33 St. Mark’s Place Building Date : 1833/1873 alt. Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Thomas E. Davis/Cook & Weiler Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations This lot was was acquired from the Stuyvesant family by Thomas E. Davis, who sold larger lots of Federal row houses to meet the demand for homes “above Bleecker.” No. 33 St. Mark’s Place was built in 1833 as a three story row house and extended to five stories in 1873 (as per tax records). This change was most likely an alteration rather than a new building. This building once housed the Manic-Panic punk-rock clothing store. It also held “Ray’s Occult Books,” featured in the movie Ghostbusters. The building is nearly unrecognizable today, as the white paint has been stripped from the natural brick exterior and a staircase has been built, among other changes. Poet Anne Waldman and her husband, the writer and published Lewis Warsh lived in this building from 1966 until 1969. Poet Anne Waldman was the Poetry Project’s first secretary in 1966, editor of the in-house magazine The World, and director of the Poetry Project, a position she held until 1978. Warsh was also part of the community of writers centered around the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.

38 East 14th Street, June 15, 1938. 14th Street (across foreground), at the S.E. corner of University Place, showing the former Springler Hotel under demolition. It will be replaced by a 2 story commercial structure. It is on a part of the old Brevoort farm of 22 acres that Elias Brevoort sold about 1758 to John Smith and whose heirs four years later sold to Henry Springler. The demolished building was originally a private dwelling and became a hotel after the Springler House of No. 5 Union Square burned down in the 1870's. It was a favorite rendezvous for actors playing at the old Academy of Music, Tony Pastors, the Union Square and other theaters of the vicinity. Tradition has it that well known Thespians lived here and that the "Lambs" had their inception here, though that organization has no record of having formally used these rooms.

87-89 Second Avenue; 239-241 East 5th Street Original Use : Residential/Commercial Original Owner : Isaac Sohlinger Original Architect : John C. Watson Description & Building Alterations This six-story new law tenement was built in 1910 and designed by architect John C. Watson for owner Isaac Sohinger.

116 Second Avenue; 48 East 7th Street Building Date : 1845-46, 1884-86 (alt) Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Samuel Perry (1845-46), H. Ludemann (1884-86) Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations This five-story tenement shares Lot 7 with the building at 48 ½ East 7th Street. A low brick extension connects these two structures; the extension has a sign that reads “Via Della Pace.” Originally built to three-and-a-half stories in 1845-46, the tenement was raised to five stories in 1884-86. The present facades feature hooded brownstone window lintels, sills and banding, a projecting chimney on the north facade with decorative brownstone and brick details, metal stoops and historic wood doors. The historic molded cornice is visible above part of the storefronts. The roof cornice has been removed. The fluted cast-iron column is visible within the northwest storefront window.

135-137 Second Avenue William Schickel, 1883-84 In the 1840’s, this area became known as “Kleindeutschland” (Little Germany) for its large number of German immigrants. The Ottendorfer Library (now a branch of the New York Public Library) and German Dispensary (later renamed the Stuyvesant Polyclinic) were funded by German-American philanthropists Anna and Oswald Ottendorfer to uplift the minds and bodies of their fellow German-Americans. The buildings include Italian Renaissance Revival and Queen Anne-style details, with red brick, terra-cotta trim, arched windows and symbolic ornament: urns and books on the library and busts of famous physicians and scientists on the dispensary. By the end of the 19th century, Kleindeutschland began to diminish as Germans moved uptown to Yorkville and other immigrants moved in. This decline quickened after the 1904 General Slocum disaster, a paddle boat accident that claimed the lives of over 1,000 German parishioners of St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. The Library is a designated New York City Individual and Interior Landmark, and listed on the State and National Register; the German Dispensary is a New York City Individual and listed on the State and National Register.

213 Second Avenue Building Date : 1865 Original Use : Residential/Commercial Original Owner : George Kruster Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations Likely built in 1865, this 5-story corner lot brick building has since been stuccoed and painted, obscuring much of the original detailing. The sills are still evident and the cornice is intact

9 East 7th Street; 53-61 Cooper Square Building Date : 1867 Original Use : Commercial Original Owner : Metropolitan Savings Bank Original Architect : Carl Pfeiffer Description & Building Alterations This New York City Landmark building, constructed in 1867 and designated a landmark in 1969, is an impressive marble work of the Italianate and French Second Empire style. It remains a significant presence on the corner of Third Avenue and East Seventh Street. Originally constructed for the Metropolitan Savings Bank by architect Carl Pfeiffer, the structure is considered one of the earliest examples of fireproof construction in the city, prompting the Superintendent of Buildings to remark at the time of its construction that “it is one of the handsomest and most thoroughly constructed buildings in the city, and a perfect model in its precaution against fire.” The building’s four-and-a-half story facade is constructed entirely of elaborately articulated marble, with decorative band courses at each floor, extensive rustication and quoinwork, ornamental entablatures and braces, and ceremonial Corinthian columns and pediments framing the entry. The building’s final floor is in a distinctive and delicately-articulated Mansard roof supported by a decorative marble cornice, creating a sophisticated Second Empire profile on the streetscape. In 1937, the building was sold to the First Ukrainian Assembly of God and has seen continuous ecclesiastical use since, primarily by the First Ukrainian Evangelical

Men and boys outside the entrance to 30 Lafayette Place (now No. 417 Lafayette Street), measuring cracks in the stoop of No. 28, August 8, 1901. Between 1897 and 1904, the city undertook twin projects connecting Lafayette Place to Elm Street, while building the IRT East Side Line (which later became the Lexington Avenue Line) by the cut and cover method. The man at right holds a measuring tape to the protruding stoop of No. 28 Lafayette Place, then a residential dwelling with a lower-floor storefront. The stoop and Greek Revival ornamentation were removed in 1911, during a street-widening project. Other such "encroachments" were removed along the block.

189 Second Avenue, Harrison G. Wiseman, 1925-26 This part of Second Avenue was once referred to as the “Yiddish Rialto” for its many theaters catering to Jewish immigrants, for whom theater was a popular form of entertainment and an important cultural institution. The Moorish Revival structure was built for Brooklyn lawyer and civic leader Louis N. Jaffe to house the Yiddish Art Theater company, which ultimately only held four seasons here. Subsequently, it functioned as a Yiddish playhouse and theater until being converted to a cinema in 1988. The Former Yiddish Art Theater is a designated New York City Individual and Interior Landmark and listed on the State and National Register of Historic Places.

144 Second Avenue Building Date : 1914-15 Original Use : Commercial Original Owner : Philip & Benjamin Menschel Original Architect : Louis A. Sheinart Description & Building Alterations This three-story brick building was originally erected between 1914 and 1915 as a movie theater with office space, designed by architect Louis A. Sheinart. In 1928, the building was converted to retail and office use. It was part of the Yiddish Theater District/Jewish Rialto during the early 20th century, and has housed the Ukrainian restaurant Veselka since 1954. The west rusticated stone facade features a bracketed thin cornice above the storefront’s segmental-arched window opening, framed by festive garland decorations. The north facade features patterned brickwork, simple rectangular window sills, and glass brick on top of the storefront.

"Brown Building, originally the Asch Building. Site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, 1975." The Asch Building was built in 1900–01 by architect John Woolley, who designed it in the neo-Renaissance style. Because it was known for "fire-proof" rooms it was attractive to garment factories who were susceptible to fires. The Triangle Shirtwaist factory moved into the top three floors a year after the building was completed. It was on these top three floors (8th, 9th, and 10th) that the Triangle Fire occurred in March of 1911. Despite the fire hoses not being able to reach the floors that were on fire, and the massive loss of life, the building survived intact. In 1916 New York University began to use the 8th floor for a library and classrooms. In 1929 the building was purchased by real estate developer and philanthropist Frederick Brown, donated to the university and renamed the Brown Building. Today the top floors are occupied by science classrooms and labs. There are a number of plaques at the base of the building that memorialize the fire and a larger memorial is currently being planned for the facade of the building.

Electric Circus, 23 St. Marks Place. These three buildings were constructed as separate row houses in the 1830s. At their completion, they would have looked much like their neighbor across the street, the Daniel Le Roy House at 20 St. Marks Place. In the 1870s nos. 19 and 21 became the headquarters of the Arion Society, a German music club, reflecting the new immigrant community in the neighborhood. In the late 1880s, all three were purchased by brewery magnate George Erhet, who turned them into Arlington Hall, a venue of community halls and ballrooms. In 1920, the properties were purchased by the Polish National Home, Polski Dom Narodwy, and served in a similar function for the Polish community. In the 1950's a nightclub called "The Dom" opened in the basement level. Advertised as "a groovy get-together place of the neighborhood cats and chicks who dig dancing and Polish food at Avenue A prices," the Dom enjoyed patrons such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and other Beats. In 1966, Andy Warhol rented the upper level as a psychedelic performance space. Their house band: Velvet Underground. By then the Dom was losing popularity. In its final hurrah, the basement became a nightclub once again, boasting the "chic bohemian" Electric Circus. Famously, a bomb was set off on the dance floor in 1970, which injured dozens of patrons. The nightclub was never able to return to its heyday of the 1950s and 1960s, and it closed in 1971.

Street scene of Third Avenue at East 13th Street, ca. 1935. At left, on the west side of the avenue, is the Variety Theatre, one of New York's earliest motion-picture houses. The building dated to about 1897, and was likely altered to house a conventional theater around 1914. The Variety screened short films, “photo plays,” second-run features, and, later, adult films, before it was closed by the health department in 1989 — illicit activities were not uncommon. From 1991-2004, the Variety operated as a live theater venue. Despite preservation efforts by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, the old theater was demolished in 2005. The tall building in the background, at right, is 200 East 16th Street, a 20-story Art Deco apartment building completed in 1930.

The oldest surviving WPA Retail Market building in New York City is in fact the East Village’s First Avenue Retail Market, which dates to 1938 (the very first to open was what came to be known as “La Marqueta” under the Park Avenue viaduct between 111th and 116th Street in East Harlem, then an Italian-American neighborhood from which LaGuardia was elected to the State Assembly and Congress; little of that original structure still exists due to demolition, fires, and alterations). In 1937, architects Albert W. Lewis and John D. Churchill were commissioned by the Department of Markets to design several of these indoor market buildings, including the new Fulton Fish Market Complex, the Gansevoort Market, the Bronx Terminal Market, and the First Avenue Retail Market. The First Avenue Market was opened by LaGuardia himself in 1938 on First Avenue between East 9th and 10th Streets. It was constructed in an L-shaped design that spanned numbers 155-157 1st Avenue and numbers 230-240 East 10th Street. Historic photos show a bustling neighborhood market that sold cheese (a 1947 New Yorker article states that the cheese vendor sold 300 varieties!), vegetables, and likely everything in, until its closure in 1965. In 1986, Theater for the New City (TNC) purchased this 30,000-square-foot former market building with the help of Bess Myerson, Ruth Messinger, and David Dinkins. TNC converted the market building into a vibrant community arts center, where they remain to this day. This transformation was a critical factor in the cultural and commercial revitalization of the surrounding East Village neighborhood. When the Theater for the New City purchased the former First Avenue Retail Market building, there was a stipulation that they had to still share part of the space with the Sanitation Department, which had been occupying the building since the Market closed in 1965. TNC didn’t have enough money to complete the four theaters, dance space, cafe, administrative offices, and rehearsal spaces, but put on shows regardless, creating interim theaters. Co-founders Crystal Field and George Bartenieff completed TNC’s home with $2 million they had raised. The City, however, retained the air rights to the building, and in 2001, a 16-story residential tower was erected above the theater. Despite this construction, though, TNC remains an important East Village institution that echos the community sentiment and necessity of the former First Avenue Retail Market, and is the oldest remaining intact Retail Market from this transformative LaGuardia/WPA project.

44 Stuyvesant Street ca. 1927 On January 31, 1795, Nicholas William Stuyvesant, descendent of Director-General Petrus Stuyvesant, married Catherine Livingston Reade, herself a descendant of New York royalty of sorts (the family name can be found on streets in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn). While clearly this was a significant date for these two early New Yorkers, why should we care over two centuries later? Because that marriage led to the construction of what is today the oldest residence in Manhattan, 44 Stuyvesant Street. Nicholas built 44 Stuyvesant Street for his wife and what would end up being a very, very large family. Walking down the unusually angled Stuyvesant Street today, this subtly elegant early Federal building may seem to fold seamlessly into the streetscape. However, if you were to stand across the street and turn the clock back to 1795, you would see the surrounding buildings disappear one by one, and the street grid as we know it dissolve in place of a completely different configuration. You would recognize but one structure: No. 44, the oldest building in the Village and the oldest structure in Manhattan continuously used for residential purposes. The land upon which 44 Stuyvesant Street was built was part of the original farm of Petrus Stuyvesant, Director-General of the West India Company in New Netherlands. Almost a century and a half before Nicholas and Catherine started their life together, Petrus Stuyvesant purchased two adjacent “boweries” (rooted in the old Dutch word for “farm”) from the West India Company on March 12, 1651. On November 30, 1787, a lane was cut between the two sections, running true east-west. The path became Stuyvesant Street, the only street preserved from the period when the Stuyvesants owned a huge swath of land within and beyond today’s East Village (roughly between Fourth Avenue, the East River, East 5th Street, and East 20th Street). The Stuyvesant street grid squared with the points of the compass: the streets running north-south were named for the female members of the family, and those bisecting them were named for the male members of the family. When Nicholas Stuyvesant built 44 Stuyvesant Street, it was a free-standing structure at the southwest corner of Stuyvesant Street and the no-longer-extant Judith Street. Nicholas and Catherine lived here together for twenty-three years, raising six sons and three daughters, just as the generations that followed them would raise their own families. When Nicholas’ mother, Margaret Livingston, passed away in 1818, Nicholas and Catherine moved into the Bowery house where she had lived. Nicholas had inherited the building upon the death of his father, Petrus Stuyvesant. After moving, he and Catherine rented out their former home at 44 Stuyvesant Street for the rest of their lives. It was during this period, in 1832, that the parlor floor of the house was remodeled in the later Federal style. In 1861, the rows of Anglo-Italianate homes that today fill in and form the rest of the St. Mark’s Historic District and ‘Renwick Triangle’ were finally developed. No. 44 Stuyvesant Street’s historical significance is amplified all the more by its important place in New York City landmarks history. After the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission began to identify and protect significant buildings and districts in the city in 1965, this was one of the first buildings, within one of the first districts, to be formally recognized. No. 44 Stuyvesant Street was designated as part of the St. Mark’s Historic District on January 14, 1969, almost one hundred seventy-five years after its original date of construction. Today, 44 Stuyvesant Street is one of two remaining houses from the early generations of the Stuyvesant family (along with the Stuyvesant Fish House at 21 Stuyvesant Street, built-in 1803 by Petrus Stuyvesant and similarly rich in architectural integrity and historical associations). Along with the Jumel Mansion and the Dyckman Farmhouse in Upper Manhattan, this is the only surviving residential building from the 18th century in Manhattan, and the only one “which has been solely used for residential use, successfully retaining …its original plan (which is two rooms off the hall) and its many architectural elements.” It also reflects the early building traditions in the area, displaying original Flemish-bond brickwork, splayed lintels, and a brownstone basement. Furthermore, 44 Stuyvesant Street showcases a 20th-century artist’s studio window, emblematic of the cultural and demographic shifts that took place in the East Village at that time, and the architectural features that defined it.

The New York Society Library was founded in 1754 as a subscription library and calls itself the oldest cultural institution in the city. The library was first housed in a room in the original City Hall during the colonial era. During the Revolutionary War, the collections were extensively damaged by looting and soldiers tearing up books to use for wadding in their muskets. During the years that New York City served as the country's capital (1789-1790), the Society Library effectively served as the first Library of Congress. (It is said that President Washington borrowed two books which he never returned). Following a number of moves in the first half of the 19th century, the Library settled in this purpose-built structure at 109 University Place building in 1856 where it remained for 81 years. In this venue, the Library was visited by luminaries such as Herman Melville and Willa Cather. The Library made its final move in 1937 into an Upper East Side mansion at 53 East 79th Street. At the time of this move the institution held 150,000 volumes; today, that number has nearly doubled. The building seen here was demolished for a new apartment building completed in 1940.

East 11th Street.

190 Second Avenue; 300 East 12th Street Building Date : 1903 Original Use : Residential/Commercial Original Owner : David Perelman Original Architect : Bernstein & Bernstein Description & Building Alterations This six-story new law brick tenement was erected in 1903 for stores and 20 families. It was designed by architect Bernstein & Bernstein. The first story used to be occupied by Café Royal from 1908 until 1952, one of the most popular social venues for Yiddish theater performers, as well as other Jewish writers, celebrities, and characters during that time. Paul Muni, Jack Benny, David Sarnoff, Fannie Hurst, Eddie Cantor, Will Durant, Carl Van Vechen, and Sarah Adler were all Café Royal habitués. The building shares many similar elements with other works by Bernstein & Bernstein. Like many other new law tenements, it sits on a corner lot. Its current facade features a curving, projecting bracketed cornice with a garlanded frieze, a chamfered corner, terra-cotta panels, beltcourses, window lintels with keystones, triangular and segmental-arched pediments, decorated panels beneath fourth-story windows, brick quoins, elaborate window surrounds, and a molded cornice above the first floor. The rounded window pediments connect the third and fourth floor windows in continuous enframements. The storefront has been reconfigured and refaced.

236 East 14th Street ca. 1941 There is an unexpectedly grand treat on the south side of this busy thoroughfare between 3rd and 2nd Avenues. The entire row of New Law tenements at 226-240 East 14th Street were built in 1902 to the designs of the architectural firm of Sass & Smallheiser. These red brick buildings with terra cotta details employ a rich Renaissance Revival style. The outer-bay, second floor bowed windows are surrounded by detailed ionic columns and topped with a fluted frieze. The four recessed bays on the second floor have arched enframements with exaggerated keystones. The second floor also has recessed belt courses of white brick, a popular feature of Renaissance Revival tenement design. The windows on the third through fifth floors have either splayed lintels or full enframements all in classically inspired motifs, and the fourth floor has windows topped with curved pediments. The sixth floor, like the second, has recessed belt courses in white brick. The pressed-metal cornice follows the curve of the projecting bays and acts as a lintel for the sixth floor windows. Though the cornice has been removed from 236, and 238-240 was painted, these buildings are still in remarkable condition.

Manhattan: 11th Street (East) - 4th Avenue.

German Hospital, ca. 1905 The German Hospital and Dispensary was founded in 1857 and opened their first facility that same year at 132 Canal Street. They moved between a number of locations downtown, settling for sometime at the William Schickel-designed building on Second Avenue, next to the Ottendorfer Library. In 1905 the hospital which had operated a location uptown for a few decades, moved their entire facility to East 77th Street location. The hospital building seen here was completed in 1900 and has since been demolished.

12th Street Cinema, ca. 1975. The theatre at 189 Second Avenue was the once a part of the Jewish Rialto that lined Second Avenue; more than two dozen theatres lined that street between Houston and 14th Street. Funded by Russian-born lawyer Louis Nathaniel Jaffe and created for the theatre company of actor Maurice Schwartz (called Mr. Second Avenue), the theatre was designed by Harrison G. Wiseman. Completed in 1926, the Yiddish Art Theatre only produced two seasons of work in the Moorish-influenced building, owing to problems between Jaffe and Schwartz. Between 1929 and 1936 various Jewish folk theatre companies produced shows there. In March of 1936 the Depression-era WPA Theatre Project took over the venue. By the 1940s a nightclub had opened in the basement, a gay supper club that was, in fact, a front for the mob. The venue showcased live performances into the 1970s. Since 1991 the building has been the Village East Cinema.

Moishe's Bakery, date unknown. Opened in the mid 1970s in a storefront that had been a bakery for decades, Moishe's Bakery has been providing kosher delights for more than four decades. Established by Moishe Perl, whose father worked in the baking business after coming to America from a Nazi concentration camp, the shop was well placed in the neighborhood where a substantial Jewish, Ukrainian and Polish communities resided. Today the menu remains the same as when the shop opened, with hamantaschen, rugelach, mandelbrot, sugar kichels and chocolate babka offered to the ever-changing East Village neighbors and those who travel from all over the city for sweets.

Luchow's Restaurant ca. 1975 Luchow’s was a German restaurant/beer garden. It opened in 1882 at 110 East 14th Street at a time when the East Village was known as “Little Germany”, or Kleindeutschland. The restaurant would expand over the years in size and prominence, eventually occupying a space eight times as large as the original venue. In its heydey, Luchow’s was the place to see and be seen if you were a part of the music, theater, or literary crowd. It imported 70,000 half-barrels of beer a year, a daily consumption of 24,000 liters. Famous diners include Theodore Roosevelt, Diamond Jim Brady, Oscar Hammerstein, John Barrymore, Arturo Caruso, Sigmund Romberg, Lillian Russell, O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Wolfe, and Edgar Lee Masters. Luchow’s was the first restaurant in the city to get its liquor license following Prohibition’s repeal in 1933. Union Square lost much of its luster and Luchow’s moved to midtown in the early 1980s. The Palace restaurant and disco opened in Luchow’s former space, followed by a gay bar. But a 1992 fire led to the building’s demolition in 1995, despite efforts to landmark the Victorian building. NYU bought the site and locals were hopeful when plans were announced to revive Luchow’s with a ground-floor “Gay 90’s”-themed restaurant with a (less warmly-received) 600-bed dorm atop it. In the end, the dorm was built, but the restaurant was never revived.

Man pulling piano outside No. 37 St. Marks Place, ca. 1980.

Veselka (Ukrainian for “rainbow”) was established in 1954 at the intersection of Second Avenue and 9th Street, by Ukrainian immigrant Wolodymyr Darmochwal. It was originally a candy shop and newsstand. At the time, the East Village was home to one of the largest expat Ukrainian communities in the world. Veselka evolved as the neighborhood did; it became a hangout not only for Ukrainian immigrants but also for the bohemian counterculture that flocked to the East Village in the 1960s. Veselka survives today, in its original location. In the late 1980s, it became a 24-hour establishment.

215 East 10th Street Building Date : 1891 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Fay Stacom Original Architect : Charles Rentz Description & Building Alterations The two tenements at 213 and 215 East 10th Street were erected together in 1891. They were designed by architect Charles Rentz, who also designed Webster Hall. The two buildings share identical facade elements despite being different building heights. No. 215 is six stories high and features a bracketed cornice with a paneled frieze, floral decorated window surrounds at the fifth and sixth stories, balconettes at the fifth story with cubic carvings beneath, molded arches at the fourth story, figural keystones, ornate panels, and quoins flanking the side windows of the second and third stories. There is a molded cornice above the first story, acanthus ornaments over the second-floor windows, masks at the keystones of the segmental-arched windows of the third floor, and cherubs in the spandrels of the arched windows of the fourth floor. The entrance is flanked by incised pilasters with lion head carvings at the top supporting a molded entablature.

Academy of Music, 1909. The Academy of Music opera house, opened in October 1854 with a production of Vincenzo Bellini’s ""Norma."" That opera house was destroyed in a May, 1866 fire. (The building pictured above is the second Academy, opened in February 1867). In 1887, the Academy of Music, no longer able to compete with the popular Metropolitan Opera uptown, was sold and to a theatrical venue. Pictured above in 1909, the marquee advertises a production of “Brewster’s Millions” starring Edward Abeles. The building was demolished in 1926. Today its site is occupied by the Consolidated Edison headquarters, a 24-story Beaux Arts skyscraper.

24 St. Mark’s Place Building Date : 1903 Original Use : Residential/Commercial Original Owner : Braverman, Silverson & Louden Original Architect : Sass & Smallheiser Description & Building Alterations This six-story brick tenement was constructed in 1903 by Sass & Smallheiser for Braverman, Silverson and Louden. It features splayed lintels with scrolled keystones above the windows and stone surrounds at the second story. The historic cornice was removed sometime after the 1980s tax photo was taken. In the 19th century, 24 St. Mark’s Place housed the offices of the Children’s Aid Society. Between 1853 and 1929, more than 150,000 abandoned, abused and orphaned children were rescued from the streets and slums of New York City and taken by train to start new lives with families on farms across the country. In just a five-month period over the winter of 1875, the Children’s Aid Society’s five Manhattan lodging sites provided lodging for 68,982 needy, and served about 277,200 meals.

Jefferson Theater, 212 E. 14th Street. For much of the twentieth century, this piece of real estate with a small front along 14th Street and a large space along 13th Street housed a theater and offices. Erected in 1912 and opened in 1913 as the B.F. Keith’s vaudeville theater, the building was designed by George Keister. Keister’s other New York works include the Astor, Belasco, Earl Carroll, and Selwyn theatres. The narrow theater entrance at 214 East 14th Street was nestled between two tenements with the bulk of the building (the theater’s auditorium) located on 13th Street side of the property. As vaudeville died out and film became popular, the theater was re-branded as the RKO Jefferson Theatre. The Jefferson operated into the late 1970s as a theater, when it was closed for good. It stood empty for decades and was finally demolished in 2000, creating the empty lot many East Villagers are familiar with today (2017).

Did you know that this eight-story Arts & Crafts style loft building designed by Robinson & Potter now known as “The Petersfield,” was once known as the “The Fish Building” due to its direct connection to the area’s Dutch-colonial history? This building’s name comes from Stuyvesant Fish, who constructed the building and was a direct descendant of the last Dutch colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant. The loft building was converted to residences in 1986 and was named The Petersfield after the name given to the original home of Peter Stuyvesant, which was located nearby. This and surrounding blocks were part of the original Stuyvesant Farm. Click here to read more.

Salmagundi Club, November 24, 1937. The Salmagundi Club was an art club founded in 1871. Initially called New York Sketch Class and later the New York Sketch Club, the organization was a men's only group of artists, students, and friends who met once a week. It was renamed Salmagundi in 1877 and meet at a number of Greenwich Village locations during its first 40 years. In 1917 the club purchased and moved into the1853 Italianate-style townhouse at 47 Fifth Avenue. For the last century it has operated in this building as a center for fine arts, artists and collectors, exhibitions, classes, demonstrations,and auctions.

15 St. Marks Place, ca. 1970. The business seen here on St. Marks Place is Paul McGregor Haircutters. Before finding fame as a stylist, McGregor had worked as a longshoreman, sandhog, and truck driver. He opened his shop in 1965 and within a decade was well-known for having invented the shag haircut, which he famously gave to actress Jane Fonda. After moving on from hair styling, McGregor transformed this location into the world’s smallest roller-skating disco, a bar called McGregor’s Garage, and finally BoyBar, a gay nightclub well known for its drag scene.

Klein Department Store, ca. 1984. S. Klein On The Square was department store whose flagship location sat in two buildings on the corner of 14th Street and Union Square East. Considered a more affordable option to stores such as Macy's and A\&S, Klein still offered a furniture department, fur salon, and a full service pet department. The original store (at 14th Street) opened in either 1905 (as stated in the founder's obituary) or by 1912 (as noted in the Landmarks Preservation Commission's East 17th Street/Irving Place Historic District Designation Report). The store expanded in 1930 to include the former Union Square Hotel building at the southeast of 15th Street (out of frame at left). During the 1960s the business expanded opening stores in New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia. By the late 1970s the parent company of the store began closing the locations en masse and selling off the property, including the flagship location, which closed in 1975. The building was demolished in the mid 1980s for the 1987-completed, Zeckendorf Towers apartment complex.

109 Third Avenue | Block : 469 | Lot #7501 Building Date : 1837 Original Use : Residential/Commercial Original Owner : William Stone Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations Formerly two separate lots, the buildings at 109 Third Avenue have been combined as Lot 7501. The smaller of the two, owned by William Stone, was constructed as a Federal style row house with three full floors and an attic level with dormer windows in 1837. Now heavily altered, little remains of the Federal details, but the fourth floor windows give a hint of the dormers that were once there. The second and third floors were originally two bays wide with shuttered windows. These two buildings have been combined and house the flagship store for Kiehl’s Since 1851. Founder John Kiehl started his career as an employee at Englehardt & Huber Apothecary at the corner of Third Avenue and East 13th Street. Englehardt and Huber were the store’s second owners, and had purchased it from German immigrant Louis Brunswick. Brunswick has started selling herbs and oils at his Brusnwick Apotheke in 1851. John Kiehl began working at the apothecary when he was approximately 20 years old, and in 1921, his apprentice Irving Moskovitz took over the store. In 1959, Moskovitz (now using the surname Morse) was running the store and Kiehl’s was moved next door to 109 Third Avenue. In 1961, Morse’s son began operating Kiehl’s and revamped the brand into what it is today.

St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery was constructed 1795-99 and designed by John McComb. In 1807 the tower designed by Town was added, consisting of four massive elegant pedestals with minimal Greek detail. The top pedestal has a clock face on each facet. In 1828 the crowning jewel was added in the form of a pyramid spire, designed by Town and Martin Thompson which terminates in a ball and cross finial.

6 St. Mark’s Place Building Date : 1831 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Thomas E. Davis/Daniel Rogers Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations This heavily-altered 4-story building started out as part of the row house development that Thomas E. Davis’ began in 1831. The first three floors have been added to, bringing out the front facade of the building and facing it with a red brick storefront topped with arched transom windows and an iron balustrade on the third-floor terrace. The facade is obscured by large retail signs. The upper floors of the building have been stuccoed and the attic level extended to create a full fourth floor. In the early 20th century, this building was the home of The Modern School, an anti-capitalist and anarchist institution dedicated to “provide education to the working classes from a liberating, class-conscious perspective”. Famed academic and anarchist thinker Emma Goldman was a founder of the institution, and lived nearby on East 13th Street. In 1979, Bruce Mailman opened the New St. Mark’s Baths at this site. They were closed by the New York City Health Department in 1985.

Colonnade Row ca. 1913 These four houses survive from a row of nine Greek Revival marble-fronted residences that, at the time of their completion, were among the grandest dwellings in New York and were occupied by members of New York’s leading families. Erected, and possibly designed, by the developer Seth Greer and named for the Marquis de Lafayette’s estate in France, the row is unified by the use of a Corinthian colonnade that was once crowned by a continuous band of anthemia (now visible only at No. 434). The buildings began to deteriorate in the post-Civil War era as the wealthy moved out of this neighborhood, and the houses were subdivided into apartments and commercial spaces. The row now contains apartments, restaurants, and theaters. From the "Guide to New York City Landmarks", courtesy of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Union Square Savings Bank ARCHITECT: Henry Bacon DATE: 1905-07 STYLE: Academic Classic, Bank The Union Square Savings Bank was designed in a bold and monumental Academic Classic style popularized by the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. Bacon’s design accentuates its prominence with a freestanding portico supported on four giant Corinthian columns and a monumental entranceway behind the columns.

208 East 13th Street, Manhattan (1901, Charles Rentz) From 1903 to 1913, this tenement was the home of the anarchist and revolutionary Emma Goldman (1869-1940), a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire). Goldman wrote and lectured in support of women’s rights, birth control, free speech, sexual freedom and labor unions. Beginning in 1906, she published a monthly periodical from this residence entitled Mother Earth, in which she and other radical thinkers and artists expressed their ideas. Her lectures, given all over the country, drew large crowds, and her activism led to multiple arrests, the last of which would be for her anti-draft activism at the beginning of the United States’ involvement in World War I. She and her long-time partner and fellow-anarchist, Alexander Berkman, were imprisoned for two years. After her release from prison in 1919, the federal government, under the Anarchist Exclusion Act, deported Goldman and 248 others, including Berkman, back to Russia. She continued to write and support her causes, spending time in England, Canada, France and Spain before she died in 1940 in Toronto, Canada. Photo by Village Preservation

Consolidated Edison Company Building ARCHITECT: Henry Hardenbergh DATE: 1910-14 STYLE: Classical Revival, Renaissance The Con Edison Building was constructed in stages between 1910 and 1929 for the Consolidated Gas Company, the predecessor to Consolidated Edison. Hardenbergh’s eighteen-story, classically-inspired facades feature giant segmental arches and double-story porticos at the base and rusticated limestone piers balanced by strong horizontal moldings at the upper stories and are enlivened by a rich blend of Classical Revival and Renaissance motifs.

132-144 Second Avenue, showing Ukrainian businesses and organizations along the avenue at the intersection of 9th Street, ca. 1975. No. 138 Second Avenue is one of just a handful of fine Federal row houses left in the neighborhood. Its bottom floor is occupied by Fresco, a gelato store. The shop is owned and run by Anna, Ilias, and Vanessa Iliopoulos– three siblings who grew up in South Africa and Greece. They considered opening their business in Cyprus or Dubai, but eventually found their way to the East Village of Manhattan. Both they and their customers consider that a very good (and yummy!) thing.

St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery, ca. 1979. The land on which this 1799 church sits was once farmland owned by the Dutch West India Company. In 1651, Peter Stuyvesant, Director General of New Netherland, purchased the farm or "bouwerie," and constructed a chapel. When Stuyvesant died in 1672, he was buried under the chapel (he remains are still interred here). A descendant sold the old chapel and its land to the Episcopal Church under the condition that a new structure be erected. The cornerstone of the late Georgian style church was laid in 1795 and the fieldstone building was consecrated in 1799. Its architect, John McComb Jr., was the designer of a number of iconic late 18th and early 19th century landmarks, including Gracie Mansion, City Hall, Hamilton Grange, and Castle Clinton. At the turn of the 19th century Alexander Hamilton assisting in the legal efforts to recognize St. Mark's Church as the first American Episcopal parish autonomous of the 1697-founded Trinity Church. In 1828 a Greek Revival steeple was added to the building, with renovated columns, a new parish house, a Sunday school, and a cast- and wrought iron fence all completed in the 1830s. Later, a cast iron portico (attributed to cast iron innovator James Bogardus) was constructed. While the parish had long been engaged in charity work, the 20th century saw the community expand their social justice and cultural efforts, hosting multicultural religious leaders, dance, poetry, and art events, and work training programs. Following a devastating fire in 1978, the community and local preservationists banned together to form the Citizens to Save St Mark's. Through advocacy, financial support, and the physical labors of the Preservation Youth Project, the building restoration was completed in 1986.

German Savings Bank, ca. 1905. The Central Savings Bank was constructed between 1870 and 1872 as the German Savings Bank. The bank, founded by successful German businessman Jacob Windmuller, dated to 1859. Windmuller created the bank for the large and growing lower Manhattan German population. Business was conducted in German and the immigrant community flocked to the institution. In 1864 the successful bank moved north to a location at the corner of 14th Street and Fourth Avenue. They outgrew their original building, purchased some of the surrounding lots, and hired German-born architect Henry Fernbach to design a French Second Empire style building. The resulting five-story structure had a facade of arched openings, separating pilasters, and cornices at each level. While the bank occupied the lower floor, the upper floor tenants included artist and glassmaker David Maitland Armstrong and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Following the anti-German sentiments of the First World War, the banks changed its name to ‘The Central Savings Bank in the City of New York.' The bank left the neighborhood in 1928, relocating to a large new building that occupied the entire block between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, 73rd to 74th Streets. The upper floors of the 14th Street bank building housed the New York County Committee of the Communist Party for a number of years in the 1940s. The bank building was demolished in 1962 and replaced by a no-style red brick apartment building.

Shoppers and Carriages Outside Wanamakers, 1898. The cast iron building, that became Wanamakers Department Store in 1896, survived for 94 years. Despite the intense blaze that destroyed the interior of the building in 1956, the cast iron facade seen here remained standing and had to be dismantled.

Grove St Press moved here after a brief stay at 80 University Place from 1964-67. Less than half a block down to 53 East 11th Street the move came at a crucial time for the enterprise. In 1967 Grove became a public corporation, vastly expanding its scope and resources. According to “From the Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader”, in January of that year, the Press also announced the acquisition of the prestigious Cinema 16 Film Library, consisting of two hundred shorts and experimental works, including films by Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Peter Weiss, all darlings of the cinematic avant-garde.

Tredwell House, September 1, 1937. Constructed in 1832, the three-story brick town house was once part of a row of six similar homes. It was built by Joseph Brewster and was likely designed from the pages of a pattern book such as ones created by the architect Minard Lafever. The home is an excellent example of the transition of style from Federal to Greek Revival at this time in Manhattan. Brewster lived in the home until 1835, when it was purchased by Seabury Tredwell, a hardware importer, whose business was located near the South Street Seaport. The Tredwell family owned the home for nearly the next century. Gertrude Tredwell, the final of eight siblings, was born (1840) and died (1933) in the house. Following Gertrude's death, George Chapman, a family cousin, turned the home into a museum. The house was designated a NYC Landmark, one of the first 20 designations in 1965. Today the museum features a collection of more than 3000 items, most of which belonged to the Tredwell family, and include furniture, decorations, lighting, household, personal and sewing accessories, family photographs, books, ephemera, works of art, costumes, and textiles. The plasterwork in the house is considered by many to be the most important extant example of a pre-Civil War residential interior in the United States.

Ottendorfer Library (at left) and Stuyvesant Polyclinic Hospital (at right), date unknown. The Ottendorfer Library and Stuyvesant Polyclinic Hospital are a pair of neo-Italian Renaissance buildings constructed between 1883 and 1884. Designed by German-born architect William Schickel, the brick facades are highly ornamented in terra cotta. The structures were funded by the philanthropist Oswald Ottendorfer, publisher of Staats-Zeitung, the city's largest German-language newspaper. (Schickel also designed the newspaper's building on Park Row, now demolished.) The building at left became the Ottendorfer Library, the second branch of the New York Free Circulating Library, later to become part of the New York Public Library. Today it remains a branch of that institution, the oldest library in the city to occupy its original building. The white building at right, originally called the Ottendorfer Clinic, was the larger, more showy of the pair, with busts of both classical and modern figures related to medicine.

98 Third Avenue Building Date : 1839 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Caleb Bartlett Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations Lot 31 is occupied by a mixed-use four-story building, built as a single-family residence in 1839 for Caleb Bartlett. The facade is similar to those belonging to nos. 92-96, except this building has a double window with a shared lintel and sill at the top story. A 1872 alteration permit indicates that the building had been utilized as a dwelling with a ground floor store and would become a three-family dwelling with a new storefront.

The former Hotel Albert complex consists of four buildings at 23 East 10th Street/40-52 East 11th Street/65-67 University Place. The buildings were constructed in 1875-76, 1881-82, 1903-1904, and 1922-1924. From the 1880s through the early 1970s, the Hotel played a large role in New York City’s cultural life. During the postwar era, prominent painters, writers, photographers, and musicians found inspiration at the hotel. LGBTQ and African-American artists established communities here, as did radical, Jewish, and working-class organizations such as the Progressive Labor Party. The hotel hosted dramatic productions at the “Albert Theatre for a brief period.” To learn more about the Hotel Albert, click here.

50 & 52 Third Avenue | Block : 556-1 | Lot #26 Building Date : Mid-19th c./1991 alt. Original Use : Commercial/Residential Original Owner : Unknown Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations This three-story conjoined building was once two separate buildings. Today there are still two separate storefronts. The buildings were likely constructed in the 19th century, but their facades have been given a complete 20th century makeover. From the late 19th century until sometime in the 1960’s, a store called Sig Klein’s Fat Men’s Shop existed in the northern storefront. As evidenced by the tax photo, around the 1930’s and 40’s Stuyvesant Loan Office was housed in the southern storefront.

Century Association Building ARCHITECT: Gambrill & Richardson DATE: 1869 STYLE: Neo-Grec The Century Association Building is the oldest known surviving structure erected as a clubhouse in Manhattan. Its stone-trimmed brick exterior, which remains remarkably intact, heralded a wave of neo-Grec buildings in the early 1870s.

On December 1, 1917, the Evening Post wrote: “The tide of Jewish immigration to this country had begun in 1883, following the first of the Russian massacres, and the question was what to do with refugees who were swarming to the United States as a Promised Land. Always a seer far into the future, \[Henry Marcus] Leipziger… was asked to take charge” of the Hebrew Technical Institute, “the first manual training school of a public nature in New York.” This school, housed in a complex of buildings located around the triangular intersection of 9th and Stuyvesant Streets, was the site of life-changing education for children and adults of all religions, nationalities, and backgrounds The Hebrew Technical Institute grew rapidly to occupy three buildings on this triangular block. The oldest of these buildings is 225 East 9th Street, which was originally built in 1891 for the Baron de Hirsch Trade School, a charitable organization established in the 19th century to help poor Jews from Eastern Europe escape poverty and violence in Eastern Europe and settle in the New World. Some time between 1899 and 1901 the Hebrew Technical Institute (a separate group with a related mission) took over 225 East 9th Street and built 34 Stuyvesant Street as an addition to 225 East 9th Street, at the same time raising the older building from four to six stories, and altering its facade from the neo-Romanesque style building we see in the 1893 image to the Beaux-Arts style building we see today. No. 34 Stuyvesant Street was built in a similar Beaux-Arts style. The newest of the buildings, 28 Stuyvesant Street, dates to some time prior to 1914, and is a 6- story neo-Renaissance style building. The building sits on the asymmetrical lot, whose shape is created by Stuyvesant Street cutting through the block. The first story features tall arched windows. The windows on the second and third floors are separated by a decorative panel and the second and fifth-floor windows feature a continuous sill. The entryway is flanked by engaged columns and topped with an arched pediment. In 1914, The Real Estate Record and Builders Guide announced that the architects were drawing up plans for the site as an addition to 34 Stuyvesant Street. The Hebrew Technical Institute was founded in 1884 and operated on 9th and Stuyvesant Street until 1939. A non-sectarian school, it was one of the first technical schools in the United States. The United Hebrew Charities, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, and the Hebrew Free School came together to found the Hebrew Technical Institute in November 1883. It officially began its life as a vocational school on January 4, 1884, and provided training in mechanical drawing, woodwork, metalwork, instrument making, electricity and auto mechanics for students between the ages of 14 and 17. After completing two years at the school, students could specialize in wood-working, pattern making, metalworking, instrument making, mechanical drawing, architectural drawing, wood carving, free-hand drawing, applied electricity, printing, textiles, automotive mechanics, aeronautics, ceramics, leatherwork, and much more. When the Institute was one year old, Dr. Edgar Starr Barney joined the staff as a teacher of engineering and math, then in 1887, he became the principal of the school, a post he held until his death in 1938 – that’s 51 years. When Barney died, “more than 20,000 volumes, including a separate collection of rare technical books…were donated by the executors of his estate, \[and] constitute the building’s library.” After 55 years of operation, the Hebrew Technical Institute closed in 1939. The building at 28 Stuyvesant was taken over by NYU and was used as a site for Industrial Arts education. NYU named the building the Barney Building, after Dr. Barney, to keep the legacy of the building’s history alive through its name. The buildings’ impressive unified architectural style and historical connection to immigration, Jewish history, and educational innovation warrants recognition and preservation. Currently lacking in landmark protections, these and many surrounding buildings could be torn down at any time.

225 East 10th Street Building Date : Before 1853, 1967 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Unknown (Before 1853), Gas Light Realty Corp. (1960-64) Original Architect : Unknown (Before 1853), M. Martin Elkind (1960-64) Description & Building Alterations This five-story residential building was altered from two four-story with basement tenements originally on the lot. During an alteration in 1916, the entrances to the two tenements at 225-227 East 10th Street were moved to the basement. It was not until 1960 that the two buildings were combined into one, from an alteration designed by M. Martin Elkind. The present facade features a plain brick surface. Most of the historical elements were lost after the renovation.

New York City abounds with tales of ghosts, and with each retelling, we breathe new life into these stories. In the grand Halloween tradition, join us as we venture into the most haunted sites of our city.

Germania Theatre, ca. 1895. The Germania Theatre pictured in this photo actually began life as the Church of St. Ann’s, which makes sense given the ecclesiastical design of the building. It was built at some point in the mid-19th century and later became a factory before it was ultimately converted to a theater. The Germania opened in September 1894, though the building had been used as a theatre previously. It did not survive long after, however, as it closed in 1903 to make way for the construction of the Wanamaker Building.

Southeast corner of 14th Street and Fourth Avenue, ca. 1977. The now unrecognizable corner of Union Square where today a large CitiBank occupies the corner lot.

"Peter Cooper became one of New York’s prominent millionaires, yet he still saw himself as a master craftsman, 'A Mechanic of New York.' However, education was paramount on Cooper’s agenda. With the fortune Cooper had amassed from his glue business, ironworks, his patent inventions and his real estate holdings Cooper invested his money in The Cooper Union, commonly called at that time, Cooper Institute. It would be the crowning glory of his life. The cornerstone was laid in 1854.He erected an imposing six-story Italianate building between Third and Fourth Avenue at Astor Place. To support the floors and make the building fireproof the rolled structural iron beams were produced at the Cooper Hewitt & Company ironworks. These iron beams would make possible the building of future skyscrapers... Cooper Union was the first free institute to provide adult education in the fields of engineering, architecture and science for young men and women who qualified regardless of race, religion, sex or social status. It is acknowledged that although Cooper Union was Peter Cooper’s vision, it was Abram Hewitt’s brain that made it possible because he oversaw the construction of the building and served as Cooper Union’s president for over forty years." For more on Peter Cooper and Cooper Union, check out this article by Polly Guérin in Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History.

216-222 Second Avenue; 301-309 East 13th Street Building Date : 1856/1890-1893 alt. Original Use : Institutional Original Owner : New York Eye and Ear Infirmary Original Architect : Unknown/Robert Williams Gibson (alt.) Description & Building Alterations The New York Eye and Ear Infirmary was founded in 1820, originally located at 83 Park Row. It is the oldest specialized hospital in the Western Hemisphere and the third-oldest hospital in New York City after the New York Hospital and Bellevue. In its first year, the hospital attempted the first surgery to restore sight to the blind. The infirmary built a four-story Italianate building faced in brownstone at this site in 1856, and remodeled and enlarged the site between 1890 and 1893. This expanded building was designed in a Richardsonian Romanesque style by Robert Williams Gibson. The base is rusticated in rock-face stone with arched windows and deep reveals, and the building has a high arched entryway on Second Avenue. It features golden brick with sills, lintels, courses of rough stone, recesses and projections, transom bars, and clustered blind arches. Alterations include an additional building in 1900, an additional story in 1908, the extension of the rear elevation in 1909, and the addition of a wooden gravity tank on the roof in 1924. The building is six stories in height and is clad in buff brick with limestone classical details and a quarry-cut stone block base. This base unites the upper story sections and features round arched windows and round arched entries on both the Second Avenue elevation and the East 13th Street elevation. There are quarry-cut stone belt courses at the upper stories, round arches above the fifth story windows, and paired windows at the attic or sixth story.

170 Second Avenue Building Date : 1929 Original Use : Residential/Commercial Original Owner : Saul Birns Original Architect : Segal & Sohn Description & Building Alterations This 15-story brick building, known as the Peter Stuyvesant Apartments, was constructed in 1927 by architects Segal & Sohn for owner Saul Birns, a prominent property-owner in the East Village. It was intended to serve as tenements and stores, and was originally leased to a Woolworth store and an opulent branch of the Bank of United States, which failed a year later. A replacement tenant was not found until 1933, when the ground floor was leased to Ratner’s dairy restaurant. Prior to construction, The New York Historical Society was located on this lot in a two-story building designed by Mettam & Burke from 1857 until 1908, when it moved to its current Central Park West location. The present building features window surrounds at the third, sixth, and thirteenth to fifteenth stories, molded banding, engaged piers, decorative panels beneath the roof line, and roping details at the building’s corners. The recessed point-arched window opening with spandrels and floral details on the north facade appears to be a former entrance.

"On March 25, 1911, a mere three days after the founding of the Wage Earner’s Suffrage League, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire transformed what Americans (especially in rural areas) knew and how they thought about factory work. When the fire broke out on the upper floors of the Asch Building at closing time on Saturday March 25, 1911, panicked workers instinctively ran for the nearest exits only to discover that the doors had been locked ostensibly to prevent employee thefts. Trapped in the inferno on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the building too high up for ladders and hoses to reach, desperate workers jumped to their deaths. The fire claimed the lives of 146 immigrant workers, mostly Jewish and Italian women. Front-page banner headlines in newspapers across the country bore news of the tragedy and immediately heightened public awareness about the dangers of the industrial workplace. The time had come for state intervention. New York convened a factory investigating commission that would eventually pass more than thirty workplace fire, safety, and health laws. In 1914, the Smith Bill went as far as limiting the number of hours that women and children would be allowed to work." For more on how the Fire galvanized New York City's nationally pivotal suffrage movement, check out this article by Karen Pastorello in Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History.

Variety Theatre ca. 2005 The Variety Photoplays Theater on 3rd Avenue between 13thand 14th Streets was never a grand movie palace like the RKO Keith’s, the Loew’s Kings, or the Loew’s Paradise, but for its 90 years of existence it played a notable supporting role in the East Village theater scene as the neighborhood transformed around it. Though its earliest history is somewhat sketchy, it seems that the original building that housed the Variety Theater at 110 3rd Avenue was constructed as early as 1897. Only 25 feet wide and just under 100 feet deep, it was most likely a store or residence that was altered to convert the space into a two story theater in 1914. As the moving picture craze swept the city in the early twentieth century, nickelodeon theaters sprung up all around the city to cash in and bring the new medium to the masses. While the Union Square area had served as home to the center of legitimate theater in New York in the late 19th century, as the twentieth century progressed that center moved north, and the neighboring East Village area became a center of ethnic theater and popular theater, movie houses, nickelodeons, and dance halls. The uses of other nearby sites such as Webster Hall, the Yiddish Art Theater, and the Academy of Music/Palladium on 14th Street all reflect this. The Variety seated 450 and as the Times notes, “first presented groups of two-reelers, collections of individual features, each 15 or 20 minutes long. This was at a period when the feature-length film was still uncommon and films in general were generally considered low-culture — ”photo plays” or not.” In 1930 a balcony, new lobby, and art deco renovations to the original 1923 marquee sign were made by architects Boak and Paris. Because of its limited size, the Variety never attracted the best first-run films, and by the late 1960s, the Variety — like many other struggling theaters in New York — turned to blue movies to help keep it afloat. By the 1970s and 1980s, the theater screened a somewhat unpredictable mélange of B and/or C-grade films as well as soft and hardcore pornography. The theater space also became a meeting place for gay men. A writer for the Bright Lights Film Journal described the scene when he visited the Variety in 1984: “Upon entering the auditorium, I saw the movie was playing upside-down. This lasted a good fifteen minutes. Nobody complained or perhaps even noticed… It was like stepping into a time capsule. I noticed four large globe-like lighting fixtures that had somehow survived the decades. The walls were an unremarkable (patched) plaster, but the ceiling was special, composed of patterned pressed tin. There was a single modest balcony. My main memory was of patrons moving about the theater in a constant bustle and streaming into and out of the toilets oddly situated down front below the screen and surely a distraction for anyone trying to watch the film. The room was filled with the continual rustlings and creakings of people on the move. It was more like a mass happening than a movie screening, and in fact I have no recollection of the film at all.” As the cinematic quality of the films shown at the Variety declined during the 1970s and 80s, so did the reputation of the surrounding East Village neighborhood. The Variety Theater was even featured in the film Taxi Driver. You can read more about Taxi Driver filming locations which happen to be just down the block from the Variety in a previous Off the Grid post. The Variety ended its run as a movie theater in 1989 when it was closed by the city’s health department, but later reopened in 1991 as a live off-Broadway theater. It ran for more than a decade as the Variety Arts Theater until 2004 when it was closed and demolished in 2005 to make room for a 21-story condominium tower.

99 Second Avenue Building Date : 1853-54, altered 1871 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Charles J. Knight or William Trusslow (1853), Louis Kappas (1871) Original Architect : Unknown (1853), Julius Boekell (1871) Description & Building Alterations This building was constructed in 1854 for owner Charles J. Knight or William Trusslow. It was altered by having the attic story built out into a full story in 1871.

11 St. Mark’s Place Building Date : 1885 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : John Kreusser Original Architect : Julius Kastner Description & Building Alterations This six story old law tenement was constructed in 1885 by Julius Kastner for John Kreusser. The cornice is highly decorative and has been painted in multiple colors. The windows at the third and fifth stories feature hooded lintels while the second story features windows with splayed lintels.

Astor Library ARCHITECT: Alexander Saeltzer; Griffith Thomas DATE: 1849-69 STYLE: Northern Italian Renaissance The Library is a three-story brick and stone building with basement and attic story. This structure has special value because each of the three portions of its development has been carefully maintained and constituted a source of stylistic influence over a wide area. Modifications, for the most part, have been few. The Library is developed in a symmetrical plan in an early Renaissance manner. Most of the architectural details of the building stem from North Italian Renaissance work of the first half of the 15th century.

104 Second Avenue, ca. 1974 This eight-story tenement was built in 1901, designed by architect Michael Bernstein, who also designed many other buildings in the East Village. The two tenements at No. 104 and No. 106 Second Avenue were built at the same time, but they are to be read as one large structure. The building features a tripartite vertical configuration and rounded corner at the intersection of Second Avenue and East 6th Street. The first and second stories are covered with rusticated limestone, with a round-arched entry enframed by molded archivolts and pilasters. The upper stories feature red brick and terra-cotta details, including window enframements with garland and foliate sculptural elements, broken pediments, and scroll keystones. The cornice has been removed and covered by metal panels. The storefronts have been reconfigured or infilled.

United States Post Office, Station D (Peter Cooper Station), August 12, 1937. Though the Village isn’t known for having too many stand-out post office buildings (many are small offices located within other buildings scattered throughout the neighborhood), Cooper Station is an exception. Located at 93 Fourth Avenue, on the northeast corner of 11th Street, the building was designed by William Dewey Foster and constructed in 1936-37 as part of the W.P.A. (Works Progress Administration) to combat the Great Depression. Foster was responsible for designing structures in both New York City and Washington D.C., including ten post offices in New York City and its immediate suburbs. Cooper Station was designed in the Classical Revival style and its most dramatic feature is the curve of the facade at the irregular corner of the site. Further highlighting the curve of this building is the two-story colonnade comprised of six receded Doric columns which delineate the corner bays.

October, the month when we mark Columbus Day, is also Italian-American Heritage and Culture Month. That combined with the recent celebrations around the 125th anniversary of Veniero’s inspires a closer look at the East Village’s own historic Little Italy, centered around First Avenue near the beloved pastry shop and cafe. While not nearly as famous or intact as similar districts around Mulberry Street or Bleecker and Carmine Street in the South Village, if you look closely, or know where to dig, vestiges of the East Village’s once-thriving Italian community are all around.

853 Broadway, ca. 1945. The Domestic Sewing Machine Company Building, which previously occupied the lot at the southwest corner of Broadway and 14th Street, was designed by Griffith Thomas. The structure was tall (for its time!) and capped with an eye-catching cupola and “DOMESTIC” sign at its rooftop. At the time of its 1873 construction, it was hailed as an early skyscraper, the tallest cast-iron building yet built. It’s hard to imagine a seven-story building as a skyscraper nowadays, but in the late 19th century it certainly was. The Domestic Sewing Machine Company showcased its sewing machines on the first floor. Its corporate headquarters were on the upper floors.

For much of New York's history, its Easter Parade was one of the most important parts of the Easter holiday. Starting in the 1880s, it quickly became one of the social events of the season.

Hancock Building, 1978. Built in 1897 by the firm of Marsh, Israels & Harder, the Hancock Building was the home of Hammacher & Schlemmer beginning in 1904. The city's first hardware store, established in 1848 in a building on the Bowery, moved into this new structure after its small local storefront boomed into national company and popular mail order catalog. The seven-story building has Romanesque details such as the arched windows on the top floor. It also features Beaux-Arts decoration, like the elegant scrolled detail above the entrance and Ionic pilasters (columns projected from the facade) on the middle stories of the building. The hardware company moved once more to a larger location out of necessity in 1926. (The new location was 147 East 57th, which remains the flagship store today.) Today the building looks very much the same as it did in this 1970s photograph.

27 Third Avenue | Block : 464 | Lot #3 Building Date : Circa 1850 Original Use : Residential/Commercial Original Owner : Unknown Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations 25 Third Avenue was constructed in 1829 for William Butler, and 27 Third Avenue was constructed in 1831 for Piere Hall. Both were originally built as residences above ground-floor shops. By 1914, both buildings were six-stories tall and only used for commercial purposes. In 1936, the upper floors of both buildings were removed and the remaining one-story structures were joined along with 3 St. Mark’s Place.

Louis N. Jaffe Art Theater (Yiddish Art Theater/Yiddish Folks Theater) ARCHITECT: Harrison G. Wiseman DATE: 1925-26 STYLE: Moorish Revival The Jaffe Art Theater is one of the most tangible reminders of the heyday of Yiddish theater in New York City in the early twentieth century. The Moorish Revival design of the cast-stone front portion of the theater building incorporates Alhambraic motifs and Judaic references, but also reflects contemporary architectural trends of the 1920s, including the search for an appropriate stylistic expression for synagogues and other Jewish institutions, the interest in contrast between areas of blank wall surface and concentrated areas of flat decoration, and the use of “exotic” styles for theaters. The interior design reflects contemporary architectural trends of the 1920s, including the search for an appropriate stylistic expression for synagogues and other Jewish institutions, and the use of exotic styles for theaters. The theater presented the work of many of the most important figures of the twentieth-century Yiddish and English-language stages, including actors, directors, writers, and designers.

Southeast corner of 14th Street and Broadway, ca. 1977.

128 East 10th Street; 37 Stuyvesant Street Building Date : 1861 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : James Sinclair Original Architect : James Renwick, Jr. Description & Building Alterations Situated at the prow, or point, of the triangular piece of land formed by Stuyvesant and East 10th Streets, this beautifully preserved four-and-a-half-story Anglo-Italianate townhouse was built in conjunction with the surrounding houses as part of the disposal of the Stuyvesant family estate surrounding St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. The most prominent feature of this house is the wall that faces the prow of the block, distinctive from the rest of the houses in that it is faced in stone, rather than brick, with decorative quoinwork and a large, ornamented bay window in the center of the ground and parlor floors. Like its neighbors, the house also displays a rusticated light-colored stone ground floor with vermiculated keystones and cornerstones and corbeled entablatures over the entry doors. The parlor floor is higher than the others in the Italianate tradition of the piano nobile or “grand floor,” and the upper floors of the facade are red brick with light stone window surrounds. This is the only house of the group to have retained the original ironwork handrails and balconies. The original owner of this lot was Mathias Banta, the developer. Elizabeth Stuyvesant Fish willed that her estate, which included the land upon which this group of town houses is built, be divided equally amongst her four children, and the property was subsequently sold to Mathias Banta in 1858 for development on the condition that no “dangerous, noxious or offensive establishments whatsoever, nor any houses generally known as tenement house” be erected there. Banta subdivided the property into the present lots and listed the properties for sale in the newspapers. The lots were sold within a few months, and construction on the triangular piece of land encompassing nos. 23 through 35 Stuyvesant Street and 112 through 128 East 10th Street began in 1859. The architecture has been attributed to architect James Renwick Jr. The five-story buildings at 112-128 East 10th Street have parlor floors covered in rusticated brownstone with vermiculated panels at the bottom. The segmental-arched doorways have carved brackets and hold double doors, but the stoops are low and narrow. Each building is faced in red brick set off by Italianate-style stone window enframements from the second through fifth floors. They are part of the St. Mark’s Historic District, designated in 1969.

Columbia Hall/"Paresis Hall" (former location), 32 Cooper Square ca. 1919 James T. (Biff) Ellison (a gangster affiliated with the Five Points Gang) opened Columbia Hall, better known as Paresis Hall, in the 1890s in the building that is still standing at 32 Cooper Square. He apparently made no attempt to disguise the establishment as anything other than what it was, a 'fairy resort', where male prostitutes waited tables, performed, and offered sex to patrons. For the men who frequented Paresis Hall, it was not the degenerate resort that tourists and reformers saw. It offered them an important social center and provided a sense of community and support.

Any opera lover in New York knows one of the best places to hear an aria (or a couple dozen) is at the Metropolitan Opera. But many may not know about its contentious beginnings! It was at 39th and Broadway where one of the greatest Gilded Age dramas played out. And it wasn't on stage!

The East Village has long been a richly diverse immigrant neighborhood. It has also served as a hub for cultural movements: the Beats, punk rock, bohemians, Hare-Krishna…the list goes on. Take a walk through the area that was considered the center of counterculture in New York.

Built in 1919, this 6-story office building between 2nd and 3rd Avenue originally housed the Cloakmakers Local 48 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. In New York in the early 20th century, nearly all-female garment workers were Jewish or Italian, and while they often worked closely together, there were also separate organizations and entities catering to differences of language and culture. The dramatic relief marble carvings on the building depicting workers’ struggle against exploitation are believed to be the work of poet and sculptor Onorio Ruotolo. In the 1920s, after Mussolini’s takeover of Italy, the Center was a hub of anti-Fascist organizing in New York.

23 East 11th Street, ca. 1971.

Veselka, ca. 1980. Established in 1954 in a small storefront—as a candy shop and newsstand— Veselka was founded by Ukrainian refugees Wlodymyr and Olha Darmochwal. The new business was named for the Ukrainian word for rainbow. In 1966 the owners took over an adjacent space on 9th Street, allowing for a full luncheonette. A family-run business, even still, Veselka has long been a curious mix of old world traditions and the modern social milieu of the East Village. They began offering 24 hour service in 1990 and expanded in size in 1996. Pierogi and borscht for everyone, whenever you want!

New York's first major library, the Astor Library, founded on Lafayette Street with money donated by financier John Jacob Astor. The Astor is one of three private libraries that merged to form the New York Public Library in 1895.

German- American Shooting Society Clubhouse, ca. 1975. Emblazoned with an eagle, crossed guns, and a symbolic target and the words Einigkeit Macht Stark (“unity is strength”), the German Renaissance Revival building recalls a time when this neighborhood was Kleindeutschland or “Little Germany.” The German-America Shooting Society was likely established in the late 1830s or 1840s, as part of German immigrant support of the German revolutions of that era and the nativist milieu present in the city at the time. The 1888 building is four-and-a-half-stories tall, with a steep mansard roof, ornate dormers, and German-inspired terra cotta decorative elements. Designed by William C. Frohne, his first major New York commission, the building was crafted with a small shooting gallery in the basement (though most of the shooting happened at a space in Queens), a saloon, lodge rooms, and a bowling alley. Despite opening in the era where German-Americans were moving away from the old neighborhood, the building still housed meetings for 24 militia groups. Later in the 20th century, it was occupied by subsequent ethnic communities that made the East Village their home, serving as a Polish community center from 1943 until 1962 and a Ukrainian Culture Center in the 1960s. Today the landmark building is a yoga studio.

Ottendorfer Library The library was built in 1883-4 by Oswald Ottendorfer, a wealthy German newspaper magnate, along with the adjoining Stuyvesant Polyclinic Hospital. These buildings are both representative of Kleindeutschland, or “Little Germany,” a German immigrant community that existed in what is now the East Village and Lower East Side back in the late 19th/ early 20th century. In the 1977 designation report, the Ottendorfer Library is described as follows: The Ottendorfer Library is the oldest branch library in Manhattan and one of the earliest buildings in the city constructed specifically as a public library. Designed in 1883-1884 by the German-born architect William Schickel, it is a particularly interesting example of late Victorian architecture exhibiting elements of both the neo-Italian Renaissance and the Queen Anne styles. Built in conjunction with the German Dispensary, now the Stuyvesant Poly-clinic, next door, the library was the gift of Anna and Oswald Ottendorfer, German-American philanthropists who concerned themselves with the welfare of the German population centered on the Lower East Side in the mid to late 19th century. The juxtaposition of the library and the clinic building is by no means coincidental. Rather it reflects the 19th-century philosophy, particularly influential in Germany, of developing the individual both physically and mentally. Ottendorfer’s desire was to help to uplift both the body and the mind of his fellow Germans in the United States (“dem Korpen und dem Geisten zu helfen”). Today the library still functions as one of the oldest branches of the New York Public Library and serves as a reminder of the enduring architectural legacy of Kleindeutschland, which is still visible around the East Village.

The Union Square Theatre, on the southeast side of the Square, was next to the Union Square Hotel. It Opened in 187 as a variety house and was transformed into a legitimate theatre the following year. Originally the most prestigious dramatic house on the Square, it faltered after a series of managers who tried to continue the tradition of serious fare, and became a vaudeville house which enjoyed a successful twenty year run under the management of B.F. Keith and E.F. Albee.

231 East 10th Street Building Date : 1889 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Adam Happel Original Architect : William Graul Description & Building Alterations This five-story brick tenement was originally erected in 1889 for 20 families, designed by architect William Graul. The present facade features a red brick surface with some stone pieces, window lintels with segmental arches, carved keystones and neo-Grec details at the first story, decorated panels, brick piers with plain capitals, and entry portico with columns supporting a bracketed door hood. The original cornice was removed prior to the 1980s.

Colonnade Row ca. 1929 Presenting a uniform facade to the street, this building might be best described as a "house of mansions," in that it consisted of a row of individual, privately owned town houses unified behind its superb colonnade. Unfortunately, half of these have been torn down to make way of a warehouse. We can see that New York, with such superb planning as this, once had ideals that might have rendered entire city blocks as handsome as those of Paris.

112-114 Second Avenue Building Date : 1892 Original Use : Religious Institution Original Owner : Collegiate Reformed Dutch Church Original Architect : Samuel B. Reed Description & Building Alterations This three-to-five-story Gothic Revival-style church was built in 1892 by architect Samuel B. Reed for the Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church. The present-day Middle Collegiate Church is constructed entirely from Indiana limestone. Its facade is three bays wide, featuring a gabled three-story central bay, a 130-foot hexagonal limestone spire on the five-story tower of the northern bay, and another hexagonal limestone spire on the four-story southern bay. Other features include a peaked entry vestibule with a pointed-arched main entrance, pointed-arched window openings, and elaborate stained-glass windows which are possibly made by Tiffany. The highest tower has a bell cast in Amsterdam that was installed in the church’s previous Nassau Street location, where it rang when the Declaration of Independence was signed. It was installed at its present location in 1949, and rings at every presidential inauguration and death. It is located in the East Village/Lower East Side Historic District, designated in 2012.

Sprague Building ca. 1905 On the corner of 12th Street, the highly ornamented 817 Broadway is a visual treat. The building, which turns 120 years old this year (in 2015) , was constructed in 1895 to the designs of prolific architect George B. Post. Post designed several well-known buildings in New York that have long been demolished, so it was nice to come across his name during our survey of the Broadway/University Place/14th Street area. As with many other buildings along Broadway at the turn of the century, 817 Broadway housed clothing manufacturing. This particular structure was designed for Meyer Jonasson & Company, cloak manufacturers, for a cost of $250,000. The building later became known as the Sprague Building. This 1905 photo, taken by Irving Underhill (courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York), shows what the intersection of Broadway and 12th Street looked like 110 years ago. Needless to say, this building made quite a statement. Post was known for his innovative skyscraper designs; his now-demolished New York World Building was, for a time, the tallest in the world. It seems surprising today that this would be considered a skyscraper, but when you look at the surrounding buildings in the photo you can see what an impression this building must have made. An alteration permit from 1940 indicates that the storefronts were changed in that year. The thing that is particularly striking about this building is the way the triangular piers change the look of the facade depending on where you’re looking. There is also the sense that there are two different facade designs – Broadway versus 12th Street – when in fact they are both exactly the same (except that Broadway is only three bays wide).

"The Tweed Ring was more than a Democratic Party scandal. William 'Boss' Tweed, leader of Tammany Hall — Manhattan's county Democratic organization — was chief architect of the scheme that embezzled millions of dollars of public funds between 1868 and 1871. Yet, Republicans also deserve a fair share of the blame... A clique of officeholders, the so-called Tammany Republicans, openly joined with the Tweed Ring during its climb to power. As early as 1868, newspapers reported 'a nice little arrangement.' The group was 'doing their best to defeat our Mayor and reelect the regular Tammany incumbent,' complained the New York Tribune. 'Perhaps this is the very way to promote Gen. Grant’s election. Do they expect to nominate him in Tammany Hall?'" For more on Tammany Hall and the Tammany Republicans, check out this article by Jeff Broxmeyer in Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History.

25 St. Mark’s Place Building Date : 1832 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Thomas E. Davis Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations According to tax assessment records, this building was constructed in 1832-33 by Thomas E. Davis as a Federal style rowhouse. Davis was a prolific real estate developer and purchased property on the south and north sides of Eighth Street in 1831. The property was originally part of Peter Stuyvesant’s Bouwerie. Davis named the block after nearby St. Mark’s church and developed homes on large lots to attract New Yorkers of wealth. The house features a plain facade and an arched Gibbs doorway surround with squarish blocks that interrupt the surrounding bands. Doorway surround, window lintels and sills are now painted black. In 1882 and again in 1888, the building, now owned by Nicholas Schultz, was expanded and used as multiple family dwelling.

The church tower was built in 1847 and the nave in 1870 to the designs of renowned architect Napoleon LeBrun. At the time of demolition in 2005 to make way for NYU’s Founder’s Hall, it was one of the only structures in all of New York City to have served what had been the city’s three main religions – it was originally a Protestant Church, later became the first home of Temple Beth El synagogue, and served as an Armenian National Shrine for the Roman Catholic Church. The demolished rectory (blue brick building) dated to the 1840’s.

McSorley’s Old Ale House is the oldest “Irish tavern” in New York City, though its claim to have been established in 1854 is questionable. Immigration records show that founding proprietor John McSorley arrived in New York in 1851, but city records indicate that the site on East Seventh Street was vacant through 1858, with a two-story building recorded in 1861 and the present five-story structure in 1865. It is, however, possible that the purported 1854 tavern was an unrecorded building (ad hoc frame house “shanties” were not uncommon at the time).

Con Edison Building ca. 1983 Though situated on the north side of 14th Street, the tower of the Consolidated Edison Building looms over the East Village to its south and has served as neighborhood place marker for decades. The complex of buildings including the tower we see today actually took almost two decades to arrive at its final form. By the turn of the twentieth century, the headquarters of the Consolidated Gas Company (an earlier iteration of what we know today as Consolidated Edison—Con Ed) was based in a warren of buildings on Irving Place near East 15th Street. When it was decided to consolidate into a single new building, the company tasked architect Henry Hardenbergh with creating a new design. The new 12-story structure on Irving Place between East 14th and 15th Streets was completed in 1911. The company soon realized it would require additional office space, and with the purchase of addition lots on the block, expanded the building to the north and south and increased its height to 19 stories. As the report notes, “because the original twelve story section at the center of the building had not been framed to carry the weight of seven additional stories, a complicated system of trusses was designed to off-load the weight of the upper floors above the old wing onto the newer portions for the building.” An innovative exterior lighting plan was also included (see image below), but was discontinued by the 1920s. It was in the 1920s when the need for expansion came again. This time, the company gave the commission for the additions to the noted firm of Warren & Wetmore, who also designed Grand Central Terminal and Pier 54 on the Hudson. With the acquisition of more land on the block to the east, the expanded building and clock tower that we see today was begun in 1926 and not completed until 1929. Warren & Wetmore looked to the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus in Turkey for inspiration for the distinctive tower top. Throughout the new building design, imagery of urns, fire, and light are present, and was meant to reflect the company’s purpose, as well as serve as a memorial to the service and sacrifice of company workers during the First World War.

The Brittany Hotel ca. 1922 The Brittany dates to 1929, and was built as an apartment hotel. It was consciously and respectfully built in the Gothic Revival style in deference to the magnificent Grace Church across the street — one of New York’s great Gothic landmarks designed by one of America’s most prominent architect’s, James Renwick.

Old Merchant’s House Interior ARCHITECT: Unknown DATE: 1831-32 STYLE: Greek Revival The Old Merchant’s House is characteristic of the type of large brick residence popular with well-to-do New Yorkers during the decade from 1825 to 1835. While the exterior of the house reflects late Federal architecture, the interiors are elaborately finished in the newly-introduced Greek Revival style. The important rooms in the house are unaltered and now appear exactly as they did when originally completed.

307 East 9th Street, ca. 1970s.

29 St. Mark’s Place Building Date : 1833 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Thomas E. Davis Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations This property was once part of Peter Stuyvesant’s Bouwerie and purchased by real estate developer Thomas E. Davis, who developed Eighth Street into St. Mark’s Place. It was built as a single-family home of three stories in 1833 and tenementized in the 1870s. From 1856 through 1859, this building hosted the Harmonie Club, a German-Jewish singing club. By the late 19th century, the building was most likely being used as a boarding or lodging house, as many colorful incidents of various residents’ were reported during the time. In the 1930s, the building housed offices for Polish organizations and businesses. Artist-poet George Schneeman lived with his wife Katie and their family in this building from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Schneedman was the unofficial artist-in-residence of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, who worked often with poet-collaborators Bill Berkson and Ron Padget

5 St. Mark’s Place Building Date : 1890 Original Use : Residential/Commercial Original Owner : Joseph Fox Original Architect : Kurtzer & Rohl Description & Building Alterations Originally meant to be a four-family dwelling and storefront, this five-story high building was constructed by Kurtzer & Rohl for Joseph Fox in 1890. The building is four bays wide and features a variety of highly decorative window surrounds made of stone and carved brick. The bracketed cornice has been painted with multiple colors to highlight its details.

The Skidmore House This three and a half story house was built in 1844-45 by Samuel Tredwell Skidmore, a relative of Seabury Tredwell, who lived with his family only a few doors away at 29 East 4th Street, known today as the Merchant’s House Museum. The Skidmore house and the Merchant’s House Museum are the two last surviving remnants of the once numerous and elegant early 19th century residences on this block. At the time of the Skidmore House’s completion in 1845, it was located in the midst of a very fashionable residential neighborhood. Meanwhile the area to the north was largely undeveloped. Grace Church, at 10th Street and Broadway for example, was still under construction. According to the designation report of the LPC: No. 37, built in 1844-45, is unusually impressive… a deep house, occupying a larger than usual portion of the lot. A high stoop, over a stone basement which still retains traces of rustication, leads to a handsome doorway with full entablature supported by a pair of Ionic columns, a typically Greek Revival feature. The Inner doorway, behind paneled reveals, is flanked by blocked-up sidelights, set between square pilasters. A three-paned transom crowns the doorway. Traces of a delicate carved molding, which once surrounded the transom, are still visible. Vestiges of the cap moldings, which originally surmounted the window lintels, remain above the windows of the third story. Six-over-six window sash is still in place at the third story, and the low attic windows and simple wood roof cornice, with fascia below, are likewise features of the Greek Revival style. A dramatic transformation from derelict wreck to beautifully restored landmark has continued the fascinating tale of this unique structure. In 1974 New York Times art critic John Russel called it “one of the prettiest houses in the town”. But by the 90’s the owner’s estate had left the building rotting and exposed to the elements and in disrepair. Fortunately the Landmark Preservation Commission eventually commenced a lawsuit against the owners for their failure to maintain the building, and won. The owners were ordered by the State Supreme Court to repair and restore the exterior (read more here). The building has since then undergone a full restoration.

Bryant's Minstrel Hall, Later Tony Pastor's New Fourteenth Street Theatre, was the first tenant of Tammany Hall, which was dedicated on July 4, 1868. Audiences flocked there to enjoy the best in entertainment at what became the most famous vaudeville house of the eighties and nineties. It would later be renamed yet again as the Olympic Theatre

118-124 3rd Avenue Building Date : Mid-19th c./1990 alt. Original Use : Residential/Commercial Original Owner : Unknown Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations As seen on the 1853 map, this site was originally four lots with a manufactory at the corner lot and row houses with stores at the lots to the south and along Third Avenue. According to the Musical Instrument Makers of New York directory, Laurence P. Cummings made and sold pianos at this address from 1854 to 1856 (p. 34). All four buildings were still intact as of 1955 according to the map from that year. By the 1980’s tax photo, the northern lots still had their original 19th structures while at the southern lots, the upper stories had been removed from the houses. By 2007 all of the buildings had been reduced to single story and in 2011 they were renovated to their current appearance.

Clinton Hall, operated by the New York Mercantile Library, 1891. This building was formerly the Astor Opera House, site of the infamous 1849 Astor Place Riot. On the evening of May 10, 1849, a crowd some 15,000 strong gathered outside the Astor Place Opera House to protest the appearance of the English Shakespearean actor, William Charles Macready. A symbol of British aristocracy, Macready (1793-1873) had not endeared himself to Americans, most of whom he considered boorish and uncultured. In expressing its distaste for Macready, the crowd championed Edwin Forrest (1806-1872), an American-born Shakespearean actor who shared their fierce working-class determination not to be dominated by elite outsiders. Members of the crowd, primarily young males, began pelting the theater with paving stones, the debris from a nearby construction site. The stones rained down on the building and on the unarmed police called in to protect the theater and the English actor. Assault followed assault. The crowd would not be repulsed. Policemen were injured. Finally, the militia were summoned to quell the disturbance. When the echo of gunfire quieted, 23 people lay dead or dying, and over 100 were wounded, some seriously.

57 St. Mark’s Place | Block : 450 | Lot #46 Building Date : 1849-50 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : William Smith Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations This four-story with basement building was originally erected in 1849-50 as a private dwelling for one family. It was used as a club house in the early 20th century, and then was turned into a church space occupied by the Holy Cross Polish National Catholic Church in the mid-20th century. Most elements of the present facade probably date from the mid-20th century or later. Features include the triangular pediment at the center roofline, and point-arched openings at first and second stories. The building also housed Club 57, a famous contemporary art venue, in the 1980s. Performers Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat, RuPaul and Ann Magnuson all emerged from this club and from the Pyramid Club at 101 Avenue A.

130 Second Avenue | Block : 449 | Lot #7 Building Date : 1952 Original Use : Commercial Original Owner : Bankers Federal Savings & Loan Association Original Architect : Lester S. LaPierre Description & Building Alterations This two-story bank building was erected in 1952. There used to be a brick tenement on site, demolished in 1947.

801 Broadway, unknown date. The middle of the 19th Century saw an influx of wealthy New Yorkers moving north of Washington Square. To cater to this growing population, lavish new developments began to spring up around Union Square. Gothic Revival religious institutions such as the James Renwick-designed Grace Church and the Richard Upjohn-designed Church of the Ascension (a 2011 GVSHP Village Award winner) served as local landmarks. For the more informal daily routines of wealthy women, stately department stores became the trend. Often known as dry goods stores (to distinguish their goods from those carried in hardware and grocery stores) , these large shopping meccas also served as social gathering places where women could mingle with their peers, have lunch, and, of course, spend money. The original Macy’s store was located on 14th Street (which was landmarked in 2011) and the A.T. Stewart store was on East 10th Street and Broadway. Another important retail presence was James McCreery & Co. James McCreery & Co. Dry Goods opened its doors in 1869. Previously, Mr. James McCreery was employed by Ubsdell, Pierson & Lake, a department store located on Broadway and Grand Streets. He worked his way up to become a partner in the company. Upon Lake’s retirement in 1867, the company was renamed James McCreery & Company. He then commissioned a new store on Broadway and 11th Street that would come to be known as one of the nation’s most esteemed dry goods stores. The building was designed by architect John Kellum, known for his work in the new medium of cast-iron. His reputation stemmed in part from his design of the A.T. Stewart Department Store. The James McCreery & Co. building occupied a large lot fronted by both Broadway and 11th Street. Both facades were cast-iron from the foundry of J. B. & W. W. Cornell Ironworks. The Italianate/French Second Empire style exemplified the extravagant goods housed inside, namely the luxurious silks unavailable elsewhere. Around 1895, McCreery followed the department store trend up to “Ladies’ Mile,” 6th Avenue between 14th and 23rd Streets, when he opened his second store on 6th Avenue and 23rd Street. According to CastIronNYC.org, “McCreery sold the \[11th Street] building to the Methodist Book Concern and Missionary Society and leased back space in the lower floors; McCreery repurchased the building in 1889. James McCreery & Co. remained in the building until 1902. By 1910 the original mansard roof had been replaced….and the storefront housed Fleischman’s Restaurant.” The original mansard roof referenced here was lost to a fire on July 3, 1909 and replaced by a one story addition. The upper floors were occupied by factories that produced suits, shoes, and leather wares. In 1971, a fire begun in one of the factories destroyed the interior of the building. Thanks to the cast-iron construction, though, the façade was left unscathed but the top story was lost. The following year, the building was purchased by the Elghanayan brothers. As noted by Daytonian in Manhattan, “When their intentions to demolish the remaining shell and erect a high-rise apartment building in its place were announced, the community protested. Residents rallied along with the Friends of Cast Iron and community groups, appearing before the Board of Appeals. The Board granted variances that made renovating the existing structure to residential use economically feasible.” This project became an early example of a commercial building converted to residential use. During the adaptation, the two setback stories were added at the roof. It was renamed the Cast Iron Building. There are 144 apartments, none of which are identical. The building is currently calendared for landmark designation.

105 Second Avenue ca. 1980 Today, 105 Second Avenue is a bank. The city moves on and overtakes what used to be at a given spot pretty quickly, but maybe you know that 105 Second Avenue was the home of the legendary Fillmore East from 1968 until 1971. It’s a narrow building with a brick facade and a domed roof, which used to be adorned with a sign taller than the building that read FILLMORE EAST, and an awning with the names of bands and performers like The Doors, B.B. King, Tina Turner, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, and The Allman Brothers, among others — the list is like an endless greatest hits of greatest hits. All were selected and curated nightly by the unparallelled Bill Graham, who owned the venue. Before it was the Fillmore East, the building was the Commodore Theater, one of many theaters on 2nd Avenue that produced Yiddish Theater, when the area was known as the Jewish Rialto. With earlier incarnations as a movie house, by the 1930s, live Yiddish drama and vaudeville appeared onstage and the theater was rented out for meetings and benefits to left-wing groups. As Yiddish theater declined, the building became a movie house before it was purchased by Bill Graham. The live music impresario renamed the building the Fillmore East, as a sister venue to his Fillmore in San Francisco, named for its original location at the intersection of Fillmore Street and Geary Boulevard.

120 East 14th Street, September 2, 1936. Irving Place, south from East 15th to 14th (where it terminates) Streets, showing prominently what was once the City Theatre.

Crowds gather for Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's remarks at the opening of the First Avenue Retail Market, 1938.

8 Third Avenue & 95 East 10th Street Building Date : 1886 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : S. Thorne & S.F. Jenkins Original Architect : James M. Farnsworth & Co. Description & Building Alterations This five-story old-law tenement still retains its original cornice, but its ground floor storefront has been altered. The quirky Stuyvesant Curiosity Shop occupied this ground floor in the 1920’s and 30’s. In the 1950’s through 1970’s a wine and liquor store occupied the 3rd Avenue and 10th Street storefronts. The building also housed the March Gallery from 1957 until 1960, which was run by Boris Lurie, a Holocaust survivor. Lurie gained national attention in 1960 as one of the founders of the NO!art movement, which stood in opposition to the popular movements of the era such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.

The Asian-American and Pacific Islander community has a more than 150-year-long history in the United States, dating back to the first wave of Chinese and Japanese immigrants settling on the West Coast. And while nearby neighborhoods like Chinatown or the Lower East Side may have been much more prominent hubs for Asian-Americans, Greenwich Village and the East Village nevertheless can boast a long and impressive roster of individuals, organizations, institutions, and events located here that played an important role in the story of Asian-Americans in our city and country — especially (and unsurprisingly) in relation to civil rights and the arts. It is here that rights were won; discrimination was given a human face; innovations in painting, writing, and sculpture took place; and people gathered to confront the challenges and opportunities presented by the world around them. Here are just a few of those inspiring individuals, places, and associations:

Buildings on the west side of Fourth Avenue, below 9th Street, during construction of the IRT Lexington Avenue Line, December 10, 1902. The buildings were razed the next year, when construction began on 770 Broadway, the massive, full-block annex to the original Wanamaker department store.

Webster Hall, a run-down community center on East 11th Street, was the site of a succession of masquerade balls during the 1910s that enhanced the image of Greenwich Village as a perpetual party place. Patterned after the bacchanals staged in the art-student quarter of Paris, these costume spectacles were conceived initially as fund-raisers for local radical organizations. However, the causes they purported to support receded in importance as the balls grew rowdier, drawing many oglers and uptowners to the Village. At their peak of popularity around 1918, as many as two balls per week were being presented at what the Villagers teasingly had branded "The Devil's Playhouse."

131 Second Avenue, ca. 1980. Ruby Silverstein and Harold Shepard founded Gem Spa, originally called “Gems Spa,” at 131 Second Avenue in 1957. The name “Gems” comes from a combination of the initial letters of Gladys, Etta, Miriam, and Silverstein-Shepard. In an interview in 1969 with New York Magazine, Ruby explained that the three ladies used in deriving the name were his wife, his partner’s ex-wife, and his partner’s current wife. “Spa” was a word that he said he picked up when he was overseas in the service. Open 24 hours a day/ 7 days a week, Gem Spa has long been a cultural destination in the East Village. It is said to have invented the quintessential New York drink–– egg cream! Many famous beat poets like Jack Kerouac, among others, got their egg cream-fill here in the 1950s. By the 1960s and 1970s, Gem Spa became a hippie hangout and well-known for its wide selection of underground newspapers. Long-time customer Patti Smith and the New York Dolls shot their debut album cover in front of the shop in 1973. Jean-Michel Basquiat also named one of his major works after Gems Spa in 1982. The shop is currently run by Ray Patel, an immigrant from Gujarat state in India, who bought the business in 1986. Despite change in ownership, Gem Spa continues to make the original egg cream recipe. According the New York Times, Patel learned the recipe, "including the secret stirring motions that create a frothy head resembling beaten egg whites, from the previous owner (Italian), who learned it from the first owner (Jewish)."

100 Third Avenue Building Date : 1837-39/2012 alt. Original Use : Industrial Original Owner : Ebenezer Pray Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations Formerly a four-story, 19th-century building, the facade was completely refaced and an extensive rooftop addition was built between 2009 and 2012. The now seven-story building features a metal facade. In the past this lot held many different functions. In the 1830s, it composed part of was a factory owned by Ebenezer Pray along with Lots 28 and 29. The lots were divided by 1865 and Lot 30 was used as a saloon. By 1899, it was converted into lofts and a concert hall. During the 1900s, different theater companies occupied the space: first the Comet, and then the Lyric Theater in 1936. In the 1960s-70s, it was called the Jewel Theater, known for playing all-male films. In the 1980s it was the Bijou, which played XXX fares until city officials had it closed in 1989.

108 Second Avenue Building Date : 1908, 1916 (alt) Original Use : Commercial/Institutional Original Owner : Hebrew Free Loan Association Original Architect : Max Muller (1908), Raphael Prager (1916) Description & Building Alterations This four-story with mezzanine building was originally erected in 1908 by and for the Hebrew Free Loan Association (HFLA). The present limestone facade probably dates from the 1916 alteration when a new front wall was installed. It features a granite water table, double-height Doric pilasters at base, a narrow limestone cornice with frieze above the second story, bracketed and pedimented window lintels at the third and fourth stories, and a denticulated roof cornice. The historic frieze reading “Hebrew Free Loan Association” is now covered by signage reading “Self Reliance F.C.U.”

Grace Church ca. 1893 Completed in 1846, Grace Church in New York is one of the earliest examples of Gothic revival architecture in New York City. Designed by James Renwick, Jr. at the age of twenty three, the building and its campus hold three celebrated distinctions: New York City Landmark, National Register of Historic Places, and National Historic Landmark. Grace Church remains an active Episcopal congregation, with worship throughout the week and abundant opportunities for service and fellowship. Its landmark buildings feature designs by Renwick, a renovation and extension by Heins & La Farge, decoration by Tiffany, windows by Clayton & Bell, along with many other celebrated artisans. The Bicentennial Organ, Opus 65, one of the finest instruments in the city, was completed in September 2013 by Taylor & Boody of Staunton, VA. It's comprised of 97 ranks and over five thousand pipes. Throughout the last decade, Grace Church has undergone significant interior restoration, including the Te Deum window rising above the altar and chancel at the front of the church. In the summer of 2017, the entire expanse of the high ceiling was restored to its original condition. Taken together, this important work will ensure that Grace Church lives on as a Greenwich Village landmark for generations to come.

New York's Doughnut Hut of the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army's connection to donut making originated in 1917 when a troop of 250 American volunteers traveled to the front lines in France during World War I. Stationed to provide spiritual and emotional support for the fighters, the volunteers, primarily women, wanted to give the soldiers a taste of home by serving them home-baked goods. However, they found it difficult to procure the ingredients necessary to bake pastries or cakes and so opted for a simple dessert that wouldn't even require an oven: donuts! Ensign Margaret Sheldon and Adjutant Helen Purviance began coordinating an effort to provide this taste of home to the soldiers in the trenches. They were quickly able to produce around 2,500 to 9,000 donuts daily, using a cutter fastened out of a condensed milk can and a camphor ice tube. This heroic effort has been credited for donuts' popularity in the states today. During the Great Depression, the Salvation Army used the donut in yet another campaign to boost morale. National Donut Day, celebrated on June 4th, was invented in Chicago in 1938 to fundraise for aid efforts provided by the Salvation Army.

New York City Fire Engine No. 72 Cinema Village, located at 22 East 12th Street, is the oldest continuously operated cinema in Greenwich Village and one of the oldest continuously operated art cinemas in the city. Information from GVSHP’s research notes the following about the Cinema Village building: The façade appears to date from a 1964 alteration. The NB application shows that the structure was built as a three-story fire engine house in 1898 and designed by Horgan & Slattery for the City of New York. (Horgan & Slattery designed the Butterick Building at the Corner of 6th and Spring Streets in 1903 and other sites around the city during the early twentieth century). The building at 22 East 12th Street remained in use as a firehouse until it was converted to a movie theater in the 1960s. A 1964 Certificate of Occupancy shows it was operating as a “moving picture theater and entrance lobby.” The theater opened on October 5th of that year with Ingmar Bergman’s All These Women. Through most of its early years, Cinema Village was one of the city’s many repertory cinemas, showcasing vintage movies, cult classics, and contemporary favorites on double bills (aka double features) that would usually change three times a week. This once essential programming format has mostly died out in commercial movie theaters throughout New York City and the United States. By the late 1980s – and due to the surge in home video, buy outs by large-name theaters, and real estate development – commercial repertory cinema all but disappeared in New York City. Cinema Village escaped closure, surviving by presenting limited engagements of unconventional first run shows. In the early 1990s, before Jackie Chan, John Woo, Michele Yeoh and their stunt coordinators went to Hollywood, Cinema Village became known, through its annual festivals and other bookings, as the place to see the Hong Kong films of what would soon be acknowledged as a filmmaking golden age.

De Vinne Press Building, ca, 1975. In 1884, owing to the success and growth of the De Vinne Press company, owner and printer Theodore Low De Vinne purchased a large plot of the corner of Lafayette (then) Place and 4th Street. De Vinne commissioned the firm of Babb, Cook, and Willard to design a functional space that would also be impressive from the outside. The resulting eight-story, red brick, Romanesque Revival building, completed in 1886) met all of the press company's wishes. Though obviously a solid industrial building, the massing was lightened by multi-story arched windows and thin brick quoins at the softly curved corner. The interior had little ornamentation and was laid out for efficient productivity. It was here that the press produced the 24-part, six-volume “Century Dictionary,” considered to be De Vinne's greatest accomplishment as a printer. De Vinne Press ceased operations in 1922 and today the red brick building is the Astor Center, an event space and wine shop.

Mabel Dodge Luhan Residence, 23 5th Avenue ca. 1915 Mabel Dodge Luhan was born in Buffalo, New York, to wealthy banker Charles Ganson and his wife Sarah Cook and grew up among the social elite. While living in New York City in 1912, Gertrude Stein introduced her to the Greenwich Village intelligentsia and provided Dodge's introduction to the artists and collectors organizing the Amory Show of modern art, which is considered the event that launched Dodge into action. Dodge organized weekly salons in her apartment at 23 Fifth Avenue (since replaced by the building with the address 25 5th Avenue) to include a mix of intellectuals and artists. John Reed and Max Eastman met with Margaret Sanger and Charles Demuth. Most importantly, the salons often crossed class barriers as Dodge invited those of different classes such as Emma Goldman and Bill Haywood to bring new voices into the conversations she hosted. She wrote that she wanted her guests to mix “in an unaccustomed freedom a kind of speech called Free.” In 1919, she moved to Taos, New Mexico and began a literary colony and hosted a number of influential artists and poets including Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, Georgia O'Keeffe, Aldous Huxley, and D.H. Lawrence. She died in 1962 at her home in Taos, which is now a National Historic Landmark.

Samuel S. Cox Statue, 1891. Louise Lawson's sculpture of Congressman Samuel S. Cox stands eighth feet tall on an eleven-foot tall pedestal and depicts Cox gesturing towards Congress. The passionate orator stood at the triangle between Fourth Avenue and Lafayette Street, just behind the present uptown 6 train station entrance. Cox was known as the "letter-carriers' friend," championing legislation that led to paid benefits for postal employees. The statue was funded by the U.S. Postal Service workers - in fact, the monument credits mail carriers from 188 cities for their contributions. Upon the unveiling of the statue, the New York Tribune wrote: "The likeness is not a good one." The New York Times pondered if it would ever be regarded as a work of art. The Sun's Guide was more direct with its criticism, calling Lawson's work " a stiff, inartistic affair." When Lafayette Street was extended, the Cox statue was moved to Tompkins Square Park, close to Seventh Street and Avenue A. His back is positioned squarely towards the park.

97 Third Avenue. May 18, 1934. 97 Third Avenue has been run by Yuko Nose (pronounced no-ZAY) for the past five years. Before that, she had a clothing store, Air Market, in the same space for 15 years. Originally from Tokyo, Nose has lived in New York City for three decades, now calling Greenpoint home. As to why she switched from selling clothing to objets d’art, she said: “I got bored.”

156 Second Avenue, June 25, 1934. Second Avenue showing the old five-story Stuyvesant and the new buildings occupying the site of the Baptist Mission Society, the Second Avenue Baptist Church, and the New York Historical Society. Cemented into the pavement at No. 156 Second Avenue is a Hollywood Walk of Fame–style memorial. The memorial is a tribute to Yiddish theater stars of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was put here in 1984 by the Second Avenue Deli to commemorate the Lower East Side's glorious past as the "Jewish Rialto." In the early decades of the 20th century, a vibrant Yiddish theatre scene blossomed on the Lower East Side. Centered at Second Avenue and the Bowery, New York’s “Yiddish Broadway” offered dramas, comedies, and musicals that entertained and inspired thousands. In 1984, Second Avenue Deli owner Abe Lebewohl installed, in the sidewalk outside his beloved restaurant, a memorial to honor the stars of this once-thriving Jewish theater scene. In the style of Hollywood Boulevard, Lebewohl embedded two rows of granite stars bearing the names of the best and brightest Jewish performers. Over 30 Jewish artists were memorialized in this way. There is one plaque of Abraham Goldfaden. According to his 1908 obituary in the New York Times, Goldfaden was the founder of Yiddish theater. Luckily, the Walk of Fame remained despite the Deli's closure in 2006. But now this civic tribute is deteriorating. Friends of the Abe Lebewohl Yiddish Walk of Fame is working to promote the history and culture of Yiddish Theatre and the neighborhood inspired by the granite stars first embedded in the sidewalk of Second Avenue by restauranteur Abe Lebewohl.

8th Street, at the intersection of Fourth Avenue, Astor Place, and the northern end of Lafayette Street, 1931. The building at right is the Bible House of the American Bible Society. Constructed in 1853 the six-story building occupied a full city block and included a salesroom, a modern printing facility, and a technologically advanced department for book binding. The first cast iron framed building in the city, the facility produced tens of millions of bibles in various languages. This headquarters along with the move of the New York Mercantile Library to a nearby building, attracted other publishing firms, libraries, and bookstores to the area, which became a sort of 'Book Row.' The Bible House was demolished in 1956, and signaled the beginning of the end for the literary and publishing firms in the neighborhood. It was replaced by the Cooper Union Engineering Building, which itself was replace by a 13-story new glass facade building in 2013.

Entrance to the Stuyvesant Polyclinic, ca. 1975. Designed in the neo-Italian Renaissance style by William Schickel and constructed between 1883 and 1884, the German Dispensary served the medical needs of the neighborhood's poorest citizens first as the Ottendorfer Clinic and then Deutsche Poliklinik. Temporarily renamed the Stuyvesant Polyclinic during the anti-German sentiment of the First World War, the named was permanently changed during the Second World War. A clinic remained in the building until 2006. Purchased for $13 million, it underwent a massive interior and exterior renovation, uncovering and restoring original stained glass long cemented over. Today the building is the home of the Gehl Institute, a global urban design and policy organization.

"Taken from above and across Broadway of Grace Church in the snow at 11th Street with adjacent courtyard and parish house," 1902.

Amid the cast-iron facades of commercial and converted residential buildings between Broadway and University Place in the Village resides a large brick and brownstone institutional building. With its Police Athletic League (PAL) banners and Police Department signage over the door, it looks like it could have been an old station house re-purposed for PAL uses. In fact, this building on East 12th Street between University Place and Broadway is one of the city’s oldest surviving school structures and was the workplace of one of the pioneers of higher education for women.

Peter Cooper monument, Cooper Square, ca. 1975. This bronze statue, enthroned under a marble and granite pedestal and canopy, was designed by Augustus Saint-Gardens in collaboration with Stanford White. Completed in 1894 and unveiled in 1897, this collaborative design reflects an inspired synthesis of the two artistic disciplines characterizing the Beaux-Arts tradition. Saint-Gardens, a student at this institution offering free instruction in the sciences and art, admired its heroic founder and chose to memorialize his legacy as an American industrialist, inventor, and philanthropist. After years of wear to the bronze patina and marble from corrosion, oxidation, cracks, pigeon droppings, and vandalism, MAS led the original restoration in 1987 with a grant from Cooper Union, 20th Century Fox Foundation, and Con Edison.

McSorley's Old Ale House Shortly before the Civil War, John McSorley, an Irish Quaker from Omagh, County Tyrone, founded "McSorely's Old House at Home" at 15 East Seventh Street near Cooper Union. About 1908, McSorley changed the name to "McSorley's Old Ale House, " which was consistent with McSorley's prohibition on the sale of hard liquor. The rich, golden-brown ale sold in McSorley's came from the Fidelio Brewery on First Avenue. During the late nineteenth century, its diverse clientele included Irish and German immigrants as well as local politicians and Wall Street financiers. The back room, warmed by a fireplace and ornamented with assorted odd clocks and artifacts, was used by McSorley for philosophizing sessions with patrons as well as for on-the-house beefsteak parties during the winter months. The saloon modified its long-standing otto "Good ale, raw onions, and no ladies" in 1970 , when the New York State Supreme Court ordered its ban on women to be lifted. McSorley's remains in business today.

103 Second Avenue Building Date : 1868 Original Use : Residential/Commercial Original Owner : Nicholas Soebeler Original Architect : Julius Boekell Description & Building Alterations Constructed in 1868, this now five-story corner building was three separate buildings. In 1876, the roof was raised by two feet and in 1922 the buildings were combined and the corbeled brick cornice likely dated to this time.

The Hotel Grosvenor Apartments were constructed in 1926 on the site of the 1876 Grosvenor Hotel. The original hotel was one of the earliest businesses in the fashionable mansion district.

Lincoln Building ARCHITECT: R. H. Robertson DATE: 1889-90 STYLE: Romanesque Revival A classic example of the layered arcade design solution, a solution in which New York pioneered, the Romanesque Revival Lincoln Building is representative of an important transitional phase in the history of tall buildings. Using interior metal skeleton skyscraper construction in combination with traditional masonry bearing walls, the building is executed in limestone, granite, and brick, and has exceptionally fine carved and terra cotta detail, which includes the corner griffin, acanthus scrolls, Byzantine capitals, crisp moldings, human and lion heads.

Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Arts was founded in 1859. The institution began as a night school hosting courses in architectural drafting and the applied sciences, also hosting day-time classes in the Female School of Design instructing women in then-new technologies such as photography, telegraph, and typewriting. Peter Cooper's humble beginnings inspired a pedagogical model that offered working-class men and women upward mobility, at the same time instilling a sense of social responsibility that would create highly active citizens.

59 Copper Square, ca. 1975 Completed in 1867 by the architect Carl Pfeiffer, the French Second Empire building was constructed for the Metropolitan Savings Bank. The corner plot has two impressive facades, which, given the width of Cooper Square and the open plaza across the intersection, can "be advantageously viewed at the same time," (according to the 1969 LPC designation report). In 1937 the building was sold to the First Ukrainian Evangelical Pentecostal Church, a Ukrainian-language parish. In 1960, though a merger, the church became the First Ukrainian Assembly of God, which it remains today.

184 Second Avenue Building Date : 1849-50 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Abram Voorhis Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations This three-bay wide, five-story tenement was originally erected in 1849-50. The front wall on the first and second floors was rebuilt during an alteration in 1919. Part of the second story was occupied by a factory in the mid-20th century. Its front portion was extended to the building line in 1953. Many of the historic details have been lost, including the bracketed cornice.

Statue of the Marquis de Lafayette, Union Square, March 20, 1936. S. Klein, a discount department store, the Union Square Savings Bank and the tower of the Consolidated Edison Building are visible in the background. Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s bronze sculpture, a gift from prominent French residents, was installed in Union Square on September 6, 1876. Bartholdi is best known for another iconic, French-funded civic sculpture: the Statue of Liberty.

When McSorley’s Old Ale House opened its doors for business in 1854, Franklin Pierce was president, the Civil War was still a decade away, and lunch was free to patrons.

East 9th Street. Street Bridge, Wanamaker Building, 1923. Called the "Bridge of Progress" this sky bridge connected the 1862 Stewart department store building (which became a Wanamaker store in 1896) and the 1907 Wanamaker "Annex" Building between 8th and 9th Streets. These two buildings were lavish shopping destinations for the first half of the 20th century. In 1954 the store closed and the older north building was set to be demolished but the interior and sky bridge were first destroyed by a fire 1956.

The Brevoort Hotel and "Mark Twain House" on Fifth Avenue, between 8th and 9th Streets, October 24, 1935. Berenice Abbott’s 1935 photo captures lower Fifth Avenue in its waning days as a boulevard of the stately townhouses. The 27-story apartment building at 1 Fifth Avenue (extreme right) is a harbinger of the developments to come. The corner townhouse at left was known as the “Mark Twain House,” but its historical significance long predates the author’s brief residence in the winter of 1904 (or 1906, sources differ). The house — called “one of the most architecturally notable houses in all New York” in the 1969 Greenwich Village Historic District Designation Report — was built by architect James Renwick Jr. for his family’s estate. The light-colored building at right (actually a set of multiple townhouses connected by a shared cornice) is the Brevoort Hotel, named for Henry Brevoort, Sr., the owner of a large farm north of 9th Street that predated Greenwich Village development. Brevoort, a vehement opponent of the grid plan, successfully persuaded the city to bend Broadway at Tenth Street to accommodate his property. In 1953, the entire block was razed for the construction of the Brevoort superblock apartment building.

Middle Collegiate Church ca. 1926 This three-to-five-story Gothic Revival-style church was built in 1891-92, by the Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church. The Middle Collegiate Church is constructed entirely from Indiana limestone. Its facade is three bays wide, featuring a gabled three-story central bay, a 130-foot hexagonal limestone spire on the five-story tower of the northern bay, and another hexagonal limestone spire on the four-story southern bay. Other features include a peaked entry vestibule with pointed-arched main entrance, pointed-arched window openings, elaborate stained-glass windows which are possibly made by Tiffany, and a rusticated limestone surface.

87-91 Third Avenue | Block : 468 | Lot #1 Building Date : 1902 Original Use : Industrial Original Owner : A.C. Gale & Company Original Architect : Ballantyne & Evans Architects Description & Building Alterations Sitting on three lots on the northeast corner of Third Avenue and East 12th Street, this 5-story brick and terra cotta building combined two Pre-Law tenements located at 91 and 89 Third Avenue with a new building at 87 Third Avenue in 1902. The original two tenements and their land were originally owned by A.C. Gale & Company, as stated in the tax assessment records, and owned by the trustees of the Hamilton Fish Estate by 1902, when they were leased to Trow’s Directory Printing and Book Binding Company. Since Hamilton Fish owned the lots before buildings were erected, it is possible that his estate owned them all along. This new, large factory space was adjacent, and possibly even adjoined to, the existing factory for Trow’s Directory Printing and Book Binding Company at 201-213 East 12th Street. Within the newly expanded factory and office space, the company was able to print and bind its directories for an ever-growing city. It likely occupied these two buildings until the mid-1950s when the Third Avenue portion was converted into apartments and shops and the East 12th Street building was leased out to another industrial manufacturer. For more information about directories and their role in early New York City history, click on the NYPL Direct Me NYC link on the side of the page… The newly conjoined three buildings on Third Avenue were originally 5-stories tall and designed in the English Neo-Classical style by Myron E. Evans of Ballantyne & Evans Architects. Today, the brick building contrasts the white terra-cotta details such as the quoins and the classically inspired splayed lintels. The original entrance to the building on East 12th Street features a triangular pediment and classical columns. Originally, the building had a cornice in the Greek style with block modillions and dentils. The sixth floor was likely added in the mid-1980s. In 2014 this building and its adjoining one at 87-91 Third Avenue were restored and the owners, the Manocherian Brothers and the architects of the restoration, Thomas Fenniman, Christopher Rome and Karl Vinge of Thomas A. Fenniman, Architect were recipients of a 2015 Village award by GVSHP for this restoration.

April 17th kicks off NYC's Immigrant Heritage Week as the day when Ellis Island set its record for processing immigrants. In celebration of this day and the many different ethnic immigrant groups that have come to the Lower East Side / East Village over the years we will walk in their footsteps and see what they saw with the Urban Archive app as our guide. On this walk, we will explore the sites together and meet with some of the local business owners whose paths brought them to the Village, creating the landscape we see today.

McSorley's Old Ale House ca. 1978 When McSorley’s Old Ale House supposedly opened its doors for business in 1854, Franklin Pierce was president, the Civil War was still a decade away, and lunch was free to patrons. The only significant change to the motley customers happened in 1970 when McSorley’s was forced by the courts to admit women. After that, the motto was amended from “Good Ale, Raw Onions, and No Ladies” to “good Ale and Raw Onions.” McSorley’s, in every other way, has not changed. When pictures were put on the wall sin the 1800s, they stayed there, even as other items were added in the intervening years. The souvenirs helped draw tourists and visitors to McSorley’s even more than the ale and onions with saltine crackers. On permanent display, today you can find everything from theater and sports memorabilia to the chair of Peter Cooper, the founder of Cooper Union, a mug that Cooper engraved with an ice pick, and flags, cartoons, clipping, and photographs. McSorley’s has had a very diverse crowd, and it has attracted numerous celebrities, artists, political figures, and more. Four presidents, including Lincoln and Clinton, have stopped in for a drink at the bar; Brendan Behan had a favorite seat by the fire; John Sloan painted pictures of the bar at least four times (one of which is in the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection); e.e. cummings has a poem about McSorley’s; and New Yorker columnist Joseph Mitchell wrote a famous article about the ale house in 1940 called “The Old House at Home.” Countless other notables have stopped in over the years, and some continue to do so today.

63 Fourth Avenue Building Date: Mid-19th c./1927 alt. Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Unknown Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations Lot 13 is a modern style building with a light panel design. Although the current building’s construction date is unknown, an alteration permit indicates it was used as a store and dwelling in 1927. Permits issued in 1954 and 1955 suggest that the building mainly consisted of stores and showrooms.

Lafayette Hotel, February 3, 1937. The Lafayette Hotel consisted of three historic townhouses which functioned as the hotel (first at the Martin Hotel, then the Lafayette) from the 1880s until 1953 when they were demolished. During and after the First World War, the hotel became a favorite gathering location for airmen (both American and French stationed in New York). The owner of the Lafayette, Raymond Orteig, was the person who offered up the prize money for the first trans-Atlantic flight, won by Charles Lindbergh in 1927. The ground floor cafe was a well-known spot for writers and artists of the bohemian movement. The building was depicted not only by Berenice Abbott in this photograph by also by painter John Sloan.

105 Second Avenue, ca. 1985. In 1968, the rock promoter Bill Graham bought a run-down movie theater built in the 1920s as a Yiddish theater, and renamed it the Fillmore East, after his Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. In its short-lived existence, Jimi Hendrix, The Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead, Miles Davis, Joe Cocker, Crosby Stills, Nash & Young, Derek & the Dominos, King Crimson, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin, and Frank Zappa all played the venue, and dozens of live albums were recorded there. After a few other incarnations, the theater was gutted and it became apartments. The lobby is now an Apple Bank.

39 Fifth Avenue ca. 1923 Emery Roth designed this 14-story apartment building, his first in Greenwich Village, in 1922. It was the first of many of the larger apartment houses which would line this part of Fifth Avenue, typically replacing the 19th-century mansions which originally lined the thoroughfare. It is clad in Flemish bond brick and is restrained in its ornament with the exception of the multi-colored terra-cotta loggias at the third and the eleventh and twelfth floors.

120 East 12th Street, ca. 1975. The parish of St. Ann's was established in 1852 in the fashionable neighborhood near Bond Street, in what is now NoHo. The church began a habit of occupying churches that had been constructed for other, earlier congregations when they moved into a sanctuary on on East 8th Street, opposite Lafayette Place. In the 1860 the congregation had outgrown their space and also wished to constructed a school. The parish purchased the plot at 120 East 12th Street, which included a building constructed in 1847 for a Christian church, which had subsequently been converted to a synagogue. St. Ann's retained the original 1847 facade but demolished the rest of the structure to build their own church and an adjacent school. Dedicated on New Year’s Day, 1871, the church was a spectacular French Gothic style church, a fitting venue for one of the wealthiest congregations in the city. Over the next century the church remained a vibrant part of the community, becoming a shrine in 1929 (they held a relic of St. Ann, a bit of her finger bone). Re-established as St. Ann’s Armenian Rite Catholic Cathedral in the early 1980s, it was one of the last churches to have traditional, pre-Vatican II, Latin masses. The Archdiocese announced their intention to close the church and sell the property in 2003 and by the following year the doors were shut. Despite the efforts of preservationists and the community, the Landmarks Preservation Commission declined to designate the building. The lot was sold in 2005 with plans drawn up for a new 26-story NYU dorm. In the end all but the facade was demolished (supposedly as a concession to the preservationists) and the new tower was constructed. In the shadow of the tower is the disembodied front of the more than century and half old church.

The Renwick, 808 Broadway, ca. 1978. Named for James Renwick, Jr., the celebrated architect of Grace Church, this mixed-use Gothic Revival building was designed by Renwick’s firm — Renwick, Aspinwall & Russell — in 1887. Renwick himself is unlikely to have been involved in the design, which features repeated arch motifs echoing the facade of Grace Church next door. Over the years, the Renwick’s tenants included a variety of clothiers and manufacturers of consumer goods, with a storefront available at street level (in recent years it has been occupied by a Halloween-themed costume store). In 1981, the building was converted for residential use.

Friends Meeting House, Stuyvesant Square, ca, 1900. The Friends Meeting House and Seminary in Stuyvesant Square date to 1860. In the 1820s a schism occurred within the Society of Friends in New York. When the larger Quaker community began accepting the then in-fashion focus on intense Bible study, a group led by Elias Hicks of Long Island defected. (Traditional Quaker practice places the utmost importance on the personal relationship and direct interaction between worshiper and deity.) The break off group, referred to as Hicksites, purchased land on what had formerly been Peter Stuyvesant's estate. In 1860 one of their own, Charles Bunting, designed and built the pictured the Meeting House and Seminary. The red brick buildings are a mix of Federal and Greek Revival styles, rendered in a simple and unassuming design. In the 1950s, more then a century after the split, the two Quaker sects reunited. Today, they continue to occupy these buildings. The Friends Seminary, a private day school, run here is the oldest continuously coeducational school in New York City. The school was founded in 1786 with funds from a $10,000 bequest by wealthy merchant Robert Murray (who the neighborhood Murray Hills named).

31 St. Mark’s Place Building Date : 1833/1874 alt. Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Thomas E. Davis Original Architect : Unknown Description & Building Alterations Prolific real estate developer of St. Mark’s Place, Thomas E. Davis built this three-story row house in 1833. This stretch of Eighth Street property was purchased from Peter Stuyvesant and had recently been part of his Bouwerie before being converted into spacious homes on large lots. The brick building was tenementized in 1874 when it was enlarged to its current size. The building then housed two families per floor and was owned by J. Metcalfe. On a hot night in June 1897, a large fire broke out in this building and 18 families barely escaped with their lives. The fire started on the first floor and spread quickly via the hallway stair. Hook & Ladder No. 3 rescued many of the residents. The Old Law tenement building features a historic cornice and pedimented lintels above the second-floor windows.

Marquis de Lafayette Statue, ca. 1917 Located at a prominent site of protest and political gathering, this statue, designed by Henry Kirke Brown, with assistance by John Quincy Adams Ward and Richard Upjohn, depicts this founding father as an equestrian hero. Celebrating the General's arrival in New York on November 25, 1783, the day the British troops evacuated the city after a seven-year occupation, the monument was unveiled on July 4, 1856. It remains one of the earliest examples of bronze statues cast in the United States and a unique record of nineteenth-century American foundry techniques. After over a century of vandalism, corrosion, and missing elements, such as a sword that once fit into the scabbard, MAS's Adopt-A-Monument program facilitated restoration efforts in 1989 with a grant from the Glick Organization.

Located in the NoHo Historic District, this full block building at 770 Broadway was built in the Renaissance Revival style and was originally home to the department store, Wanamaker’s and its warehouse when this stretch of Broadway was a bustling commercial center at the beginning of the 20th century.

Most of us remember the famous line from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 thriller, Rear Window, “Meet me in the bar at the Albert Hotel,” delivered hauntingly by Jimmy Stewart to Raymond Burr. Today the building is a co-op complex comprised of four distinct structures functioning as a single entity and occupying the entire blockfront of University Place between East 10th Street and East 11th Street. The oldest of the buildings dates back to the 1870s, while another section was built by one of New York’s greatest and most celebrated architects. Collectively, the four buildings of the Albert Hotel have hosted a nearly unrivaled list of historically significant figures over the years. In 2012 the complex was listed on the New York State and National Registers of Historic Places — a largely honorific designation.

Friends Meeting House and Seminary ARCHITECT: Charles T. Bunting DATE: 1861 These two buildings are fine brick buildings built in the style of an earlier period. They display great elegance in their simplicity and, as a pair of buildings, set off in spacious grounds, they are a positive addition to Stuyvesant Square.

Union Square Park, 1902. In 1815, the former potter's field at the intersection of Bowery and Bloomingdale Road (Broadway) was designated Union Place, a public commons. Official establishment as a park came in 1833, and re-designed in 1839 to adopt the spirit of the public spaces dotting the London city map. Development in the surrounding neighborhood accelerated during the middle decades of the 19th century, as Manhattan's fashionable residential and commercial districts shifted uptown. In 1872, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the celebrated landscape architects behind Central Park and Prospect Park, were enlisted to redesign Union Square. The Olmsted and Vaux design is still evident in today's park, with its emphasis on space for public assembly and greenery.

Van Tassell and Kearney Auction Ring ca. 1910 Did you know that 126 East 13th Street is believed to be the last surviving horse and carriage auction mart building in New York City? It was threatened with demolition until GVSHP got the Landmark Preservation Commission to hold an emergency hearing on landmarking the building on September 7, 2006, which started the long path toward designation of the building as an official New York City Landmark. A once-common building type in New York, these marts are distinguished by their high central halls, where horses were paraded around on rings for potential buyers to review. This particular survivor also has an unusually distinguished history. It was built in 1903 by Jardine, Kent, and Jardine, one of the era’s most distinguished architectural firms. According to contemporary reports in the New York Times, in the mart’s early years “the Belmonts and the Vanderbilts and other families transacted their horse affairs” there. Later, the building was converted to a machine shop, and there according to the New York Times during World War II women were taught “assembly and inspection work, the reading of blueprints, and various mechanical aspects needed in defense industries.” Most recently, the building served as the studio of Frank Stella, one of the 20th century’s most notable and influential artists. Few buildings in New York could be said to have had such a distinguished history, intersecting with so many key phases of our city’s development and transformation.

Cooper Union This building was specially designed to house Peter Cooper's great philanthropy- a trade school for boys in New York who could not otherwise afford such specialized training. It is notable for the early use of rolled-iron sections produced by Cooper, Hewitt & Co. at Trenton Jersey- Cooper's own rolling mills. Cooper put off the completion of the school to roll beams for Astor's new library on Lafayette Street and for Harper & Brothers' publishing house on Franklin Square.

229 East 10th Street Building Date : 1889 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Charles & Aug. Ruff Original Architect : Schneider & Herter Description & Building Alterations This four-bay wide, five-story tenement was erected in 1889 and designed by architects Schneider & Herter. It was originally built for 21 families, including one in the basement. The building facade features a bracketed cornice with elevated center piece and a brick round arch and projecting pier below, elaborate foliate beltcourses and decorations, patterned brickwork, round-arched window openings at the third story with keystones, ornamented panels, and segmental-arched window openings with figural keystones at the first story. The entrance is set on a stoop, flanked by short Corinthian columns supporting a round brick arch with tiled spandrels and a bracketed door hood on top.

Salmagundi Club ca. 1965 As written in the designation report, the four-and-a-half story Italianate style building at 47 Fifth Avenue was constructed in 1852-1853 for Irad Hawley, the president of the Pennsylvania Coal Company, which had yards along the Hudson River in the West Village. The building’s arresting entrance, up a flight of wide steps, is framed in original stone ornament and flanked by French doors that open onto cast-iron balconies. And, the report indicates, the inside is no less stunning. The first floor of the building showcases Italianate-style carved marble chimney pieces, rose wood doors, and an arcaded Corinthian screen dividing the front and back parlors. The dining room features elements of the Gothic Revival style and is one of the few remaining interiors in New York to do so. The Salmagundi Club, by 1969, was one-of-a-kind, the last architectural relic of the swath of mid-nineteenth century Anglo-Italianate brownstone mansions that once lined the lower portion of Fifth Avenue. Its dignified, former northern neighbors at 49 and 51 Fifth Avenue were razed to make way for a 19-story apartment building, built-in 1929 by Thomas W. Lamb, but the Salmagundi Club stayed put. Beyond the architectural significance of 47 Fifth Avenue, the designation report cites the building’s cultural significance as a key reason for its designation. The Salmagundi Club, before moving into its longtime home, was organized in 1871 for the “the promotion of social intercourse among artists and the advancement of the art” and named for the “Salmagundi Papers,” a satirical magazine published by short-story writer Washington Irving in which he coined the term “Gotham.” The Club purchased the grand Fifth Avenue mansion in 1917, and has resided there ever since. The designation report credits the maintenance of the historic building to the club, which had been, and continues to be, a reliable and generous steward. Notable members of the Club include illustrators Edwin Abbey, N.C. Wyeth, and Howard Pyle; Impressionist painters William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam; Arts and Crafts pioneer John LaFarge; designer Louis C. Tiffany; Hudson River School artist Thomas Moran; and architect Stanford White. But that’s not all there is to celebrate today. The building is not only a historic cross-section of Fifth Avenue history and an esteemed center of orbit in the city’s art world. It is noteworthy also as one of the first individual landmarks named and protected by the city. The designation report is a mere page long, absolutely minuscule compared to the over 50-page reports put together today, but it set a crucial precedent in New York City’s landmarking process. And, from April 1, 1982 until 1999, Village Preservation’s offices were located in the building’s attic!

Village Preservation would like to satisfy your cravings for hauntings. Preserving the Village not only means maintaining the old buildings and historic landscapes but sometimes also the domiciles of the dearly departed. We have put together a list of some of the most haunted historical places in the Village that will hopefully facilitate both engagement with the neighborhood’s history and encounters with the otherworldly. History buffs beware, you’re in for a scare…

St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery Occupying what is often described as the oldest site of continuous worship in Manhattan, this church as seen today embodies a series of additions in various styles of architecture, made over a considerable period of years. The main body of the church is basically Georgian, while the steeple is Greek Revival and the cast-iron porch is Italianate.

100 East 12th Street ca. 1925 This 12-story terra cotta and brick building was completed in 1920. It was designed by Starrett & Van Vleck Architects as manufacturing lofts for the International Tailoring Company with a retail ground floor. In 1938, an adjoining 3-story building on the northeast corner of the lot was demolished by the W.P.A. and turned into a loading dock. In 1955, the dock gave way to a parking lot. Starrett and Van Vleck became known for their designs of department stores, including those buildings for Bloomingdales, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Lord & Taylor (their first department store commission, which is now a designated New York City Landmark).

19 St. Marks Avenue ca. 1942 One of the many wonderful things about the East Village is the fascinating layers of history that convey the evolution of the neighborhood. The buildings at 19-23 St. Mark’s Place are an excellent example of how the East Village has changed over time from a wealthy merchants neighborhood to a landing spot for immigrants, to the launch pad for numerous counterculture and artistic movements. Where else would one find a building which had been townhouses for wealthy families, a ballroom, a gangster hangout, a Polish wedding chapel, and a performance venue with the Velvet Underground as the house band? The buildings at 19-23 St. Marks Place have been altered over the years diluting the handsome architecture of the original designs. They were built as three separate rowhouses in the early 1830s by real estate developer Thomas E. Davis who constructed many of the homes on this block of St. Marks Place. This undated photo at left gives a sense of how impressive the buildings were. We can also see the buildings’ resemblance to two New York City Landmarks in the same block, the Hamilton-Holly House at 4 St. Marks Place (a Federal house which GVSHP helped get landmarked in 2003) and the Daniel Le Roy House at 20 St. Marks Place. These early buildings are truly a rarity and unfortunately many are often targets for development. Reflecting the changing demographics of the neighborhood in 1870, the buildings at 19 and 21 St. Marks Place were acquired by the Arion Society, a German music club, one of many that emerged in the East Village as it developed into Kleindeustchland, or Little Germany. When the Arion Society moved uptown in 1887 all three buildings were purchased by George Erhet and combined into community halls and ballrooms as Arlington Hall. Arlington Hall hosted everyone from Theodore Roosevelt, when he was a NYC Police Commissioner, to William Randolph Hearst. One of its most infamous incidents occurred on January 6, 1914 when there was a mob shootout between Jewish mobsters led by Benjamin “Dope Benny” Fein and Italian gangster Jack Sirocco’s crew. In 1920 the buildings were acquired by the Polish National Home or Polski Dom Narodowy, a community meeting hall and restaurant. The building began to transform again as the Beat Generation took root in the Village in the 1950s and 1960s. A performance space was opened in part of the basement that became a dance venue known as The Dom that attracted mostly black patrons. In an odd twist of “upstairs/downstairs” a short time later in 1966 Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey rented the upstairs space to open a psychedelic performance venue known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable with The Velvet Underground as the house band. Under new management, it reopened as the Electric Circus, a chic bohemian nightclub that drew more than 3,000 people to its opening night, according to contemporary coverage in The Village Voice. As evidence of its “boho chicness,” the interior pictured below, was designed to resemble a 1960s version of a Bedouin tent. So what happened to the Electric Circus? One could say it fell victim to the increasingly radicalized activity centered in the East Village in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In March 1970 a bomb was set off in the middle of the dance floor, injuring dozens. Though unconfirmed the bombing was attributed to the Black Panther Party. The club never regained its chic reputation and closed in 1971. In the 1980s and 1990s, the building was the All Craft Center, an addiction treatment and housing facility run by local interfaith minister Joyce Hartwell. A 1998 article from the New York Times recounted Hartwell’s unrealized plans to add a large tower to the facility in the adjoining rear lot. Not only were Hartwell’s plans unrealized, due to the group’s financial difficulties in 2000 the building was sold to a developer.

197 Second Avenue Building Date : 1878 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Jacob Schmitt Original Architect : William Jose Description & Building Alterations A pair of twin five story buildings, 199 and 197 Second Avenue were built in 1878 as French Flats designed by William Jose. The buildings each had one flat per floor, for a total of four families in each building. This class of buildings were some of the earliest types of middle-class apartment housing seen in New York City and unlike tenements, they were marketed to and attracted a wealthier clientele. Little now remains of the original detailing of this building other than the metal cornice. The brownstone facade, which has been stuccoed and painted, would have once had projecting window lintels and sills and a projecting entry surround atop a raised-stoop. The stoop was removed in 1915 and commercial space was put into the new first floor. From 1941 until 2008 the first floor was home to Jade Mountain, a Chinese restaurant that was a hallmark of the East Village. It was here that singer, songwriter, and civil rights activist Pete Seeger held his first gig, at a lunch for refugees of the Spanish Civil War, in 1941.

830 Broadway This eleven-story brick building was constructed in 1897 for owner Ferdinand H. Mela, and designed by the architectural firm of Cleverdon & Putzel in the Renaissance Revival style. On January 1, 1898, the Real Estate Record and Guide noted that “Builder F.H. Mela has just completed a new 11-story mercantile building at no. 830 Broadway which contains several features that are likely to be imitated, notably the arrangement of stairs and elevators. Mr. Mella reports a good demand for lofts, and the fact that more than half of his new building is already rented testifies forcibly that the inquirers have meant business.” During the 20th century, a number of businesses were located at No. 830, largely within the clothing industry. Beginning in the 1970’s, artists occupied the building for studio and living space.

Triangle Fire, March 25, 1911 When an accidental fire raced through the top three stories of the Triangle Waist Company factory in Greenwich Village, hundreds of blouse makers escaped on elevators and stairs. Others were blocked by a locked exit door or trapped on the fire escape. Firemen’s ladders could not reach them, and dozens of people jumped to their deaths. Twenty-one-year-old pipefitter Victor Joseph Gatto witnessed the fire from Washington Square Park. Over 30 years later, he painted this vivid depiction of the fire from memory. Image Info: Victor Joseph Gatto, 1944-1945, oil on canvas CREDIT: Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Mrs. Henry L. Moses, 54.75

Palladium, ca. 1985.

New York University Main Building, February 1928. Constructed in 1892-1895 as the Main Building of the New York University campus replaced a previous 1835 Gothic Revival structure on the site. Alfred Zucker, the German born architect of the building retained the foundation and a number of elements of the early structure. The impetus for this new building was perhaps less pedagogical than one might imagine. According to the AIA Guide the new building was constructed to accommodate a well paying tenant, the American Bank Note Company. That firm occupied the lower seven floors while the upper floors were used as the main administrative offices and the schools of law, commerce and pedagogy. Following the end of the First World War, the increase in student body necessitated the school taking over the entirely of the building. In 2002 a bequest of $150 million by Julius Silver, a College of Arts and Science alumnus, prompted the building to be renamed the Silver Center for Arts and Science.

111 Second Avenue This six-story building was erected in 1928 and designed by Ralph H. Segal for Saul Birns. When it was constructed, the building contained ninety-four suites of one to four rooms. Originally meant to be a bank, store, and office building, the building was occupied by by the beloved deli restaurant Ratners for many years. It was a nighttime hangout for rock-n-roll legends like Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and The Grateful Dead. The structure is now occupied by New York University.

Fleischmann’s Vienna Model Bakery, Broadway and 10th Street, 1898. Sometime after 1876, Louis Fleischmann built his bakery on Broadway, in the shadow on James Renwick’s Grace Church (left). The bakery, which sold a popular “new dough” style of bread made with yeast, also operated a restaurant and rented storefront space to other vendors. Beyond baking technique, Louis Fleischmann’s influence endures in an evocative turn of phrase: the bread line. Noticing the indigent New Yorkers who gathered near the bakery, Fleischmann instituted a practice whereby the bakery would give away its unsold loaves at the close of business. When hungry men lined up for their daily loaves, the phrase was born. Fleischmann’s Broadway bakery remained open until 1908, when the property was razed, having been acquired by Grace Church. Today, the Fleischmann name lives on in a brand of baker’s yeast available in supermarkets.

Alamo Sculpture, ca. 1980. The Alamo, also called the Astor Place Cube or just The Cube is an eight-foot-square cube mounted on one corner that sits in Astor Place and has become an icon of the neighborhood. Created by artist Bernard (Tony) Rosenthal and installed in 1967, the work was originally a temporary piece in the outdoor art show called "Sculpture and the Environment" organized by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. It was so popular that citizens petitioned the city to allow it to remain. Spinning the Cube (which takes more than one person) has become a sort of token New York City experience. The Cube was placed in storage between 2015 and 2016 during the reconstruction of Astor Place. It made a triumphant return in November of 2016 as the centerpiece of a new, permanent, pedestrian plaza.

The painter and writer Jack Dowling, at the Ninth Avenue station of the Third Avenue El, near Cooper Union; 1953. Dowling graduated from Cooper Union in 1957 before going abroad to teach and paint in Italy. In the mid-1960s, Dowling began to gain recognition in New York's art scene. In 1971, after losing the lease to the East Village loft where he lived and worked, Dowling moved into the Westbeth Artists Housing complex, where he later directed the in-house gallery.

840 Broadway ca. 1927 840 Broadway was constructed for garment industry tenants in 1899-1901. This 12-story, steel-frame Renaissance Revival style building was designed by Robert Maynicke, and is a prominent reminder of Broadway’s turn-of-the-20th century development below Union Square. The report tells us that permits to construct 840 Broadway were filed with the Bureau of Buildings in December 1899. Construction began in 1900 and was completed in 1901. The structural framing was fabricated by the Hecla Ironworks, possibly at their North 11th Street Williamsburg factory During the first half of the 20th century, the ground (or first) floor was leased to companies that sold men’s clothing. Thompson & Company was first, signing a ten-year lease in 1899. A 1901 ad described 840 Broadway as “The Thompson Building.” It was the clothier’s uptown branch, selling “haberdashery and hats, as well as men’s and youth’s clothing.” The store closed at the end of 1907. Lester & Lester, another men’s clothing company, was the next tenant, followed by the Goodyear Waterproof Company, which sold raincoats and waterproof apparel. Goodyear operated in this location until 1953.” The architect of 840 Broadway was the German-born Robert Maynicke (1848- 1913). He took night courses at the Cooper Union (also a New York City Landmark). He supervised the construction of the New York Times (1888-89), Equitable (1886- 89), World/Pulitzer (1889-90), Union Trust (1889- 90) and Havemeyer (1891-93) Buildings, as well as the New York Produce (1881-84) and New York Cotton (1883-85) Exchanges. Further south on Broadway and Waverly Place, Maynicke was also responsible for the Guggenheimer Building. Maynicke was an expert on the structural properties of iron and steel and, consequently, tall buildings. Not just an engineering expert, Maynicke used various types of classical ornament here. The upper stories have elaborate terra-cotta details that draw from Greek, Roman, Renaissance, and Baroque sources. Such features include wreaths, garlands, margents, fasces, rosettes, banded arches with keystones, and banded Ionic columns with fluting.

A hot spot for writers and artists, this bar is credited as an important incubator of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the mid century. The Cedar Street Bar first opened in 1866 on (unsurprisingly) Cedar Street in lower Manhattan. After nearly a century and a number of moves further uptown, in 1964 the bar relocated to 82 University Place (seen here) after its venue a few blocks to the south was demolished for apartment buildings. While at its previous location at 24 University Place (1945-1964) the Cedar Tavern became a popular watering hole for many Abstract Expressionists. Artist Robert Motherwell held weekly salons in his nearby studio and this was the closed spot for a drink after the meetings. This group of patrons included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Michael Goldberg, Landes Lewitin, Aristodimos Kaldis, and others of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. Beat Generation writers and artists, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Bob Dylan, also frequented Cedar Tavern. The 82 University Place location closed in 2006 and its century-old, 50-foot mahogany bar was sold and transported to a bar in Austin, Texas.

Hebrew Actors' Union Building ca. 1978 With its stark Neo-Classical facade, the small but mighty building Hebrew Actors' Union building stands out on a block full of brick. From 1923 to 2002, the building housed the Hebrew Actors’ Union (HAU). Although they officially disbanded years ago, the HAU still owns the building. While primarily consisting of members from New York City, and more specifically from the nearby Jewish theater district on Second Avenue, the union also served Jewish actors across the country. As the union’s home for nearly 80 years, the HAU is an integral part of East Village history. Let’s take a closer look at this cultural gem. Although we’re looking at a 1978 facade, some of the bones of this building are even older. As tax records we have on file indicate, the original rowhouse that stood here likely dated to about 1848. It almost certainly had a stoop, too. Converting from single- to multi-family later in the decade (we’re guessing it became a tenementized rowhouse as the area’s immigrant population grew and grew), the building received its makeover just as the Hebrew Actors’ Union took over. Architect Victor Mayper was commissioned to give the building a 20th century update. His Neo-Classical design put a fresh face on a brick-heavy neighborhood and was likely a bright spot for many actors who passed through its doors. Overall, the building has held up well over the years, don’t you think? The LPC had actually proposed it for individual landmark designation and held a hearing in 2009 at which GVSHP testified in support. However, it ultimately became part of the East Village/Lower East Side Historic District almost a year ago now. Here’s what the designation report has to say about the building’s notable history: The Hebrew Actors’ Union (HAU) was founded in 1888, making it the first theatrical union founded in the United States. With a peak membership of 400 members, the HAU was the organizing force behind some dozen Yiddish theaters in New York and in other major American cities. In this way, the building at 31 East 7th Street, home to the HAU for nearly eight decades, is an enduring reminder of the Yiddish theater, one of the most important cultural institutions of New York City’s Jewish community in the early 20th century.

Grace Church at night, ca. 1975. Grace Church was first organized in 1805, and they built a church at Broadway and Rector Street three years later. The parish moved uptown in 1843. They commissioned 24-year-old James Renwick Jr.—in his first major work—to design their new edifice. The cornerstone of the French Gothic Revival masterpiece was laid in 1843, and the church was consecrated in 1846. The stone of the church was Sing Sing marble (cut by inmates of the infamous prison). At the time of completion, the steeple was built of plain wood (a cost saving measure). They also used plaster and lath (and not cut stone) for some of the interiors—it was quite the scandal! Over the next few decades, through the generous support of various congregants, most notably philanthropist Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, the church complex was expanded. The new features included a beautiful stained glass East Window (1878), a small chapel next to the church (1879), and a stone spire (1883). Additions and updates continued into the early 20th century. In the second half of the 19th century, the church was one of New York's most fashionable. Minister and author Matthew Hale Smith wrote in 1869 that, "To be married or buried within its walls has been ever considered the height of felicity." Pews within the society church were traditionally rented at a premium, though this practice was abolished in the 1960s. According to the Municipal Art Society, it is "one of the few buildings in New York that closes a vista." Visible from far south on Broadway and prominent at its location where Broadway begins its path northwestward, the church is one of the most significant examples of Gothic Revival architecture in America. It underwent a multi-million dollar rehabilitation project in the mid-1990s which focused on the restoration of crumbling marble exterior and the stained glass windows.

48 Third Avenue Built in 1886 by Samuel Thorne and S. F. Jenkins as a tenement with stores, 48 Third Avenue cost $15,000 to construct and was designed by James M. Farnsworth. Samuel Thorne (1835-1915) was kind of a big deal in his day — he was President of the Pennsylvania Coal Company, and served on the boards of Bank of America, the New York Life Insurance Company, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a member of tony private social clubs, the Union League and the Metropolitan Club , he regularly rubbed shoulders with J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts. Appropriately enough, Thorne’s building at 48 Third Avenue was no less distinguished, in spite of it being a tenement located in what was then a hard-scrabble, working-class district. Compared to the heavier ornament typical of other Victorian era buildings, architect James M. Farnsworth (1847-1917) used a light and purposeful approach to the building’s detailing. Recessed mortar joints and belt courses wrapping the building emphasize its structure. The patterns of its cornice imply more abstract, naturalistic forms than the classically derived ornament more typically found on tenement cornices from this era. However, the most richly detailed element of the building is the gorgeous, balconette-like iron fire escapes on the 10th Street elevation, more reminiscent of New Orleans that New York. What kind of talent created such a building? James Mace Farnsworth worked as a draftsman for Calvert Vaux, the man who, along with Frederick Law Olmsted, designed Central Park and a number of buildings for the Children’s Aid Society. Later, with his partner Benjamin Sillman, Jr., Farnsworth designed office and institutional buildings including the Morse Building (1878-80) at 138-142 Nassau Street, and the Temple Court Building (1881-83) at 3-9 Beekman Street, both designated New York City landmarks. Red brick buildings in the Romanesque Revival style seemed to be a favorite motif. From 1883-1897, Farnsworth also practiced independently and one of his most notable works was the renovation and additions to the Bennett Building (1872-73, 1890-92, and 1894) at 93-99 Nassau Street, one of New York’s finest and largest Second Empire cast iron buildings. On the applications submitted to construct 48 Third Avenue, Farnsworth listed his address as 218 West 23rd Street. Can you guess what iconic New York City building that is? Give up or did you Google it? Yep, it’s the Chelsea Hotel. Hmm, wonder if Farnsworth was inspired by the then-recently completed (1885) Chelsea Hotel’s lovely balconies (the work of the Cornell Foundry)?

Temporary staircases for buildings along Fourth Avenue, June 5, 1906. Stations between City Hall and and 33rd Street on the IRT Lexington Avenue line opened in October, 1904. In this photo 1906 photo, it’s unclear what work is being done, though the placement of the wooden stairways suggests sidewalk work.

The Astor Library opened to the public in 1854, and in 1895 consolidated with the Lenox Library and the Tilden Foundation to become the New York Public Library (NYPL). During this time, its building was expanded twice, in 1859 and 1881. In 1898, the Astor Library became part of the new public library at 42nd Street. Subsequently, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society purchased the building to use it as a "receiving station, aid center, dormitory, and synagogue for thousands of newly arrived immigrants." (Christopher Gray in the New York Times) In this iteration, the stacks were removed and the interior was largely reworked by architect Benjamin Levitam. The building was sold once more, in 1965, and just as the developer who bought the structure planned for demolition, it was saved by the newly established Landmarks Preservation Commission. The Commission arranged for the producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival, Joseph Papp, to step in to purchase the building. And thus, the present-day program for the building was born. Aside from major interior reimaginations, the building's front stoop, as the 1875 photo above shows, was restored (though with considerable stylistic difference), to re-establish the connection between Lafayette Street and the building entrance.

Old Merchant’s House ARCHITECT: Unknown DATE: 1831-32 STYLE: Federal The building has existed for 130 years in its original state, inside and out. The house is a unique document of its period; it shows with unrivaled authenticity how a prosperous merchant of the 1830’s lived. In addition, the building is a fine example of New York architecture of the late Federal period. It has been given national landmark status through its designation by the National Park Service of the U.S Department of the Interior.

16-20 East 7th Street Building Date : 1973 Original Use : Institutional Original Owner : St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church Original Architect : Appolinare Osadca Description & Building Alterations The St. George Ukranian Catholic Church at 30 East 7th Street was constructed in 1978. The congregation, which is in communion with the Church of Rome, dates to services at St. Brigid’s Roman Catholic Church in Tompkins Square in 1890. In 1911, the congregation moved to the Seventh Street Methodist Church, a Greek Revival church built in 1836 on the present site. The congregation then added a squat tower with five onion domes to the the top of the front gable. The current Byzantine, Romanesque-style building was designed by the Ukraninan-born architect Apollinaire Osadca. The north entrance bears colored, gold-background mosaics.

57 East 4th Street Building Date : 1897-1899 Original Use : Residential/Commercial Original Owner : Jacob Sommer Original Architect : Sass & Smallheiser Description & Building Alterations This six story brick and stone Renaissance Revival old law tenement was constructed in 1899-1900. It features round-arch fenestration at the first story, fluted cast-iron columns, scrolled keystones, splayed lintels, continuous sills in projecting bands, segmental relieving arch above the fifth story center bays, cartouches above the fifth story end bays, Corinthian pilasters flanking fifth story windows, and a bracketed cornice.

112-114 Second Avenue,Samuel B. Reed, 1891-92 110 Second Avenue, 1837-38 323-327 East 6th Street 1847 Middle Collegiate Church stands out both for its graceful 130-foot spire and for the uniform color and rich texture of its Indiana limestone, Gothic Revival façades. The red brick and brownstone, Greek Revival rowhouse next door was originally one of four built for wealthy merchant Ralph Mead. In 1874, it was purchased by the Women’s Prison Association, established in 1845 by Isaac Tatem Hopper and his daughter Abigail Hopper Gibbons, Quaker abolitionists and prison reform advocates. Still in operation, it is considered the world’s oldest halfway house for girls and women released from prison. Walk east on East 6th Street to the former St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church (converted to the Sixth Street Community Synagogue in 1940). One of the largest German churches in Kleindeutschland, a plaque commemorates the many congregants lost in the General Slocum steamboat disaster of 1904, the deadliest event in New York’s history before the attacks of September 11, 2001. Middle Collegiate Church is located in the East Village/Lower East Side Historic Ditrict. Women’s Prison Association / Isaac T. Hopper House is located in the East Village/Lower East Side Historic Ditrict, is a New York City Individual Landmark and listed on the National register of Historic Places. Former St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church is listed on the National register of Historic Places.

First Avenue Retail Market, 1938. A decisive action in Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's war on pushcarts, the opening of indoor retail markets citywide in the late 1930s and early 1940s moved the Mayor closer to his goal of riding the street of the vendors he claimed were unsanitary and causing traffic congestion. The First Avenue Market, opened in December of 1938, was the second in a series of nine public markets. Designed by architects Albert W. Lewis and John D. Churchill and using federal WPA funds, the new markets were mandated to have running water, rail facilities, and loading platforms. The generally L-shaped space occupied addresses both of First Avenue (the front entrance) and East 10th Street. The vendors within (many of whom who had previous owned pushcarts) sold cheese, vegetables, and a dizzying variety of other products. The markets were successful, often crowded, and survived through the 1960s. Pushcarts, the thorn in La Guardia's side, were never truly were eliminated, despite the new markets. After 1965 the building was used in part by the Department of Sanitation. In the mid 1980s the building was purchased by the avant-garde theatre company, Theater for the New City. The theatre has occupied the space with auditoriums, rehearsal rooms, and offices since 1986. In 2001 the city (who retained the air rights on the building) allowed the construction of a set-back, 16-story, residential tower above the original 1938 market building (which, thankfully retains its 1930s carved signage).

200 East 5th Street Building Date : 1983 Original Use : Residential Original Owner : Cooper Square Hospital Development Fund Original Architect : Shuman, Lichtenstein, Climan & Efron Description & Building Alterations This building was constructed in 1983 and was designed by architects Schuman, Lichtenstein, Climan & Efron. It was the former site of the Five Spot club, a divey neighborhood bar founded in the 1930s that attracted writers and artists living nearby: Williem de Kooning, Alfred Leslie, Larry Rivers, Franz Kline, Howard Kanovitz, Grace Hartigan, David Smith, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and Kenneth Koch, among others. It became one of the world’s premiere jazz clubs in the 1950s, at which point it featured John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, and Billie Holiday. The club needed more space and moved to 2 St. Mark’s Place in 1962.

The University Place Presbyterian Church was officially established in 1845 by members of the Duane Street Presbyterian Church who wished for a community further uptown. With more than $60,000 in donations (or subscriptions), the new parish purchased a plot at the corner of University Place and 10th Street from the managers of Sailors' Snug Harbor who owned this and much of the surrounding acreage. The parish commissioned famed architect Richard Upjohn to design their new home. Rendered in an English Gothic style with soaring spire, the church was dedicated in June 1845. In the ensuing decades, the once wealthy surrounding neighborhood began to decline as well-to-do New Yorkers moved further uptown. The church merged with Mercer Street Church in 1870 while continuing to use this edifice. Further financial struggles due to declining membership necessitated the 1918 merger of this church and the Madison Square Presbyterian into the nearby Old First Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue and 12th Street. In 1927 the old church was razed and in its place, the Devonshire House, a 14-story apartment building, was erected the following year.

Northwest corner of 14th Street and Fourth Avenue, ca. 2001.

The Sinclair Building, March 2, 1955. Named for the Sinclair House, a hotel that occupied this site as early as 1840, the Sinclair office building was built in 1908 by architect W.H. Gompert. The building was converted for residential use in 1980. At the corner, an entrance to the 8th Street station of the BMT Broadway line is visible.

Lincoln Funeral on Broadway, 1865. This 1865 photograph of President Lincoln's funeral procession shows Broadway looking north from 13th Street. The large home on corner is that of Cornelius van Schaack Roosevelt, grandfather of future president Teddy Roosevelt. Cornelius was a very successful plate glass importer and he owned the entire blockfront of Broadway from Union Square to 13th Street. In the 1940s a filmmaker and author named Stefan Lorant was putting together a pictorial biography of Lincoln. Upon closer inspection of this photograph he noticed two small figures in the second-story window. Lorant proposed that the two children were Teddy and his brother. He was able to ask Roosevelt's widow, Edith Carow Roosevelt, who was then in her late 80s, and she confirmed that it was very likely them.

The Ritz (at Webster Hall), ca. 1985. In 1980, a club called The Ritz (1980-1992) took over the space, and performers such as U2, Guns & Roses, Depeche Mode, Ozzy Osbourne, Run-DMC, and Duran Duran played gigs there. In the 1980s a new cable music channel called MTV broadcast its first live show from here and “Live from the Ritz” was a regular feature.

14 St. Mark’s Place Building Date : 1874 Original Use : Residential/Commercial Original Owner : Henry Weiler Original Architect : Julius Boekell Description & Building Alterations Constructed in 1874 by Julius Boekell this five-story tenement was owned by Henry Weiler. It features simple lintels and bracketed sills on the windows, quoins, and a bracketed cornice. In the 1920s, a one story addition was constructed at the front of the building to accommodate a storefront.

LaGrange Terrace (Colonnade Row), ca. 1890. LaGrange Terrace, a set of nine colonnade-fronted Greek revival townhouses, was built in the early 1830s on land owned by John Jacob Astor. At the time, Lafayette Place was a short, cobblestoned street between Great Jones and Art (later Astor Place) Streets, adjacent to the Vauxhall Gardens pleasure garden and theatre. Astor’s residences attracted member’s of New York’s upper crust: members of the Vanderbilt and Delano families owned homes, as did Washington Irving and Astor, himself. LaGrange Terrace remained a fashionable address through the 1870s, by which time the wealthiest New Yorkers had begun to decamp for parts uptown. Five of the townhouses were later demolished. While the 20th century has seen Astor’s development continue to deteriorate, the surviving houses were designated New York City Landmark in 1965.

Stuyvesant Polyclinic Hospital ARCHITECT: William Schickel DATE: 1883-84 STYLE: Neo-Italian Renaissance This building is an exceptionally handsome building designed in a modified version of the neo-Italian Renaissance style. The extensive and imaginative use of molded terra cotta on the facade was innovative when the building was constructed. The ornament is especially Interesting for its series of portrait busts depicting famous physicians and scientists.

Julian Baczynsky opened his meat market on Second Avenue in 1970 at a time when this section of the East Village was an Eastern European enclave. Selling house-made smoked meats from Polish and Ukrainian recipes, he was popular among locals. While the demographics of the neighborhood have changed drastically in the ensuing decades, the Meat Market, with its original signage, remains. With steady business year round, the weeks before Easter are particularly busy. People travel from all over the city, waiting in lines to procure kielbasa for their traditional Eastern European Easter celebrations.

The Hamilton Fish House, 21 Stuyvesant Street, ca. 1971. The Hamilton Fish House (a.k.a. Nicholas and Elizabeth Stuyvesant Fish House, Stuyvesant Fish House), was built in 1803-04 by Peter Stuyvesant, the great-grandson of the last Dutch Director-General of New Amsterdam. The three-story Federal style townhouse sits on a parcel granted to the first Peter Stuyvesant in 1651, by the Dutch West India Company . The house was a wedding gift to Stuyvesant's daughter Elizabeth and her husband, the Revolutionary War officer Nicholas Fish, a veteran of Valley Forge. Fish served throughout the Revolutionary War and at the age of 18, was commissioned as the youngest Major in the history of the United States army. His son, Hamilton Fish, who later served as Governor of New York and as Secretary of State, was born at this address in 1808.

The Renwick The striking loft building at 806-808 Broadway/104-106 Fourth Avenue, which runs the entire block from Broadway to Fourth Avenue behind Grace Church at 11th Street, was designed in 1887 by James Renwick (architect of the adjacent landmarked church forty years earlier) and the partners in historic successor firm –James Lawrence Aspinwall and William Hamilton Russell, Renwick’s grand-nephew. Though a utilitarian structure housing offices, storage, and manufacturing, Renwick and partners designed it with vivid Gothic detail to serve as an appropriate backdrop to Grace Church, a New York City and National Historic Landmark. Aside from some storefront signage, the building is almost completely intact to its original design, from the gothic arches and tracery to the more robust, industrial Romanesque detailing of the Fourth Avenue façade. Both sides of the building maintain beautifully intact cast-iron storefronts, while the Broadway side boasts florid Art Noveau-style ironwork over the doorway and entry. The harmony between this structure, built as a store and manufacturing building, and one of the most delicate and important Gothic Revival structures in the United States, is nothing short of remarkable. In 1981 the building was converted to residences and renamed ‘The Renwick,’ in honor of its architect. The building gained additional notoriety with the publication of Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, in which the building serves as the headquarters for the team of investigators looking into the murders at the heart of the book’s story. The Grace Church, Grace Church Rectory, Grace Church Memorial House, The Renwick, and The Lancaster, an 1887 apartment building at 39-41 East 10th Street also designed by Renwick –all within feet of one another –provide an unrivaled example of the skill of James Renwick as an architect. The sadly recently-demolished St. Denis Hotel at Broadway and 11th Street added even further to this rich ensemble of Renwick designs added over time. While the master architect constructed other ensembles elsewhere, few if any span nearly half a century as these do, and serve such varied purposes –religious worship, residences, and commercial loft space –while maintaining such compatibility and dialogue between the pieces.

Every year millions of tourists make their way to New York City. While many of them may bypass the Village to flock to Times Square or the Statue of Liberty for a photo, there are many spots here that have gained popularity as a top spot to Instagram. Many of the popular spots draw tourists with their pleasing aesthetics. But often these traveling shutterbugs know little about the vast amount of history behind the sites. So for our many visitors, today we provide some history of some of the spots they use as a backdrop for their social media feeds.