While I couldn't find the restaurant, I did find the addresses of two of my relatives that lived in NYC in the 1870s! Henry Battjer (my Great-great-grandfather) was a carman who lived at 49 Pitt Street. A few years later in 1880, he opened a bar called Smith & Battjer that after years of research I finally tracked down to be formerly located at 422 East 14th Street - just a few blocks from where I lived on 14th street for 4 years!
...and someone dunked their feet in purple paint and made footsteps that go between the two community gardens. (Adam Purple pretty much single-handedly created every garden in the Lower East Side by riding his bike up to the central park horse stables, collecting manure, and carting it back downtown to mix into the soil around all the empty lots where they'd torn buildings down. Over the years and through thousands of trips with manure, he turned all the empty lots into fertile topsoil where plants could grow!
While we waited for the horse to arrive at the hotel (he was being transported down to Manhattan from upstate via trailer), Klaus (the manager of the hotel at the time) took us up to the roof so we could see the totally surreal view from the glass-edged roof deck. Breathtaking!
While I was sitting there, two guys showed up with upright basses and started playing together. They were both using bows and making haunting, mournful, beautiful sounds and a man wandered over holding his newborn son and was holding him up into the sound. All while reading a book about learning to let go and get lost in life moment to moment. Call it the reason I live here.
Apparently, unbeknown to us, earlier in the day, someone had climbed the other side of the NYT building and this was the SECOND free-climber to scale the same building in a several-hour span!
