It’s Mother’s Day 1960, and you’re part of a well-to-do family looking to celebrate the holiday at one of the Mother’s Day brunches hosted by hotels and restaurants all over the city. You choose the Park Lane Hotel, which in 1960 actually was on Park Avenue, opposite the Waldorf-Astoria. (Since 1971, the Park Lane Hotel has been on Central Park South.) So what’s on the menu? Things start off light, with the requisite offerings of consommé, grapefruit, and melon. For the entreé course, the eggs benedict look tasty, but the boneless squab chicken casserole less so. And what exactly is “mother ..read more

A rollicking mix of apartment buildings, loft spaces, bars, and discount stores, West 14th Street hasn’t been considered an elite place to build a home for almost two centuries. But in the New York of the 1840s, what had once been the dividing line between the urban city and the wilds of Manhattan was transforming into a fashionable residential thoroughfare. Families with money and means began purchasing land on West 14th Street and putting up wide, roomy brownstones from Union Square to Eighth Avenue. One of those new brownstone dwellers was Andrew S. Norwood. Norwood’s name wouldn’t resonat ..read more

It doesn’t look like much, just another semi-vacant commercial building—this one on the southeast corner of 106th Street and Third Avenue—now occupied by a Duane Reade. But give it a closer look, and Art Deco decorative touches come in to view, like the patterns in the light bricks and small geometric shapes above the first and second floors. With its enormous windows, this space was meant to be welcoming and accessible. On the 106th Street side is a slab in the middle of the facade by the roofline. It proudly carries a name: Kress. What was Kress? Similar to Woolworth’s, S. W. Kress & C ..read more

By the Depression year of 1930, New York City was increasingly becoming a city of highs and lows. [“Sixth Avenue and Ziegfeld Theater”] The highs were evident in Gotham’s skyline. Elegant residential towers lined the borders of Central Park and the city’s posher avenues. The Chrysler Building rose above 42nd Street, and the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center soon followed at different ends of Midtown. At odds with these gleaming towers were the lows—the many low-rise blocks across Manhattan. Spread out between their new high-rise neighbors and congregated in poorer, more densely pac ..read more

Which still-standing mansion built in 1907 has a mysterious basement tunnel leading to the Hudson River? Where is one of the few Beaux-Arts row houses that has its original wood-carved doors? Why is the Drive the only avenue in Manhattan that branches off into small carriage roads? Which famous American writer came to a rock outcropping in Riverside Park every day to stare across the Hudson River? Who was the rich wife and mother so disturbed by tugboat horns on the riverfront that she formed a committee to suppress “unnecessary” noise? Join Ephemeral New York on a time-traveling walking tour ..read more

Imagine being a first-time guest to one of Alice and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Gilded Age balls or dinner parties, held at their spectacular new mansion on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. As you pass through the front doors of the house, completed in 1883, you’re received in view of this stunning ornate mantelpiece. At the time, it dominated the mansion’s entry hall, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s the kind of objet d’art one would expect from a Vanderbilt mansion. Sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who had been hired by artist John La Farge, the mantelpiece features “two classi ..read more

It’s an eye-catching piece of street furniture: a booth made of glass, brass, and copper, with a door like a Romanesque arch and a capsule-shaped side compartments. This unusual sidewalk booth can be found under the awning at the East 55th Street entrance of the St. Regis Hotel. Built on Fifth Avenue in 1904 by John Jacob Astor IV (the only son of the infamous Mrs. Astor), the Beaux-Arts St. Regis has long been one of Manhattan’s most luxurious hotels, heralded as “the new shrine of the millionaire” shortly after it opened by the New York Times. (Below in 1907) The purpose of this glass and ..read more

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