As the city grew and changed, Olmsted and Vaux’s design for Morning Side Park changed with it. In their first plan of 1873 the grandest of the park entrances was to be at the corner of Manhattan Ave and West 110th Street (Cathedral Parkway). This corner was closest to the northwest corner of Central Park just a short block away and one can imagine the designers envisioning park goers strolling back and forth between the two parks. Here we see a major change that most certainly made them rethink that approach. This 1879 eastward looking view of the elevated train tracks built along 110th Street just south of what would become Morningside Park, show what a changed prospect now presented itself to the designers. Olmsted and Vaux’s second 1887 plan for the park took into account this dramatically changed condition. It retained but played down the southern entrance and made more of the grand staircase leading into the middle of the park from Morningside Drive at 116th Street.

110th Street Curve, also known as “suicide curve,” 1913. In 1879, the elevated tracks of the IRT Ninth Avenue Line were extended northward from the 104th Street station. At 110th Street, the trestle turned 90 degrees to the right on 110th Street, before turning uptown again at Eighth Avenue. The 110th Street station and adjacent tracks earned the nickname “suicide curve,” as the high elevated railway had become a destination for jumpers. In 1927, the New York Times reported that local business owners were concerned that the curve’s reputation was a deterrent to customers. The Ninth Avenue El ceased operations in June, 1940, and the railway was dismantled shortly thereafter. While many sources claim the tracks stood a dizzy 100 feet above street level, a 1940 dispatch in the New York Times quoted the project superintendent overseeing the trestle's demolition, who claimed a maximum height of 56 feet. Today, the elevated tracks former right of way is still visible at the southeast corner of 110th Street and Columbus Avenue: older buildings are set back from the corner, while more recent single-story construction occupies the land once underneath the tracks.

When you’re planning to build some of the world’s most spectacular and challenging tunnels, you need to know ahead of time what you’ll be digging through. Is it soil, sand, or stone? Is the stone strong and secure or friable and likely to collapse? To know what the bedrock is like, you need a drill rig to dig it out from hundreds of feet below the surface. The drill extracts geological core borings, cylindrical samples that provide a cross-section of subsurface conditions and let engineers know whether the area is good for tunneling and what construction methods should be used. The drill bits are tubular and loaded with shot or embedded with diamonds to cut around the core, like a drinking straw plunging into a milkshake (except really, really hard!).

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.”

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.

General Memorial Hospital, 1917. This still standing fortresslike French Renaissance building was constructed in 1887 as the New York Cancer Hospital, the first medical facility to focus solely on cancer. The planning and design of the building reflected prevailing ideas about illness, its causes, and treatment on that era. The hospital was funded by, among others, John Jacob Astor III, who wished to refute the stigma of cancer (in the Victorian period, cancer thought to be contagious and a disease of the poor or those with lacking hygiene). The patients were kept in the round towers, as it was believed that germs flourished in corners. The large windows in the circular towers allowed for more light, better ventilation, and a better view of the patients for the medical staff. Given the low survival rate of cancer patients in the early years of cancer research, the building became known as a death trap (with cancer advancement came an improved reputation). In the 1950s the building became a nursing home, but the operation shut down in 1974 with claims of patient abuse and crumbling facilities. The city designated the building a landmark in 1976, which saved it from demolition over the next few decades as plans were put forth for reuse, but none came to be. All the while the building continued to deteriorate and became a den for drug addicts during New York's roughest years. Finally, in 2001 a new owner began work on a residential tower on the west side of the lot. September 11th halted work, but in 2002 new loans and Columbia University's purchase of apartments in the new tower turned the tide. The tower was completed and the old hospital was restored and renovated into 17 luxury units. The roofs were fixed, the mortar repointed, and original windows were replicated.

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.

At the same time as architect Henry F Kilburn was completing work on West-Park Presbyterian Church on West 86th Street, he was building another masterpiece 20 blocks north. Both churches were built to accommodate the Upper West Side’s rapidly growing population. This church, with its light-yellow, speckled brick and detailed terra-cotta banding, once housed the largest Presbyterian congregation in New York City.

New-York Cancer Hospital ARCHITECT: Charles C. Haight DATE: 1884-86 STYLE: Hospital Although the construction of the hospital was essentially finished in 1886, the opening was delayed a year because of difficulties in establishing proper sewer connections and the necessity of erecting two additional buildings; one a small mortuary building, no longer standing; the other, a boiler-house. laundry, and servant dormitory, still standing at 32 West I06th Street. When the New York Cancer Hospital opened, it was the first hospital in the United States and only the second in the world to be devoted exclusively to cancer patients (the other was the London Cancer Hospital). The death of President Ulysses S. Grant from cancer in 1885 was a factor which helped arouse public interest in the funding of the hospital. It was not until the 1880s that cancer was being seriously studied for the first time, and the New York Cancer Hospital was anxious to establish itself as a proper scientific institution. It promoted the use of surgical techniques for cancer treatment and the belief that this helped save lives. Many of the cancer patients were treated free of charge.

In this view from 1911 we see the rugged topography of the site which is just one block wide but 13 blocks long. The Olmsted and Vaux design highlights the natural setting by creating two linear path systems, one broad and meandering and the other cutting through the Manhattan schist and hugging a massive buttressed retaining wall along the park’s western edge.

Atlas Motor Company Garage, ca. 1907.

Elevated railroad at 110th Street and 8th Avenue, ca. 1895.