My Archive Spring 2019 "This photo was taken by my buddy "Willie" who was attending Manhattan Community College and was in the school's student photography club. Willie had taken me to visit his old neighborhood since moving to my neighborhood on West 145th Street." —JP Nieves

The then-new location Museum of the City of New York, seen from across Fifth Avenue near 103rd St. In the niche at right, Adolph Alexander Weinman’s statue of DeWitt Clinton, the sixth Governor of New York.

Ogden Codman House ARCHITECT: Ogden Codman DATE: 1912-13 STYLE: French The Parisian character of the house is most emphatically to be found in the street elevation, with its strong, rusticated first floor and high double carriage door entrance, which serves also as a vestibule. It is again expressed in the second floor stone balcony supported on carved brackets, with beautifully detailed wrought iron railing extending across the width of the entire front. The second floor windows are very high with arched heads indicating the importance of the drawing room behind them. The third-floor windows are square in shape with heavy molded stone frames with swags beneath the sills. All windows of this three-story section are shuttered in a typically French manner. Completing the composition of the facade is a well-proportioned stone cornice at the fourth floor level behind which rises a slate Mansard roof with three unusual dormer windows, distinguished by their handsome semicircular stone frames and arched roofs.

By 1897, New York City was well on its way to becoming the metropolis of steel and concrete that we know today. Elevator cars were carrying passengers up and down in the earliest skyscrapers, while the elevated rail lines stretched further and further uptown. It was around this time that photographer James Reuel Smith embarked upon a quest to document part of the city’s vanishing pastoral life—its springs and wells.

Park Avenue and East 100th Street, to the east of the New York and Harlem Railroad's Harlem line tracks.

St. Cecilia's Church, 1942. Construction on the brick Romanesque Revival structure began in 1883, and was completed in 1887. The completion of the upper church (the larger more ornate space) in 1887 was not only managed by the pastor at the time, but he, Reverend Michael J. Phelan, acted as general contractor and enlisted the skills of church members to finish the construction. Designed by Napoleon Le Brun & Sons, the firm was not involved in the construction at all. The red brick church, with terra cotta relief of St. Cecilia on the front facade, was designated a landmark in 1976 and continues to serve the East Harlem community today.

Saint Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral ARCHITECT: John Bergesen DATE: 1901-02 STYLE: Church The St. Nicholas congregation, which was established in 1894, met in a rented house at 323 Second Avenue until a permanent building could be erected. The purchase of the 75-by-100-foot lot, on which the present church buildings stand, was undertaken by Dean Alexander Hotovitsky on behalf of the congregation in September 1899. The lot was smaller than what had initially been sought, and it was not a corner site, but the high cost of real estate in New York limited the selection. The New York City congregation was unable to fully finance the building, so the Synod of Russia was given Imperial permission to collect money throughout the Russian Empire.

The Harlem line railroad tracks, then operated by the New York Railways Corporation, as seen from the northeast corner of Park Avenue and East 100th Street. Today the buildings on the western side of Park Avenue have been replaced by the NYCHA George Washington Carver Houses.

The McGown's Pass Tavern was built in 1883-1884 and served refreshments to Central Park visitors for the next 30 years. Originally called the Mount St. Vincent's Hotel (after an earlier establishment), the first proprietor was Patrick H. McCann, brother-in-law to a Tammany Hall boss. Supposedly McCann lost his lease on the business in 1890 after refusing to provide Tammany men free entertainment (a capital offense to the presumptuous and overly indulged political machine leaders). The Tavern closed in 1915, its furnishings sold at auction, and the building razed.

Hydrant at 1181 Fifth Avenue, on the northeast corner of East 99th Street

New York Academy of Medicine ca. 1927 A group of respected physicians founded The New York Academy of Medicine in 1847 to provide a voice for “the advancement of the art and science of medicine, the maintenance of a public medical Library, and the promotion of public health and medical education." As an advocate for modern ideas in medicine, the Academy was an important part of improving public health and sanitation as well as documenting the city's populace, particularly births and deaths (leading to the eventual formation of the Medical Examiner’s Office). Though it has occupied multiple buildings during its lifetime, including the old Sherry's Hotel (10 West 44th Street) and 15 West 43rd, it is now housed on Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street. Its current home, to which it moved in 1926, was designed by York and Sawyer. The style of the building is eclectic, incorporating Byzantine Revival and Lombardian Romanesque elements. Notably, inscriptions and mythological figures and animals relating to medicine adorn its walls. The building's library remains one of the most significant collections of medical and public health records in the United States, encompassing everything from papyri on surgery to Sigmund Freud's original writings to a prototype for George Washington's dentures.

St. Cecilia Roman Catholic Church complex, built from 1883-87, is located at 120 East 106th Street in between Lexington and Park Avenues. St. Cecilia’s was one of the first religious institutions built in the area. The church has been in continuous use as a Roman Catholic parish church since the chapel was completed in 1884. The adjacent buildings that housed the Convent were finished in 1887.

The New York Academy of Medicine, a neo-Romanesque building by York and Sawyer, was constructed 1925-1926 with funding from the Carnegie Foundation. More information on the NYAM is available on the OHNY website here.

The Museo Del Barrio, sometimes simply referred to as "El Museo," is a museum dedicated to primarily Puerto Rican Art. The institution was born out of East Harlem protests in the late 1960s that called for education in neighborhood public schools to include curricula that acknowledged and addressed the heritage of many of the families whose children attended these schools. A group of Central and East Harlem activists demanded for resources to be made available to students. In response, Superintendent Martin W. Frey of District 4 appointed Puerto Rican educator and activist Raphael Montaña Ortiz to create the educational materials necessary for this change. In response, Montaña Ortiz formed the idea to create a community-based museum that would supplement this necessity. A museum "del Barrio" (of the neighborhood) would be accessible to all ages, not just those attending the schools of District 4. East Harlem's primarily Puerto-Rican and Caribbean population needed to also benefit from this asset in their community. The endeavor was funded by the Board of Education from 1969-1974, which enabled Montaña Ortiz to travel to Puerto Rico and make connections with local museums and anthropologists alongside Superintendent Martin W. Frey. Additionally, Montaña Ortiz visited museums across New York City to survey their collections of Puerto-Rican Art. Montaña Ortiz was conscious to involve the immediate community in discussions of the project, along with members of The Young Lords Political Party, The Real Great Society, and Marcos Dimas and Adrian Garcia who would later form the Art Worker's Coalition. The museum was founded in a classroom of PS 125 at 425 West 123rd Street, where District 4's offices were also located. Montaña Ortiz said the following of the museum: "The cultural disenfranchisement I experience as a Puerto Rican has prompted me to seek a practical alternative to the orthodox museum, which fails to meet my needs for an authentic ethnic experience. To afford me and others to establish living connections with our own culture, I founded El Museo del Barrio." El Museo del Barrio moved from the PS 125 to PS 206 and then subsequent storefronts in the vicinity. El Museo later moved to an old firehouse on 104th street, where it launched it's "Mobile Unit" that traveled to serve schools and events. Eventually, in 1977, El Museo settled in the Heckscher Building on 104th Street, where it occupied the ground floor. In this move, it joined the Cultural Institutions Group (CIG), an association of 23 cultural organizations housed in city-owned buildings. El Museo is the founding member of the Museum Mile. The permanent collection of El Museo del Barrio spans over 800 years of Puerto-Rican, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Art. There are now around 6,500 pieces in the collection, and El Museo hosts a variety of temporary exhibitions on Puerto-Rican and Latin American Modern Art. Additionally, the institution is the site for many festivals, educational programs, and events. The most well known and widely attended festivity is the parade for Three Kings Day in January. The museum underwent a renovation and expansion in 2009 and another renovation of its theater from 2018 to 2019. In 2012, an exhibition at now-defunct gallery Exit Art and a subsequent publication called "Alternative Histories" said that El Museo del Barrio went from alternative art space to a globally established museum. In El Museo's mission statement, it states the following: "To enhance the sense of identity, self-esteem and self-knowledge of the Caribbean and Latin American peoples by educating them in their artistic heritage and bringing art and artists into their communities."

141-145 East 103rd Street between Lexington and Third Avenues.

The Lucy Drexel Dahlgren House is a historic home located at 15 East 96th Street. It was built in 1915-16, and was designed by Ogden Codman, Jr. in the French Renaissance Revival style. Codman, Jr, with the novelist Edith Wharton, authored The Decoration of Houses (1897), a well-respected manual on interior design that criticized Victorian interior design as heavy, poorly planned, and wasteful of space. The wealthy and socially prominent Lucy Drexel Dahlgren spent little time in her house at 15 East 96th Street. Apparently, Dahlgren rented the house to the French jeweler Pierre Cartier from 1922 until she sold it to him in 1927. In 1945, on his retirement, Cartier sold the house to the Roman Catholic Church of St. Francis de Sales (135 East 96th Street), which used it as a convent for the nuns who taught at the church's parochial school. In 1981 the church sold the house to a private owner, who restored it.

Artist and educator Raphael Montañez Ortiz and a coalition of Puerto Rican activists founded El Museo del Barrio in 1970 to combat the city’s institutional indifference to Puerto Rican art and culture. Over the past five decades, El Museo has become a major institution celebrating and promoting Latin American art, with a permanent collection of over 6,500 objects spanning 800 years of history. El Museo also performs outreach and education for young people of Caribbean and Latin American descent to enhance their understanding of and pride in their heritage. El Museo’s permanent home since 1977 is a building commissioned by philanthropists August and Anna Heckscher for the headquarters of The Heckscher Foundation for Children, and donated to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children as a shelter for abused and neglected children. Its interior features a series of tile murals on the ground floor depicting storybook tales and children at play, which El Museo restored in 2008-12, as well as the Heckscher Theater, which hosted performances for and by children. El Museo undertook a renovation of the theater in 1995-2000, renaming it Teatro Heckscher.

St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral, ca. 1970. The congregation of St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church was founded in 1894. When fundraising for a church building was undertaken in 1900 the Synod of Russian was given permission to ask for donations within the Russian Empire. One of the earliest gifts from this effort was from Czar Nicholas II himself. The Baroque style design of the church, inspired by Moscow cathedrals, was created by John Bergesen, a New York architect of Russian descent. The church, topped with its eye-catching onion domed cupolas, was dedicated in November of 1902. The church was elevated to cathedral status in 1903 and in 1905 the Diocesan seat was moved from San Fransisco to here.

Mt. Sinai Hospital ca. 1904 On May 22, 1901, Isaac Wallach, President of the Mount Sinai Board of Directors, placed the cornerstone of the new hospital buildings at 100th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, a neighborhood that was experiencing a surge of development. The ten new buildings, which filled the entire block from Fifth to Madison Avenues, 100th to 101st Streets, were dedicated on March 15, 1904. Equipped with 456 beds (up from 200 at the Lexington Avenue site), the hospital needed to expand again by 1913, when the campus took over two-thirds of the 99th Street block along Fifth Avenue. This expansion included larger private patient facilities (allowing the old private pavilion to be used for a new model of care: semi-private rooms), a larger employee dormitory on 99th Street to house the non-medical staff, a new children’s pavilion, and a pediatric outpatient department building on the south side of 100th Street. This building program was completed in 1922. Other expansions followed. In 1952, Mount Sinai’s obstetrical service began with the establishment of the Klingenstein Maternity Pavilion. Ten years later the Klingenstein Clinical Center opened on Madison Avenue to house the Psychiatry Department as well as medical-surgical semi-private rooms that replaced large, communal, open wards. The towering Annenberg Building opened in 1974. The next significant construction came with the razing of the 1904 buildings to make way for the Guggenheim Pavilion, designed by internationally-renowned architect I.M. Pei and dedicated in 1992. Three years later, the creation of the new Primary Care Building on Madison Avenue, 101st to 102nd Streets, brought pediatrics, geriatrics, and internal medicine outpatient services together to better serve the community. Also in 1995, the East Building on Madison Avenue opened with state-of-the-art laboratories as well as patient care areas.

Streetcars on Lexington Avenue, as seen from the northwest corner of 102nd Street, 1931. Nicknamed "crackup hill" or "Duffy's Hill" for the Tammany Hall Alderman Michael James Duffy, who built rowhouses in the area, this block was the site of frequent traffic accidents. Visible in the lower-left portion of the frame is the entrance to the 6 train at 103rd Street.

Green Line Car Barns, March 1, 1928. Constructed in the late 1880s or early 1890s as a streetcar barn, this building on Lexington Avenue was used by the Metropolitan Street Railway Company during the height of their operations. By 1907 the company controlled 47 streetcar lines and 300 miles of track. This car barn served the Lexington Avenue and Lennox Avenue lines. The building functioned in the later 20th century as a MaBSTOA facility (Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transportation Operating Authority). The building was razed and replaced with a new bus facility in 2003 (described by the AIA Guide to NYC as functional, up-to-date, and banal). In 2012, the 100th Street Bus Depot was renamed the Tuskegee Airmen Bus Depot in honor of the World War II African-American military pilots and support personnel.

St. Cecilia’s Roman Catholic Church Designed by Napoleon LeBrun & Sons, 1883-87 116 East 106th Street Neville & Bagge, 1907 This beautiful Romanesque Revival style church was built for the parish of St. Cecilia’s Roman Catholic Church, which, beginning in the 1870s, worshipped in the former Old Red House, a hotel on East 105th Street. In 1881, the church purchased this property and hired Napoleon LeBrun & Sons to design proper church facilities. The result is a richly ornate brick and terra cotta church featuring a large relief of St. Cecilia, patron saint of music, embedded into an arched panel on the building’s central gable. The adjacent “Regina Angelorum” was originally two separate buildings, a four-story tenement built in 1883-84 and a school built in 1885-87. The two buildings were combined in 1906-07 with a façade by Neville & Bagge, but still had two separate functions: a home for working women and a convent. In the late 1930s, the convent took over the entire building until 2004, when the building was converted to the Cristo Rey New York High School.

In tandem with our exhibition, Cycling in the City: A 200 Year History, we are excited to invite you on a bike tour throughout our neighborhood. MCNY's little section of the world, nestled between the Upper East Side and East Harlem, has a plethora of amazing buildings and sites with an even more amazing history. We suggest that you stick to the labeled bike lanes and follow the safety rules of biking in the city. Never text and ride at the same time, and always wear a helmet!

The site of the Lexington Avenue Explosion on July 4, 1914. Members of the Anarchist Black Cross along with a member of the Industrial Workers of the World had been plotting to assassinate John D. Rockefeller by blowing up his home in Tarrytown, NY. Their dynamite explosive detonated prematurely, killing four — including three conspirators — and destroying the upper floors of 1626 Lexington Avenue.

The Museum of the City of New York was founded in 1923 by Henry Collins Brown, a Scottish-born writer with a vision for a populist approach to the city. The Museum was originally housed in Gracie Mansion, the future residence of the Mayor of New York. The City offered land on Fifth Avenue between 103rd-104th Streets and construction for Joseph H. Freedlander’s Georgian Colonial-Revival building started in 1929 and was completed in 1932. Freedlander’s red brick museum was not his only contribution to New York City history: he’s also known for designing the city’s first-ever traffic signals.