A plaque remaining from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem.

Above, a 1934 plaque from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem. Discarded as trash in 2006. Now a Popeyes fast food restaurant on Google Maps.

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Entry from February 19, 2022
Little Berlin (Tompkins Square Park)

“NEW YORK’S QUEEREST PARK. TOMPKINS SQUARE, WHICH SOME CALL ‘LITTLE BERLIN’” is an article that was published in The Sun (New York, NY) on May 27, 1894. Tompkins Square Park, located in the East Village of Manhattan, was in the center of what was then called “Little Germany” (Kleindeutchland). Berlin is the capital and the most populous city in Germany.
   
“Little Germany” was largely destroyed when over 1,000 school children died on the PS General Slocum ship disaster on June 15, 1904. The term “Little Berlin” is of historical interest today.
   
   
Wikipedia: Tompkins Square Park
Tompkins Square Park is a 10.5-acre (4.2 ha) public park in the Alphabet City portion of East Village, Manhattan, New York City. The square-shaped park, bounded on the north by East 10th Street, on the east by Avenue B, on the south by East 7th Street, and on the west by Avenue A, is abutted by St. Marks Place to the west. The park opened in 1834 and is named for Daniel D. Tompkins, Vice President of the United States.
   
Google Books
New York, 1894: Illustrated
New York, NY: A. F. Parsons Publishing Company
1894
Pg. 48:
... New York’s queerest of all parks, Tompkins Square, and which some call “Little Berlin.”
 
Newspapers.com
27 May 1894, The Sun (New York, NY), pg. 6, col. 1:
NEW YORK’S QUEEREST PARK.
TOMPKINS SQUARE, WHICH SOME CALL “LITTLE BERLIN.”
Go There Some Fine Sunday and See the Swarming People, See the Lovers, the Flirts, the Beauties, the Tough Girls, the Bearded Germans, and All the Rest.
A merry, swarming, lively bit of town in Tompkins Square. To see it at its best is to witness scenes as full of oddity as any experience of the same length of time will yield in a European city. You may hear no English at all while in the square, but if you do hear it the speech will most likely come from children. “Little Berlin” is what some of the east siders call the square, because it is in the heart of the biggest German quarter. But the Germans call it so because they find more of their kind than any other kind.

Posted by Barry Popik
New York CityNeighborhoods • Saturday, February 19, 2022 • Permalink


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