This little stretch of Lexington is borderline Kips Bay or Murray Hill, but I’m not really sure it makes a difference here. It’s a modest slice of mid-Manhattan with some places to eat and some apartments.

I’m going to tell you upfront: this isn’t the most exciting block. We don’t have the flair of Curry Hill a few blocks to the south, the pedigree of Murray Hill to the north, or the vibecoding and slopbowls of NoMad. But we came all this way and we have some surprises, so get comfy.

Like a lot of mid-Manhattan, blocks like this were once townhouses built by upper-crust Manhattanites fleeing the rabble of downtown. By the early 20th century, the apartments were sprouting up and the scale got bigger.

These photos were taken in February, so excuse the piles of snow clinging to every surface.

Streetview

170 Lexington Avenue | 1850s

There’s a strip of rowhouses on the west side of the street that have been preserved or mangled in various ways.

Number 170, on the left, got the full Daytonian in Manhattan treatment, so there’s lots of detail about the folks who’ve lived there over the years. Residents have included a Vedanta guru (1897), a clairvoyant borrowing the name of a reputable professor (1900), and recently, creative director and consultant Drew Elliott, whose apartment here was profiled by Curbed in 2016. (Very tasteful.)

At some point, the stoop and an iron balcony disappeared, according to Daytonian. And that yellow clapboard that makes it look pretty old? That was added some time after World War II.

The sticker here says: “The only thing better than fishing is committing tax fraud.” Happy tax day (for those who celebrate).

The Pratt/Phoenix School | 1909

This one is a little treat.

This was originally built as an art and design school for women, where students learned specialties like book cover design, wallpaper art, interiors, and architecture. It went co-ed in World War II and became part of the Pratt Institute in 1974.

There’s a lot of places where you can read about the academic history here (Wikipedia and the Landmarks document, for example). But I’m more focused on the cool columns, and the stone reliefs riffing on the Elgin Marbles of the Parthenon. There’s some naked people, some headless people, and a guy about to get run down by a horse.

Now it houses a branch of the trendy Dover Street Market, which sells nice clothing. It’s a bit too hip for this part of town, but who am I to say, half of my wardrobe is from Target.

161 Lexington Avenue | 1908

This is where we get a little bit weird.

In late summer of 1982, what was then the Rutledge Hotel was a long way from its heyday in the earlier part of the century as one of the few hotels catering exclusively to traveling businesswomen, with rooms priced at a dollar per night. At this point, UPI reporters described it as a “down-at-heels” residential hotel located “in a neighborhood frequented by prostitutes” with rooms going for about $95 a week.

So maybe it was a perfect place for James Lewis and his wife to arrive from Chicago and stay here in Room 200 under an alias.

During their stay in the Rutledge, someone had laced Tylenol capsules in Chicagoland drugstores with potassium cyanide, ultimately killing seven people and inciting a national panic. Lewis became a prime suspect after a man who looked like him was identified in a surveillance video. The Chicago Reader recounts what happened on October 14, when one of the hotel owners, Moshe Siri, chatted Lewis up:

Lewis said hello, and Siri greeted him with questions: “Do I know you from someplace? Did you live maybe in another building of mine? 94th Street? 84th Street? 99th? 17th Street?” Lewis replied, “No, I am new. I’m from Missouri.” Siri left it at that. Only later did he realize where he’d seen Lewis’s face before–Nightline.

The pair fled to another hotel, but police ultimately arrested Lewis in December. He was long considered the chief suspect, but denied the murders and was never charged in the killings. In 1984, he was found guilty of sending an extortion letter to Johnson & Johnson—the maker of Tylenol—demanding $1 million to “stop the killing,” and ultimately served 12 years before his release. Since then, police have looked into other suspects, but have never solved the crime.

Anyway, here’s what the hotel looked like in 1934. Now, at least part of it has become transitional housing run by the Bowery Residents' Committee, according to The Real Deal.

175 Lexington Avenue | 1915

This apartment building was at one time home to the Film-Makers' Cooperative, an avant-garde collective of experimental filmmakers.² In 1967, experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger came to the offices to burn copies of his films (or at least claimed to), according to one biography.

Four years later, Ernie Gehr set up a camera through a window of the group’s ground-floor offices and recorded the street life. This produced the film “Still” in which almost all of the movie’s eight shots were filmed using double exposures, and focused on the movements of cars, people, and the interplay of urban life showing the same scene in different times of the day.

A 1999 retrospective in the New York Times said the technique helped to “evoke the mysterious interplay of different times of day or different seasons or different years in the life of a place” allowing viewers to “sense that this is a place happily haunted by its ghosts.” It continued:

One admirer, the dramatist Richard Foreman, called ''Still'' an intimation of paradise. It is paradise found in the yellow of cabs and the green of a tree across the street, in the way that things are seen to fit, body and ghost, into the fabric of the world. It is paradise found in the kind of detachment that is most deeply involving.¹

I’m having a hard time finding footage of this online, but based on some of the photos, the luncheonette with the cool sign is now the Hong Kong Noodle & Sariku Sushi.

These days, an Ernie Gehr might have fun watching the dozens of delivery guys cycle in and out on ebikes at what seems like the busiest takeout spot in the neighborhood.

Pizza here’s supposed to be good.

What’s Good: You never know what you’re going to find in the middle of Manhattan…

What’s Not: ….sometimes it ain’t much!

Block Rating: 4.5/10