1. City with a Past
THE CITY GAME
Q. I’ve heard of a street game, called ring-a-levio, ring-a-lerio or relievio, which was played by children in New York City in the 1950’s. It sounds a lot like a game I played, called home-free-all. What were the rules?
A. Ring-a-levio probably has a half dozen other names, which have varied slightly from neighborhood to neighborhood. Like all games children play in city streets and vacant lots, it is highly improvisational, adapting itself to the peculiarities of local geography, the age and size of players and the hour when everyone has to go home to bed.
The rules of ring-a-levio are deceptively simple. A five- or six-foot square or circle is drawn in chalk and designated the “jail.” One team runs away and hides, the other team sets out to hunt them down. A hiding player is apprehended when he is seized and held while his captor yells, “Caught, caught, caught-a-levio 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3!” Meanwhile, the victim is free to wiggle, squirm, claw and fight back, and the struggle can become intense.
A captured player is led to the jail, which is guarded by a member of the seeking team. At any time, however, a daring member of the hiding team can free the prisoners by dashing into the jail and shouting “Home free all!” while avoiding capture. Only one prisoner can be freed at a time, and after an entire team has been captured, the two groups switch roles.
Evidence suggests that some form of the game has been popular in New York City since at least the 1920’s, and it is probably still played in scattered neighborhoods. Children playing the game in the 1970’s and 1980’s knew it as “Manhunt.”
PENN STATION’S REMAINS
Q. I’ve heard that after it was razed nearly 40 years ago, the architectural remains of the old Pennsylvania Station were dumped somewhere in the New Jersey Meadowlands. Where might I look?
A. The remains of Penn Station certainly aren’t standing in the swamps of New Jersey like some moss-covered Roman ruins, and it would seem likely that any rubble or debris from the demolition has by now sunk into the mud, been bulldozed over or simply disappeared beneath the tall grasses of the Hackensack Meadowlands. Yet some, obsessed, still search.
Demolition of the sooty, majestic station began in October 1963. This enormous, complicated operation allowed the lower, track-level parts of the station to remain in use even as the sprawling Roman shed overhead was razed. The rubble, including 84 monumental Doric columns, 17 million bricks, and 660,000 cubic feet of pink Milford granite, marble, travertine and stone, was carted off to the Meadowlands, and by summer 1966, the old station, completed in 1910, had disappeared.
The Hackensack Meadowlands cover 32 square miles, including parts of 14 towns in Bergen and Hudson Counties, and at least 14 landfill sites were in use during the 1960’s. Dozens of landfills have opened and closed in the area since the 1960’s. Working from old photographs of the dumping ground, one enthusiast recently searched for remains in the area below Tonnelle Avenue in North Bergen. He found a field of old architectural debris, including broken columns, dentils and chunks of granite, but nothing he could positively identify as a fragment of the old station. Robert Sullivan, author of a book on the Meadowlands, believes that he found parts of columns from the station while searching the old dumping sites on the border of Secaucus and North Bergen.
SLOW-FOOD CHAIN
Q. I’ve seen an ancient-looking neon sign that says “Longchamps” in sloping, Art Deco letters, hanging from the face of a small building at 423 Madison Avenue, near 48th Street, above a Japanese noodle shop. Was there once a restaurant here by that name?
A. Yes indeed. Longchamps, like Schrafft’s, Childs and Horn & Hardart, was a chain of local restaurants in the days before fast-food franchises transformed the city’s commercial corridors into an overlit Formica Disneyland. Named for the race track in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, the first elegant Longchamps opened in 1919, and by the 1950’s there were 10 in Manhattan, most clustered around Midtown. The chain was bankrupt by the mid-1970’s, but former patrons still grow misty-eyed at the mention of Longchamps specialties like oxtail ragout, crabmeat à la Dewey, Nesselrode pie, baked apple and “21 percent butterfat” ice cream.
LIFE AT THE TOP
Q. When did the first penthouses appear atop New York apartment buildings?
A. The construction date and the location of the first true penthouse is a matter of some dispute, but scholars generally agree that the advent of the rooftop terrace apartment in New York reflected technological and social shifts that occurred between the 1880’s and 1920’s. According to Elizabeth Collins Cromley, author of Alone Together: A History of New York’s Early Apartments, rooftops were typically used for drying clothes in the late 19th century, in virtually every type of apartment house. By the 1880’s, luxury buildings, which, given their location, often had the most spectacular views of the city, began to set aside small areas to be used as viewing terraces or promenades, some with gazebos or wooden trellises.
Rooftop gardens also began to appear atop theaters and civic arenas, affording visitors a sense of privacy and sanctuary above the public din. Such rooftop oases became commonplace in the exclusive apartment houses of the 1880’s and 90’s. At about the same time, electric elevators were introduced into apartment houses, rendering the rooftop more accessible and opening up basement space formerly devoted to generators and hydraulic equipment. With stairs no longer an issue, tenants began to pay more, not less, to rent the light-filled apartments above the third or fourth floor. And though the automatic drier was still decades away, new kinds of equipment appeared that could be used to dry clothes at basement level. As Professor Cromley wrote, “Technological changes supported conceptual changes, and the notion of the roof as servants’ territory was gradually reinterpreted after the turn of the century to the dream of a penthouse apartment for well-to-do tenants.”
ENVYING THE JONESES
Q. I’ve heard that the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” refers to a wealthy East Side family that lived in an area known as Jones’s Wood in the mid-19th century. Can you shed any light?
A. Some. Keeping Up With the Joneses was a popular comic strip by Arthur R. Momand, which ran in The New York World from 1913 until the early 1940’s. Mr. Momand said the strip was based on his observations of life in Cedarhurst, N.Y., where he and his wife had lived “far beyond their means” in a vain effort to keep pace with “the well-to-do class.” The Joneses were often mentioned in the strip, but never seen. The cartoonist said he considered using the name Smith, but decided on Jones because it was more “euphonious.”
There was, however, a wealthy and prominent Jones family in 19th-century New York. The patriarch was Joshua Jones (1757–1821), a merchant who made his country home in a hilly, wooded area on the East River, between what are now East 66th and East 75th Streets. The Jones house was a simple, square wooden structure with broad verandas and a rooftop gallery. By midcentury the Jones land had become a popular picnic spot, known as Jones’s Wood.
Joshua Jones’s eldest son, Edward Renshaw Jones (1785–1839), became a merchant as well, and amassed a fortune. His wife, Elizabeth, belonged to the equally prosperous Schermerhorn family. Edward and Elizabeth had five children. One, George Frederic Jones, was the father of the novelist Edith Wharton. In 1853, a daughter, Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones, built one of the most extravagant homes of the era, overlooking the Hudson in Rhinecliff, N.Y. Some believe that the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” was inspired by the 24-room mansion, a melange of Norman, Gothic and Italianate themes, called Wyndcliff.
RED STAR IN THE BRONX
Q. I heard that Leon Trotsky once lived in the Bronx. How did it go for him there?
A. Not so well at first. In January 1917, Trotsky, his wife, Natalya, and their two sons arrived by ship in New York, which he referred to in a 1930 autobiography, My Life, as a city of “capitalist automatism.” Trotsky, who became Lenin’s chief lieutenant in revolutionary Russia, wanted to live in a “workers district,” so he moved his family into an $18-per-month apartment in the Bronx. Some historians believe that the apartment was at 1522 Vyse Avenue, near 172nd Street, just east of Crotona Park. But in his autobiography Trotsky gave 164th Street as the location (he made no distinction between East and West).
Before occupying the apartment, Trotsky’s wife paid the janitor three months’ rent in advance. She got no receipt, and upon moving in, Trotsky learned that the janitor had absconded with rent from several tenants. But when he unpacked boxes of belongings that he’d stored in the apartment, Trotsky found his $54 carefully wrapped in paper. “He did not mind robbing the landlord,...
