A Tale of a Changing Neighborhood

David's Pot Belly Stove, Christopher Street, New York, NY, in 1979.

Local joints are among my favorite topics to cover because they are at the same time completely insignificant to the world at large and yet loom large in our memories. They thus receive little attention despite the huge impact they had and have on local residents. 

A continuing theme of this blog is that tectonic social shifts in a big city can pass almost unnoticed if you aren't intimately involved. The buildings and streets remain the same, but everything around them and the way they are used can evolve in unexpected ways. Social changes form cross-currents around the more permanent parts of society that are made of steel and stone. They barely leave a trace unless you go looking for them.

Well, here we're looking at some of those changes. While going through old photos of Manhattan, I noticed the photo above and it caused me to reflect on how changing social patterns give a neighborhood its character. So, we'll take a then-and-now look at David's Pot Belly at 94 Christopher Street, NYC, from 1979 to the present.

David's Pot Belly was not some earthshaking establishment that goes into the history books like a Lutece or a Four Seasons. It was just a burger joint that opened in 1971 near the corner of Christopher Street and Bleecker Street. The "David" in the name was David Levine. He quickly opened another David's Pot Belly (people now remember the name as David's Pot Belly Stove, but it's unclear if that was ever its official name) on Hope Street in Providence, Rhode Island, so perhaps his intent was to start a chain. If that was the plan, it failed, because both restaurants are long gone. However, the restaurants made an impact. Musicians David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth, for instance, worked at the Providence David's Pot Belly in the early 1970s and that led (very indirectly) to the founding of Talking Heads. Byrne and the others were attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD, pronounced "riz-dee") at the time. RISD has always attracted an artistic crowd that contrasted nicely with the more staid Brown U. crowd nearby. Incidentally, and this is getting way off track, but Byrne, who was really only interested in music at the time, got the job at the Providence Pot Belly after being fired from a hot dog stand for having hairy arms (true story). But, let's get back on track...

The David's Pot Belly location was located in a classic four-story 1910 residential building that is typical of Greenwich Village.

Havana Alma de Cuba occupied the site at 94 Christopher Street before it, too, closed.

The old David's Pot Belly location as of October 2019 (Google Street View).

I hope you enjoyed this wandering walk down the winding streets of Greenwich Village. The world around them may change, but the streets of New York endure. Please visit some of our other pages in this "the more things change, the more they stay the same" series!
2021

We get a rare insight into the life of celebrities because one of them took the time to record his activities for posterity. Actor Roddy McDowall knew almost everyone who was anyone in Hollywood during the 1960s through 1990s. He also was quite an amateur filmmaker of his own, though his works were done with a consumer-grade film camera and remained in his private collection until his 3 October 1998 passing. One of Roddy's films records a gathering at his Malibu Beach bungalow on 9 May 1965. That puts it squarely within the usual time frame we like to compare against. Let's see what has changed and what is different about the site of this epic gathering.

Julie Andrews gets a chance to see a Mary Poppins doll at Roddy McDowall's beach house on 9 May 1965. "Mary Poppins" had been released to theaters the previous year, while "The Sound of Music" opened a couple of months before this scene.

Beach parties at Roddy's house were nothing unusual, but this one was special. While there were quite a few luminaries at Roddy's party that day, two of them will help show what Malibu was like that sunny day. The first is actress Julie Andrews, who had just finished filming "Mary Poppins" and "The Sound of Music" back-to-back and had just won the Academy Award for Best Actress a month earlier on 5 April 1965. In the clip below from Roddy's film, we see Julie and her two-year-old daughter Emma Walton leaving the party and driving down the road.

Malibu Colony Road in 2021, showing the distinctive white garage visible in the 1965 film (Google Earth).

The same white garage is there in the center-right of the above photograph. Julie Andrews parked her Ford Falcon station wagon where that white pickup truck is parked over to the right in front of the tennis court. Whereas there were trees there in 1965, they since have been replaced by that tennis court. To the left in the photo, the white picket fence visible in the 1965 film has been replaced by a brick wall.
Roddy's video concludes with Julie and her daughter driving away to the north. There's an intersection up ahead where another car is just turning as Andrews is leaving. This same scene appears quite similar today.

Let's take a cruise down Wilshire Boulevard in 1935 (film at bottom of the article).

In the year 1935, there was a global Depression that had begun with the stock market crash of 1929. It lasted until 1939 and wasn't truly through until after World War II. People lived in shacks in Central Park and sold apples on street corners to make a few pennies. However, the Great Depression's effects were not evenly felt everywhere. There was a pocket of wealth was in California, specifically, in a town called Hollywood. The 1930s were a great decade for the film industry. Money flowed from across the country and world to the West Coast as people crowded into movie palaces to escape their dismal plights. This created enduring stars like Clark Gable, Ginger Rogers, Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, James Cagney, and Carole Lombard. It also created this film.

All of that wealth is apparent in this beautifully restored footage of a drive down Wilshire Boulevard ca. June 1935. The usual restoration tricks have been applied to make the old black-and-white original footage more palatable to the modern eye. The sharp-eyed will spot many telling details throughout this footage which likely was considered exceedingly mundane and fit only for rear-projection purposes at the time it was filmed.

Needless to say, Wilshire Boulevard looks nothing like this today. For one thing, then there were no lane markings on the roads. Drivers just went where they wanted and were expected to stay on their side of the road. You would be driving quite properly if you simply straddle the line running down the road. Not quite an honor system, but far from today's highly regimented traffic rules.

Even people who are very familiar with Wilshire Boulevard will have a difficult time placing most of these locations. The entire area has changed radically over time, particularly during the years immediately after World War II. Jack Warner opened the Beverly Hills Theater in 1931. 

The Beverly Hills Theater lasted until 1975, after which it was purchased by a bank and then demolished. Perhaps the most striking thing that you don't see in this 1935 film are homeless people, tents, or panhandlers. You would have seen them all across the country in 1935 and in 2020s Los Angeles, but not on this drive down 1935 Wilshire Boulevard.

If you like this excursion, please consider taking a few more from the following selection:

That lady knew how to take photographs!

While this blog usually looks at photos from the 1960s through the 1980s, occasionally an older photo intrigues me enough to do a little research on it. Such was the case with the above photo by pioneering photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991). She began her career in Paris but moved to New York in 1929 - just in time for the Stock Market Crash. After scratching out an existence for the next five years, she happily was picked by the city to contribute to a project called “Changing New York.” Funding was allocated by the U.S. Government commissioned through the New Deal art projects WPA Collection. This was one of many similar efforts to employ artists of various types during the Great Depression, and Abbott rewarded the city by taking some of the most evocative shots of the city ever, both before and since.

Another photo of the same scene in the 1930s, around the same time as the Berenice Abbott photo (Peter Sekaer).