Lincoln Tunnel entrance roadway at Dyer Avenue and West 34th Street, February 10, 1938.

My Archive Spring 2019 "The concert crowd exiting after the New Years Eve show, I had 3rd-row seats on the floor. Phish... we partied like it was 1999." —Kevin Young

West 28th Street Bathhouse at 407 West 28th Street as seen from Ninth Avenue, 1927. The Public Bathhouse seen in the center of the frame was the second to last such public facility constructed in New York City. Built in 1914, the complex included showers, an indoor swimming pool, public laundry facilities, a gymnasium with an indoor track, a roof garden, and playground. The nearby Irish community used this facility. The pool facility was active until at least the 1960s, and was demolished sometime during the Lindsay administration (1966-1973). This block (between Ninth and Tenth Avenues and 28th and 29th Street) is currently occupied by an annex of the 1933-built Morgan Postal Facility, constructed in 1992.

Jim and Al Coffee Shop under the Ninth Avenue El at West 34th Street, 1932.

Manhattan Opera House, ca. 1907. Opera fanatic and theater mogul Oscar Hammerstein I opened his second Manhattan Opera House as an answer to his dissatisfaction with the Metropolitan Opera. (His first 1893-built Manhattan Opera House was also on 34th Street and was an unmitigated financial disaster.) His second Manhattan Opera House was meant to be an opera "for opera-philes like himself." This would be unlike the Met Opera, where patrons treated the shows as a social affair. This was Hammerstein's eighth theater and proved majorly successful. It offered productions of the classics: Aida, Carmen, La Traviata, Otello, Tosca, Rigoletto, among others. The Met Opera had found a worthy rival - the competition of the Hammerstein's opera house had inflated the costs of producing opera and re-saturated the public's interests in the medium. Eventually, the Met won out, and Hammerstein went bankrupt. He could not compete with the high price of bringing in the biggest opera stars that the Met could. Oscar Hammerstein's son, Arthur, negotiated a contract with the Met that awarded his father $1.2 million if he refrained from producing grand opera in the United States for the next 10 years. Otto Kahn, president of the Metropolitan Opera, gained possession of the theater in 1911. The space was leased from 1911 to 1917 to The Shuberts. From 1927 to 1940 the space was a Warner Brother's sound stage, and then a meeting hall.

Ninth Avenue east side, from West 34th to 33rd Streets. Building shown is the New York Asylum for the Blind, 1922. The New York Asylum for the Blind was established in 1831 and that same year a large building for the organization was constructed in the bucolic area that would later become the border between the Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen neighborhoods. In 1831 this area was far north of the city and the open space and park-like grounds were the perfect location for a school for the blind. The large neo-Gothic structure was designed by an unknown architect, but was constructed in a style very similar to James Renwick's buildings on Blackwell's Island. These facilities on today's Roosevelt Island included a smallpox hospital, insane asylum, debtors house, and a prison. The school had upwards of 150 students and whenever possible jobs in the institution were also filled by the blind, including teachers. The school roughed some harsh criticism in the second half of the 19th century. An article in 1854 said this of the school, "Neglect, slovenliness and bad management are visible in every part of the establishment." In the early 20th century the city had not only stretched to the Asylum but surrounded it on all sides with large urban development. After a number of failed attempts to move elsewhere, the renamed New York Institute for the Education of the Blind (a more politically correct moniker) finally relocated to Pelham Parkway in the Bronx in 1924. The following year the large, nearly 100 year old building was demolished. Today the plot that was once occupied by the Asylum is now the popular photography store B\&H.

My Archive Spring 2019 "A photo of my mother, her siblings, and their mother taken in 1942 or so, no later than 1945. my mother, her siblings, and their mother." —Jill Melamed

329-339 West 30th Street, north side, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. No. 333 was the Rural New Yorker Building which was formerly the old Chelsea Methodist Church. About 1910.

🥞 🍳 ☕... ✔️ Perhaps more than any other eatery, diners are the quintessential American restaurant. And for decades, starting in the 1920s, the railcar diners were a special breed of this iconic American venue. Whether actual refurbished rail dining cars (a very small %) or purpose-built, pre-fab diners made to look like railroad rolling stock, these venues provided a unique business model. In New York City, they often sat at narrow corner lots, hugged larger structures on leftover acreage, or occupied empty plots for the time between the razing of old buildings and the construction of new ones. With increased development, more advanced construction technologies, and the rising cost of land, most of these diners have been lost to time (and new construction). Here are some of the railcar diners that once fed New Yorkers.

Madison Square Garden, ca. 1970. The fourth iteration of Madison Square Garden was made possible by the demolition of the former Beaux-Arts Pennsylvania Station at Eighth Avenue and 34th Street, an event which catalyzed the city’s nascent preservation movement and led to the creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The cylindrical multi-purpose stadium opened in 1968, atop the below-ground portion of the train station, after five years of construction.

413 West 35th Street, 1932.

467 Ninth Avenue, 1938. The building in the foreground is one of New York City's ubiquitous corner markets. The building across the street at no. 469 is the North-Western Dispensary building. The dispensary was a municipal social welfare and medical facility for the poor. The three-story brick building was constructed for this facility in 1869. In 1938 when this photograph was taken, it is unclear if the dispensary still functioned. The signage on the building notes it is occupied by a cheese shop on the first floor and a flag and awning business on one of the upper floors.

339 West 29th Street, 1932. No. 339 (seen here covered in ivy) is a 19th-century rowhouse with a powerful abolitionist history and a sad and complicated recent history. Built in 1846-1867, the four-story house was constructed as part of a row for Cyrus Mason. James Gibbons, a banker, and financial writer purchased the home in 1852 and moved in with his wife Abigail Hopper Gibbons and family. The family was ardent abolitionists. The house served not only a station of the Underground Railroad, but the home hosted a school for African American children and a meeting place for black and white abolition leaders. The house was well known for these activities and so was targeted during the Draft Riots in 1863. After black homes and orphanages were burned, the rioters turned to the abolitionists. This house was set aflame on the second night (July 14), and the occupants were only saved from death (by fire or beating) via an escape route that included climbing to the roof, running over the neighboring homes, and climbing out through someone else's house. The home was designated a New York City landmark as part of the Lamartine Place Historic District in 2009. Around that same time, the current owner added a fifth floor (illegally). Over the next decade, the community members and preservationists fought to have the home returned to its original state. Through lawsuits and legal and landmark hearings, the community persisted, and in 2017 when the project came to the Landmarks Commission, the added floor was denied. The height of the building and the cornice would need to be restored. After more than a decade under scaffolding, the front of the building will soon be visible once again.

246 West 38th Street, ca. 1923.

Greyhound Bus Terminal ca. 1936 In the 1930s, bus travel was a new industry, providing cheaper and more flexible passenger service than the railroads. Built in 1935 across the street from the monumental Pennsylvania Station, the streamlined Greyhound Bus Terminal was the perfect symbol for this new mode of travel. Abbott photographed the bus terminal from the Pennsylvania Building at 225 West 34th Street. That mundane office building still stands, but the terminal was replaced in 1972 by the undistinguished 1 Penn Plaza.

James A. Farley Post Office Building, 1912. Formerly the General Post Office Building, the main branch of the United State Postal Service was built as part of the Pennsylvania Station construction plan. The firm of McKim, Mead, and White designed both the train station and the post office in a Beaux-Arts style. The General Post Office and Pennsylvania Station became twin symbols of American progress and industry. With its giant order Corinthian colonnade stretching the length of two city blocks, the Post Office matched the grandiosity of Penn Station across the avenue. Bracing either side of the colonnade are square pavilions, capped with low domes expressed as stepped pyramids on the exterior. From the street, continuous steps lead to the main floor, which hosted various customer services. A dry moat at the base of the building allows for natural light to flood into the basement level, occupied by workspaces. On the interior, the ceiling is coffered and its floor is Knoxville marble. The colossal structure housed nearly one-acre of mail sorting space. In 1967, the facility was praised for handling one-tenth of all U.S. mail during Christmastime. However, the facility became outdated, hand-sorting technology just didn't cut it any longer, and the size of the building became too much to maintain. The former post office hosted a variety of bizarre functionalities: Operation Santa, beginning in 1912, authorized postmasters to respond to children's letters to Santa Claus. Pneumatic mail tubes facilitated the transport of mail (up to 100 pounds) to 22 post offices in Manhattan (and one in Brooklyn) at speeds of 30 to 35 mph. A Museum of Postal History occupied a small portion of the main floor, displaying postal paraphernalia until 2017. Portions of the landmark are now being converted to house the Moynihan Station, an Amtrak concourse which would expand Penn Station.

Revillon Frères fur storage warehouse, 1925. Built in 1924 by the firm Cross & Cross, the building was both a storage facility and retail location for Revillon Frères, the French luxury furrier. After the company left the building, the upper cold storage floors were substantially altered, with the diaper-pattern brickwork replaced by rows of windows.