Chronicling an ever-changing city through faded and forgotten artifacts
He’s hardly a household name today. But Utah-born John Held, Jr. helped create the popular imagery of the 1920s. Held made Jazz Age icons out of bobbed-hair flappers, college guys in raccoon coats, sporty women wielding tennis rackets, and tuxedoed partygoers dangling cigarette holders from their lips. His gently satirical drawings depicting a carefree and … … Continue reading →
Facing it head-on from the sidewalk, 1001 Fifth Avenue is impressive enough—a 23-story residential building clad in a limestone facade topped by what looks like a mansard roof that stretches into the sky. Viewed from the side, however, and this mansard roof is just a massive limestone slab supported by steel buttresses, creating no extra … … Continue reading →
Getting to Coney Island from Manhattan could take a long time in the 1890s. Depending on where you were coming from, you d likely have to board a streetcar or elevated train, or more than one, and then catch one of the Brooklyn railroads that then delivered you to a beachfront terminal. The shorter way to [ ]
New York is a graveyard of former theater houses, and in recent years these vacant venues have been repurposed into retail shops, boutique hotels, a workout studio, and even a Starbucks. So why not a one-time dramatic stock and vaudeville theater transformed into a church? A Pentecostal Christian congregation currently occupies what was once the [ ]
Some buildings in New York are so stunning, they make you stop in your tracks. The Knox Hat Factory, at Grand Avenue and St. Marks Place in Prospect Heights, is that kind of building. It almost looks like a castle, with the yellow brick factory walls fortified to protect the interior, and a corner watchtower [ ]
It was just another corner brownstone tenement. Empty and boarded up for years, its facade was marred by graffiti and a tattered Chinese restaurant awning hung across the ground floor. The time came to bulldoze the old building, which held court at the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 116th Street. But once the site [ ]
The pitched roofs, overhanging eaves, curlycue flower petal motifs—is this really the entrance to the Third Avenue Elevated at 28th Street, or is it a house from a fairy tale? Painted by Staats Cotsworth around 1940, this depiction of an ordinary train entrance feels fanciful, almost magical; the city itself is barely seen. Yet it [ ]
It s kind of a sad-looking flagpole, plastered with stickers and a layer of grime at the chaotic intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues. But it once stood in Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1913 to 1957. And that makes it a welcome rescued relic from a very different Brooklyn. The flagpole took [ ]
The enormous faux shopping bag that served as an advertisement for Macy s is mostly gone, save for a patch of red facing Sixth Avenue. Scaffolding covers the ground floor retail space, and dark netting swaths the brick and limestone upper floors. What s going on these days at the northwest corner of 34th Street and Sixth [ ]
A visitor to today s recently restored Waldorf Astoria might be dazzled by the Art Deco design, the luxurious lobby, and the ghosts of all the actors, inventors, and heads of state who made it their temporary home. What that visitor might not realize is that the hypen —as the hotel was called before the hyphen was [ ]
On the edge of Prospect Heights at 736 Bergen Street sits a charming slate blue row house. Just two stories high with a top half-floor (based on some Zillow interior photos), the little Greek Revival-style relic features long slender windows, an ornamental front entrance, and a cornice with decorative moldings. Exactly when 736 Bergen Street [ ]
The first things I noticed about 2029 First Avenue were the decorative lintels above the second floor windows. Attractively styled for window lintels on upper First Avenue, I figured this stubby holdout wedged beside two brick buildings between East 104th and 105th Streets must have been a former stable. I imagined that those roll-down window [ ]
