“Twelfth Avenue, north from West 45th Street, showing this marginal thoroughfare prior to improvement. The pier shown is No. 86 North River, located at the foot of 46th Street. The bend beyond is at 47th Street. April 11, 1924.” Eugene Armbruster’s photo captures the West Side waterfront about a decade prior to the development of the West Side Elevated Highway. Today, Pier 86 (lower left) is home to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, aboard the USS Intrepid, a decommissioned World War II-era aircraft carrier.

The West Midtown Ferry Terminal, operated by the New York Waterway company, is located at Pier 79 on the Hudson River and 39th Street. The terminal's design includes a bus garage and incorporates two of the Lincoln Tunnel's ventilation shafts. The air shafts are constructed of brick in the Art Deco Style. The original terminal, seen here, was built in 1985. An updated design was completed in the mid-2000s after September 11th prompted fears surrounding train travel increased demand for ferry service. The terminal is owned by the New York City but leased to New York Waterway, a private transportation company.

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?

Kalman 'Kalmele' Weitz, known as “The Boy Cantor,” and ‘The Young Caruso” was born in 1916 in Grosswardein in Austro-Hungary on the Romanian border in what is currently known as Oradea, Romania. Weitz was a Jewish liturgical musician, concert performer frequently accompanying himself on piano, and a cantor, who hailed from a creative family of traditional scribes, rabbis, musicians and more. He debuted at six years of age before hundreds in a packed local synagogue on a Jewish holiday, and subsequently went on to tour widely in Central and Western Europe, even appearing in a musical film directed by composer Ferdinand Straub.

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.

631 West 46th Street, November 14, 1947.

United Parcel Service Building, seen at the corner of 12th Avenue and West 43rd Street, July 1, 1965. Rendered in glass and a light brown brick, the UPS Building is a modernist structure built in 1961-1962 The firm that designed this building, Leon & Lionel Levy, were best known for the New York Coliseum, a convention center on Columbus Circle erected in 1956 through the influence of master planner Robert Moses.

"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.

"39th Street, between Twelfth and Eleventh Avenues, looking east, showing a flock of sheep in front of the slaughter house at No. 627, October 31, 1931." West 39th Street near the Hudson River was the center of the city's slaughterhouse district from the middle of the 19th century through the 1950s. Called “Abattoir Row," cattle and other livestock were ferried across the river and held in the slaughterhouses of this neighborhood before being processed for consumption in New York's homes and restaurants. The infrastructure for this operation included a cow tunnel under 12th Avenue for livestock exiting the ferries, and in 1955, an aluminum-sided bridge built above the street so the cattle did not stop the flow of traffic. The pictured block of 39th Street between 11th and 12th Avenues no longer exists, a victim of the Javits Center construction in the late 1970s. Some sources suggest that whatever remained of the cow tunnels were also lost with that development.