The Lone Star Cafe

Construction of the new branch of Shrafft's began in 1936 after an old brownstone was demolished.

The Lone Star Cafe in 1978.

Another shot of the new building going up in place of the Lone Star.

The new high-rise going up in July 2011.

An interior shot of the new Shrafft's on at 61 5th Avenue, corner of East 13th Street, in 1938.

A shot of the front entrance in 1938.

The Korean Deli that was the building's last occupant in 2005.

The Lone Star Cafe in the '80s.

The 40-foot-long iguana keeping guard at the Lone Star about 1987.

I was walking around in Greenwich Village the other day and came across the new building going up in place of the former Korean deli on 5th Avenue and 13th Street. In 1936 a brownstone was demolished to make way for a new two-story Schrafft's, probably the most popular chain of diners in the city during the '30s, '40s and '50s. A number of photos from the Metropolitan College of New York show what a beautiful place it was when it was first built. A revolving door led to a cocktail bar to the right and a spiral staircase to the second floor on the left.

Critic Lewis Mumford didn't like the place, though. He hated its "screwy" curved front, calling it "the new cliche and it will soon belong in the done to death department." He went on to say that the building is "a pretty sorry mismatch" with "ill-assorted windows" and a "crazy little balcony".

These pictures were taken in 1938, when the place was still new and fashionable. By 1969, it had become the hang out of staff members from Women's Wear Daily, the New School, and loftmen from 14th Street. According to a 1969 New York Magazine article called "The Little Old Lady Restaurants", Schrafft's would fill up with L.O.L.s (which back then didn't mean "Laugh Out Loud"). In an effort to revamp their not-very-hip image, they hired Andy Warhol to do a commercial about the chain. But it was what it was, and ultimately closed a few years later.

In 1976, it became The Lone Star Cafe, the city's most popular country music concert venue. It hosted a number of musical acts, and particularly featured acts from Texas. Roy Orbison, Willie Nelson, Kinky Friedman and Billy Joe Shaver all did regular shows there. The Blues Brothers and James Brown also did shows there, with Brown recording a live album there in 1985. The place was also visited by Texas TV personalities such as Larry King, Dan Rather and Linda Ellerbee. My parents went to see rockabilly musician Robert Gordon there when they were dating.

Over the front entrance was draped the line "Too Much Ain't Enough" from Waylon Jennings' song "Old Five And Dimers Like Me", and the building was famous and infamous for the 40-foot long iguana sculpture on it's roof by Bob "Daddy-O" Wade. The place didn't really fit in with its upscale neighborhood, and local residents fought a hard battle get rid of the sculpture, considering it to be an eyesore. Detractors succeeded for a couple of years and it was removed, but in 1983 it was restored and unveiled in a ceremony presided over by Mayor Ed Koch and then-Texas Governor Mark White. My father said that he wanted to take it, but that it probably wouldn't fit in our apartment.

When the Lone Star closed in 1989, the iguana went into storage on the Hudson River docks across from North Moore Street, but ultimately "disappeared". I assume it was stolen. I don't know how they pulled that one off.

Serving as a gallery for street art for a number of years and then a deli, in 2009 it joined the ranks of historic buildings in the city that have been torn down to be replaced by expensive glass boxes. A ten-story luxury apartment building is currently being built in its place. I had been on that corner plenty of times when I worked near there and never even noticed that small building with a lot of history. I try to notice as much of them as I can these days, because they're disappearing one by one.

The Jefferson Market Library

The Jefferson Market Library today.

The Jefferson Market Courthouse and the Women's House of Detention in the '40s.

The 6th Avenue elevated line in front of the courthouse in the '30s.

Walking along lower Sixth Avenue, it's hard to miss the striking Jefferson Market Library and Garden, at the intersection of West 10th Street and 6th Avenue, a masterpiece in architecture built from 1873-7 that has just recently reopened after some renovations inside, but is still covered in scaffolding.  Walking down there to take a few pictures, I saw it was open for business again and took a look around inside.  The building really is a work of art, inside and out, and as I walked up the spiral staircase to the upper floors I saw inscribed on the circular wall quotes about justice and the law written in intricate gothic lettering.  On the upper and ground floors are ornately carved wooden entrances.  What's now the children's book room, with picture books, a group reading area and computers for teens only, were once the police courts where sensational trials of the likes of Henry K. Thaw and Mae West were held in the early twentieth century; Thaw for the murder of his wife's former lover, architect Stanford White, West for obscenity.  In the basement, there are a couple of arched castle-like entranceways to the former civil court, where the adult computers  and periodicals are.  Sherlock Holmes did his research down there in 1971's "They Might Be Giants".

Several merchants' sheds were set up on the land in 1832, along with the Jefferson Market Assembly Rooms that held trials, named for the late President, and, the following year, a large, octagon-shaped wooden fire tower in the center of the triangular plot formed by the intersection of West 10th Street, 6th and Greenwich Avenues.  Remaining for only a few decades, in 1873 new red-brick, richly decorated victorian structures began to be built in it's place, completed in ten years.  Of the nicely matching picturesque group that consisted of a courthouse, jail and merchants' sheds, only the courthouse remains.  The new, imposing tower and surrounding buildings were based on Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, built for King Ludwig II from 1869 to 1886.  (Only a few blocks away, oddly enough, on the southeast corner of 17th and 7th, directly across from a bank I used to always go to when I worked at Alger, was the last home of Lola Montez, who's catch-phrase inspired the song "Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets".  She was Ludwig II's grandfather's mistress and was once made a countess, but died on that corner in poverty in 1861.)  The old jail was torn down by the end of the 1920s, and with Art Deco masterpieces such as the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, a new Art Deco-style female prison, the Women's House of Detention, went up in 1932.  Supposedly, it was the only Art Deco prison ever built, and with it's walls and windows close to street level, the female prisoners could easily heckle passers-by.  Ruth E. Collins, the prison's first warden, called the completion of the structure "a new era in penology", and believed firmly in rehabilitation as well as punishment, and treating the women with dignity and as individuals.  She commissioned a number of works of art, most famously Lucienne Blotch's mural "Cycle of a Woman's Life from Childhood to Womanhood".  David Duchovny's directorial and writing debut, House of D, about his childhood growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1970s, is named for the prison and features it prominently.

Despite Collins' philosophy, the prison became notorious in it's final years over allegations of racial discrimination, abuse and mistreatment.  Black activist Angela Davis was outspoken about the cruel treatment she witnessed, and anti-porn feminist Angela Dworkin testified that she was assaulted by two doctors there.

The courthouse had it's last trial in 1945 and sat vacant until the late '60s, when it was slated for demolition, while contractors such as Robert Moses planned to build apartments there.  However, preservationist and Greenwich Village resident Margot Gayle enlisted the help of writer E.E. Cummings and historian Lewis Mumford and successfully persuaded the city to preserve the building and reuse it as a branch of the New York Public Library.

Instead of the courthouse, the prison, along with the famous mural was destroyed in 1974, mainly due to the bad reputation it had gained in its final years.  In its place a peaceful, well-cared-for park and garden was planted by community residents.  With benches, lush grass and healthy trees, it is one of the many intimate escapes that speckle the concrete city.  In 1996, after 135 years, the old bell in the clock tower rang out once again, putting, as the New York Times stated, "the 'Village' back in 'Greenwich Village'."  It rings every hour, on the hour, from 9AM to 9PM.

All in all, it's a relief for guys like me who appreciate the lost art form of a bygone era.  What a shame it would have been if this building had actually been demolished.  I walked around the Village a little more, and then headed home.  With Open House New York in November, I'll definitely get an early start to sign-ups and try to catch a more in-depth tour of this place.

Lucienne Blotch's "Cycle of a Woman's Life from Childhood to Adulthood".

Greenwich Village

The Jefferson Market Library, 10th Street, 6th and Greenwich Avenues.

The Empire State Building, 34th and 5th.

The Chrysler Building, 42nd and Park.

The main entrance of the "News" Building.

The Daily News Building, 42nd between 2nd and 3rd.

This past weekend I decided to take a walk down to Greenwich Village, taking a few shots of the skyscrapers up town along the way for the Facebook page. While downtown, I tried to take in some of the old buildings that remain down there after trying to get some good shots of the art deco buildings of the '30s. High rises such as the the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and Daily News Building, where my grandfather, father, mother and brother have all worked in one form or another, I'm guessing were supposed to represent New Yorkers vision of the future, with a sleek, plain looking design that was a big contrast to the ornate Victorian style of some of the late nineteenth century buildings, that are now common downtown, a prime example being the Jefferson Market Courthouse (now a branch of the New York Public Library), that still prominently stands in the middle of Greenwich Village. Built from 1874 - 1877, in the 1880s a panel of architects voted it the fourth most beautiful building in the United States. Abandoned by the court system in 1945, it was slated for destruction by the 1960s, but public outcry saved it, and authors like E.E. Cummings, who lived in Patchin Place across the street, persuaded the city to turn it into a library. Meanwhile, the Women's House of Detention, a 1932 Art Deco building that replaced an older jail, and was reportedly the only art deco - style prison in the world, was closed down and demolished in 1973. The prison is featured prominently in David Duchovny's 2005 movie House of D, about his childhood in Greenwich Village in the early '70s, where he befriends one of the prisoners. The prison supposedly was of close enough proximity to the street that prisoners would often heckle passers-by along Sixth Avenue. I never saw that movie but I feel like I should, even though it got terrible reviews, mainly from critics who said it lacked depth and direction.

A couple blocks down is St. Joseph's Church, on West Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. St. Peter's Church, on the corner of Barclay an Church Streets downtown, is the oldest Catholic Church in New York State, dating back to 1785, but a fire destroyed the original building, and the one standing there now dates back to 1840. St. Joseph's is the oldest Catholic Church building in the city, dating back to 1808, and the Dominican Friars there now run the NYU Catholic Campus Ministry there. I went in their and sat down for a while. The last time I was there, I was browsing through the bulletins in flyers by the door when a woman I'd say in about her sixties who was sitting at one of the chairs by the door came up to me.

"Excuse me," she asked, "are you wearing your pants below your waist."

"No, they're at my waist."

"Oh, good. I was just making sure, because wearing them below your waist is an abomination."

Once she had confirmed that I wasn't one of those rowdy teens who wore his jeans below his waist, she had me cornered to start talking to me.

I always try to be polite. I don't like brushing people off, so I sit with her for a while, and she talks about how she didn't like the changes in the Catholic Church since Vatican 2, and she thinks the mass that's going on inside now is not a Catholic service at all. I let her talk to me for a while, and tried to engage her in conversation. But when I was sitting there, I was reminded of something about people who like to talk a lot, no matter who they are: they don't care about whether you are blowing them off or truly trying to engage them in conversation, all they want to do is hear themselves talk. As I watched a glazed over look slowly form over her face as I finished my measly sentence, I decided to just let her say what she wanted to say about the terrible state of the Catholic Church and the world in general. On that note, as she went up to get communion, despite her distaste of the Vatican 2 mass, I beat it out of there.

The relationship this city has with architecture is very interesting to me, though. In the '30s, city developers like Robert Moses, who seemed to have some kind of unrealistic vision of the future, seemed to have no appreciation for the artistic skill that went into the old buildings and monuments in this city, and were content to have them bulldozed to the ground for something that was considered more modern. That old prison, which replaced an even older one, was a great example of old Victorian and new Art Deco side by side. I wish I could have seen it for myself, but at least that tower at the Jefferson Market thankfully isn't going anywhere.