Cigars and Rooms

There are many faded advertisements painted on building walls in this City, but his survivor in Times Square may be my favorite. I may like it so much because it is in Times Square, where so much has changed in the last decade. It's amazing that it's still there and hasn't been torn down, painted over or built in front of.


I also like it because it's not just one ad, it's two—one painted over the other. The first and bigger one was for cigars. The diagonal rectangle is a picture of a cigar box, the brand of which I can't make out. The words read "Society Smoke" on one side and "Cigars" on the other. There's still quite a lot of color left in what must have been a brightly hued ad in its heyday.


At some point, however, the owner of a hotel or boarding house painted over part of the cigar box to advertise, "Furnished Rooms. 1 * 2 * 3. Steam Heat. Housekeeping. Hot and Cold Water." The wording is so redolent of an older, early 20th-century Times Square, one of hopeful and hopeless people coming and going, trying to make it, getting by, living out of a rented, furnished room and a bath. Could very well have been an ad for the building it's painted on, which is still a house of lodging, albeit not a very nice one.

The Alarming and Unfortunate Residents of 765 Eighth Avenue

Last week, I marveled at the faded ad on the side of 765 Eighth Avenue in Times Square and wondered at what sort of rooming house it might have been back in the day. Well, I did a little research and I found out what kind of place it was: scary. And getting scarier with each passing decade, as it turned from whatever it was to begin with, to the Hollis Hotel to the current New York Inn. Actually, the residents start out as generally unlucky and hapless; they only turn actively criminal with the urban decline in Times Square.

Here's a sampling, drawn from the New York Times archives, or the kind of people who have called the address home over the years:

1904: Charles O'Connor, who was arrested for operating an illegal pool hall and betting parlor on 31st Street, in which information on the races was communicated from an upstairs bedroom by way of a 30-foot length of garden hose.

1913; John Heageney, the manager of the Bijou Theatre, who was arrested for showing the much-objected-to picture "The Inside of the White Slave Traffic."

1916: Charles O'Neill, 25, a salesman, who was arraigned for sending out a false fire alarm. His excuse was that he was celebrating his imminent marriage and that an excited friend, not he, pulled the fire alarm box.

1928: Irene Cross, a 26-year-old chorus girl, who was visiting the home of Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sidell here, when she mistook the door to the dumbwaiter for the bathroom. She fell three stories down a shaft and fratured her right leg. Bad move for a chorus girl.

1937: Thomas Meister, a ventriloquist, who was arrested as possible kidnapper, but released when the officers found only a baby doll in his black handbag, not a real kid. The police were confused when Meister tried out part of his routine on a train, causing a voice to come out of the bag.

1939: Jade Sen, 25, an employee at Ruby Foo's Den at W. 52nd Street, who was slugged and robbed of $4,000 while entering the IRT subway, while heading to the bank at 34th and Eighth.

1964: Thomas Gambino, a boxer, who checked into what was by then called the Hollis Hotel, and strangled his 19-year-old girlfriend, one Laura Macaluso, an "unemployed waitress."

1976: Clarence Stewart, a resident, also known as Blood, also known as Ralph Moss, who abducted, abused and raped a 14-year-old Long Island runaway over a period of three days, and then attempted to turn her into a prostitute.

1995: And unknown John, who, on the night of June 29, checked in with Wendi Rivera Hoffman, a 46-year-old prostitute. The next day her body was found, partly clothed, face down on the bed, with her hands tied. She had been strangled.

Faded Times Square Ad Endangered Now That Astor's Porn Palace Gone for Good

Walking up Eighth Avenue in Hell's Kitchen the other night I noticed that the building I once referred to as William Waldorf Astor's Porn Palace was gone.

This was the building on the northwest corner of Eighth Avenue and 46th Street. One of the oldest structures left in the now-almost-completely-gentrified neighborhood, it had been girdled with a sidewalk shed for years, its windows all punched out and half-covered with plywood. For a time, I wondered if it would ever been taken down. Of course, it finally was.

The people who took it down probably only saw an eyesore. I doubt they had an inkling as to its history as a possession of the Astor family. From 1853 to 1921, the Astors owned this corner, as well as a number of properties on W. 46th. (The Astors once owned the building that now houses Barbetta.) They divested themselves of the area when it got a little too raffish for their tastes.

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