Since New York City’s last working farm closed, New Yorkers have found inventive ways to grow their own food. Limited space required creative thinking: growing areas shrunk to the size of a yard or lot, or experiments that used new technology to cultivate fruit and vegetables. Throughout the 20th century, a variety of projects connected city residents with the food system, from the high-tech, like growing hydroponic tomatoes at the World’s Fair, to the resourceful, like using park land to create urban farms.

The high-tech example is timely, because last month marked the 87th anniversary of the 1939 World’s Fair. The Heinz dome, an egg-shaped structure sponsored by the ketchup brand, featured an indoor display of chemiculture, now known as hydroponics. The display featured tomatoes grown inside the dome, which, according David J. Cope, a historian on the fair, were planted in white sand or treated water with refined temperature regulation and care by a designated attendant.1 But it wasn’t all artificial sunshine:

The experiment caused a number of problems for the exhibitors. Samuel Galloway Hibbon of the Westinghouse Corporation suggested placing 150-watt reflector lamps above the plants. They flourished! G. H. Van Vecten, a plant physiologist, discovered looping caterpillars had infiltrated the carefully controlled environment through a microscopic hole adjoining the next room. A chemically safe insecticide did the trick.

From futuristic experiments to neighborhood-scale efforts, these projects show how New Yorkers adapted agriculture to fit the city’s constraints.

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New York’s Urban Farming History

• A rare survivor from Queens County’s agricultural past, the Queens County Farm Museum is one of New York City’s last operating farms and is the longest continually farmed site in New York State. First established by the Adriance family in the 17th century, the farm was operated by a succession of family farmers for nearly 300 years. The current farmhouse was built around 1772 by Jacob Adriance; much of the original building remains standing today.

• The “Farm Garden,” was an educational program established by Frances “Fannie” Griscom Parsons in the early 20th century. Parsons believed that farming was crucial to education. Skills and values taught cultivating vegetables were particularly valuable for city children “whose knowledge is limited to stone pavements and one small room in a tenement house.”2 When the first of such programs launched at DeWitt Clinton Park, in the Meatpacking District, there were waiting lists in the hundreds to join the first Farm Gardens. Eventually, the program was expanded and became a feature of many parks across the city, including Betsy Head Memorial Park, in Brownsville, Brooklyn, which has given the community a space for health and recreation for over 100 years.

• Community gardens borrow from earlier urban-gardening movements, including the “Farm-Gardens” and Depression-era “subsistence gardens” which provided for communities across the city. Beginning in the 1960s, New Yorkers increasingly favored progressive government programs and looked towards the city to sponsor many past-due revitalization efforts for neighborhoods. One such effort was community gardens, which beautified abandoned lots and, most importantly, allowed the community to have an active say in the design of their urban environment.

Day in History

May 8, 1877. The first edition of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show opens at Gilmore’s Gardens, as the original Madison Square Garden was then known.

From the Archive

• From Newburgh, NY → Check out the Artist and Craftsman-style typography on this 1895 advertisement for a hardware store on Water Street.

• We were struck by just how tiny those windows are on this storefront facade at 148 Delancey Street. Are they an advertisement, or something else? Take a look and give us your guess.

• Explore the history of the Lower West Side, which included “Little Syria” located along lower Washington Street and the surrounding blocks from 1880-1920. Manhattan’s Syrian Quarter was central to the lives of other Syrian communities throughout the U.S., both economically and culturally. Its merchants imported—and its factories produced—wares including Oriental rugs, cigarettes and mirrors.

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In our last issue, we showcased the Woolworth Building, which was from 1913 to 1930 was the tallest building in the world. In the early 20th century, a number of other slender towers rose alongside it in Lower Manhattan, including the Singer Building and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower. World War I paused construction throughout the country, but this lull was followed by a period of post-war prosperity. The boom culminated in another competition, this time in Midtown, where the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building were competing to claim the title of the world’s tallest building.

The Chrysler Building had its own secret weapon, a surprise spire, which was hoisted into place at the last moment, ultimately allowing it to beat out its downtown competitor 40 Wall Street. But it would not hold the crown for long. The ultimate winner of the race to the sky was the Empire State Building, which celebrates its 94th anniversary today.

The site of the Empire State Building has a long history. It was first purchased as a farm by the Astor family, then transformed into the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel before it was demolished and relocated north to Park Avenue. The land then passed to Empire State Inc., a group of wealthy investors who hired the architects Shreve, Lamb & Harmon to design a new tower. Early plans called for a modest 50-story building, but in a familiar tale, the ambitions kept climbing: ten stories were added, and then ten more, until the final design reached 102 stories.

The building was completed just over a year after construction began, opening on May 1, 1931, a full 45 days ahead of schedule. To ensure the tower would have unobstructed views of the city, height restrictions were placed on neighboring lots. But the developers of the Empire State had a bigger concern: that their four-foot lead over the rising Chrysler Building was too close for comfort. Read on for the secret weapon that won New York’s race to the sky.

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The Zeppelin Dock on Top of the World

• The “secret weapon” which made the Empire Building the tallest building in the world? A 200-foot mooring mast atop the 1,050-foot tall skyscraper, which developers claimed would be a landing dock for dirigibles and Zeppelins. In their idea, passengers would then descend the rocket-ship like mast and the 102-stories, reaching the streets of New York in seven short minutes. In practice, the idea proved unworkable, as high winds made docking nearly impossible. The mast remained, less as a piece of infrastructure than as a final assertion of height in New York’s most competitive building boom.

• The main entrance to the building on Fifth Avenue features three sets of metal doors flanked by sculpted eagles perched atop molded piers. In the national mythology of the era, eagles served as a symbol of America’s economic and military power, a fitting guardian for the building its developers intended as a monument to American power and ambition.

• Considered one of the finest surviving Art Deco interiors in New York City, the Empire State Building’s lobby features an aluminum relief showing the building itself, with rays of light reflecting off the mooring mast above a map of New York State.

Day in History

May 1, 1931. The Empire State Building is dedicated.

From the Archive

• Cinema Village, located at 22 East 12th Street, is the oldest continuously operated cinema in Greenwich Village and one of the oldest continuously operated art cinemas in the city. The building was a firehouse until it was converted to a movie theater in the 1960s.

• 100 Broad Street was once the Jacobean-style headquarters of the Bush Terminal Company, the manufacturing and shipping operation that built a self-sustaining city for its employees across the Brooklyn waterfront over the first half of the 20th century.

• With its distinctive, patterned brickwork and its height on a block nearly void of structures (today the building has only one low-rise neighbor to the east), the Hook and Ladder 66 firehouse on Northern Boulevard in Queens is eye-catching. Today, the station is used by one of the city’s elite Emergency Medical Squad- ESU units.

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The Woolworth Building is one of New York’s most striking pre-war skyscrapers. Dubbed the ‘Cathedral of Commerce,’ it served as both an advertisement for Woolworth’s brand (he selected the site for its visibility from the Brooklyn Bridge) and a testament to his personal financial success. Unusually, Woolworth paid the entire cost of the building, $13.5 million in cash. One might even say he paid for it in nickels and dimes.

F.W. Woolworth and his architect Cass Gilbert beg did not initially set out to build the tallest building in New York. Once construction began, Woolworth found it hard to pass up the opportunity to build higher. He contemplated the risks and delays that would come with adding additional height with his architect. Eventually, Woolworth “saw the commercial potential of the skyscraper’s location, with the building acting as a ‘giant signboard,’ advertising the greatness of his company, and as a way to make money, leasing floors to other companies, which would in turn raise the value of his real estate.”1

After hiring surveyors to confirm the height of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower, which was completed in 1909, Woolworth famously had the following exchange.2

“How high do you want the tower now?” asked Mr. Gilbert.

“How high can you make it?” Mr. Woolworth asked in reply.

“It is for you to make the limit,” said Mr. Gilbert.

“Then make it fifty feet higher than the Metropolitan Tower.”

The building was completed at a rapid pace, topping off at 792 feet high with 60 stories in 1913, just three years after its foundations were laid. A grand opening was held for nearly a thousand guests on the 27th floor of the building on April 24, 1913, sometimes called “the highest dinner party in New York.”

At 7:29, a telegraph was sent from the event to President Woodrow Wilson, who was in Washington at the time. New York Times reported the next day on the matter:

One minute later President Wilson touched the instrument, closing the circuit, which caused a bell to ring in the banquet hall and in the engine room, thirty stories below, and immediately and for the first time lights flashed from every floor of the fifty-five stories, from the sub-basement, 37 feet below the street level, to the top of the tower, 792 feet above the street.

Rising above lower Manhattan, the Woolworth Building transformed the skyline into a kind of advertisement, where height, light, and visibility became tools of business. Read on below to learn more:

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Building a Cathedral of Commerce

• The building was originally planned to occupy a much small site at the corner of Broadway and Park Place, and caissons were driven in the ground there to support the rising tower. However, Woolworth’s desire to complete the world’s tallest building meant he needed to expand the footprint along the full block of Broadway to Barclay Street. Foundation work began in 1910 (photographed here in 1911), and this model of the structure shows the front corner of the building, at Broadway and Park Place, with larger caissons at a higher density than the rest of the site. If placed end-to-end, the length of the caissons would stretch to about 1 mile.3

  

• The lobby was envisioned by Gilbert as an extension of the opulence of the Neo-Gothic exterior and is triple-heighted, perhaps a nod to the verticality of the tower. It features a grand staircase, walls clad in marble, and a glass ceiling overhead. As the height of the building necessitated elevators which would travel more than 700 feet, the engineers were cautious and tested them rigorously with methods that included: “dropping elevator cars filled with eggs and bottles to test the ‘air cushion.’” Curiously, there are also busts of architect (holding a model), owner (counting nickels), and structural engineer.

• Knowing that the building of the world’s tallest tower would become a great spectacle, Woolworth capitalized on the publicity. According to the New York Public Library, Woolworth hired commercial photographer Irving Underhill to document the building’s rise. He maintained a studio at Broadway and Park Place, opposite the site, and photographed construction at regular intervals. Photos were then sent to the Woolworth stores all over the country so all customers could know of the great construction taking place in New York. These photos show the rapid pace of construction, from February 20th to April 4th 1912, to this shot of the building’s copper roof coming on.

Day in History

April 24, 1913. The Woolworth Building, then the tallest skyscraper in the world, opens.

From the Archive

It’s National Library Week! We’re spotlighting the photos of some of our library partners below:

• In 1930, Queens Public Library drove its first “book bus” to City Hall. Named “The Pioneer,” the bus was a library on wheels, bringing the stacks to the neighborhoods of Queens.

• The Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library’s history dates back to 1889, when the Brooklyn Park Commission selected a location for the building near Grand Army Plaza.

• From Harrison, MS → Talk about a handsome building. Check out those spiral columns and the symmetry on the Old Biloxi Library (still standing), a Mission-style structure that was erected in 1925.

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From 1885 until World War I, New York City was home to some of the country’s most-visited tourist sites. While a few, like the Statue of Liberty, still draw crowds today, another monument briefly captured even greater public attention. Grant’s Tomb, which is dedicated to the Civil War hero and eighteenth President, is the country’s largest mausoleum and was, for a time, was more popular than even the Statue of Liberty.1

The Tomb is sits on the north edge of Riverside Park along the Hudson River at 122nd Street. The site, one of the highest points of elevation in Manhattan, gives the monument commanding visibility along the West Side. Architect John H. Duncan’s design evokes a rounded, rotunda-like reinterpretation of the ancient Tomb of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.2 The interior, inspired by Napoleon’s Dôme des Invalides, features paired sarcophagi for Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia Dent Grant.

Construction began six years after Grant’s death in 1885 and the tomb was dedicated on April 27, 1897. Public fascination continued through the early 20th-century, with renewed interest during the Great Depression when the WPA funded murals on the interior. By the 1970s, the building was falling into disrepair even as it came under management of the National Park Service. Restoration efforts eventually brought the Grant’s Tomb back to its original spender after Frank Scaturro, then a student at Columbia University, spearheaded efforts to preserve the site. Below, read more about what was once the most popular tourist site in New York:

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Building Grant’s Tomb

• Before the full mausoleum was completed, Grant’s remains were laid to rest for more than a decade (1885-1897) in a vaulted brick tomb at a temporary site in Riverside Park. The grounds had been offered by the New York City Mayor William R. Grace, after Julia Grant had selected the site for its proximity to her home at 3 East 66th Street, which she expressed in a letter to the mayor: “I hope to occupy as long as I live, and where I will be able to visit his resting place often…I have believed, and am now convinced, that the tomb will be visited by as many of his countrymen there as it would be at any other place.”3

• To seat the crowds anticipated to for its dedication, the builder of the tomb, John T. Brady, was commissioned to construct grandstands and viewing platforms for the ceremonies. After the occasion, the grandstands were deconstructed and a commemorative brick was sent to Grand Army posts all over the country.

• Opening day on April 27, 1897, drew more than 55,000 marchers and countless spectators to Riverside Park. The parade stretched for miles, with veterans’ groups, marching bands, and foreign dignitaries honoring Grant’s legacy as his tomb was officially dedicated.

Day in History

April 17, 1897. Ulysses S. Grant’s remains are quietly transferred to the newly completed Grant’s Tomb.

From the Archive

• In 1918, the Provincetown Playhouse staged their first performance in their Village location. Founded in 1915 in Massachusetts, the Provincetown Players were a group of actors and theater writers who moved their company down to the Village in 1916, eventually settling in their permanent home at 133-139 MacDougal Street. Sadly, the original building was demolished in 2009, but the playhouse was reconstructed in the ground floor.

• This Queens Intermediate School is named for acclaimed nature writer Rachel Carson. Across the street, a playground honors one of her most well-known works, Silent Spring, which warned of the dangers of using DDT by citing examples of environmental damage caused by the chemical.

• From Harrison County, MS → Did you know Barq’s Root Beer was invented in Mississippi? Edward C. Barq, a chemist, moved to Biloxi in 1897 and opened the Biloxi Artesian Bottling Works. It was there that he created the formula that would become Barq’s Root Beer.

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From the 1830s to the 1920s, the stretch of Park Row across from City Hall Park was the center of newspaper publishing in New York City. Known as Newspaper Row, the area was a hub for all things print, home to over a dozen newspaper headquarters as well as “paper manufacturers, advertising agencies, photographers, printers, printmakers.”1 Together, these offices produced as many as a quarter of a million copies of the daily papers.

The proximity to City Hall was advantageous for the publishers because reporters needed their desks within “sprinting distance” from city officials and court proceedings. During the Civil War, growing demand for timely information fueled the expansion of the newspaper industry, and papers delivered battle updates, casualty counts, and ultimately rallied public support across the country. As New Yorkers grew accustomed to immediate reporting, the publishing houses of Newspaper Row grew to stay in step. Larger, modern office buildings were constructed to meet the growing demands of news production, keeping up with the flow of news and the need for space near City Hall.2

Below, explore Newspaper Row, the 19th century media capital in Lower Manhattan:

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America’s Publishing Core

• Designed by Richard Morris Hunt in 1875, the New York Tribune Building was the tallest office building when completed and the second tallest structure in the city. Though many consider this a “protoskyscraper,” an early experiment in constructing great heights, the building was not particularly well received by critics, being derided for what one writer noted as expressing “the weariness, the fever and fret of modern life.”

• The New York World Building, also called the Pulitzer Building, launched the city into the era of modern skyscraper construction. Its 309-foot steel frame made it the tallest building in the city until 1899. Publisher Joseph Pulitzer envisioned a dome that would symbolize both the ascendance of his paper and, as he professed, the highest ideals of journalism: liberty, justice, democracy, and “true Americanism.”

• 41 Park Row is the oldest of the surviving buildings of Newspaper Row. The third building to house the operations of the New York Times, the 16-story Romanesque Revival style structure was constructed around the core of an earlier structure.

Day in History

April 10, 1841. The New-York Daily Tribune is founded. From 1875-1966, the New York Tribune building took its place on "Newspaper Row," across from City Hall Park.

From the Archive

• This 1932 photograph from social worker J.B. Lightman captures a shantytown on the East River, with the Williamsburg Bridge visible in the background and Domino Sugar Factory in the distance. We lined this up with a street view from today so you can see how much has changed.

• 17 East 128th Street is one of the few surviving wood frame houses in Harlem, built when Harlem was still a rural village separate from New York City. It stands as a reminder of Harlem’s early history before it was annexed.

• On August 3, 1855, Castle Garden opened its doors as the first immigration processing center in the United States. During its role as an immigration center, Castle Garden welcomed over 8 million people. One in six native-born American citizens can trace their lineage back to Castle Garden.

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In 1888, one of New York’s largest hotels, the Brighton Beach Hotel, was under threat— not to make room for development, but because the building itself was in danger of collapsing into the ocean. The unthinkable happened to save it: a logistical feat involving a team of locomotives pulling the hotel 600 feet along railroad tracks to save it from being swept into the sea.1

The Brighton Beach Hotel was a multi-story wood-framed structure with deep porches, towers, and manicured lawns overlooking the boardwalk and the ocean. The Hotel opened in 1878 alongside the Brighton Beach Bathing Pavilion and the Ocean Pier. Together, this development competed with Austin Corbin’s neighboring Oriental Hotel and Manhattan Beach Hotel, crowding the shoreline with “some of the poshest digs this side of fancy town.”2

The area of Brighton Beach was developed by William A. Engeman, a millionaire who made his fortune selling mules and horses to the Union Army in the Civil War. In 1868, Engeman purchased land between Coney Island and Manhattan Beach to create a beachside resort community. A contest was held to name the area, and drawing inspiration from the British coastal town, politician Henry C. Murphy and his partners proposed the name “Brighton Beach.” By 1870, Engeman built the Ocean Hotel, which was later replaced by the larger and grander Brighton Beach Hotel with its accompanying Bathing Pavilion, Ocean Pier, and racetrack. The development could accommodate over a thousand guests for ocean bathing, walking along the water, and dining at the high end restaurants.

While the hotel’s beachfront location gave visitors immediate access to the shore, this romantic setting soon threatened the building’s very foundation with erosion. In 1888, Engeman’s son (also named William), who had taken over the business after his father’s death, funded the colossal undertaking to lift the hotel onto train tracks in order to move it further inland to escape the sweeping tide. As outlandish as it sounds, this actually happened and seemingly without a hitch.

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Moving the Brighton Beach Hotel

• On the day of the move, hundreds of New Yorkers came out to witness the spectacle, with the Evening World reporting that “every train car [towards Coney Island] carried a big load to the scene of operations.”

• The monumental task of moving the hotel took around three months to coordinate. Engineers rested the entire structure on a bed of 120 custom-built flatcars running on 24 tracks,3 with the locomotives moving in perfect synchronization. The hotel crept forward at roughly six inches per minute, and the move itself was expected to be completed in ten days. By June, the Brighton Hotel welcomed visitors for the summer season some 550 feet further from the ocean.

• Ultimately, the Brighton Beach Hotel survived another 40 years after the relocation. Prohibition, strict anti-gambling laws, a series of natural disasters, and changing leisure trends eventually marked the end of Brighton’s resort era. In 1924, the building was demolished and replaced with the Riegelmann Boardwalk.

Day in History

April 3, 1888. The entire Brighton Beach Hotel is moved inland to protect it from erosion.

From the Archive

• From Newburgh, NY → Conceived in 1852, Johnston Street formed part of Newburgh's first housing development and signaled an effort to expand westward. The street includes these former triplets (just two remain) which were designed in the Italianate Renaissance Revival style.

• Last week on Instagram we shared a photo of Raymon’s Candy Shop (now Ray’s Candy Store) on 113 Avenue A, which opened in 1974. A few of our followers remarked on their favorite things to order— egg creams and pretzels.

• In 1917, a New England Society committee organized the Colony House Guild in order to take care of the children of factory girls and women. First renting a house on Atlantic Avenue they then purchased a home on Dean Street. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle documented the Colony House’s work with the borough’s children.

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When the Seagram Building landed on Park Avenue, it prompted a new era of America midcentury corporate architecture. As recently as 1947, the surrounding blocks of the avenue had never seen an office tower; but by 1963, the New York Times reported that two percent of the country’s skyscraper office space could be found here, in New York City’s newly christened “Plaza District.” This set the scene for “the most remarkable example of postwar office skyscraper construction in the country.”1

The Seagram Building was designed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the German architect and the final director of the Bauhaus. Mies already had powerful inroads in New York by the 1950s; his first U.S. commission was the interior of Philip Johnson’s apartment in 1930. With the Seagram Building, he designed a piece of tower-in-the-park architecture which ingeniously used only a quarter of the site to avoid the zoning requirement for setbacks. An icon of modernism, the simple, straightforward design of glass and metal highlights minimalist geometries and the underlying shape of the structure without added ornamentation. Though the design meant the building had significantly less space for rent on floors, “investors were attracted to the beauty of the exterior, plaza, and the Four Seasons, a restaurant on the ground floor designed by Philip Johnson.”2

Thus began the age of the tower on Park Avenue. By 1961, revisions to the city’s zoning resolutions codified its example, introducing “incentive zoning,” which offered developers extra height in exchange for incorporating public amenities like plazas or arcades. This change produced “Publicly Owned Private Space,” or POPS. Some of these were studied in William H. Whyte’s 1980 book and film, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, which had a screening at Anthology Film Archives last fall.

Below, a look across the avenue at towers invited by the Seagram’s innovation, which transformed Park Avenue from a residential promenade to carefully choreographed public space.

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Inventions of Public Space

• Diagonally across the street from the Seagram Building is the Lever House, which was designed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill in 1954. The design similarly uses only a fraction of available zoning area, and it is New York’s second ever curtain-wall glass facade building after the Secretariat. Lever House can be thought of as two parts: a 21-story tower and a horizontal base. The plinth comprises a pedestrian arcade at street-level shaded by a second story across the entire lot, save for a square open to the sky, which functions as a protected courtyard.

• The former Chemical Bank Building at 277 Park Avenue is a quintessential example of the modernist steel and glass towers that sprung up along Park Avenue in the late 50s through the 60s. It was designed by Emery Roth & Sons, who by the midcentury were known for “marketable designs that maximized the net rentable area.” By the 1980s, architects Haines Lundberg Waehler proposed an addition to the structure which would move it from “banal glass box” to “more dignified and more public-spirited.” Architects said this would be akin to “kissing a frog and turning it into a prince,” to which, upon completion, critic Paul Goldberger responded: “Park Avenue now has a better grade of frog, but that is not quite the same thing.”3 We couldn’t resist including a photo of the addition:

  

• In 1961, Citigroup (formerly First National City Bank) moved from Wall Street to Park Avenue, ushering in an era where big banks moved from Downtown to Midtown (especially Park Avenue). Originally, Vincent Astor planned for a 46-story tower called Astor Plaza on the site. His design included a helicopter pad on the roof, sunken garden, and even tunnels connecting the building to the subway to reduce sidewalk congestion.4 In the end, the tower was built (with a pretty swanky lobby) for Citigroup with the helipad and plaza, but it’s unclear if the other bells and whistles even made it to the drawing board.

Day in History

March 27, 1886. Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is born in Aachen, German Empire. Van der Rohe’s 1958 Seagram Building is among New York’s most recognizable modernist structures.

From the Archive

• From Harrison County, Mississippi → Howard Avenue was Biloxi’s main business district with storefronts include Vladimir’s Cafe, Barq’s Building (previously known as the Yerger Building) which included many medical offices, and the W.V. Joyce Building.

• Over the centuries, the coast of Lower Manhattan has been reshaped by tides, fires, demolition, development, and various colors of gentrification, from Castle Clinton to the Seaport. This glass plate negative shows a Manhattan side of a small trapezoidal square once a berth for sailing vessels, named old Coenties Slip. The slip was filled with land in 1835 to become a street.

• Designed by C.B.J. Snyder in 1898, 107 Suffolk Street was home to P.S. 160 until its closure in 1976. The Dutch Neo-Gothic building was completed in 1898. Today the building houses the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center whose mission is to nurture and develop Puerto Rican and Latino arts in the Lower East Side.

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How do you let someone know their time on stage is up? On the Bowery, the answer was simply to “Give ‘em the hook!” The phrase and the gag originated at Miner’s Bowery Theater, after a resourceful stage manager fashioned a prop shepherd’s crook attached to a long pole to yank off any amateur act that refused to leave the stage.

The Bowery is Manhattan’s oldest thoroughfare. Originally Bouwerie Road, the street connected early Dutch settlements around Wall Street to farms and villages, eventually joining Boston Post Road. From the 1820s into the 1830s, the Bowery became a wide and elegant thoroughfare lined with single-family Federal-style rowhouses inhabited by New York’s wealthy merchant class. Among the fashionable newcomers, an appetite grew for high-class European-style Theater.

Henry Astor— the older brother of fur trader, opium smuggler, and real-estate magnate John Jacob Astor, was at the time a successful butcher and proprietor of the Bull’s Head Tavern on the Bowery.1 Henry saw an opportunity to have a say in the Bowery’s transformation. Under Astor’s leadership, a consortium of wealthy residents formed the New York Association and purchased the land beneath his tavern to build a new playhouse meant to rival the Park Theatre on Park Row and Ann Street.2 Among the investors were members of prominent political families, including James Alexander Hamilton and Samuel L. Gouverneur, son-in-law of President James Monroe. By the time the New-York theater opened in 1826, it boasted the largest auditorium on the continent. Its fate would foreshadow what would become of the Bowery in the coming years: ”built as a distinguished venue for the elite, its managers quickly recognized that the real money lay elsewhere with the vast working public, with its eager and immediate hunger.”3

Theaters along the Bowery learned to be the most nimble programmatically, constantly adapting to meet the tastes of new audiences as the neighborhood shifted around them. The world of New York City theaters was stratified with implicit class associations. By the 1840s, urban theaters were important democratic gathering spaces where ticket holders could relax, voice political opinions, and mingle with allies and enemies, either in the pit or costlier boxes.

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Theaters of Manhattan’s oldest thoroughfare

• The Bowery Theater’s most successful period was from the 1830s to the 1850s, when it became a proud hub of American nativist culture. Fittingly, it was during this time that it took the name “American Theater.” The building weathered waves of neighborhood change with shifting immigrant populations and even rebuilt after a series of 19th century fires. But the curtain finally fell in 1929, and the theater was closed for good.

• Miner’s Bowery Theater, where “give ‘em the hook” originated, stood on the east side of the Bowery just south of Delancey Street at 165–167 Bowery. By 1878, the Third Avenue Elevated shaded the thoroughfare’s sidewalks with tracks overhead, darkening the street until 1955 when the El was dismantled.

• This theater was on Third Avenue, but we’ll give it a pass: Built about 1880, the Lyric Theater began as a restaurant and was converted into a music hall before its 1910 renovation as one of New York’s earliest motion picture houses. Originally seating 274, the theater doubled its capacity in 1923 in response to the growing taste for movie-going. By the 1930s, the Lyric’s clientele consisted chiefly of transients from the Bowery, a few blocks to the south, who paid ten cents to see two features (one a western), a newsreel, and a short subject. This was one more house where the acts changed, but the restless appetite for entertainment never really did.

Day in History

March 20, 1872. The City of New York designates the portion of Central Park between 79th and 84th Streets as the location for the new Metropolitan Museum of Art.

From the Archive

• Speaking of movies: See what a 1913 outdoor movie theater looked like in 1913, pictured here in Flatlands, Brooklyn. St. Thomas Aquinas, the church that hosted the event to fundraise for a new school building, still holds the distinction of being the only Catholic Church on Flatbush Avenue.

• Playwright and Queens local “Mr. Bayside” John Lionel Golden produced over 150 plays and musicals. Famously, he and his wife Margaret opened their huge property in Bayside to the neighborhood for recreational activities. According to the Parks Department, “some Bayside residents remember seeing Golden strolling in his white suit, broad-rimmed hat, and spats, carrying a silver-handled cane.” When the Goldens died, they donated the property to the city with the stipulation that it remain a park.

• The U.S. Rubber Company Building, on the corner of 58th Street, was one of the most prominent and important of the many automobile-related structures concentrated on Broadway above 47th street. The building’s design features a distinctive rounded corner and vertically-grouped windows with metal spandrels and thin, continuous piers.

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Almost forty years before the Empire State Building defined Midtown’s skyline, another colossal structure dominated the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. In the early 1890s, the avenue was still lined with three to five-story mansions and townhomes belonging to New York’s elite.1 Sensing that the city’s wealthy were moving uptown, two members of the Astor family anticipated the era of private mansions on Lower Fifth would soon end.

To bring this change to life, William Waldorf Astor commissioned architect Henry J. Hardenbergh to design a 450-room hotel in the German Renaissance style. The Waldorf featured an interior garden court, an entrance hall of Sienna marble, and a Marie Antoinette-themed parlor (complete with antiques to match, courtesy the hotel’s operator). The hotel also boasted a mall-like arcade of interior shops and supposedly invented room service.2 A year after its completion, Hardenberg would go on to develop and design one of New York’s most famous apartment houses, the Dakota.

Not long after the Waldorf opened, John Jacob Astor IV would develop the neighboring lot (once his mother’s mansion, more on that below) to build a companion, the Astoria, which was named for a town he established in Oregon.3 The neighbors eventually joined together as the Waldorf-Astoria, then the largest hotel in the world. Curiously, a double hyphen (Waldorf=Astoria) was used at one point to represent the corridors connecting the two buildings.

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The Largest Hotel in the World

• New York City had its share of hotels prior to the Waldorf-Astoria’s opening, but this was the first to bring Gilded Age social life out into the wide open. It not only provided large and lavish spaces for the wealthy to entertain but also the opportunity for the rest of New York to observe and covet their lifestyle.

• In 1929, the hotel was demolished ahead of the construction of the Empire State Building. Plans went ahead for a new Waldorf-Astoria to be constructed further uptown (as was fashionable) on Park Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets. Opened in 1931, it was the largest, the tallest and the most expensive hotel ever built, not just succeeding its illustrious predecessor, but surpassing it in every way imaginable.

Day in History

Manhattan, 1893. The Waldorf Hotel opens at Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street. Four years later, the Astoria Hotel opened on the same block.

From the Archive

• From Harrison County, MS → William K.M. DuKate moved from Indiana to Mississippi as a telegraph operator. In 1881, he joined Lazaro Lopez (1850-1903), F. William Elmer (1847-1926), William Gorenflo (1844-1932), and James Maycock (1826-1892) to form the Lopez, Elmer and Company, an cannery on the Back Bay of Biloxi. By 1902, the factories of Biloxi ranked second to those of Baltimore, Maryland in canning American oysters. DuKate’s home, at Howard Avenue and Magnolia Street, was constructed in 1894.

• This postal building once served as the headquarters of Brooklyn Local 361 of the Bridge, Structural, and Ornamental Ironworkers Union. In the 1920s, a group of Mohawk ironworkers from Quebec joined the union after relocating to New York. Many settled nearby in Boerum Hill, forming a community known as “Little Caughnawaga.” By the 1950s, the enclave numbered roughly 700 residents, many of whom worked on landmark projects such as the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and Twin Towers. In 2019, plans were filed to replace the post office with an 11-story residential tower. The building was demolished in 2020, and postal operations later relocated to Dean Street.

• This six-story new law brick tenement was erected in 1903 for stores and 20 families. It was designed by architect Bernstein & Bernstein. The first story used to be occupied by Café Royal from 1908 until 1952, one of the most popular social venues for Yiddish theater performers, as well as other Jewish writers, celebrities, and characters during that time. Paul Muni, Jack Benny, David Sarnoff, Fannie Hurst, Eddie Cantor, Will Durant, Carl Van Vechen, and Sarah Adler were all Café Royal habitués.

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Tiffany’s is one of the world’s most famous jewelers. Tiffany & Co. began as a shop selling “stationary and fancy goods,” eventually evolving by the mid 19th-century to define jewelry as its defining product. The businesses was founded by Charles L. Tiffany and John B. Young, though Tiffany eventually bought out his partner and renamed the business “Tiffany & Co,” marking the start of a brand that would grow with New York City’s own ambitions.

By the time Charles Tiffany had died in 1902, he already made plans to move the storefront uptown, helping create one of New York’s first corridors of luxury shopping. Some of the business passed to his son, Louis Comfort Tiffany, a trained artist and craftsman who would go on to become the company’s first design director, leading the development of both jewelry and interior decoration. Tiffany Studios, Louis’ glass and interior-design firm, sometimes sold items through the Tiffany & Co. shop, including Favrile glass pieces and lamps that slipped into the showcases of Fifth Avenue as merchandise and advertisement for his artistic vision. Tiffany & Co's evolution from small downtown storefront to a global luxury house is, in many ways, a story of Manhattan’s growing obsession with status and display.

The Rise of Tiffany & Co.

• Tiffany and Young began in a small shop on Broadway and Warren Street. When Tiffany & Co. moved uptown to Fifth Avenue and 37th Street in 1905, some said their departure from Broadway signaled its end as a preeminent shopping district. Charles L. Tiffany’s successor, Charles T. Cook, purchased the site, then most expensive commercial lot in Manhattan, and hired Sanford White of McKim, Mead & White to design a structure inspired by a 16th-century Venetian Palazzo. At this point, the prominence of Tiffany & Co. as status symbol for the wealthy grew even further. Following their move uptown, they regularly sold $6 million in diamonds each year and kept up to $40 million in jewels in its vault.

• In 1904 Tiffany & Co. purchased No. 142 East 41st Street, formerly a livery stable, to be transformed into an “automobile stable.” According to Daytonian in Manhattan, Tiffany & Co. was “among the first of Manhattan’s upscale retailers to switch from horse-drawn delivery wagons to motor-powered trucks.”1 Curiously, the trucks were electric and charging plugs were called out in the building’s construction drawings. The fleet totaled around 30 vehicles that traveled about 25 miles per day, making deliveries at a rate of around two parcels per minute.

• By the mid-century, Tiffany & Co. moved uptown once more to 5th Avenue and 57th Street, in a building designed by Cross & Cross, “described as ‘modern but not extreme,’ according to plans filed yesterday.”2 Above the entrance, the “heroic figure of Atlas with his clock, first installed in the 1853 in front of the Tiffany Store at Broadway,” continuing the legacy of the little fancy stationary shop downtown.

Day in History

March 6, 1970, Manhattan. Three members of the radical Weather Underground group are killed by the premature explosion of a bomb being assembled at a townhouse on West 11th Street.

From the Archive

• The Chelsea Fiber Mills at the end of Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint were part of North Brooklyn’s rope industry. The mills began supplying nearby shipyards with material in 1868 and continued operations well into the 20th century, manufacturing marine rope from sisal, manila, jute, and hemp. This mill and another North Brooklyn rope producer, the American Manufacturing Company, employed around 4,000 people, many of whom lived in the neighborhood or across the creek in Queens.

• To celebrate Queens Public Library’s 130th Anniversary, learn about the brave and brilliant women, with named places in Queens, who have built, shaped, and sustained the library.

• See what the Lower East Side looked like in the 1860s: the corner entrance may have led to a hotel (it is listed in the Warshaw Collection of Business Americana: Hotels) while the side door led to some kind of eatery selling, you heard it right, oysters.

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This cold winter and its accompanying snowfall has New Yorkers waxing poetic about blizzards of yore. There’s a clear competition over who can claim to remember the worst of the winter weather, with each generation recalling its own formative storm: in 1996, New York City public schools closed for the first time since 1974, while “Snowzilla” in 2016 brought 27.5 inches of snow to Central Park, the last blizzard of such magnitude in recent memory.

To understand why recent storms loom so large in the city’s imagination, it helps to look back at some of the earlier winter weather events that tested New York’s resilience. These episodes below show how blizzards have repeatedly forced the city to adapt:

Winter Weather Events

• March, 1888: A catastrophic snowstorm dubbed “the Great White Hurricane” blanketed parts of the East Coast. New York City saw 85 mph wind gusts and snow drifts that reached the second stories of some buildings. Three days of brutal weather broke telephone and telegraph lines, creating hazardous conditions with exposed wires and infrastructure obstructing street and sidewalk traffic.

• January, 1918: Flushing Bay froze solid after a bleak 43-day cold stretch.1 The freeze delayed deliveries of coal to the area, and so methods to break up the ice were devised. Workers chiseled away with picks and pry bars, then rope was used to haul off chunks and loosen the ice, and at some point dynamite was deployed (it failed).

• December, 1947: A post-holiday blizzard surprises the city with around 26 inches of snow, which fell silently on the night after Christmas at a rate of around 3 inches per hour.2 New Yorkers were digging themselves out for days.

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This Week in History

February 24, 1988, Manhattan. Celebrated Art Deco architect Irwin S. Chanin dies at 98. Chanin designed several New York buildings, including The Century, an apartment building on Central Park West. We featured Chanin’s work in last week’s newsletter.

From the Archive

• This 1862 lithograph of Church and Franklin Streets shows just how narrow Church Street once was. The thoroughfare was widened in 1928 to accommodate the Eighth Avenue Subway Line, and the west side of the street was moved back around 65 feet, with buildings demolished or truncated to make room.

• From Harrison County, MS → Still standing! Gulfport’s branch of the First National Bank is opposite the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad Office Building, and both structures were designed by local architect Thomas Sully in the early 20th century.3

• This often overlooked mid-century building on 14th Street (blame the bleak retail tenant on the ground floor) at No. 350 was designed in 1949 as the First Federal Savings & Loan Bank. Its chamfered corner entrance features a classical surround, quite the entrance to what is now a Panda Express.

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In 1925, the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts) opened in Paris, showcasing a new style moderne of architecture, interiors, and design. Among its 15-16 million visitors were many Americans, some of whom would export the style home across the Atlantic. One of them was Irwin S. Chanin, a young engineer and architect credited with popularizing Art Deco (a name derived from the exhibition) in New York through his ambitious developments and designs. By 1952, Chanin’s organization encompassed twenty-five firms and corporations in architecture, engineering, construction, and real estate.

Irwin S. Chanin was born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and went on to build an expansive portfolio that included apartment buildings, office towers, theaters, modest one and two-family homes, and industrial plants. He studied architecture and engineering at The Cooper Union (which later named its architecture school after him) and graduated in 1915. In partnership with his brother Henry I. Chanin, who managed the firm’s business operations, Irwin founded the Chanin Construction Company in 1919. Together, they developed numerous buildings, including the Lincoln Hotel and the eponymous Chanin Building. Because Irwin was not yet a registered architect when the building was designed in 1927, he hired “the rather conservative architectural firm of Sloan & Robertson to examine plans prepared by his company. Sloan & Robertson were responsible for the exterior form of the building, while [Irwin S.] Chanin personally supervised the interior decoration and exterior detailing, much of it executed by the French-trained sculptor Rene Chambellan,” according to the 1988 Landmarks Preservation Commission report. The year after the building’s completion in 1929, Chanin earned his architectural license and went on to design several of his most acclaimed apartment houses.

Chanin’s Constructions

• The eponymous Chanin Building rises 56 stories above 42nd Street at Lexington Avenue and greets commuters leaving Grand Central Station. Its facade features sculptural decoration in terra cotta, bronze, and limestone by Rene Paul Chambellan, with colored glass, stone, and metal integrated throughout. The 50th and 51st floors, near Irwin Chanin’s offices, featured a full movie theater.

• The Century Apartments is “a sophisticated essay in Art Deco design,” whose twin-towered form, enabled by the 1929 Multiple Dwelling Law, it is one of a small group of related structures that give Central Park West its distinctive silhouette.

• One of Chanin’s lesser known works is the Coney Island Pumping Station, an elegant and utilitarian elliptical structure of limestone and granite. According to our partners at Historic Districts Council, statues of horses and Neptune adorned the building, likely inspired by the avenue on which it stands; but these were later moved to the Brooklyn Museum.

• Help us solve a building mystery from the architect: we can’t identify what glass-block industrial building this is, but maybe you know.

Day in History

February 20, 1861, Manhattan. President-elect Abraham Lincoln attends a performance of Verdi's "Un ballo in maschera" at the Academy of Music opera house.

From the Archive

• The Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences is the oldest cultural institution on the borough. It was started by a group of naturalists and antiquarians who pooled their personal collections to create a museum.

• Did you know the composer of Carry Me Back to Old Virginny was from Flushing, Queens? The song was the official state song of Virginia until 1997, when it was retired for its controversial lyrics. Explore musician James Alan Bland’s legacy and more Black history in Queens, curated by the Queens Public Library.

• From Newburgh, NY → The Newburgh Free Academy was a three-story building on Montgomery and South Street. The graduating class of 1890 was around 50 and is pictured here, with the class dog.

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Before the 1870s, housing stock in New York City was dominated by two main types: tenements and rowhouses. Tenements provided crowded low-cost housing ($2-4 per room per month) for poor and working-class immigrants in neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side. Most were built to a standard size (25 feet wide by 100 feet deep) sometimes with an additional tenement house in the rear yard.1 These buildings became infamous for poor ventilation, lack of light, and unsanitary conditions, with many early examples lacking proper plumbing.

Row houses, by contrast, were designed for middle-class families, and appealed to the “Anglo-Saxon bias towards ‘house’ and ownership.”2 These buildings were adapted from Dutch and English architecture, where a families of varying sizes could live under one roof. In England, they were called “terraced houses,” where the entire block of connected buildings would make a terrace. In New York, they spread throughout the 19th century in neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village, Brooklyn Heights, and Bay Ridge, where Wogan Terrace nods to the English tradition in name and form.

As the city’s population grew and Manhattan became increasingly dense, so did the appetite for a new type of housing, one that could attract a growing upper and middle class while offering the efficiencies of urban living. Thus, the apartment-house or ‘French Flat’ came to New York, which offered privacy and modern conveniences in a shared building, a concept The Bowery Boys have called “a daring style of communal and affordable living.”

While many people think some of the first apartment-houses in the city were as extravagant as the Dakota, early apartment houses began on a much humbler scale and were stepping stones toward the city’s later (and grander) iterations.

Early Apartment Buildings

• This pair of stately Romanesque Revival style brick apartment buildings was constructed at a time when apartment-style living was becoming more socially acceptable for New York’s burgeoning middle class. They exemplified the use of distinctive architecture and evocative naming to elevate the image of the multiple-dwelling building type, which had long been associated with the cramped and squalid quarters of Manhattan’s worst tenement districts. In this case, the choice of the noble-sounding names “Kaiser” and “Rhine” signaled the overwhelmingly German heritage of their presumed occupants, as well as the prominent Rhinelander family’s involvement in their construction and in broader real estate development in Yorkville.

• Completed in 1870, the Stuyvesant Apartments are considered New York’s first apartment building for middle-class residents. The building was designed in the Victorian Gothic Style by Richard Morris Hunt. When the building opened, annual rent was between $1,000-1,800 (we approximate $50k-92k per year in today’s dollars).

• This Queen Ann style building with “high bay window… classical sways and small broken pediment” at 37 Willow Street was designed by architect A.F. Norris in 1886 as one of the first apartment houses in the city. It is marked by a plaque, which was erected in 1956 by the New York Community Trust.

This Week in History

On February 13, 1915, The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers is established at the Hotel Claridge to protect the copyrighted musical compositions of its members.

From the Archive

• From Harrison County, MS → This photo shows the corner of the W.V. Joyce Building, a top destination for shoppers in the Gulf Coast region from 1923 until it closed in the 1960s. It was the first three-story building on the avenue in the early 20th century.3

• The irregular street angles of the Village have produced several flatiron-shaped buildings, including this one on Hudson Street, built in 1849 and once home to a lock and safe company.

• Check out the stereograph (an early form of a 3-D photographs) showing the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Photographs like this were printed on cards and sometimes collected by tourists. “Viewings” of them was comparable to watching a video.4

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The first major train terminal on 42nd Street was Grand Central Depot. Commissioned by Cornelius Vanderbilt, who controlled most of the rail lines into the city, the New York Times called it “architecturally disgracefully bad,” going as far as saying “it was barely up to date in 1871”…the very year it opened.

By 1899, a requirement for all railroads to electrify service sentenced the depot further into obsolescence, leading railroad executives, engineers, and architects to dream of a grander Grand Central. In 1903, New York Central launched a competition to redesign the new station. Four teams submitted proposals, but Minnesota-based firm Reed & Stem won with a forward-thinking plan that separated rail, automobile, and pedestrian circulation.

Grand Central’s Grand Idea

• Though architects Reed & Stem were initially awarded the project, New York Central added local firm Warren & Wetmore to the project to enhance the design’s grandeur. While the relationship between the architects is said to have been fraught, the resulting building was a perfect marriage of their ideals. Whitney Warren (a cousin of William Vanderbilt) was responsible for the terminal’s iconic Beaux-Arts south facade, featuring triple triumphal arches flanked by tall columns, crowned by the statue The Glory of Commerce, with Minera, Mercury, and Hercules above a clock.

• Chief engineer William Wilgus proposed the tracks be submerged underground and, to generate revenue, he had the genius idea of leasing the “air rights” over the tracks from Madison to Lexington and 42nd through 50th Streets. This 1914 photo shows what the newly covered streets looked like: talk about tabula rasa for Midtown’s future development.

• Inside the station, the ceiling of the Main Concourse depicts a starry night sky with zodiac constellations along lines of the celestial sphere in a mirrored formation. After Grand Central opened, a commuter supposedly noticed that the zodiac figures were reversed left to right. Interestingly, postcards which were printed prior to the terminal’s opening show the correct orientation.

This Week in History

On February 2, 1913, Grand Central Terminal opened its doors to the public, where more than 150,000 people came to see the opening. Today, it welcomes nearly 750,000 visitors each day.

From the Archive

• Hey NYC, are you sick of the snow yet? In Newburgh, city plows pushed snow into the middle lane of Broadway to keep intersections open. When snow stacked up too high, the center-lane piles were dumped into the Hudson River.

• Speaking of frigid temperatures, check out this photo from the South Street Seaport Museum showing ocean liner USAT Edmund B. Alexander navigating through ice.

• See an early version of the Northern Boulevard Crossing in Flushing, Queens. This variation was free to cross unless you exceeded a speed limit of five miles per hour.

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A predecessor to both the World Trade Center and the PATH System, Hudson Terminal was an engineering marvel and transit super hub designed to serve more people than the original Penn Station. When Port Authority gained control of the Hudson Tubes (which now carry the PATH) in the 1960s, it also acquired air rights over the Terminal building. Ultimately, this gave the agency the power to radically transform the area to create the World Trade Center complex.

Manhattan’s Forgotten Superhub

• The terminal connected the rail and streetcar lines which were coming from New Jersey with lines in Manhattan. Above the station was a mammoth office-tower complex comprising 22 stories and 375 feet in height, among the world’s largest upon opening in 1909.

• Hudson Terminal was constructed by the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad with a novel design which employed ramps from the street to mezzanine to avoid rush hour delays at stairs.

• The building was demolished in 1971, but some of its tracks remain and are in use by the new World Trade Center and PATH station.

Day in History

1882, New York. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States, is born in Hyde Park, N.Y. His wife, Sara, commissioned this house for her son and daughter-in-law in 1907.

From the Archive

• From Harrison County, MS → Known by the city has the “finest Spanish Colonial Revival building in Biloxi,” the Old Biloxi Library is a handsome structure that once greeted those walking up Lameuse Street from the coastline just south of Beach Street (now Beach Boulevard).

• Explore the story of how Udall’s Cove Park was saved, “as a precious remaining cove, with its upland and marshes, its fresh water streams and its fine springs and wild life”

• Mark Twain’s stately Greenwich Village residence at 21 Fifth Avenue was designed by the architect of Grace Church and known by his biographer as a “distinctly suitable setting for Mark Twain.”

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Pushcarts were once ubiquitous across many of our city streets. Since the city’s first vending regulations more than three centuries ago, street vendors have sold to generations of New Yorkers. For a large number of New Yorkers, the pushcarts served as the grocery stores of the day. You could buy anything from fruit and vegetables to meat and fish to clothes!

By the early 20th century, the Lower East Side, then the densest part of New York, saw a high concentration of vendors who cropped up to meet the demand of newly arrived immigrant communities. Beyond the LES, other markets grew to meet the demand of new New Yorkers. Check out some pushcart history beyond the Lower East Side below:

Street Vending History

• In the early 20th century, Brooklyn’s 13th Avenue saw a wave of new residents, mainly Italian and Jewish, who relocated from the Lower East Side. The Borough Park Pushcart Market, at 13th Avenue and 39th Street, served the growing population until the city-run 13th Avenue Market took its place.

• Beneath the Park Avenue viaduct, from 11th to 116th Street, is La Marqueta, now a revitalized urban marketplace. But before that, it was an informal hub of vendors who pedaled both wares and food for surrounding East Harlem.

• Pushcarts along the Bronx’s Arthur Avenue later became part of the New York Retail Market, which opened with 120 stalls in 1941.

Day in History

January 9, 1940, Manhattan. The Essex Market opens as part of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s “war on pushcarts.” According to the NY Times, a crowd of 3,500 residents gathered for the grand opening.

From the Archive

• Take a virtual walk through Greenwich Village to learn about the legacy of folk and protest music in the neighborhood (and beyond).

• The New York Produce Exchange, seen at a distance in this photo, was once the leading export market in the country for goods like wheat, flour, and cottonseed oil.

• The oldest remaining school building in Newburgh, this deep brick structure was constructed as The Clinton Street School in 1840.

Last year, support from the National Archives enabled us to launch our new-and-improved site, including adding walking tours and expanding beyond NYC to cities like San Francisco and Toronto. Thanks to their support, you can explore nearly 90 local walks in NYC and browse historical archives in other cities.

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In the early 20th century, housing boomed in Manhattan, especially after the subway opened. Upwards of 70,000 apartments were built between 1905 and 1908, which offered well-lit rooms, hot running water, electric elevators, and more, distinguishing them from the “old law” tenements of yore.

Reformers linked overcrowded and poorly ventilated housing to tuberculosis (then the second leading cause of death) and other disease, and some argued good architecture, with access to light and air, could protect public health. We’ve showcased a few “model tenements” below:

Light, Air, and Better Housing

• Shively Sanitary Tenements had a design which prioritized features encouraging exposure to fresh air: open stairways, courtyards, rooftop recreation areas, and triple-hung windows, and balconies were all thought to confer therapeutic benefits.

• Just on the other side of East 78th Street, the City and Suburban Homes Company filled the block with 13 model tenements in the early 20th century which are visible in the background of this photo. Like the Shively, the buildings “attempted to address the housing problems of the nation’s working poor,” and are the oldest extant project of this type.

• The Phipps Model Tenements, which were constructed in 1906 at East 31st Street and Second Avenue, also included courtyards entrances designed as the social hub of the building.

Today in History

PHOTO: Rex Cole appliance showroom at Fourth Avenue and Pacific Street.

From the Archive

• When McSorley’s Old Ale House opened its doors for business in 1854, Franklin Pierce was president, the Civil War was still a decade away, and lunch was free to patrons.

• Check out some of the photos that document the aftermath of Hurricane Camille on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi in 1969.

• Explore a sampling of the diverse musicians who've lived and practiced their art in Queens.

When plans for a new East River span were unveiled, the proposed design for the Williamsburg Bridge drew criticism for its “graceless form.” Architect Henry Hornbostel was brought on to improve the appearance of the bridge, designing the decoration on the towers and approach. He also envisioned a structure that would be illuminated at night. Ultimately, the bridge was designed for utility: it would alleviate the congestion on the Brooklyn Bridge, at the time the only span across the East River.

Williamsburg Bridge History

• After the bridge opened in 1903, Delancey Street became a bustling hub for transportation with pedestrians spilling out onto the street to board surface-level streetcars or underground trolleys (entrance at foreground in this postcard).

• On the Brooklyn side, trolleys and streetcars converged at the Williamsburg Bridge Plaza, located roughly where the bus terminal is today. The plaza had covered waiting areas and shelters for the various lines that stopped here.

• On the 33rd anniversary of the Williamsburg Bridge, in 1936, Mayor LaGuardia opened a new vehicular roadway. This road replaced trolley lines on the north side of the bridge that had degraded beyond repair.

Today in History

New York, 1903. The Williamsburg Bridge opens and is the longest suspension bridge span in the world (until 1924).

From the Archive

• This 1950s photo of Broadway in Newburgh shows snow being piled up on the center lane before being dumped in the Hudson River. Now that’s snow management!

• Take a hike (literally) in Inwood, where a unique pieces of city parkland encompasses the largest remaining forest in Manhattan.

• Learn about the design of The Packer Collegiate Institute which features nine Gothic arches and stained-glass windows produced by Tiffany Studios.

Back in March, we shared a bit about thanks in part to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and, as one of our readers pointed out, through the handiwork of Robert Moses. Today, we’re diving deeper to take a look at what transformed this area around the East River, including the site of the UN.

When the East River Went Global

• In the 1920s, the growing obsolescence, squalid conditions, and rising vacancies in old-law tenements near a booming business district provoked developers to dream of lucrative, high-density private construction. Enter: Tudor City, an amenity-rich alternative for white-collar workers who wanted to “walk to work.”

• We dug deep in our collections for a glimpse at the UN site prior to its construction. One of our (freshly located) finds: a photo of a partially empty lot at 42nd Street and the East River, with the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants of “Abattoir Center” in the background. We’re not sure what the people in the photo are doing, but maybe you have a clue?

• This 1956 photo of the completed United Nations complex offers a stark contrast to the image above, with the view towards the East River dominated by the Secretariat Building. This International Style tower was the first skyscraper in the city to feature a glass curtain wall, now an extremely common design method.

Today in History

Manhattan, 1946. The UN votes to accept a six-block tract of Manhattan real estate offered as a gift by John D. Rockefeller Jr. for its headquarters.

From the Archive

• Check out these postcards of George Ohr’s Pottery Studio in Biloxi, MS. Ohr was once called the “Mad Potter of Biloxi,” and we can understand why!

• The Flushing Civil War Monument, at the intersection of Northern Boulevard and Linden Place, looked a lot different back in 1900 compared to today.

• The Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, on East 3rd Street, was once so grand that it resembled a cathedral! Today, Village Preservation is fighting to save it.

While the talk of the town is on residential-to-office building conversions, we’re looking back to another building type that’s been reimagined for decades: schools.

Inside NYC’s Repurposed Classrooms

• Now home to seven apartments, 295 East 8th Street opened in 1887 as the Tompkins Square Lodging for Boys and Industrial School. It’s the oldest remaining property built for the use by the Children’s Aid Society.

• The P.S. 9 Annex, constructed 1895 to accommodate increasing enrollment across the street at P.S. 9, was converted into 22 co-op apartments in 1989.

• 205 Warren Street was built in 1887 as St. Paul’s Parochial School and features large windows, common in early academic buildings, many of which were originally constructed before the advent of electric lighting.

Today in History

Manhattan, 1905. Mark Twain is the guest of honor at a large and fancy party at Delmonico's celebrating his 70th birthday (which was on November 30th).

From the Archive

• Take a virtual walk through Mott Haven, once a dense industrial base and still full of rich history and architectural distinction.

• After Newburgh’s Palatine Hotel opened in 1893, New York doctors would send their patients up for a cure of the fresh air and scenery.

• From Queens Name Explorer: Read up on the diverse musicians who've lived and practiced their art in Queens.