This curated scavenger hunt celebrates Pride and tests your LGBT history knowledge. Where did civil rights activist and literary icon James Baldwin reside? At what community church did transgender activist Sylvia Rivera find community on the Far West Side (the congregation renamed the food pantry in her honor)? Know the answers? Take part in the hunt! To get credit for solving a clue, check in at the location (tap the lock button to the left; if you’re in the right place, it will turn green). Each location you check in to is worth a single point. For clues that start with a camera emoji (📸), tap the image to re-create the historical photo for an additional point. After you’ve lined up your re-creation, please remember to tap the “submit to hunt” button.

My Archive Summer 2019 “A group visit by Landmarks Commissioners and staff sometime between 1990 and 1994 to review proposed restoration work at Bethesda Terrace.“ —Jeremy Woodoff

By Dianne Durante As one walks around Central Park, statues, monuments, and memorials pop up left and right. Come along for the ride as the Gotham Center for New York City History explores this history of some of these Central Park landmarks. Adapted from "The Earliest Sculptures In Central Park": August 14, 2018, an article that originally appeared on the Gotham Center blog here.

Sheep Meadow ca 1910 Sheep Meadow is the best example in today’s Park of the pastoral vision that Olmsted and Vaux intended for Central Park’s meadows. Their design called for peaceful expanses of green that inspired calm and refreshing thoughts just by looking at them, not necessarily walking upon them. The fifteen-acre meadow holds true to this intention today as Central Park’s largest lawn without ballfields and as a designated quiet zone. No organized sports or gatherings are allowed on Sheep Meadow to preserve the space for quiet picnicking and relaxation. Originally a rocky and swampy terrain, Sheep Meadow was the most expensive landscape in the Park to construct. Its transformation to a pastoral meadow required the blasting of rock outcrops and the installation of four feet of soil. The landscape was first known as “the Green” or “the Commons,” but became known as “Sheep Meadow” in the early twentieth century due to the ever-present flock of pedigree sheep that grazed the meadow. For nearly fifty years, the sheep spent their days on the meadow and their evenings in the nearby Sheepfold, which is now the landmark Tavern on the Green restaurant. In the 1960s, Sheep Meadow became the iconic gathering spot for New York’s counterculture, including anti-War protests, peace rallies, love-ins, be-ins, draft card burnings, Earth Day celebrations, and popular concerts. These events, and the lack of management and proper maintenance led to severe damage and erosion on the lawn. By the late 1970s, it was a virtual dustbowl. The restoration of Sheep Meadow was one of the first projects undertaken by the Central Park Conservancy in 1980. The newly lush and well-managed lawn was the first green space that many New Yorkers had ever seen in Central Park. Public excitement over the newly opened lawn inspired and an outpouring of support for the nascent Conservancy that empowered its first decade of success. -Central Park Conservancy

By Dianne Durante In Olmsted and Vaux’s Greensward Plan, the only sculpture was one atop the fountain at the center of Bethesda Terrace.

21-31 West 73rd Street, 1925. Image above shows the south side of the Park Royal building from West 73rd Street. The Park Royal is a 15-story red brick prewar apartment building designed by architect George F. Pelham. Built around the time of the Dakota, which is just a block south on 72nd Street, the Park Royal was of the first “apartment hotels” constructed to appeal to the wealthy, to attract people out of their downtown townhouses and to the Upper West Side. Leases in the Park Royal included full-time staff, and individual units were sprawling. To preserve the view of Central Park, developers originally purchased a row of brownstones on either side of the building to prevent construction. In 1985, the building underwent conversion into a Cooperative.

Majestic Apartment ARCHITECT: Irwin S. Chanin DATE: 1930-31 STYLE: Art Deco The Majestic is one of five-towered skyscraper apartment buildings which define the impressive skyline of Central Park West. Erected in 1930-31 by the Chanin Construction Company, headed by architect and developer Irwin S. Chanin, it is an excellent example of the Art Deco style in its streamlined later phase. Chanin had attended the highly influential 1925 Paris exposition of decorative arts, and returned a convert to the “modernistic” style. The Majestic was the Chanin organization’s first “experiment” in applying the Art Deco style to residential building. The Majestic successfully adjusts the city’s housing laws to the new style; its soaring twin towers are a response to new regulations enacted in 1929. Although built during the Depression, it belongs to the luxury apartment building genre of the 1920s. While the Majestic’s sparing use of ornament and simple materials reflect its date of construction, the resulting austerity is an integral part of the building’s stylistic imagery

Dakota Apartments, ca. 1975. Considered the city’s first luxury apartment building, the Dakota Apartments were constructed between 1880 and 1884 and designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh for the real estate investor Edward Clark. The imposing German Renaissance style structure was an architectural revelation at the time when the Upper West Side was largely barren, far from the bustling downtown centre of New York City at the time. At eight stories, with 65 apartments (no two of them alike), the building featured a number of desirable and innovative amenities meant to lure prospective tenants who were unaccustomed to the idea of luxurious multi-family buildings. (Rich people in early 19th century New York lived nearly exclusively in single-family private mansions.) Some of these comforts included apartments of up to 16 rooms, newfangled service elevators, and uber quiet living spaces created by heavy interior partitions and double think concrete floors. The Dakota was long thought to be the “most famous apartment building in New York City,” (though perhaps that superlative has changed in the era of the supertalls, like 432 Park). It was well-known as the home of celebrities, most notably John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The Dakota is also a major plot device in the 1980 novel "Time and Again," in which the building proves to be a portal for time travel to historic New York.

Shearith Israel Synagogue ARCHITECT: Brunner & Tyron DATE: 1896-97 STYLE: Neo-Classical This synagogue is a striking example of the monumental neo-Classical style, popular at the turn of the century for public and ecclesiastical architecture. The imposing front facade facing Central Parle West is composed of four large, engaged Composite columns that embrace three round-arched openings, enclosed by elaborate bronze gates, and three round-arched windows with balustrades. The openings, which produce the effect of a loggia, lead into a porch containing the two primary entrances which are located at either side. The front columns are surmounted by an entablature with a modillioned cornice, which is also found above the two smooth ashlar surfaces flanking this central area. Above the entablature is a high attic with smooth-faced pilasters, positioned to correspond with the columns. They enframe panels with classical wreath motifs.

The Mall is a quarter-mile stretch in Central Park, capped off on the south end by the famous Literary Walk. The only deliberate straight line in the park, it contains a quadruple row of American Elm trees, an important feature as the location is one of the few remaining stands of the trees in North America. As one of the most photographed and visited sections of the park, it has been nicknamed the "Promenade."

Fountain at Bethesda Terrace, ca 1890. The Angel of the Waters statue atop the Bethesda Fountain is the masterpiece of sculptor Emma Stebbins. She created the piece in the 1860s while living in Rome with her lover, the actress Charlotte Cushamn. With this commission she became the first woman to create a piece of public art in New York City. Though designers Olmstead and Vaux wished to limit any "artificial" additions to their natural landscape, this sculpture was the only one sanctioned as part of the early design and construction of Central Park. When the statue was unveiled in 1873 it was met with mixed reviews, though it has become an icon and well-loved feature of the Park.

The Daniel Webster Monument was commissioned when Gordon W. Burnham came upon Sculptor Thomas Bell's statuette of Webster. Bell had made a bust of the famed Massachusetts Senator and used that for the basis of a extremely popular and mass produced statuette. Burnham commissioned Bell to make a much larger version for the Central Park Mall to commemorate the Senator's commitment to American unity. Cast at the von Miller Foundry in Munich, the statue ended up being initially much larger than expected and couldn't be placed on the Mall. This resulted in its place on the West Drive where it was dedicated in 1872.

"On December 11, 1858, Central Park welcomed its first official visitors, the ice skaters. Roughly 300 people showed up on that first Sunday. A week later, 10,000 descended on the park. New York, suffering through the latest in a series of unseasonably cold winters, fell quickly into an ice-skating swoon... The Lake, the site of future ice skating, was in reality a low-lying piece of swampy ground. Before park construction began, it existed only on Olmsted and Vaux’s ten-foot blueprint, where the squiggly, naturalistic contours of its shoreline were rendered in india ink. To fill it, clay pipes carried rain runoff from the carriage paths and other spots in the park. To drain it, a series of sluices could be opened. Some of the sluices fed into natural springs running under the parkland, and certain springs, in turn, emptied into New York’s East River... As the winter drew on, sometimes as many as 100,000 people a day visited the park. Skating proved so popular that the park was kept open well into the night. The Lake’s icy surface reflected the glow of newly installed calcium lamps. Vaux went skating. There is no record that Olmsted did." For more on Central Park Lake, check out this excerpt Justin Martin's biography of Frederick Law Olmstead in Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History.

Dakota Apartments ARCHITECT: Henry J. Hardenbergh DATE: 1880-84 STYLE: German Renaissance Clearly unique in its architectural character in New York, the Dakota, the City’s first luxury apartment house, continue s to be a conversation piece. This imposing structure of eight stories with attic reflects the romanticism of the German Renaissance style and combines a superb blend of formalism and picturesqueness into a unified composition, with dignity and serenity. The design of each elevation is treated in an individual manner, without repetition or symmetry inhibiting the free use of a historical style. Monumental in scale and impressive in appearance, this building, massively constructed of yellow colored brick with stone trim and terra cotta ornament, has the indestructible quality and undeniable grandeur reminiscent of a large, European chateau. It was designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh, who later designed the Plaza Hotel .

John Quincy Adams Ward's bronze work titled the "Indian Hunter Monument" was the first statue created by an American artist in Central Park-- and is one of the oldest statues in the park. Lauded for its realism, the original plaster work was so popular that a committee of New Yorkers raised funds in 1869 for a bronze cast.

Congregation Shearith Israel, ca, 1980. Congregation Shearith Israel is the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States, established in 1654 by newly arrived Spanish and Portuguese Jewish. Between 1654 and 1825 all Jews in New York City belonged to this community, as it was the only one. Before 1730 the community was not allowed to built a structure for worship, and as such, leased rented space on Beaver and Mills (now South William) Street in lower Manhattan. The first purpose-built synagogue was on Mills Street, where the community remained until 1834; the original synagogue was rebuilt and expanded in 1818. They then moved to 60 Crosby Street and a location on 19th Street, before building their now 120-year-old building (seen here) on West 70th Street. Designed by the firm of Brunner and Tryon, the neo-Classical limestone temple held to a traditional architectural style, eschewing the Moorish, Romanesque, and Gothic designs of other contemporary synagogues. The interior spaces were designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose stained glass windows complete the facade.

San Remo Apartments ARCHITECT: Emery Roth DATE: 1929-30 STYLE: Apartment, Skyscraper The San Remo is one of the finest apartment buildings designed by Emery Roth, a noted New York architect who specialized in apartment house design, and whose work played a key role in the creation of Central Park West, one of New York’s grandest residential avenues. It is one of Manhattan’s last great luxury apartment houses built in the pre-Depression era, and was the first twin-towered residential skyscraper in New York.

Majestic Apartments, 1932. The 29-story Art Deco apartment building was constructed in 1930-31. Designed by Irwin S. Chanin, the futuristic sculptures on the facade were created by Rene Paul Chambellan (who also created some of the sculptural art at Rockefeller Center). It is one of the four two-towered apartment houses that line Central Park West. The Majestic was once the home to members of the Genovese crime family, including Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, and Meyer Lansky. It was also the venue for an attempted mafia hit when Vincent "The Chin" Gigante shot Frank Costello in the lobby.

“People ice skating on the Lake in Central Park. The Hotel Majestic and Dakota residence are visible in the background at 72nd Street & Central Park West,” 1894.

It’s no secret that New York is one of the Jewish capitals of the world. The city alone is home to 1.1 million Jews. That makes the city the largest Jewish community outside of Israel - larger than Tel Aviv and Jerusalem combined! The city's Jewish communities are not only multiple but diverse – they are Ashkenazic and Sephardic, Hasidic, and secular. The city owes this diversity to various waves of Jewish immigration over time, but did you know that Jewish geography today still in many ways reflects these immigration eras? Indeed, when and from where your Jewish ancestors immigrated may actually inform where you live in NYC today!

LANDMARK WEST! is the proud curator of the over 3,500 designated landmarks between West 59th and West 110th Streets, Central Park to Riverside Park (up from only 337 when we began our work in 1985). We promote public awareness of these landmarks and the urgent need to protect them against insensitive change and destruction for the sake of our community quality of life. Here, we take you through a number of the building types that make up the Upper West Side.

On October 25th, 1917, New York City celebrated "Liberty Day," a massive attempt to raise funds for the United States entry into World War I. The campaign drew a crowd of thousands to watch a parade of military vehicles fill the streets of Fifth Avenue. Bomber planes flew low over the city, dropping a message in paper pamphlets: "A Liberty Bond in your home will keep German Bombs out of your home." But the real sight to see was the German captured submarine, renamed "U-Buy-A-Bond" in honor of the occasion.

Congregation Shearith Israel, now located at 2 West 70th Street, takes pride in being the very first Jewish congregation in North America, where something like half the world’s Jewish population now lives. It was founded in 1654 by 23 Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent who had been living in a Dutch colony in Brazil. When the colony changed hands and the Portuguese took over, the Jewish community fled to avoid the imposition of Inquisition policies, which had previously pushed their families out of Portugal and Spain in the late 15th and early 16th centuries

My Archive Spring 2019 "Marques and Jayden at the park." —Juana Rodriguez

While New York is the setting of an enormous amount of films, some scenes define a space and some spaces define a scene. Either way, they happened in New York. 🎬

Sculptor George Blackall Simonds (1844-1929) created The Falconer, which is located to the south of Cherry Hill at Terrace Drive.

Durland’s Riding Academy, 1903. Long before carriage rides were a maligned Central Park tourist trap, riding was a common Central Park leisure activity. The Durland Riding Academy was established in 1887, with stables at Columbus Circle. In 1900, that structure was condemned, and a new, massive riding facility was built on 67th Street, off of Central Park West. The central building (at left, with multi-story arched windows) included a 600-spectator riding ring, club rooms and boarding facilities for the horses belonging to the city’s elite families. In 1949, the former riding club was purchased by ABC and converted into television studios. The buildings have been significantly modified, but the distinctive arched windows of the Durland Club are still visible.

Central Park Casino, during demolition, 1936. It’s 1929 in an Art Deco ballroom. Dancers glide around, dimly reflected in the black glass ceiling while outside on the terrace, the sound of champagne corks popping intersperses with conversations, laughter, and jazz, all floating through the night air. Surrounded by Central Park, the Central Park Casino was the place for rich, fabulous, and socially and politically connected citizens of the late 1920s and early 1930s who wanted to party together and ignore the troublesome 18th Amendment. Yet by 1935, the party was over. How did a political rivalry end the revelry at one of the most exclusive Jazz Age nightclubs? The Central Park Casino began in 1864 as the Ladies’ Refreshment Salon, a quaint Victorian two-room stone cottage designed by Calvert Vaux on East Drive and 72nd Street. Unaccompanied ladies could relax during their excursions around the park and enjoy refreshments at decent prices, free of any threat to their propriety. Twenty years later, the salon had morphed into a far pricier destination, called The Casino, and was open to both sexes. The name was used to invoke the Italian translation of “little house” rather than denoting a gambling joint. Locals and tourists flocked to the restaurant, where one could get a sirloin steak for 75 cents (just under 20 dollars in today’s money) and choose from an extensive wine list. Because it was in the park and had the then rare attraction of outdoor seating, it was the place to see and be seen. Yet after decades of feeding and refreshing wealthy and hungry park-goers, the Casino fell onto hard times and according to an article from the New Yorker from September 20, 1941, by the early 1920’s it was being managed in “a somewhat dumpy nite-club style.” In 1926 New York City was swept up in the Jazz Age. Speakeasies, dancing, and just a general pursuit of good times engulfed the city. To go with this fun-loving era, New York City elected a new mayor, James “Gentleman Jimmy” or “Beau Jim” Walker, who personified this spirit. Walker was a successful songwriter with the 1905 hit “Will You Still Love Me in December as You do in May?” and was generally much more enthusiastic about the excesses of the Roaring Twenties than being the mayor of New York. This worked out well since Tammany Hall was quite content to manage the city while Walker functioned as its dashing figurehead. Walker reportedly never made it to City Hall before noon and when he did and wasn’t feeling up to the task, he had a private “hangover room,” complete with a bed and an exercise bike (the bike was reportedly never used). This is not to say that Walker was a bad mayor. His constituents loved him because he vowed to keep subway ride prices at a nickel, allowed baseball games to be played on Sundays, and promised to improve the parks. Mobsters loved him too since he was such a fan of the nightlife that they ran. On top of that, Walker was a gifted speaker, always ready with a quip, wisecrack or some delightful repartee. He was New York City’s master of ceremonies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the next incarnation of the Central Park Casino started with a favor. Sidney Solomon, a noted hotelier, had introduced Walker to his personal tailor and that, to the always snazzily dressed mayor, was worth quite a bit. So when Solomon asked to take over the Casino to make it into an “outstanding restaurant instead of the shanty it is now,” Walker (through a series of somewhat sketchy maneuvers) made it happen. After a $500,000 renovation, the Casino added a tulip pavilion, orange terrace, a silver conservatory and, most importantly, a black-glass Art Deco ballroom. There were tables to seat 600 and a parking lot for 300 cars. Solomon said, very humbly, “it is not just a renovation. It’s something that has never before existed so perfectly in the world.” On the night of June 25, 1929, every seat was taken as the Casino opened to select guests, the so-called “fashionable and fastidious” to whom the restaurant now catered to. It was called “Walker’s Versailles,” where the bandleader would immediately start playing “Will You Still Love Me in December as You do in May?” as soon as Walker and his mistress, the actress Betty Compton, walked in the door. For the next few months, parties regularly lasted until 3 A.M., with Tammany hotshots mingling with Ziegfeld Follies’ showgirls. To get around the pesky Prohibition laws, patrons would leave their Rolls-Royces stocked with bootleg champagne parked outside. The maître d kept an eye on the drinks at the wealthiest tables and when they ran low, he would signal their chauffeur, standing near the doorway, to restock the alcohol from the stash in the car. It was the most exclusive playground for the most exclusive set. In the fall of 1929, Walker easily defeated Fiorello La Guardia for a second term as mayor. While the Casino was still dazzling its well-heeled guests, some people saw it as the epitome of...

Dakota Apartments The first of the great super-block apartments with central drive-in courtyard, this building was virtually without precedent. It was designed in the early eighteen-eighties by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh in the high manner of the nineteenth-century German Renaissance. He would later design the Plaza Hotel.

My Archive Spring 2019 "I took this in the late 1960s on a day trip to Central Park. At that time I lived in the suburbs. I was taken by the three of them dressed in the same uniform. I wondered what their organization was because they were not in Boy Scout or Cub Scout uniforms. I wondered what they were thinking of the fabulous fountain and all of the people below." —Stephen Harmon

Situated at the edge of the area known as The Concert Ground, the Naumburg Bandshell is the only Neo-Classical building in the park. It replaced a previous (and acoustically poor) cast-iron bandstand in 1923. It has been the site of many musical performances across genres, with concerts by greats like Irving Berlin, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and The Grateful Dead. The Central Park SummerStage concerts originated at this venue.

Mineral Springs Pavilion ca. 1880 The Mineral Springs Pavilion was constructed due to the popularity of a health craze that was sweeping 19th-century New York. It was thought at the time that mineral water was essential to a healthy constitution (which at a time before the Croton Aqueduct supplied fresh water to most New York households it may have been.) Drinking mineral water was thought to be the cure for a number of ailments. Thus, Carl Schultz, the owner of a mineral water company successfully petitioned the Board of Health to have a pavilion, designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wray Mould, that would sell mineral water in the park. It was for a time quite popular, serving as a spot for socialization, however, the supply of readily available clean water meant that the Mineral Springs Pavilion lost its uniqueness and by the 1960s the pavilion was torn down.