By West Side Rag
At the beginning of March, West Side Rag received an inquiry that caught our eye.
“I’m hoping you or your readers can help solve a mystery that has nagged at my family for years,” Upper West Sider David Leslie wrote to the Rag. “There is a bricked-up entryway on the 83rd Street side of 2299 Broadway — i.e., the Harry’s Shoes building — with ‘Leslie.’ (period included) inscribed in the stone arch above. Leslie is my family’s surname, and I’ve tried in vain to learn more about the history of the building in hopes of turning this into an anecdote for my kids.”
“So far, I’ve come up empty. We pass by this building multiple times a day, and it eats at me more and more every time,” he added.
While we did not immediately have the answer, we knew someone who could help: Rob Garber, the author of WSR’s Upper West Side Historical Photo Challenges, and a historian of the neighborhood.
We sent the query to Garber, who rose to the challenge.
Here’s how he responded.
The answer to the question about the word “LESLIE.” over the door is that the upper floor of the two-story building that faces Broadway between 82nd and 83rd was home to a meeting space called Leslie Hall for more than 30 years, from 1896 until the late 1920s.
The doorway at 260 West 83rd Street that caught David Leslie’s attention.
The west side of Broadway from 82nd to 83rd Street was devoid of structures until the 1890s. Throughout much of the 19th century, land on the Upper West Side remained largely undeveloped. Many pieces of property changed hands repeatedly, with investors and speculators anticipating rising property values as the city inexorably developed northward. An 1885 map shows the blockfront composed of eight lots, and all eight, plus six adjacent lots facing 82nd and 83rd Streets, were sold for a total of $120,000 in December 1887. As late as 1894, a fire insurance map still showed no structures at all along the block, even as the surrounding neighborhood began to fill in with buildings.
Development on the west side of Broadway in the late 19th century. Wood structures are yellow; brick or stone structures are pink.
The property was finally “improved” in the late 1890s. Charles T Barney, a wealthy investor and president of Knickerbocker Trust–now chiefly remembered for having committed suicide when the Knickerbocker failed in the Panic of 1907–engaged architect William Strom to design a two-story structure. It went up in stages, according to a 2009 New York Times Streetscapes column by Christopher Gray: first the north half, then the south half. Insurance maps from the turn of the century show that the building was sometimes called the Leslie and sometimes was known as the Lansing Building. Such two-story buildings, known as “taxpayers”, were common on the Upper West Side and were often built as temporary commercial structures, with the expectation that they would be replaced by taller buildings when the economics could justify the investment. In the case of the Leslie building, it never happened and nearly 130 years later, it’s one of an increasingly-rare species of low buildings on Broadway.
The Leslie or Lansing Building was built in 1897-98. By 1911 every lot has been developed between 80th and 83rd, and the last wood structures are gone.
Looking south across Broadway, probably at the very end of the 19th century. The Lansing and Wellesley buildings were brand-new. A piece of All Angels’ is visible on the northwest corner of West End Ave and 81st, as are the asymmetric spires of First Baptist Church at Broadway and 79th.
So, who or what was The Leslie? Variously called Leslie Hall, Leslie Rooms, Leslie’s Rooms, or the Leslie Ballroom, it was a public meeting space that could be rented for everything from weddings to a 1927 rally by striking barbers, as well as musical performances, religious services, and twice-monthly meetings of the Associated Electrical Contractors of New York. From its earliest days, dance classes were also held at Leslie Hall.
In the era before broadcast media, there were numerous meeting halls in New York where political rallies were staged, and where speeches or performances were given in a less formal atmosphere than a theater or auditorium. Leslie Hall was one such space, and during its 30 years, it hosted speakers that ranged from Eugene Debs to Emma Goldman to Macy’s owner Oscar Straus, as well as countless worthy events such as a 1917 reading by the Dramatic Society of Columbia Grammar School.
Its capacity was impressive—when Theodore Roosevelt appeared at Leslie Hall in 1910 to deliver a political speech, the New-York Tribune reported that “two thousand persons awaited the coming of the colonel, in addition to the large crowd gathered on the outside”. In January 1924 Leslie Hall was the site of the first American performance of sacred dances by the philosopher and mystic Georgij Gurdjieff and his troupe. Thomas de Hartmann, a pianist and composer who accompanied Gurdjieff, wrote a description of the interior of Leslie Hall: “it was a longish two-storey building. Each floor had a hall along its length, but on the ground floor there was only a small stage and a meeting room, which was not appropriate. The upper hall had plenty of space but no stage from which the movements would be visible, so Mr. Gurdjieff had one quickly built by the pupils…”
Events advertised at Leslie Hall used the street address 260 West 83rd Street rather than a Broadway address, suggesting that the entrance on West 83rd that retains the LESLIE sign over the bricked-up door was the main entrance in the early 1900s.
The north facade of the block-long building looks much the same today as it did in 1940, including the now bricked-up doorway noticed by David Leslie.
Just who Leslie was, remains a mystery—the name “Leslie’s Rooms” suggests that Leslie was the proprietor, but neither advertisements nor city directories of the time identify a person behind the place.
It’s not clear whether Leslie sometimes referred to the entire building or only to the upper floor. As early as 1905, newspaper ads for businesses described the addresses from 2281 to 2299 Broadway as the Lansing Building. Several real estate brokers had offices in the Lansing Building, and Schrafft’s, a candy counter and lunch spot, was notable among the retail tenants.
Popular with generations of UWSers, Schrafft’s took out a lease for 2285 Broadway in 1929, the same year that the Lansing Building was renovated, according to a social history by Tom Miller at LandmarkWest’s “The Boulevard” website. The neoclassical exterior appearance we see today, including what Tom described as “terra cotta swags” on the second floor, were not original to the building, as a before-and after comparison of photographs demonstrates.
2281-2299 Broadway as it appeared over the course of a century.
After its 1929 do-over, the building took the appearance that it has today. Its most celebrated tenant was Geoge Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, which was upstairs from 1956 until moving to Lincoln Center in 1969. It was succeeded by the New York School of Ballet, which continued the building’s long dance tradition until it was evicted in 1985.
Mr. Leslie responded, “Our daily walks past the old Leslie Hall have been completely enriched by this back story, and the final lingering piece of the mystery will be left to our imaginations.”
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