New York’s lost landmarks live again in an engaging museum show

To live in a large, dynamic metropolis is to experience a constant sense of loss. New Yorkers of just about any vintage carry around memories of the city they first encountered a few decades, or maybe just a month ago. We mourn buildings, businesses and institutions before they’re even gone, scanning for omens of impending disappearance. I already wonder what will replace the neighbourhood ice-cream store that took over the old neighbourhood ice-cream store in the space previously occupied by a small café, which replaced . . . oh, who even remembers any more?

Gotham’s twin lions, Nostalgia and Amnesia, are the subject of Lost New York, the New-York Historical Society’s engagingly fragmentary chronicle of a metropolis that is unsentimental until the day the demolition crew shows up, at which point it grows teary.

Everyone has their personal talisman of the vanished past: the subway token, the automat, the chocolate malted, stickball in the street, CBGB, the record stores on St Mark’s Place, neon signs, Studio 54, second-hand book stores, phone booths — the litany could roll on. Wendy Ikemoto, new chief curator at the city’s oldest museum, selected from this limitless lost-and-found with an understandable randomness: monuments (Yankee Stadium, Crystal Palace); an obsolete technology or two (the Penny Farthing); hang-out spots (21 Club); fashion (a Bloomingdale’s hat with guinea-hen feathers); and entire industries (glass manufacture).

Even people who have never been to New York bring their own vicarious memories. In Leonard Bernstein’s 1944 On the Town — one of the most joyous and melancholy musical treatments the city has ever received — a sailor disembarks in wartime Manhattan, clutching a list of outdated recommendations. “If you should ever hit New York/Be sure to see the Hippodrome,” he dutifully intones. Too late: “Aida sang an ‘A’/And blew the place away!”

The show omits the song, which is a shame, and instead narrates the Hippodrome’s biography in more verifiable detail. A pair of amusement-park impresarios, Frederic Thompson and Elmer Dundy, opened the 5,300-seat venue at Sixth Avenue and 43rd Street in 1905 and billed it as the world’s largest theatre. With its extravagant entertainments and low-priced tickets, the “gigantic toy”, as Thompson called it, was the place to catch the circus, watch Houdini disappear an elephant or marvel at the Million-Dollar Mermaid’s synchronised swimming act in an immense glass-walled fish tank.

The exhibition includes an oil painting of the place by Gari Melchers, a long-forgotten contemporary of John Singer Sargent, who thoughtfully deletes the looming trestle of the Sixth Avenue Elevated so that we observe the impressive palace through the softening filter of Bryant Park trees. We also get a more recent reminiscence from a Broadway carpenter, Mark Iilo, one of the “community voices” that the museum recruited to escort the past into the present.

“When I see the pictures and the painting of the Hippodrome, I can’t help but think of a photograph of my father on a rocking horse in front of the stage door, circa 1920,” says Iilo, whose grandparents, a circus performer and a chorus girl, met on the premises. “The Hippodrome is gone, my grandparents are gone and the little boy on the rocking horse in front of the stage door is gone. But they are never forgotten.”

Many of the places memorialised in these galleries came and went before most of us were born, yet their bones turn up now and then on construction sites or embedded in later walls, and their spirits loiter like wraiths amid glass towers. Ikemoto has performed a public service by resurrecting them.

Often, what remains is just the ghost of a ritual, the retelling of some ancient custom. Anne Eisner’s pair of paintings from the 1930s, “Klein’s Outer Sanctum” and “Klein’s Inner Sanctum”, made me catch my breath in recognition. That’s not because I ever patronised the S Klein department store (which, a 1932 New Yorker article noted, “catered to the humble and lowly”), but because those images document a style of shopping that lasted into my childhood. Ladies crowd around the tables mounded with clothes, jostle for bargains and haul their finds into the communal dressing room.

I remember that kind of sanctum: the abundance of stockings, underwear and bare flesh, the shoppers who gave each other appraising once-overs and plenty of candid advice about which items looked good on whom and which emphatically did not.

Maybe it’s inevitable that such a backward-glancing exhibition should raise a host of unanswered questions. What caused the department store’s demise? Was the lunch counter at Klein’s really as cheerful and racially integrated as it looks in Theresa Bernstein’s Depression-era watercolour? And what about that scene’s artist? You have to look elsewhere to discover that Bernstein was a Polish immigrant who trained in New York, was briefly better known than Edward Hopper and died in 2002, aged almost 112.

The Historical Society’s pleasantly haphazard assortment of objects and vignettes tells a colourful and disjointed story full of odd detail. In an 1830s view of the Bowery by De La Prelette Wriley, a hog ambles unsupervised past the Smith & Brothers Clock Establishment. It’s doing an important job: pigs were deputised as street cleaners, roaming free to graze on refuse. In the early 19th century, notes Jennifer Prezioso, fourth-generation owner of Albanese Meats and Poultry and one of the museum’s community voices, every sixth New Yorker was a pig. Even so, by 1859, the animals were banned below 86th Street. Apparently, in solving one sanitation problem, they created another.

There are aspects of this city you can appreciate only from above. In the 1930s, Berenice Abbott and F Scott Fitzgerald ogled it from atop the Empire State Building; their predecessors in the mid-1850s climbed a structure I’d never even heard of, the Latting Observatory. Erected for the 1853 Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, this wood-and-iron spire rose 315 feet above 42nd Street, making it the country’s tallest structure. It overlooked two other high-tech monuments: the Crystal Palace, which showcased the latest in technology, lifestyle and the arts (the elevator! photography!); and the Croton Reservoir, a fortress-like junction in the essential waterworks.

These were the mid-19th century’s modern wonders, symbols of a country obsessed with the future — and soon, they were gone. The Latting Observatory burnt down in 1856, the Crystal Palace followed two years later, and the reservoir was torn down in 1900. They were replaced by other, purportedly permanent, dearly beloved works of architecture: the New York Public Library, Bryant Park and the gently swooping 1974 Grace Building. The hard truth of this city is that the landmarks we treasure once obliterated somebody else’s.

To September 29, nyhistory.org