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

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.

Constructed on the Hudson River Front between 1979 and 1986, the Javits Center is the most contemporary building on our tour. I.M. Pei and Partners designed the conference center to evoke the crystal palaces at the center of 19th-century World’s Fairs in London and Paris. Unfortunately, the Javits Center, has been enmeshed in controversy since its nascence. The project was finished two years behind schedule andmore than $111 million dollars over budget, and was investigated by the U.S. attorney’s office for its links to corrupt, mob-dominated unions. The glass exterior was constructed without any thought to cleaning, and the defining feature of the proposed design, a glittering entrance hall that would have opened onto the Hudson River, was never constructed due to budgetary constraints. In 2015, FXFOWLE completed a major renovation of the Javits Center which greened the building and made the glass façade safer for birds. Javits has been disparagingly likened to a tinker-toy set, a mausoleum, and Darth Vader. New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff went so far as to list the building as one of his “top candidates for demolition” in New York City. With such vitriol surrounding the Javits Center, could a building like this ever warrant historic preservation? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Historic and cultural significance are accrued over time. Buildings can only be considered for historic designation once they have turned 50, which also happens to be the average lifespan of an American commercial building. A building is most at risk for demolition when it is between 30 and 40 years old. The Javits Center is 34. Should preservationists begin to reconsider the architectural contributions of this building? Probably – I.M. Pei is a significant Chinese-American architect whose work will be studied by many generations to come. With its clear nod to 19th-century architecture, the building embodies many of the ideals of the postmodernism movement and fulfills criteria for cultural significance. Time is the most precious resource in historic preservation – how can we better guess which buildings will be significant before they are at high risk for demolition?

Church of Sts. Cyril & Methodius and St. Raphael, ca. 1977. This French Gothic church was constructed between 1901 and 1903 as St. Raphael. Designed by George H. Streeton, the parish of St. Raphael served the poor Irish community of Hell's Kitchen. That Irish parish dated to 1886. In the late 19th and early 20th century Catholic Croatian immigrants were also moving into the west side neighborhood. Many worked on the docks, rail yards, and factories near the waterfront. They had no Croatian language church, though in the early 20th century a Croatian priest began celebrating marriages and christenings in an Italian parish nearby. In 1913 the parish of Sts. Cyril & Methodius was established in a small disused church at 552 West 50th Street. They remained there until the 1970s when they purchased a back back building to St. Raphael. Soon though they were given permission to take over use of the whole church building. The church was renovated after the transfer of parishes. In the 1990s it was a center of relief assistance during the Bosnian War. Today it continues to have massed said in both English and Croatian.

West 40th Street Carnegie Library Branch, 1914. Completed in 1913 (relatively late for a Manhattan Carnegie) the West 40th Street Branch was designed by Cook & Welch. The architects had designed a number of other Carnegie libraries, including the Seward Park Branch. The neighborhood that surrounds is drastically different from when the building was constructed. Once flanked by four and five-story tenements, today the building is surrounded by the ramps and infrastructure of the Lincoln Tunnel, constructed in the mid 1930s. The library was decommissioned at some point in the late 20th century and was attached to a newer structure that was part of Covenant House, a charity that combats teenage homelessness. In 2020, the library was demolished to make way for redevelopment of the block.

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.

41st Street Public Paths, ca. 1905. Built in 1904, this bath house was possibly one of the first to be demolished, according to NYC Bath House expert Michael Minn. Its address places it adjacent to or perhaps within the footprint of the 1931-built McGraw-Hill skyscraper. Though a 1956 seems to depict at least a section of the building in place and noted as a bath house.

"Larry David, Alicia Keys, and Samuel L. Jackson walk into an elevator. Sounds like the prelude to a bad joke? Actually, that’s just daily routine at Manhattan Plaza, a 1,600-unit affordable housing complex for performing artists in Times Square that has served as the launching pad for thousands of creative careers since it opened in the late 1970s. It was in this anonymous high-rise in Hell’s Kitchen, that Alicia Keys first learned to play the piano. It was here, in a federally subsidized apartment, that Larry David first met Kenny Kramer — the 'real' Kramer — and wrote the pilot for Seinfeld. To this day, Manhattan Plaza continues to serve as affordable 'on-campus housing' for thousands of performers in the nearby Theater District. But despite Manhattan Plaza’s enormous contributions to popular culture — not to mention the local entertainment economy — the project is little known. To most passersby, it’s just another ugly redbrick tower block. That’s about to change with the release of the forthcoming documentary Miracle on 42nd Street, which explores the project’s dramatic history and features countless Manhattan Plaza 'alumni' paying tribute to the project’s transformative impact on their lives and careers. The film also offers fresh insights into familiar moments in the city’s history: the fiscal crisis, the AIDS crisis, and the revitalization of Times Square." For more on Manhattan Plaza, check out this interview with award-nominated filmmaker Alice Elliott in Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History.