Still Life in a Spinning City: New York Keeps Moving While Some UWS Rebels Won’t Budge

By Yvonne Vávra

It never stops. Not at one, or two, or three, and certainly not at twelve, when they just start rockin’ around the clock all over again.

Last weekend, 71 years ago, the world changed in a room on West 70th Street. On April 12, 1954, Bill Haley & His Comets recorded “Rock Around the Clock” — the anthem of relentless motion — at Decca Records’ studio inside the Pythian building at 135 West 70th Street.

That record is widely credited with making rock ’n’ roll a mainstream phenomenon that unleashed people around the world to dance like never before. Black artists had been pioneering the sound for years, but this was the track that gave it global exposure. There was a before, and there was an after in pop culture.

This song changed the times.

“Rock Around the Clock” is all about nonstop pulse — anytime, all the time. A fitting tune for our city with its relentless energy. Like a record on repeat, New York is always spinning, remixing itself, turning over again and again, always on the move.

That’s the story.

But just a few blocks north of the record’s birthplace, there’s proof that the city can be just as rebellious as the song — saying no to the expectations of the times. Amidst a century of bustle, a corner of the Upper West Side stood still, refusing to let a ghost from another era move on.

Walk up Amsterdam Avenue, and you’ll see an old painted advertisement for Hotel Lincoln Square still clinging to the south-facing wall of 166 W 75th Street. Constructed in 1922, the building was originally called the Hotel Emerson and advertised in The New York Times as offering “Comfort Without Extravagance,” assuring the “weather minded” that “life at the Emerson is cool and comfortable regardless of heat.”

The hotel changed its name to Hotel Lincoln Square in 1959, and despite the promise, there would soon be plenty of heat inside.

Once, the hotel was home to a former Ziegfeld Follies showgirl who cheated on her newlywed husband — and was later stabbed by him with a pocketknife in her lover’s downtown apartment. Another Ziegfeld Follies dancer made history here, though she wasn’t a resident. Her rival was: Charlotte Burke, a model who was having an affair with actor Kenneth Harlan, the showgirl’s husband. One day, the Follies girl showed up at the hotel with a friend, knocked on Burke’s door, and beat her up. Badly.

In the 1970s, the hotel witnessed a woman fatally bludgeoned on the ninth floor and a man stabbed to death in his bathtub. But it wasn’t all bad — there was also a counseling service for Vietnam War veterans on the ground floor, right next to, wait for it, a snorkel shop. I might never have known any of this if not for that fading ad on the building’s wall, stubbornly defying time. And what a shame that would’ve been.

Today, the former Hotel Lincoln Square is a residential building and home to a restaurant that was just added to the Michelin Guide last week.

Across the street, there’s — or was — another sign of the city standing still. The western wall of the parking garage that houses Playa Betty’s and the West Side Comedy Club, at the corner of Amsterdam and 75th Street, holds two huge painted ads: one for Livingston Automobile Radiators, the other for Sherman Square Motors Corp., both of which operated here in the 1910s and ‘20s. The ads remained visible until about ten years ago, when the new structure at 207 West 75th Street went up, now home to the Sugarfish sushi restaurant. Seven stories high, just tall enough to cover the ads on the garage wall. Maybe one day, if 207 doesn’t stand the test of time, the hand-painted bricks will reemerge from behind the building.

The parking garage itself has stood remarkably still while witnessing a century in motion. Built in 1890, it housed the New York Cab Company, which used it as a stable for horse-drawn carriages. While the Upper West Side changed dramatically during that transformative time, the structure barely did. Built to keep the city moving, it calmly adapted to its changing needs — watching horses move out, cars move in, and history unfold: In 1918, a room inside was used as a voter registration office, where New York’s women were allowed to register, two years before they won the right to vote nationally.

I wonder what, if anything, from our time will linger a hundred years from now. We leave fewer traces — mostly data, ready to be overwritten. The digital ads on LinkNYC kiosks and bus stops vanish the second something new appears.

But maybe that doesn’t matter. The future might look like something I can’t even imagine — with new ways of remembering, new ways of forgetting. And what is time and space, anyway?

Just go back to the Pythian building on 70th Street, where “Rock Around the Clock” was recorded, and give yourself over to losing all sense of both. Built in 1927 as a temple for the Knights of Pythias — a secret society and fraternal organization — this time-warping structure bursts with pharaohs, flamboyant oxen, cobras with crowns, lions with wings, and colonnades. Think antiquity, Egypt, Babylon, Art Deco — in technicolor. No wonder they caught a beat that wouldn’t stop in here. It all makes your head spin, like you’re not quite sure what time it is. That’s what New York does best: hold the beat, and keep you guessing.

Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Nora Ephron), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.

Subscribe to West Side Rag’s FREE email newsletter here. And you can Support the Rag here.