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.

New York's first automat opened in 1912. It was operated by the Philadelphia-based food service company Horn & Hardart, who were the first non-Europeans to receive patented vending machines from Max Sielaff's Automat factory in Berlin.

Film Center Building, ca. 1948 The Film Center was built in 1928 and was used for various functions of film productions during the late 1920s and 1930s when New York City was the center of filmmaking. The building housed sets, editing, and production facilities, as well as a distribution center. The Film Center Building was designed by Eli Jaques Kahn in an Art Deco style. Kahn was a prominent architect in the first half of the 20th century, known for his modernist designs. The building has one of the most detailed surviving interiors from that period in New York City. Both the exterior of the building and a portion of the interior were landmarked in 1982.

Entrance to Film Center, ca. 1995.

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.

Eagle Brewery, ca. 1892. This 19th century west side brewery has a history intertwined with the oldest brewery in the United States, Yuengling. Eagle Brewery was founded in by John Frederick Betz, a young man who had apprenticed at Yuengling in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. After a trip to Europe to learn from master brewers in Germany and Austria, he returned to America and opened his business in 1853. Betz began a brewing empire, with operations in Philadelphia and Jersey City. In 1890 the name was changed to Lembeck and Betz Eagle Brewery. The NJ and PA breweries closed in 1920 during Prohibition, so likely this one did as well. It is unknown when the buildings were demolished.

"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.

Film Center Building ARCHITECT: Ely Jacques Kahn DATE: 1928-29 STYLE: Art Deco The Film Center Building interior design is an example of the Art Deco style. The architect, Ely Jacques Kahn, was one of the city’s most prominent architects working in modernistic styles. The interior incorporates a technique of “woven” plaster wall and ceiling surfaces, and a wide-ranging polychromatic program, and it survives largely intact. The building was built to service the motion picture industry then centered in Times Square to the east and still serves the functions for which it was constructed.