Firefighters battle a blaze at a partially completed apartment building on 91st Street between Third and Fourth Avenues, June 1929. The New York Times reported that "a great crowd watched the apartment house fire" on 91st Street. The apartment building was unoccupied when fire was first spotted by a police officer, late in the afternoon of June 2. However, high winds caused the blaze to spread: "Sparks swept on a stiff wind ignited a garage across the street and started roof fires, all trifling, in three frame dwellings in the vicinity. Embers were carried a quarter of a mile to the Army reservation at Fort Hamilton. A one-story warehouse of the Quartermaster Corps took fire and was burned." While firefighters fought the spread of flames, a 91st Street resident prevailed in gaining access to her imperiled home in order to recover certain valuables: "The police ordered the Seatti family to stay out of the house. Mrs. Robert Brandon, however, a tenant, insisted that valuable securities must be rescued. Firemen finally accompanied Mrs. Brandon to her quarters and she came out with the securities. They consisted of $10 and two strawberry shortcakes she had made for her son's birthday party."

My Archive Spring 2019 "Me and my brother. I always loved visiting my grandparents in Brooklyn. It also meant exploring the most amazing city ever, crumb cake from Ebinger's bakery, limpa bread from the Swedish bakery, museums and shopping downtown, Coney Island, and the obligatory visit to Bay Ridge Methodist Church to check out my grandfather's gardening skills on the meticulously maintained grounds there. The playground down the hill from my grandparent's apartment was unlike anything I'd seen before. Like the city itself, the place was larger than life. Seemingly big enough for hundreds of kids to play at once, it had enormous sandboxes, impossibly tall slides, towering swings and the huge jungle gyms we're climbing in this picture. Reaching the top was quite an accomplishment, and insanely dangerous by today's standards of playground equipment, hence our triumphant poses. Taken by my father around 1963 and discovered in my father's boxes of old slides. The Verrazano-Narrows bridge was still under construction. Incredible memories will always be a huge part of my life long love of New York City." —Paul Carlson

VISITATION ACADEMY 8902 Ridge Boulevard, 1913 This private girls’ school was designed in the Italian neo-Renaissance style. The beige brick chapel features circular windows on its upper stories, triangular gables, a square tower with an arcaded belfry and decorative cruciform brickwork on its south façade. The entire complex is surrounded by a 20-foot stone and concrete wall. The site was previously home to the Kings County Inebriate Asylum and a natural glacier lake exists on the grounds.

Over the years, as I’ve photographed the city, I’ve amassed a collection of loose typologies—those omnipresent features like storefront churches, split houses, and dead ends that create a throughline across the different neighborhoods and boroughs of New York. One of the first subjects I began to document somewhat systematically was handball walls. These large concrete monoliths, pockmarked, peeling, and painted-over slabs, preside over playgrounds like oversized Rorschach tests. A standard wall is 16’ by 20’, mirroring the proportions of the 8x10 camera I was working with. They are everywhere.