43 Years of Busted Chasses

You don't see many auto body shops with a sense a history. This one's in the South Slope on Fourth Avenue, a strip filled with car service businesses.

Greenwich on 57th

You have to crane your neck to see this forgotten sign for the Greenwich Savings Bank. It's on the east face of a building on w. 57th Street just next door to Bergdorf Goodman. It looks to have been there for some time. The bank was chartered way back in 1833 and finally swallowed by Crossland Savings in 1985. The Art Deco, woodblock style of the sign is very nice, I think.

History in a Starbucks: 38 Park Row

Whenever Starbucks opens a franchise below 14th Street in Manhattan, the address can't help but be loaded with history. Case in point: 38 Park Row.

This is the Potter Building. It is the second to go by that name. The first, home to the New York World, went down in flames in 1882. Mr. Potter smarted up with his replacement structure. It's the first building in New York to have used fireproof cast and pressed terracotta in its ornamental facade. It was also the first to use a structural steel framework. And there it is, 124 years later, still standing.

Being so close to City Hall, the Potter Building was chock full of lawyers. And where you find lawyers, you find scandal. The annals of New York history seem to be replete with stories of 38 Park Row legal eagles being indicted and jailed, or committing suicide before the authorities had a chance to do so.

In 1905, lawyer Herbert Valentine, with offices at 38 Park Row, shot himself in the head at the Hotel St. Andrew, Seventy-second Street and Broadway. Sometimes, lawyers cause other people to commit suicide. In 1915, "laywer-actor" (what the hell is that) Lorlys Elton Roger caused some women a whole lot of trouble. Already married in to a lady in Chicago, the serial philanderer set up house in Manhattan with one Ida Sniffen Walters-Rogers and her two kiddies. When Roger's first wife found out, he decided to go back to her, causing Ida to despair, poison her two children and attempt suicide with bichloride of mercury. She was successful in the first task, not so much with the second. Roger was divorced by his real wife and indicted as a white slaver. Ida was tried for the deaths of her kids and found insane.

A more curious bit of trouble for a 38 Park Row lawyer happened in 1902 when Mrs. Frederick L.C. Keating, wife of wealthy attorney Keating, started stealing a bunch of stuff for no reason, at places like B. Altman. When arrested by a detective, she denied having shoplifted, but then confessed. She blamed her transgression on "The Girl and the Judge," a play by Clyde Fitch she had seen on Broadway a few weeks before, in which the central character was an old mother who shoplifted. "Ever since I've been unable to keep myself from stealing anything I could carry away from the stores." Relatives said she was suffering from "nervous prostation."

The Proof Is in the Pudding

I've always had an affection for the grocery store pudding known as Kozy Shack. Perhaps it was the hokey name, with its intimations of home and hearth, but I also thought it tasted suspiciously good.

Vincent Gruppuso, the founder of Kozy Shack Enterprises, died on Dec. 29, and through his New York Times obituary I was able to find out the origins of the company. Turns out my instincts were right to a certain extent, because the story behind the pudding is a fairly homespun, heartwarming one.

First of all, there was an actual Kozy Shack. It was called Cozy Shack (no K), and it was a deli on Seneca Avenue on Brooklyn. Gruppuso was a bread delivery man and he used to stop there for a break. They made a great rice pudding that attracted the guy's attention. He worked out a deal where he started delivering the pudding to his customers. In 1967, he bought the recipe and started a factory. The company is based in Hicksville.

I will no longer feel guilty for liking Kozy Shack Pudding.

A Clair Sign

The old St. Clair Restaurant—which recently closed after 87 years of occupying a corner at Atlantic Avenue and Smith Street, and will reopen soon under the guideance of the owners of the Carroll Gardens Classic Diner—is currently revealing a bit of history.

A watchful reader tipped Lost City off to the disclosure of an old sign hidden beneath the St. Clair's most recent wraparound banner. Only part of it is on view, but its clearly the word "restaurant," and probably is an older St. Clair sign that covered covered up some decades ago. It will doubtless be covered up or taken down altogether, since the new diner is supposed to be "trendy."

History in a Starbucks: 164 Smith

This, the first Starbucks to blight Smith Street in Brooklyn, was once the site of Whalen Brothers, "The Universal Home Providers," "The Big Credit Store." (You can see it back there on the left side of the picture.) You could get furniture, clothing, carpets, everything here. And all goods would be "delivered in unmarked wagons!" Hot-diggety! They were also known for their "extraordinary" $3.95 Parlor Suit Sale. (What's a Parlor Suit?)

The Whalens weren't so nice, it seems. There was a sensational case back in 1885 where a washerwoman named Anna McAuliffe bought a set of furniture, valued at $80, on the installment plan. (Whalen heavily advertised these plans, which let you put $5 down on $100 worth of goods.) She paid all of it except $9, but since that portion was late, four burly men from the store came to her home to collect the goods. Mrs. McAuliffe, with her children present, began to fight over a chair a man was removing. The man called his buddies and they had a little fun by using the chair to pin the woman against the wall, laughing while they did it. Mrs. McAuliffe screamed, gave them a dollar and promised to pay the balance on Monday, and they desisted. But the lady felt pains in her abdomen. After being examined by a doctor, she (Jesus Christ!) died.

The men told police they had been "gentle." Both Whalen Brothers proved to be "out of town." There was a trial in 1886, but I couldn't discover the outcome.

The Queensboro Bridge Knows Where Four-Fifths of You Live

On the Manhattan side of the Queensboro Bridge, on the south side of the entrance, there's a towering metal lamppost on a sold stone pedestal holding up five glass globes. (There's no sign of a similar post on the north side.)

It's a beautiful thing, even if it renders the visual effect of the whole bridge a little lopsided. The best part are metal carvings on each side of the post which honor the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx and Queens, each word pointed basically in the direction of said borough.

Staten Island, apparently, can go suck a lemon.

What Goes on in Queens?

I just read a Daily News article reprinted on Queens Crap and I feel like my eyes are about to cross. It's about the Jamaica Savings Bank, a 110-year-old Beaux Arts beauty, and how the Landmarks Preservation Committee's drive to landmark it is being roadblocked by the building fussy owner, Morris Cohen.

I've read and reread it and I don't get it. Gloria Black, the chairwoman of Queens Community Board 12, City Councilman Leroy Comrie, commission spokeswoman Lisi de Bourbon—they all talk as if Cohen is some Queens County potentate to be wooed and coddled. Excuse my French, but who the fuck is Morris Cohen, besides the owner of a crappy Conway department store next door? (Thanks for the ugly pink shopping bags, Morris!) Is he a mobster? Is he the mayor's brother-in-law? The Commission doesn't need his approval. Nobody does. If the building's landmark-worthy, it's landmark-worthy and that's that. The whole of Sunnyside Gardens was recently landmarked; was there any talk of getting approval from the many houseowners in the area?

Look at the Landmarks Commission website. Lots of stuff there are meeting the owner and informing the owner, etc., but nothing about getting his say-so. "The Commission then votes on the designation at a public meeting. Six votes are needed to approve or deny a designation. By law, landmark designation is effective upon the Commission's vote, and all rules and regulations of the Landmarks Law are applicable."

Comrie in particular seems like a prize asshole. (E-mail him!) The news quoted him as saying that that he wouldn't support landmarking if Cohen "can show it's economically unfeasible for him to maintain the building [as a landmark], we have to make sure we don't leave that eyesore for another millennium."

Huh? What building is he looking at? I'm looking at the one up above, which is fantastic. As for the economics, Cohen owns the Conway store, remember. But that's beside the point. He doesn't get to say the Bank can't be a landmark because he doesn't want to spend money on it.

This bank seems to make weird (read: crooked) things happen, politically. There have been two previous attempts to landmark it, in 1974 and 1992, both shot down, likely because the then-owner, Rita Stark, opposed the motion. You can read more about slumlord and political string-puller Stark here and here and here and here.

Cohen is far less notorious. Perhaps he's just trying to follow Stark's bad example

History in a Starbucks

Recently, I wrote about a Starbucks that lives on Astor Place at the exact location where the Astor Place Opera House once was, and where, in 1849, a bloody theatre riot (yes, theatre riot) occured. Within a day of posting this item, another article appeared telling how a Starbucks now held the ground where mobster Albert Anastasia got slaughtered while sitting in a barber chair.

This got me thinking. Perhaps the unrelieved visual and spiritual torture of seeing our City pockmarked with kudzu-like chains such as Starbucks would be lessened if we knew something of the history that once took place at the addresses where, today, candy-flavored coffee products are dolled out. Hey, one must find one's silver linings where one can.

You've got to start somewhere, so I'm beginning with the Starbucks in downtown Brooklyn at 50 Court Street on the corner of Joralemon—a particularly busy franchise, as it happens.

On this spot once stood a Chemical Bank and Trust Company branch where, in 1952, was employed a 36-year-old teller named Martin G. Olsen. A judge would later term Olsen an "ordinary" man. But his behavior on Jan. 29 of that year was not ordinary. Leaving for his lunch break, he took with him a plain brown paper bag in which was not a sandwich, but $32,224. With that, a nationwide manhunt began, with the papers breathlessly following Olsen's nifty disappearing act.

By March, Olsen, still unfound, was indicted in absentia. Finally, in July, he was located on the other side of the country, in Los Angeles. The man said debts drove him to embezzle the cash. The money represented 10 years salary for the teller. He was sentenced to two and one-half years in a Federal Penitentiary by Chief Judge Robert A. Inch, who did not give an inch.

So, think, Starbucks flunkies, before you take that extra long lunch break.

A Good Sign: C & H Restaurant

A nice bit of old-school wall painting up in the Bronx. For a narrow corner diner on White Plains Road. Looked nice and comfortable.