CROSBY Street is one of those NYC streets that traditionally had been somewhat overlooked, since it’s wedged between main N-S thoroughfares Broadway and Lafayette Street between Howard and Bleecker Streets. It has had a checkered history that saw only one-half of it given landmark protection. That, though, has been changed as the Soho Cast-Iron Historic District Extension has covered its east side since 2010. In recent years, like the rest of Soho, it has become home to a number of high-end residences; homeowners here appreciated its relative quiet. At 126, its northern end near East Houston Street you will find the Housing Works Used Book Café, where all profits go a nonprofit offering housing, health care, job placement and other services for homeless suffering with HIV and AIDS.
Up until recently I had found Crosby one of SoHo’s quietest streets, but especially in recent years, things have gotten very busy as high-end retailers have taken up a great deal of space. Sidewalk free space is now at a premium on weekends given the new trend of lining up for blocks for small retailers and restaurants with limited seating or small floor space. Scenesters also want … to be seen on line … in social media such as instagram and tiktok. I walked Crosby’s full length, will eventually make its way to an FNY post, but I thought I’d get the jump on things with something that perplexes me at #1 Crosby, on the corner of #28 Howard. This corner appears in Scorsese’s “After Hours” in which anything that can go wrong does, for Griffin Dunne’s office jockey.
^ The LPC report lined above gives a detailed description and history. I’ll spare you the architecture-ese in the description, but here’s the history. The description, though, leaves out one element I found perplexing.
These’s this cameo, or bas-relief, probably executed in marble, on the Crosby Street side, with a loosly-wrapped or swaddled baby, but with free arms; usually swaddling is done with both arms and legs. I’m not a scholar of Victorian-era symbolism; the most famed swaddled baby I know of is the Christ child, so this may be a depiction. The LPC description does not include an ecclesiastical use of the building. The Rosenbaum “infant wear” in 1909 is a possible clue.
Any ideas? Comments are open.
Check out the ForgottenBook (HarperCollins, 2006), as well as Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013). I also have a chapter in the anthology “New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg” (Reaktion, 2007). As always, “comment…as you see fit.” I earn a small payment when you click on any ad on the site.
9/15/26
2 comments
The baby does not appear on the ca. 1940 tax lot photo (when it was an expansion bolt company) and Google Street View only goes back to the early 2010s, so who knows when the window was covered over and the image added.
For whatever it’s worth, there’s some 1999 photos floating around the NYPL digital archives that show the building with the windows covered as above but, no sign of the baby.