by Peter Salwen
I've decided to blame this whole thing on the goat.
When I came to the Upper West Side in the 1950s, she had been
standing for decades in the window of Friedgen's Pharmacy, at
Amsterdam Avenue and West 118th Street. Stuffed. If you asked what a
stuffed nanny goat was doing in a drugstore window (everyone did, once)
you learned that she had been a historic figure -- the last goat in the
neighborhood, lived into the 1920s or '30s. And if you were properly
impressed (most people were), Mr. Friedgen would top that by pointing to
a framed photo behind the counter. It showed a wooded setting and two
young men with shotguns, grinning and leaning against a sign that read
NO HUNTING. That, he said, was Morningside Heights a half-century
before.
The idea that my intensely urban neighborhood had sprung up out of
farmland, and within living memory at that, was intriguing, and like most
intriguing thoughts it was forgotten. Twenty-some years later, though, that
photo and that goat were in the back of my mind when I set out to learn a
little more about my neighborhood, present and past.
I was living then near Riverside Drive on West 89th street (some of us
don't cover a lot of distance). All I wanted then was a half-page of local
history for a block association newsletter, and just as an aside I would
like to suggest that bookson New York history should carry a warning
label: CAUTION, ADDICTIVE MATERIAL. A few weekends' research at the
Historical Society and I was hooked -- and I'd fallen in love all over again
with Manhattan's Upper West Side, the quirky, sordid, hustling, grandiose,
hopelessly overarticulate hodgepodge of a neighborhood bounded by
Morningside, Riverside, and Central Parks and stretching from Columbus
Circle to roughly today's West 125th Street. The first result of that addiction
was a series of articles in the late, lamented Columbus Ave magazine,
where Sue Berkman and Mary Frances Shaugnessy, the editor and
publisher, very kindly allowed their local historian free rein. The second is
this book.
Like most kids exposed to an American education, I had had the general
idea that history began in 1776. Rooting around among old books and
manuscripts, I found myself among some neighbors who had been
carrying on remarkably like today's New Yorkers a good century before the
Revolution. I also came the somewhat startled realization that my little
corner of New York had a population well over a quarter of a million --
roughly equal to that of Sacramento or Akron, or of Hartford and New
Haven combined -- i.e., it was a fair-sized city in its own right, and one that
had never really been written about, unless you counted a couple of
parish histories that came out in 1907 and 1910.
I became fascinated with how the onnetime riverbank suburb got
swallowed up by the burgeoning metropolis -- and even more by the fact
that it apparently stuck, undigested, in the city's craw. Like an unsubdued
colony, the Upper West Side often seems, as an earlier writer, Lloyd
Morris, put it, like a city unto itself, with its own distinctive social tone.
With a few obvious differences, a biography of the Upper West Side could
be the story of almost any American town. One difference, of course, is
that any American town would not have boasted -- or endured -- the throng
that has made the Upper West Side one of New York's most vital
neighborhoods.
A collage of Upper West Side faces would include Lillian Russell and
Anna Held; William Tecumseh Sherman and Florenz Ziegfeld; Charles
Evans Hughes and Bruno Richard Hauptmann; Humphrey Bogart and
Richard Rodgers; F. Scott Fitzgerald and Theodore Dreiser; Caruso and
Toscanini; Walter Winchell and his pal Frank Costello; Gertrude Stein and
Mae West; Leonard Bernstein and John Lennon; Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Polly Adler. And luckily for the storyteller, most of them were up to
something worth mentioning when they were here.
You'll also meet a number of their relatively unknown neighbors, some of
them sufficiently celebrated or notorious in their own day but never, until
now, trapped between the covers of a book.
When the townsfolk of New Amsterdam first turned their attention to the
undeveloped West Side, they called it Blomendaal, "flowering valley," after
a town in Holland's tulip region. Gentrification, as we now call it, started in
the 1760s, when the wealthiest Colonial merchants and power brokers
chose this area, with its grand river views, for their lavish country seats. In
the nineteenth century the name "Bloomingdale" was familiar to all New
Yorkers. The Bloomingdale Road (later renamed The Boulevard or
Western Boulevard) was the main western route out of town and a favorite
with coaching and sleighing parties; we call it Broadway. There were three
different Bloomingdale Squares on the map at different times, and the
Bloomingdale Lunitic Asylum -- where Columbia University is now -- was
a prime tourist attraction.
For most of this century the name "Upper West Side" has been familiar
and thoroughly unfashionable; the area's most recent gentrification -- a
verb coined by an Upper West Side journalist, by the way -- was preceded
by a long half-century when it became home to an unsurpassed mix of
classes, races, and ways of life, which was stimulating or alarming,
depending on your point of view.
My archetypal East Side - West Side story (old style) is about the Fifth
Avenue dowager who admits that yes, she actually had been to the West
Side once, "but only to board the Ile de France for Cherbourg, my dear."
The people in this book would mostly have been outside the lady's circle
of acquaintance: promoters, eccentrics, writers, socialists, scientists,
madams, artists, mobsters, a counterfeiter and a poisoner or two, lots of
actors, musicians and theater people. But then at times it also was a
place of high social aspirations, a district of fine homes and noble public
boulevards. At certain carefully selected epochs in the neighborhood's
checkered past, I would wager, the Cherbourg-bound lady would have felt
right at home.
But then, so would the goat.
standing for decades in the window of Friedgen's Pharmacy, at
Amsterdam Avenue and West 118th Street. Stuffed. If you asked what a
stuffed nanny goat was doing in a drugstore window (everyone did, once)
you learned that she had been a historic figure -- the last goat in the
neighborhood, lived into the 1920s or '30s. And if you were properly
impressed (most people were), Mr. Friedgen would top that by pointing to
a framed photo behind the counter. It showed a wooded setting and two
young men with shotguns, grinning and leaning against a sign that read
NO HUNTING. That, he said, was Morningside Heights a half-century
before.
The idea that my intensely urban neighborhood had sprung up out of
farmland, and within living memory at that, was intriguing, and like most
intriguing thoughts it was forgotten. Twenty-some years later, though, that
photo and that goat were in the back of my mind when I set out to learn a
little more about my neighborhood, present and past.
I was living then near Riverside Drive on West 89th street (some of us
don't cover a lot of distance). All I wanted then was a half-page of local
history for a block association newsletter, and just as an aside I would
like to suggest that bookson New York history should carry a warning
label: CAUTION, ADDICTIVE MATERIAL. A few weekends' research at the
Historical Society and I was hooked -- and I'd fallen in love all over again
with Manhattan's Upper West Side, the quirky, sordid, hustling, grandiose,
hopelessly overarticulate hodgepodge of a neighborhood bounded by
Morningside, Riverside, and Central Parks and stretching from Columbus
Circle to roughly today's West 125th Street. The first result of that addiction
was a series of articles in the late, lamented Columbus Ave magazine,
where Sue Berkman and Mary Frances Shaugnessy, the editor and
publisher, very kindly allowed their local historian free rein. The second is
this book.
Like most kids exposed to an American education, I had had the general
idea that history began in 1776. Rooting around among old books and
manuscripts, I found myself among some neighbors who had been
carrying on remarkably like today's New Yorkers a good century before the
Revolution. I also came the somewhat startled realization that my little
corner of New York had a population well over a quarter of a million --
roughly equal to that of Sacramento or Akron, or of Hartford and New
Haven combined -- i.e., it was a fair-sized city in its own right, and one that
had never really been written about, unless you counted a couple of
parish histories that came out in 1907 and 1910.
I became fascinated with how the onnetime riverbank suburb got
swallowed up by the burgeoning metropolis -- and even more by the fact
that it apparently stuck, undigested, in the city's craw. Like an unsubdued
colony, the Upper West Side often seems, as an earlier writer, Lloyd
Morris, put it, like a city unto itself, with its own distinctive social tone.
With a few obvious differences, a biography of the Upper West Side could
be the story of almost any American town. One difference, of course, is
that any American town would not have boasted -- or endured -- the throng
that has made the Upper West Side one of New York's most vital
neighborhoods.
A collage of Upper West Side faces would include Lillian Russell and
Anna Held; William Tecumseh Sherman and Florenz Ziegfeld; Charles
Evans Hughes and Bruno Richard Hauptmann; Humphrey Bogart and
Richard Rodgers; F. Scott Fitzgerald and Theodore Dreiser; Caruso and
Toscanini; Walter Winchell and his pal Frank Costello; Gertrude Stein and
Mae West; Leonard Bernstein and John Lennon; Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Polly Adler. And luckily for the storyteller, most of them were up to
something worth mentioning when they were here.
You'll also meet a number of their relatively unknown neighbors, some of
them sufficiently celebrated or notorious in their own day but never, until
now, trapped between the covers of a book.
When the townsfolk of New Amsterdam first turned their attention to the
undeveloped West Side, they called it Blomendaal, "flowering valley," after
a town in Holland's tulip region. Gentrification, as we now call it, started in
the 1760s, when the wealthiest Colonial merchants and power brokers
chose this area, with its grand river views, for their lavish country seats. In
the nineteenth century the name "Bloomingdale" was familiar to all New
Yorkers. The Bloomingdale Road (later renamed The Boulevard or
Western Boulevard) was the main western route out of town and a favorite
with coaching and sleighing parties; we call it Broadway. There were three
different Bloomingdale Squares on the map at different times, and the
Bloomingdale Lunitic Asylum -- where Columbia University is now -- was
a prime tourist attraction.
For most of this century the name "Upper West Side" has been familiar
and thoroughly unfashionable; the area's most recent gentrification -- a
verb coined by an Upper West Side journalist, by the way -- was preceded
by a long half-century when it became home to an unsurpassed mix of
classes, races, and ways of life, which was stimulating or alarming,
depending on your point of view.
My archetypal East Side - West Side story (old style) is about the Fifth
Avenue dowager who admits that yes, she actually had been to the West
Side once, "but only to board the Ile de France for Cherbourg, my dear."
The people in this book would mostly have been outside the lady's circle
of acquaintance: promoters, eccentrics, writers, socialists, scientists,
madams, artists, mobsters, a counterfeiter and a poisoner or two, lots of
actors, musicians and theater people. But then at times it also was a
place of high social aspirations, a district of fine homes and noble public
boulevards. At certain carefully selected epochs in the neighborhood's
checkered past, I would wager, the Cherbourg-bound lady would have felt
right at home.
But then, so would the goat.
Press BUY NOW to purchase Upper West Side Story through PayPal:
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| NYC History |
| Mark Twain |
| Heedless of flying lead, thousands of neighbors gather to enjoy police shootout with cop-killer Francis "Two-Gun" Crowley on West 91st Street. May 1931. |
| Newly completed Grant's Tomb quickly became a favorite destination for strollers and cyclists, c. 1897. |
With its own theater and
night-club scene, turn-
of-the-century Columbus
Circle was a glamorous
district even on a rainy
night.
night-club scene, turn-
of-the-century Columbus
Circle was a glamorous
district even on a rainy
night.
