Sixth Avenue Elevated tracks above Murray Street, April 14, 1902. The elevated trestle carrying the Sixth Avenue El ran over Murray Street for one block, after its downtown route over Church Street, before turning uptown at West Broadway. In the background, the Ninth Avenue El trestle is visible over Greenwich Street.

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.

My Archive Spring 2019 "Tent & Trails: self-portrait with my buddy Nate on a downtown open house day in 1997." —Ethan Wolff

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Laing Stores, 1954. Famed cast-iron architectural pioneer James Bogardus designed this curved corner building at the northwest corner of Washington and Murray Streets in 1849. The four-story building was completed for the stores of Edward H. Laing. Construction on the building took just two months, an impressive accomplishment for the period. It was one of the earliest uses of prefabricated, mass-produced, modular iron parts for curtain-wall construction, and it was one of the oldest cast-iron building in the world. The building was scheduled for demolition in the late 1960s as part of the urban renewal of the Washington Market area. It remained standing until 1971. Owing to its iconic place in architectural history (the NY Times suggested that " in a sense, all skyscrapers are its grandchildren") the building was carefully dismantled. The pieces were labeled and stored in a nearby vacant lot. The hope was that the building would be reassembled next to its original site on the campus of Manhattan Community College. But in 1974 disaster struck, three men were discovered removing the building pieces from the lot. While a small section of panels was recovered, broken, in a Bronx junkyard, more than 60% of the pieces had already been sold for scrap. Later a building in the South Street Seaport was planned, and it was to use the remaining panels and new parts. While the remaining pieces were under lock and key following the earlier burglary, they too were stolen in 1977. An entirely new building, a reproduction of the Laing Stores, was completed at the corner of Fulton and Fronts Streets in 1983 and still stands.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Workers at a trench on Greenwich Street, beneath the Ninth Avenue El.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

West Street at the corner of Warren Street, 1936. Most of the commercial buildings on this stretch of West Street date to the 1880s, when the Hudson waterfront was City's primary port. Known as "The Farm" these buildings contained wholesale distributors of fresh produce. The photograph shows, suspended from the building facades, the corrugated metal awnings that shielded the fresh fruit and vegetables from the sun. At the near corner is No. 176 West Street, the Lucky Star Cafeteria. The New York Telephone Building is in the background to the right and the Woolworth Building appears on the left. These blocks were demolished as part of the Washington Market Urban Renewal Project in 1962. Today, the site is occupied by 101 Warren Street, a massive luxury development by Skidmore Owings & Merrill completed in 2008.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Transportation Building (at left) Built in 1927. Architects York & Sawyer. The setbacks, which the building exhibits, were common following the 1916 Zoning Resolution.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Benziger Brothers, 1951. Benziger Brothers is a Catholic publishing firm that was founded in 1792 in Einsiedeln, Switzerland. In the middle of the 19th century the firm expanded to the United States with an office in New York opening in 1853 and English-language publishing activities here commencing in 1860. The firm produced not only religious books, but also lithographs of religious images and liturgical paraphernalia (including Catholic vestments). They occupied a number of offices and storefronts in New York City starting in 1854 at 333 Houston Street. This mid century storefront housed the Catholic shop between 1950-1966.

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.