The Sidewalks of New York
"On docking at our Pier 40, North River, I was always the first one down the gangplank. My mission was to buy daily papers for Capt. Pettigrew and other officers. Ten cents would buy five New York newspapers. My favorite was the New York World. It once carried my picture, "The First Boy at the Lifeboats."
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Above: The interesting drawing of Norwich Line's Pier 40 (later called New London Line) probably dates from the 1880s, well before Ellery's time. He wouldn't recognize today's waterfront, but the streets he walked in 1915 are essentially unchanged from this map published a year later.
-- At top left is Pier 40 at Clarkson and West Houston Streets, now labeled New London Line.
-- Just below the Hudson & Manhattan railroad tunnels (now the PATH train) is the Fall River Line at Pier 14, Fulton Street, and the Providence Line at Pier 15, Vesey Street.
-- Over on the East River the New Haven Line, formerly at Pier 26 with the Hartford Line (as shown in a photograph below) is now at Pier 28 just above the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Note: An East River location relating to another exhibit, New London and the First Steam-Powered Atlantic Crossing, appears at upper right. Corlears Hook, where the East River bends north, was the site of Fickett & Crockett shipbuilders from whom Capt. Moses Rogers of New London bought a sailing packet and transformed it into the pioneer steamship Savannah, the first to cross the Atlantic to Europe. To view, select "Browse Exhibits" at the top of these pages, and scroll down.
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"Each week I visited the Fulton Fish Market on the east side, looping over Battery Park on the El at the cost of a nickel, getting off just below Brooklyn Bridge. South Street in 1915 still featured not only the Fish Market but berthed sailing ships with their jibbooms poking up towards the upper floors of ship chandleries and warehouses."
A close-up of the map (below) shows the route of the elevated railroad ("El") as a solid line with stops shown as dots. From Cortlandt and Rector Streets at left, near the piers, it curves across the Battery in a "U" (not to be confused with the dotted line of the Subway), turns north, negotiating the tight curve at Coenties Slip, followed by stops at Hanover Square and Fulton Street.
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"According to the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, a 1940 authority of low life around Fulton Fish Market, one of my oil paintings of a storm-tossed Connecticut dragger hung for a while in an office stall occupied by the old Fish Mongers Association."
Below: Seen from the Brooklyn Bridge a few years before Ellery's time, the Fulton Fish Market buildings are just beyond the New Haven Line's Richard Peck and a Hartford Line boat. Similar to City of Lowell, Richard Peck (named for a founder of the New Haven Line) became a familiar presence on the Thames River while operating on the New London Line.
"On leaving the Market I walked up Fulton Street, thinking of all the Horatio Alger books I had enjoyed, of how a poor boy could strike it rich on the streets of lower New York City. But my riches came from the delightful memories I now possess. On entering Ann Street, near City Hall, I stopped in at Max's Busy Bee, an eating place like no other. Roasts of beef, lamb, hung in the window. Meat sandwiches were three cents each. Pieces of cake and pie were three cents. Also milk, coffee, tea, at three cents a cup. I ate my fill -- 15 cents."
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From Max Garfunkel's obituary in The New York Times, February 22, 1942:
"The first Busy Bee started buzzing at 3 Ann Street, offering a 2-cent sandwich, a 2-cent cut of pie, a 2-cent cup of coffee and a penny drink of lemonade. For twenty years Mr. Garfunkel held to these prices and then only advanced them gradually and with great reluctance."
Left: In this postcard view, Ann Street starts by the small red building behind St. Paul's Chapel and runs toward the East River and Fulton Market. City Hall is hidden by the hulking Victorian post office building (demolished 1939).
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"The day I bought a set of French postcards outside the Olympic Burlesque theater on Fourteenth Street I was warned not to open the sealed envelope until I left the area. With wildly beating heart, I waited until I was walking through Greenwich Village toward Pier 40. Imagine my shock at opening the envelope to discover post cards which pictured the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame cathedral, the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. And did I feel foolish and city slickered."
"New York offered so much to see and without anyone molesting me while seeing a fair share: the old Madison Square Garden and the Hippodrome, the new Woolworth Building where, in a court of law on the tenth floor, I would be put on the stand in a rum running case in 1921."
Right: Postcard view of the Woolworth Building from the Hudson River, with Fall River Line's Pier 14 at the west end of Fulton Street.
Many years later, for an unfinished sequel to his autobiographies ("Draggerman's Loot"), Ellery wrote:
"Throughout my five years of fishing with father - helping to catch over 1,000,000 pounds of flounders - we depended on the Sound steamers for transporting our barreled catches to New York where, from Pier 14 or Pier 40 North River (the Hudson), trucks (some horse-drawn) would carry our fish shipments across town to Fulton Fish Market near the Brooklyn Bridge."