whom Harold was clearly named. It says only that father Jacob opened the Delancey place with brother-in-law Alex Ratner. Even in a correction at the end, the Times says they omitted other co-owners, some Zankel brothers, but again where's uncle Harry? This Wikipedia article also omits him.

So there is a mystery within this mystery. What does it mean that Jacob and Harry went their separate ways? Why has Harry and Abraham's 2nd Ave Ratner's been, in some weird way, stricken from history? I have to wonder, did they have a rift much like the Manganaros? If it was a family feud, the Delancey branch definitely won the claim to Ratner's fame.

Other than photographs, the only concrete evidence we have of Harry and Abraham's 2nd Ave restaurant is that R embedded in the floor of Met Foods.

1551 Broadway

A magazine writer emailed me yesterday in a search for the lost buildings of 2007. Many buildings come to mind. The smaller ones seem to fall away from memory -- they go so quickly and without warning. It's hard sometimes to remember what was where. But the one that stands out in my mind, perhaps more than any other, is 1551 Broadway, the former home of Times Square's last Howard Johnson's and the Gaiety Burlesk.


photo: my flickr

The 112-year-old building was not a beauty, but it held a lot of New York history -- right down to the bricks, which came from the Shultz Brick Company and probably traveled down the Hudson River to get here from a once-thriving industry now vanished.

The Childs Company bought the property from the Martel family of France in 1920 for $400,000. In this photo from the same year, it held Park Taylor clothing and, upstairs, Wilson's Dancing Studio, where Henry Miller fell in love with June Edith Smith in 1923.


photo source: NYPL

Wilson's later became the Orpheum Dance Palace, a taxi-dance hall that closed in 1964, soon after journalist Liz Trotta went undercover there, posing as a dancer to write an expose (which I would love to read, if anyone can find it). It then became the New Paris, which went from the "All-Live Whirly-Girly Revue Big-Time Vaudeville" house to a 1970s swinging place where live sex acts were performed on mattresses fragrant with bodily fluids. The Gaiety also most likely opened during that same sticky decade.

Thanks to owner Morris Rubinstein, Howard Johnson's came to the corner in 1959, around about the time this photo was taken:


photo source: hojoland

In the New York Times in 1988, Morris Rubinstein (then 79) said of 1551, "As long as the Lord will spare me in this world, it's not for sale...What am I going to do with the money? I already give to charity. What else do I need? What would I do with $20 million? Would I have a better cup of coffee? Would I get a better sandwich?" But the Lord could not spare Morris forever and in 2005 the building was sold by the Rubinsteins, along with two other properties, for over $100 million. The Gaiety closed and was soon followed by Howard Johnson's.

For two years, 1551 stood partly fallen, the demolition halted by the intrusion of a refreshment bar belonging to the Lunt-Fontanne, formerly the Globe Theater, whose Broadway lobby stood next to 1551.


photo source: NY Times


Globe in 1930s with Orpheum sign on 1551

It wasn't until sometime late this summer that the demolition continued to its completion and 1551 fell back into a pile of bricks, each of them holding untold secrets and sensations, each one stamped over a century ago with the name Shultz.


my flickr

• The Gaiety
• Hojo's in the Times