Travel: Hello, Columbus Avenue

Columbus Avenue, on Manhattan’s West Side, is, was, and always will be an adventure in real estate. Still, Penny Whistle Toys has managed to hold its spot for an impressive 25 years on the ground floor of the block-long building named the Endicott, where its large mechanical bear, a sidewalk feature, blows bubbles to charmed onlookers. Lately the bear suffered an accident to one arm, the result of adults playing with it, but it is in repair and will soon be back on the job. But what hopes are there for the shiny new Canine Ranch pet spa, and whither the Indian-themed furnishings store, Ponchicherri, that occupied a sprawling, now vacant corner space until a few months ago? Never mind. Whatever comes and goes, the avenue still has the power to enthrall.

Really part of Ninth Avenue, which runs north-south, Columbus received its name, alongside Amsterdam and Central Park West Avenues, on April 22, 1890. By then, the Ninth Avenue El, completed in 1879 and running up to 110th Street, was doing its job of “civilizing” the Upper West Side, bringing speculators and builders to what had been a mostly barren landscape of hardscrabble farms and shantytowns. In their wake flowed new enterprises and a growing middle class of apartment dwellers.

In his engaging history The New York Elevated, Robert Reed speaks lovingly of the of the el’s “lacy ironwork,” comparing it to that of the Eiffel Tower and the great train sheds of the late nineteenth century. Reed is as passionate about the el as I am about the era of the classic ocean liners, but he does admit to another side of his story, conceding the noise, filth, and shadowed streets where, as The New York Timesclaimed, the el inflicted “a perpetual city of night.” Well-organized opposition to the el and the nearly impossible task of maintaining its aging structures finally led to the razing of the Ninth Avenue line in 1940.

Across Central Park, the demise of the Third Avenue El in 1955 quickly gave rise to a banal skyline of blocky office towers and white brick apartment houses (in recent times the latter have themselves become objects of nostalgia). But with Columbus things remained very much as they had been. The neighborhood had spiraled downward during the Depression years and didn’t recover after World War II.

Columbus Avenue came into my life when I was very young and often parceled off to my grandmother, who lived in a 1920 building on 86th Street just west of Columbus. There was nothing high enough nearby to block her view from the seventeenth floor, and I could see great distances east, south, and west. In an effect that seemed magical, I would watch the evening sun gild the windows of tall buildings way east of Central Park. And because 110 West 86th Street remains taller than any surrounding apartment house, when I make my way up the avenue today I can pick out the very same windows I stared from. I wonder who lives behind them now.

At street level, we patrolled Columbus on what seemed, to a child who didn’t care for walking, interminable forced marches. My grandmother thought them healthful. A few years later I noticed that a favorite movie theater had been transformed into a supermarket, its marquee shrieking specials in meat and fruit, and on our walks we’d sometimes swerve to avoid men drinking out of paper bags and muttering unintelligible oaths. Ornate red brick five- or six-story apartment houses, grown neglected and decayed, became home to waves of recent immigrants. Known now for its dangers, as was its neighbor Amsterdam Avenue, Columbus had become a street to avoid.

This is the sociology that can save a place as well as wreck it, and when it emerged from its long gap-mouthed sleep in the late 1970s, Columbus Avenue was suddenly hot, its decrepit but still imposing housing stock deemed worth renovating to the tune of millions. When gentrification hit the Upper West Side, I lived a few blocks from Columbus and spent plenty of time there, browsing in shops, eating in newly quaint cafes, and dodging hordes of tourists instead of glittery-eyed drunks. Of course the uneasy question raised then persists, as it does elsewhere in the city: What was gained and what was lost?

Friends often seem surprised when I convey my profound admiration for Columbus Avenue. On weekends it can be trying, with people spilling out of restaurants and steering high-end baby strollers into the crowds like tanks. Fast-food places shoulder empty storefronts whose owners finally couldn’t make the monthly rent and whose blank windows reflect back the wares of the insanely expensive clothing store across the street. And yet . . .

Try it one weekday afternoon in winter, when it is lightly populated. Walk north from 66th Street and keep mostly on the left side (unless tempted by something on the right). That’s when the setting sun, like a spotlight playing across a stage, reveals the menace in the grin of a gargoyle over an arched doorway, or carves deep shadows on an unbroken roofscape running the length of a block. The sun warms the ochers, deepens the reds, makes the whites gleam like fresh milk. Watch the east side of any street light up, and then look straight up at the expanse of blue above it. This is Big Sky Country, I often tell myself. Because, with very few breaks for the outsize box that can take the form of a New York City apartment house, it really is.

Columbus was made part of a landmark district in 1990, with the result that the needle-like 31-story Park Belevedere, at 79th, dating from 1985, is the last such excrescence you’re likely ever to spot on the avenue. Meanwhile, pick out a few of the more agreeable buildings to focus on. At the northwest corner of 72nd stands an 1887 structure then named the St. Charles. Now it’s a bank bearing the logo of Chase, which must be congratulated for the good restoration of the ground floor interior, including the raising of the ceiling to its original soaring height.

In one of his absorbing New York Times columns that appear in Sunday’s real estate section, Christopher Gray noted that the red-brick apartment houses at the northwest and northeast corners of 73rd Street date from 1879 and are the work of the architect Henry Hardenbergh, who went on to glory a year later with his masterpiece at Central Park West and 72nd, the Dakota. Have a look at the stately structure originally named the Gladys at the southeast corner of 75th, and conjure up its interiors. Gray cites an 1890 publication “describing the typical apartment as having a music room, a marble-lined bathroom, nickel-plated pipes, and an oak-paneled dining room with frescoed ceilings.”

I am drawn again and again to the Endicott, home to the bubble-blowing bear. If the real estate market on Columbus resembles a fever chart, up one decade and down the next, here is a prime example. Taking up the block between 81st and 82nd, it was built in 1889 as the seven-story Hotel Endicott, with welcoming public spaces, including a glass-roofed Palm Room and opulent dining rooms. Some years ago, as I walked past it with my mother, she startled me by revealing that while my father was away during World War II, he worried so much about the rent on their East Side apartment that he urged her to sublet it and move to the Endicott. By then, she said, it was seriously decayed and scary, but under protest she did. After what must have been some fiery correspondence, he surrendered, and my mother reclaimed East 90th Street.

Nothing improved until Columbus’s second Golden Age. “By 1983, even the Endicott Hotel had been emptied, fumigated and converted to expensive co-ops,” writes Peter Salwen in Upper West Side Story, his lively volume on neighborhood history. With manic exuberance, even for those optimistic times, the movie producer Dino De Laurentiis opened a vast emporium in the Endicott’s former palm court and named it DDL Foodshow. On a 34-foot marble counter he served countless varieties of cheeses, breads, salads, even a suckling pig or two. This lasted barely more than a year, and DDL Foodshow succumbed, along with many neighbors, to what the Timesthen called “one of the biggest retailing busts in recent memory.”

Whatever ups and downs the Endicott has seen, it is today an expensive co-op apartment house and a wonderfully preserved monument to the time and place of its birth. I wouldn’t mind living there now. Unlike many of the avenue’s storefronts that have been altered, usually garishly, with each succeeding tenant, the Endicott’s have been nicely preserved, or perhaps redone, to harmonize with the bay-windowed apartments above.

In 1987, in the midst of the ultimately successful struggle to create a West Side Historic District, Gene Norman, chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, testified that “unlike the streets of lower Manhattan . . . most of what can be seen on the Upper West Side today is all that has ever stood on those sites, the equivalent of a virgin forest.” Come forage on Columbus.

To plan a trip: A manageable and scenic slice of Columbus runs the mile from 66th Street to 86th. It will take you past some logical stopping points, like the New-York Historical Society, at 77th near Central Park West, and the American Museum of Natural History, whose entrance is on 77th just east of Columbus. You can also defect from the avenue to wander east on 72nd, past the Dakota, and into Central Park. The Museum of Natural History, by the way, has just spruced up the very pleasant greensward that surrounds it, and its benches make a good resting and viewing spot. As this article suggests, there is no end to the cafes and restaurants on Columbus, and plenty of shops as well. I’d recommend, given a second wind born of a refreshment stop, heading north past 86th Street, if only to peer down 87th between Columbus and Central Park West to see a classic Upper West Side street of perfectly maintained if slightly pompous brownstones, not to mention a sweet and leafy neighborhood garden. To get a wider look at the Upper West Side, you might sign up for a guided walking tour. The Internet doesn’t reveal very many, but I did notice a promising one on offer from Big Onion walking tours, (212) 439-1090.