City Lodging House, 23rd Street and First Avenue ca. 1895. Attempting to address homelessness, The Municipal Lodging and House Act, passed in 1886, encouraged the city to operate lodging houses for those left with other recourse, In 1893, another type of housing emerged which gave men a place to stay so long as they performed labor, such as chopping wood or other similar tasks. This house, located at 398-400 First Avenue, gave a night's stay to almost 2,000 men, women, and children from March 17 through 23rd, as reported in Charities, a "Weekly Review of Local and General Philanthropy."

Southward view of Fourth Avenue, from East 29th Street, during the construction of the IRT Lexington Avenue Line, April 2, 1901. The crossing in the foreground is East 29th Street. The towers in the middle-distance at center-left are atop Madison Square Garden, between East 26th and 27th Streets.

Provident Loan Society of New York, 1917. The Provident Loan Society was established in response to the panic of 1893, with Gilded Age industrialists providing its initial capital, and expanded its operations in the early years of the 20th century. In 1908, the organization moved into its new headquarters at Fourth Avenue (now Park Avenue South) and 25th Street, an Italianate palazzo designed by J. Lawrence Aspinwall. Today, the building is unaltered, despite the development of skyscrapers on all sides.

146 East 24th Street, ca 1974. In the late 19th-century, this Beaux-Arts building was home to the Fiss, Doerr & Carroll Auction Mart. According to an 1895 advertisement, the firm was once "the largest dealer of horses in the world.'' The mart would host crowds of up to 1,000 people in a huge interior rink that was 65 feet by 197 feet. Before torn down, it was caught in a preservation battle against Baruch College, who eventually demolished the building to construct their William and Anita Newman Vertical Campus.

New York Life Insurance, 1929. Between 1879 and 1925 this plot at Madison Avenue and 26th Street was home to the first two incarnations of Madison Square Garden. MSG II (by famed architect Stanford White) was never a great financial success. In 1925, the New York Life Insurance Company who owned the land decided to demolish the Garden for their new headquarters. Completed in 1928, the New York Life Building stands 40-stories-tall and is topped by a gleaming gilded pyramidal roof. While its ornament is solidly Gothic Revival, its massing and shape are distinctly more Moderne.

Saint Stephen’s Church ARCHITECT: James Renwick, Jr. DATE: 1853-54 STYLE: Romanesque Revival James Renwick used the Romanesque Revival style for St. Stephen’s, early use of this style and an unusual choice for a Catholic church at this time. The deeply-set round-arched openings, the corbel tables, and blind arcades create a lively façade on this densely developed street. St. Stephen’s Church was established at a time of great expansion by the Catholic Church due to the huge numbers of immigrants to New York from such heavily Catholic countries as Ireland and Germany.

Epiphany Branch, NYPL, 1916. Opened in 1907 and designed by the firm that worked on a large number of Carnegie libraries in New York City, Carrère and Hastings, the Epiphany Library actually dates back to the 1880s. The library was founded by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York as a part of the Cathedral Library Association in 1887. (The unique name of the branch is understandable given the religious origins of the institution.) The new Carnegie building opened in 1907 and underwent a large renovation by the WPA in 1939. In the late 1960s the community successfully blocked plans for its demolition. Originally a four bay building, as seen in this early photograph, the building had a fifth bay, set back from the street, added during substantial work in the 1980s. The addition included a new front door, which was handicap accessible, and the original door was converted into a window.

Manhattan Trade School for Girls, 1929. The first vocational school for girls—the Manhattan Trade School for Girls—was organized in 1902. Here, young underprivileged female students were trained in a trade (dressmaking, millinery, etc) and given physical education until the age 14, when they aged out of mandatory education and entered into the industrial workforce. After continuously outgrowing smaller spaces, Superintendent of School Buildings C. B. J. Snyder was tasked with designing a new larger home for the school. The resulting building was rendered in the Collegiate Gothic style (a Snyder favorite) with a gleaming white terra cotta facade. The 10-story building could accommodate 1,200 student for classes during the day and 2,000 in the two sets of night classes. Completed in the summer of 1918, much of the training at the start was devoted preparing women to work in the war effort. They learned to drape military garments, cook for canteens, and being nurse's aids. While work for the war effort ended by the close of 1918, the school did continue to produce items that could be sold. An article in 1932 stated that items for sale included "children’s clothes, towels, hats and dresses for adults, neckwear, lampshades, novelties, cakes, cookies, and pies." Over the next few decades the curriculum of the school slowly changed with the times. By the 1980s, the school, then known as Mabel Dean Bacon Vocational High School, was concentrating on business education, nursing, dental assistance and cosmetology. Today the once again gleaming white building (following extensive restoration and upkeep) is the School of the Future, a middle and high school facility focused on small class sizes and an “ethnically, economically, academically, and geographically” diverse student body.

College of the City of New York, formerly the Free Academy of the City of New York. July 25, 1927.

College of the City of New York, formerly the Free Academy of the City of New York. Ca. 1912.

Bramhall Playhouse,1915. On March 27, 1915, the New York Times reported on "Manhattan's Tiniest Theatre." The Playhouse was hosted in a former residence and later a church and was the brainchild of playwright and theatrical entrepreneur Butler Davenport. Davenport, who lived in an apartment above this theatre was fond of addressing his audiences each night by saying, "I’ve been tremendously rich in everything but money.” The theatre later became known as the Gramercy Arts Theatre which produced avant-garde productions in the 1960s. In 1968 Gilberto Zaldívar and René Buch formed Repertorio Español, "to produce excellent theatre in Spanish." In 1972 the troupe moved into the Gramercy Arts Theatre and remain here to this day presenting works directed, designed, and performed by Latino theatre artists from the U.S. and diverse Spanish-speaking nations.

Wealthy painter and philanthropist Ellen Dunlap Hopkins founded the New York School of Applied Design for Women in 1892. Its mission was to "afford \[...] women inspiration which may enable them to earn a livelihood by the employment of their taste and manual dexterity in the application of ornamental design to manufacture and the arts." This meant illustration, book cover design, interior design, wallpaper, and textile design and architecture. The school also helped the students and graduate sell their pieces. The school moved into a brand new building in 1909. Designed by Harvey Wiley Corbett, the five-story neo-Classical building was funded largely by J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Despite its classical temple look and Greek details, a contemporary architecture journal derided it as "drastically modern." The New York Times' Christopher Gray was kinder if more expressive when he noted in a 2008 article that "the steeply sloping roof provides a pungent termination." Following a brief partnership with Columbia University between 1910 and 1912, the school continued as originally organized until 1944. A merger with the Phoenix Art Institute turned the school into a co-educational facility. A further merger in 1974 with Pratt. The now-named Pratt-New York Phoenix School of Design operated until the 1980s. Today the building, whose facade has not been seriously altered since its construction, is home to a high-end fashion showroom.

New York School of Applied Design for Women ARCHITECT: Harvey Wiley Corbett DATE: 1908-09 STYLE: Neo-Classical This building was built in neo-Classical institutional design, and it long housed the New York School of Applied Design for Women. It is a five-story building and stone neo-Classical institutional building. Harvey Wiley Corbett designed this building as a school of art, and it has been used exclusively for that purpose since its completion in 1909

Labor College, ca. 1972. The Mayan-inspired B.W. Mayer Building was completed to the plans of architect Herman Lee Meader in 1916. The facade of the seven-story building is awash in brickwork, terra cotta snakes and skulls, and turquoise details. Originally offices, the building was bought in 1923 by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, a trade union, and in 1930 it became a trade school for the Electrical Workers. The Labor College was established in 1971 as the first such program in the United States. Affiliated with the SUNY system it focused on work, workers and the working-class presence — social, cultural and institutional — in a historical and contemporary context. The building was bought in 1994 by the Society of Friends (Quakers) who converted it into the Friends House, a residence for people with AIDS.

The Bellevue Psychopathic Hospital, as it was called at the time, was built in 1931 by Charles B. Meyers in the Italian Renaissance style. The building is still standing alongside the East River on First Avenue between 29th and 30th Streets, occupying an entire city block. When constructed, it joined the growing Bellevue hospital complex, and was intended to match the existing buildings, which were designed by architects McKim, Mead & White – same color brick, embellished with granite base course, limestone and terra cotta trimmings. By then, McKim, Mead & White was barely active; Meyers had just designed the Tammany Hall building and was a favorite of then-Mayor Jimmy Walker.

Supergraphic on the facade of architect James R. Doman’s East 25th Street firm, ca. 1972. Doman’s offices are described in an October, 1972 Life Magazine feature on supergraphic painting: “The blueprint on the facade, painted by two of the firm’s architects in four days, is a replica of the plan the firm used in renovating the building."

Cornell University Medical College, ca. 1900. During the late 19th century, Cornell University sought to establish a medical college in New York City, but by the late 1890s had seen multiple attempts fail, including a proposed scheme to affiliate with New York University. In April 1898, Cornell University Medical College was established, with faculty who had left NYU following a dispute. Standard Oil Trustee Oliver Hazard Payne funded the construction of a new facility for the fledgling college, across First Avenue from Bellevue Hospital. Stanford White’s Neoclassical hospital occupied the full block between 27th and 28th Streets, with two Corinthian-columned entrances on First Avenue. Today, the capitals of four of those columns are preserved in the courtyard garden of the Bellevue Men’s Shelter. The teaching hospital was operated by Cornell until 1932. Between 1933-1955, it was operated by NYU. The building was ultimately leveled during the 1960s, as part of the Bellevue South Urban Renewal project.

Entrance to the Domestic Relations Courthouse, August 13, 1940.

Wood-frame farm house and carriage house, East 29th Street, ca. 1965. The history of this odd, sideways-oriented farmhouse is subject to speculation among researchers and preservationists among who there are two major theories: first, the house dates to the 18th century and may have been moved from its original location; or this house built on this site after the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 laid out the street grid, as late as 1840. In a 2006 “Streetscapes” column, the New York Times’ Christopher Gray examines the first theory: the house was built during the 18th century, on the grounds of John Watts’ Rose Hill Estate. When the Commissioners’ Plan was adopted, the lots on 29th Street included a small, peculiar parcel at No. 203. Gray suggests a hypothesis: the small lot was set aside, “perhaps to receive an outbuilding relocated from the Rose Hill estate because it lay in the path of new roadways?” Tax and property records make the picture even murkier: 1830 records note a building, but don’t describe it; 1840 documents refer to a three-story structure; and the 1880 tax inventory definitively refers to the four-story structure standing today. It’s possible that these records all describe the same building — but just as likely that they don’t. And then come the experts. Gray’s column references the assessment of Alan Burnham, a former executive director of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Burnham initially believed the gambrel roof indicated an old farmhouse of Dutch construction, but eventually dated the building at ca. 1845. However, a preservation consultant hired by the building’s 1980s owners dates the house’s frame elements to 1790. While its early history may be uncertain, recent events are relatively clear. By 1900, the house had been subdivided into apartments. For many years, it was a junk shop, likely with residences upstairs, and was later abandoned and boarded up. The house was purchased in 1979 for $80,000, gutted, and converted to single-floor apartments with a faithful exterior restoration.

PRESIDENT CHESTER A. ARTHUR HOUSE, MANHATTAN Address: 123 Lexington Avenue Built: c.1860s 123 Lexington Avenue is the former residence of President Chester A. Arthur and his wife, Ellen. Arthur served a short term as Vice President of the United States, and became president after taking the Oath of Office in this house in 1881 after President Garfield was assassinated. Arthur left Lexington Avenue during his presidency in Washington, and returned after his term and lived in the house until he died there in 1886. The entire block of once-elegant brownstone townhomes remains along this stretch of Lexington. All of the buildings have converted storefronts, speaking to the evolution of Lexington Avenue from upper-class residential to a commercial corridor. The President Chester A. Arthur house was originally one of nine similarly designed five storied structures completed in 1855 on the east side of Lexington Avenue between 28th and 29th Streets. Today, only their upper three floors are the same, the first and second having been altered to such an extent, that the row house architectural character of the group has been all but destroyed. The Arthur house and adjacent number 121 remain the least altered, particularly number 121 which still retains its outside steps and trim iron railings leading from the sidewalk level to the second, or parlor floor. The high entrance doors and transom at the second floor, of greater height than the others, is framed by a wide molded stone band, segmental head, and a horizontal series of moldings above supported on a row of brackets. Although extremely simple, the proportions of the whole register dignity and scale. On the Arthur house, no doubt originally a facsimile of Number 121 the doorway motive has been altered to provide a street level entrance leaving only the segmental head and cornice with the frame terminating at the second floor level. The upper floors each have three segmental headed double hung windows with molded stone sills and cap molded lintels. A metal cornice on brackets, typical of so many brownstone fronts, crowns each building at the roof level. The buildings, of native brownstone color originally, are now painted white. It was in this house on September 20, 1882, that Chester Arthur took the oath of office President of the United States following the assassination of President Garfield. The house had been purchased by his wife Ellen Herndon Arthur in 1858 and remained their home when he left office in March 1885 until his death the following year. The report that William Randolph Hearst who occupied Number 119, the southern corner building of this historically distinguished row of houses, bought the Arthur house later for his own residential use has been disproved.

The 1913 Armory Show The Armory Show took place from February 17 to March 15, 1913 at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue and 25th Street, and in just less than a month it changed the way Americans thought about modern art. It has been called the most important exhibition ever held in the United States. The International Exhibition of Modern Art took place in the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets. Its enormous drill hall provided over 30,000 square feet of display space for the estimated 1,400 works on view. The hall was divided into eighteen octagonal galleries with burlap covered panels. The space was decorated with greenery, pine trees, flags and bunting, and yellow streamers that formed a tent-like cap to the exhibition space. The Armory Show was a stunning exhibition of nearly 1,400 objects that included both American and European works, but it is best known for introducing the American public to the new in art: European avant-garde paintings and sculpture. One hundred years later it is hard to imagine what it would have been like to see works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, and Vincent Van Gogh, all together for the very first time. The exhibition created a huge sensation in New York. It traveled to Chicago and Boston, and was even more controversial in Chicago, where students burned paintings by Matisse in effigy. The exhibition’s travel turned it into a national event, and the polemical responses to the show have come to represent a turning point in the history of American art.

27th Street at N. E. corner of Lexington Avenue, ca. 1931. In the 1930s, this storefront was home to the Armenian bookstore of H. Mamasian.

Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, ca. 1978. New York’s most infamous hospital, the Renaissance Revival Bellevue Psychiatric Ward was built in 1931 to treat a broad swath of the city’s often-indigent mentally ill population. Prominent inpatients included Norman Mailer, Edie Sedgwick, and Mark David Chapman (John Lennon’s Assassin). The Bellevue Psychiatric Ward closed in 1984. Today, the facility is partially occupied by a men’s shelter.

Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory ARCHITECT: Hunt & Hunt DATE: 1904-06 STYLE: Beaux-Arts, Military Among its important qualities, the Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory is an outstanding example of military architecture, notable for its unique synthesis of Beaux-Arts design principles and clear expression of military function. It is an important work of the firm of Hunt & Hunt. The vast drill hall is an outstanding example of innovative engineering technology.

American Cinephone Company, 1910. Referred to as the Camera Building, this structure on 25th Street was home to the American Kinograph Company and the American Cinephone Company. Both companies provided equipment related to the "talking picture" movie industry.

69th Regiment Armory building, ca. 1905. Completed in 1906, the armory remains the headquarters for New York Army National Guard's 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry Regiment. However, the space is likely best known for hosting the International Exhibition of Modern Art in 1913; the “Armory Show” was the first presentation of Modern art in the United States.

Domestic Relations Courthouse, January 9, 1943. Legislation passed in 1933 combined the Family Court and Children's Court to create the Domestic Relations Court. More space was needed to house the increased functions of the court and a new building was undertaken next to the Children's Courthouse on 22nd Street. Designed by Charles B. Meyers and completed in 1940, the structure has a granite base and windows lined up in strong vertical orientation. Similar to other municipal buildings constructed at the time, the facade features reliefs that express themes illuminating the purpose of the structure. Here the reliefs, created by sculptor H.P. Camden, feature families in group activities such as reading, gardening, and praying. Since 1983 building has been a part of the campus of Baruch College. The school has preserved the facade and even some of the interior features. A tutoring space occupies an old jail cell in the building, complete with bars along the walls and windows and a thick steel door with a peephole.

The names of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick are well known in New York City and beyond for Carnegie Hall and for the Frick Collection. Though the institutions built by these two steel magnates are important to the city’s cultural identity, the organization built by their lesser known (but just as wealthy) associate, Henry Phipps, has had and continues to have, a more material effect on the lives of New Yorkers. His legacy, Phipps Houses, is the oldest non-profit developer of affordable housing, erecting its first buildings in 1906 and actively developing and managing properties today.

The famed Armory Show took place from February 17 to March 15, 1913, at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Ave. and 25th St., and in just less than a month, it changed the way Americans thought about modern art. It has been called the most important exhibition ever held in the United States.

Phipps Houses, ca. 1905. In the early part of the twentieth century, the entire block span between First and Second Avenues on East 31st Street was the site of the Phipps Houses. Completed in 1906 and designed by Grosvenor Atterbury, the building was commissioned by steel magnate Henry Phipps. Also a philanthropist, the building was Phipps' first attempt to curb the rising tuberculosis epidemic in the city by improving living conditions for paying tenement tenants. Home to 142 apartments, each unit at the Phipps Houses included two to five rooms, individual bathrooms, and a finished courtyard. Although rent was $14 monthly, which was $4 more expensive than usual tenement rent at the time, the building was designed to maximize the wellbeing of those who would live there. An early brochure said: "This enterprise is not a charity. Tenants are not asked to accept anything free. All that they pay for in their rent they will receive." Atterbury's design for the Phipps Houses was the first of its kind in the city. The complex was grand and constructed with varied brickwork to maximize airflow. Unlike other tenement buildings, Phipps also designated the bottom floor of his development as space for tenants to receive social services and counsel.

Buildings on East 32nd Street. At far right (No. 207) is the former Tammany Central Association, ca. 1965. In 1901, the Tammany Central Association, at the time an influential faction of the political machine, broke ground on this ostentatious Beaux-Arts clubhouse. However, internecine conflicts soon saw the district’s patron, Richard Croker, out of power. The clubhouse was completed all the same, but reform efforts and the financial strain of upkeep saw the facility rented out a soon as 1911. Later tenants included the City of New York, itself. In 1965, the old Tammany clubhouse became the headquarters of New York Magazine, when Milton Glaser, New York’s founder, purchased the building. When the magazine moved to new offices in 1974, Glaser remained; he maintains his studio there to this day. The buildings at left have since been demolished.

Peter Cooper residence, Fourth Avenue, 1888. Cooper originally built this two-story frame house at Fourth Avenue and 8th Street, later the site of Cooper Union. The house was later moved to Fourth Avenue and 28th Street, closer to Cooper’s Kips Bay glue factory.

Kips Bay Towers, 1966. The two towers of the Kips Bay Plaza Apartments were completed between 1960 and 1963. Designed by I.M. Pei and S. J. Kessler, the Brutalist style complex was erected on what had been the first Phipps Houses, a series of tenements created as working class housing just after the turn of the century. The two towers are massive 21-stories of glass and raw concrete facades. They were conceived as a middle-income rental project, but just 20 years later were converted to condominium apartments over the objections of a substantial number of residents.

"A town isn't a town without a bookstore," -Neil Gaiman 📚📚📚

Adams Memorial Church, 1942. Architect J.Cleaveland Cady designed this church with the double spires as the Adams-Parkhurst Memorial Presbyterian Church. It was a mission church of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, just a few blocks away. Dedicated in 1875 over the next decades it was home not only the Adams-Parkhurst church but also a German Lutheran congregation and an Armenian Evangelical Church. Left empty and abandoned after a stint as a radio station, the church became the CBS 30th Street Studio from 1948 to 1981. The Columbia Records studio was the location of thousands of recordings, including Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (1959), Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (Original Broadway Cast recording, 1957), and Pink Floyd's The Wall (1979). It was aptly nicknamed "the Church." Columbia Records moved out in 1981, and after changing hands a few times, the building was razed and replaced with a 10-story apartment building called "The Wilshire," completed in 1985.