How many ways are there to style a subway entrance sign? In New York City, dozens of designs and typefaces are used across the subway system—often with no rhyme or reason. Take this gold and white sign on William Street. It’s for a side entrance/exit for the Fulton Street station, affixed to a 20th century office building called the Royal Building. Its long tapered shape, the white block (a light?) at the top—I’ve never seen anything like it. More than a few stops in Midtown style their subway signage with Art Deco lettering, like this subway sign on East 42nd Street. The design is sleek and ..read more

Look up at the massive brick and mortar confection at the southeastern corner of West End Avenue and 102nd Street, and you might think you’re facing one wildly idiosyncratic Gilded Age mansion. There’s the center tower with four stories of bay windows capped by a bell-shaped roof. On the West End Avenue side are chimneys, carved panels, stained glass, and windows of all styles. On the 102nd Street end, balconies, pedimented parapets and a stoop entrance animate this sleepy side street. Because all these ornamental eccentricities are united in brownstone and fronted by a lacy iron fence, it se ..read more

Riverside Drive was just 30 years old when this stunning birds-eye panorama of the Drive between about 110th and 123rd Street was taken, according to the Kermit Project, which posted the photo (via Shorpy.com) and some information about it. Though it’s more than a century old, click into the photo to magnify the view—you’ll see that the landmarks of the Riverside Drive of today are already in place. The dome and columns of Grant’s Tomb stand to the north, some elegant prewar apartment towers loom over low-rise dwelling houses (almost all of which will disappear in the ensuing decades), and th ..read more

The R.M.S. Titanic went to its watery grave in the Atlantic Ocean on the morning of April 15, 1912. Few cities felt the tragedy as deeply as New York City. At the end of its maiden voyage, the luxurious ship was set to dock at the White Star Line’s Pier 59, near today’s Chelsea Piers. Instead, 706 dazed survivors picked up by the R.M.S. Carpathia disembarked a few blocks away at Pier 54—greeted by a crowd of thousands desperate for news about the iceberg that sank the ship and the whereabouts of family members. St. Vincent’s Hospital tended to survivors; Lower Manhattan hotels put them up as ..read more

Some pedestrians try to avoid walking over subway grates, others march across these sidewalk ventilation openings without care. However you handle them, subway grates are a fact of life in New York City, and underground mass transit couldn’t exist without them. Metal, utilitarian, and usually filthy, they aren’t especially noteworthy. But one particular subway grate on the East Side is perhaps the most famous grate in Gotham. This subway grate is on Lexington Avenue near 52nd Street. What makes it so celebrated? This is the grate a flirtatious Marilyn Monroe stood above during the filming of ..read more

Is that the crenellated crown of a faux Medieval castle looming five stories above Riverside Drive and 83rd Street—flanked by European-inspired row houses with dormer windows and tiled roofs? The separate dwellings that compose this delightful design mashup are quite a sight among the Drive’s mostly uniform prewar apartment houses. Who built these eclectic residences and what inspired him is worth delving into. Let’s go back to the New York City of the 1890s. Upscale residences were going up in the part of the city known as the West End, especially on West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. But ..read more

Officially, the era of the elevated train in Manhattan ended in 1955. (Not subways that go above ground at certain points but actual elevated train lines.) That’s when miles of track and trestles were removed from the borough’s Third Avenue El, the last of the mighty above-ground railroads that roared up and down four major avenues starting in the late 1860s and helped reshape Gotham northward. But even though the infrastructure of the elevated trains has vanished from the streetscape—along with the grime they attracted and the ear-splitting noise they produced—some remains of their existence ..read more

Going to the theater has always been a beloved New York City pastime. But theater became even more thrilling with the advent of open-air rooftop gardens—which hit the scene in the late 1880s with the opening of the rooftop theater at the Casino on Broadway and 39th Street. It wasn’t just the cool breezes that appealed to New Yorkers. “Only at the turn of the century did amusements of this sort become acceptable places for respectable women,” explains the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has this painting, by William Glackens, in its collection. “Hammerstein’s Roof Garden,” from 1901, dep ..read more

There’s something about legendary East Village bars that leave New Yorkers mourning them even decades after they close their doors. The tenth anniversary of the shuttering of Mars Bar in 2011, the gritty dive on Second Avenue and East First Street, merited tribute posts recalling its eclectic mix of regulars. Brownie’s, on Avenue A, pulled the plug in 2002, but Gen X fans are still reminiscing about the bands they saw there. So it seems unusual that one old-school East Village haunt has no Facebook fan group posting photos and videos, no articles bemoaning the reasons behind its closure. That ..read more

It’s been more than 70 years since Paul A. Fino began serving as a U.S. Congressional rep for the Bronx, where he was born and raised. Fino, a leader in the Bronx’s Republican party, won a seat in the 83rd Congress in 1952, then was reelected for seven more terms—resigning in 1968 to become a judge on the New York State Supreme Court. He sounds like the kind of colorful, promotional politician who understood his constituents in the borough’s 25th District. In postwar New York City, that district—from Riverdale to Woodlawn to Parkchester to Throgs Neck—was primarily Italian, Irish, German, and ..read more