Do you want to look like a hero and everybody wins? It’s so easy. Just take a friend or two on a trip down THEIR memory lane, touring the special places of their youth. On January 11, 2012, I went on such a trip through East New York, Brooklyn, driven by an old friend. But now, I was to be the driver and guide.

This was my unplanned agenda for Easter Sunday (after the Easter Parade), when I accompanied a friend and her mother to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, for Easter dinner. Before dinner, we decided to take advantage of the extraordinary weather in the mid-60s and see the places of my friend and her mother’s where they were born and had grown up.

This type of mission is not about efficient driving, nor will it necessarily be a tour of the scenic or architectural wonders of New York City. It will be punctuated by stops that have deep meaning only for your guests being toured and for the small number of others who at one time shared the same addresses.

I accommodated every twist and turn, circling and back tracking, zigging and zagging, providing chauffeur services – convenient for them and enjoyable for me, since I was at one time a New York City taxi cab driver. Patience is required for such a mission, since often only foggy or partial memories are available as a guide to locating addresses. There were places which were of zero difficulty to locate, such as my friend’s former grade school, P.S. 102, and the church where her parents married, Our Lady of Angels.

A special treat was Owl’s Head Park, a place which I had heard about and driven by but never actually walked in. This was special for my company, too, since my friend’s mother had taken her there as young as when she was one year old, their residence only one-half block away. The waterside park affords vistas of the bay of New York, the Verrazano Bridge, Staten Island, Memorial Pier, and the skyline of Manhattan. We took in the views while basking in the warm afternoon sun setting over the bay.

Other stops were the former homes of parents, grandparents, brothers, and sisters – this is an Italian family with deep roots in this section of Brooklyn. Some exact addresses were known. For others, we became Big Game hunters, tracking our quarry. Details of buildings were examined, proximity to other buildings and shops, all with a singular goal – to identify with absolute certainty that, yes, THAT’S the place.

Like a modern African safari, our trip through the urban jungle was to see and shoot our game with eyes and cameras only. Once positively identified, we would sit and look as my guests would ooh, aah, and reminisce. And that is how I spent my Easter afternoon. Starting on the highways of New York City, I watched the sign posts, looking for An Exit Marked Memory Lane 🙂

Related Post: Wherever You Go, There You Are

She said she wanted to find the “mushroom house” she knew as a child, a very special place where her father often took her growing up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The memories of childhood are clouded and skewed, and I doubted that we would find such a house or, if we did, how long it would take. But her instincts were good, and what I truly anticipated to be a long and likely fruitless search mission turned out to be a very quick drive, almost like she was guided by a secret hand straight to our destination.

But nothing would prepare either of us for what we saw. As I turned up 83rd Street and pointed out a “nice” house, she cried for joy, “That’s it.” It was much larger than her memory served her, and she was elated, to say the least. The home is extraordinary and, as I surmised, no secret at all. It was designated a historic landmark by New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. It is known internationally and referred to variously as the Mushroom House, the Witch’s House, the Hansel and Gretel House, and, most commonly, The Gingerbread House. The AIA Guide to New York City calls it:

A mansion disguised as a witch’s hideaway. Black Forest Art Nouveau. Bumpety stone and pseudothatchery make this Arts and Crafts revival one of Brooklyn’s greatest fantasies.

The mansion sports 6 bedrooms and 6 baths and is 5743 square feet and sits on 10 acres – unfathomable for New York City. It is constructed of uncut stone. The roof, with its rolled edges, is covered in special asphalt shingles the color of thatch, recalling the thatched roofs of English country manors. Inside, it exudes old world charm with beautiful woodwork, pictorials set into walls, enormous fireplaces, and decorative elements using medieval stained glass from Europe.

The home is located at 8220 Narrows Avenue and spans between 82nd and 83rd Street. It was built between 1916-17 for Howard E. and Jesse Jones House and designed by James Sarsfield Kennedy. Howard Jones was a shipping tycoon, president of James W. Elwell & Co. and also a director and later vice president of the Maritime Association Board of New York. The house has changed hands only a few times and made big news when it was put up for sale in 2009 for $12 million dollars by the owners, Jerry and Diane Fishman, who lived there for 25 years. From the New York Post:

But Jerry Fishman said it has held a fairy-tale-like spell over him his entire life growing up in the neighborhood, where he was born and raised. “My mother used to push me in my stroller past the house and one time I got out of the stroller and tried to get into the house,” recalled Fishman, 62.

When he was a student at Fort Hamilton HS — across the street from the Gingerbread House — Fishman said he would sit in his English class staring out the window at the house as if in a trance. “My grades suffered,” he recalled. And on his first date with Diane, Jerry remembers driving her by the home and telling her, “One day I’m going to own that house.”

And he did. From the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Fishman, who grew up two blocks away from the house in the Bay Ridge neighborhood, had his eye on the house all his life. “As the legend goes,” he says, “I knew of this house when I was six months old, and I was attracted to it like it was candy.” As he got older, his fascination with the Arts and Crafts-style house only grew. “I would walk by it, drive by it on purpose just to look at it,” he says. His first date with his future wife, Diane, included a drive past the house and a vow. “I told her, ‘I’m going to own this house,” says Mr. Fishman, now 61.

Built around 1917 when Bay Ridge was, as the New York Post puts it, “an oceanfront getaway for the city’s rich and famous,”  the Gingerbread House has only changed hands a few times. In 1980, just after the Fishmans bought a home nearby, it came on the market. “We ran over here, and we looked at the house,” Mr. Fishman says, But he was disappointed. Two elderly women had lived in the home since the 1930s, Mr. Fishman says, and many sections of the home needed extensive work that he and his wife could not afford at that time.

When the home came on the market again in 1985, they pounced, even entering a bidding war. The day the Fishmans closed on the house, paying under $1 million, “was the most memorable day of my life,” Mr. Fishman says. “We had the Gingerbread House.”

The Fishmans sold the house in order to relocate near their parents in Florida. The fairy tale home that cast a spell on at least two people from childhood. For them, the chapter is finally closed – Jerry Fishman and my friend both found their Childhood Dream 🙂

More homes: Big Secret on Little Street, Love Is All Around, Part 1, Grisly Business, Todt Hill, The Feeling Passes, Head for the Hills, All the Way…, Affront to Dignity, Manhattan Beach, Itsy Bitsy, Bloomberg, Terrapin Chelsea Art Gallery

I was walking with two friends, touring them by what I felt was the most beautiful prewar building in Greenwich Village: 43 Fifth Avenue. This architectural gem is a grand and elegant 1903 Beaux-Arts building which sports a distinctive mansard roof. The property just screams PARIS. I have learned that this building is not just my little secret but also, in fact, highly coveted. There is little turnover/availability of apartments, and a number of celebrities, past and present, have called it home.

At the time, an entire floor was available at the unfathomable price of $17 million dollars (reduced from $25 million). That’s a lot of money for an apartment. It does however, buy you 13 rooms – 5 bedrooms, 4 1/2 baths, and everything imaginable, even with a recording studio.

On the same evening, we strolled down my favorite block in the center Village: 11th street between 5th and 6th Avenues. As my friend Bill, also a long-time Village resident, and I concurred on the number of reasons that made this block special, a For Sale sign appeared for a small, exquisite townhouse. I joked that he and I would be buying the building in partnership, splitting the floors, and that he look up the price immediately on his iPhone. A quick search of the broker’s listing returned the bad news very quickly: asking price, $14 million for the small townhouse.

And so it goes in Manhattan. Many non-city residents, accustomed to the idea of owning a house, are unaware that this cornerstone of the American Dream – private home ownership – is essentially unattainable here except for a very few who are able to come up with 10-40 million dollars. Even in the outer boroughs, single-family homes are quickly becoming unaffordable for any except the very well heeled. With few apartments currently under one million dollars in Manhattan, these prices for entire townhouse should come as no big surprise.

So sales of these homes have become newsworthy events, often purchased by notables. Spending time at the Central Park boat pond years ago, I learned that Woody Allen had decided to join the ranks of home ownership, making the move from a Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment to the purchase of a property at 118 East 70th Street. From a Streetscapes article by Christopher Gray of the New York Times:

In 1939, Fortune magazine called it “probably New York City’s most beautiful residential block,” and Paul Goldberger, in his 1979 book, “New York: The City Observed” (Random House), described it as having “a perfect balance between individuality and an overall order.”

Regarding the property purchased by Woody Allen in 2006 for $26 million:

The neo-Georgian house at 118 East 70th was designed by Trowbridge & Livingston in 1900, with a spectacularly wide fanlight; the rippling surface of the glass dances and glistens in the sun.

So I toured the block in 2006 to see for myself what all the hoopla was about and why this one city block, between Park and Lexington Avenues, has been considered by some to be one of New York City’s finest. Today’s photos are from that visit. At the time, construction was under way on Woody’s house (lower left and center photos).

I know what many of you are thinking. Manhattan is a very nice place, and 70th Street looks like a very nice block, but $26 million for a small house? Even as a long-time resident of New York City, and inured as I am to the lust for this borough and stratospheric prices, I share A Furrowed Brow 🙂

Related Posts: Old New York (Part 1 and Part 2), The Feeling Passes, When Worlds Collide, Air Rights, 121 Charles, Grove Court, The Dakota, Kerbs Boathouse

My tagline for this blog avoids a few very applicable cliches. It could easily read something like “New York City – a place of contrasts and juxtaposition.” True or not, it’s one of those claims that many want to make. I cannot argue that New York City leads the world in contrasts; travelers to places like Egypt speak of the extreme contrasts unknown in the United States, such as disembarking from a plane and seeing the pyramids of Giza, or camels and limos in the streets of Cairo.

In the United States, we cannot compete with contrasts based on age. However, in New York City, there are remarkable cultural and ethnic pockets, with shops and services often juxtaposed in startling ways. Looking into my vault of photos, I found today’s images from July 2011, when I paid a visit to Woodside, Queens.

On or near 55th Street, in two short blocks, you can have you taxes done, bookkeeping, find a notary, pray at the local Masjid Fatima mosque, or get your fresh fowl at the Bismillah Live Poultry. From their website:

We are in business since 2002. All our poultry items are slaughtered Under Muslim rules & regulations (100% Halal). We are a proud member of Shariah Board of USA. All our chicken are naturally grown, no hormone or steroids used and they are tested by USDA.

In this industrial warehouse district, you will also find Sapori d’Ischia, an Italian foods retailer that becomes a highly regarded restaurant at night. ABC has a rental facility there, as well as Saks Fifth Avenue.

The live poultry business is always the biggest shocker for me to see in New York City. When I started this blog in 2006, I was particularly driven to show things of dramatically disparate natures. I had recalled passing a live poultry dealer on the Lower East Side, and one of my first postings was of a Live Poultry Market on Delancey Street, which I believe is now closed. At one time, there was even a live poultry dealer in the South Village, only blocks from my home. These things are often taken for granted at the time, and once gone, I begin to question my own memory of something so seemingly out of place in Manhattan.

As I explored the streets of Woodside that Sunday in the hot summer sun, there was very little activity, even by locals. The streets were deserted. Some of the backroads hearkened to the Old West. At any moment, I expected tumbleweed to blow through, had there been a breeze. And maybe out of that New York-styled Wild West would be our own Wyatt Earp, just back from Masjid Fatima toting a sixshooter on one hip and live poultry from Bismillah on the other. And that’s New York City at High Noon 🙂

I have not been to many book signings, but one which I did attend was that of Terry Miller for Greenwich Village and How it Got That Way, published in 1990. I do love the Village, but like many New Yorkers, I do find that it can, at times, be a love-hate relationship. When I met Terry for the signing, I complained to him about things I disliked about the Village. He dismissed it immediately, saying, “Where are you going to go? Europe?” He was right. I had found no urban enclave in the United States that had the ambiance and charm of the West Village in New York City.

And so it is. For old-world charm, sophistication, artistry, and elegance, Americans often look to Europe. We style, decorate, design, distribute, manufacture, and name things, foods, and places using words and phrases that hearken back to countries such as France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, and Britain. The influences of Spain also permeate our culture, not just in language, food, and transplanted citizens but also in motifs and naming.
The property at 11 Cornelia Street reflects this Spanish influence. Built in 1850, the facade was resurfaced in 1928. From Christopher Gray’s Streetscapes:

Stoops started coming off brownstones in the 1890s, when a few adventurous souls took a sledgehammer to them and other aspects of the facades. According to “The Row House Reborn,” the architect Frederick Sterner was the first to remake an entire group of brownstones, beginning in 1908 on East 19th Street between Irving Place and Third Avenue.

Others followed his lead, and Greenwich Village, with its emerging bohemianism and stock of older, decaying houses, became a center of reimagined quaintness, typically with pastel stucco fronts, studio-type windows and tile roofs.

Vincent Pepe, an Italian-born real estate entrepreneur, began to be active in Greenwich Village real estate around 1900, and was soon the Village’s most enthusiastic promoter.

Another of these lively facades went up in 1928 on an old tenement at 11 Cornelia Street. The architect, James H. Galloway, ignored the upper floors but refaced the lower section with yellow stucco and tile decoration. The stucco facade is dotted with low relief molds of galleons, Venetian gondolas, parrots and other images.

Terry Miller was right. If you want to be immersed in the charm of the old world, look to the West Village. Otherwise, where are you going to go? Europe?

Discover the charm of the West Village: I Doubt It, Friends Part 2, Friends Part 1, Diamonds and Rust, Zena, Conflict, Itsy Bitsy, Our Lady of Pompei, Abingdon Square, Paris in New York, 121 Charles, 17 Grove Street, Grove Court, Cherry Lane Theater, Jane Jacobs