Trinity Church ARCHITECT: Richard Upjohn DATE: 1839-46 STYLE: Gothic Revival, Church The present Church is a Gothic Revival monument, executed in brownstone by the noted ecclesiastical architect Richard Upjohn in a free rendering of English Gothic. The Church displays a wealth of ornament and detail, that it is a truly outstanding Church of one of New York’s oldest parishes and through its beauty and its wealth of historical associations, it is one of the outstanding monuments of the Gothic Revival.

New York County Lawyers Association, ca. 1930. This very handsome little building, although basically an eclectic version of Federal architecture, is executed in stone instead of brick and vaunts a fine row of Corinthian pilasters, floral swags, and medallions. These features are reminiscent of Adamesque design and British prototypes.

The Barclay Vesey Telephone Building was one of the first skyscrapers built on downtown's gritty westside - a working waterfront dominated by piers, warehouses, and small-scale industry. The building housed offices and communications machinery for the New York Telephone Company. This dual function explains the building's unusual massiveness, as the machines housed on the interior did not require natural light. At ground level, the builders provided generous public arcades as well as a fantastically decorated lobby. Architect Ralph Walker's complex sculptural accents play off of the skyscraper's somber brick bulk. These accents on the building's exterior and in the lobby feature stylized shallow-relief trees, flora, and fauna. The Barclay Vesey Telephone Building was one of the first major skyscrapers of the "setback style," the ziggurat-like form suggested by the city's 1916 zoning law. It was also a masterpiece of Art Deco design by the architect. The famed French architect and theorist, Le Corbusier, used the Barclay Vesey Telephone Building as the frontispiece for the English language edition of his polemic, Towards a Modern Architecture. For him, it represented the functionality and power of American building in the late 1920's.

Headquarters of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, the mighty AT & T, and erected on the site of the early highrise headquarters of the Western Union Building (1874), 195 Broadway is an important address in the history of business communication. The monumental scale of the current landmark dates from a second building campaign in 1924 that completed the imposing mass. The building was constructed in two phases. In the first, it had narrow frontages on both Broadway and Fulton Street, as AT\&T did not have title to the corner. The tower was expanded out to the corner when the company was able to acquire that property. The western end of the Fulton Street façade is capped by a small stepped pyramid, formerly the plinth for Evelyn Beatrice Longman's figure in bronze, the Spirit of Communications. The sculpture was spirited away by AT\&T when it moved from 195 Broadway in the early 1980's first to midtown and subsequently to a new corporate campus in New Jersey. The building's lobby has an air of temple-like solemnity to it. Five rows of monumental Doric columns dwarf visitors. Distinctive chandeliers in a Greco-Roman style illuminate the space. At the center of the lobby is a poignant bronze monument to the soldiers of the First World War sculpted by Chester Beach.

Saint Peter’s Roman Catholic Church ARCHITECT: John R. Haggarty; Thomas Thomas DATE: 1836-40 STYLE: Greek Revival, Church St. Peter’s Church is an outstanding example of Greek Revival architecture executed in fine materials. It is a temple-form building of excellent proportions and that it is one of the oldest Catholic churches in the City. St. Peter’s Church is a granite building with a fine six-columned portico and a low-angled gable. As an early Catholic church, the present building closely follows the tradition of Classic monumentality of so many of its predecessors in Rome.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James has led a political life deeply rooted in New York City. A few points of interest around town highlight the career of "Tish." Resources used include the New York Times; designation reports published by the Landmarks Preservation Commission; the City Council legislation database; the Office of the Attorney General; New York Amsterdam News; The Chiseler; the NYC Green Book; and HPD. By Andy McCarthy, Reference Librarian, NYPL Milstein Division of U.S. History, Local History, and Genealogy.

22 Cortlandt Street, 1936. This East River Savings Bank branch was constructed in 1933. Designed by the same firm, Walker & Gillette, as the National City Bank of New York on Broadway and Canal, the two buildings share a number of features. This Art Deco structure also includes stylized eagles surrounding the bank seal, towering over the main entrance of decorate metalwork. Today the building houses a section of the enormous flagship Century 21 department store.

“Aftermath of the Equitable Fire,” January, 1912. A fire broke out before dawn on January 9, 1912, spreading to an eighth floor kitchen via a dumbwaiter and eventually engulfing the entire structure. The ten-story skyscraper had been the headquarters of the Equitable Life Assurance Society since 1870, and was purportedly fire-proof. However, weather conditions rendered firefighting efforts ineffective: freezing temperatures and gusts measured at 68 miles per hour reduced spray from fire hoses to droplets, eventually encasing the building’s facade in ice formations while the interior structure continued to burn. The ice made the fire-damaged building something of a local attraction. As the New York Times reported: “\[the ice] settled over the building in a gleaming sheath of white that made the fire a wonderful thing to see. Ice converted the ruined building into a fantastic palace, with the rainbows arching at every turn as the sunlight filtered through the spray and smoke.” The building was unsalvageable and what remained of its facade was eventually razed. The new, 40-story Equitable Life building was built on its site in 1915, becoming a National Historic Landmark in 1978.

Bankers Trust Company ARCHITECT: Trowbridge & Livingstone DATE: 1910-12 STYLE: Classical Revival The 14 Wall Street Building, with its distinctive pyramidal roof, is one of the great towers that define the lower Manhattan skyline. This 539-foot-high tower, utilizing the latest in building technology, including one of the first cofferdam foundation systems in the city, was the tallest bank building in the world when it was completed. The building’s design was inspired by the campanile of San Marco in Venice and features an austere Classical Revival decorative scheme incorporating specific Greek architectural motifs, notably the stepped pyramid top.

Trinity Church ca. 1895 The present is the third Episcopal church on this site. Its spire was long a landmark on the horizon. Today we see it surrounded by high buildings, which tend to dwarf it, although in its day it was quite a large church. The quality of the Gothic Revival is well exemplified by the rather naive detail, the plaster vaults, and the traceried windows. The beautiful bronze doors, added at a later date under the supervision of Richard Morris Hunt, depict biblical scenes based on Italian precedent. That all the figures on the doors are not biblical is testified to by a little head on the frame of the right hand door; here we find sculptor Karl Bitter's "cher patron," Hunt himself, complete with beret and pointed beard.

The Woolworth Building, framed by the base of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers., ca. 1977.

Chamber of Commerce ca. 1902 The New York Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1768 to promote the development of business in the City. The organization held meetings at various locations until 1900, when it decided to build its prestigious marble headquarters on Liberty Street. Its Great Hall, with a stained glass ceiling, mahogany paneling, and gilded ornament, was acclaimed as one of the most impressive interiors in the City. Designated a landmark in 1966, the building was sold to the International Commercial Bank of China in 1979, and its restoration was completed in 1991.

My Archive Spring 2019 "Three months before September 11, 2001. —Joe Curran

Although Trinity Church now appears toy-like, nestled among glass and steel giants, its spire was once the highest point on the Manhattan skyline. Until the construction, in the 1890s, of such towers as the American Surety Building at 100 Broadway and 15 Park Row, the 284-foot tall church tower afforded views to sightseers. At the entrance, note the large bronze doors designed by Richard Morris Hunt and executed by Charles Niehaus, Karl Bitter and J. Massey Rhind, dating from 1890 to 1896. Architect Richard Upjohn used local brownstone for the church's exterior, feeling its dark tone well suited the building’s romantic architecture. This was a controversial decision due to brownstone's low status. Many considered it an unsuitable material for a church, especially one of the most prominent and wealthy churches in the city. A quiet and comforting rest stop, especially during the summer months, Trinity welcomes visitors. Trinity Church is also open daily to worshipers and offers an extensive schedule of services.

My Archive Spring 2019 "My husband and I on a boat in NY Harbor on July 5, 1988. We were entertaining friends from Tokyo, showing them around the city. It was our friend Nobuko's first visit to the states although her husband Yoshio had visited on business many times before. This photo of us was taken by our Yoshio while on the Statue of Liberty ferry." —Elaine Engelstein

New York Telephone Building, 1936. Designed by Ralph Walker of the firm McKenzie, Voorhees & Gmelin in a Mayan-inspired Art Deco style, the massive New York Telephone Building was one of the most impressive buildings of the 1920s. The 32-story, buff brick clad structure, completed in 1927, has unusual massing with a short obliquely-angled tower, vertical piers ending on battlements at the top and sculptural ornaments on the many setbacks. It is considered one of the first skyscraper designed under the 1916 Zoning Law that required setbacks. The interior was designed as monumentally, with a neo-Romanesque Guastavino-vaulted arcade that runs the whole length of the Vesey Street side. The five sub-basement levels were built for and continue to house communications equipment, today a telephone switching center. The building's east and south facades were damaged following the collapse of WTC Building 7 in the attacks on September 11, 2001. In the years after the attacks, the original limestone carvings on the facade were reproduced.

Financial District Rooftops, June 9, 1938. Looking from 60 Wall Tower (at 70 Pine Street) northwest towards Broadway. On Cedar Street below are Chase National Bank and the Equitable Building; on Liberty Street is the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, filling an entire trapezoid-shaped block; at 149 Broadway is the Singer Tower, with its famous domed top; and at 140 West Street is the York Telephone Building, upper right.

100 Trinity Place, viewed from Liberty Plaza Park (now Zuccotti Park), ca. 1975.

Entrance to New York Telephone Building, ca. 1995.

Streetcars on Broadway, outside the Equitable Life Assurance Building, July 7, 1905. The photo was possibly taken from scaffolding for the construction of the new Trinity Building, at the southwest corner of Thames Street (visible at far right).

Originally the American Railway Express Company Building, this building remained the headquarters of the American Express Company until 1975. It now is the home of J.J. Kenny/Standard and Poors. Built in the neoclassical style, the building’s concrete and steel framed structure are faced with white brick and terra cotta over a granite base. An H shaped floor plan results in a pair of slender 23-story wings, embracing and arching over light courts fore and aft, an elegant solution to the deficiencies of electric office lighting before the introduction of fluorescent fixtures. Note the asymmetric eagle on lower arch and the symmetrical one on the arch atop the building

1 Wall Street, at the southern corner of Broadway, has long been a prized address. In 1905, the 30' by 40' lot that had been occupied since the early 19th century by a four-story commercial building changed hands for the highest price per square foot ever recorded for Manhattan property: $615 This story is adapted from an exhibition at the Skycraper Museum. The original version can be seen here.

One Wall Street was originally built as the headquarters for the Irving Trust, which was acquired by the building's present owner, the Bank of New York, in 1992. The corner of Broadway and Wall Street is a prestigious location, for which the Irving Trust Company paid dearly. It was an ideal site for a skyscraper because the graveyard of Trinity Church guaranteed direct sunlight and fresh air in perpetuity. Its rear on New Street faced the New York Stock Exchange and challenged the headquarters of rival Banker's Trust a block away at Wall Street and Nassau. Ralph Walker was the architect of numerous large-scale industrial and corporate buildings in New York. His first major work in the city was the Barclay Vesey Telephone Building. One Wall Street cuts a distinctive figure on Broadway. Unusual is the graceful façade that creates an effect of fabric-like lightness with its faceted limestone cladding. In contrast to the contemporary towers, One Wall Street depends on this subtle surface effect for its impact rather than an iconic crown or spire. Its highly expressive Art Deco styling was not for everyone: Lewis Mumford, an advocate of much more rational modes of modernist architecture, wrote in his first architectural review for The New Yorker that it was "mere swank, and unconvincing swank at that." The light colored exterior stone contrasts strongly with the opulence of the interiors, in particular, the rich red, amber, and gold mosaics of the reception hall. One of the most beautiful interiors in the Financial District, its theatricality seems more suited to the Ziegfeld Follies than to Wall Street. Designed by Walker in consultation with Hildreth Meiere, the room shimmers in tones rising from deep burgundy to gold. The lobby beyond was formerly highlighted by a wonderful abstract ceiling mural designed by Kimon Nicolaides and executed by Meiere. This space was altered beyond recognition in the 1960's, although Meiere's work may survive above the dropped ceiling. Inaccessible to the public is the observation lounge, which is marked by majestic thirty-foot windows at the tower's crown. In 1962 Walker's successor firm built an addition in a sympathetic but simplified style. But despite the grand interior design of the interior spaces, tourist visits are not currently allowed.

Skybridges, which, though rare, could once be found in various Manhattan locations, are quickly becoming a thing of the past. While erected for pedestrian convenience, the utility of these aerial walkways became less relevant as elevator technology improved over the 20th century. Despite their decline, a handful of sky bridges remain today and are always an unexpected joy to see. In this list, we will introduce you to the history and wonder of some of our favorite "skywalks" (those long gone and those still extant)!

Central Building, 1915. The Central Building was constructed circa 1890 for the offices of the Central Railroad of New Jersey. The 12-story Romanesque Revival building was only a few short blocks from the ferry terminal used by the Central Railroad of NJ in Manhattan. The building was demolished in 1966 to make way for the construction of the World Trade Center.

Singer Tower at night, ca. 1908.

Singer Building, 1913. The Singer Building, constructed for the Singer Sewing Machine Corporation, was originally constructed as a small red brick building with a mansard roof in 1896. Designed by Ernest Flagg, the building was later incorporated into the larger, more well-known Singer Building, also designed by Flagg and completed in 1908. For a single year (1908-1909) it was the tallest building in the world. At 47-stories (the base was only 12 stories, while the tower topped out at 612 feet), the building was quickly surpassed by the Metropolitan Life Tower on 23rd Street. Visitors to the building could pay 50 cents to take in the view from the 40th-floor observation deck. The Beaux-Arts building had a marble columned and bronze trimmed lobby and was described by architectural historian Christoper Gray as having "celestial radiance." The building was sold in 1961 to Webb & Knapp, a real estate development company, who attempted to have the New York Stock Exchange moved into the structure. That bid was unsuccessful and in 1964 U.S. Steel purchased the building. It was demolished in 1967 (two years after the Landmarks Law was passed). Today the site is occupied by One Liberty Plaza, a 54-story office building completed in 1973. The Singer Building remains the tallest structure to be intentionally demolished.

Lebanon Restaurant ca. 1936 The blocks on Washington Street between Rector Street and Battery Place formed “Little Syria,” settled in the 1880s by Middle Eastern immigrants. Many became successful merchants and moved to Brooklyn. In the 1930s, their upwardly mobile progeny returned to the old neighborhood for family gatherings and traditional cuisine. The Lebanon Restaurant, opened in 1920, featured shish kebab, baklava, and thick Turkish coffee. Abbott may have delighted in the mixture of traditional and modern elements: the window displays of Turkish coffee cups and RCA Victor records, and the juxtaposition of Arabic calligraphy with a poster advertising a seven-course blue-plate special for $5.00. In 1946, the neighborhood was demolished for construction of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

“Washington Market. Fish stand from balcony. April 28, 1933.” Decades before the World Trade Center was proposed, Manhattan’s Lower West Side was known for Washington Market, the city’s largest wholesale produce market. Established in 1812, the market became a prominent feature of the neighborhood, with over 500 vendor stalls by the 1880s. As regulations evolved, operations were moved into more orderly — and sanitary — quarters indoors. In 1962, the city closed Washington Market, shifting the wholesale food business to Hunter’s Point in the Bronx. Today, One World Trade Center’s base occupies the former site of the final Washington Market building.

Bankers Trust Building, 1938.

By Atiba Pertilla William Allen Butler, Jr., the founder of downtown Manhattan’s Lawyers Club, would later explain that its creation was inspired by a disturbing encounter. One afternoon in the 1880s, he went out for lunch with his father and partner, William Allen Butler, Sr.—a respected corporate lawyer, son of a former U.S. Attorney General, and co-founder of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. The restaurant was crowded, but moments later an office boy from his law firm finished lunch and “my respected father occup\[ied] that same stool to order a slice of roast beef.” Unable to find a seat for himself, the younger Butler ended up standing at the restaurant’s “oyster counter” and swallowing down a sandwich “of the genus warranted to stand on one’s chest for a couple \[o]f hours.” He found the blurring of class boundaries and the uncomfortable conditions troubling, wondering “Was there not some better way for the noon-day hour luncheon?” His conclusion was that there was a need for “a reputable and decent place” where men like himself and his father could enjoy a decent midday meal in private, dignified surroundings, away from their subordinates. He decided, in short, to establish a lunch club. Read this in its original format here

St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church ca. 1916 A full-fledged example of the Greek Revival in temple form executed in stone. The great dignity of this church is at once apparent. The shafts of the columns consist of only three drums, each one about ten feet tall. Such large pieces of stone usually came in by barge and were brought up from the river on horse-drawn drays.

America adopted the bald eagle as the emblem of the United States of America in 1782. The eagle symbolized strength, beauty, long life, flight, and freedom, characterized by its lofty flight and mountain top nesting. It not surprising then, with these idolized attributes, that the eagle would become an oft-seen decorative feature in architecture and memorial sculpture. In New York, a city that prides itself on its role as a powerful, resilient, and endlessly innovative center of financial, political and cultural life, the eagle has been incorporated into the built environment. Architects, designers, and sculptors have decorated their banks, civic buildings, statues of war heroes, skyscrapers, and airports (of course) with the noble birds. To see them, you usually just need to look up.

American Express Company Building (white building at middle), ca. 1920. The American Express Company, founded in 1850, has been located at this lower Manhattan site since 1874. Housed in rental offices in two, five-story brownstones at 63 and 65 Broadway, the American Express Company purchased the lots in 1903. Constructed between 1916 an 1917, the concrete-and-steel-frame building was designed by James L. Aspinwall of the firm of Renwick, Aspinwall & Tucker. The H-shaped plan created central light courts, which allowed for maximum light and air to the interior offices. Faced in granite at the base and white brick and terra cotta on the upper floors, the massive neo-classical structure added to the canyon-esque environment on this section of Broadway. American Express moved their headquarters out of this building in 1975.

My Archive Spring 2019 "This is a photograph of my great-great grandfather’s jewelry store. His name was John William Day. He was born in New York in 1866 and died in 1908." — Todd Hirsch

Hudson Terminal, ca. 1928. Hudson Terminal was a rapid transit station on the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad (H & M). The terminal, which contained five tracks and three platforms, was located along Radio Row. The two 22-story office skyscrapers, which sat above the terminal, were among the world's largest when the terminal opened in 1909. The main purpose of the H & M buildings was to connect the railroad and streetcar terminals on the New Jersey waterfront with Manhattan. The H & M's only station downtown near Wall Street was designed to handle as many passengers as possible to meet the demands of rush hour traffic. In 1962, as part of the construction of the World Trade Center, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey took over the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad. The terminal was eventually rebranded as the PATH and later, in 1972, demolished to make way for the World Trade Center. It was replaced by the original World Trade Center and an entirely new PATH station.

Evening Post Building ca. 1905. The Art Nouveau found little favor in New York, yet it offered many new possibilities to the designer. Here a beautiful expression of the underlying structure was combined with a novel, free-flowing design which subtly emphasized the vertical by means of elongation, both in the sculptured figures and in the niches behind them.

Thames Cafe, February 15, 1938. The the signage visible in this 1938 photograph, it seems likely that Thames Street was a busy lunch spot for the workers of the surrounding Financial District buildings including the twin Gothic skyscrapers at 111 and 115 Broadway, seen at center. The eateries include the Thames Tavern, the Thames Cafe Grill, and the Cooperative Cafeteria.

A walking tour through Lower Manhattan's skyscraper canyons and more than a century of high-rise construction. This walk focuses on the buildings on the west side.

Completed in 1896, at 312 feet, the 22-story American Surety Building towered over surrounding structures. The design by architect Bruce Price was one of the most elegant of New York's early skyscrapers. Price divided the tower's height into three zones - base, shaft, and capital - corresponding to the parts of a classical column. Far above the street level, life-sized figures flank the round windows above the second cornice line. The tower stood in splendor until the 1910s when its neighbors rose to equal its height. In 1921 the company expanded the tower, doubling its mass and broadening its elegant proportions. The architect of this expansion, Herman Lee Meader, recycled stone elements from the obscured back façades in his extension of the Broadway and Pine Street façades to ensure visual continuity. In 1975, the Bank of Tokyo renovated the interiors. This modernization, which maintained the tower's historic shell, was at the time a bold strategy for balancing the needs of a modern company with preservation interests. This juxtaposition of mid-seventies modernism and late nineteenth-century classicism is best observed in the starkly minimalist open colonnade between the building's nineteenth-century Broadway façade and the banking hall inserted behind it. Certain period elements were retained in the new interiors, namely the ornate coffered ceiling and the dark red marble columns.

The Columbia tavern on Trinity Place, in the shadow of the Sixth Avenue El, February 23, 1913. This photo was taken ahead of construction of the IRT Broadway Line (1/2/3), though the stretch of Trinity Place pictured is today directly above the Rector Place station of the BMT Broadway Line (N/Q/R/W).

21 West Street ARCHITECT: Starrett & Van Vleck DATE: 1929-31 STYLE: Art Deco The 21 West Street Building, constructed in 1929-30, is a particularly fine example of the numerous Art Deco skyscrapers built during this period in New York City. The architects were trying to create a new stylistic expression which they felt would best represent the Jazz Age. The use of brick cladding on this building in different colors and textures was influenced by North German Expressionist architects, while the numerous and varied setbacks near the top of the building were the architects’ response to New York’s 1916 Zoning Resolution.

Rector Street elevated station on the Sixth Avenue line, above Trinity Place, August 17, 1912. The photographer is facing downtown; Trinity Church is out of frame at left.

Edmund Vincent Gillon shot thousands of photographs documenting New York’s architecture and public art from the 1970s to the 1990s. Among Gillon’s rolls, his keen eye for civic sculpture stands out. Admire this set of memorable monuments, part of the Museum of the City of New York’s collection:

Singer Building ca. 1908 Architect Ernest Flagg had already designed two buildings for the Singer Manufacturing Company when, in 1906, the company declared it would build the world's tallest building. Flagg achieved the company's goal by utilizing innovative techniques in wind bracing and the anchoring of the building's steel frame, which allowed it to soar to a height of 612 feet. Completed in 1908, the ornate Beaux-Arts tower, with its distinctive lantern top, stood out in the Manhattan skyline and served as a billboard for the Singer Company. For 50 cents, visitors could ascend to the 40th-floor observation deck. In accordance with newly enacted zoning laws, the slender tower was set back from the street and occupied only one-fourth the area of the building from which it arose. The success of the design influenced the use of setbacks, which became a standard feature of successive skyscrapers. In 1968, the Singer Tower became the tallest building ever demolished when its new owner, U.S. Steel, sacrificed it for the glass and steel One Liberty Plaza.

Empire Building, ca. 1905.

These twin Gothic towers, completed two years apart, are separated by the narrow canyon of Thames Street. Their roofs are connected by a small wrought iron- bridge. The Gothic ornament on these buildings harmonizes with the architecture of neighboring Trinity Church. They contrast sharply with the classical style that the eclectic Kimball used on the Empire Building on the south side of the churchyard. Beautifully restored in the 1990's, the lobbies of both towers are wonderful examples of High Victorian Gothic with floor and lower walls paneled in marble, bronze tracery moldings, and polychrome patterns stenciled on the walls. The elevator-door surrounds, designed to resemble Gothic choir stalls, seem more suited to a sacristy than an office building, as does the ceiling with its heavy beams and the transom windows with their leaded glass

A walking tours through Lower Manhattan's skyscraper canyons and more than a century of high-rise construction. This walk focuses on the buildings on Wall Street.

An elaborate neo-Renaissance tower which dominates Trinity Churchyard, 2 Rector Street sports highly ornate terra-cotta cladding at the base and on the upper stories. Other notable features are the oculus windows and elaborate life-size angels with out-stretched arms. This 23-story building was built as a headquarters and speculative office venture by the U.S. Express Company, a railway delivery service.

140 West Street ca. 1926 The east side of West Street was lined with cheap hotels, bars, luncheonettes, auto repair shops, and gas stations. Rising over these low buildings and filling an entire city block was an Art Deco behemoth, the headquarters of the New York Telephone Company (1926). Designed with a huge base, setbacks, and a tower, the building offered an ingenious solution to the height and mass restrictions of New York’s 1916 zoning law. Today it is a designated landmark.

John Watts Jr. Statue from Trinity Courtyard, March 1, 1938. The son of a Scottish immigrant father and a mother who belonged to the city founding DeLancey family, John Watts Jr. graduated from King's College (now Columbia University) and held a number of Colonial posts. He was New York’s last Royal Recorder, a role where he served as a mayoral assistant, judge, and a player in administrative and judicial functions. Despite his father's Royalist position, Watts Jr. sided with the colonies (according to sources) and would become the only Crown official who held elected state or federal office after the Revolution in New York. Watts became a New York State Assemblyman and later Congressman. He also established the Leake and Watts Orphan Home using an inheritance from a friend left to his son, and then himself when he son predeceased him. It was one of the first private charitable institutions dedicated to child welfare in the new country. Founded in 1831, the Leake and Watts Services, Inc continues to serve children in the New York area. The statue was erected by his grandson John Watts DePeyster in 1893 in his memory at Trinity Cemetery where Watts was buried following his 1836 death.

Adams Express Building, July 16, 1936. The 32-story Adams Express Building was designed by Francis Kimball (architect of Brooklyn's Montauk Club) and constructed between 1912 and 1914. When complete the building featured over a million square feet of terracotta. The style of the structure is called palazzo by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, but it described often as simple and utilitarian, almost devoid of a style. Mirroring arguments that are still occurring today, many developers and architects complained that the Adams Express Building cast an 875-foot shadow, devaluing the real estate that fell in its shadow. Tall building that went straight up from the street level to the roof, including this one and the 40-story Equitable Building, were partial the reason for the 1916 zoning law changes that required setbacks above a certain height, determined by the width at the street. In 1916 the building had more than 300 of its windows damaged by an explosion on the Jersey City waterfront. The Black Tom explosion was a German sabotage attempt to stop the United States from arming the Allies during the First World War. The explosion damaged the Statue of Liberty and awoke people as far away as Maryland, thinking they were experiencing an earthquake. In the 1990s the building saw a $20 million renovation by new owners, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. They also discovered goldfish living in a pool of warm water created by a high water table under the building's boilers. Today it is owned by a huge real estate firm and is occupied by law firms and financial institutions, among others.

Manhattan Life Insurance Building, 1945. Designed by Kimball & Thompson for the Manhattan Life Insurance Company, the Manhattan Life Building became New York City's tallest skyscraper in 1893. It was also the first office building to use pneumatic caissons (watertight retaining structures) its foundation. The building was 348 feet tall. The building was demolished in 1963-1964 for the construction of a 36-story annex to the Irving Trust Company Building at One Wall Street.

American Telephone and Telegraph Building, ca. 1917. The 29-story building, also known as 15 Dey Street, was designed by architect William Welles Bosworth as the headquarters of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Construction was completed in stages between 1912 and 1916. In 1915, the building hosted the Atlantic end of the purported first transcontinental telephone conversation (the technology had previously been tested (also from this building); this call was a demonstration for marketing purposes). Alexander Graham Bell reprised his famous call to Thomas Watson, who this time answered from San Francisco.

Western Union Building ca. 1885 At 230 feet tall, the Western Union Building, completed in 1875, became the city’s second-tallest office building after the Tribune, and its spired silhouette dominated the vista of Broadway. It was the first “skyscraper” – although that term was not used in print until the 1880s – of George B. Post, who in the following decades would become one of New York’s most prolific architects of tall buildings, designing twelve of the structures featured in our survey, including Joseph Pulitzer’s World Building, which in 1890, at 309 ft., took the title of the tallest office building in the city and in the world. Like its contemporaries, the Tribune Building and the Evening Post Building, Western Union was a masonry bearing-wall structure that also employed some cast-iron columns and wrought iron girders and beams. Architecturally, it was a horizontally striped Victorian pile of red brick and gray stone, crowned with a high mansard roof built over a metal frame. The ornate roof capped an arcaded eighth story where the company’s telegraph operators sent and received messages from a net of wires that crisscrossed rooftops. From the mid-19th century, telegraphs were the major method of long-distance communication. Using code developed by Samuel Morse to covey “written messages by electricity,” competing companies connected cities, the continent, and opposite sides of oceans with wires and cables that, for considerable charges, carried vital messages. By the 1870s, through inventions and business mergers, Western Union had become the dominant telegraph company. As an article on the new building in the journal The Aldine described: “No single enterprise, in the whole world, has grown so rapidly within a few years, as the telegraph interest of America, of which the Western Union Telegraph Company is the principal exponent; and perhaps it is quite correct that the Company should be the builder and owner of one of the most remarkable structures on the continent, if not in the world…. That the Telegraph Building is to be, architecturally and practically, an immense success, there can be no question; its great height making the amount of disposable space within, simply enormous; and its location, so near the Post Office and the great business centres, rendering its availability quite as marked as its size”.… Called by The Daily Graphic the city’s new “business palaces,” the Western Union Building, like the Tribune, advertised the success of their companies, but they also offered offices for rent on their middle floors.

Westinghouse Building, 150 Broadway, ca. 1924. Architects Starrett & Van Vleck erected the 23-story Westinghouse Building in 1923-1924. According to architect and critic Robert A.M. Stern, the Westinghouse Building "marked an important step toward realizing the aesthetic potential of the zoning law," the 1916 statute governing skyscraper height and lot use.

Hamburg American Building (originally known as Aldrich Court), ca. 1905. The Aldrich Court was designed by the firm of Youngs & Cable in 1886. The building, funded by the estate of deceased American businessman and philanthropist Herman Aldrich, was ten stories tall and designed in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. The large building ran through the block fully to Trinity Place, and had a light court in the middle of the building. The tall gable that topped the two northern most bays gave the impression of a tower (seen at right). The building became the headquarters of the Hamburg America Line, a German-based transatlantic shipping company in 1906. During the First World War, the building was seized from the German business, and became the Shipping Board Building. By 1935 the building was the central location for all federal bureaus concerned with the local supervision or regulation of merchant shipping. The building was demolished in 1982 and replaced by a 32-story office building.

Church Street, beneath the tracks of the Sixth Avenue El; April 1, 1928. This survey photo was taken in preparation for construction on the IND Eighth Avenue Line subway, just south of the future Fulton Street station. At the next intersection south, entrance stairways to the Cortlandt Street elevated station are visible either side of Church Street. At right is the entrance to No. 30 Church Street, the Hudson Terminal Cortlandt Building, one of two towers atop the Hudson & Manhattan railroad station.

American Express Company Building ARCHITECT: James L. Aspinwall; Renwick, Aspinwall & Tucker DATE: 1914-17 STYLE: Neo-Classical The American Express Co. Building was constructed in 1916-17 in neo-Classical design. It was built as the new headquarters of the American Express Co. The concrete-and-steel-framed building was designed with an H-shaped plan with tall slender wings arranged around central light courts, a type of plan employed from the 1880s through the 1910s to provide offices with maximum light and air. Both facades, clad in white brick and terra cotta above a granite base, are articulated in the tripartite composition of base-shaft-capital then popular for skyscrapers.

New York County Lawyers’ Association Building STATUS Designated Individual Landmark 14 Vesey Street ARCHITECT: Cass Gilbert DATE: 1929-30 STYLE: Federal Eclectic This building is four stories high, and above the third floor, there is an attic story set back behind a handsome rail (balustrade) and roof deck. The building is an example of Federal Eclectic architecture. It is built of stone, instead of brick, as it would have been if it had been built in the Federal Period in New York.

West Street (at left) and Telegraph Square (also Dey Street), looking generally east, August 12, 1936. The block of Dey Street between West and Washington Streets was named Globe Square in 1911 after the newspaper the New York Evening Globe. In 1923 the Globe merged with the New York Sun. The New York Telegram and Evening Mail took over the nearby offices of the Globe and as such the Square was renamed for the new tenant. This entire area including this intersection was demapped in the 1960s in the planning for the World Trade Center.

Gillender Building, 1910. Constructed on a plot of land only 25 feet 2 inches wide by 73 feet 5 inches long, the 1896 Gillender Building was the brainchild of Helena L. Gillender Asinari, who dreamed of a new skyscraper. Architect Charles I. Berg was left to create a building with innumerable issues to design and construction. Massive caissons were needed to build on the soft soil, and with such a narrow plot, much of the interior spaces was taken up by common corridors, stairways, and elevator shafts. At 306 feet from the curb to the tip of the tower it was the tallest building nearby and was, in fact, struck by lighting a number of times. In 1908 Helena sold the building to her major tenant, the Manhattan Trust Company who quickly resold it. The new owners, Bankers Trust, made plans for a new building on the two corner plots of land they now owned. In 1910 the Gillender became to the first skyscraper to be demolished. Disassembled from the top down, the structural sections of the building were examined by a chemistry professor, looking to study corrosion and the state of the metal infrastructure. The building was replaced in 1912 by the Bankers Trust Company Building, which still stands. The New York Times said of the demise of the Gillender, “Here is a modern steel skyscraper in every respect, which was finished barely twelve years ago, and yet the purchasers of the property are going to sacrifice it as ruthlessly as though it were some ancient shack whose usefulness had long outlived the demands required from it by the immediate business vicinity.”

Take a drive up the West Side! This story guides us along the path of the West Side Highway. Following the western shoreline of Manhattan is the West Side Highway. In history, it has passed the World Trade Center, various warehouses and slaughterhouses for livestock received on piers in the Hudson, and Moses' famous failure, the West Side Elevated Highway. Since the 19th century, the West Side Highway has been a vital part of the city's system of roadways.

"Taken from the roof of a 55 story building on Broadway looking southwest toward New York Harbor. The Adams Building is in the foreground and rising to the west is the Whitehall Building on West Street. Also visible is Battery Park with Castle Clinton, and in the harbor the Statue of Liberty and the ocean liner "Ile de France, May 4, 1938."

Guaranty Trust Building ca. 1912 Here the colossal Ionic order, set off by simple ashlar masonry walls, lent great dignity to the front facade, while an equally handsome colonnade screened the windows of the main banking room along Liberty Street. York and Sawyer proved their versatility in departing from their Romanesque mode of this more purely Classical theme.

“St. Paul's Chapel, looking east from junkyard, general view of front entrance.” June 1, 1931. Built in 1766, St. Paul’s is the oldest church building in Manhattan. The Georgian chapel was designed by Thomas McBean as a northern “chapel-of-ease” outpost of the Trinity Church at Broadway and Wall Street. In its early years, St. Paul’s was a place of worship for early American luminaries like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. More recently, St. Paul’s is known for its role related to the September 11, 2001 attacks and the aftermath. Despite its proximity to the World Trade Center site, St. Paul’s survived the towers’ collapse intact, without so much as a broken window. In the subsequent weeks, it served as a place of rest for first responders while its iron fence became the site of ad hoc memorial displays.

21 West Street Architect: Starrett and Van Vleck Completed: 1931 Starrett & Van Vleck designed 21 West Street in concert with its neighbor, the Downtown Athletic Club. The two designs contrast strongly in their use of color and textured brick, but set back at the same points and utilize similar materials. Built for the speculative office market, 21 West Street was converted into apartments under the incentive of the 1995 Downtown Revitalization Plan. Vertical piers in a mottled golden brick contrast with spandrels in textured red brick, creating a woven effect. Cantilevers at the building corners create wrap-around windows. The bright red aluminum window frames – which have recently been replaced – add to the liveliness of the composition. The open arcade on the street is supported by massive columns with gilded stepped capitals reminiscent of Inca and Aztec architecture. The marble lobby retains most of its original fittings, as well as a beautiful wall map rendered in marble.

Mutual Life Insurance Building, ca. 1890. Erected during the Civil War for the Mutual Life Insurance Company, this ornate, mansard-roofed building was considered the "handsomest and costliest" building in the city when completed. The building's original owners occupied the structure for less than two decades. In 1911 the building was sold to the Guaranty Trust Company who planned to raze it and rebuilt. 'Engineering News,' trade magazine reported on the intricacies of demolishing such a large structure. The grand Guaranty Trust Building was completed in 1912.

St. Paul's Chapel This chapel, where George Washington worshiped, was designed to face the North River, with its very fine spire above the entry. The porch on Broadway provided a secondary entrance. The interior with its High Georgian detail appears today much as it did when built. It is the sole survivor of all those ancient churches which once abounded in lower Manhattan, including the Dutch Reformed Lower, Middle, North churches; the Garden Street Church; and the Old Brick Church.

Alexander Hamilton's grave, ca. 1920. July 11, 1804... Weehawken, New Jersey... a duel... Hamilton and Burr...with one bullet Hamilton falls and dies the next day. On July 14, 1804, Alexander Hamilton was buried at Trinity Church, after his body was carried from the home of his sister-in-law through the street, lined with thousands of mourners, to his final resting place. The city had declared the date a day of mourning. Gouverneur Morris, a friend gave the eulogy. The large grave marker seen here was not installed right away but donated two years later by Society of the Cincinnati, a Revolutionary War fraternal group of which Hamilton was President General.

Central Hanover Bank and Trust Company, ca. 1931.

Astor Memorial Doors, ca. 1912. In 1891 William Waldorf Astor commissioned a series of bronze doors for Trinity Church in honor of his father John Jacob Astor. Karl Bitter won the competition to sculpt the largest doors at the front entrance (Charles Henry Niehaus and John Massey Rhind, the runners-up worked on the smaller north and south doors). The 14-foot pair, seen here, was created with six panels illustrating Biblical scenes. The doors are topped by a 4-foot tympanum with Christ standing above depictions of his twelve apostles. While the smaller doors were installed in 1893, Bitter was quite busy with work at the World's Columbian Exposition and his pieces were not completed until 1896.

The American Stock Exchange is housed in a distinctive Art Deco granite building facing Trinity Churchyard. The original facility, built in 1921, was enlarged with a massive new trading floor and refaced with this boldly expressive façade in 1929. Starrett & Van Vleck were the architects of both the original building and the subsequent addition. They also designed 21 West Street and the Downtown Athletic Club in a more jazzy Art Deco style. The American Stock Exchange was originally known as the New York Curb Exchange because the brokers met and traded in the street at the corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place, in front of 24 Broad Street, the Broad Exchange Building. They moved inside for the first time in 1921 when they occupied this facility. Now, to visit the interior one must be a trader, all access to the public is closed.

Mail and Express Building Completed in 1892, the odd skyscraper headquarters of the Mail and Express was an extraordinarily ornate and narrow 14-story slab embedded in a mid-block site, with a main facade on Broadway a mere 21 feet wide. The building was L-shaped, extending 211 feet deep into the lot; a second section on Fulton Street was wider, but only eleven stories. Designed by the Beaux Arts architects Carrère and Hastings, the Broadway façade had the appearance of the entrance to a French chateau squeezed and stretched vertically and capped with an attenuated mansard tower and spire. The Broadway entrance to the paper's business offices were adorned and overwhelmed by four large caryatids designed by the sculptors J. Massey Rhind and Philip Martiny representing the "four continents." The high degree of sculpture and architectural ornament, also seen in the World Building, seems to have been driven by the desires of the strong-willed client, the publisher Col. Elliott Shepard, who was married to the heiress Margaret Louise Vanderbilt. In 1888, Shepard purchased the newspaper from Cyrus Field, the prominent businessman responsible for laying the first transatlantic cable. An extremely religious man, Shepard included text from the Bible on the editorial page; the paper was politically Republican. The critic Barr Ferree reviewed the building in Stone Magazine, noting that the individual detail of the Broadway façade made a better impression than the structure as a whole. He credited Carrère and Hastings for doing the best they could under the difficult circumstances of lot size and shape and client demands, noting that, "commercial requirements, however, have little regard for the necessities of the architect." The presses of the Mail and Express occupied the basement and could turn out 98,000 papers per hour. The editorial offices and the composing room were located on the tenth and eleventh floors. Like all the other newspaper buildings of the time, the Mail and Express rented extra floors to tenants; these included technology companies and publishers, such as Electrical Engineer and the American Lithographic Company. The Mail and Express Building survived only until 1920 when it was torn down along with others on the block to make way for the monumental American Telephone and Telegraph Building.

New York, the city of great heights. Let's admire some buildings that were at one time the tallest!

There were several successive Equitable Buildings on this site as the powerful insurance company headquarters expanded over the last decades of the nineteenth century to fill the entire block framed by Broadway, Pine, Nassau, and Cedar Streets. The first Equitable Building, a seven-story building designed by Kendall & Gilman, was finished in 1870 and was innovative both in terms of its structure and technology. Said to be the first office building in New York to use a passenger elevator, the building exploited technology to render the upper floors as convenient, and even more desirable, than the lower floors. In addition, the building's use of metal structural columns represented a major step towards the construction techniques that would later develop into steel cage construction. The building expanded in numerous construction campaigns, most notably George B. Post's extension of 1889 which more than doubled the building's Broadway frontage. It was a highly profitable investment that the Equitable Company was keen to optimize. On January 9, 1912, the Equitable Building was almost completely destroyed by fire, despite its much-touted "fire-proof" construction. Chicago architect Ernest R. Graham's firm was retained the day after the fire to supervise the stabilization and demolition of the ruin, and later the redevelopment of the site with a much larger structure. The company had previously discussed plans for the building's redevelopment with Graham for three years before the fire. The new Equitable Building was to represent once again the heights of modernity: ample and speedy elevator service, state-of-the-art heating and ventilation systems, fireproof construction, and fire- safety systems. At 38 stories, the Equitable Building was never the tallest, but it was the largest building in the world with 1,200,000 square feet of rentable office space. The massive size of this building galvanized the political forces necessary to enact the 1916 Zoning Resolution, which required high-rises to set-back at their upper levels. The main entrance to the building is on Broadway.

West Street Building, 1905. Cass Gilbert, later architect of the Woolworth Building, designed this speculative office tower for developer General Howard Carroll. Originally, 90 West Street stood across the street from the Hudson River wharves and warehouses used by its tenants. This area became landfill in the late 1960s using material excavated in the construction of the World Trade Center. It is now occupied by the World Financial Center and Battery Park City. The tower's restrained granite base and shaft contrast sharply with its crown-like finale which is marked by a graceful three-story arcade, elaborate over-hanging cornice, and mansard roof decorated by pinnacles, look-outs, and niches – all expertly rendered in terracotta in the style of the French Renaissance. This was Gilbert's most elaborate use to date of colored glazed terracotta and can be seen as a clear precursor to the Woolworth Building. Badly damaged on September 11, 2001, the debris from the towers falling just a few hundred feet away tore gashes into the facade. Two workers were killed in an elevator and the entire interior was completed gutted by fire. The facade of 90 West Street remained shrouded in a protective covering for years as restoration was undertaken. Unveiled a few years later, the rehabilitation of the building was honored by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2006.

Isamu Noguchi's "Red Cube," ca. 1970. Noguchi's sculpture was installed in 1968, outside the Marine Midland Building at 140 Broadway.

Commercial buildings at the southern end of the Washington Market, March 23, 1938. No. 115 West Street, the Cortland Hotel, is at the end of the row at right. These and adjacent blocks were demolished in the 1970s for the construction of the World Trade Center.

New York City is home to coffee lovers. For centuries, coffee has been sold, traded, and enjoyed in the city. One aspect of coffee culture that has aided its popularity is the coffee house. Coffee houses' locations throughout Lower Manhattan were essential to the foundations of the City's political and financial institutions. Providing both public and private rooms to men of all classes for discussions of business, politics, new ideas, and the latest gossip, coffee houses quickly rose in popularity. Although these institutions no longer stand their influences are still felt today. Join us as we travel to the locations of several old New York City coffee houses to see what has replaced them in their stead.

Starin's Pier, April 9, 1936. Pier 13 was constructed in the late 1890s and was occupied for at least the next few decades by the Lackawanna Railroad and the Starin Transportation Lines. The Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad was established in 1853. The company bought a number of smaller local railroads in the NY/NJ area over the next decades and extended through New Jersey to the shores of the Hudson River in the 1860s. The fright station was used for floating freight across the river. The upper sign of this building notes it as a headquarters of the Starin Transportation Lines, which was a river, harbor, coast transportation company. They were one of the largest firms involved in the movement of mail, soldiers, supplies, and freight via steamboats, tugs and steamers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The dark mass of 53-story One Liberty Plaza was an unusual departure from the glass curtain-wall typical of International Style office buildings. One Liberty Plaza's thick columns and horizontal steel spandrels, which have the appearance of massive I-beams, give the building enhanced strength and were appropriate for the tower’s original tenant, the U.S. Steel Company. The exterior walls, which are an integral element of the building's structure, showcase an advanced use of steel in high-rise construction. This structural system frees the building of most interior columns allowing for a more open and readily adaptable floor plan. One Liberty Plaza occupies the site of the Singer Building (once the world's tallest) and City Investing Company Building (once the world's largest) both built-in 1907 and demolished in 1969. The Singer Sewing Machine Company initially commissioned Ernest Flagg to design a 35-story tower, but soon decided to nearly double that height to 600 feet. Completed in 1908, just twenty months after the foundations were set, the Beaux-Arts style tower clad in red brick and bluestone stretched to 612 feet, besting 15 Park Row by more than 200 feet. However, the Singer Building held the title for only a year before it was surpassed by the Metropolitan Life Tower at Madison Square. The tower's demolition sparked a little protest at the time. Major losses throughout the 1960s -- Penn Station being the most prominent -- galvanized public concern regarding the preservation of landmark-quality buildings. Architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable described the Singer Building's last hours: "Piranesi anyone? The master never produced a more impressive ruin than the Singer Building under demolition. Curious New Yorkers who risk a piece of Pavonazza marble on the head by looking beyond the boarding that surrounds the tower will find a scene of rich, surrealist desolation. Domed vaults supported by bronze trimmed marble columns await the sledgehammer in the half-light and plaster dust. The distinctive tower, a triumph of 'modern' steel construction that added its Beaux-Arts silhouette to the picturesque bouquet of early skyscraper spires, will probably be replaced by one more 'flat-top,' diminishing the character of the downtown skyline." Erected simultaneously with the Singer Building was the City Investing Building, a speculative office block that contained more rentable space than any other in the city at the time of its completion in 1908. Francis Kimball, the architect of many other early skyscrapers, designed it. The building occupied an awkward and long site with narrow frontages on Broadway and Church Street. Liberty Park occupies the full block directly to the south. The developers of One Liberty Plaza in exchange for additional floors created it under an incentive available under the 1961 Zoning Law. On the block that is now the open plaza to the south of the skyscraper once stood the Washington Life Building, an early skyscraper of 1898 by Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz.

Empire Apartments, ca. 1975. Speculatively built by the O.B Potter estate and by designed by Kimball & Thompson, the Empire Building was completed in1898. From 1901 until 1976, the United Steel Corporation occupied the building. The building was converted into high-end residents prior to 2000. The AIA Guide to New York City refers to its entrance as, " a triumphant Roman ensemble."

World Financial Center Architect: Cesar Pelli Completed: 1992 The four major towers of the World Financial Center are the business and commercial center of Battery Park City, a 92-acre swath of landfill built over the closely spaced piers of the working port. Separated from historic downtown by West Street an eight-lane highway, Battery Park City has been developed since the 1970s. The recently completed esplanade, the beautifully landscaped Wagner and Rockefeller Parks, and a rich program of public sculpture compliment the residential high-rises to the south and north of the World Trade Center site. Expanding on the success of the World Trade Center, and building literally on the landfill created by it, the World Financial Center was developed by Olympia & York in partnership with a state entity, the Battery Park City Authority. Planner Alexander Cooper was responsible for the master plan of the site, and architect Cesar Pelli designed the four towers and the waterfront plaza that connects them. In contrast to the barren plaza of the former World Trade Center, the World Financial Center centers on a lively Winter Garden with upscale shops and restaurants that spill onto a large riverfront terrace. The complex also has a ferry landing and a marina for sailboats, large yachts and charter boats. Badly damaged on September 11, 2001, the Winter Garden has since been rebuilt and reopened. The riverfront area is a nice place to stop and rest while enjoying views of the Statue of Liberty.

59 Washington Street (center left, with the large windows), August 12, 1936. The railcar diner, seen at left, is located on the east side of West Street in the vacant lots that were once 41-45 West Street. Formerly occupied by small brick tenement buildings, the structures were razed between 1927 and 1931. Photographs from 1931 have a gas station in its location. The three-story white building with cross (at right) at the top (no. 57) is St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church. The church served the local community of Maronites, Christian from present day Lebanon. Next door, 59 Washington was once the headquarters of the Lebanon National Bank. The entire surrounding area was an ethnic enclave of Syrian and Lebanese immigrants, referred to as 'Little Syria.' In 1946 the City acquired the titles for all of the properties on this block and razed the buildings for infrastructure related to the Brooklyn-Battery (now Hugh L. Carey) Tunnel.

In 1905, James Hazen Hyde threw one of the grandest parties of the Gilded Age: a Versailles-themed costume ball at Sherry's restaurant.

Trinity Building ARCHITECT: Francis H. Kimball DATE: 1904-07 STYLE: Neo-Gothic, Skyscraper The Trinity Building, built in 1905 and 1907, is among the first skyscrapers in New York designed in the neo-Gothic style. Among the notable design features of the building is its sympathetic relationship to Trinity Church, with its southern elevation providing an important and harmonious backdrop to the graveyard, thereby enhancing one of New York’s most important landmarks.

Subway construction for the IRT Lexington Avenue line on Broadway, at Exchange Place, June 7, 1905.

Cortlandt Street Ferry Depot, ca. 1910 This marine terminal, built in 1891, housed ferries that brought passengers back and forth from Manhattan to New Jersey, at Exchange Place and Weehawken stations. This new terminal replaced the old ferry station built in 1856. During this time, Pennsylvania Railroad began modernizing stations in New York and New Jersey, and addition to the bulk of their ferry fleet. The new Cortlandt Street Ferry Depot featured a 12-track, canopied train shed for coach passengers. A large concourse allowed train passengers to enter the harborside ferry slips, where they boarded through the upper-deck. Prior to the depot's construction, the site was known as Mesier's Dock, where a ferry to Paulus Hook in Jersey City had been operating as early as the 1760s. It was founded by Abraham Mesier and Michael Cornelissen, who arranged with Cornelius Van Vorst to make a landing at Paulus Hook. Legal battles were waged over operators, crossings and passenger fares, as the founders had no legal authority to charter this route. They faced challenges from local officials in New Jersey for many decades. The Cortlandt Street Ferry Depot discontinued ferry service at the end of 1949, and in the 1960s it was demolished after years of inactivity.

My Archive Summer 2019 “This is a photo I took in April 1979 looking downward while on the escalator taking me from the 107th Floor Observation Deck to the rooftop Observation Deck on the 111th Floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. The escalator was right next to the windows providing this spectacular view.” —Eric Smith

World Trade Center - Site of the Hudson Terminal Buildings, 1907-1908 by Clinton & Russell. Architects: Minoru Yamasaki and Emery Roth and Sons Completed: 1973-1974 The entire World Trade Center was more than its signature twin towers; it was designed as a complex of seven buildings on 16-acres comprising a city-sized 10 million square feet of rentable office space. The World Trade Center was built and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey from 1966 to 1974. The Twin Towers, One and Two World Trade Center, represented the ambition of the bi-state authority and of the confident modernism of the late 1960's that saw bigger as better. The World Trade Center replaced the Hudson Terminal Buildings, a pair of 23-story buildings that housed offices as well as a three-level underground commuter rail facility from New Jersey. Dey Street divided the complex into two distinct buildings, which were connected both underground and by a sky-bridge. James Hollis Wells of Clinton and Russell designed the complex for the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Company. Altogether, the buildings yielded more than 1 million square feet of office space, which made the complex the largest in the world in 1908. The Japanese-born architect Minoru Yamasaki considered more than a hundred different building configurations before settling on the concept of twin towers and three lower-rise structures. Initially, the towers were to rise 80-90 stories. Only later were they to become the world's tallest man-made structures at 110 stories, following a suggestion said to have originated with the Port Authority's public relations staff. Tower 1 was 1368 feet tall; Tower 2 was 1362 feet. Yamasaki and structural engineer Les Robertson worked closely to create an innovative structural solution, an exterior wall of rigid "hollow tube" construction- closely spaced steel columns with floor trusses extending across to a central core. The columns, clad with a silver-colored aluminum alloy, were 18 3/4" wide and set only 22" apart, making the towers appear from afar to have no windows at all. One World Trade Center was ready for its first tenants in late 1970, even though the final construction on its upper stories were not completed until 1972; Two World Trade Center was finished in 1973. The foundations, which required excavation to bedrock 70 feet below, produced the material for the Battery Park City landfill project in the Hudson River.

Havemeyer Building, ca. 1910. Built in between 1891 and 1893, the Havemeyer Building was a massive structure on a long, narrow plot on Church Street between Dey and Cortlandt Streets. Designed by George B. Post, who just the year before had completed the World Building, the city's and world's tallest office building, the Havemeyer was 14-stories tall with a footprint of 47 feet by 214 feet. It was described by Kings Handbook as "a majestic pile of architecture." Developed by Theodore Havemeyer, of the sugar-refining family, the building featured seven Otis elevators, a layout that allowed for bright, light-filled offices, and a killer view from its roof. The structure survived until the early 1930s when it was razed for a branch of the East River Savings Bank.

Lebanon Restaurant (Syrian), 88 Washington Street, Manhattan. Photographed by Berenice Abbott, 1936. From the 1880s to 1940s, Manhattan’s Lower West Side was home to Little Syria, an enclave of storefront businesses and tenements occupied by immigrants of Levantine origin. At the time of Abbott’s photo, present-day Lebanon was part of the post-Ottoman French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon (hence the parenthetical reference in Abbott’s caption). Shortly after this photo was taken, much of the neighborhood was cleared for the construction of the Manhattan entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which broke ground in October 1940.

New York Clearing House, ca. 1912. Founded in 1853, the New York Clearing House was a financial institution that facilitated the daily exchanges and settlements of money between the city's banks. The building, which stood five stories high with a marble front, was erected in 1896 by architect R.W. Gibson. Throughout its existence, the New York Clearing House dealt with many financial waves of panic and emergencies. By 1913, the Clearing House had begun to feel overwhelmed by surrounding skyscrapers and its growing company, but it wasn't until 1963 that it relocated to its new headquarters at No. 100 Broad Street. In 1964, the building was demolished for a Skidmore, Owings & Merrill acclaimed nondescript glass office tower.

Empire Building ARCHITECT: Kimball & Thompson DATE: 1895-98 STYLE: Skyscraper The Empire Building is considered one of the finest of the surviving late-nineteenth-century office towers in New York City, and is also significant as one of the earliest, as well as one of the earliest extant, steel skeletal-frame curtain-wall skyscrapers set on pneumatic caissons in the city. The building, originally 20 stories (plus basement) and clad in rusticated white granite above a polished gray granite base, features the tripartite arrangement of base-shaft-capital common to many of New York’s early skyscrapers, with a four-story base, arcaded on the long facade, a triumphal arch entrance on Broadway, a midsection ornamented by bandcourses and balconies, and an upper section with colonnaded loggias and a heavy projecting cornic

Singer Building ca. 1905 Entering the lobby of this building in the summer of 1908, one would have been struck by its appearance, so different from the staid Classical interiors of the day. Here, for the first time, was a commercial building with a twentieth-century feeling- an almost plastic flow of lines; rich, warm-colored marble edged with crisp bronze profiles; columns flowing upward into pendentives which once supported glowing saucers of glass; and above all a great feeling of height and elegance. Ernest Flagg, the architect, was one of the few who, having caught the spirit of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, were able to apply its principles with freedom of expression.

St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church, ca. 1979.

The Bankers Trust Building, ca. 1938. The original granite clad, Neoclassical tower, topped with a monumental stepped pyramid, rises on the corner of Broad and Wall Streets from a site ninety feet square. The pyramid, which was once the trademark of the now-defunct Banker’s Trust, is modeled on the classical Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. Until this point, the more prominent banks and investment houses of Wall Street had eschewed the novelty of high-rise construction. Trowbridge and Livingston were also the architects of the J.P. Morgan Building, diagonally across the street, and the New York Stock Exchange Extension, across Wall Street. They imbued the tower’s design with a sense of monumentality. Note how the deeply set windows in the ground and first floor give the base a sense of real solidity -- an effect also achieved by the deep-set Ionic colonnade below the pyramid top. An L-shaped Art Deco extension surrounds the tower on three sides. While the extension employs a modernist vocabulary, its design defers to the architecture of its origins. Shreve Lamb & Harmon were also the architects of the Empire State Building. Until recently the tower contained one of the most beautiful Art Deco banking halls in the city and was home to the Skyscraper Museum from 1998-1999. It has since been converted to a health club.

Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal, August 12, 1936. Completed in 1865, the Liberty Street Terminal was the ferry terminal used to move passengers from New York to connecting travel on the Central Railroad of New Jersey, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Reading Railroad and the Lehigh Valley Railroad. The terminal the passengers arrived at on the New Jersey side was call the Communipaw Terminal. It was named after the community nearby and the historic ferry that traversed a similar route starting in 1661 That original ferry service reportedly fell into disuse in the 1780s, though it is possible it continued intermittently. Directly next to this building was another passenger terminal; the Cortland Street Ferry Depot was operated by the Pennsylvania Railroad and the West Shore Railroad. Depicted here in 1936, the service from this building continued until the final ferry departed for New Jersey on April 26, 1967. In the early 1970s the terminal was razed and the nearby waterfront was landfilled for the creation of Battery Park City. (This is why the once waterfront location of the ferry terminal is now a couple blocks in inland from the river.)

61 Broadway - Adams Express Building Architect: Francis H. Kimball Completed: 1916 Rising 33-stories without setbacks, the Adams Express Building once dominated the view from ships entering New York Bay by virtue of its height and white glazed southern façade. For its construction, architect Francis H. Kimball took advantage of new developments in steel frame construction, foundation engineering and wind bracing. The building originally served as the headquarters of the Adams Express Company, founded in 1840 by Alvin Adams, who began his business delivering packages using a wheelbarrow. The company grew rapidly to become a major competitor in the express delivery business before being consolidated in 1918 with the other major express companies to form the behemoth American Railway Express Company, later the Railway Express Agency.

My Archive Summer 2019 “Looking east towards the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges from the 111th Floor Rooftop Observation Deck of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. The photo was taken by me in August of 1978.” —Eric Smith

New York Evening Post Building ARCHITECT: Robert D. Kohn DATE: 1906-07 STYLE: Art Nouveau The Old New York Evening Post Building is one of the few outstanding Art Nouveau style buildings ever constructed in this country and its ornament and sculpture, attain a high artistic level. It is a fourteen-story building with steel-framed structure veneered with stone. Although Art Nouveau in inspiration, it is not copied from any particular building executed in that style. In general appearance, its ornament, windows, and copper roof are more Continental than American and are reminiscent of the boulevards of Paris.

Trinity Church, ca. 1979. Constructed at the foot of Wall Street in 1698, the first Trinity Church faced the Hudson River. Captain William Kidd, later a notorious pirate, lent tackle from his ship to hoist stones to build the church. This Church burned in the Great Fire of 1776, which burned one third of the City just after British forces occupied it and was blamed by the British on revolutionary arsonists. The Second Trinity Church was completed in 1790; this time the Church faced Wall Street. At that time, New York was the U.S. Capital, and George Washington frequently worshiped at Trinity Church. Other notable parishioners included Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. Severe winters in the late 1830’s damaged the Church. Trinity gave Architect Richard Upjohn his first New York church commission for repair work. Trinity and Upjohn eventually decided to tear down the existing church and build the third Trinity Church in a Gothic Revival style designed to resemble a 14th century English parish church. The Church was consecrated in 1846. With its 281-foot-high steeple, Trinity Church dominated the Manhattan skyline until the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge rose 50 years later. Trinity Churchyard, adjacent to the church, is the burial place of many famous New Yorkers including Alexander Hamilton, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton and her sister, Angelica Schuyler Church, and Robert Fulton. Trinity was the first Anglican Church on Manhattan, and, in 1705, Queen Anne granted 215 acres of land to support the church. Consisting of the land West of Broadway from Fulton to Reade Street and a strip along the Hudson from Duane to Christopher Streets and known first as “Kings Farm” and later as “Church Farm,” the land was first used for agriculture from which the Church paid its annual rent of 60 bushels of wheat. Over the years, Trinity developed the land and sold or gave away most of the original tract, but today retains 14 acres on which sits 5.5 million square feet of commercial real estate worth over $2 billion. This makes Trinity Church one of the largest landowners in Manhattan, and the recipient of a large income used for church operations, care of its historic buildings, and its philanthropic mission.

New York City is one of the most photographed places in the world. With globally-recognized icons like the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building, this collection includes some of the city's most popular spots to recreate a historic photo, along with a few underrated gems. Remember, tag your photos on social media with @museumofcityny and @urbanarchiveny for a chance to have your before/after photos featured!

If you were walking down West Street in Tribeca in 1928, chances are you'd enjoy being mesmerized by Fred Jensen's clock museum full of his handcrafted mini mechanicals. Also, you could get your watch fixed at the legendary shop. Back in 1928, he was featured in the Forward's culture and local arty news "Roundabout" column too.

Cortlandt Street between Washington and Greenwich Streets, April 8, 1936. Berenice Abbott’s view of Cortlandt Street includes the signs of "radio row" where radios and related electronic equipment were sold before the area was redeveloped as the World Trade Center. The Cortlandt Street station of the Ninth Avenue El is visible at right.