84. Puck Building

Location: 295-309 Lafayette Street
Built: 1885-1886; 1892-1893 and 1899 (additions and subtractions); 1983-1984 (restoration)
Architects: Albert Wagner and Herman Wagner
National Register Number: 83001740
Listed: July 21, 1983
Visited: October 12, 2008
Additional Information: New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission Designation Report



That's the Shakespearean Puck right up there, leaning on a pen and carrying a mirror, presumably reflecting the poor slobs down below.

This building was the home of the snark, not once but twice. First time was with the building's namesake, a satirical magazine that excoriated all manner of political and social figures of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era with nasty fantastic grotesquerie. A lot of the subjects dealt with are mostly urr and umm to me (for now), so while it's very interesting to note that Puck's cartoons may have swung Presidential elections, what this prisoner of the 21st century gets is all the identity politics stuff: they were pro-Semitic (yay, even if premised on stereotype), anti-Catholic (argh; this must've been real lulzy to the folks across the street), and anti-racist if not above portraying Frederick Douglass as an ape (guh)--as well as the Irish (OMFG).



A hundred years later, Spy Magazine took up residence here. You know it, or remember it--a comic scorner of all things celebrity. I used to read copies of it in the basement of Woodward Hall my freshman year at St. John's when I wasn't reading some incomprehensible translation from the Greek: it kinda thrilled me because I could get a moontan from its reflected New York sophistication and it kinda disturbed me because it gave me nothing to hold on to other than that, couldn't tell what it stood for, couldn't learn anything from it other than things not worth learning about, couldn't make sense of its stance. And it wasn't very nice, and I always fancied myself from kidhood on as awfully nice. So even as all the biggie magazines out there started to mimic its layouts, its Boschian density of factlets, it was something of a relief not to have to take Spy seriously any more when it started sucking a few years into its existence. And now that I know that VFer and truffled-mac-and-cheese-slinger Graydon Carter was partly behind it, I'm sorta sorry I gave the magazine even the slightest mental encouragement.

(If you're a follower of Gawker like I am, you might be amused to know the Puck is owned by the Kushners.)



The Puck was originally a little smaller--the taller back half of the building was added a few years after it was initially completed in 1886. But it was also a little wider. This is what the corner of Mulberry and Houston looks like today:



And this is how it looked in 1892, according to King's Handbook of New York City:



That's right: two bays' worth of building were sliced off the Puck like it was a block of Cracker Barrel Extra Sharp. You see, when the city decided to open up a three-block cul-de-sac--called Lafayette Place--that ran from Astor Place to Great Jones Street, and connect it to several other existing streets, the route of the new north-south thoroughfare went right through the Puck and several of its neighbors. While the latter were all destroyed, the Puck merely underwent major surgery in 1899, in the end gaining an entirely new Western face to meet Lafayette Street.



That's why the building has two Puck statues: the one on Mulberry and Houston stands over what used to be the original main entry, which was later replaced by a grander entrance with multi-story columns and a brownstone capital on which another Puck stands.

83. Old St. Patrick's Cathedral Complex

A.K.A.: Old St. Patrick's Cathedral; Old St. Patrick's Convent and Girl's School; St. Michael's Chapel
Location: 260-264 Mulberry Street (cathedral); 32 Prince Street (convent); 266 Mulberry Street (chapel)
Built: 1809-1815, restored 1868 (cathedral); 1826 (convent); 1858-1859 (chapel)
Architects: Joseph F. Mangin (cathedral); unknown (convent); James Renwick Jr. and William Rodrigue (chapel)
National Register Number: 77000964
Listed: August 29, 1977
Visited: October 12 and 21, 2008



The oldest city churches are surrounded by an iron gate, if anything at all. Old St. Patrick's--the St. Patrick's before what's now the St. Patrick's was completed in 1879--is surrounded by a wall.

I find it easy to imagine a New York with horses instead of cars, or candles and gas and not electric light. If you're attentive, the physical evidence of that former life is everywhere, in things like big SoHo windows or skinny streets, the horseplop stink of Central Park South in the summer. A New York with an underdog Catholic minority is a much bigger conceptual leap because--wall excepted--evidence of such things has largely disappeared, and its counter-evidence so imposing. Speaking as a Catholic (born as such, barely raised as such, lived my adult not immune to the religion's power but never fully embracing it either--did I mention I'm gay?) we are, well, everywhere. But it was not always thus.



In spite of brief moments of religious toleration in its colonial days, Roman Catholicism was suppressed in New York following England's Protestant Glorious Revolution. So effective was the clampdown, once source I've found states there were only 100 Catholics after the Revolutionary War, this in a city of 33,000. A new era of governmental tolerance, epitomized by the Bill of Rights, and immigration, primarily from Ireland, changed the equation to the point where New York could sustain a diocese of its own in 1808. Construction on St. Patrick's began a year later, in what was then the hinterlands of Mulberry Street, which was so isolated that a fox was caught in the churchyard five years after it was completed.

Immigrants kept coming and coming and coming to New York City (even before Ireland's Great Famine), and Nativist hostility towards what was seen as the great squirmy masses and their lockstep religion sometimes flamed up into violence. As early as 1806, St. Peter's Church (the St. Peter's before what's now St. Peter's) was attacked by a mob on Christmas Eve; the later St. Mary's Church was burned down to the ground in 1831; and St. Patrick's itself was "menaced" by a mob in 1835.



Which brings us back to the wall. On the official website for Old St. Patrick's, a picture of the wall has a caption implying the wall was erected by the diocese's fourth bishop, The Most Rev. John J. Hughes. Hughes was a power behind the establishment of churches and schools to serve the growing population of Catholics. The thing, though, that makes him beguiling to me is his toughness in a tough time. In the face of rioting that had destroyed Catholic churches and killed people in Philadelphia, he told New York's Nativist mayor-elect John Harper that "if a single Catholic church is burned in New York, the city will become a second Moscow." (He was referencing this.) Don't take this wrong--I say this out of a kind of discomfort and a kind of awe, but not impeity--but it's a wonder he could walk when he had cojones the size of church bells. He signed his letters with a dagger-like cross: he was known as "Dagger John," a name right out of Low Life or Gangs of New York.

When Old St. Patrick's finally burned down in 1866, the cause was one of those absolutely quotidian city accidents--flying embers from a Broadway fire--not an angry mob. The church we see today was built from the walls left standing, the eccentricity of its original Gothic style (which predated the craze for it by about two decades) toned down a bit.



As for the neighborhood's Irish, they were replaced by the Italians (hi there), who much later got systematically bodysnatched by hipsters. Mulberry Street, just south of Old St. Patrick's: all flimsy boutiques.

82. Fourteenth Ward Industrial School

A.K.A.: Astor Memorial School; Mott Street Industrial School
Location: 256-258 Mott Street, between East Houston and Prince Streets
Built: 1888-89; restored 2004
Architects: Vaux & Radford
National Register Number: 83001724
Listed: January 27, 1983
Visited: October 12, 2008



A is for Astor--John Jacob Astor III, who paid for the building and the property it stood on to honor his late wife. The school was one of many built for the Children's Aid Society, a charitable organization founded in 1853; this location served a local Italian-American community whose last vestiges in Nolita up and died decades ago. The National Register of Historic Places nomination form says the Children's Aid Society was founded to benefit the lives of the city's homeless children "through the establishment of lodging houses, reading rooms, and industrial schools." In a bit of what is perhaps a misplaced focus, the form gives somewhat more detail about the building's architectural rather than civic virtues, Queen Anne style this and stepped gable that. In her book Alone in the World: Orphans and Orphanages, Catherine Reef is a bit blunter with the details as to what exactly TCAS did. For example: "The volunteer teachers were mainly were mainly well-to-do women who paid particular attention to the girls, hoping to prevent them from becoming prostitutes." Oh. Another fact: between 1854 and 1929, TCAS shipped over 100,000 indigent children from New York City to the Midwest where they'd find new families, something like indentured servitude, or a little of both. My god.

TCAS is still around. New Yorkers of a certain age (and economic strata, I suppose) best know it as the source of an insistent television jingle that goes "I'm really glad they made/The Children's Aid/Society." No YouTube evidence of it exists, it seems; you'll have to take my word for it.