First Church of Christ, Scientist, October, 1928.

East River Savings Bank, 1927. The temple-styled Amsterdam Avenue branch of the East River Savings Bank played a role in the Lindbergh kidnapping: a marked bill from the ransom payment was discovered in a deposit at the branch, one of many clues leading investigators to solve the case.

Midtown Theater ARCHITECT: Boak & Paris DATE: 1932 STYLE: Art Deco The Midtown Theater (now Metro Theater), a rare surviving small Art Deco style neighborhood movie theater, has one of the finest facades of its type in New York City. Among the Art Deco buildings in New York City, many of the most notable are skyscrapers and tall apartment buildings, but small buildings including banks, stores, and some theaters were also constructed in this style. The Midtown was designed and built in 1932-33 by Boak & Paris, an architectural firm involved mainly with the construction of apartment houses in the 1920s and 30s. The theater is distinguished by a glazed terra-cotta facade, executed in various colors, predominantly beige and black. A central medallion features bas-relief stylized figures holding theatrical masks representing comedy and tragedy, symbolic of the use of the building as a theater. Constructed during the Depression, when small neighborhood theaters were built instead of the popular large movie palaces of the 1920s, the Midtown is one of the few functioning Pre-World War II movie theaters of the many which once lined Broadway on Manhattan’s Upper West Side

The Metro Theater (formerly Midtown Theatre), ca. 1994. This landmarked, Depression-era theater has since closed, and, as of March, 2016, is slated for retail conversion. The Midtown Theater was completed in 1933, replacing the seven-story tenement building which had occupied its site. Described by the Landmarks Preservation Commission as “a rare surviving small Art Deco style neighborhood movie theater” with “one of the finest facades of its type in New York City,” it recalls a specific era of theater construction, when 1930s austerity led developers to eschew the grand theater architecture of the previous decades. In Edmund Vincent Gillon’s 1994 photo, the marquee advertises showings of “The Client,” a legal drama starring Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon, and Brad Renfro.

The Braender apartment house, ca. 1910. The Braender, named for its German-born developer Philip Braender, is a ten-story apartment building designed by Frederick Browne and completed in 1903. Architecturally, the Braender incorporates a variety of influences into what the New York Times calls a “complicated, even chaotic mix of French Renaissance, Spanish and Baroque styles.”

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.

2641 Broadway, the only surviving 19th century wood-frame building on the Upper West Side, May 9, 1938. When Henry Grimm completed a three-story wood-frame house in 1871, his was the only building on the block. Grimm, an entrepreneur, anticipated the development of the Upper West Side and decided to set up a grocery business to serve the residents who would arrive once paved roads, public transit, and other infrastructure reached the neighborhood. Unfortunately, Grimm ran out of funds before his clientele arrived. The Italianate building was soon converted into the Boulevard House saloon, with rooms for rent upstairs. In 1894, the successful Lower East Side brewer Peter Doegler purchased Grimm’s building, keeping the saloon open to promote his popular German-style lager. Following Prohibition, the ground floor cycled through retail businesses, including the cigar shop and grocery pictured above, while the upper stories were modified to support billboard advertisements. These alterations have damaged recent appeals for landmark designation.

ST. MICHAEL’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH COMPLEX, MANHATTAN Address: 227 West 99th Street New York, NY 10025 The congregation of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church has been worshipping on this site since 1807, outgrowing its previous two buildings before this complex was constructed. The church, parish house and rectory were completed over roughly 25 years, all in the same rock-faced Indiana limestone. The church was designed in the Northern Italian Renaissance or Romanesque-Byzantine style and completed in 1891. Its square clock and bell tower is visible throughout the surrounding neighborhood. It also features Spanish tile roofs and magnificent stained glass windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The parish house, set back from the street, was completed in 1896-97, and the rectory, the final piece of the complex, was completed in 1912-13. The complex is striking in its materials and monumental scale. St. Michael's Church, Parish House and Rectory form one of the finest ecclesiastical complexes in Manhattan. The church building of 1890-91 was designed by Robert W. Gibson. Gibson was a major figure on the New York architectural scene during the late 19th century and was proficient at designing buildings in a great number of stylistic variants. He is best known for the West End Collegiate Church and School designed in the neo-Flemish style. The St. Michael's complex is Romanesque Revival in style, but the Romanesque forms are used in an unusual manner and are combined with a variety of other stylistic motifs to create a singularly eclectic composition. All three buildings are constructed of rock-faced limestone blocks laid in a random pattern and all are strikingly monochromatic. The most powerful feature of the church is the massing of the various liturgical elements --the long nave, apsidal chancel, unevenly-sized transepts, cloistered arcade, tall clerestory, steeply-pitched tiled roof, and most notable, the tall corner clock tower. The square tower, located at the corner of the building, nestled between the apse and the east transept, is based on Italian, Early Christian precedents. Topped by two tiers of open arcades and a pyramidal roof, it is visible for many blocks. The parish house of 1896-97 on West 99th Street is a picturesque, asymmetrically-massed structure set back from the street behind a garden. The building, designed by F. Carles Merry, is Romanesque Revival in form, with rock-faced stone facing, round-arched openings, and stone transom bars. The boldness of the Romanesque Revival forms is tempered by the asymmetrical massing reminiscent of a mid-19th-century picturesque villa and by the Palladian window motif in the gabled projection. The rectory of 1912-13 is located to the west of the parish house and is built out to the lot line, serving to enclose the garden on the third side. Although more austere than the other buildings of the complex, it is designed by Robert W. Gibson in a similar manner and is an integral part of the complex. The church is well known for its series of Tiffany windows and for its acoustics. A new organ was installed in 1967 and is used for recitals. All three buildings are remarkably intact and are in an excellent state of repair.

891 Amsterdam Avenue, 1937. The Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females (ARRAIF) was conceived in 1813. During the "Second Great Awakening," a time when the church aimed to reassert itself, mostly through charity, a group of women established a society to help elderly women who "once enjoyed a good degree of affluence, but now reduced to poverty due to the vicissitudes of Providence." The ARRAIF aimed to aid widows of both the American Revolution and the War of 1812. The first years of the society consisted of raising donations and giving clothing, furniture, and other household items to elderly women in need. In 1837, they established their first brick-and-mortar asylum at 226 East 20th Street with the help of John Jacob Astor and Peter G. Stuyvesant. In the late 1870s, the group purchased new land at 891 Amsterdam Avenue to construct a larger building. The building here was completed in 1883. Architect Richard Morris Hunt created a Victorian Gothic style structure. The new building was open to “any respectable non-Roman Catholic gentlewoman over sixty years of age, on payment of $150 and the surrender of any property she possessed." The building operated as the ARRAIF until about 1968. In 1990, it became a branch of Hostelling International and is currently the largest hostel in North America.

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

School of Holy Name of Jesus Roman Catholic Church, 1926. The parochial school was opened in 1905, five years after Holy Name’s new Gothic Revival church was completed at the southern side of the block.

Grace Methodist Episcopal Church, ca. 1905. The original Grace Methodist Episcopal Church was a small wood-frame chapel on West 104th Street, constructed in 1870. As the once sparse population of the neighborhood boomed around the turn of the century, the need for a larger space became apparent. In 1894 the cornerstone for a new church was dedicated. The resulting structure was a Lombardic-Romanesque building and one of the first churches in the city erected with an iron frame skeleton. Its most defining feature was the 156-foot tower at the southwest corner of the building. Unfortunately the church was destroyed in a 1983 fire. It was replaced in 1990 with a contemporary complex that includes a small church and an apartment building for clergy and low-income families.

450 Columbus Avenue, date unknown. Originally intended to be luxury apartments, the two buildings (connected on the Columbus Avenue front by a cornice) were completed in 1890 and 1891 as the Endicott Hotel . The hotel was quite opulent, with steam heat, electric lighting, and a glass-roofed restaurant. At the time of its opening, the Ninth Avenue El's 81st Street station ran just next to the hotel's third floor windows. A location for high society and political events, the hotel also had an unusually high rate of disasters and scandals, including assaults, murders, suicides, and plenty of mafia activity. By the middle of the 20th century the building was a cheap welfare hotel. As the city and neighborhood revitalized and gentrified in the 1980s, the once grand, then seedy hotel, was completely renovated and converted to condos.

The Midtown Theatre, 1933. The Marquee advertises “Double Harness,” a 1933 film starring Ann Harding and William Howell.

St. Michael’s Protestant Episcopal Church, viewed from 99th Street, ca. 1907. The church’s 160-foot tower is, according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, “based on Italian, Early Christian precedents.”

First Church of Christ, Scientist ARCHITECT: Carrère & Hastings DATE: 1899-1903 STYLE: Beaux-Arts The First Church of Christ, Scientist, built in 1899-1903 at the northwest of Central Park West and 96th Street was designed in the finest tradition of Beaux-Arts classicism. Although the architects of his church designed a few churches, the Christian Science building is very much in keeping with its designs for other public buildings.

East River Savings Bank ARCHITECT: Walker & Gillette DATE: 1926-27 The building has two major limestone-clad facades, which are dominated by giant Ionic columns. The Amsterdam Avenue facade was doubled in size when the building was enlarged. The columns flank paired pedimented entrances on Amsterdam Avenue and recessed double-height windows lighting the main banking room on both Amsterdam Avenue and West 96th Street. A boldly-scaled entablature and parapet enclose a penthouse floor. The building, which is a reminder of the important role that savings banks have played in their communities, remains largely intact.

First Church of Christ, Scientist, ca. 1990. The First Church of Christ, Scientist, was designed by Carrère & Hastings and built between 1899-1903. The firm’s imposing Beaux-Arts design fulfilled an intriguing commission: to create a grand ecclesiastical architecture for a relatively young religion. The design incorporates a large central auditorium, in addition to two upper stories of offices and areas for study. The building is notable for its large stained glass windows, especially those facing Central Park. In 2004, the church was sold to the California-based Crenshaw Christian Center. Ten years later, it was sold again, this time to a private developer. A planned adaptive redevelopment/condominium conversion project was later rejected, and in early 2018 the Children's Museum of Manhattan announced that it had acquired the building.

St. Michael's Protestant Episcopal Church, ca. 1915. St. Michael’s parish was founded in 1807 as an outpost of the Trinity Church on Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. Bloomingdale, as the Manhattan Valley section of the Upper West Side was then known, was a largely rural district, close to the Hudson River and the summer country homes of Trinity pewholders. Accordingly, the first church was a simple wooden structure at the corner of 99th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The second church, built in 1854, was another wooden structure in the Carpenter Gothic style. The present St Michael’s church, a 1,500-seat Romanesque structure by Robert W. Gibson, was completed in 1891. The church features several works designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, including a set of seven stained-glass lancet windows, a reredos mosaic in the Chapel of the Angels, and various decorative elements. St. Michael’s was designated a New York City Landmark in April, 2016.