We haven’t spent much time south of Canal Street yet. Come! There’s bubble tea.

This stretch of Chambers sits in the Tribeca South Historic District, which is a vibrant parade of cast iron, Italianate design, and artfully laid stones.

In the middle of the 1800s, this part of Chambers Street was shaped by the Hudson River Railroad terminal nearby. After the Great Fire of 1835 burned many of the warehouses near Wall Street, many of those businesses migrated here to be close to the railroad and the Hudson River docks, according to the historic district report.

Much later, those warehouses and workshops moved out and the buildings were cheap enough for artists to move to and make things pricey enough to force them out.

This block is so dense with character and history and even though this is a long post, there’s much more unsaid.

So watch for men with bullet holes in their hats, dicey investments, and deranged dentists.

I am trying to integrate a map, so we’re located where this pushpin is. Click for a streetview.

There are so many insane things that have happened here, which seems fitting for a hotel that’s been around for 180 years.

It operated early on as the Girard House in 1845, when this area was still closely tied to the docks and the Hudson River Railroad Terminal nearby. Freight trains went north and the nearby piers soon made the hotel popular with people leaving or coming back from the California Gold Rush.

“They’d arrive all whiskered, according to legend, deposit their money with the clerk, go out and get shaved, and come back unrecognizable, causing high confusion when they asked for their money back,” the New Yorker wrote in 1934.

Over time, the hotel’s had so many alterations that Christopher Gray called it “loved to death.” And it also cycled through names from the Cosmopolitan, a flophouse called the Bond, back to the Cosmopolitan, and now as a boutique hotel called the Frederick.

Over those years, the hotel has had murders, fires, and at least one explosion. Here’s a Letterman-style countdown of some of the most unusual things that have happened here:

#5: “Fifty years ago, a postman named Frederick Kopp used to trudge in and out of the fine hotel and wish that he could live there some day,” wrote The New Yorker in 1934. “By the time he got his pension, he found he could, and he moved in. He died there a few weeks ago, aged eighty-seven.”

#4: There was a secret room! At least back in 2012 there was, when the owner of a cafe here let the Tribeca Citizen tour an old vault filled with neighborhood artifacts including cast-iron detailing, an antique elevator panel, and an old call box from the hotel.

#3: Gothamist in 2012 wrote an article about an incident here with the headline: “Why You Shouldn't Fall Asleep In A Room With A Hooker And $500K Worth Of Diamonds” and, sure, you should click the link to read the story, but you probably have a clue about what happened.

#2: In the mid-19th century, John Morrissey was a well-known boxer, gambler, drinker, and violent guy. One morning in the 1850s, he and a friend decided to “clean out” the hotel bar, according to a memoir account by a former city police chief. Here goes:

“They first threw a large water-pitcher at the bartender, and then, when one of the other employees, named Conway, interfered Morrissey fired at him. He missed his aim, and the ball, after shattering a window, passed through the hat of a gentleman who was walking along West Broadway.”

Someone called the police and Morrissey “drew an ugly-looking dagger and threatened to rip open any man who approached him.” The police ultimately were able to subdue him.

Of course, given his temperament, he went on to a more appropriate career: a stint in the U.S. House of Representatives and the New York State Senate.

Ok, this one is my favorite:

#1: In July 1895, U.S. Marshal William Nix arrived at the hotel with his wife, a deputy sheriff, and a prisoner named John Bittell, who was being transported to a Brooklyn jail for a seven-year sentence for making counterfeit silver coins.

They locked the prisoner in a hotel room, locked the door, and went downstairs for a smoke and a bite to eat. At least they thought they locked the door.

As the New York Times reported a couple of days later, they’d turned the key to lock the door from the outside, but “the lock was an ordinary spring lock and the door was easily opened by turning the knob on the inside.”

Eventually realizing this, Bittell opened the door, walked down to the office to ask where his ‘friends’ were, ordered a drink at the bar, and walked out down Chambers Street. On their return the officers panicked and searched for a mustachioed convict with “heavy eyebrows, a bullet hole in his large black derby hat, and a general wild western air.”

After a fruitless search, Marshal Nix returned to the hotel in the early morning, ordered a whiskey, snapped at a reporter and went to his room. The next day—after the escape had already reached the papers—the pair wandered around town looking for the escapee. “They stopped several policemen and asked them to arrest Bittell if they met him,” the New York Times reported. “The policemen, who had read the story of Bittell’s escape, promised to do so, and chuckled.”

This is a cavernous and colorful print and poster shop that seems to specialize in postwar European posters, but really has a bit of everything.

It’s been open since 1973 and the owner has claimed that it’s the world’s largest collection of posters on sale. And if you spend enough time to browse the collection you might get the impression that the 20th century had some good things going for it after all.

Ten years before this cast-iron beauty was built, this address hosted one of the stranger and darker episodes in medical history.

For a week in early January 1848, women walking down Broadway were worried about a malicious person who was throwing sulfuric acid at them. Police eventually arrested a man who gave a false name, but they quickly figured out his real identity: Horace Wells.

Wells was a dentist and early pioneer of using gases to ease the pain of dental work, especially nitrous oxide. He’d demonstrated nitrous in Boston a few years earlier, but the patient may not have gotten enough of the gas and cried out during the procedure, humiliating Wells in front of the audience, American Heritage wrote.

Wells kept experimenting, even on himself. Once, he breathed some nitrous from a bag and instructed a colleague to pull his wisdom tooth. Success!

By 1847, the dentist was experimenting with chloroform in various combinations, again on himself, and became increasingly erratic and worn down by competing claims on who discovered the efficacy of using gas. By January 1848, he’d left his family in Hartford and was boarding a house here that predates this one.

In his own account, Wells said that an acquaintance had used some of his acid to get revenge on a woman who supposedly ruined his clothes. Wells was horrified, especially when the man returned with his friends asking for help “to drive all the bad girls out of Broadway by sprinkling them with acid.”

But after a week of inhaling chloroform, Wells, high and in a frenzy, grabbed the acid and threw it on two women who were passing by, burning one on the neck. A nearby cop quickly caught him and after his arrest, guards allowed him to visit his home, where he collected some things including a razor and, secretly, a bottle of chloroform. The next day he committed suicide in jail, having written apologetic letters to his family and the newspapers.

Despite the disputes over credit in his years, Wells later received recognition for using gases to abolish pain during surgery from the Paris Medical Society and, later, the American Medical and the American Dental associations.

(Many of these details come from an account kept by the National Library of Medicine, which quotes from newspaper and journal articles from the time, as well as a biography archived by the Wood Library-Museum).

You can read about the building itself here.

This was built in the Roaring 20s as a small but grand banking hall for the Irving Savings Bank with granite and limestone columns and the eagle reliefs to indicate stability.

Thirty years later, this became home to a company called Small Investors Real Estate, a firm that would let Joe and Jane Sixpack invest in fractional shares of real estate. Nice idea, in theory.

“The telephone campaign is well organized,” the Atlantic wrote of such companies in 1962. “Platoons of syndicate salesmen work lists from batteries of telephone cubicles in midtown Manhattan which resemble the bucket shops and boiler rooms no longer allowed to offer stocks.” (Just wait 20 years!)

I’m not sure if it left the station as a scheme or simply arrived there, but soon taxes and mortgages for the real estate weren’t being paid and investors weren’t getting the interest payments they’d been promised. Finally, with complaints pouring into the state Attorney General, investigators found some interesting loans connected to its president, Albert Mintzer.

He was soon indicted on charges of stealing $1.1 million from investors, according to a New York Times report at the time. In 1964, a jury found him guilty of “grand larceny in the first degree by false pretenses” and sentenced him to 5 to 15 years.

By 1976, you could still come here to invest your money, but it would instead be in discounted records, jeans, and 8-track player components.

And today, if you’re a member of District Council 37, a union which represents nearly 1,000 job titles across city government, you can come to the health center here to get dental work done or see your primary care doctor.

Sometimes referred to as “Tribeca Rogue,” this is a very nice new building on the corner of Church Street and the proud winner of the “New Metal Walls” category in Metal Construction News’s 2019 Metal Building and Roofing Award. The facade uses protruding Deco Bronze-finished aluminum forms that are angled like sevens to create shade. Over the course of the day, the shadows deepen with the light.

Its boosters have compared its repetitive motif to the landmark Cary Building, which sits across the street. (Though we wouldn’t know because it was covered by a scaffolding.)

“This whole area of Tribeca is really rich with these cast iron facades,” one of the designers told a metal construction trade. “That’s just not a construction method that’s really used anymore, so we were trying to replicate that depth and that quality with contemporary materials.”

Don’t know much about bubble tea, but this place is supposed to be pretty good. The Black Tea Latte with Pearl isn’t bad.

When I was taking this photo, a passerby helpfully told me this used to be Yoko Ono’s house. It’s true!

For six months starting in December 1960, the artist rented a loft here as a studio and performance space. She borrowed a baby grand piano and used discarded crates as chairs and, with composer La Monte Young, presented artists, musicians, and dancers here, MoMa wrote. Attendees included Marcel Duchamp, Peggy Guggenheim, Jasper Johns, and John Cage.

One of these artworks, as described by Lewis Menand in the New Yorker, had Ono mounting a piece of paper to the wall, taking food from the fridge, throwing it against the paper, before setting it on fire. “Cage had advised her to treat the paper with fire retardant first so that the building would not burn down,” he writes.

Well, that was a lifetime ago. This building and its neighbor at Number 114 are empty now, but will soon be renovated and converted to high-end homes.

This block is so nutrition-dense, I skipped or cut out a lot. I even cut a whole section about the history of fruit jars which probably would have doubled my subscriber base.

What’s Good: There were two stories of people with bullet holes in their hats. Two!

What’s Not: RIP to the Patriot Bar, which is now a weed store. And the Cary Building, which is probably one of the best things here, but is covered in scaffolding. Of course.

Block Rating: 7.5/10