If there’s a creepy corner of New York City, William Helmreich has walked around it — and he’s got the worn-down shoes to prove it. Helmreich, a sociology professor at the City University of New York, decided that the best way to satisfy his love of exploring would be to see all of New York City — on foot — for his new book, “The New York Nobody Knows,” which came out last week. The Switzerland native, who was raised on the Upper West Side, walked 120,000 blocks and 6,048 miles — the distance from New York to Los Angeles and back, with a trip to St. Louis to boot — over four years to learn the city’s nooks and crannies. Helmreich, 68, shares some off-the-beaten-path haunts from his journey. This is his spooky New York.
1. Graffiti murals, Troutman Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, Brooklyn
“That place has really scary graffiti. There are blocks and blocks of it. There’s a very somber picture of james gandolfini; there’s also a picture — hundreds of yards wide — of a human head lying on its side. There are various monsters and animals cut in half that look really weird. The human imagination knows no bounds for thinking up weird things, and this place has them.”
2. Rumored Mafia dumping ground, Ruby Street between Blake and Dumont avenues, Brooklyn
“The Ruby Street lot is a really godforsaken [spot on the] Queens-Brooklyn border. The only houses around are abandoned. In a famous Gotti case, [investigators] looked for a body there. There was an incident where [a] guy who lived next to Gotti ran over [Gotti’s] son. It was an accident. Four months later, he disappeared. People say there are 200 bodies buried there, but nobody was found.”
3. Botanica Santeria & Magic, 1485D Myrtle Ave., Brooklyn
“They have spells, potions, all sorts of things. They sell folk medicine, religious candles, potions, incense, perfume. The store exists in the shadows of the train. Its atmosphere is what you think of when you think of spookiness and magic.”
4. Edgar Allan Poe Park, 2640 Grand Concourse, Bronx
“In Poe Park, there stands this cottage. It looks very out of place. It’s been preserved since the 1840s and is surrounded by tenements. Nobody knows Poe lived in the Bronx — they think of him as a Manhattanite — but it’s where he wrote a very famous poem, ‘Annabel Lee.’ It’s a spooky poem, it’s great. ‘The Bells’ was also written there.”
5. Eclesia Catolica Cristiana exorcism church, 2112 Grand Ave., Bronx
“There was a man named Delfin Rodriguez who believed Jesus came to him in a dream and told him [Rodriguez] was the second Jesus, because of his love for ‘the black, the white, the yellow, the mulatto, the American Indian’ minorities, oppressed people of the world, and that he had anointed him the second son of Christ. [Rodriguez] had a white beard and always dressed in white. When I talked to people in the community, they told me he cared about people in the community, yet he had these [exorcism] services every Friday night.”
6. Hell Gate Bridge, connecting Randall’s Island and Astoria
“In 1904, the General Slocum, an excursion ferry, caught fire and sank, right by the bridge. It was the largest disaster before 9/11. Something like 1,021 people died — men, women and children. People on shore didn’t realize the boat caught fire, and they waved back [at the passengers].”
7. Ruins of Old Willowbrook State School, next to the College of Staten Island, 2800 Victory Blvd.
“It was a huge complex and a famous dumping ground for child mental patients. It was known as a place where the neglected, unwanted and forgotten lived in misery and squalor. These people had no one to advocate for them — they were either from families which chose to forget about them or no one chose to look after their health care. [the facility] closed in 1987 after protests.”
8. The House of Death, private resident at 14 W. 10th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues
“A number of tenants have died mysteriously there, and there are supposed to be 22 tenants who haunt the building. Mark Twain haunts there. Joel Steinberg beat his [girlfriend’s] 6-year-old daughter to death there in 1987. The Joel Steinberg and Hedda Nussbaum case dominated the headlines for months. When you have a number of deaths, it always raises the question: Is it coincidence or is it just that you notice it more?”
9. The Towers, 2 W. 106th St., at Fifth Ave.
“It’s now condominiums. [The building] has this rich red brick color, it has turrets. It’s now a very fancy place but used to be infamous. Bernard Bergman ran a terrible nursing home there. After people died, he kept them in freezers in the basement and then continued to collect Social Security on them. The whole nursing home was a house of horrors.
“I used to walk by it as a kid all the time. It was always a scary place, you didn’t want to hang out there. [Bergman] was emblematic of the nursing-home scandals of the late ’60s and early ’70s, where people would be taken care of very poorly, lying in their own urine and excrement.”