Cover of October/November 1966 issue of Venture Magazine.(Images via: NYCDreamin Archives)Gotta love a library book sale. All kinds of goodies usually await and for dirt cheap prices. The Chaska library held their annual book sale this weekend as part of the annual city-wide "River City Days" celebration. So I'm there and Jeff, the most rockinist librarian anywhere, walks up and hands me a copy of the MONSTER "The Power Broker: Robert Moses & the Fall of New York" (1975 by Robert A. Caro) - at over 1,200 pages, it's not easy reading. But the other thing I found (for 50 cents too - a steal!) is this old magazine from 1966, titled "Venture" - obviously a travel magazine. There are a few issues, so I'm checking them out and they have this issue, the October/November '66 issue, and it's title is "Transopolis: New York/London" So you know I'm picking this thig up - and it's pretty cool - the basis is a connection between New York City and London in the mid-late '60s. There are a lot of cool old car ads in there actually (Sorry, NOT here), but there was some pretty cool New York stuff I thought I scan and share with all you City freaks.
Unfortunately, London got the cover, not NYC. Boo! Hiss! Anyway...
First up was this cool full page ad for the Plaza Hotel at Fifth Avenue at 59th Street, NYC, NY.
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And what does the magazine have to reveal about the NYC of forty-four years ago?
Street MusiciansNew York's street musicians are, on the whole, more impromptu than London's buskers. Here are a few to look for:
Moondog - A blind man who sports a beard, a flowing cloak a sort of Viking helmet and a spear. In his fifties, Moondog invents and builds his own musical instruments (one of his most intriguing: the Oo, a triangular wooden frame fitted with dowels and strung with piano wire) and writes his own music. He usually can be seen after dark somewhere in the area bounded by 50th and 57th Streets between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, where he takes over an empty doorway, sets up the Oo and several triangular drums, and serenades the night.
A pair of scruffy minstrels, one a saxophone player, the other a guitar player, are sometimes seen around town - especially in the summer - playing the likes of "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling." They are the Gabler Brothers, members of the city's dwindling, restless colony of gypsies. When last heard of, they operated out of Orchard Street, but in the course of their unpredictable wanderings, they have been spotted everywhere from the east seventies to the Puerto Rican neighborhoods, where they don starw hats and switch to Spanish tunes.
If you want less elusive quarry, you will find the largest concentration of street musicians any fine Sunday from lunchtime till dusk, May through September, in Washington Square. Folks ingers of Greenwich Village, and even from out of state, converge upon the large fountain to play guitars, banjos, mouth organs, mandolins, ocarions, even spoon, and every kind of folk music from hillbilly to Bob Dylan's protests.
No caption with this one, but you can almost imagine what the artist was thinking: "The man at the front of the line is saying something about the big shiny building to the slack-jawed tourists from flyover country in the big city for the first time blocking up the fucking sidewalk while I'm TRYING to get by so I can get to work, Goddammit!!!!! Sorry...where were we?New StructuresNew York's mania for tearing down and putting up continues apace. This winter and most of 1967 promise field days for ardent work watchers.
Pennsylvania Station - Seventh between 31st and 33rd streets. On the site of this much mourned old terminal a vast complex by Charles Luckman Associates - the new Madison Square Garden, an office building, convention halls - is rising over the train tracks.
Madison Square Garden - Eighth Avenue at 50th Street. Late next year, demolition of the Garden should be an awesome sight. In it's place will rise another Luckman project, Cinema Center: a glassed-in arcade with promenade areas, restaurants, two theatres, and four art cinemas, flanked by two thirty-nine-story towers.
Savoy Plaza Site - opposite the Plaza Hotel, Fifth Aveneue at 59th Street (
Oh, that place again.) Excavation is already under way for the new General Motors Building by Emery Roth & Sons. It will be an office tower set back in a sunken plaza ringed with luxury shops.
Then...there's this cool tri-fold map (below) , titled "Street Scenes". It breaks Manhattan down into 40 seperate neighborhoods, and then goes on for a few pages, describing each of them for a paragraph or two. Beneathe the map are some of the neighborhood descriptions...with some noticable differences to what is happining in those same neighborhoods NOW, 44 years later.
Map created by Robert Sullivan - Venture Magazine 10/11-66.2. Electronics Area - The Collosal New York Trade Center complex proposed for the west side of lower Manhattan will wipe out one of the oldest special interest areas in the city - the electronics bazaar ranged along Cortland Street. Shop after Shop spills into the street with bins of tubes, transistors, loudspeakers, recondite forms or wiring, and all things to gladden the hearts of the radio or hi-fi hobbyist.
5. Fish Market - A visit to the Fulton Street Fish Market, at the right time of day, will land you ankle-deep in chipped ice, and eye to eye with some of the fishiest stares outside of a customs lineup. It will also put you alongside Sweets, one of the greatest fist restaurants anywhere.
9. Lower East Side - The old Jewish Lower East Side isn't as ethnically solid as it used to be. Orchard Street on Sunday still looks like something straight out of Baghdad, with gaudy stuffs hanging over the street, strolling shoppers jamming the roadway, impotunining merchants. It's a great place to see, if only to remind you of how unlike New York New York can be.
12. Beat Broadway - To the new, pseudo-Villagers who on weekends turn the Bleecker-McDougal axis into a bad scene, Washington Square is just that. The kids who jam the sidewalks looking for action, even if it generally consists of just elbowing each other, have the residents pretty steamed up; sometimes you wonder if one Saturday night the whole thing will burst and coffeehouses will be plundered, to the howling sirens and leaping of flames. It's not really worth swelling the crowd unless your're waiting for atreatsie on the rootlessness of the urban adolescent.
13. Used Books - As might be expected in a period when an LSD kick is more highly valued than the discovery of a great author, the role of the second-hand bookstores is sadly declining. The ranks of them that used to line Broadway and Fourth Avenue below Union Square are thinning fast, but it's still a great area for browsing - even if you emerge only with dusty fingers.
23. Hell's Kitchen - There was a time when this was the toughest part of New York, but the dubious distinction has moved elsewhere - in fact some of the hellish old blocks abutting on the theatre district have become downright sissy, with French restaurants and people getting out of cabs and all.
37. Harlem - The days when Harlem was a fashionable place to end an evening on the town are unhappily over, and though some enthusiastic jazz - and audiences - can still be found at such places as the Apollo, Count Basie's, the Palm Cafe and the Baby Grand, the big names have moved downtown.
40. Upper Harlem - Is somewhere a visitor usually sees only from a train - endless boxy housing projects, the subway yards and High Bridge Park, crossed by the most spectacular highway overpass in the metropolitan area.
This is followed by a few articles about fashion and style in NYC. This is followed by a bit of cartoon art...
There is not caption with this one - but I'd like to think it's called "Built on Speculation". It's by artist Ronald Searle.
Another illustration by Ronald Searle, my favorite one of the two...no caption but I'd call it "The Rotting Apple".The magazine reviews quite a few restaurants and other NYC attractions, but sadly, half of the issue is also devoted to London attractions and things of interest. And then there is the special section near the end of the magazine on Crete...don't get me started on that!!
I stayed at the Hotel Martinique at 49 West 32nd Street in March 2004. This shot is looking east with the Empire State Building in the background. At the time of my visit in 2004, I had no idea about the Martiniques' storied past as a "welfare hotel".
March 2004: The Flat Iron Building at 175 - 5th Avenue, intersection of 5th Avenue, Broadway and 23rd street. This is one of my favorite buildings in the city.
March 2004: A display case of rare (and mostly overpriced) Kiss merchandise and collectibles for sale at Colony Records, who's slogan is "60 years serving Broadway, New York, and the world!"
July 2006: Here is the beautiful Youth Hostel International, located at 891 Amsterdam Avenue at 103rd Street. A bit of history on the building from the New York Sun:
July 4th, 2006: Late in the afternoon, 4 NYPD choppers fly formation in a security sweep above the East River, where just a few hours later, the world's most amazing July 4th fireworks display would be set off. See some footage from the July 4th 2006 fireworks show HERE.
Inside of the men's room door at Ray's Pizza at 62nd & Lexington
Here's me, standing in front of Gem Spa at St. Marks & 2nd, the site of a very famous New York Dolls photo.
This is my buddy "337" checking out a graffitti-covered delivery van near Union Square and 16th Street.
313-315 Bowery - CBGB had been closed for a while by this point and the building was still available for lease. Unfortunately for us all, it was soon taken over by the much reviled John Varvatos Gallery. I myself would have preferred it to sit empty for ever until the end of time.
Here's another shot of me clowning around outside the beautiful #11 Spring Street.
(Image via: NYCDreamin Archives)
A co-worker of mine, Kevin H., (that's him in Times Square holding a hot dog with everything on it) just returned from his first-ever trip to New York City. He and his wife spent a few days in the city on business and when not bogged down by that, managed to tour the city and cram in all kinds of sight-seeing in just a few days' time.
