Sapersteins: 1936

from the nypl digital collection.

1908: The Chinese Opera House On Doyers Street

Below another gem from shorpy Above I zoomed in to read the advertisement for the picnic. Only four years earlier about 1000 people died on a similar excursion on the General Slocum

Some comments on the shorpy post about the Doyers Street photo:

5-7 Doyers, the former Opera House, is now CC Fashion.
[Fascinating. A hundred years later the bottom section of that cast-iron drainpipe is still there. - Dave]
Doyers Street in Chinatown, New York is called The Bloody Angle for its violent history. Doyers is a street with a sharp corner (hence the name) and departs from Bowery just below Canal Street. The street witnessed a remarkable number of shootings among the Tong Gangs of Chinatown between 1870 and 1930. The street was ideal for street battles not just because of its angle but also because of the tunnels that connected the buildings.

1894: Hanky Panky At The Baptist Church

So now we know what that large structure adjoining the church was, the "Baptist Home For Young Women." Putnam blows the whistle on Potter and then he gets sued for libel!

!896: The Baptist On 2nd Avenue Church Is Sold

I wonder what unministerial thing Reverend Potter did?

The View From The Consolidated Gas Company, 1913: Part 2

Two more close up views that shorpy's high resolution picture allows us. Above the St. Marks Church on 10th Street and the massive Baptist Tabernacle across the street. I believe one of those ubiquitous urban outfitters is there now. It took me a while to figure out what that Tabernacle was. It must be long gone. Below are close up views of Holy Redeemer Church and PS 63, both on East 3rd Street. In the distance, one of the tallest buildings on the LES at that time, the Hoe Factory on Grand and Sheriff Streets.

The View From The Consolidated Gas Building, 1913:

During my September-January KV hiatus I was working on a couple of other projects. One of them was, I admit, a somewhat sick obsession with dissing Caroline Kennedy and the other was an on-site Knickerbocker Village Museum. It would contain posterized versions of many of the visuals and primary documents seen on these pages. In order to do that requires the conversion of digital files into a higher resolution format. I discovered that there are PhotoShop plug-ins that allow for this like Genuine Fractals, but it also helps if you have a high resolution image to begin with. One site that has them, historically rich and public domain as well, is shorpy The image above, but not in hi-def, is an example. It's a "Summer 1913 Bird's eye view of N.Y.C. from the roof of Consolidated Gas Building." The building, later just the plain Con Edison building, is on 15th Street and Irving Place. The blog entry is not only sweet because of the digital enhancement that shorpy does, but also because of the commentary. I added some of my own historical sweet spots, below, as well