The Ardsley, 1931. Completed in 1931 the building remained "The Ardsley," though it was a very different structure. Designed by famed Art Deco architect Emery Roth, the now 22- story building was a Mayan inspired Deco masterpiece. Because of the changes in zoning in 1916, taller buildings were required to include setbacks for increased light and air. Roth took this requirement and ran with, creating ziggurat-like setbacks decorated with Mayan style motifs and executed in black brick on a beige facade. The apartments within were smaller and less extravagant than the ones in the previous building (large rooms but no servants quarters). The exception to this was the triplex on the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd floors. This 11-room suite included 15-foot ceilings and a wood-burning fireplace in every room. Its occupants also had access to a wrap-around terrace on the 21st floor and two terraces on the 22nd floor.

Eldorado Apartments ARCHITECT: Margon & Holder; Emery Roth DATE: 1929-31 STYLE: Art Deco The Eldorado, extending along the entire blockfront of Central Park West between 90th and 9lst Streets, is the northernmost of the four twin-towered apartment houses that give Central Park West its distinctive skyline silhouette. The Eldorado was designed in 1929 by the architectural firm of Margon & Holder with the renowned early 20th-century New York City architect Emery Roth as a consultant. These architects created one of the finest and most dramatically massed Art Deco style residential buildings in New York City.

Belnord, ca. 1909. Designed by the architectural firm of Hiss and Weekes and completed in 1908, the Belnord Apartments is a 12-story, Italian Renaissance apartment building. The building occupies the full block between West 86th and 87th Streets and Amsterdam and Broadway. Similar to other full block apartments in New York City the building surrounds a large, landscaped interior courtyard. Originally all entrances to the building were located within the central courtyard. Two low, barrel vaulted arches on the 86th Street facade allow car access to the interior yard. Famous residents of the building include actor Zero Mostel and jazz impresario Art D'Lugoff.

Public School 166 ARCHITECT: C. B. J. Snyder DATE: 1897-99 STYLE: Collegiate Gothic Built in 1897-99, Public School 166 is one of the few remaining nineteenth-century institutional buildings, and one of the oldest extant public schools, on the Upper West Side. The school was designed by New York’s Superintendent of School Buildings, C.B.J. Snyder, who held that position from 1891 to 1923, exerting a tremendous influence on the design and construction of the city’s schools. He created buildings that were inventive, functional, and handsome as civic monuments and is credited with introducing the Collegiate Gothic style (usually associated with universities) to New York’s public school architecture where it was used for over twenty years.

The Ardsley, 1928. Built in 1900 and designed by George W. Keister, the ten-story apartment building was a grand apartment house. The rounded bays of the Central Park West facade allowed for excellent views of the Park and for ideal cross ventilation. The individual apartments were massive with six to twelve rooms; some apartments had three bathrooms. Other features included private telephones, electric lighting and individual "refrigeration plants." But the gilded, over the top 19th century style of the building was, by the 1920s, passé. The older Victorian style buildings of Central Park West began to be demolished and in their place, sleek Art Deco style buildings were rising.

127 West 89th Street, unknown date. This theatre, which is for sale, was formerly the Battery Swedish Methodist Episcopal Church

12-16 West 86th Street, ca. 1913. Designed by Alexander Welch, for speculative developers William and Thomas Hall, the row mansions were constructed in 1910. No. 14 (at center) was designed in the neo-Renaissance style, while no. 16 (at right) is neo-Georgian.

Using Google Street View if you drop yourself into New York City, there is a very high chance that you will come across scaffolding over sidewalks. Also known as sidewalk sheds, these can be seen all over the five boroughs. Scaffolding has always been there across the entirety of New York City, but we don’t really know why and what is the purpose of scaffolding. Scaffolding in New York City is 400 miles long, which protects pedestrians from falling bricks and provides shelter when it rains. However, scaffolding destroys city landscapes and leads to other safety concerns, especially when walking at night. Some scaffolding covered the buildings over ten years, which also led to the fact that people never actually get a chance to see the entire design of the building. A misconception surrounding these sidewalk sheds is that they are up because of all the constant new developments in the city. The truth is far from this. To understand why almost every street in New York City looks like this we have to go back to 1979 when Grace Gold, a freshman at Barnard College in Columbia University was killed by a falling piece of masonry. The city responded to this by passing Local Law 10 in 1980 which was later amended by Local Law 11 in 1980 which required buildings over six stories tall to have their facades inspected every five years. If they fail inspection, the building owner is required to repair the facade, and in the meantime install a sidewalk shed to protect people from falling debris. The problem is, the law isn’t working as intended. Buildings fail inspection all the time and that is primarily because New York is chock full of buildings whose exterior masonry was done decades if not centuries ago. Repairing the facades of these buildings is very expensive. But here is what isn’t expensive, indefinitely leaving a sidewalk shed up. For most building owners it is cheaper to just leave the shed up, pay the occasional fine, and hope residents don't mind paying $3,000 a month to live in a building they’ve never seen. So that's exactly what they do. That's why a building like 409 Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem has had its sidewalk shed up for over 15 years.

Metropolitan Apartments, at the S.W. corner of West 88th Street, 1901. The first subway line, which traveled from City Hall to 145th Street on the West Side, was constructed using the 'cut and cover' method. Workers dug giant trenches through existing streets, laid the tracks, and covered them back up. This was a very disruptive construction method, as entire sections of streets were blocked off for weeks or months at a time. This photograph depicts subway construction at West 87th Street, three years before the subway officially opened.

The Stephen Wise Towers is a 19-story public housing building erected by the City between 1964 and 1965. As an experiment in playground design (think more than the regular ol' slides and jungle gyms), NYCHA commissioned Sardinian immigrant and well-known artist Constantino Nivola to enliven the 100-ft. by 200-ft. lot between the housing and a nearby school. Nivola said, "There is a desolation and barrenness to these buildings. I wanted to relieve that, to introduce a friendly atmosphere in plastic form.” The resulting public art was rendered not in plastic but in cast stone. Nivola created two 9-foot-tall pyramid sculptures and an 80-foot long mural out of cement. But the best known of his works here are the band of 18 chubby abstract horsies. The fat horses were cast with marble dust to sparkle in three colors. The fanciful creatures did not fare well early on, having their snouts knocked off my vandals the same year (1965) they were installed. This ca. 1971 photo captures them post-nose-removal. The horses with the short legs remain today, though perhaps made even more squat by additional layers of cement on the ground they stand on. The murals and pyramids have survived mostly well. The NYCHA partner and non-profit Fund for Public Housing announced in 2016 plans to make the restoration of public art at public housing a priority.

"Amsterdam Avenue, south from and including West 90th Street, showing W.P.A. employees resurfacing the former street car track bed, 1936." As transportation infrastructure changed in the city, so to did the streetscapes. The deconstruction of the elevated trains introduced sunlight to streets that had been in shadows for decades. Similarly as streetcars and trolleys were retired and replaced by buses, the streets they traveled needed to be repaved for automobile traffic. This type of infrastructure work was undertaken by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression.

West Park Presbyterian Church ARCHITECT: Henry Kilburn DATE: 1889-1890 STYLE: Romanesque Revival The West Park Presbyterian Church is considered to be one of the best examples of a Romanesque Revival style religious structure in New York City. The extraordinarily deep color of its red sandstone cladding and the church’s bold forms with broad, round-arched openings and a soaring tower at the corner of West 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue produce a monumental and distinguished presence along those streets.

My Archive Spring 2019 "January 28, 2004. Took my 2 1/2-year-old son out for a walk after a snow storm." —Seth Jonas

View of 96th Street reservoir from 350 Central Park West. Taken on 7/20/1942.

The Ardsley, 320 Central Park West. Door detail, ca. 1990.

127 West 89th Street, ca. 1925. Formerly the Battery Swedish Methodist Episcopal Church, 127 West 89th Street, between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. This church was remodeled into a motion picture theatre and by 1931 the theatre was boarded up and offered for sale.

El Dorado Apartments, ca. 1920. The history of the El Dorado Apartments is similar to that of its nearby neighbor The Ardsley. The original El Dorado (seen in this photograph) was an eight-story speculative apartment house completed in 1902. Somewhat similar in design to the original Ardsley, the CPW front of the building had large rounded corners to allow for sweeping views of the park and good cross ventilation. In the 1920s the real estate market on Central Park West boomed and a number of the older apartment houses were demolished and replaced. In 1929 investor Frederick Brown bought the first El Dorado and resold the site to Louis Klosk, a Bronx-based developer. The financial crisis that followed would eventually stall the construction and force Klosk to foreclose. The eventual building, finished late in 1931 under new ownership, was a 30-story, twin tower Art Deco building. Designed by Margon & Holder, and their associate architect Emery Roth (who designed the second Ardsley) the large building has terraced setbacks on the towers topped by abstract geometric spires.

Belnord Apartments ARCHITECT: Hiss & Weekes DATE: 1908-09 A notable feature of this architectural scheme is the manner in which the window arrangements differ from those in most contemporary high-rise buildings. Instead of establishing a uniform window size and subordinating the entire composition to it, the architect of the Belnord chose to use windows of several sizes, which were then further differentiated by varying their enframements and embellishments. Handsomely decorated panels were used to tie the corner windows together vertically, which, combined with the rusticated brickwork at the corners of the building, constitute a very subtle but effective vertical emphasis for each of the four long, horizontal facades.

39-35 West 89th Street, ca.1915. This series of Renaissance Revival rowhouses was constructed in 1894-1895. The row, from nos.19-39, were designed by Gilbert Schellenger, who designed homes all over the city, including many in the proposed Bedford-Stuyvesant historic district.

Starting in the late 1960s, groups such as the Public Art Fund and New York City's Public Arts Council funded works of public art all around New York. These sculptures were sometimes celebrated, and sometimes ill-received, often prompting both civil discussion and lively debate.

Jewish Center, ca. 1918. While the Upper West Side boasted a number of Jewish congregations in the early decades of the 20th century, most observed a casual prayer environment, or in the case of Congregation Shearith Israel, offered more formal, but foreign services. Two successful clothing manufacturers who moved to the neighborhood, Joseph H. Cohen and William Fischman, looked for but did not find a traditional Orthodox Synagogue. With the religious leadership of Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, the two men founded the Jewish Center in 1918. The new synagogue building, designed by Louis Abramson in a Neo-Classical style, housed not only a main sanctuary. The tall building was an extensive facility that sought to serve not only as a spiritual home, but also a cultural, social, and recreational home for its members.

40 West 86th Street, ca. 1980.

Apthorp Mansion, 1891. The Apthorp Farm was a large plot of land on what is now the Upper West Side of Manhattan (approximately 78th to 99th Streets, from Central Park to the Hudson River). Loyalist and merchant Charles Ward Apthorp purchased parcels and built a mansion in 1764 at what is now 90th Street and Columbus Avenue. It was considered one of the grandest pre-Revolutionary houses in Manhattan. The Hudson River-facing mansion was called "Elmwood" because of the large, mature elm trees that stood nearby. During the Revolutionary War the home was occupied by both sides at various points, a hard fact for the faithful British subject, Apthorp. In the mid 19th century the house and some of the surrounding land became "Elm Park," a beer garden, picnic area, and inn popular among German immigrants. It was also used as a parade ground, where in 1870 a clash between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants resulted in eight deaths. The home was demolished in 1891, while the original acreage had largely been divided and sold off decades earlier. In 1908 a large apartment house was constructed on the full block between Broadway and West End Avenue and West 78th and West 79th streets. That plot of land had once been occupied by a different home built by Apthorp in 1759 (and sold to someone else less than ten years later). The 20th century apartment building was named for the original landowner.

32 West 88th Street, 1911. Built as a series of buildings on the south side of 88th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue in 1887-1889, no. 32 is one of a few of the buildings to retain the majority of its original features. Designed by Thom and Wilson, the rowhouses here are of a Renaissance Revival style with Romanesque and Gothic Revival features. A number of these buildings were altered in the 1910s and 1920s. They had their stoops removed, new basement entrances created, and some even had their cornices removed as well. No. 32 retains its prominent dogleg front staircase.