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.

Martha Washington Hotel ARCHITECT: Robert W. Gibson DATE: 1901-03 STYLE: Renaissance Revival Martha Washington Hotel was developed by the Women’s Hotel Company for the purpose of providing comfortable, independent living arrangements for middle-class working women. This company was formed by a group of people active in the Charity Organization Society to fill an unmet need for housing for working women. This building displays the popular Renaissance Revival style using classical elements such as rustication, columns, strong cornices with dentils and modillions, Palladian windows and quoins, to give a sense of dignity to this important structure. The hotel continued to provide women-only facilities until 1998, when it was converted to a co-ed hotel.

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.

The Madison Avenue Baptist Church once stood on the corner of 31st Street and Madison Avenue, just next door to this small structure. The building was replaced in 1930 with a 17-story residential hotel with space for the church in the first four stories. The previous church had been constructed in 1858 in the Romanesque Revival style, which informed the design of the much later Parish House, which itself replaced a chapel on this site. The Parish House retains an old sign with its previous namesake. On a much grander scale, just down the block, is an Eclectic loft building at number 36, which originally housed garment industry firms. The structure features double-height fluted columns at the first and second stories and the top two stories, as well as ornamental brickwork and carved stone accents.

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.

Martha Washington Hotel ca. 1907 Designed by Robert Gibson and completed in 1903, the twelve-story Martha Washington was designed to house 400-500 “business women” and to provide specifically for this groups’ needs, at 30 East 30th Street. From the start, the hotel was conceived as a profit-making venture, organized and executed by the Women’s Hotel Company (incorporated in 1897), and funded by investments from New Yorkers such as William Schermerhorn, John D. Rockefeller, Helen Gould, and Olivia Sage (the wife of Russell Sage and founder of the Russell Sage Foundation). In practice, women were responsible for the success of the project. By the time the hotel opened, much of the stock was owned by individual women backing the idea of a women’s hotel. An early promotional brochure describes the Martha Washington as a “world-famous and interesting hostelry … well appointed, thoroughly modern, strictly fireproof and equipped with every facility for the comfort of its guests.” These included a drug store, ladies tailor shop, millinery, manicurist, and newspaper stand. The staff was entirely female, down to the elevator operators. The brochure also highlights the role of women in planning the interior design of the hotel: “woman’s wit has been used to provide the little necessities and comforts so much appreciated by her…” Promotional materials emphasized a unique aspect of the Martha Washington Hotel: Not only was it was intended for professional women, but it was planned without “paternalism or philanthropic idea,” and had “no harassing restrictions…imposed on the hotel guests other than those prevailing in the best hotels.” At the Martha Washington, female residents were afforded the same freedoms allowed their male counterparts. In contrast to the supervisory homes, this women’s hotel was explicitly linked with feminist ideals of independence, the ability to earn one’s own living, and the conscious presentation of white-collar working women as “business women.” It was a success: The building was fully occupied immediately with both permanent and transient guests and 200 more women on a waiting list. The hotel’s philosophy was met with approval by important feminist groups, including the Interurban Women’s Suffrage Council, who made the hotel their headquarters beginning in 1907. The novel hotel caught the public’s eye, so much so that residents complained it had become a tourist attraction, complete with “lectures on megaphones” given atop tour buses.

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

34th Street, viewed from the exit of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, ca. 1985. This is the view that greeted motorists entering Manhattan via the Queens-Midtown tunnel: the dilapidated remains of No. 214 East 34th Street, the former “Furniture Exhibition Building.” Today, a new building has replaced No. 214, but the 34th Street sign (upper right) remains.

2 Park Avenue ARCHITECT: Ely Jacques Kahn; Buchman and Kahn DATE: 1926-28 STYLE: Art Deco This building is one of the most important examples in New York of Art Deco or Modern style architecture, a popular architectural style for commercial structures at the time of its construction. Ely Jacques Kahn’s ornamental vocabulary was representative of the period’s concern with movement and technology and included brick and terra cotta in abstract geometric patterns, sometimes inspired by native designs or suggestions of the warp and weft of fabric, and emphasized the surface tension inherent in steel-framed commercial buildings.

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.

"Designed by Robert Gibson and completed in 1903, the twelve-story Martha Washington was designed to house 400-500 'business women' and to provide specifically for this groups’ needs, at 30 East 30th Street... By the time the hotel opened, much of the stock was owned by individual women backing the idea of a women’s hotel… At the Martha Washington, female residents were afforded the same freedoms allowed their male counterparts. In contrast to the supervisory homes, this women’s hotel was explicitly linked with feminist ideals of independence, the ability to earn one’s own living, and the conscious presentation of white-collar working women as 'business women.' It was a success: the building was fully occupied immediately with both permanent and transient guests and 200 more women on a waiting list. The hotel’s philosophy was met with approval by important feminist groups, including the Interurban Women’s Suffrage Council, who made the hotel their headquarters beginning in 1907." For more on the Martha Washington and other Industrial Era female-only housing, check out this article by Nina E. Harkrader in Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History

The growth of manufacturing and industry in Northeastern cities during the early to mid-19th century increased demand for female labor in the United States. The newly arrived women workers were expected to find their own lodging, but there was no precedent for housing single women in cities. So, hotels like the Martha Washington were planned to provide women with safe places to stay.

Packard Commercial School, ca. 1910. In 1858 Silas Packard started a commercial school out of two rooms at Cooper Union. His students learned the math, business, and secretarial skills needed to work as clerks in commercial firms. He would go to write a number of popular textbooks on the topic. Outgrowing a succession of buildings in the late 29th century, the school purchased a plot at 35th Street in 1910. Designed by architect H. F. Ballantyne, the Packard Commercial School was described by the architect himself as, "Georgian, or rather a modern adaptation of that early American style sometimes called Colonial.” The Commercial School closed by the mid century and the building was purchased by Yeshiva University for a women's educational facility (Stern College for Women), which it remains today.

The former Aberdeen Hotel. The Aberdeen Hotel features red brick with a rusticated limestone base and projecting bay windows, as well as richly decorated balconettes and cornices. The Aberdeen had originally been built as an apartment hotel, but began accepting transient guests in 1912 and was one of the first hotels to accept unaccompanied women in the 1920s.

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."

105 MADISON AVENUE Buchman & Fox 1912-13 Like Madison Square Park, Madison Avenue was named after James Madison, the fourth President of the United States. The Avenue begins at 23rd Street and extends to the Madison Avenue Bridge at 138th Street. When the Manhattan street grid was mandated in 1811, there was no avenue between Fourth (now Park) and Fifth Avenues. Madison Avenue was carved out in the 1840s due to the wide distance between Fourth and Fifth Avenues and in order to create more building lots with avenue frontage. This southern section of Madison Avenue is characterized by its fine assortment of large-scale hotels, lofts and office buildings. The imposing store and loft building is clad entirely in terra-cotta, much like Cass Gilbert’s famed Woolworth Building, which was constructed at the same time. At 20 stories tall, it has a strong presence on Madison Avenue. The structure features Gothic Revival style ornament, with grand arches at the ground level and at the crown.

New York Yacht Club ca. 1893 The New York Yacht Club, the oldest such organization in the country, was founded in 1844 and incorporated in 1865. In 1901 the club moved from its headquarters at 27 Madison Avenue to its current Beaux-Art clubhouse on West 44th Street. The New York Yacht Club is most famous for its founding of the famed Americas Cup competition.

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.

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.

71st Regiment Armory, ca. 1955. The Armory, although basically Romanesque in design, flaunts a very high medieval Italian tower complete with machicolations and American flags built into the masonry at the top as a decorative element. The architect reputedly asked his little son what he thought ought to go at the top of the tower, to which he replied, "Flags, Daddy."

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.

105 MADISON AVENUE Buchman & Fox 1912-13 Like Madison Square Park, Madison Avenue was named after James Madison, the fourth President of the United States. The Avenue begins at 23rd Street and extends to the Madison Avenue Bridge at 138th Street. When the Manhattan street grid was mandated in 1811, there was no avenue between Fourth (now Park) and Fifth Avenues. Madison Avenue was carved out in the 1840s due to the wide distance between Fourth and Fifth Avenues and in order to create more building lots with avenue frontage. This southern section of Madison Avenue is characterized by its fine assortment of large-scale hotels, lofts and office buildings. The imposing store and loft building is clad entirely in terra-cotta, much like Cass Gilbert’s famed Woolworth Building, which was constructed at the same time. At 20 stories tall, it has a strong presence on Madison Avenue. The structure features Gothic Revival style ornament, with grand arches at the ground level and at the crown.

Mrs. Stewart's Hotel for Working Women ca. 1901 In 1869, mercantile magnate Alexander T. Stewart—whose stores employed many young women as “shop girls”—proposed the Hotel for Working Women, the first of its kind. At the time, single women were never admitted to hotels; to be a guest, a woman had to be accompanied by a husband, or check-in as part of a family with a male head of household. Stewart stated his hotel would be for “industrious young women…to foster individuality and self-dependence…in which lodging, food, and warmth, with other essentials, may be furnished at the lowest possible rates.” Located on Park Avenue between 32nd and 33rd Streets, the Hotel for Working Women stood in startling contrast to the small size and austerity of the moral homes: It was a grand structure, seven stories tall, and built of iron with a mansard roof, interior courtyard with flowers and a large fountain, and an elegant marble-columned lobby. Inside, it boasted five elevators, marble floors with carpets, more than 1,700 gaslights throughout the building, speaking tubes to communicate with the staff, and hot and cold running water throughout. The upper floors had single and double rooms, while the lower floors featured a dining-room, parlors for entertaining guests, reading rooms fully stocked with books and periodicals, and other amenities. At the time of its completion in 1878, press coverage of the hotel’s opening was extensive and largely laudatory. It was compared favorably to contemporary hotels, and on the opening day, the hotel manager reported 1,000 applications for rooms. Sadly, this novel experiment was curtailed almost immediately: Stewart died before the Hotel’s completion, and within a year, it was sold and converted into the Park Avenue Hotel, a market rate hostelry that catered to a well-heeled and largely male clientele. This conversion was controversial. The executor of Stewart’s estate maintained that the hotel had never been fully occupied and thus was a financial failure. Women’s groups countered that the hotel had a long waiting list, and that the executor stood to profit personally from its conversion to a luxury hotel

Between 1954 and 1957, the Municipal Art Society surveyed historic buildings in all five boroughs to create a database of potential landmarks to preserve. Local residents and MAS staff compiled individual sheets devoted to about 200 buildings. Each sheet outlined the building’s date, location, and style and provided a description and a small photograph. This is the list of Manhattan buildings.

Lexington Avenue at 33rd Street, ca. 1975. The building at right is No. 141 East 33rd Street. The Chrysler Building is visible through the haze, further up Lexington Avenue.

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.

Homecoming of the 71st Regiment from the Spanish-American War, August 29, 1898.

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.

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.

The benevolent home was not the only model proposed to house single, working women in New York City. In 1869, mercantile magnate Alexander T. Stewart—whose stores employed many young women as “shop girls”—proposed the Hotel for Working Women, the first of its kind.

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 📚📚📚

The Roger Williams Hotel/Madison Avenue Baptist Church replaced the 1858 Madison Avenue Baptist Church structure that originally stood on this site. In 1930, this residential hotel was constructed with the church incorporated into its first four stories. The building’s Romanesque Revival style recalls the architecture of the original church.

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.

The Civic Club ARCHITECT: Thomas A. Gray DATE: 1898-99 STYLE: French Beaux-Art The elegant building of the Civic Club, now known as Estonian House, was designed in the French Beaux-Arts style by Thomas A. Gray. Erected in 1898-99, the Civic Club building was commissioned by Frederick Norton Goddard (1861-1905), the founder of the club and a leading social reformer in the city.