From prison to post office: The odd fate of a Dutch church

Say a prayer for the Middle Dutch Church (pictured here from sometime before the war) as things are about to get very ugly.

 One need only walk through the Limelight Marketplace -- perhaps stopping to grab a slice of Grimaldi's pizza or a champagne damask lace duvet at Brocade Home -- to understand the strange flexibility of church architecture. I've pondered before on this former Richard Upjohn-designed Episcopal church at West 20th Street and Sixth Avenue, transformed into a rehab center in the 1970s, then a notorious nightclub in the '80s.

But the Limelight is only the most extreme example of church alteration in New York. Brooklyn Heights has so many churches that some have been turned into swanky loft apartments. This is not a new trend. New York grew so rapidly in the 19th century that small stone and clapboard churches, once situated on the outskirts of town, found themselves surrounded. As population shifted, congregations left, and other civic services moved in.

The Middle Dutch Church was built between 1726 and 1731, a vestige of Manhattan's Dutch Reformed community that traced itself back to New Amsterdam's very first house of worship. Its location at Nassau Street and Cedar Street made it central to the lives of colonial New Yorkers, but a series of historical twists ensured a few less hallowed activities would take place here.

Below: The church and the adjoining 'sugar house' in 1830, years after being turned into a horrifying prison complex.

During the Revolutionary War, the occupying British turned the damaged and deteriorating Middle Dutch and its neighboring sugar house into a prison for unruly rebels. An old Times article estimates that up to 8,000 prisoners were held here in those years.  "When the victims confined to the Middle Dutch church crawled to the windows begging for food, a sentinel, pistol in hand, would turn back the gifts of the charitable." [source]

"The whole floor of the Church was one caked mass of dead, dying, excrement and vermin," reported the Times, "supernatural" conditions that probably echoed throughout the entire city, choked off during the occupation years between 1776 to 1783.

I'm grimly speculating that prisoners were transferred the prison ships of Wallabout Bay at some point, for the building was emptied, "the planking torn up, tan laid down, and a riding-school established for the recruits of the English riding-horse."

When the British galloped out of New York entirely in 1783, the beat-up old building sat virtually unused -- although Benjamin Franklin may have used the belfry for electricity experiments, according to one source -- before being turned back into a church, re-opening on July 4, 1790. It stayed as a church for 44 years, even as New York's population migrated north.

Under a cloud of debt, the church finally closed in 1844, with its final service symbolically held in both English and Dutch languages.

If Franklin (America's first postmaster general) indeed practiced with electricity here, then the next transformation seems natural. With the federal standardization of postal rates in 1845, New York found itself in need of a central post office. So the U.S. government leased the old church -- buying it outright in 1861 -- and radically transformed the building into New York's central post office.

Special delivery: The interior of the Dutch church turned post office in 1871 (NYPL)

The poor building, renovated and stretched thin, could barely process the flow of mail coming through the city by the late 1860s, so a new central post office was built -- the odd, greatly loathed City Hall Post Office building.

The old Dutch church, now 150 years old, was considered a city treasure, but real estate in downtown Manhattan was now being carved out for skyscrapers. The church of a thousand faces, to the curiosity of "thousands of relic-hunters and citizens," was finally torn down and replaced with the Mutual Life Insurance Building in 1882. The ornate Mutual Life had a good run but was demolished -- with a part of Cedar Street erased -- to make room for One Chase Manhattan Plaza.

The Bowery Boys back catalog -- fully illustrated!

Above: How people used to listen to podcasts in the 1930s.

 If you've been listening to our latest podcasts and want to take a dip into our history, episodes #3-#50 are available on a second podcast RSS feed: NYC History: Bowery Boys Archive. You can subscribe to that feed at the link or go to podcast aggregators like iTunes and directly subscribe.

Some of those earlier shows feature such topics as the Flatiron Building, Macy's, The Astor family, Apollo Theatre, the Chrysler Building, the New York Yankees, Studio 54, Union Square, the Brooklyn Bridge, Katz Delicatessen and a great many more.

In addition, I'm also adding to the feed some of the newer episodes (#51-#65 so far), with illustrations of the people and places being discussed. These images will pop up on your listening devices. Most of the shows in this archive feed are illustrated, although some of the earliest ones are not.


Meanwhile, we will have a new full-length podcast available for download by Friday.

Pictured above: A 1930s Harlem scene in front of a local shop, courtesy Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 

Marilyn Monroe's surprising link to a few Broadway classics

Monroe on the New York set of 'The Seven Year Itch', the film version of a Broadway box office success.

The heavily-hyped 'Smash' debuted last night on NBC, a glossy musical-drama unspooling the backstage tribulations of a new Broadway musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Although Monroe was once married to one of Broadway's greatest playwrights (Arthur Miller) and personally coached by the stage's most renown drama coaches (Lee and Paula Strasberg), she never hit the legitimate stage herself.

I'm surprised this 'Marilyn Monroe musical' idea is taken as such a revelation in the show. Many of Marilyn's big cinema breakthroughs were plucked from Broadway shows, and her film resume has even inspired a couple Broadway musicals:

'All About Eve' (1950)
Inspired the musical 'Applause'
Opened: March 30, 1970 at the Palace Theatre (aka the 'haunted' theater)

The Role: You would hardly call the Oscar-winning 'Eve' a true Marilyn movie, although her brief scene as Miss Caswell is indeed a memorable one. For the Betty Compton/Adolph Green musical adaptation, her role was entirely deleted. People were too busy lavishing praise upon Lauren Bacall, stepping into the Bette Davis role, to notice.




'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' (1953)
Original musical: 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' by Joseph Field and Anita Loos, Music by Jule Styne, Lyrics by Leo Rubin
Opened: December 8, 1949, at the Zeigfeld Theatre

The Role: Believe it or not, the role of Lorelei Lee on Broadway was originated by a young actress in her first starring role -- Carol Channing. That role would define Marilyn's sophisticated sexpot image in the Howard Hawks film edition.

And then: A quarter century later, Channing returns to Broadway in a re-tinkered version of 'Blondes' called 'Lorelei'. It was actually a bigger hit, in part to the genius lyrical contributions of 'Applause's Compton and Green.



'The Seven Year Itch' (1955)
Original play: 'The Seven Year Itch' by George Axelrod
Opened: November 20, 1952 at the Fulton Theater

The Role: When it arrived on film, the role of 'The Girl' gave us this iconic Marilyn image. It unfortunately had less effect on the career of Austrian-born Vanessa Brown, who originated the role.

Also in the Broadway cast: Tom Ewell, habitue of Sardi's Restaurant, who played opposite Marilyn in the film. Anybody looking for him could find him parked at Sardi's 'little bar'.





'Bus Stop' (1956)
Original play: 'Bus Stop' by William Inge
Opened: March 2, 1955, at the Music Box Theatre

The Role: Kim Stanley played the role of 'Cherie', Marilyn played a variation the following year, in a film loosely based on the stage play
Also in the Broadway cast: An Elaine Stritch so scrappy she was nominated for a Tony



'Some Like It Hot' (1959)
Inspired the musical 'Sugar'
Opened: April 9, 1972 at the Majestic Theatre

The Role: The musical debut of Marilyn's greatest film role was played by Elaine Joyce, later a popular television personality and best known, in some circles, as being the obsession of writer J.D. Salinger.


I couldn't find any video of Joyce in 'Sugar', so enjoy this clip of her on 'Match Game' instead:




Another Marilyn Monroe musical film, 'There's No Business Like Show Business' (1954), isn't based a stage musical at all, but took its title straight from a song in the Broadway musical 'Annie Get Your Gun' (which debuted in 1946)

Boston vs. New York: You think this is just about sports? Origins of an epic rivalry, from Puritans to the Super Bowl

The Metropolitans vs. the Beaneaters, captioned: "Boston and New York players on opening day, 1886, at the Polo Grounds, 5th Ave. and 110th St., NYC. posed in front of stands; Boston player in back row on left has his middle finger raised in obscene gesture."  LOC

Eli Manning, Tom Brady -- how heavy the burden you bear on your shoulders!

When the New York Giants meet the New England Patriots this Sunday for Super Bowl XLVI, the beast of an old rivalry will once again emerge from the gridiron, the latest configuration of a fierce competition between two of America's greatest cities.

While the rivalry between Boston and New York primarily manifests within the world of sports -- the venue of modern warfare --  it echos a spirit of competition that has existed between the coastal cities for over two centuries. But how did it begin?

The cultures of the cities which would become Boston and New York were drastically different from the very start. Boston, after all, was founded in 1630 by Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (at right), a society based on specific religious values, with little tolerance for variation. New Amsterdam, New York's pre-cursor, developed as a company town in the 1620s and was quite renown for being notoriously value-less, relatively speaking.

The Puritans, with a moral superiority that paralleled national antagonisms, believed a distasteful mix of cultures, an abhorrent godless mixture festered there in New Amsterdam. As a secular development, New Amsterdam fostered a policy of religious freedom far more in keeping with modern American ethics than the stringent, finger-pointing Puritans. Many so-called heretics fled the Puritans and were granted haven by the Dutch.

The Puritans were fortified by their connection to England, while New Amsterdam was a rowdy outpost of a faltering world power. By 1644, Massachusetts had created a powerful alliance with other colonies, allowing England a stronghold in the New World. New Amsterdam, meanwhile, deteriorated as the Dutch focused on warfare with the Lenape and encroaching colonies such as Swedish. Peter Stuyvesant arrived in 1647 to shape up the Dutch town, but by then motions were already in place to drive them out entirely.

By 1664, the Dutch were thrown out of New Amsterdam and the defeated city was renamed New York, part of a larger British colony named for the Duke of York.  Boston, for its part, became the premier British bastion, capital of the Dominion of New England, and a place many believed chosen by God (the storied 'City Upon a Hill') as a shining beacon of humanity. Boston was right to have an attitude. Even as New York and Boston became competing ports in the British era, the Massachusetts city always had the edge.

America has benefited from Boston pride. The opening salvos of American independence were born from clashes between Boston citizens and British soldiers, rebellion in the form of bloody clashes (the Boston Massacre) and economic unrest (the Boston Tea Party). As colonists rose up against British oppression during the Revolutionary War, they could look to the Boston battle at Bunker Hill as an example of victory and perseverance.

Bostonians celebrated Evacuation Day on March 17 because the British were booted from there in 1776 and never returned. New Yorkers celebrated the same holiday on November 25 because the British kept that city for most of the war and weren't expelled from it until 1783.

Both cities struggled for economic footing after the war. Both had sophisticated ports and bustling harbors ready to send and receive shipping vessels, manufacturing plants rivaling anything overseas, and a growing class of wealthy old-family elites. In Boston, they were the Brahmins and went to Harvard. In New York, they were Knickerbockers and turned to Yale or Princeton. (Columbia was not quite in their league yet.)

Below: Boston in 1873

But only one city had access to a river inland, a point made explicit with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. Suddenly, New York became a gateway into the expanding American west. Not only would New York traders and merchants grow rich and form a nouveau upper-crust (thriving in the wake of men like John Jacob Astor), the canal would siphon away much of Boston's livelihood, one ship at a time.

Bostonians were not pleased. The founder of Boston's first daily newspaper saw a diversion of goods to New York as 'evil' and recommended the city jump on a newfangled transportation idea just debuting in England -- the steam-powered railroad. Within a few years, train tracks stretched down the old Boston Post Road (almost, but not quite, to New York) in an effort to connect Boston to the waters of the Hudson River. Or as author Eric Jaffe observes: "...the goal of everyone involved in Boston's railroad system at the time was clear: to move Manhattan toward the [Massachusetts] Bay along the highways of the future."

The two cities remained locked in quiet, but stiff, competition throughout the 19th century, not only in industry and trade, but in intelligentsia, literature, politics and social 'quality'. The dynamics of both cities changed with the immigration boom that began in the late 1840s. Soon, one fifth of the populations of both cities would be Irish. The culture of Boston was greatly affected, perhaps more that any American city, by these new Irish arrivals, but it was New York that felt the most weight. By 1860, with New York as the biggest city in America, even the city of Brooklyn had a greater population than Boston.

Bostonians had their legendary, steely pride for their city -- in many ways, America's first, greatest city -- but New York was a powerful, untouchable metropolis by the time of the Gilded Age. Despite its grime and squalor, despite its sinful and corrupt reputation (or perhaps because of it), New York had bested Boston to become the biggest, richest, most powerful city in America by the time of the Civil War.

Below: New York City in 1873 (from George Schlegel lithograph)

And so it was that, in the late 19th century, an apparatus arose for which the undercurrent of rivalry between the cities could take a more explicit, more robust form -- sports.

Universities already organized sports teams -- with accompanying rivalries of their own -- and now, in the post-war era, professional teams began sprouting up in a wide variety of games. The first sports leagues formed in the Northeast, thus it was natural that teams from Northern and Rust Belt cities would often clash.

The first organized baseball league principally concerned New York and Brooklyn teams. (Don't even get me started on the New York/Brooklyn rivalry!) Teams wouldn't truly take on defined regional characters until the formation of the National League in 1876, which included the Boston Red Stockings, a precursor of the Sox, among its original teams.

The two baseball franchises that would cement the Boston-New York conflict were born in the 20th century. The Boston team came first, in 1901, with the inauguration of the American League, but were not referred to by their distinctive bold-colored foot coverings until 1908. In 1904, the Boston team was declared champion of the American League. However, National League teams looked down upon the 'inferiority' of the younger American League teams, and thus, what might have been the first World Series -- between the Boston Red Sox and National League victors the New York Giants -- never occurred.

The Giants were considered New York's principal baseball franchise and even spawned a successful soccer team. (They frequently played a soccer spinoff of the Boston Beaneaters.) By this time, another New York team limped into the city in 1903 -- the Highlanders, who later changed their name to the New York Yankees.

In 1918 came an event that changed the fortunes of the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees forever. Red Sox star Babe Ruth was traded to the New York Yankees during the off-season 1919-1920, allegedly because Sox owner Harry Frazee was looking to finance his Broadway musical offering No No Nanette. (That's the popular legend, although many believe the trade was to finance another, equally  ridiculous production called My Lady Friends.)

Whatever the origin of the 'Curse of the Bambino', it had a psychological effect on fans and players on both sides. Boston, once the league's most successful squad, didn't win another World Series until 2004, while the Yankees, well, changed sports history with 27 World Series victories.

The deep animosity spilled over into other sport match-ups. In basketball, the New York Knicks pale under the legacy of the Boston Celtics, simply put the best basketball team in history. In hockey, the Boston Bruins and New York Rangers became the first two American teams to play each other for the Stanley Cup in 1929. The Bruins cleaned the ice with the Rangers.

But it's in football that the two cities have had some truly dramatic clashes. The New York Giants football team, hardly a threat when they first formed in the late 1920s, were a force to be reckoned with by the time they first met the Boston Patriots in 1960. Notably, when the Boston team changed its name to the New England Patriots and moved to Schaefer Stadium in Foxborough in 1971, the first game they played was against the Giants.

The Giants and the Patriots have met in the Super Bowl just once before -- and notably so -- in 2008. New York was the victor, in one of the greatest upsets in sports history. This Sunday, Boston seeks revenge. As you sit through a halftime show with Madonna (a New Yorker in her formative years), ponder upon the weight of history hanging over both teams.



To sports fans: I welcome any clarification of details if I've gotten something wrong!

Langston Hughes: A few Harlem stops on his birthday

Dapper gentlemen: At a 1924 celebration in Langston's honor, at the home of Regina Andrews on 580 St. Nicholas Avenue. The author is to the far left, followed by future sociologists Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier; novelist and future doctor Rudolph Fisher; and Hubert T. Delany, who would become a New York justice in 1942, appointed by Fiorello LaGuardia.

Since I was a teenager, I've had an affinity for writer Langston Hughes, the revolutionary jazz poet who was born 110 years ago today in 1902. I grew up about an hour away from Langston's birthplace in Joplin, Mo. One of the brightest lights of the Harlem Renaissance grew up here?, I frequently pondered in English class.  In fact, Hughes is considered Joplin's most famous son.*

But you don't need to follow Langston's footprints back to the Ozarks. Celebrate his birthday with a mini-walking tour, four Manhattan addresses that were pivotal to Hughes' development as an iconic African-American voice and a star of the Harlem literary scene:

181 W. 135th Street (corrected, see note) -- Langston's first exposure to Harlem's creative energy was as a Columbia University student in 1921, wandering the street, hoping to see "Duke Ellington on the corner of 135th Street, or Bessie Smith passing by, or Bojangles Bill Robinson in front of the Lincoln Theatre, or maybe Paul Robeson or Bert Williams walking down the avenue." [source] Before moving into Columbia's Hartley Hall, however, Langston took a room here at the YMCA, known for its live drama productions and art shows. He didn't need to stroll around to find Robeson; he got his start acting in productions at the YMCA.

NOTE: Thanks to Stephen Robinson for the following correction to the information above: "I'm afraid you've got the wrong address for the YMCA at which Langston Hughes would have stayed. From 1919-1933, the YMCA was located across the street from the current building, at 181 West 135th Street. You can see the footprint of this building on the 1930 map we use on our site Digital Harlem: Everyday Life, 1915-1930 , and find more information about it by doing a search for Places, location type=YMCA."

634 St. Nicholas Avenue -- Although Langston would rent out a studio in 1938 down the street at 66 St. Nicholas Avenue, he frequently stayed at this address in the Sugar Hill area of Harlem, the home of his friends Toy and Emerson Harper. (He referred to them as 'aunt' and 'uncle'.) Hughes later moved with the couple to another address...

20 East 127th Street -- For 20 years, Hughes worked out of the top floor, by now an international phenomenon. He was residing here (his own 'ivory tower') when he died in 1967. The house was up for sale for most of the year, but was finally sold in December in a Sotheby's auction.

 515 Malcolm X Boulevard (at W. 135th Street) -- The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a branch of the New York Public Library, is Hughes' final resting place. His ashes are contained underneath the foyer floor, beneath an inscription: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers." But the library always had a long association with Hughes. His 'poetry-play' 'Don't You Want To Be Free' played to sold-out crowds in the basement of the library in 1938. The play co-starred Robert Earl Jones, the father of James Earl Jones.

You can find a far more in-depth walking tour of 1920s Harlem here.

 *Another African-American cultural icon, George Washington Carver, was born in the town of Diamond, Mo., fifteen minutes southeast of Joplin. If you're ever swinging through that area of the world, the George Washington Carver National Monument, where his home was located, is worth a stop.