This photograph by Percy Loomis Sperr shows the Ninth Avenue El looking north from the west side of 23rd Street.
We can see the entire corner from 23rd to 24th Street has been cleared in preparation for the construction of the London Terrace apartment complex. London Terrace has 14 buildings stretching from Ninth to Tenth Avenues. Continue reading
This stereoscope view of lower Manhattan was taken from the St. Paul Building at 220 Broadway around 1900.
The development of steel skeleton buildings enabled skyscrapers to be constructed towards the end of the 19th century.
The 25-story St. Paul Building stood at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street. Continue reading
Congress Hall Hotel, Saratoga Springs, NY ad 1886
Summer is underway. For many people summer vacation plans are in place.
Yet, vacations are something we take for granted and are a relatively modern notion.
What was leisure like in the late 1870s?
Your family lives in the city. Your job as a shipping clerk; pressman; dressmaker; bookkeeper; engineer; blacksmith; engraver or iron worker pays the bills, and you may be able to put a little money aside each month.
New York Sun Help Wanted ads 1872
Your work schedule: 10 hours a day, six days a week.
Days off?
One. Sunday. The Lord’s day of rest. Continue reading
This magic lantern slide offers a clear view of the oldest existing bridge in New York City, High Bridge which opened in 1848.
High Bridge spans the Harlem River from the Bronx to Manhattan. It was constructed to connect the city with water from the Croton Aqueduct. A pedestrian path was built and became a popular spot for New Yorkers to visit and take in the rural landscape.
Below is the 19th century hand-colored version Continue reading
Nathan (Nat) D. Lobell’s Of Things That Used To Be A Childhood On Fox Street In The Bronx In The Early Twentieth Century is a memoir concentrating on a striving South Bronx neighborhood full of immigrants, primarily Jewish, Irish and Italian between World War I and the 1920s. Continue reading
Our photograph was taken around 1905 by the Byron Company (1888-1942), a partnership of Joseph Byron and his son Percy C. Byron. The Byron’s and their employees took thousands of photographs in and around New York City from the 1880s until the 1940s.
This view looking down Fifth Avenue from between 25th and 26th Street at the edge of Madison Square Park shows the Flatiron Building in the hazy background. Continue reading
This 1935 photograph is from city street photographer Percy Loomis Sperr.
We are looking east from First Avenue and 67th Street and shows the land that would soon be the site for Memorial Hospital for the Treatment of Cancer and Allied Diseases.
This plot of land stretching from York Avenue to First Avenue between 67th and 68th Street was donated to Memorial Hospital by John D. Rockefeller. This neighborhood today houses numerous medical institutions.
Over the ensuing decades, every visible building along 68th Street; the tenements, a blacksmith shop, auto repair shop and ambulance company would be demolished for expansion of hospital buildings.
The large building complex with the tower Continue reading
There are certainly people who have never seen a pay phone before. And people who are familiar with pay phones may have only seen them with push buttons. Rotary dial phones were replaced in the 1970s by push buttons. Whereas pay phones managed to remain ubiquitous until the 1990s.
Pay phones were once everywhere. You could find them in hotels restaurants, gas stations, drug stores, transportation facilities, office and public buildings and on street corners,
The ad above ran in the September 11, 1971 New Yorker magazine.
In 1970 vandals cost American Telephone and Telegraph $12 million Continue reading
The two illustrations seen here are excerpts from a full page ad. This advertisement comes from the April 27, 1919 New York Sun daily newspaper. Shown is an array of intimates of the late teens that a fashionable woman would wear beneath their clothes.
The uptown location of James McCreery & Co. at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street Continue reading
For over 150 years Coney Island has attracted visitors to sample its beach, cuisine and amusement parks.
This magic lantern slide photograph shows an attraction that was more of a curiosity. Though It was only in existence for 11 years, hundreds of thousands of people came to see the Elephantine Colossus.
It was not a ride, but Continue reading