Early 2010 in NYC has featured some crazy weather — three feet of snow in February, which fell in three storms; sunny and very warm in March, accompanied by several rounds of flooding rain; and at this writing on April 7, 85 degrees is expected for a high temperature in the afternoon. Your webmaster took advantage of one of the March breaks in the monsoons to wander about High Bridge in the Bronx, and as my fleece jacket allowed the sun to soak my shirt through with sweat, a march across Washington Bridge to 181st Street, the main east-west shopping artery in northern Manhattan. (The Alexander Hamilton Bridge – Trans-Manhattan Expressway – George Washington Bridge route is the main traffic express route) …
Sign at Amsterdam Avenue and the 181st Street end of Washington Bridge. Fort Tryon Park and The Cloisters — can’t-be-missed highlights of northern Manhattan (I’ll have to do Fort Tryon Park in FNY soon) — are attainable from West 181st Street west to Fort Washington Avenue and going north for about 12 blocks.
One of the massive apartment buildings found along 181st, this one at Audubon Avenue. John James Audubon (1785-1851), “America’s Woodsman,” was born in Haiti, moved to just outside Philadelphia to avoid conscription into Napoleon’s army … and took an interest in America’s wildlife:
Audubon set off on his epic quest to depict America’s avifauna, with nothing but his gun, artist’s materials, and a young assistant. Floating down the Mississippi, he lived a rugged hand-to-mouth existence in the South while [wife] Lucy earned money as a tutor to wealthy plantation families. In 1826 he sailed with his partly finished collection to England. “The American Woodsman” was literally an overnight success. His life-size, highly dramatic bird portraits, along with his embellished descriptions of wilderness life, hit just the right note at the height of the Continent’s Romantic era. Audubon found a printer for the Birds of America, first in Edinburgh, then London, and later collaborated with the Scottish ornithologist William MacGillivray on the Ornithological Biographies — life histories of each of the species in the work. —Audubon.org
In 1839 Audubon purchased an estate on the Hudson River in what is now Washington Heights, and passed away there in 1851 — he is buried in Uptown Trinity Cemetery.
On the NW corner of Broadway and West 181st is the massive Coliseum Cinemas.
…the Coliseum Theatre boasted to be the third largest theatre in the United States, with 3,500 seats, when it opened in 1920. B.S. Moss was involved with the launching of the theatre as an entity and it later came under the management of RKO. The architects were DeRosa and Piera, who designed other movie palaces of that period.
In its heyday many of the most famous vaudeville acts came to the stage of the Coliseum. The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Uncle Don’s Kiddie Show, and Gertrude Berg of television’s “The Goldbergs” were among the performers who had been there. Cinematreasures
Yet another large apartment building, NW corner
A pair of “vintage” shots from the Broadway IRT line’s 181st street station, from nycsubway.org, from 1978 and 1987, when the R32/R33 “redbirds” were still running. The station is one of the deepest in the system and the station is in a barrel vault with three overhead crossovers, one of which is still open. At left, the original tiled nameplate has been altered twice since 1906, when the station first opened.
714 West 181st Street. Oddly, south of about 165th Street most “west” streets end their house numbers in the mid-600s, while they go considerably higher north of that. Jerome Avenue in the Bronx forms the east-west divide north of 161st, and while the Harlem River causes the house numbers to skip a few hundred, Manhattan Island also curves a bit west in this part of town, enabling the house numbers to climb higher.
Several old-fashioned signs persist on West 181st from Bennett Avenue west to Ft. Washington Avenue, including the pestle in the vessel shown here. Unfortunately, some are closing…
It appears that Joseph’s Shoes and Orthopedic Appliances, which was in business for almost 90 years, is either moving or closing.
Its old-fashioned neon sign was covered with a modern exterior a few years ago, but the hi-heel shape was retained.
Changing demographics doomed Gruenebaum’s, a couple of doors way from Joseph’s, but there is still a Gruenebaum’s in Riverdale, Bronx.
Gruenebaum’s, according to an April 6, 2001 article in The New York Jewish Week, was “founded…in Frankfurt, Germany, early in the 20th century.” The article continues:
The Frankfurt bakery closed its doors in 1938 and the family immigrated to the United States in 1940. Banin’s father worked for different bakeries until 1957, when he bought out a store on 177th Street and Broadway. In 1961, he opened Gruenbaum’s on 181st Street and “the place took off. Bakeries was all my father did,” says Banin. “That was what he knew.” Daily Snowman
Revolutionary War hero Colonel Robert F. Magaw claims a one-block street from West 181st-183rd Street (182nd is skipped) west of Bennett Avenue, and a very old plaque on the corner of West 181st commemorates the Philadelphia lawyer who commanded Fort Washington during a British attack on northern Manhattan in 1776 but was forced to surrender. The British occupied the island until the war ended in 1783. When the street was mapped in the 1910s and laid out in the 1930s it was apparently briefly called Fort Washington Place and occupies the old position of the driveway to the estate of newspaper publisher J.G. Bennett (see below).
Fort Washington Collegiate Church, built in 1909 at Ft. Washington Avenue and West 181st, a descendant of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church. It was constructed on the former property of James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald (cf. nearby Bennett Avenue).
Closeup of the lettering over the doorway to the parish house, the larger building on the right in the photo.
History of Fort Washington Collegiate Church [Washington Heights and Inwood Online]
Page completed April 7, 2010