One Labor Day, years ago, I tuned into the Jerry Lewis Labor Day telethon. Lewis took a number of breaks during the daylong show, and during that time, the network threw it back to the local studio in Secaucus, which had its own acts lined up. One of them was Sylvain Sylvain and his band at the moment, who were doing a song named “14th Street Beat,” a catchy number that featured subway noise, including the “bing-bong” noise the doors make when they close. Sylvain played guitar in the New York Dolls in the early-1970s, with Sylvain, Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan, and front man David Johansen. The Dolls, who were known to take the stage in drag, didn’t sell many records, but were influential in the new-wave scene emanating from the Lower East Side in the 1970s. Thunders and Nolan died young, and are interred in Mount St. Mary’s Cemetery in Queens Johansen has gone on to have hits as lounge lizard Buster Poindexter, and Sylvain died in 2021. Here’s a 2016 rendition of “14th Street Beat.”
What brought this to mind? A few years ago The Department of Transportation recently cleared out 14th Street —of traffic, that is. Most automobiles can’t travel on 14th St. except for local traffic between six a.m. to 10 p.m., with buses and trucks making local deliveries still permitted on the formerly bustling street. I decided to check things out, guessing the photo opportunities would be augmented without SUVs getting in the way.
I began at the 8th Ave. A train station at W. 14th, and walked east. Between 7th and 8th Aves. on 14th, you see the last vestiges of 14th St.’s original residential district, rows of Italianate townhouses constructed from the late-1840s into the 1850s. Developer Andrew Norwood occupied the center building in this grouping. The building on the right, flying the Spanish flag, is home to the Spanish Benevolent Society, which along with Our Lady of Guadalupe church are the remnants of a small enclave of Spanish immigrants who settled in Chelsea as well as Brooklyn Heights. In H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cool Air,” set on W. 14th St., a Doctor Muñoz self-animates his own body after his death by keeping his apartment artificially cold by means of a complicated apparatus in the era before widespread air conditioning in 1921. When the power fails, he melts into an amorphous pile of putrefaction.
You’ve heard of storefront churches. At #229 W. 14th, there’s a residential building-front church. It was built as one of the row of townhouses along the block in the 1850s, but was converted to the Roman Catholic Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1921, serving what at the time was large number of Spanish immigrants in the area, most of whom were Catholic. The Spanish for “Our Lady of Guadalupe” can be seen above the entrance, with an interlocking “SH” digraph above the second floor window, which likely stands for the “Sacred Heart” often found in Church iconography. No longer a church, the building now holds the offices of the merged parish of Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Bernard.
I was perplexed for years by this handsome, five-story red brick apartment building at the SW corner of 7th Ave. and W. 14th. There’s a statue of a female figure on the second floor, above the entrance, with a partial inscription that says “Jear.” I figured it out eventually: it represents Joan of Arc, or Jeanne d’Arc in France. The other letters have since partially broken off or worn away. If you’ve ever heard the term “French flats” for apartment buildings, it may come from here, as this was one of the first buildings to adopt the French practice of many living spaces in one building. This building, designed by architect James W. Cole, goes back to 1888. The front entrance is a treat too, with its pairs of caryatids and guardian beasts.
The Salvation Army, the charitable society founded by William Booth, has been a presence on W. 14th St. since the 1890s. Its weird, fortress-like building at #120 W. 14th was constructed in the 1930s, with Robert Walker, the architect of a number of prominent NYC Art Deco office towers. On its left is the Dix Building, constructed in 1907 for William Dix, a garment factory executive who was the first to grant workers a five-day week instead of six, and paid vacation time. The building was also the home of Screw magazine for a few years.
New School University Center, southeast corner of E. 14th St. and 5th Ave., is a grim modernist building home to the school’s classrooms, a library-research center, a new auditorium, a cafeteria and an event café, and a 600-bed student residence, is the school’s new flagship building. The New School isn’t new: it celebrated its centennial in 2019.
These “bigloop” lampposts, installed on 14th St. in the early-1990s, can be seen as a modern nod to the curved Bishop Crook lamps which arrived in NYC in the 1910s and beginning in the 1990s, have been revived in many places. 14th is so far the only street to get the “bigloops” though they can also be found on the Williamsburg Bridge.
An impressive former department store with a cast iron front, this one at 22-26 E. 14th between 5th and University Pl., went up in 1881 and was originally the Baumann Brothers Furniture and Carpets, designed by Scottish architect brothers David and John Jardine. According to the Neighborhood Preservation Center, “For eight decades, the ground story contained 5-10-and-25-cent stores, beginning with the fourth Woolworth store in Manhattan (1900-1928), acclaimed at its opening as ‘the largest ten-cent store in the world’ and in 1910 the location of the chain’s first lunchroom. This space was later a store for F. & W. Grand, H.L. Green, and McCrory. The upper stories were leased for over eight decades for show rooms and manufacturing by various firms related to the textile and sporting goods industries, as well as a gymnasium and classrooms for the Delehanty Institute (1930-1963), which trained candidates of the Police and Fire Departments. The upper stories are currently used as an annex to the Parsons School of Design.”
Here’s the Spingler Building, 5-9 Union Square West near E. 14th, built in 1896 by William H. Hume and Son. It originally contained stores, showrooms, manufacturers and industrial lofts. Note the tripartite style, an architectural sandwich: two floors with wide windows at the bottom, yellow-bricked center, and attic floor and cornice. The name harkens back to the Spingler House, a hotel formerly in the locale—C. Henry Spingler owned much of the land here in the colonial era.
I happened upon the Spingler family vault in St. Mark’s Churchyard, and research shows that German immigrant C. Henry Spingler (1747-1814) was employed as a butcher and shopkeeper, married three times, and dabbled enthusiastically in real estate, buying and selling properties all over southern Manhattan. His first wife, Jane Sloo Spingler (d. 1790) is buried in the churchyard at St. Paul’s Church, Broadway and Vesey St.
Can a building have a house number of zero? This building, Zero Irving, a new office tower at 124 E. 14th opposite Irving Place, attempts it, since it’s not on Irving Pl. but on E. 14th, across the street from where Irving Pl. begins. It replaced a PC Richard appliance store at E. 14th St. and Irving Pl. (named for Washington Irving) is the former location of the German restaurant Luchow’s, which closed in the early-1980s. East of Luchow’s was the Palladium concert hall (which started out in 1926 as the Academy Music Hall). I saw the Ramones on New Year’s Eve in 1979 here, the Pretenders when they were breaking in the spring of 1980 and the Pogues on St. Patrick’s Day in 1990, among many other acts. The guitar-smashing shot on Clash London Calling LP was made here. The Palladium went quietly in 1997.
Beauty Bar, at #231 E. 14th, is unusual for two reasons: it’s a former beauty parlor turned into a beauty-parlor-themed bar. The former Thomas Beauty Salon was converted in 1995. The building was constructed in 1921 as the Italian Labor Center, an organized labor/antifascist society. The building contains a pair of oddly sensual friezes by Onorio Ruotolo, depicting “a content family of working father, mother, and baby, the latter being cradled by his parents. The father holds a shovel in his left hand. The western panel illustrates the naked Roman goddess Minerva, patroness of craftspeople, next to a naked male child in the foreground before a shirtless laborer,” according to the 14th Street and Union Square Preservation Plan.
The Bait & Hook, on the NW corner of E. 14th and 2nd Ave., is a home away from home for Philadelphia Eagles fans, so it should be hopping on Super Bowl Sunday. The apartment building the bar’s in could logically be called NYC’s Senate building. Its two entrances are inscribed “The U.S. Senate” and “The W.M. Evarts.” Evarts was a Republican senator for NYS from 1885-1891, and that’s likely when the building went up. The developer must’ve been a friend of Evarts’. The senator’s grandson, Maxwell Evarts Perkins, who edited Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway at Scribner’s, was born in the building.
Stuyvesant Town sits on an almost-square defined by E. 14th and E. 20th St., 1st Ave. and Ave. C, with 89 buildings containing 8757 apartments. By auto it’s accessed by a series of ovals located on its four border streets, and pedestrians can access its four “quadrants” via the center oval. A second residential complex, Peter Cooper Village, sits north of E. 20th St.
I have a connection to Stuyvesant Town—my father worked here as a custodian for 30 years, between 1958 and 1988; he retired upon turning 70. This was an era when unionized jobs with ample benefits were more attainable than now. He’d work the usual Monday-through-Friday, but occasionally the weekend and take Wednesday and Friday off, on which days he’d see me off to school. It was a long way with two trains from Bay Ridge to Stuyvesant Town, so he’d leave the house at around seven or earlier, before I got up, usually arriving home around seven p.m.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)
