Located on East 79th Street at the corner of Fifth Avenue and across from Central Park, sits one of New York City’s last turn-of-the-century, French-Gothic styled-structures. Designed by Gilded-Age architect Charles Pierrepont Henry Gilbert, the building was home to Isaac D. Fletcher and Harry F. Sinclair, giving it the fitting name of the Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion. Now, the mansion is occupied by the Ukrainian Institute of America, a nonprofit organization that has promoted Ukrainian art, music and literature since 1948. Ahead, join 6sqft on a tour of the landmarked building and check out some of the unique features within this hidden-in-plain sight New York city architectural gem.

In 1898, banker Isaac Fletcher commissioned C. P.H. Gilbert to build a house modeled after William K. Vanderbilt’s neo-Loire Valley chateau. Completed in 1899, the Gothic drip moldings, gargoyles, huge entryway and limestone pinnacles of the mansion highlight the elegant, turn-of-the-century design. Ornamentations include a winged monster on the chimney, dolphins on the entrance railings and heads on the second-floor windows.

Self-made millionaire Harry Ford Sinclair bought the mansion in 1918 from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of which Fletcher had left his house and art collection. Two years prior, Sinclair founded the Sinclair Oil Corporation, becoming the country’s largest independent oil company.

But a few years later, while living at the home, Sinclair was implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal after he was found giving bribes to Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall for an oil lease on government-owned land in Wyoming. After a judge found he had hired a detective agency to follow every jury member ahead of his trial,  Sinclair served six months in prison for jury tampering.

While Sinclair returned to his 79th Street home after a stint in jail, he soon sold the mansion in 1930. Direct descendants of Peter Stuyvesant, Augustus and Anne van Horne, bought the home from Sinclair. In 1954, Augustus’ executor, following his death, sold the property to a group of investors in 1954, who then sold it to the Ukrainian Institute the following year.

Originally founded in 1948 by inventor William Dzus, the Ukrainian Institute of America got its start in West Islip, Long Island. The Institute later moved to the historic building on East 79th Street in 1955, its current home.

The Museum Mile mansion, which sits in the city’s Fifth Avenue Historic District and the Metropolitan Museum Historic District, was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1978. The designation from the National Parks Service cites the north-facing home’s “slate-shingle-covered mansard roof that features both copper and terra cotta decoration” and the main stair’s “carved stone seahorses” as some of the noteworthy design elements.

The property underwent some restorations in the late 1990s, under the Institute’s direction. In an article in the New York Times in 1996, the institute’s architect, Joesph Levine, told the newspaper that 25 percent of the slate would be removed and leaks repaired, as part of a $250,000 project.

Artist-Activists Daria Marchenko and Daniel Green in front of their artwork

The institute’s last installation included a massive portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin, made with 5,000 bullet shells from the Eastern Ukraine war. The five-artwork installation, titled Five Elements of War, was designed by Ukrainian artist-activists Daria Marchenko and Daniel Green and displayed last winter.

“Art sometimes has more power than wars and can provoke long lasting changes,” the artists said. “We felt that we could not explore what is happening in Ukraine with just paint so we decided to turn ammunition into art. Bullets and debris of weapons are what is left behind after people are killed and are used to represent the lives of the people lost in this war.”

RELATED:

• How the Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion Went from Private Home to the Ukrainian Institute of America
• Gilded-Age Riverside Drive Mansion With Basement Pool Returns to the Market for $20M
• C.P.H. Gilbert-Designed Park Slope Brownstone Retains All of Its Historic Splendor

All photos taken by Trel Brock exclusively for 6sqft. Photos are not to be reproduced without written permission from 6sqft.

Steeplechase Park circa 1930-45, via Digital Commonwealth

Steeplechase Park was the first of Coney Island‘s three original amusement parks (in addition to Luna Park and Dreamland) and its longest lasting, operating from 1897 to 1964. It had a Ferris Wheel modeled after that of Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition, a mechanical horse race course (from which the park got its name), scale models of world landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben, “Canals of Venice,” the largest ballroom in the state, and the famous Parachute Jump, among other rides and attractions.

After World War II, Coney Island’s popularity began to fade, especially when Robert Moses made it his personal mission to replace the resort area’s amusements with low-income, high-rise residential developments. But ultimately, it was Fred Trump, Donald’s father, who sealed Steeplechase’s fate, going so far as to throw a demolition party when he razed the site in 1966 before it could receive landmark status.

The entrance to Steeplechase in 1905

Steeplechase in 1920

Steeplechase in 1927

George Tilyou opened Steeplechase Park in 1897. His parents ran the famous Surf House resort, popular among Manhattan and Brooklyn city officials, so George grew up on the boardwalk. He started his career in real estate, but after visiting the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, he knew he wanted to bring the Ferris Wheel (then a brand new engineering feat) to Coney Island. His was half the size, but nothing like it existed outside Chicago, so it quickly became Coney Island’s biggest attraction. After a few years, he decided to add other amusements around the Wheel and began charging guests 25 cents to enter the now-enclosed park. To keep visitors interested and compete with the other amusement parks popping up, he continually added new attractions, like “A Trip to the Moon,” an early motion simulator ride, and the 235-foot-long “Giant See-Saw,” which lifted riders almost 170 feet into the sky.

The “Caterpillar” ride at Steeplechase in 1944

In July 1907, a lit cigarette thrown in a trashcan burned down Steeplechase Park, but by 1909 it was completely rebuilt with all new attractions. Three years later, George Tilyou passed away and left the park to his children, who faced the uncertainty of the entire boardwalk after World War II. Competitor Luna Park also caught fire in 1944, which led to its closure in 1946. This might sound like a good thing for Steeplechase, but it greatly depleted the overall amusements in Coney Island, fueling interest from developers. And in 1950, Luna was totally razed and rezoned for residential development.

This was a sentiment echoed by “master planner” Robert Moses, who expressed his disdain for Coney Island, implying that those who went there were low-class. Beginning in the ’30s, he tried to convert the area into parkland, and in 1947 he moved the New York Aquarium to the former home of Dreamland to prevent another amusement park from opening. In the late ’50s, having served for almost a decade as the city housing commissioner, he built several high-rise, low-income residential developments, completely altering the character of the amusement area. By the ’60s, Coney Island saw a rise in crime, affecting attendance at Steeplechase and the surrounding parks.

Image of Coney Island today with residential towers in the background © Daniel Fleming

Despite the end of Coney Island’s heyday, in 1962, a new amusement park, Astroland, opened up next to Steeplechase. It kept the east end zoned for amusements, and was beneficial to Steeplechase. But by this time, George Tilyou’s children were getting older and concerned about the park’s future. His daughter Marie was the majority stockholder, and without the blessing of her siblings, sold all the family’s Coney Island property to none other than Fred Trump (that’s right, Donald‘s father) in February 1965. She rejected other bids by local entities like Astroland and the owners of Nathan’s Famous, leading most to believe the sale to Trump was more financially lucrative as a possible residential redevelopment. Since he was unable to obtain the necessary zoning variances, it was assumed that Steeplechase would continue to operate as an amusement park until then. But Trump didn’t open it for the 1965 season, and the following year, amid efforts to landmark the park, he threw a “demolition party” where people were invited to throw bricks at the facade of Steeplechase. He then bulldozed it, thankfully sparing the beloved Parachute Jump.

MCU Park today

In a bitterly ironic twist, Trump never was able to build housing on the site, so he eventually leased it to Norman Kaufman, a ride operator who turned the property into a makeshift amusement park called Steeplechase Kiddie Park. He intended to build the park back up to its glory, but in 1981, the city (to whom Fred Trump had sold the site in 1969) wouldn’t renew his lease when other amusement operators complained of the abnormally low rent Kaufman was paying. Two years later, the city tore down any remnants of Steeplechase and turned the site into a private park, leaving this entire end of Coney Island without any amusements. For the next decade or so, many ideas for the property were floated, including one to create a new Steeplechase by KFC owner Horace Bullard, but it wasn’t until 2001 that MCU Park (formerly KeySpan Park), a minor league baseball stadium was erected. Today it’s operated by the Mets and hosts the Brooklyn Cyclones.

Fred Trump (L) and the Parachute Jump today (R)

As previously mentioned, the Parachute Jump is all that remains today of Steeplechase. It was designated an official landmark in 1977 and serves as a symbol not only of Coney Island’s history as an amusement capital but of a reminder that controversy and public antics from the Trumps go back much further than Donald’s presidency.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on 6sqft on May 18, 2016.

RELATED:

• Never-Built Coney Island Globe Tower Would Have Been a Massive Boardwalk in the Air
• VIDEO: Travel Back to Coney Island’s Summer Heyday in the 1940s
• City Will Use Eminent Domain to Seize Coney Island Land for New Amusements
• Before Nathan’s There Was Feltman’s: The History of the Coney Island Hot Dog

All historic images courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York unless otherwise noted

Jay Maisel is best known for the incredibly expressive stories he tells through his beautiful photography. But in recent years, he’s become perhaps just as well known for his New York City real estate story where he made the deal of the century when he sold his home, the Germania Bank Building at 190 Bowery. What he’s not at all known for, though, are the stories he tells through the hundreds of thousands of memories that fill his home and studio.

Maisel, who may appear gruff on the exterior (at 87 years-old, he still likes to shock), is actually incredibly kind and sentimental. He misses his home and all his toys that once filled the 35,000-square-foot building. Although he was initially intimidated by the size and upkeep costs of 190 Bowery, Maisel grew to love the home and raise his family there for 50 years. In 2015, he sold the building for $55 million and purchased a stately townhouse on Pacific Street in Cobble Hill for $15.5 million. (At the time, it was the most expensive townhouse sale in Brooklyn.) 6sqft sat down with Maisel and discussed his real estate coup, his move to Brooklyn (which is not “the city” in his view) and his most recent New York City photography series, entitled “Jaywalking.”

What was it like living in 190 Bowery? What caught your eye with that building?

I lived at 190 Bowery for almost 50 years. I was aware of what a gift it was. I didn’t take it for granted at any point. It was an amazing experience and I’m sure no one else has ever had an experience like this. Wealthy people that have that kind of space don’t have usually don’t have the desire or ability to build it themselves. That’s what I did there. We never had a contractor. We had electrical and plumbing help because otherwise, it would’ve been illegal. I only had two tenants in the first two years, Adolph Gottlieb and Roy Lichtenstein. And then I never rented it out again.

When you bought the building the neighborhood was nothing like it is now, right?

Are you joking? That’s the understatement of all time. When I moved in, every friend, every relationship, every family member unanimously said, “are you out of your fucking mind? Are you crazy?” Plus, whenever I would have someone visit the place, I’d show them it from the roof down because the view was amazing and I was very proud of it, of course. Inevitably they’d get to a physical point which was four to eight steps below the main room and they would look back through the banister and say, “You are crazy.”

People would say to me, “What if nobody wants to come down here? Who would want to come down to this neighborhood?” That was the unanimous opinion. I understand. I was overwhelmed by it the first time I saw it too.

The agent who got it for me was a guy named Jack Klein. He said, “Oh you can handle this.” To which I said, “I can afford to buy it but I don’t think I can afford to keep it up.” I remember my payments to the bank to the penny. They were $427.78 a month. It was a struggle to do it but I never took it for granted.

When Klein told me he had a bank to show me I thought immediately of a little two-story bank I knew on Broadway because, as part of his bragging, he’d shown me the place he got Rauschenberg, with Rauschenberg in it.

When I met Klein, I took an instant dislike to him and he took an instant dislike to me. I met him at a party in the middle of the day and then I met him again in the evening at another party. This time the painter friend who was trying to put us together came over and looked at us and put his arms around both of us and said, “I want both of you to know that neither of you is the prick the other one seems to be.”

So we said, “Okay, we’ll do business.”

He said, “here’s the deal, you are going to give me a check for $500, you’re never going to see that money again. I will look and look and look and find you something and I will stop when you realize you don’t know what the hell you want.” At that point, you can kiss the $500 goodbye. At that point, $500 was a lot of money.

In your mind, what were you looking for?

I had a loft at 122 2nd Avenue. I had a 10-year lease for $125 a month. I put new, first-grade maple flooring. I put in lighting. I put in a dark room. And as the end of my lease came up, he jacked up my rent to $175. I was outraged [he laughs]. I said, “nobody is ever going to do that to me again.” So I went around and tried to buy a building. But I had no idea what I was going to get into.

I wanted a lot of space and I wanted a view. I also wanted a building that was fireproof.  I used to come down the street after being away on a trip and I would come down St. Marks Place and make a right and I would always hold my breath to see if the building would be there. It was a wooden building that could’ve caught fire.

My daughter started at the Friends School on 16th when she was about five-years-old. The building extends in all directions, it’s a real rabbit warren. After the first day, my wife and I asked her, “How’d you like the school?” She said, “It’s nice, it’s small but it’s nice.” Compared to our house, the school was small.

What would your daughter’s friends say when they came over to your house?

Being her father, I didn’t get to hear what her friends say because I was away a lot. I was not the best father I could be because I traveled a lot. The amazing thing is that kids that age take certain things for granted, as a given. You tell them the sky is blue and they look outside and say, “okay, that’s it.” My daughter always thought she liked some places because these people had a lot of money. So I asked her “what do you mean they have a lot of money?” She said, “they have rugs on the floor, they have real furniture…”

Maisel home/studio

Maisel studio

More filing cabinets and collectibles.

What was the motivation to move and sell?

It’s complex. One thing is that I figured it was time. Everyone had been telling me to sell the place since I bought it. And one guy said to me, “You realize you could’ve sold that place for $3 million but now that we had a recession, you’re not going to be able to.”

I always had the building in the back of my mind as my insurance plan, my retirement plan. It was everything.

In 1995, I was around 65 years old and I retired. I didn’t stop working, I retired which meant I would no longer do any commercial work because the terms of employment had gotten very shitty. I’d put away money over the years. So for those 20 years from 1995-2015, I didn’t really make a lot of money. In fact, I spent most of my money. In my head, I knew I was going to sell this place because I can’t do that forever. At some point, I decided I would do it. Also, I was partially motivated by the inundation of brokers’ letters. I have a whole file called “I want to buy the bank.”

Did you have any idea how much it was worth?

I thought it was worth what I could get for it. I was getting ridiculously low bids for it. [One developer] came to me through an acquaintance of an acquaintance. They offered me something like $20 million for it. I just looked at them and said, “You’re jerking me off, right? You can’t be fucking serious? Forget it, we’re out.”

I was thinking of something in the 30s or 40s and then I spoke to one person in the business and asked what do you think it’s worth. She said, $50 million at least. If I hadn’t had a need for money I might not have sold it.

I knew I was never going to find anything better. I knew my next home was going to be a compromise. I had 35,000 square feet and this place I have now is 5,000 square feet. I tried to buy the space next door but I couldn’t buy it without buying the building next to it which they wanted about $15 million for. I already spent a lot on this place and I didn’t want to be the kind of guy who had made all this money then didn’t have anything left. So I didn’t buy it. Somebody else bought it and they turned the four-story garage into the Parking Club. They sell $180,000 parking spots plus maintenance. So I went to the guy and asked to have the other building. He said, “It’s not for sale but I’ll rent it to you” but the rent was more than I thought it was worth. So two years have past and he’s rented out a portion of it.

I have 3,000 square feet of storage in New Jersey. I miss it. It’s all my toys, my files. If you look around, I’m a filing cabinet freak. At this point, we’re talking about renting the rest of the place. He’s rented about one-third of it.

I miss the place a lot. I went back there the other day. He did nice work, he respected it. He ruined the two best rooms, the bank president’s room and the ante room to the president’s room, but he may have had to because he had to make a second means of egress. Both rooms were paneled in mahogany, both had terrific plasterwork on the ceiling. They were just beautiful. One of them had a stained glass window, the other had two large windows which I closed off because there was a building right next to it.

Aby Rosen, the developer who bought the bank, is a big collector of art. Did you have any personal interaction during the sale?

Yea. We hated each other. I managed to offend him completely by correcting his use of language, which is a terrible habit I have. He said, “it’s a very simplistic offer.” And I said, “you don’t mean simplistic.” He said “what do you mean I don’t mean?” I said, “simplistic means something very different than what you mean. It does not mean simple.” It was a contentious thing. Fortunately, I had a very good lawyer who got along with his lawyer and we finally brokered the deal.

Maisel among one of his many rooms filled with filing cabinets.

When did you find this place?

We found this place when we were in the process of getting out of the building. We had a deal at 190 where when we made a deal we had the legal right to stay there a certain amount of time. So it was after the deal was made but before we had to get out.

We found it simply because Matt’s [his assistant] wife was walking along and said, “I think you ought to look in it.” My wife went to look at it, came home and got me out of the shower and said, “You have to come see this place.”

The house has had a very bizarre past. It was used for gold chain manufacturing. A Hasidic guy owned it. At one point there were horses in here, this studio was a stable.

But I put nothing in this house. I have made no structural changes. We only changed the lighting and some minor things. When the owner came back and saw this place, and this is not a man given to compliments, he said, “this is terrific. It’s very artistic.”

When we smoke cigars here, the whole place fills up with rays of light. It’s marvelous, we photographed it.

This landscape is from the 70s or 80s. There are not buildings you can measure it by. You can measure it by the absence of buildings but you’d have to know what’s there now. That’s shot on one piece of film, not by stitching it together.

Maisel’s Cobble Hill home/studio

Have you lived in New York your whole life?

Until I lived in Brooklyn.

You don’t consider that New York?

No. This is a neighborhood. New York is very hard to put in words. Basically, when I take pictures here I feel like I’m invading somebody’s neighborhood. New York is on the streets for everybody. I’m sorry to be inarticulate about it but it’s an intuitive thing, I just feel New York is there to take. It’s available.

Couple in Red Car, 1992 

I was really struck by the photo of the two people kissing in the red car, in the front seat all embraced. How did you feel taking that photo? You weren’t invading their space?

Oh, sure. But basically what happens on the street is public. It’s not like I’m going into their home and shooting in their bedroom.

I have one photo in Paris just like that but even closer. And the guy got out of the car and started towards me and I said, “you’re fucking kidding, aren’t you? You think I’m not going to photograph that when you’re doing it in public?” And he turned around and got back in the car.

I want to do a book called, “The First Time I Saw Paris.” What other country besides the United States thinks they’re the best in the world. We have the best fashion, the best food and they’re probably right. They look at us and think of us as animals. Now that we have Trump, it’s valid.

Man in Silver Jacket

There was young man with a shiny silver jacket. Did you just take his photo and walk away.

No, I smiled at him and he smiled at me.

What struck you about him?

Why do you like the picture?

Because he has something.

That’s what struck me about him. He has a great presence.

As does this guy.

Man in Purple Jacket, 1974

Oh, he’s a pimp. If he’s not a pimp, he’s a pimp want-to-be. Every picture has some simple story about it. Very few don’t have any.

Man Sitting by Yellow Wall, 1983

In this picture, the guy got up and came toward me and said, “what the hell are you shooting?” I said, well, I was shooting the light and you. You were in it, you look great.

The guy going to the bathroom on the street is priceless.

Man in Green Pants, 1978

That’s funny because we got a letter asking, “is that man really urinating in public?”

Body Builder in Diner

What struck you about this scene?

The guy, obviously. But I like the light and the casualness of him sitting there, completely showing off and the magic of the light.

World Trade Center Reflection, 1999

You don’t seem to take pictures of a lot of buildings, why?

Oh, I used to but I don’t anymore. When I started, I was very interested in nature. And then I got very interested in people. And then I got very interested in city and buildings. And then I got interested in exotica and naked women. But then finally, it came back to people. And that influences the way I edit now. Except for my Baja, California series, I’m not showing anything about nature. But when I photographed Baja, one of the tenants of the job was I couldn’t photograph anything that smacked of civilization and the hand of man. It’s a wilderness book. Outside of that, nature doesn’t interest me much anymore. I’ll take a day in the country every once in awhile be transformed into, “oh, isn’t this beautiful” but then, after a while, I want a place where I can get a bagel at 4am.

Sooner or later I want to publish some books. I have published a number of books already. I am now spending eight hours a day for two-and-a-half years is to put together something for a book. But to some degree, I’m more interested in getting it on the website. I knew a guy once who was a genius at business, Richard Benson, he made plates for books for years. He’s also the head of the art department of Yale. He was technically and aesthetically adept, a real genius. When he retired from Yale, he went out shooting on his own. I saw his stuff and it was amazing, not my style but amazing. I said to him, “you’re not looking gesture” and he said, “yea, I gave that up a long time ago, I’m too slow to get the gesture.” I asked, “what are you going to do for the rest of your life?” He said, “Well, I’m hoping to die in obscurity.” What he meant was he did not want to spend his life promoting himself. If it happened it happens. He didn’t want to spend his time going around, looking for publishers, doing exhibitions and whatnot. The next thing I know, he’s got an exhibit at the Pace Gallery in Manhattan on 57th street. I bought a couple of prints and I noticed I had bought the 76th and 77th print that had been sold from the show. And I said to him, “how is this obscurity thing working out for you?” I have no wish to die in obscurity but I don’t want to spend my time promoting.

I did a book with a friend of mine, the illustrator, Bob Gill, called “Four Eyes.” It’s a good book but we can’t get anybody to publish it. When we started, I told him we wouldn’t be able to get anybody to publish it and he said, “why not?” Because the people who know me and love my work don’t have any idea who you are and the people who know you and love your work, haven’t a clue of who I am. So it’s not going to work. We’ve sent it to a lot of people, everybody loves it but nobody loves it that much because they’re one way or the other. He’s an incredibly funny guy. He came to the bank and at one point, the literal bank vault was empty, later I stored all my negatives there, everybody would come into this room and say, “wow, what a great place to make into a restaurant or what a great place to have a little place to dine or what a great place to store your negatives.” Bob came in and said, “ahh, what a great place to masturbate.” You understand the mind.

We never, ever communicated about matching pictures until we did the book and the pictures he did and I did were already done. He’d send me a bunch of pictures, I’d send him a bunch of pictures. He would try to match mine, I’d match his.

Buckminster Fuller. Maisel was his apprentice and said he would have devoted his life to him if “Bucky” let him

When was the last time you took a photograph?

The other day. I just saw something I liked, it was in the building.

Do you ever use your iPhone?

Yea, that’s what I’m using. The problem is I have bad arthritis and I have neuropathy in my feet which means I don’t feel them really. So standing and photographing is an impossibility, I’m going to fall flat on my face.

What was Miles Davis like when you shot his album cover?

I have no idea what these people are like. I was shooting from the audience or nearby. I didn’t get to meet any of them. I just felt so grateful I was able to. I just went out to shoot on my own and he was one of the guys that was there. They called me and said do you have any pictures of Miles Davis. Simple.

In reference to his very stern author photograph in “Four Eyes,” he said, “I showed this photograph to another photographer, Greg Heisler, tell me how he lit it. He said, “he got a soft light and a room light” and that was exactly right. One of the ways you can tell is to look in the eyeballs. Because the eyeballs sometimes have a perfect reflection of what the set up is.

You don’t mind having your own pictures taken?

I don’t stop people from shooting.

Can I take a picture of you? It’s very intimidating taking a photograph of a photographer

Well, if you start with the concept that you’re not competing with me, it’s not.

That is for sure.

Now you’ve got to show it to me.

Jay Maisel in his Cobble Hill home/studio

Not bad. I should’ve raised my head though.

+++

All “Jaywalking” photos © Jay Maisel 2018

All “Jaywalking” photos © Jay Maisel 2018

Earlier this year, 6sqft got an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour at the Loew’s Jersey City, one of the five opulent Loew’s Wonder Theatres built in 1929-30 around the NYC area. We’ve now gotten a tour of another, the United Palace in Washington Heights. Originally known as the Loew’s 175th Street Theatre, the “Cambodian neo-Classical” landmark has served as a church and cultural center since it closed in 1969 and was purchased by televangelist Reverend Ike, who renamed it the Palace Cathedral. Today it’s still owned by late Reverend’s church but functions as a spiritual center and arts center.

Thanks to Reverand Ike and his church’s continued stewardship, Manhattan’s fourth-largest theater remains virtually unchanged since architect Thomas W. Lamb completed it in 1930. 6sqft recently visited and saw everything from the insane ornamentation in the lobby to the former smoking lounge that recently caught the eye of Woody Allen. We also chatted with UPCA’s executive director Mike Fitelson about why this space is truly one-of-a-kind.

After just 13 months of construction, Loew’s 175th Street Theatre opened on February 22, 1930, the last of the five Wonder Theatres. It was preceded by the Loew’s Jersey, which opened on September 28, 1929. Also opened in 1929 were the Loew’s Paradise in the Bronx, the Loew’s Kings in Brooklyn, and the Loew’s Valencia in Queens. Both the Loew’s Jersey and the Loew’s Kings operate as cultural/performance spaces today, while the Bronx and Queens locations are religious spaces. As we previously explained, the theaters were “built by the Loew’s Corporation not only to establish their stature in the film world but to be an escape for people from all walks of life. This held true during the Great Depression and World War II.”

The chandeliers crank down for cleanings and to have their roughly 70 bulbs replaced

Though the exterior has a rather hard, Mayan-inspired look, the interior architecture at the Loew’s 175th is perhaps the most diverse of all five theaters. It was designed by Scottish-born, NYC-based architect Thomas W. Lamb, who had already established himself as one of the leading architects of the movie theater boom of the 1910s and ’20s. He’s also responsible for the Cort Theatre, the former Ziegfeld Theatre, and the former Capitol Theatre. Decorative specialist Harold Rambausch, of Waldorf Astoria and Radio City fame, helped to style the interiors.

For years, architecture critics have struggled to define the theater’s style. The most accepted characterization is “Cambodian neo-Classical,” but David W. Dunlap described it in the Times as “Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco,” whereas times reporter Nathaniel Adams summed it up as a “kitchen-sink masterpiece.” In Lamb’s own words: “Exotic ornaments, colors and scenes are particularly effective in creating an atmosphere in which the mind is free to frolic and becomes receptive to entertainment.”

And Fitelson shared his own ideas with us: “This was the fifth Wonder Theatre to be designed. [The others] had very specific styles, but at the end of the day, they had all these ideas they couldn’t squeeze in the others. So at the end of the day, they said, ‘everything that’s left on the cutting-room floor we’re going to stick in the Palace.'”

The columns are actually mail-ordered. The Loew’s Corporation was putting up so many theatres across the country at this time, that they’d buy them in bulk.

Around the time the theater was built, Americans grew fascinated with travel to the “Orient” and “Far East.” This explains why Dunlap wrote that Lamb borrowed styles from “the Alhambra in Spain, the Kailasa rock-cut shrine in India, and the Wat Phra Keo temple in Thailand, adding Buddhas, bodhisattvas, elephants, and honeycomb stonework in an Islamic pattern known as muqarnas.”

Throughout the lavish interior are ornate chandeliers, filigreed walls and ceilings, and hand-carved Moorish patterns. Among the eclectic ornamentation are Buddhas, lions, elephants, and seahorses.  You’ll also see many authentic Louis XV and XVI furnishings brought in by Reverend Ike.

When the theatre opened, it presented films and live vaudeville acts. Opening night saw the films “Their Own Desire” and “Pearls” and a live musical stage performance by vaudevillians Al Shaw and Sam Lee.

All of the Wonder Theatres had identical Robert Morton “Wonder Morton” pipe organs with a four-manual console and 23 ranks of pipes. The Robert Morton Organ Company of Van Nuys, California was the second largest producer of theatre organs behind Wurlitzer, and they were known to be “tonally powerful while retaining a refined, symphonic sound.” The Palace’s organ is the only one to remain unaltered in its original home. It was rediscovered in 1970 after sitting disused for nearly 25 years under the stage, which had been sealed by the previous owners. It was then used by the church but suffered water damage in later years. Beginning in 2016, the New York Theater Organ Society and UPCA began a full renovation of the organ, working to raise $1 million over five years to bring back the “only remaining, consistently used theatre organ” in the city.

Pictured above is the “men’s smoking lounge.” Since women weren’t supposed to be smoking, their smoking lounge, referred to as a “retiring lounge” was a much smaller, discrete space.

Fitelson says the best secret of the theater is that the Reverend turned the men’s smoking lounge into his library, adding floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. When he passed away in 2009 and all his books were put in storage, they painted the walls the current red. Since the photos from the ’30s are all black-and-white, there’s no way of telling if it was the original color. They also painted the fireplace stark white. When Woody Allen came in in 2015 to shoot “Cafe Society,” his team wanted to use the room as a 1920s jazz lounge and said they’d like to paint the fireplace but would restore it after filming. But Palace leadership thought the new paint job was so spectacular, they decided to keep it!

By the mid-’60s, middle-class families had begun relocating to the suburbs where they were taken by the new “mega-plex” phenomenon. The Loew’s 175th Street closed in 1969 after a final showing of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Shortly thereafter, Reverend Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II’s church purchased the building for $600,000 in cash and renamed it the Palace Cathedral, though it quickly became known as “Reverend Ike’s Prayer Tower.” His Sunday services would draw 5,000 people into the then-3,000-seat auditorium.

The only permanent change Rev. Ike made to the building was to add a “Miracle Star of Faith” to the cupola on the building’s northeast corner. It can be seen all the way from New Jersey and the George Washington Bridge. He also undertook an extensive renovation of both the facade and the interior, bringing in artisans from Italy and Eastern Europe to tackle the job.

In the early 2000s, the theatre began renting its space out to musicians from Bob Dylan and Neil Young to Adele and Bon Iver, along with film shoots for Blacklist, Law & Order, and even Beyonce’s Target commercial.

UPCA became an official nonprofit in 2014, founded by Reverend Ike’s son, musician Xavier Eikerenkotter. Its mission is to serve Northern Manhattan artists, youth, and audiences through artistic programming at the United Palace. Over the years UPCA has helped return Movies to the Palace, brought dance (Danza!) programming uptown, invited local artists to perform in the Lobby Series, and provided Community Arts Programs through partner organizations.

In addition, the United Palace spiritual center continues to offer Sunday services. as well as new programming such as Open Heart Conversations–a guided space to meet, talk and explore the world’s varied and rich spiritual traditions– for everyone from devout followers to agnostics. As an inclusive spiritual community, the United Palace seeks to cultivate compassion, wisdom, and peace through spiritual practices, sacred service, and joyous connection through music, arts, and entertainment.

The United Palace venue, which allows the 3,400-seat theatre to be rented for concerts and all kinds of performances and screenings. Though the Eikerenkotter family separated from the venture this past fall, the church still maintains ownership of the building.

Almost exactly a year ago, the city designated the United Palace Theatre an official city landmark. Though this only protects the exterior, but it doesn’t seem as though there’s anything to worry about after all these years.

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All photos taken by James and Karla Murray exclusively for 6sqft. Photos are not to be reproduced without written permission from 6sqft.

An 1870 newspaper illustration of Elizabeth Blackwell giving an anatomy lecture alongside a corpse at the Woman’s Medical College of New York Infirmary. Courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress.

One of the most radical and influential women of the 19th century changed the course of public health history while living and working in Greenwich Village and the East Village. Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first female doctor, established cutting-edge care facilities and practices throughout these neighborhoods, the imprint of which can still be felt to this day in surviving institutions and buildings. In fact, one recently received a historic plaque to mark this ground-breaking but often overlooked piece of our history.

Elizabeth Blackwell home and medical office

Google Street View of 80 University Place

At 80 University Place at 11th Street in Greenwich Village stands a building which housed the former home and first medical office of. Elizabeth Blackwell. After receiving a medical degree from Geneva College in 1849, Blackwell was denied opportunities to practice medicine because of her gender. In 1851, she moved to New York City and rented a floor at the building still located here, which was at the time numbered 44 University Place. Tired of being refused work opportunities, Blackwell began using the building as her own medical office, as well as her home.

Despite insults and objections from her landlady and neighbors, Blackwell began providing medical services to patients, most of whom were females and members of the local Quaker community. Elizabeth Blackwell’s legacy of inspiring and empowering women to enter the medical field began during this early phase of her career that unfolded at this site.

Present-day 80 University Place was originally built as a house and later became a hotel; over the years the building has undergone major alterations, including the addition of the current postmodern façade around 1990, but is the same building Blackwell lived and worked in.

New York Dispensary for Poor Women and Children, 207 East 7th Street

Google Street View of 207 East 7th Street today

Early in her medical career, the dire conditions of the poor immigrant districts surrounding her attracted Blackwell’s attention. Blackwell decided to open her own dispensary to address some of the myriad shortcomings she saw in the care her neighbors were receiving. But she found it very difficult to find a space for such a practice. When someone finally allowed her to rent a room, all the other boarders left, scandalized at having a “lady doctor” as their neighbor.

Elizabeth Blackwell c. 1850-60, via Wiki Commons

Thus, in 1853, Blackwell was forced to rent her own house at 207 East 7th Street, living in the attic and using the main room for treating patients. Called the New York Dispensary for Poor Women and Children, its first annual report announced that its purpose was to “give to poor women an opportunity of consulting physicians of their own sex.”

The woman doctors at the Dispensary were highly aware of the relationship between health, socio-economic conditions, and gender. Today’s New York Downtown Hospital is the extension of Blackwell’s infirmary which began its life here. The building which housed the dispensary has since been demolished.

New York Infirmary for Women and Children, 58 Bleecker Street
58 Bleecker Street, courtesy of GVSHP

The needs of the poor immigrant communities served by Blackwell soon outgrew the small dispensary on East 7th Street. In 1857 Blackwell, established the first hospital for women, staffed by women, and run by women, called The New York Infirmary for Women and Children. It was located in the house at 58 Bleecker Street, at the corner of Crosby Street, which was originally numbered 64 Bleecker Street.

Built in 1822-1823, the house was erected for great-grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, James Roosevelt, who lived there until his passing only ten years before Blackwell began renting there. Blackwell’s hospital opened its doors on May 12, 1857, the 37th birthday of Florence Nightingale, whom Blackwell had befriended earlier in her career.

The hospital was open seven days a week and provided medical care for needy women and children free of charge. The staff at first consisted of Elizabeth, director; her sister Emily Blackwell, surgeon; and Dr. Marie Zakrewska. The hospital provided practical medical instruction for women studying for their medical degree, which was unavailable elsewhere. The hospital was operated solely by a staff of women, and its opening was attended and praised by the noted abolitionist preacher Rev. Henry Ward Beecher.

However, many others were not enthusiastic about this enterprise, and according to Blackwell she was told that no one would rent her a space for this purpose, that the police would shut the hospital down, that she would not be able to control the patients, and that no one would financially support such an institution.

However, the hospital was able to succeed, and over time views on women in medicine evolved. The hospital was responsible for innovations in hygiene critical in preventing disease and in educating the public on those benefits, such as bathing ailing patients and encouraging them to keep clean. Blackwell also launched a “Sanitary Visitor” program to visit the needy in their homes in the slums and improve hygiene. The program later expanded into the hospital’s “Out Practice Department,” a precursor of the Visiting Nurse Service. The first Sanitary Visitor, Rebecca Cole, was also the second African American woman to become a doctor in America.

The plaque, courtesy of GVSHP

The building still stands and is located within the Noho Historic District. This past Monday, GVSHP placed a historic plaque upon the building as part of a larger celebration commemorating Blackwell’s work and the legacy of the New York Infirmary.

Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, 128 Second Avenue

1868 Announcement for the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, courtesy of the National Library of Medicine

This is the site of the first female medical school and women’s medical hospital in the United States, established in a house originally numbered 126 Second Avenue, between East 7th and East 8th Streets in 1868.

Blackwell, along with Dr. Marie Zakrzewska and her sister Emily, opened and operated the college and infirmary to provide both training to aspiring female doctors and medical care for poor women and children. Not only was this institution the first to offer women medical training and to prioritize female medical care, it was also staffed entirely by women. The Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary was also ahead of its time in that it offered four-year educational programs during a time in which medical schools, catering almost exclusively to men, only offered two-year programs. In its thirty-one years of successful operation, the Women’s Medical College educated more than 350 female physicians.

Google Street View of 126 Second Avenue, today number 128

The infirmary was located in a converted rowhouse built in the early 19th century; that building was demolished and the site is currently occupied by a tenement built in 1899.

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You can read more about this and other GVSHP historic plaques here, and further explore this and other historically significant sits on GVSHP’s Civil Rights and Social Justice Map.

This post comes from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. Since 1980, GVSHP has been the community’s leading advocate for preserving the cultural and architectural heritage of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and Noho, working to prevent inappropriate development, expand landmark protection, and create programming for adults and children that promotes these neighborhoods’ unique historic features. Read more history pieces on their blog Off th

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Photo via Wiki Commons

At 102 West 116th Street in Harlem sits a mosque singularly incorporated into the cityscape. The building houses street-level commercial businesses and is topped by a large green dome, the structure in-between used as a Sunni Muslim mosque. While the property has seen much local history pass through it, it is not landmarked.

Before becoming a religious structure, the lot used to contain the Lenox Casino, a space which was often rented for meetings by the Socialist Party and used as a theatrical performance venue for a number of then-renowned artists. Built in 1905 and designed by Lorenz F. J. Weiher, the Lenox Casino was raided in 1912 for showing “illegal films” in an escapade grippingly documented by the New York Times.

A cow pasture at the corner of what is now 116th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in 1893. Courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL

The chronology of the following years, involving the building’s transition from casino to religious space are a bit unclear, but what would become the Nation of Islam’s Temple No. 7 (later renamed Mosque No. 7 as part of a nationwide change) had very humble beginnings. It seems that the building began being used as a storefront church in the early 1950s. Around this time, in 1954, Malcolm X was named minister, according to David W. Dunlap’s guide to Manhattan’s houses of worship. In Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X, there are a number of lines regarding the temple. By 1964, Dunlop reports, Malcolm had stopped preaching at Mosque No. 7, opening the Muslim Mosque instead.

Following Malcolm X’s assassination the following year, in 1965, Mosque No. 7 was firebombed in a dynamite blast and destroyed. One Sabbath Brown redesigned the space over a decade later in 1976, giving it the modern appearance (albeit today lacking its former crown, a golden crescent) it has today as well as a new co-name – Masjid Malcolm Shabazz, in honor of Malcolm X.

On April 14, 1972, the mosque again made the news in an event which has become known as the Harlem mosque incident. NYPD officers Phillip Cardillo and his partner Vito Navarrai, in response to what turned out to be a phony 911 call, entered the mosque and were ambushed, Cardillo fatally shot. The contentious event had two intensely opposing stories from the sides of the cops and the congregants and sparked much public anger against then-Mayor John Lindsay’s administration.

Today, the mosque hosts interfaith congregants, a school and continues to be a hub of religious life on an otherwise intensely changed corner of Harlem.

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Photo via Jeffrey Zeldman/Flickr

The New York Public Library first roared into existence on May 23, 1895, educating and inspiring countless millions, free of charge. The Library’s 92 locations include four research divisions and hold over 51 million items. Out of all these tomes, the greatest tale might be Library’s own history: Founded by immigrants and industrialists, it was equally admired by William Howard Taft and Vladimir Lenin; open to all, it has counted among its staff American Olympians and Soviet spies; dedicated to intellectual exploration and civic responsibility, it has made its map collection available to buried treasure hunters and Allied Commanders; evolving with the city itself, it has made branch locations out of a prison, a movie theater, and most recently, a chocolate factory. The history of the New York Public Library is as vital and various New York itself, so get ready to read between the lions.

The Central Branch under late-stage construction in 1908, via Wiki Commons

When NYPL’s Central Branch opened on 42nd Street and 5th Avenue on May 23rd, 1911. After 16 years of planning, it was the largest marble structure ever built in the United States. This extraordinary grandeur reflected New York’s aspirations at the turn of the 20th Century. Samuel Tilden, the 25th Governor of New York State, saw New York emerging as a world city, and believed it needed world-class public institutions to match. He bequeathed about $2.4 Million to “establish and maintain a free library and reading room in the city of New York.” His institution would be on par with the British Library, the Bibliotheque Nationale, and, New Yorkers hoped, it would the put stately the Boston Public Library to shame.

The Central Branch in the 1910s, via Library of Congress

Tilden’s library needed a collection to match. Luckily, New York already had two major public research collections. The Astor Library, John Jacob Astor’s legacy, built on Lafayette Street in 1854 in what is now the Public Theater, was a scholarly reference collection; The Lenox Library, founded by the bibliophile philanthropist James Lenox in 1877, held special literary treasures and galleries of painting and sculpture.

At the Astor and Lennox Libraries, books didn’t circulate. This cloistered approach reflecting the Astor Chief Librarian’s idea that “A free library of circulation is a practical impossibility in a city as populous as New York. In the first place, it could never supply one out of a hundred of the demands in the case of popular books; and in the next place, it would be dispersed to the four winds within five years.” When the Astor and Lenox Libraries merged with The Tilden Trust on May 23rd 1895 to create the New York Public Library, it seemed NYPL would follow the same course, with items only available on-site.

49 Bond Street (opened 1883) where the first branch of the NYFCL settled for most of its existence, via Wiki Commons

Thankfully, The New York Free Circulating Library proved books could fly off the shelves. Founded by a group of women in a Grace Church sewing class in 1879, the New York Free Circulating Library attracted patrons “from lower Broadway to 120th street,” who packed the library, and spilled out to block the sidewalk. The NYFCL met this need-to-read using rented rooms on Bond Street to “circulate books among the very poor,” and furnish “free reading to the people of New York City.” The NYFCL eventually supported 11 branches and a traveling library service.

The New York Free Circulating Library joined NYPL as the Circulation Department in February 1901. A month later, Andrew Carnegie made that mission manifest throughout New York, offering the city $5.2 million to construct 67 branch libraries that would be privately financed and publicly maintained.

Thirty-nine Carnegie Libraries became part of the New York Public Library System, and Carnegie’s public-private partnership still shapes the NYPL: the Library’s circulating collections are maintained by the city; its 4 research branches are privately funded, but open to all.

With money and vision secure, the Central Branch was built on the site of the Old Croton Reservoir. Before work could begin on Carrère & Hasting’s Beaux-Arts masterpiece, 500 workers spent two years preparing the site. Finally, the cornerstone was laid on November 10, 1902.

NYPL on opening day, via the Library of Congress

When the Library opened May 23, 1911, crowds of 50,000 marked the occasion. So impressive was New York’s “splendid temple of the mind,” President Taft called its opening a day of Nation importance, declaring that the Library would be a model for other cities hoping to spread knowledge among the people.

Vladimir Lenin agreed. He touted NYPL as a model because the system made its “gigantic, boundless libraries available, not to a guild of scholars, professors and other such specialists, but to the masses.” (Lenin himself enriched the Library – NYPL acquired a large measure of the private collections of the Czars when the Soviet Union sold its treasures after the Revolution.)

Lenin loved the Library, but in its first decades NYPL was decidedly all-American. It sent books overseas to soldiers during WWI, and in 1926, the Library staff boasted six former Olympic athletes: a hurdler, three high jumpers, one broad jumper, a mountain climber, an oarsman/canoeist, and a discus thrower.

The 1920s also proved a landmark decade for the Library because the Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints—the forerunner to today’s Schomburg Center—opened as a special collection at the 135th Street branch in 1925. The following year, the division garnered worldwide acclaim when it acquired Arturo Alfonso Schomburg’s personal collection of over 10,000 books, manuscripts, etchings, paintings and pamphlets.

By the 1930s, the Library, built for the people, was practically the Popular Front: radical librarians published their own in-house quarterly called Class Mark, declaring, “We are the librarians, pages, and service workers in the New York Public Library system who are members of the Communist Party and of the young Communist League.”

The lion sculptures by Edward Clark Potter were installed in 1911, ahead of the opening, via Wiki Commons

The Library may have seemed its most radically hopeful during the Depression, when use reached its record high. Mayor LaGuardia nicknamed the Library’s lions Patience and Fortitude, because he believed those qualities would get New Yorkers through the tough times. Between 1929 and 1939, the Central Building was open 365 days a year, 9am-10pm Monday-Saturday, and 1pm-10pm on Sunday. The City’s contract with the Carnegie branches required that they remain open 12 hours daily except Sundays. Writer and critic Alfred Kazin remembered the library crowds during those years: “That Depression crowd, so pent up, searching for puzzle contests, beauty contests, treasure of Sandy Hook…I could hear day and evening those relentless hungry footsteps.”

A fire insurance map of the East Village from 1927, via NYPL

As the Depression gave way to WWII, the Maps Division followed suit. The Library’s maps of North Africa and of Normandy informed the Allies’ largest-scale invasions; on their most precise bombing missions, NYPL’s maps helped Allied pilots recognized their targets.

And as the “Atomic Age” dawned, industrial firms had fulltime researchers at work in the Library’s Economics, Science and Technology Divisions. When the nation awaited a decision in Brown v. Board of Education, interested parties could have appealed to the Library, because lawyers on both sides of the case used NYPL’s collection on state education laws to write their briefs.

In the 1960s and 70s, the collections changed and expand with the world itself. As empires fell and new nations were forged, the Library collected in every region and language. The nature of the collections changed, too. A Librarian working in the 1960s explained, “The Library started out being the best Arabic collection in the United States, and was especially strong in classical Arabic literature and Islam. Now there is a sharp rise, in countries from Morocco to Iraq, in materials dealing with economics politics and law, so the nature of our collections keeps changing.”

Other changes took place closer to home, and the Library was the eye of the storm. Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in the Library, and claimed in the introduction to her landmark text, “I wouldn’t have even started it if The New York Public Library had not, at just the right time, opened the Frederick Lewis Allen Room.”

Amidst the ferment, the Library was in for a physical change. In 1965, the Performing Arts Collection, the largest of its kind in the world, got its own research branch at Lincoln Center. The Schomburg Center opened as its own research institution in 1972.

Rendering of the Mid-Manhattan Branch’s current renovation, courtesy of Mecanoo with Beyer Blinder Belle

As the research divisions expanded, so did the Branch Libraries. Today there are 88 branch libraries, and each one has reinvented itself as many times as the New Yorkers it serves. For example, the Belmont Library, opened in 1980 at 186th Street and Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, was once Cinelli’s Savoy Theatre, better known as “The Dumps,” where cartoons were king, and women sat “shelling peas for that night’s supper.”

Rendering of the main branch’s new 40th Street entrance, courtesy of Mecanoo with Beyer Blinder Belle

And today, its Mid-Manhattan branch at 5th Avenue and 40th Street will undergo a $200 million renovation by Dutch architecture firm Mecanoo. The Library is calling the project, a “state-of-the-art library that will serve as both a model and catalyst for a rejuvenated library system.” To that end, they also unveiled this past November a $317 million master plan for the iconic main branch. Also to be undertaken by Mecanoo with NYC-based Beyer Blinder Belle, the plan will add 20 percent more public space to the building and transform long-underutilized, historic spaces, along with many other improvements.

Photos of the renovated Rose Main Reading Room by Max Touhey Photography courtesy of the New York Public Library

But one thing that doesn’t change is the glorious, landmarked Rose Main Reading Room at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, which was refurbished in 2016. A sun-filled chamber two blocks long, Room 315 can seat up to 700 people, at “the heart of the heart of the library.”

Henry Miller handily summed up Rose’s thrill: “Working amidst so many other industrious students in a room the size of a cathedral, under a lofty ceiling which was an imitation of heaven itself…wondering what question I could put to the genius which presided over this vast institution which it could not answer. There was no subject under the sun which had not been written about and filed in those archives.”

Via Wally Gobetz/Flickr

Throughout NYPL’s history, Library staff has hunted down millions of answers. They run a wild gamut, from whether the city of Chemnitz was part of the kingdom of Saxony in 1899, to how long an asp bite would take to kill a human being, to queries regarding the specific heat of tooth enamel. Judges have called during trials, surgeons have called during operations, irate McDonald’s customers have called from the Drive Thru. (You can call too, at 917-ASK-NYPL.)

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Lucie Levine is the founder of Archive on Parade, a local tour and event company that aims to take New York’s fascinating history out of the archives and into the streets. She’s a Native New Yorker, and licensed New York City tour guide, with a passion for the city’s social, political and cultural history. She has collaborated with local partners including the New York Public Library, The 92nd Street Y, The Brooklyn Brainery, The Society for the Advancement of Social Studies and Nerd Nite to offer exciting tours, lectures and community events all over town. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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Photographer Berenice Abbott has long captured the imagination of New Yorkers. Her storied career began after fleeing Ohio for Greenwich Village in 1918 and included a stint in Paris taking portraits of 1920s heavyweights. But she is best known for her searing images of New York buildings and street life–her photograph “Nightview, New York,” taken from an upper-floor window of the Empire State Building in 1932, remains one of the most recognized images of the city. Well known is her exchange with a male supervisor, who informed Abbott that “nice girls” don’t go to the Bowery. Her reply: “Buddy, I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer… I go anywhere.”

Despite Abbott’s prolific career and fascinating life, there’s never been a biography to capture it all. Until now, with Julia Van Haaften’s work, “Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography.” Van Haaften is the founding curator of the New York Public Library’s photography collection. She also befriended Abbott, as the photographer approached 90, while curating a retrospective exhibition of her work in the late 1980s. (Abbott passed away in 1991 at the age of 93.)

With 6sqft, Van Haaften shares what it was like translating Abbott’s wide-ranging work and life into a biography, and the help she received from Abbott herself. From her favorite stories to her favorite photographs, Van Haaften shows why Abbott’s work has remained such a powerful lens capturing New York City to this day.

What work were you doing before you took on this book?

Julia: I was an art librarian–I graduated from Barnard College with an art history degree. As an art librarian, I discovered there wasn’t a photography section at the New York Public Library. At the same time photography was rising in the art world, there was no specialist on staff for materials acquired at the library for decades. It became my mission internally and a department was formed.

Out of that grew my interest in exhibitions, and I discovered how much the NYPL owned of Berenice Abbott’s “Changing New York.” It fed back onto a passion of mine, photography, which was not part of art history when I went to college in the 1960s. There were a few places that taught photography practice but not necessarily as art. It was taught in journalism or publishing.

Berenice Abbott in New York City in 1979, photograph by Hank O’Neal via Wikipedia

So what it is about Abbott’s photography that draws you in?

Julia: It’s an interesting balance. It’s both the realism of her city views and the absolute factuality of the pictures, and yet the artistry of the vantage and the subject matter. She would say, “You take pictures of things that are worth taking the trouble about.” That meant, to her, not a political agenda–although something there is meaning underneath the imagery. More she meant something that makes a significant graphic and compositional contribution.

She began taking NYC pictures in the winter of 1929 when she came here back from Paris with a reputation for society portraits on par with Man Ray, who had been her mentor and employer.

She has this incredible, interesting life, and there haven’t been any biographies about her before yours, correct?

Julia: Not really. There had been a biographical essay in a big picture book that came out in the 1980s that she collaborated on with the author, Hank O’Neal. The essay is the story she wanted told about her career; it’s largely her professional practice and accomplishments.

On the other hand, she knew [my book] was in the works, because she and I had done a retrospective exhibition in 1989 that toured. She wasn’t really a collaborator, but she was helpful and interested. She and I hit it off personally. When we talked, she was forthcoming in a way that probably had to do with my being a woman, my being at the library–which she had a deep affection for–and because I didn’t have an agenda beyond admiring her pictures. I thought they were an important, under-celebrated aspect of 20th-century modern art.

Bowery restaurant photograph for Changing New York, 1935, via Wikipedia

She has a fearlessness, being a female photographer when it wasn’t a common thing to be. Can you talk about that?

Julia: I can talk about it in the sense that she didn’t want to be called a woman anything. That’s what I meant about myself not having an agenda. Obviously, I’m a feminist; obviously, Berenice is too. But it wasn’t the point of our activity. She was an artist, first of all. And I do my work, I don’t see it as an expression of being a woman.

If anything, Berenice and I had a fun relationship because of the contrast between us. I’m a long-married woman, I have two kids Berenice met as children. Personally, I couldn’t be more different than her. But we saw a wavelength of how to get by in the world, on one level, and doing our work and taking it seriously.

Seventh Avenue, looking south from 35th Street, 1935, via Wikipedia

And so how did you take her life–her traveling, the breadth of her work–digest it and turn it into a book?

Julia: I began trying to get a handle on the chronology. When I met Berenice, she had just turned 90. So she had codified a lot of her history, and explanation of how things happened, into neat little packets of sequence. Rather than accept it at face value, I figured there’s a lot of fits and starts–it isn’t one smooth flow. She didn’t really know what happened in her own family, her mother’s or father’s story. So it took some genealogy, some digging, on my part.

Sometimes she would drop clues. She would say, “I came back three times to New York.” And I thought, I only knew of two. I found from Ancestry.com that she had, in fact, come back in 1922 with a girlfriend to just come back, and they didn’t go further than New York City. [Her friend] was trying to line up a patron for Berenice, someone who would support a woman artist. Unfortunately, it never happened.

By not getting that support in 1922, 1923, Berenice went to Berlin expecting the money to come. No money came. She was starving and didn’t know what to do. She fled Berlin, gave up her career of trying to be a sculptor, and that’s what landed her in Man Ray’s studio.

She does have quite a lot of setbacks in her life, and it’s not until later she’s recognized for her work. When do people start acknowledging her work as important?

Julia: This is complicated, too. Before the 1970s she had recognition as the photo art world has taken off. She had success as a Paris portrait artist, and then for the 1930s New York City View collection. Both works were celebrated in their day, and her as a photographic artist.

But then she would fall out of fashion. After the portraiture work, the Depression coincided and she couldn’t get more work, which she expected to support her life as a fledgling city photographer. She was hand-to-mouth for five years until the WPA came along. In the 1940s and most of the 1950s, it was touch-and-go freelance work–teaching at the New School was the only steady money she saw at that time.

She had had highs and lows in the art world, and in the 1970s she was one of the older people discovered in that generation of the art galleries that began to sell photographic prints. She printed on demand, and modern prints were what was sold.

Pike and Henry Street in 1936, via Wikipedia

There’s something so timeless about her work. How did you decide what photographs to include in the biography?

Julia: Well, that was tough. Even for organizing an exhibition, it’s really hard to leave things out. I decided, since it’s not an art book, I would use photographs with a story that related to her life, or there was something interesting she had said about them. That was a way of helping me cut down the things I’d want to show in an exhibition.

What’s a story of Berenice that has stuck with you?

Julia: The one that gets reproduced all the time is when she says, “Buddy, I’m not a nice girl–I’m a photographer.” But the other aspect, to me, is the narrative of this brazen little girl, who was actually not so brazen. She was timid, she didn’t have family to support her, she was really on her own.

In the 1930s, she linked up with the art critic Elizabeth McCausland. They were virtual age-mates and were together for 30 years. But Elizabeth had a little trust fund and solid family back in Kansas. Berenice had no family, no one who understood what she was doing and could be sympathetic.

What’s your experience in wrapping up the book?

Julia: I am thrilled! I am still having fun with it, it’s a delight to share. I want more people to know about Berenice, to treasure her work and enjoy it.

Portrait of Jean Cocteau, from the series “Paris Portraits: 1925-1930,” via Art News

So what’s next for you?

Julia: I am actually going to take a break, but it would be a great pleasure to do more on Abbott in terms of specialized exhibitions. Nobody has done a good exhibition about her portraiture in the 1920s. But, the last portrait she took was in 1961, of Norbert Wiener, the cybernetics pioneer. She kept accepting commissions all her career. It’s an interesting arc because it’s decades long. And as a portraitist, she crossed paths will all kinds of interesting and important people.

“Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography” is now available at local booksellers and on Amazon.

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135 years ago today, throngs of New Yorkers came to the Manhattan and Brooklyn waterfronts to celebrate the opening of what was then known as the New York and Brooklyn Bridge. 1,800 vehicles and 150,300 people total crossed what was then the only land passage between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The bridge–later dubbed the Brooklyn Bridge, a name that stuck–went on to become one of the most iconic landmarks in New York. But there’s been plenty of history, and secrets, along the way. Lesser known facts about the bridge include everything from hidden wine cellars to a parade of 21 elephants crossing in 1884. So for the Brooklyn Bridge’s 135th anniversary, 6sqft rounded up its top 10 most intriguing secrets.

Thomas Pope’s proposal for his “Flying Pendant Lever Bridge.”

1. The idea for a Brooklyn/Manhattan bridge was as old as the century

Much like the Second Avenue Subway, the idea of a bridge connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn was considered years before construction actually happened. According to The Great Bridge, by David McCullough, the first serious proposal for a bridge was recorded in Brooklyn in 1800. The carpenter and landscaper Thomas Pope proposed a “Flying Pendant Lever Bridge” to cross the East River, and his idea was kept alive for 60 years as plans for the Brooklyn Bridge developed. But the cantilevered bridge, made completely out of wood, didn’t prove to be structurally sound.

Chain bridges, wire bridges, even a bridge 100 feet wide were all proposed to connect the two waterfronts. The main challenge, however, was the East River–actually a tidal straight–known as a turbulent waterway crammed with boats. The bridge needed to pass over the masts of ships, and could not have piers or a drawbridge.

2. When construction actually did start, the bridge was considered “symbolic of a new age”

When plans for a bridge actually came together, in the 1860s, planners, engineers and architects knew this was not to be a run-of-the-mill bridge. From the offset it was considered, according to McCullough, “one of history’s great connecting works, symbolic of a new age.” They wanted their bridge to stand up against projects like the Suez Canal and the transcontinental railroad. It was planned as the largest suspension bridge in the world, lined with towers that would dwarf everything else in view. At the time, steel was considered “the metal of the future” and the bridge would be the first in the country to utilize it. And once open, it would serve as a “great avenue” between both cities. John Augustus Roebling, the bridge’s designer, claimed it “will not only be the greatest bridge in existence, but it will be the greatest engineering work of the continent, and of the age.”

The bridge under construction 

3. The towers were crucial to the bridge’s success

Many of the bridge’s construction challenges, which held the project up for so many years, were solved by its identical 268-foot-tall towers. Architecturally, they were distinguished by twin Gothic arches, two in each tower, for the roadways to pass through. Rising more than 100 feet, the arches were meant to be reminiscent of a church’s great cathedral windows. They were constructed of limestone, granite and Rosendale cement.

These towers, heralded as the most massive things ever built on the entire North American continent, also served a crucial engineering role. They bore the weight of four enormous cables and held the cables and roadway of the bridge high enough so not to interfere with river traffic.

Emily Warren Roebling, courtesy Bridge Builder in Petticoats

4. The first woman to cross the bridge also supervised its construction

John Roebling, the initial designer of the bridge, never got to see it to fruition. While taking compass readings in preparation for its construction his foot got stuck and crushed between a ferry and the dock. Doctors amputated his toes but Roebling slipped into a coma and died of tetanus. Then his son, Washington Roebling, took over responsibilities but suffered two attacks of caisson disease–known at that time as the bends–during construction. (The bends, a common ailment for bridge workers, was the result of coming up too quickly in the compressed air chambers used to lay the foundations underwater.)

Washington Roebling, suffering from paralysis, deafness and partial blindness, turned the responsibilities over to his wife, Emily Warren Roebling. Emily took on the challenge and studied mathematics, the calculations of catenary curves, strengths of materials and the intricacies of cable construction. She spent the next 11 years assisting her husband and supervising the bridge’s construction–many were under the impression she was the real designer. She was the first person to cross the bridge fully when it was completed, “her long skirt billowing in the wind as she showed [the crowd] details of the construction.” After that, she went on to help design the family mansion in New Jersey, studied law, organized relief for returning troops from the Spanish-American War, and even took tea with Queen Victoria.

1901 records show the ‘Luyties Brothers’ paid $5,000 for wine storage in a vault on the Manhattan side, courtesy Museum of the City of New York

5. The bridge was built with numerous passageways and compartments in its anchorages, including wine cellars

New York City rented out the large vaults under the bridge’s Manhattan and Brooklyn anchorages in order to fund the bridge. Some space in each anchorage was dedicated to wine and champagne storage, and the alcohol was kept in stable temperatures throughout the year. The cellar on the Manhattan side was known as the “Blue Grotto” and was covered in beautiful frescoes depicting vineyards in Germany, Italy, Spain and France. They ended up closing in the 1930s, but a visit in 1978 uncovered this faded inscription: “Who loveth not wine, women and song, he remaineth a fool his whole life long.”

Inside the bunker, courtesy of Reuters/Seth Wenig

6. There’s also a Cold War-era bomb shelter under the bridge’s main entrance

As 6sqft pointed out a few years back, there is a nuclear bunker inside one of the massive stone arches below the bridge’s main entrance on the Manhattan side. It is full of supplies, including medication like Dextran (used to treat shock), water drums, paper blankets and 352,000 calorie-packed crackers. The forgotten vault wasn’t discovered until 2006, when city workers performed a routine structural inspection and found cardboard boxes of supplies ink-stamped with two significant years in Cold War history: 1957, when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, and 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis.

7. A fatal stampede caused New Yorkers to doubt the bridge’s strength

Only six days after the bridge opened, a woman tripped and descended down the wooden stairs on the Manhattan side of the bridge. As the story goes, her fall caused another woman to scream and those nearby rushed towards the scene. The commotion sparked a chain reaction of confusion. More people mobbed the narrow staircase, and a rumor that the bridge would collapse began in the crowd. With thousands of people on the promenade, a stampede caused the deaths of at least twelve people.

8. But a parade of elephants quelled any doubts

When the Brooklyn Bridge was gearing up for its opening day, P.T. Barnum made a proposal to walk his troupe of elephants across it–but authorities turned him down. After the stampede, however, there remained doubts if the bridge was indeed stable. So in 1884, P. T. Barnum was asked to help squelch those lingering concerns, and he got the opportunity to promote his circus. His parade of bridge-crossing elephants included Jumbo, Barnum’s prized giant African elephant.

As the New York Times reported at the time, “At 9:30 o’clock 21 elephants, 7 camels, and 10 dromedaries issued from the ferry at the foot of Courtlandt-Street… The other elephants shuffled along, raising their trunks and snorting as every train went by. Old Jumbo brought up the rear.” The paper of record also noted that “To people who looked up from the river at the big arch of electric lights it seemed as if Noah’s Ark were emptying itself over on Long Island.”

View in 1933, © NYC Municipal Archives

9. This bridge inspired the saying “I’ve got a bridge to sell you,” because people were actually trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge

Con artist George C. Parker is supposedly the man who came up with the idea of “selling” the Brooklyn Bridge to unsuspecting visitors after it opened. His scam actually worked, as it is said he sold the bridge twice a week for two years. Reports say he targeted gullible tourists and immigrants. (He didn’t just put a price tag on the bridge, he also “sold” off Grant’s Tomb, the Statue of Liberty and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) Parker’s success convinced other conmen to try their hand at selling the bridge, but none were as successful. The sensation, however, inspired the phrase “I’ve got a bridge to sell you.”

Parker did see consequences for his scamming: after being arrested for fraud a few times, he was sent to Sing Sing for life in 1928.

Inspectors from the New York and Brooklyn Corporation test the cables

10. Despite its strength, the bridge still moves

Even today, the Brooklyn Bridge rises about three inches if it’s extremely cold. It’s a result of the cables contracting and expanding in cold temperatures, which has happened ever since the bridge was complete.

But you’d be mistaken to think the cables don’t have super-human strength. Each cable is made of 19 separate strands, each of which has 278 separate wires. (There are over 14,000 miles of wire in the Brooklyn Bridge.) To install the cables, workers would splice wires together, then tie them to make the strands. A boat would come from Brooklyn and sail it across to the Manhattan side. Then, two winches on the outside of the towers would hold the strands in place as workers raised them to the top. This tedious process, often interrupted by weather, took two years to complete.

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Photo via LPC

The Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) on Tuesday designated three blocks in Central Harlem as a historic district in recognition of the significant role African Americans played in social change in New York City and beyond during the 20th century. The Central Harlem District measures West 130-132nd Streets, the mid-blocks between Lenox and Seventh Avenues.

LPC notes how Harlem residents used residential buildings to accommodate cultural, religious and political activities, starting with the Harlem Renaissance through the civil rights movement of the 1960s. “This collection of buildings is exactly why we designate historic districts: it’s an architecturally distinctive and historically significant set of structures that together tell an essential piece of Central Harlem’s story,” Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer said. The commission also launched an interactive story map as a way to illustrate the unique influence of this district through photos, maps and video.

Illustrated map of dance, theater and music venues in the district; courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Much of the district’s buildings remain intact, with just 12 of the 164 structures considered new. The rest were built in the late 19th century. The area boasts a cohesive collection of architectural styles, including neo-Grec, Queen Anne, Renaissance Revival and Romanesque Revival.

Following the Great Migration from the southern part of the United States, Central Harlem’s African American population soared after the turn of the 20th century. In 1910, African Americans made up 10 percent of the neighborhood. By 1930, 70 percent of Central Harlem’s population was black.

During the Harlem Renaissance, Central Harlem became one of the most vibrant urban areas in the country, with the emergence of some of the greatest black jazz musicians, poets, artists and writers of all time. Notably, the row houses in the historic district were used as clubs, dance halls, churches and political organizations, instead of simply residences.

These include the home of Scott Joplin, the “King of Ragtime,” the Utopia Neighborhood Club, an African American women’s social club and the New Amsterdam Musical Association, the oldest African-American music club in the U.S.

The district was also home to the meeting spots for a number of civil rights activist groups and philanthropists. These societies and fraternal organizations were key to invigorating the community to become active in boycotts, rallies and marches leading up to the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The headquarters of the March of Washington was found in a building at 170 West 130th Street.

“By recognizing and preserving the political and artistic accomplishments of Harlem’s past we ensure it continues to be a source of inspiration for the future,” L. Rachel Lecoq, president of the West 132nd Street Block Association, said in a statement. “The residents of this district are honored by this designation and commend the efforts of those who have worked tirelessly to make it a reality.”

Using this interactive story map, explore the Central Harlem West 130th-132nd Street Historic District.

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Drawing by a staff artist at Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper

On May 24, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge officially opened, with roughly 1,800 vehicles and over 150,000 people crossing what was then the only passageway between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Less than a week later, 12 people were killed and over 35 others injured in a violent stampede.

On that fateful day, the bridge was brimming with people celebrating the Memorial Day holiday and checking out the new overpass, which was considered the longest bridge in the world at the time. A woman had tripped and fallen down the wooden stairs headed toward Manhattan, which caused another woman to scream. In a grand misinterpretation, a rumor was started that the bridge was about to collapse, sending the crowd into complete hysteria. Pedestrians ran to get off the bridge, stampeding their way to the entrance and pushing others to the ground.

Drawing by a staff artist at Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper

According to a New York Times article from that day: “As she lost her footing another woman screamed, and the throng behind crowded forward so rapidly that those at the top of the steps were pushed over and fell in a heap.”

Before this tragic day, many New Yorkers doubted the strength of a bridge that could stretch that long, 1,595 feet, and carry that many people. Plus, an estimated 27 men died during the construction of the behemoth bridge.

After the stampede, concerns about the bridge’s capability grew. To quell any doubts, P.T. Barnum was asked to parade his circus troupe of elephants across the bridge to prove that it was stable. In 1884, Barnum walked 21 elephants, 7 camels and 10 dromedaries from the bottom of Cortlandt Street and over the bridge. Jumbo, the prized giant African elephant, led the pack of circus animals.

While the bridge is six times stronger than necessary, with a capacity of over 18,700 tons, there are plans to renovate the 135 year old bridge. Plans include a redesigned gateway, as well as traffic and landscaping improvements. In 2010, repairs were estimated to cost $508 million. In 2016, 6sqft learned that the price tag jumped to a whopping $811 million.

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This Saturday, 6sqft is excited to sponsor “The Hunt: NYC LGBT Sites.” Put on by our friends at Urban Archive and the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, the three-hour historic scavenger hunt will mark Pride Week by focusing on the history of the LGBT community in NYC. To give 6sqft readers an idea of what to expect, the Historic Sites Project has put together eight things you probably don’t know about LGBT history in New York, from the four remaining lesbian bars in the city to the first LGBT activist organization.

↑ 1. There are only four lesbian bars in active operation in NYC: Bum Bum Bar in Queens; Henrietta Hudson and Cubbyhole in Manhattan; and Ginger’s in Brooklyn.

↑ 2. Only one residence associated with the great American poet Walt Whitman still stands–99 Ryerson Street in Brooklyn.

↑ 3. The first LGBT activist organization, organized after the Stonewall Rebellion in June 1969, was here in New York City — the Gay Liberation Front. This LGBT historic site is actively threatened with demolition.

↑ 4. On Columbia University’s campus, six buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. One of these is on the basis of its significance to LGBT history: Earl Hall, the venue for the first student gay group in America, the Student Homophile League, later Gay People at Columbia, founded in 1966. Earl Hall was also the site of pioneering monthly gay dances that were key social events for younger gay men and lesbians.

↑ 5. Legendary nightclub Paradise Garage was considered the birthplace of the modern nightclub. Resident DJ Larry Levan influenced dance music tastes and trends across the globe. The site has just recently been demolished.

↑ 6. The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project has documented sites of significance as far back as the Dutch settlement when New York was still New Amsterdam. In the mid-1600s, records show men executed in today’s Whitehall area for the crime of sexual relations with boys, sodomy being a crime punishable by death.

↑ 7. Long before it became a well-known concert venue, Webster Hall in the East Village was one of New York’s most significant large 19th-century assembly halls, famous for its Bohemian masquerade balls in the 1910s and 1920s and a gathering place for an early 20th-century lesbian and gay community, who felt welcome and then sponsored their own events by the 1920s.

↑ 8. “Vaseline Alley,” “Bitches’ Walk,” and “the Fruited Plain” are just some of the nicknames for the popular cruising locations in historic Central Park.

Register for the event and find out more details HERE >>

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The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project is a scholarly initiative and educational resource that officially began in August 2015 and is based on over 25 years of research and advocacy by founders and directors, Andrew Dolkart, Ken Lustbader, and Jay Shockley. While part of the Organization of Lesbian and Gay Architects + Designers (OLGAD), they helped create the nation’s first map for LGBT historic sites in 1994.

It is the first initiative to document historic and cultural sites associated with the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community in the five boroughs. Sites illustrate the richness of the city’s LGBT history and the community’s influence on America.

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All photos and images courtesy of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project

Vault lights in Soho, via WooJin Chung for 6sqft

“Viva Vault Lights!” wrote the Historic Districts Council in response to the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s decision to backpedal on its rules amendments, which called for “more oversight by LPC staff but less time for public review” in proposals for alterations to historic buildings. HDC’s celebratory sentiment is in response to one of the now-moot stipulations that Soho and Tribeca’s vault lights–historic, industrial-era sidewalks made from small circular glass bulbs–could be removed by building owners and replaced with modern sidewalks.

Soho cast-iron storefronts via CityRealty

When the LPC first proposed the new rules earlier this year, they said it would streamline the application process and improve transparency. As 6sqft previously explained:

One way to do this would be to allow fewer applications to go through the public-review process, which can take up to eight weeks and involve lengthy presentations to the commission and the community board. To save time, LPC wants their staff to solely look at items that typically are approved. In the amended rules, LPC staff alone could approve alterations to historic buildings like the replacement of windows in landmarked districts, the removal of steps and the lowering of doors.

With the opportunity for outside testimony limited, preservation groups and several elected officials criticized the proposal for its lack of public process. Following the backlash, LPC commissioner Meenakshi Srinivasan announced she would step down from her post, effective as of today, just three days after the LPC decision to roll back its rule changes.

The major points that will now not take effect are:

• Removing amendments to rooftop and rear yard addition rules and allowing them to be reviewed at staff-level
• Prioritizing repairs with substitute materials instead of replacement with in-kind materials
• Lessening provisions for window replacement to match the historic ones at visible secondary facades
• Amending the codification of no-style/non-contributing buildings

An 1880 broadsheet advertising “Hyatt’s Patent Illuminating Tiles.” Courtesy of Ian Macky/Glassian.

And of course, a provision for the removal of cast iron vault lights has also been removed. As 6sqft explained, “These skylight-like sidewalks first came about in the 1840s when these neighborhoods were transitioning from residential to commercial and when their signature cast-iron buildings first started to rise.” Most of the factories were located in basements, and since there was still no electricity at the time, sky-lit sidewalks helped to illuminate the subterranean spaces. Streamlining the design, in 1845 abolitionist and inventor Thaddeus Hyatt created “Hyatt Patent Lights,” round glass pieces set into cast iron sidewalks. Since they were actually lenses, “their underside had a prism attached to bend the light and focus it to a specific underground area.”

Vault lights in Soho, via WooJin Chung for 6sqft

Over the years, some building owners have filled their vault lights in with concrete or stone when the metal frames corroded. But for landmarked buildings, the LPC’s amendments would have permitted staff to approve the removal of exposed vault lights that are deteriorated beyond repair if no other vault lights exist on the same side of the block, replacing them with “diamond plate steel or concrete/granite to match the adjacent sidewalk.” For covered, deteriorated lights, owners would have been given the choice to repair them or remove them altogether, which HDC felt “would remove all incentive for applicants to replicate this historic detail.”

The LPC still needs to formally vote on the amended rules; Tuesday’s hearing was strictly a briefing. A date for the official vote has not yet been set.

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Photo of the Decker Building via Wally Gobetz on Flickr; photo of Andy Warhol via Wikimedia

1968 was a turbulent year marked by riots, massive protests, and assassinations of notable political figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy.

But 50 years ago on June 3, 1968, an attempted assassination in New York City shook the downtown art world more deeply and personally than any of these other headline-grabbing events. Perhaps that was because it involved two quintessentially downtown figures — one a world-famous artist; the other, a struggling, mentally unbalanced aspiring writer/performer/self-proclaimed social propagandist, whose greatest claim to fame ended up being her attempt to kill the former, her one-time employer.

On that unusually cool grey day, Valerie Solanas went to Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory,’ then at 33 Union Square West, with a gun she had bought a few weeks earlier. She shot at Warhol three times, missing him twice but striking him the third time. She also shot art critic Mario Amaya, who was in the Factory at the time, and attempted to shoot Warhol’s manager Fred Hughes at point blank, but the gun jammed.

Solanas left the factory and turned herself into the police. She was charged with attempted murder, assault, and illegal possession of a gun. While in custody, Solanas was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. She plead guilty to “reckless assault with intent to harm,”  and served a three-year prison sentence, including psychiatric hospital time.

Sadly for Solanas, the assassination attempt was the zenith of her fame. After her release from prison, she moved to San Francisco, where she continued to attempt to publish her writings, to little notice. She died of pneumonia in almost total obscurity in 1988, though in later years her notoriety increased, including with the release in 1996 of the independent film based upon her life, “I Shot Andy Warhol.”

Solanas was no ordinary figure, though like many in the 1960’s, she was a drifter drawn to the Greenwich Village by the promise of cheap living and a receptive climate for radical ideas and unconventional lifestyles.

Born in Ventnor City, New Jersey, she was a troubled child, who later claimed she had been abused by several different male relatives, preferring to run away and become homeless as a teenager. But she also displayed precocious intelligence and ambition, graduating from high school on time in spite of the challenges she faced and earning a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park. There she became known for a militant brand of feminism she espoused, and, in spite of the highly restrictive laws and mores of the day, declared herself a lesbian.

By the mid-1960’s, she had moved to New York City, where she began begging and working as a prostitute to support herself. In 1965, she wrote a play titled “Up Your Ass” about a man-hating prostitute and panhandler who ends up killing a man, which would not only presage but indirectly lead to her attempt upon Warhol’s life.

An ad placed by Solanas in The Village Voice, April 27, 1967; via Wikimedia

In 1967 Solanas wrote and self-published (via mimeograph) The SCUM Manifesto, a radical feminist screed which came to be both reviled and celebrated, but which attracted little attention at the time. The manifesto called for the overthrowing of the male gender and for women to institute automation and take over the world.

“SCUM” may or may not have stood for “Society for Cutting Up Men,” a phrase which appears on the cover, but which scholars believe Solanas never intended as the literal meaning of SCUM. She sold the manifesto on the streets on Greenwich Village, charging women one dollar and men two. By the following spring, she had sold about 400 copies.

The manifesto opens:

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex. It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage.

It was around this time, in 1967, that Solanas first met Warhol, outside the Factory, where she asked him to publish her play, Up Your Ass. Warhol told Solanas the play was “well typed” and offered to read it. However, Warhol eventually told Solanas that he lost her play (some in the Factory claimed that Warhol found the play so dirty that he assumed it was being offered to him for production by the police as a form of entrapment).

In response, Solanas demanded monetary remuneration from Warhol. Instead, he offered her $25 to appear in his film I, A Man, which she did. Solanas seemed to be happy with the arrangement, and with Warhol, bringing the new publisher of the SCUM Manifesto, Maurice Girodias, along with her to see the film.

But somewhere along the way, things went sour between her and Warhol, as well as Girodias, at least in Solanas’ mind. Solanas became increasingly combative with several people in her life, demanding they lend her money, and she seemed increasingly angry about the control she felt both Warhol and Girodias had over her life. She came to believe that both were conspiring against her.

With this in her head, on June 3rd, 1968, Solanas went to the Chelsea Hotel, where Girodias was living, with the intent to shoot him. However, she was told that he was out of town, and never found him.

Unfortunately for Andy Warhol, though several people at the Factory tried to keep Solanas from him, telling her that he too was away, she finally encountered him in the elevator of the building. She followed him inside the Factory, and fired off several bullets. Though only one hit Warhol, it went through his lungs, spleen, liver, stomach, and esophagus. After five hours of surgery, Warhol’s life was saved, but changed forever.

The very public, outgoing pop artist became much more guarded and reclusive. He spent much of the rest of his life worried that Solanas (who stalked him by phone for a while after her release from prison) would try to shoot him again. Warhol was left physically frail from the shooting as well, and his injuries were believed to have contributed to his untimely death in 1987.

When arrested for the shootings, Solanas told reporters that the reason for why she did it could be found in the SCUM Manifesto. Girodias immediately had the SCUM Manifesto published, and sales picked up considerably. Solanas was for a time hailed as a hero by some radical feminists and other revolutionaries. But her instability and apparent mental illness kept her from ever reaching the mass audience she desired — at least in her lifetime. At the time of her death in 1988, Solanas was living in a single room occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco.

* Editor’s note: A version of this post appeared on Off the Grid on June 2, 2014

This post comes from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. Since 1980, GVSHP has been the community’s leading advocate for preserving the cultural and architectural heritage of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and Noho, working to prevent inappropriate development, expand landmark protection, and create programming for adults and children that promotes these neighborhoods’ unique historic features. Read more history pieces on their blog Off the Grid.

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West Side Cowboy on Death Avenue, via Kalmbach Publishing Co.

The now-defunct elevated train lines of Manhattan are well known today thanks to their reincarnation as the High Line. But before this raised structure was put in place, the west side was home to a deadly train system appropriately referred to by locals as “The Butcher.” The full-size railway line ran from 1846 to 1941 between 10th and 11th Avenues without barriers, fences or platforms, earning the route the nickname “Death Avenue” before it was taken out of operation for causing more than 430 fatalities–deaths that not even true western cowboys could stop.

Death Avenue in 1910 by George Grantham Bain, via Library of Congress

A view of the congestion caused by the trains, via Kalmbach Publishing Co.

The line circled back on 11th Avenue and included an additional east side train running on Fourth Avenue. Barreling down Death Avenue amongst the city’s bustling foot traffic, cabs, and early motorcars, the block-long trains killed and mangled pedestrians by the dozens, sparking well-deserved public upset over its 95-year lifespan.

The trains were operated by the Hudson River Railroad, and while the outcries from citizens were mostly ignored, at one point the company hired actual cowboys (shipped in from the West), to help manage the situation. The cowboys’ main objective was to ride their horses in front of the trains while waving a red flag to warn pedestrians of the oncoming trains. Unfortunately, the “West Side Cowboys” were unable to prevent all fatalities and local protest continued: In 1894 a man named Willie Lennon, who lost his leg to the trains, set a fire on the tracks; and in 1908 Seth Los Hanscamp, a seven-year-old boy, was killed by the train, inspiring a protest march of 500.

In 1929 the city, state, and New York Central Railroad reached an agreement, known as the West Side Improvement Project, to finally take action and build the aforementioned elevated railroad. A small somber plaque is located on the brick wall of a bar called Death Avenue on 10th Avenue and 29th Street in remembrance of those who lost their lives to the train.

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While visiting the major, most popular attractions of New York City can be fun, it can also be stressful, overwhelming and full of selfie-taking tourists. However, the great thing about the Big Apple is that plenty of other attractions exist that are far less known or even hidden in plain sight. To go beyond the tourist-filled sites and tour the city like you’re seeing it for the very first time, check out 6sqft’s list ahead of the 20 best underground, secret spots in New York City.

Doyers Street in 1909 via RK Chin

Photos via the Downtown Project (r) and Vanishing New York (l)

1. The Doyers Street Tunnel a.k.a the “Bloody Angle”

At the turn of the century, Chinatown was made up of many alleyways used for gambling, smuggling, and quick getaways. Found between Pell and Mott Streets, the sharp curve of Doyers Street became known as the “Bloody Angle” in 1905 because of the gangs that lay waiting in the street that bent at a nearly 90-degree angle. Two major factions battling for control of Chinatown included the Hip Sing Tong and On Leong Tong. Literally stained red during its most violent years, the 200-foot long street is considered one of the most violent in American history. Because of the street’s shape, gangsters carrying hatchets would wait around one side of the Bloody Angle until their victims turned the corner. Some say this is where the term “hatchet man” originated.

While part of the tunnel is gone now, the half that travels through Chatham Square can still be visited. At the southwestern counter of the alley, is the Chinatown landmark Nam Wah Tea Parlor, the first business to bring Dim Sum to New York in 1920.

Photo courtesy of Jason Eppink’s Flickr

2. Dead Horse Bay

Located between the Marine Park and Jamaica Bay in southern Brooklyn sits a 20th-century landfill known as Dead Horse Bay. Detached from the rest of New York City, the bay is covered with thousands of broken bottles, shards of glass, and other indecomposable remains. The bay first got its name in the 1850s when horse-rendering plants still surrounded the beach. From the 1850s until the 1930s, dead horse carcasses and other animals from NYC streets were used to manufacture glue, fertilizer, and other products at the site. As more people started driving cars more than horse and buggies, the marsh was turned into a landfill. Completely filled with trash by the 1930s, the piled had to be capped. Then, in the 1950s, the cap burst and the trash leaked onto the beach and continues to do so today. While not exactly a scenic harbor trip, visitors of Dead Horse Bay will leave with treasures of New York’s past, some even 100 years old.

Photo via Wiki Commons

3. Radio City’s secret apartment

Radio City Music Hall, which opened in 1932, is a New York City icon home to the famous Rockettes. Designed by architect Edward Durrell Stone and interior designer Donald Deskey, Radio City is known for its Art Deco decor, luxurious drapes, gold leaf and incredible murals. While millions have visited the music hall since it opened, many do not realize there is a secret apartment, built for Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel, an entrepreneur who owned some of the first successful theaters in Times Square.

Roxy helped Radio City produce ground breaking shows and introduced synchronized orchestral scores to silent films. To thank him for his magic touch, Stone and Deskey gave Roxy a present, found high inside Radio City: A lavish Art Deco-style apartment with 20-foot high ceilings covered in gold leaf. Roxy used to wine and dine celebrities like Olivia de Havilland and Alfred Hitchcock. No one has lived in the apartment since Roxy died in the apartment in 1936. However, the room, now known as the Roxy Suites still features its original furniture and fixtures and can only be rented out for the most luxurious events.

Photo via Amit Gupta’s Flickr

4. Roosevelt Island’s Small Pox Hospital & Cat Sanctuary

In the middle of the East River between Manhattan and Queens sits Roosevelt Island, known for its tram that takes you between the island and Manhattan. However, the land, formerly known as Blackwell’s Island, has a bit of a spooky history. As a way to quarantine people with smallpox from the rest of the city, a hospital was built in 1856 on the island to treat them.

Designed by James Renwick Jr., known for designing St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Madison Avenue, the hospital featured a Gothic Revival style. From 1856 to 1875, the Renwick Hospital treated roughly 7,000 patients per year. In 1875, the building was turned into a nurses’ dormitory and the smallpox hospital was moved to North Brothers Island. The hospital left behind quickly became useless and was abandoned by the city in the 1950s. In 1975, the Landmarks Preservation Commission declared it a city landmark and reinforced the walls. While there are rumors of ghosts evading the ruins, the only creatures taking over include a group of stray cats. Indeed, the site has become something of a feline sanctuary.

Photo via narcissistic tendencies flickr CC 

5. The Freedom Tunnel

The Freedom Tunnel, which runs three miles under Riverside Park from West 72nd to West 122nd Streets, was first built by Robert Moses in the 1930s to expand park space for Upper West Side residents. It was used for freight trains until 1980 when its operations stopped and the tunnel became a haven for homeless New Yorkers and graffiti artists. Artist Chris “Freedom” Pape first came to the tunnel in 1974 and started spraying painting artwork throughout.

In 1991, Amtrak reopened the tunnel which led to a mass displacement of hundreds of people that lived there. The shantytowns were bulldozed and the tunnel was no longer accessible. Still, Pape continued his work. His final work was a comic book-style mural, called “Buy American,” in honor of the homeless New Yorkers who lived in the tunnel. It became such an attraction for those curious about the city below them that Amtrak painted over the mural in 2009. While not all of his artwork survived, Pape’s “Venus de Milo” and “Coca-Cola Mural” can be seen today.

For those hoping to get a deeper look into the graffiti culture of New York City, it’s possible but somewhat dangerous to get to the Freedom Tunnel. The tunnel continues to be used by Amtrak, so explorers must stay alert. Find the tunnel’s entrance by taking the subway to 125th Street, slipping through a gap between a fence and following the tracks until reaching the tunnel.

Photo via Dia Art Foundation

6. The New York Earth Room

It’s hard to believe 280,000 pounds of soil hides in a random New York room. But that’s exactly what can be found at 141 Wooster Street in a spacious Soho loft. The art installation, known as the “New York Earth Room,” was created by Walter De Maria in 1977 and the same dirt the artist installed 35 years ago remains today. The Earth room contains a 22-inch deep layer of dirt spread across the 3,600-square-foot gallery. Originally meant to be displayed for just three months, the Dia Art Foundation supported it permanently beginning in 1980.

Image © Emily Nonko for 6sqft

7. Track 61 under Grand Central

Hidden in the depths of Grand Central is a secret train platform used by presidents to escape the public and enter the Waldorf Astoria Hotel without anyone seeing them. Known as Track 61, the private railway was first used by General John J. Pershing in 1938 and later in 1944 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who did not want the public to see he was confined to a wheelchair after contracting Polio at age 39. FDR would travel in a train car covered in thick steel and bulletproof glass, with his Pierce Arrow limousine in tow. When the train arrived at Track 61, both the president and his limo were lifted into the freight elevator.

While the hidden track stopped being used in the 1960s and 1970s, some believe Andy Warhol snuck down to the railway to host an underground party. By the 1980s, the abandoned track became home to many squatters. While the station now consists of mostly grime and soot, an antique train car remains parked there. No public tours of Track 61 currently are available, but those trained to be docents of Grand Central are known to be offered tours.

Photo courtesy of Marvel Architects

8. The Elevated Acre in FiDi

Discreetly tucked away between two office buildings at 55 Water Street in the Financial District, there is a secret, elevated plaza. While the public plaza was completed in the 1970s, the current design wrapped up in 2005 by Rogers Marvel Architects. The hidden meadow features lots of gardens and plants, elevated high above the bustling streets of FiDi. Those sly enough to discover the plaza can benefit from an amphitheater, beer garden and sweeping views of the East River. The plaza can be reserved to host private events and programs, or simply be used as a peaceful lunch break spot.

Image © Diane Pham for 6sqft

9. Brooklyn Heights’ hidden subway ventilator

Walking through Brooklyn Heights and admiring the historic, beautiful brownstones can be a fun and relaxing way to spend an afternoon. But, while on that Sunday stroll, head to 58 Joralemon Street. This home looks like the all the rest; the big difference is that no one lives inside. The building is a decoy used to hide a subway ventilator and an emergency exit. The Brooklyn Heights home was used as a private residence in 1847, but was later converted into a ventilation building and emergency exit during the extension of the subway from Bowling Green in Manhattan to Borough Hall in Brooklyn which opened in 1908. In order to curb curious explorers, the NYPD is said to have heightened some security measures near the home.

Photo via Wikipedia

10. Mysterious Toynbee tiles

Like many secret New York attractions, the Toynbee Tiles are hidden in plain sight. Found in about two dozen major cities in the United States, the hundreds of tiles have no clear origin. Roughly the size of a license plate, the rectangular tiles are embedded in the asphalt and have the following vague inscription: “TOYNBEE IDEA IN MOViE ‘2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER.” While a few compelling theories exist (and even a documentary called “Resurrect Dead” explaining them), no one knows for sure why they originated. Some believe a 70-year-old carpenter from Philadelphia, James Morasco, created the tiles, with copycat tiles beginning to spread worldwide. For those seeking to interpret the meaning behind these cryptic tiles, head to 24th Street and 6th Avenue and look down. To find the rest of the Toynbee Tiles throughout New York and other cities, use this map.

Photo via Wikipedia

11. The Blockhouse

Lovers of hidden American history should head to the northern section of Central Park. Blockhouse No.1 or the Blockhouse remains the park’s second oldest structure. First built in 1812 to defend against the British, the structure stands on the edge of a high precipice above the lower part of Harlem and Morningside Heights. At its peak, the fort held 2,000 New York militiaman. Since the British never attacked New York City, the Blockhouse never was used during a combat. Currently, the structure sits abandoned. Tours are occasionally given by the Urban Park Rangers, but usually, the building stays locked and solo exploration trips are not allowed.

Photo courtesy of the Mela Foundation

12. Tribeca’s Dream House

Covertly located off Church Street in Tribeca, the “Dream House” serves as a trippy meditative art space for New Yorkers in need of a deep breath or two. A black door simply reads “the dream house” in white letters. For a small price, visitors can spend as long as they wish in the purple-lit, incense-smelling room. Created in 1993 by modern composer La Monte Young and visual artist Marian Zazeela, this light and sound art installation lets city dwellers relieve stress after a long day. Looped, minimalist music plays throughout the pad, and the music changes based on whether visitors are standing or lying down. The spot is run by La Monte Young’s MELA Foundation and funded by the Dia Art Foundation.
Photo courtesy of Craig Cavallo

13. El Sabroso

El Sabroso, while becoming increasingly better known, is definitely not easy to stumble upon. Located inside the freight entrance of 265 West 37th Street, you will find a tiny counter serving Latin American food, which makes up the entire restaurant. While simply a counter inside a hallway, the standard Latin fare is some of the best in Midtown and New York. This legitimate hole-in-the-wall, found in between a coffee shop and a smoke shop, takes cash only and offers delicious food for under $10.
Photo via the Federal Reserve Bank of New York

14. The New York Federal Reserve’s Gold Vault

Found nearly 80 feet beneath the New York Federal Reserve Bank in the Financial District is the largest concentration of gold in human history. It contains a Fed-operated vault that is built in bedrock and includes deposits from central banks from around the world. The vault is a double-story cylindrical space which rotates. Inside, there are 122 separate mini vaults, in addition to smaller vaults for account holders. In total, there are about 7,000 tons of gold bars, five percent of all of the gold ever mined. Surprisingly, anyone can tour the vault with the Federal Reserve Bank. But for security purposes, visitors must register 30 days before the day of the tour.

Photo via Wikipedia

15. The Berlin Wall in Midtown

After the Berlin Wall was taken down, pieces of it were sent around the globe, including five pieces that landed in New York City. The concrete hunks include artwork from artist Thierry Noir, who began painting the west side of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s, to make the wall less threatening. A 20-foot section of the wall can be found at 520 Madison Avenue, originally bought in 1990 from the East German government by Jerry Speyer of Tishman Speyer. The five bright panels were visible from the street for many years but recently moved into the lobby of the building in an effort to preserve the historic slabs. Thankfully, the lobby remains open to the public every day.

Photo via Houdini Museum of New York

16. The Houdini Museum

Did you know that over 1,500 rare belongings of Harry Houdini can be found just around the corner from Penn Station? However, most travelers passing by the Houdini Museum walk right by it. Visitors must walk through a nondescript lobby on 7th Avenue and take the elevator to the third floor to find the museum, which first opened in 2012 and sits within the Fantasma Magic shop. Objects displayed include rare publicity posters, unthinkable handcuffs, large escape restraints, Houdini’s secret escape tools and other memorabilia. The most magical part of this hidden destination? It’s free.

Image courtesy of Scouting New York
Image courtesy of Scouting New York

17. 77 Water Street

The 26-story tower at 77 Water Street in the Financial District is not your typical office building. On top of the roof sits a World War I fighter plane and its lobby features a penny candy store. The William Kaufman Organization first built the office tower in 1970 and hoped to decorate the roof with something unique, letting workers be free of their confined office environments. While some speculated the aircraft landed on top of the building, it actually is just an artistic replica of a 1916 British Sopwith Camel.

Another whimsical touch of the building includes a turn-of-the-century penny candy store. The store remains open for business, with signs for actual old-time brands and a striped awning.

Photo by Gabriel Pintado

18. The Umbrella House

What started out as squatters taking over an abandoned city-owned building at 21 Avenue C on the Lower East Side, later became a successfully run affordable housing co-op. When squatters first moved in around 1980 they discovered a leaky roof. To stop water from dripping on their heads, the inhabitants used umbrellas, giving way to the building’s name. Almost fifteen years ago, the City of New York granted the squatters of Umbrella House the rights to 11 buildings they had taken over. After many years of renovations and improvements, the building recently built an 820-square-foot urban garden on its roof, run by volunteers. Each year, residents paint old umbrellas and hang them from the fire escape as a way to honor the building’s history.

Photo via Wikipedia

19. The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store

Where else would one find a superhero supply store, but in Brooklyn? While the Park Slope store boldly states its business out front, promising all wishful heroes all of the costumes, superpowers and toys needed to succeed, the store has a legitimate secret door hiding their second identity. Behind the door, is a large learning center for students ages 6 to 18 to get homework help and participate in creative writing workshops. The nonprofit, called 826NYC, is part of best-selling author Dave Eggers’ 826 National, an organization that uses fun stores to mask tutoring centers in the back. The manager of the store, Chris Molnar, told Business Insider: “We want people to get lost in the idea of a superhero store. We don’t want to beat them over the head with our programs. We want to keep the magic.”

Photo via Teri Tynes’s Flickr

20. Midtown’s 25-foot waterfall

Squeezed in between Second and Third Avenues on East 51st Street sits a vest-pocket park known as Greenacre Park. While New Yorkers appreciate any tiny piece of greenery, this privately-owned, but publicly accessible park, one of the smallest in the city, stands out from other parks around NYC. Greenacre Park spans just 6,360 square feet but features a 25-foot waterfall. In addition to being a beautiful escape into nature, the roaring waters block out a lot of the car honking and construction work noise of Midtown. The park was first constructed in 1971 by the Greenacre Foundation and designed by Hideo Sasaki. Additional perks of the park include a trellis with heat lamps, plenty of seating and honey locust trees, azaleas and pansies.

* Editor’s note: This post was originally published on July 26, 2017

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Photo via Clean Sweep Auctions

On September 30, 1973, during the last home game at Yankee Stadium before the historic arena underwent two years of renovations, diehard baseball fans came wielding screwdrivers and hammers. Not to fight fans from the opposing team of that night’s game, the Detroit Tigers, but to dismantle any memorabilia from “The House That Ruth Built.” One fan somehow got his hands on a right field sign wall that designates the 296-foot distance from home plate (h/t Forbes). A family member of the brazen fan put up the sign for auction last month and on Wednesday, after 18 bids, the 1960s era sign sold for a final sale price of $55,344.

Photo via Wikimedia

The right field sign sat in a closet for more than four decades. The president of the auction company Clean Sweep, Steve Verkman, told Forbes: “The consignor’s brother ripped it off the outfield fence at the end of the game and it was total chaos. The brother died and then left it to his brother, our consignor. He knew it was special and kept it until now.”

The owner of the sign, who found the unique item difficult to assign a price, opened the bidding at just $200. Over the course of a month, and 18 bids later, the souvenir’s winning bid jumped to an extraordinary $46,120 and a final sales price of $55,344.

The site for the auction, which closed last night, describes the home run sign as being in very good condition with some peeling paint off the numbers, but “the display value is simply tremendous.”

In addition to being a treasured relic from the beloved old Yankee Stadium, which was built in 1923, the sign also represents one of the most famous “short porches” in baseball history. The old stadium gained a lot of infamy in the baseball world for being an easy park for left-handed hitters to smash home runs to the right side, just over where the “296” sign hung.

[Via Forbes]

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Lincoln Square, a part of the Upper West Side, is a literal square of approximately 50 blocks that runs east-west from Central Park West to the West Side Drive and north-south from 59th to 72nd Streets. The neighborhood, which is bisected by Broadway and contains the Lincoln Center “superblock,” has an enormous amount of culture, loads of prestigious schools, tons of old-school luxury residences lining the park, and a massive, five-acre, four-building new development called Waterline Square, finalizing a decades-long master plan for the neighborhood. Ahead, we take a look at the neighborhood’s history, from its Dutch roots to Robert Moses’ slum clearance, modern residential development, and all the amenities that make this area more fun than one may think.

History

1920 photo, looking south from 64th Street with Lincoln Square in the foreground. Tracks of 9th Ave “El” on Columbus Avenue seen in lower right-hand corner. Hotel Empire at right. Via MCNY.

When the Dutch first settled Manhattan, the Lincoln Square area was known as Bloomingdale (or “Bloemendael,” by early settlers) in reference to a flower-growing region of Holland.

The urbanization of Lincoln Square came on strong in the late 1800s, only to fall into disrepair relatively quickly. Most of the Upper West Side brownstones were built in the late 1890s for middle-class families. But by the 1950s, those brownstones had been broken up into tiny apartments and neglected by absentee landlords.

Street scene in San Juan Hill in 1939, via Lee Sievan/MCNY.

After being known as Bloomingdale, Lincoln Square was referred to as San Juan Hill. In the early 1900s, San Juan Hill was a predominantly African American neighborhood filled with tenements. The area had so many residents, that it’s been reported up to 5,000 people lived on a single block. Legend has it that the area was named after the segregated black 10th Cavalry that fought with Theodore Roosevelt at the Battle of San Juan Hill during the Spanish–American War in 1898.

San Juan Hill soon became a cultural hub, serving as the first locale in the city to hear live jazz. One of the area’s most famous residents was Thelonius Monk, and as 6sqft previously explained, “among the clubs was The Jungle’s Casino where pianist James P. Johnson wrote a song to go along with the ‘wild and comical dance’ of off-duty dock workers. Together, this became the Charleston, which took the nation by storm.”

Unfortunately, the area also became wrought with gang warfare between African-American gangs from the neighborhood and Irish-American gangs from nearby communities. In fact, the setting of “West Side Story” was inspired by the frequent clashes between the black residents of San Juan Hill and Irish residents of Hell’s Kitchen. The 1961 film’s opening scenes were even shot in the neighborhood.

In the 1940s, the New York City Housing Authority deemed the area the worst slum section in the City of New York. In 1967, award-winning journalist and urban critic Roberta Brandes Gratz and her husband bought a brownstone in Lincoln Square. Brandes Gratz says, “the Upper West Side was one of New York’s fastest-declining neighborhoods, rife with drugs, crime and decay.”

Lincoln Center in 1965, via MCNY

In his typical fashion, Robert Moses took this as an opportunity in the 1950s and 60s to create the urban renewal “Lincoln Square Renewal Project.” Under his slum clearance plan, 18 blocks of the old tenements were demolished, displacing 7,000 lower-income families and 800 businesses. In their place, he built the Amsterdam Housing Projects in 1948, where close to none of the new housing units were intended for the original residents. Later, in the ’60s, backed by heavyweight civic leaders including John D. Rockefeller III, Moses began work on the 16-acre Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

As the decades progressed, the surrounding and remaining residential areas grew in fashion, thanks mainly to the proximity to Lincoln Center, multiple train lines, Central Park, and those brownstones still remaining.

Residential development 

15 Central Park West, via CityRealty

A decade after it was completed, Robert A.M. Stern’s 15 Central Park West still reigns as the most expensive condo in New York City, averaging $6,405 per square foot. But there are plenty of new developments springing up nearby that’ll likely give it a run for its money (though some are more welcomed than others).

200 Amsterdam Avenue

200 Amsterdam Avenue is a planned 52-story, 668-foot condo tower from developers SJP Properties and Mitsui Fudosan. The 112-unit building was slated to be the tallest on the Upper West Side until Extell increased the height of their proposed tower at 50 West 66th Street to 775 feet tall. Designed by Elkus Manfredi, 200 Amsterdam has an Art Deco-inspired facade with an aluminum curtainwall and metal panels.

Renderings of 200 Amsterdam Avenue via SJP Properties/ Elkus Manfredi

As 6sqft previously explained:

Construction on 200 Amsterdam was stalled after critics argued the project did not follow required open space regulations and the city’s Department of Buildings shut down the site in July [2017] until the issue was resolved. In October, developers approved SJP Properties’ revised plan, which added unused air rights from other sites and connected them back to the project’s lot.

But in March of this year, opponents of the tower fought to block the condominium building based on a technicality. According to the New York Post, the Committee for Environmentally Sound Development, an activist group led by neighborhood preservationist group Landmark West!, used a 1978 Department of Buildings air rights memo that misinterprets the department’s allocation of air rights. The fight is far from over but it is a small coup for LW! A follow-up hearing was scheduled for June 5th, but for the second time, the NYC Board of Standards and Appeals has postponed the decision until July 17th.

50 West 66th Street

50 West 66th Street is also facing backlash from local residents. As mentioned, the 69-story, 775-foot condominium tower from Extell will be the tallest on the Upper West Side. As 6sqft explained:

Gary Barnett, the founder and president of Extell, initially filed plans with the Buildings Department for a 25-story building. Opponents of the project claim Barnett used a “bait-and-switch” tactic, as the building’s new height is three times what Extell had first reported.

“Based on these new renderings, it is clear that Extell did not present neighbors or the Department of Buildings (DOB) with a truthful description of their plans,” [Council Member Helen] Rosenthal said in a statement. “Without the complete plans, DOB granted permits to excavate a foundation that would support a 25-story building– one-third of Extell’s intended building. This raises serious process concerns.”

Barnett says he’s not worried and has tapped a zoning lawyer who’s arguing that “current zoning laws allow for a skinny tower of unrestricted hight as long as the bulk of the building is in a podium that does not exceed 150 feet tall.” As of March, demolition had begun at the site. If all goes according to Extell’s plan, the 127-unit tower will be completed in 2019.

Renderings of 50 West 66th Street courtesy of Binyan Studios/ Snøhetta

On a less contentious note is the tower’s design by Snøhetta. The building’s podium at street level will be covered in textured limestone with bronze and glass storefronts. According to the firm:

The design is achieved through a series of sculptural excavations, evocative of the chiseled stone of Manhattan’s geologic legacy. As the building rises, its bulk is carved away, splitting the tower volume into two. Chamfered corners refine its silhouette and form a shared amenity terrace on the 16th floor.

Amenities will include an indoor pool, full basketball court, squash court, and bowling alley. The 16th floor, with one of its structural excavations, will be dedicated to additional resident amenities centered around a landscaped terrace with an outdoor pool, spa, and fire pit.

350 West 71st Street

Rendering via Redundant Pixel/Alan Hill Design

Situated in the West 71st Street Historic District, a landmarked row of 33 Renaissance Revival townhouses, 350 West 71st Street is offering brand new contemporary homes encased in a classic facade. According to Stribling broker Jeffrey Stockwell, “it is so rare to have the prewar, 1900s facade on the outside and have everything inside completely new. This is not a conversion. Everything inside has been gutted so this is a brand new building within historical facade.”

The DXA Studio-designed boutique residence has 38 apartments, ranging from two- to four-bedrooms. Its location on a cul-de-sac between Riverside Boulevard and West End Avenue means there’s very little traffic but the building is still accessible to Riverside Park.

Despite being a small building, the building’s amenities are comparatively robust. There is a 24-hour attended marble-clad lobby, a wood-paneled library, a landscaped rooftop terrace with a furnished dining area, gas grill, and lounge seating, a fitness center including Peloton cycling equipment, children’s playroom, bicycle storage, and individual storage units.

Waterline Square

Speaking of robust amenities, Waterline Square takes that to a new level with their 100,000-square- foot facility designed by David Rockwell.

James Linsley, the President of General Investment and Development Companies says, “The thinking at the outset was that we knew we had a chance to do something very unique and rare which was to control five acres of waterfront property right at the nexus Upper West Side and Midtown. This was a pretty unique proposition. From the beginning, we thought of this not as us building three buildings but was creating a place. We aren’t just trying to construct space, we are trying to create place.”

With early 2019 occupancy expectations, Waterline Square is a trio of luxury residential high-rises, sitting on nearly five acres along the Hudson River, from West 59th Street to West 61st Street. The entire, four-building (three residential buildings and one amenity facility) is centered on a 2.6-acre, beautifully-landscaped park and open spaces, the Waterline Club connects all three buildings and has been designed by famed hospitality group, Rockwell Group.

Each building has its own starchitect-designed personality, its own team of interior designers. Richard Meier’s One Waterline Square rises 37 stories and will have 288 condo units. Kohn Pedersen Fox’s Two Waterline Square rises 38 stories and will have 160 condos. Rafael Viñoly handled the 34-story Three Waterline Square, which will have 200 units, high-end condos on the upper floors and rentals below.

Linsley explains DIG was intent to “create an authentic New York City neighborhood. We decided to use three architects so each building has its own personality but they each communicate with each other architecturally. We consciously chose world famous architects who live and work in New York so that they would truly understand the pulse of the city as we.”

The common amenities includes a state-of-the-art fitness center, an indoor basketball court, indoor tennis court, soccer field, bowling alley, and a 25-meter, three-lane lap pool for those looking to get a workout outside of the traditional fitness center. Other amenity highlights include an art studio, music studio, indoor gardening studio, and specialty zones for children and pets. Also, the first-ever Cipriani food hall will open at Waterline Square, offering a 28,000-square-foot food hall with a market and restaurants at Two Waterline Square.

Aside from the outrageous amenities, what really makes Waterline Square stand out is its park designed by Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects. It includes tree-lined groves, open grass areas, walking paths, a playground and water features.

“Some of the most valuable real estate in New York City is on parks but they are separated by a street. Here, the park directly abuts the footprint of the buildings so the buildings are in the park.” Additionally, Linsley adds, that the entire park and development weave into the fabric of the neighborhood, “so all nearby residents can use it the park as it is a gateway entrance between the fabric of Midtown and the West Side to the waterfront esplanade.”

Waterline Square is the final phase of the final phase of the Riverside South master plan: a 77-acre plot of land that shoulders the Hudson River from West 59th Street to 72nd Street, and was once home to a freight rail-yard owned by the Penn Central Railroad. Linsley says, “after a multi-decade master plan to come to completion, our project, in itself is pretty special, but it is also the exclamation point at the end of this massive project.” The project is expected to be complete later this year.

1865 Broadway

Renderings via JLL/AvalonBay

This 33-story tower is being built on the former site of the American Bible Society building (the organization sold to move to Philadelphia in the fall of 2015). Developers AvalonBay Communities are building a 416-foot, concrete superstructure designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM). Although Avalon usually builds rentals, this building will be a mix of condominiums and rentals, with 160 total units. The amenities will include a pool, a game room, fitness center, several lounges, a communal pantry, a roof terrace, bicycle parking and tenant storage. There will also be a two-story podium with more than 70,000 square feet of retail, which will extend to two more floors below ground. The building topped out late last year and is expected to wrap up in early 2019.

Things to do

Lincoln Center

Photo via Chun-Hung Eric Cheng/Flickr

In October 2012, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts underwent a $1.2 billion campus renovation, now presenting over 3,000 programs, events, and initiatives each year. Among the organizations it hosts are the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, and the New York City Opera.

Time Warner Center

Via Wiki Commons

Attracting more than 16 million visitors annually, Related Companies’ Time Warner Center offers shopping, dining, accommodations, and entertainment in a 2.8 million-square-foot double tower complex. There are over 50 retail shops, a Whole Foods, the largest collection of Michelin-starred restaurants under one roof (Masa, Per Se, Bouchon Bakery, and Porter House New York), the five-star Mandarin Hotel with nearly 200 rooms, the luxury residential condominiums of One Central Park, and many office headquarters.

Museum of Arts and Design (MAD)

With an ill-fitting acronym, MAD champions contemporary creatives including artists, designers, and artisans. Started in 1956 by philanthropist Aileen Osborn Webb, MAD honors the creative process and a cross-disciplinary approach to art and design.

Juilliard

Juilliard has always been the epitome of cool and it continues to be so as the school president, Joseph W. Polisi asserts, “Artists of the 21st century must rededicate themselves to a broader professional agenda that reaches beyond what has been expected of them in an earlier time. Specifically, the 21st century artist will have to be an effective and active advocate for the arts in communities large and small around the globe.” The Juilliard School was founded in 1905 and is a world leader in performing arts education. Its mission “to provide the highest caliber of artistic education for gifted musicians, dancers, and actors from around the world so that they may achieve their fullest potential as artists, leaders, and global citizens” offers more than 800 artists from 40 states and 38 countries and regions an amazing and unique education. The school offers 700 annual performances in the school’s five theaters – there is never a dull moment for the Fame inspiration.

American Folk Art Museum

The museum is currently closed for installation but will reopen on June 12th with their Charting the Divine Plan exhibit highlighting the art of the first American scientific illustrator Orra White Hitchcock. The museum, opened in 1961, focuses on self-taught artists “whose singular talents have been refined through experience rather than formal artistic training, the museum considers the historical, social, and artistic context of American culture.” The collection has more than 7,000 artworks dating from the 18th century to today.

Equinox Sports Club

With work spaces, sports leagues and events, you could spend all day in this Equinox. With a recent multi-million dollar investment, this outpost of Equinox Sports Club has a terrific roof deck and outdoor track, and a Mind Body Studio, a dedicated Boxing studio, a Cycling studio and new communal lounge spaces, in addition to fitness equipment, this is a true luxury fitness destination.

Restaurants

In addition to the many glam restaurants of the Time Warner Center, there are other hot spots in the area too.

Jean-Georges’ Nougatine

The more casual version of Jean‑Georges, Nougatine has a lively bar scene at night. With an abundance of celebrities, socialites, and business tycoons, Nougatine serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner, 365 days a year. The restaurant features only the freshest and finest ingredients.

The newly renovated dining room by acclaimed interior designer Thomas Juul‑Hansen features a bustling open kitchen. Additionally, there is the Terrace at Jean‑Georges which is a beautiful outdoor patio. Diners can sit under umbrellas and get terrific views of Central Park.

Boulud Sud
Chef Daniel Boulud’s Boulud Sud is the chef’s celebration of the sun and the sea. Inspired by the Mediterranean coast, the menu emphasizes regional flavors with an abundance of fresh vegetables, seafood, citrus, grains and herbs. The wine list ranges from French rosés and Italian reds to Greece, Spain and other coastal regions. The restaurant also offers cocktails inspired by the same seasonal products found on the food menu, with a dedicated gin page as well as a robust selection of absinthes, amari, vermouths and liqueurs.

The Smith
For a terrific brunch and lunch with casual with outdoor seating, the Smith states they are “passionate and empowered” and place their employees, guests and community as a priority. They also work closely with local farms to provide the top quality farm to table ingredients.

Lincoln Restaurante

For a fancy night out or a pre-theater meal, Lincoln Restaurante’s location beside Lincoln Center’s reflecting pool and the Henry Moore sculpture offers panoramic views and a grass lawn roof. Their Negroni Bar and Prosecco Bar have rotating selections and also have a 350 bottle wine list focused on small producers which is constantly changing.

Sapphire
For a relaxed, Indian meal, Sapphire offers boxed lunches and buffets and caters to the Lincoln Center crew.

Rosa Mexicano
Rosa Mexicano’s signature menu items including Guacamole en Molcajete prepared table side and Pomegranate Margarita. They say they “strive to redefine expectations with our contemporary Mexican cuisine, rooted in authentic flavors combined with stylish spaces, festive atmospheres and warm Latin hospitality.”

55 Washington Street in 1907, courtesy of the Skyscaper Museum

New Yorkers are known for their innovative thinking: Inventions like Scrabble, credit cards, and even Baked Alaska all came from local creators. A little less exciting, but still a crucial contraption, the cardboard box was also invented in New York City. Like many discoveries, the box came to be only after a careless mistake. Scottish-born entrepreneur Robert Gair owned a paper bag factory on Reade Street in Manhattan. One day in 1879, a pressman accidentally cut through thousands of small seed bags, instead of pressing them. Following the accident, Gair, who moved headquarters to Dumbo, developed a method for the mass production of cardboard boxes and later supplied major companies like Kellogg and Nabisco.

Gair’s Read Street location in 1909, courtesy of the Greater Astoria Historical Society

At the age of 14, Gair moved to Brooklyn from Scotland in 1853. After serving in the Civil War, he returned to the city and began manufacturing paper bags with square bottoms, along with a new business partner. Gair started his business after realizing people preferred packaging made of paper rather than cotton and burlap bags, which were not readily available during the war.

For over ten years, Gair ran the paper bag company, becoming one of the most successful leaders of the paper goods industry. In 1879, a happy coincidence would make the Brooklynite even more prosperous.

One of Gair’s paper bag makers accidentally sliced through thousands of seed bags after a metal ruler intended to crease the bags shifted, cutting the bags instead. Instead of worrying about the ruined bags, Gair saw that cutting and creasing the paperboard at once could create the prefabricated boxes. Before, making boxes was a time-consuming and expensive process. Now, thanks to Gair, cardboard boxes could be mass-produced, making them more affordable. So that same year, he patented a machine that made folding boxes.

In 1888, Gair needed a larger production facility, and he moved his headquarters from Tribeca to 55 Washington Street in Dumbo (today the headquarters of Etsy, among other businesses) after seeing the success there of his friend John Arbuckle’s massive coffee roastery. Gair also became a major real estate player in Dumbo, buying and leasing so many manufacturing buildings that people started referring to the neighborhood as “Gairville.”

Via Wikimedia

Gair first made boxes for cigarette companies and other major retailers like Colgate, Bloomingdales, and Ponds. But it wasn’t until 1896 that the cardboard box became a nationwide sensation. That year, the National Biscuit Company (now known as Nabisco), which had its factory at today’s Chelsea Market, started selling its Uneeda Biscuits in boxes. The company’s first two million boxes were from Gair’s factory, often considered the start of consumer packaging because of its wide reach.

Gair passed away in 1927, at which time his factory had been moved to Piermont, New York.

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Eleven blocks of Rockaway Beach will be closed this summer due to erosion, but that’s just one setback in a long history of resilience on the peninsula. Four-and-a-half miles of the beach are open right now, with every block steeped in history. The Rockaways ushered Henry Hudson into the New World; Walt Whitman into paradise; Hog Island into oblivion; and the Transatlantic Flight into existence.

As “the brightest jewel within the diadem of imperial Manhattan,” the pristine beaches of the “Queens Riviera” became the preferred summer locale for New York’s most illustrious citizens. Later, the “people’s beach” at Riis Park helped make the Rockaways accessible to more New Yorkers. From, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, to Patti Smith to Robert Mosses, everybody wanted to be at Rockaway Beach.

An illustration of the Half Moon in the Hudson River in 1609, via Wiki Commons

“Rockaway” is derived from “Reckouwacky,” a Canarsie Native American word. It means “The place of our own people.” The Canarsie were the first people to live on the Rockaway Peninsula, and they were the first to see Henry Hudson arrive in New York.

When he made landfall in New York on September 3, 1609, Hudson anchored the Half Moon at Rockaway Inlet. One of his men wrote that the Canarsie people greeted the ship’s arrival with “every sign of friendship,” and came aboard to trade. Given such a warm reception, Hudson made Rockaway Inlet his first base of operations in New York and used the anchorage to explore Jamaica Bay.

Hudson was not the only illustrious name associated with the early history of the Rockaways. The Canarsie “sold” the Rockaways to the English in 1685, and Richard Cornell snapped up what is now Far Rockaway in 1687, establishing residence as the first European settler in the area in 1690. Cornell, founder of Cornell University, might be the most famous member of the family, but long before the School of Hotel Management was dolling out degrees, Benjamin Cornell was managing a hotel in the Rockaways.

View of the luxurious hotels in the Rockaways, via Lancaster History

He established Rockaway Bath in 1816, beginning Rockaway’s life as a resort destination. Stagecoach lines brought wealthy people from Long Island out to Cornell’s Bath to take in the salt air (with the help of their horses who backed bathing houses into the water, so that fusty beachgoers could “swim.”) The enterprise was so successful that the entire Cornell homestead became the Marine Pavilion Hotel and Resort in 1833. The Marine Pavilion was one of the most luxurious hotels in the country and billed as “a large and splendid edifice standing upon the margin of the Atlantic.” It was also the most expensive hotel ever constructed at the time, costing $43,000 to erect.

A boardwalk bathing pavilion in 1903, via NYPL

The hotel made “summer” into a verb in the Rockaways. Well-to-do 19th-century sun-worshipers came pouring in for the season, using the hotel’s private turnpike from Long Island, or the newly opened ferry service to shuttle across the bay from Brooklyn. The Pavilion was so chic, it attracted assorted Astors and Vanderbilts and became a destination for New York’s literati, counting Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Walt Whitman as frequent guests.

Top: Rockaway Beach in 1897, via MCNY; Bottom: Crowds arriving on the Rockaway Pier in 1900, via MCNY

The Marine Pavilion burned down in 1864, but by the end of the decade, the resort boom would be back and better than ever, thanks to the Rockaway Beach Railroad, which opened in 1868, and the LIRR, which extended service to the Rockaways in 1873. As public transit proliferated on the peninsula, Rockaway became accessible to New Yorkers trapped in the stifling tenements of an un-airconditioned city. Irish immigrants, in particular, made their way to Rockaway, and the peninsula became known as the Irish Riveria.

The Rockaway boardwalk in 1903, via NYPL

As Rockaway welcomed a wider array of summer revelers, the beach scene became a bit more rollicking. The Wave, Rockaway’s local newspaper reports:

As the gross receipts for all the establishments in Rockaway [rose] for the 1876 season ($1,180,000), complaints of murder, housebreaking, gambling, vice, unlicensed liquor sales, numerous places selling liquor on the same license, theft, assault, pickpocketing, corrupt and drunken sheriffs fighting amongst themselves, and last of all the confidence men operating on the peninsula were frequent.

A lithograph of the Rockaway Beach Hotel, via Vincent Seyfried and William Asadorian, “Old Rockaway, New York, in Early Photographs,” Dover Publications, Mineola, NY, 2000

This intoxicating 19th-century bungalow bash came to a head in the ill-fated Rockaway Beach Hotel, billed as the largest hotel in the world. The mammoth structure stretched 1,180 feet from Beach 116th Street to Beach 112th Street, could accommodate 7,600 guests, and cost $1.5 million to build in 1879! Complete with a reported “100,000 square feet of piazzas,” and an observation deck on the roof, the grand summer palace was the Titanic of hotels: it went down so fast only a wing of the hotel was ever open to the public, and only then for a single month, in August 1881. The whole place was torn down in 1884.

Speaking of going under, the entire Seaside section of the Peninsula, from Beach 102nd Street to Beach 106th Street, burned from beach to bay in 1882, and an 1883 hurricane pummeled the Rockaways so hard it wiped Hog Island off the map, giving New York its very own Atlantis.

A 1907 postcard that shows the Rockaway’s rollercoaster, via MCNY

In the 20th Century, the Rockaways rose from the ashes and the waves to rival Coney Island as a summertime amusement paradise. Coney Island can lay claim to the world’s first enclosed amusement park, but Rockaway got its own Steeplechase in 1901, and with it, the original wooden Rockaway Boardwalk, which stretched from beach 59th Street to Beach 74th Street. Rockaway Playland followed the following year and brought the world the Atom Smasher, rollercoaster extraordinaire.

With the Coming of the First World War, Hercules and Ajax missiles joined the Atom Smasher on the Peninsula. The artillery was stationed at Fort Tilden, built in 1917 between what is now Riis Park and Breezy Point. Fort Tilden was decommissioned in 1978 and is now administered by the national park service.

Jacob Riis Park and bathhouse via Padraic/Flickr

The Rockaways also hold a hallowed place in Aviation History: the world’s first Transatlantic Flight took off from the Rockaway Naval Air Station in May 1919. Today, we bound into the surf, not into the sky, from the Air Station, because Robert Moses built Jacob Riis Park on the site of the Station in 1934. The Art Deco bathing retreat modeled on Jones Beach, became “The People’s Beach,” attracting a working-class crowd Riis himself would have known well, and showing New York how the other half swims.

Riis Park wouldn’t be Moses’ only stamp on the Rockaways. The Prince of Parkways built the Marine Parkway Bridge, the Cross Bay Bridge, and Shorefront Parkway, cutting through neighborhoods and felling all structures within 200 feet of the boardwalk. At the same time, post-war suburban sprawl meant that the hot crowds who had once spent summer in the city and trekked out to the Rockaways looking for relief took their vacations elsewhere.

View of the Rockaway boardwalk today, showing some of the public housing. Via Robert/Flickr.

Both these factors diminished Rockaway’s vibrant beach community in the ‘60s, and Moses targeted the peninsula for slum clearance and urban renewal projects, building large-scale public housing at the Rockaways. These programs effectively took the city’s most underserved residents and moved them as far as possible from the resources they needed.

But, the Rockaways rose once again. When Hurricane Sandy made landfall in October 2012, it destroyed nearly three-and-a-half miles of the five-mile boardwalk and devastated homes in the area. The communities of the peninsula rebuilt, and the new boardwalk was fully finished July 4, 2016.

Rockaway Beach Surf Club via Mig Gilbert/Flickr

Today, the peninsula has become so popular, it’s been dubbed New York’s “next hot neighborhood,” and locals and day-trippers once again flood Riis Park, coming via ferry, beach bus, or subway. The Peninsula also offers quite a few quirks: The Rockaway Theater Company holds its productions in Fort Tilden; A reef made of ice cream trucks supports an entire ecosystem.

Surfers in the Rockaways, via Dakine Kane/Flickr

But perhaps the most special: the Rockaways are the only place in New York City you can legally surf, and it might be the surfers who sum up the beach best. Jimmy O’Brien, a surfer who writes The Wave’s “Down by the Jetty” column, says, “The Ocean is the Last Great Wilderness left on this Earth…Surfing has provided the opportunity to enter this foreign watery world…In our hyper-connected world, where the maps have been filled in, the routes have been calculated, our schedules have been pre-planned to the minute, it is with great anticipation, wonder and excitement that we look out at the sun-dappled horizon waiting for the waves to roll in.”

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Lucie Levine is the founder of Archive on Parade, a local tour and event company that aims to take New York’s fascinating history out of the archives and into the streets. She’s a Native New Yorker, and licensed New York City tour guide, with a passion for the city’s social, political and cultural history. She has collaborated with local partners including the New York Public Library, The 92nd Street Y, The Brooklyn Brainery, The Society for the Advancement of Social Studies and Nerd Nite to offer exciting tours, lectures and community events all over town. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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