Upper West Side Story

A History and Guide

by Peter Salwen

This site, currently "under construction," will offer excerpts and images from Upper West Side Story: A History and Guide (Abbeville Press, 1989, 389 pp.), an affectionate, anecdotal history of Manhattan's Upper West Side from colonial times to the trendy present, illustrated with over 100 drawings and vintage photos.

If you can't wait, the book is available at bookstores everywhere. Meanwhile, why not see how many of these Upper-West-Side trivia questions you can answer:

Q. What gregarious Upper West Sider popularized the phrase "A House Is Not a Home" as the title of her best-selling autobiography?

A. Polly Adler, the most renowned madam of the Jazz Age.

Q. What irascible Upper West Sider claimed to be the "real" designer of Central Park?

A. Brigadier General Egbert L. Viele, a West Point-educated civil engineer. He sued the city over the Park issue, and eventually won a court award of ten thousand dollars.

Q. Columbia University occupies the site of an old (and, some say, not entirely unrelated) Upper West Side institution. What was it?

A. The Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum. Morningside Heights was also known as "Asylum Hill."

Q. John Martin, the original ticket-taker in the subway station at Broadway and West 103rd Street, had a unique claim to fame. What was it?

A. He was the only survivor of the Custer massacre at Little Big Horn.

Q. Early in the century, Mary Mallon was arrested while working as the cook for a family on West 89th Street. What was her crime?

A. "Typhoid Mary" was a carrier of the typhus bacillus, and the health department had repeatedly forbidden her to take employment as a cook. She ended her days in quarantine on an island in the East River.

Q. Several square blocks of slum tenements were torn down to make way for Lincoln Center, yet you can still see them today. Where and how?

A. The empty streets were used for location shooting and dance numbers in the movie West Side Story.

Q. Arthur Smith of 151 West 62nd Street and his neighbor Henry Bliss of 235 West 75th were unintentional participants in a landmark event. What and where?

A. Taxi driver Smith was the first motorist in America to run over someone fatally. Bliss, who was alighting from a Central Park West streetcar at the time, was his victim.

Q. The peaceful-looking corner of Central Park West and West 72nd Street has an extraordinary number of associations with crime. How so?

A. Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the convicted kidnapper-killer of the Lindberg baby, worked as a carpenter in the Majestic Apartments on that corner at the time of the crime. Later, mob bosses Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello all lived in the Majestic. Costello was shot (not fatally) in the lobby in 1957. And across the street, John Lennon was murdered in front of his home in the Dakota Apartments in 1980. This also happens to be the corner where poor Mr. Bliss met his fate (see previous item).

Q. What Upper West Sider was the first woman to be honored with a ticker-tape parade?

A. Seventeen-year-old Gertrude Ederle, daughter of an Amsterdam Avenue butcher, became a hero(ine) to New Yorkers overnight in 1926, when she became the first woman (and first American) ever to swim the English Channel.

Q. What Upper West Sider was the first New Yorker to own a private car?

A. The flamboyant James Buchanan Brady, of West 86th Street -- known to history as Diamond Jim. (Diamond Jim may actually have been beaten out for the honor by another, quieter Upper West Sider, the industrialist-lawyer-publisher Isaac L. Rice.)

Q. Some historians take a rather cynical attitude toward the famous Maine monument on Columbus Circle commemorating the Spanish-American War. Why?

A. William Randolph Hearst, who raised most of the money for the monument, owned most of the nearby real estate. Through his newspaper chain, Hearst had also done more than anyone else to get the U.S. into war with Spain -- and in any case, research now shows the Maine was sunk by accident, not by Spanish sabotage.

Q. What national dance craze was introduced in an Upper West Side musical?

A. The Charleston, introduced by Elizabeth in the last act of Runnin' Wild at the Colonial Theatre, Broadway and 63rd Street, 1922.

Q. Another Upper West Side production was the first black musical to reach the Broadway stage. What, where, and when?

A. Shuffle Along, with words and music by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, opened at the 63rd Street Theatre in 1921. The show introduced the immortal "I'm Just Wild About Harry," and Langston Hughes credited it with kicking off the great "Harlem Renaissance" of the Twenties.

Q. In August 1926 a crowd of 80,000 mobbed the street outside Campbell's Funeral Church on Broadway and West 67th Street, and actually broke through the plate-glass window before the police restored order. Who or what was inside?

A. The body of silent-screen Shiek Rudolph Valentino, who had died at a nearby hospital. (Ironically, Valentino had started in show business as a tango dance in a cabaret a few blocks away.)

Born on the Upper West Side: Diane Arbus, Lauren Bacall, Richard Barthelmess, Humphrey Bogart, Heywood Broun (and his son, Heywood Hale Broun), Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Frank Loesser, Hellmann's Mayonnaise, Thelonious Monk, Lewis Mumford, Howard Nemerov, Virginia ("Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus") O'Hanlon, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Dorothy Parker, Pilsener beer (at Lion Brewery, Columbus Avenue and 108th Street), the Reuben sandwich, Norman Rockwell, J.D. Salinger, Jonas Salk, Carly Simon, Raoul Walsh, Herman Wouk, Vincent Youmans.

And some Upper-West-Side "famous firsts" (and other miscellany) --

First American cancer hospital: New York Cancer Hospital (later merged with Sloan-Kettering) on Central Park West

Premiere performance of Victor Herbert's Babes in Toyland, at the Majestic Theatre on Columbus Circle, 1903

First artificially induced nuclear chain reaction, and so-called "birth of the Atomic Age" in Columbia University's physics lab, 1938

Largest church in U.S. (when completed) and largest Gothic cathedral in world (Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, on Morningside Heights, high enough to contain the Statue of Liberty)

First U.S. appearance by Charlie Chaplin, with Karno's Komedians in the Monday vaudeville matinee at the Colonial Theatre, October 3, 1910

Oldest Baptist congregation in U.S. (founded 1753; First Baptist Church, Broadway and W 79th St)

Oldest Jewish congregation in New York (established 1654; Congregation Shearith Israel, Central Park West and W 70th St)

World's largest bible collection (American Bible Society, with 37,000 items)

First fireproof building in NYC (122 West 78th Street, built by Rafael Guastavino in 1883)

First recorded Upper West Side murder, 1764: a Scottish construction worker, M'Intosh, killed in a fight with a Dutch work on the project, Loudon

Oldest school in U.S. (Collegiate School, West End Avenue and West 77th St; founded 1628)

World's largest carillon (the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Carillon, in Riverside Church; includes world's largest tuned bell, the "Bourdon")