33RD AND 35TH

IT’S time for another entry in FNY’s Cross Streets of NYC series! I have been walking Manhattan’s numbered streets from east to west or vice versa so compulsively, I’ve decided to create a new FNY category to hold them. Over the years, I’ve done this quite a few times and I was amazed at how much stuff I missed and how much material I knew about and posted here and there, but never really formalized or categorized. There’s a separate universe in each NYC numbered cross street.

In late January I traveled on 33rd and 35th Streets from Penn Station to 1st Avenue. Though neither street has many landmarked structures, I was able to gather some interesting tidbits and of course some infrastructural oddments. In July 2020, I walked 34th Street from Penn to 1st at the height of the pandemic, when NYC streets were at their emptiest. Looking back on that now it seems almost surreal. In late January 2022, the streets were more populated, but it was cold and snow was on the way.

Date taken: January 23, 2022
Photos in batch: 109

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Here’s Broadway at West 33rd at Greeley Square, where it meets 6th Avenue. Formerly a horn honking center of cacophony, traffic here been tamed considerably by closing some sections of Broadway and reducing traffic on other sections in Midtown. I remarked about this in a post from January 30, 2022:

Jack Dempsey was the American heavyweight boxing champion between 1919 and 1926, and later capitalized on his popularity by owning a successful restaurant in Midtown beginning in 1935, at first on 8th Avenue and West 50th Street across from the longtime site of Madison Square Garden, later moving to the Brill Building at Broadway and West 49th. At both locations, Dempsey himself would greet guests and schmooze. Dempsey also owned a restaurant on West 46th Street for a few years. Jack Dempsey’s on Broadway closed in 1974 and the boxer himself passed in 1983; the corner of Broadway and West 49th bears a Jack Dempsey Corner street sign.

Jack Demsey’s meanwhile, at #36 West 33rd, has nothing to do with the boxer (as far as I know), except perhaps an attempt to capitalize on his restaurant’s old reputation: indeed, his photograph is on their contact page. The building it’s in, though considerably altered, is a leftover townhouse from the days when Manhattan’s side streets were dominated by them instead of taller office towers.

While West 33rd passes the Empire State Building as it nears 5th Avenue, I was more fascinated by the Bawo and Dotter Building across the street at #20 West 33rd, for the weird escutcheons that appear to be showing aliens or strange plants. As the Latin number indicates it was constructed in 1912.

Bawo & Dotter was established in New York City in the 1860s to import porcelain, especially from Limoges, into the USA. In the early 1870s they established The Elite Works in Limoges to decorate porcelain made by other factories. Their production included table china, decorative pieces and trinket boxes. Some of their marks incorporated St. Martial from the seal of the City of Limoges. Porcelain production was interrupted during WWI. Shortly after the war, they bought the William Guerin company, and the mark changed to “Guerin-Pouyat-Elite, apparently continuing use of all three company marks. The company closed in 1932. Bawo & Dotter also had large operations in Austria and Czechoslovakia, with completely different marks. [The Detroit News]

No doubt, the name “Bawo and Dotter” was at one time famed among collectors, but only this building, long since converted to other uses. Fame and notoriety are more ephemeral than a New York Knicks late game lead.

A faded sign on the east side of the Hotel Martinique can be seen from West 33rd midblock between 5th and 6th. Henry Hardenburgh’s Hotel Martinique was builtin 1900 and expanded greatly in 1910. Its own restaurant was modeled after the Apollo Room of the Louvre featuring walnut panels and wainscoting and paintings depicting Louis XIV and his courtiers. The hotel was not named for the Caribbean island but for its original owner, William R. H. Martin. (R.H. were popular initials around here — Rowland Hussey Macy’s giant emporium moved to Herald square in 1902.) After a stint as a homeless shelter, the Martinique was revived as part of the Radisson chain.

Angel or goddess detail at #4-16 West 33d, constructed in 1914, currently occupied by many fashion accessories wholesalers. I was a frequent visitor to one of the ground floor businesses, Jim Hanley’s Universe comic store, when I worked in the general neighborhood. It was here from the mid-1990s through the 2020s. Currently, some former associates operate JHU Comic Books in midtown and New Dorp, Staten Island.

I liked that pair of carven number 10s above the ground floor at West 33rd.

#12 West 33rd Street was originally called the SS Building, likely for the initials of its original builder, owner or prominent tenant, now lost to history. I suppose if I combed the municipal records I could find the entity to whom the initials belonged.

There are some classic painted ads on the upper floors on East 33rd east of Madison Avenue. As a rule, white paint was used for these type of ads, but here, the painters got a little experimental with designs and colors. As usual, the Indispensable Walter Grutchfield is consulted.

This one, at #1 East 33rd Street near 5th Avenue for handbag designer Robert Bestien, is one of the newer in the bunch because the company occupied this building from 1978 to 1987; ’78 is likely the year this was painted, so it’s a good 50 years younger than some of the painted ads in the area. Bestien handbags are readily available from ebay and other outlets, but there’s precious little on the world wide web about the designer himself.

The “handbags MM” ad on the left refers to designer Morris Moskowitz, who was in this building between 1952 and 1984.

Magid Handbags originated with Polish immigrant milliner Anna I. Magid (1870-1934) who worked for a number of midtown shops after immigrating to the USA before opening the first of a number of businesses in 1916. After she retired with her husband to Florida in 1930, her sons continued running her various businesses and moved to this building in 1937, remaining until the 1980s.

Meanwhile, Coblentz Bags occupied space at #30 East 33rd from 1938 to about 1980. Other businesses’s ads here have largely faded into invisibility, but Grutchfield has the scoop on all of them.

I found #30 West 33rd, The Crystal Building, largely unremarkable…except for its wildly terra-cotta’d entrances, one main, one freight, with identical details including Corinthian pilaster, or half-columns.

#2 Park Avenue at West 33rd has figured in publishing and literature, according to NY Songlines; Ayn Rand researched architecture architecture for “The Fountainhead” here and Charles Bronson played architect/vigilante Paul Kersey in “Death Wish” in scenes shot here. It was designed by Eli Jacques Kahn and built in 1927.

The Park Avenue was closed to traffic when I passed it in 2022. Motorists know all about it but few pedestrians ever see it. It was built in 1834 as an open cut for the New York & Harlem Railroad (NY&H) which ran both steam engines and horsecars, and the cut was bridged over in the 1850s, creating the tunnel — one of NYC’s oldest, if not the very oldest. The tunnel has carried trolley tracks, two-way traffic, and now northbound auto traffic.

Periodically the Park Avenue Tunnel is open to pedestrians during the Summer Streets event, three Sundays in August, when Lafayette Street/4th/Park Avenues ban motorized traffic from Foley Square north to East 72nd Street. In 2013, an art exhibit  featured Rafael Lozano-Hemmer‘s Voice Tunnel installation, in which visitors could record a short message that would be played back continuously from speakers along the tunnel walls.

#3 Park Avenue is an unusual 42-story office building (also the home of Norman Thomas High School, named for a Socialist candidate for US President) constructed in 1973 by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon on the site of the former 71st Regiment Armory. The 33rd Street #6 train station, located beneath the building, still boasts terra cotta eagles that were an early subway design indicator of armories. The building is unusually set catercorner to East 34th and windows are hard to come by on the lower floors.

In late 1999 I interviewed for a compositor position with Transperfect Translations, then as now on the 39th floor (the views were incredible), and things were looking good until the fellow that interviewed me was dismissed. Soon enough I wound up at a typesetter, Marx + Myles, further south on Park, and then at Macy’s in April 2000.

The space was formerly occupied by the 71st Regiment Armory, built in 1905, which is remembered by a plaque at the subway steps on the northeast corner and terra cotta eagle plaques in the station.

East 33rd between Madison and Park was subnamed Sholom Aleichem Place in 1996. The phrase in Hebrew and Yiddish means “peace be to you” but this actually honors Ukrainian Jewish writer Solomon Naumovich Rabinovitch (1859-1916) who used it as his pen name. He is remembered today for his series of stories about Tevye, the pious Jewish milkman, some of which were distilled into the Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” He was published in The Forward, which formerly had offices on East 33rd.

#245 Lexington at the SE corner of East 33rd Street the Yeshiva University Israel Henry Beren Campus, named for the co-owner, with his brothers Adolf, Harry, of the Okmar Oil Company, and was a charitable donor, including to the university.

East of Lexington Avenue, East 33rd Street changes character considerably, becoming much more residential in nature with attached townhouses with perhaps 3 dwellings apiece, with retail and restaurants on the ground floors.

In have remarked often about architects’ seeming inability to design esthetically appealing parking garages. This one at #150 East 33rd is OK to me, though; it has a streamlined simplicity that I liked.

The original Second Avenue Deli was at 2nd Avenue and East 10th in the East Village, but closed in 2005 and later moved uptown to #162 East 33rd. Owner Abe Lebewohl was murdered during a robbery in 1996.  The original Second Avenue Deli neon sign can be found in Williamsburg’s City Reliquary. 

At #220 East 33rd, PS 116 is named for Mary Lindley Murray, who figured prominently in the British invasion and occupation of New York in 1776. The story of rebel forces in opposition to British in NYC often involved a situation in which the ragtag rebel forces escaped the larger and better equipped British forces, allowing the patriots to regroup and devise better strategies later. This was also the case in Mary Murray’s involvement because, as the story goes, she delayed British General William Howe and his adjutants leading 8000 troops for a few hours with cake, wine and conviviality which allowed the patriots, led by General Israel Putnam and consisting of 3000 troops, escaped a battle in which they would be considerably outnumbered.

As you can see the detail on the school building entrances is engaging and interesting.

A newer, and therefore less architecturally interesting, annex was added later.

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Believe it or not and I had never been on the stretch of East 33rd between 2nd and 1st Avenues before and therefore had never before set eyes on the huge Kips Bay Towers condominium before and poked a bit of fun at its relentless rows of square windows on Facebook, but I have come to grudgingly admire it somewhat. Famed Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei was the main designer. It replaced the original Phipps Houses and was built from 1960 to 1965.

East 33rd ends at 1st Avenue, where we find the New York University Medical Center featuring the Wollman Memorial Pavilion and the Ronald O. Perelman Clinical Research Building, both named for very wealthy donors.

35th Street

At 1st Avenue I walked a couple of blocks and reversed course on East 35th Street…

As stated I hadn’t been in this previous corner of Manhattan before and therefore, I had never before visited St, Vartan’s Park, which occupies a square block between 1st and 2nd Avenues and East 35th and 36th Streets. It is named for a nearby cathedral (see below).

In the winter with less vegetation, a clear view of nearby towers is available, with the foremost among them The Corinthian apartment tower, with its myriad bay windows, constructed in 1987 by architect Michael Schimenti at #645 1st Avenue between East 37th and 38th.

According to Jim Naureckas of New York Songlines, Corinthian “is used to mean ‘luxurious’ because Corinth was the party town of ancient Greece–noted as the home of Aphrodite’s sacred prostitutes. The fountain in front of the building is called Pierene – named for the fountain in Corinth where the flying horse Pegasus was captured.” Of course you remember Ricardo Mantalban’s “Corinthian leather” car commercials in the Super Seventies.

When I hear “Corinthian,” though, I recall Neil Gaiman’s Corinthian character from his Sandman series in the 1990s. At first a killer and later more sympathetic, the Corinthian usually wore sunglasses, to hide the fact that his eyes were open mouths.

A look at the American Copper Building towers, one of which has an unusual angled design that makes them look from across the East River in Hunters Point as a giant reverse letter K or perhaps a crooked letter H. The two towers are residential, despite their industrial sounding name, and are connected by a pedestrian skybridge. The two buildings do have copper cladding, with both open for occupation in 2018.

St. Vartan Cathedral of the Armenian Orthodox Church at East 34th and 2nd Avenue was built in 1967: the first cathedral of that denomination to be built in NYC. Check the exterior for inscriptions in Armenian; inside you will find stone crosses that date to the 1400s.

Vartan was a 5th-century Armenian warrior who opposed Persia (today’s Iran) and helped spread Christianity in opposition to the main Persian religion of the era, Zoroastrianism. Armenia was the site of a mass slaughter by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, but Turkey still officially denies it took place.

My original plan for this page was to do a complete set of 35th Street photos, but it’s getting fairly late on Sunday and i need a rest as I am a working boy these days, so I’ll do a Part 2 sometime soon.

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4/3/22