St. Francis Court, ca. 1910. Early advertising for St. Franics Court notes that its location on "the choicest corner' of Riverside Drive afford it 20-mile views of the Hudson River and the hills of New Jersey. The apartments offered in this Neville & Bagge-designed building were five, six, or seven rooms with wood floors and a long distance telephone in each apartment! They rented for between $700 and $1500 a year.

498 West 130th Street, ca. 1932.

West 130th Street ferry, with service to points in New Jersey, ca. 1915. The West Harlem Piers sit at a low point between the bluffs of Morningside and Washington Heights, where Manhattan’s inhabitants have long accessed the waters of the Hudson River. In the early 1800s, Manhattan’s merchant class — and those seeking a more bucolic life — began to build country homes overlooking the Hudson River. By 1808, ferry service connected the new village of Manhattanville to New Jersey. A century later, Irving Underhill’s photo includes placards advertising services to Newark, Englewood, Paterson, Rutherford, Edgewater, Hackensack, Leonia, Fort Lee, and Tenafly. Ferry service was discontinued in 1965 when the pier was demolished.

125th Street and Twelfth Avenue, under the Riverside Drive Viaduct, November 10, 1937.

407 West 130th Street, unknown date.

Freshwater spring at the Tiemann & Company Paint & Dye Works, 1897. In the early decades of the 19th century Manhattanville, in West Harlem, was a sleepy area of farms and a few out-of-the-city mansions. In 1832 a freshwater spring was discovered near Broadway and 125th Street (then called Manhattan Street). With plentiful water for production operations businessman, Anthony Tiemann, moved his Tiemann & Company Paint & Dye Works uptown, settling on a large plot at 560 Riverside Drive. The company, founded in 1804, was one of the earliest color works in America. This move began the slow but steady industrialization of Manhattanville. Tiemann retired a few years after the move uptown and his son Daniel F. (who was later Mayor of New York 1858-1860) took over control of the business. About 50 German men and their families had moved to Manhattanville to work in the factory when it was established here. Within the first decade, the factory grew to cover 40 lots with more than 120 workers. These Germans helped to create a prominent German community uptown. Following a number of fires in the 19th century (dye making materials + a spark= bad news), the factory was sold in 1902. The young boy in the photo is playfully shooting water out of Tiemann's spring situated on the factory property.

The Riverside Drive Viaduct was built in 1901. The 50-foot tall elevated roadway is an extension of Riverside Drive. The Drive splits into two paths at the terminus of Riverside Park which converge at the entrance to the Viaduct. Aside from a masonry approach on both the north and south entrance, the structure is entirely steel. At the time of its construction, the girders over 125th street were the largest ever built. F. Stuart Williamson was the chief engineer of the project, which was regarded as a civic monument. The Scientific American referred to Riverside Drive as "a continuous drive of ten miles along the picturesque banks of the Hudson and Harlem Rivers."

Construction on the Manhattan Valley Viaduct of the IRT Broadway-Seventh Avenue Line, at the future site of the line's 125th Street station; July 10, 1903. Today, 125th Street is the southernmost of four above-ground stations in Manhattan. The viaduct was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.

656 West 125th Street, c. 1941 This white-bricked triangular building opened as a Shell Gas Station in 1920. By 1978, the building was repurposed as a reincarnation of Harlem's Cotton Club which operated from 1923 to 1940. The original Cotton Club, located on Lenox Avenue and 142nd Street, was a segregated establishment where an all-white audience watched black dancers, comedians, and musicians. Acts reproduced entertainment that cast performers as exotic, savage, or "darkies" from the plantation south. Artists such as Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington enjoyed increased popularity after performing at the Cotton Club, though Langston Hughes criticized it as "authentic black entertainment to a wealthy, whites-only audience." The club closed in 1940. When the new club opened at this location, Billboard magazine wrote: "if after an evening at the Cotton Club anyone fed up with the elegance can walk to the subway and pass one of Manhattan's most blighted and desolate areas."

Jacob Schieffelin gave the land for St. Mary's Episcopal Church. The parish was formed to minister to the poor in 1823 by fashionable St. Michael's Church in Bloomingdale at the north end of the present-day Upper West Side, where Schieffelin served as a vestryman. By the 1830s, St. Mary's had the distinction of being the first "free" Episcopal church in the nation, charging no annual fee for pew rental. The rectory of St. Mary's Church at present-day 521 West 126th Street was built about 1840 by architect Robert Oughton. It survived a turn-of-the-century fire that destroyed the church. The church was quickly replaced-and enlarged-by the Schieffelin family (newly enriched through an alliance with the Vanderbilts). With a long history of serving the poor and the working class, it would survive in a changing Harlem where other churches failed.

Crowds gathered in Riverside Park, opposite the West Harlem Piers, for the fireworks show opening the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, September 25, 1909. The celebration jointly commemorated the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the Hudson River and the 100th anniversary of Robert Fulton’s East River Ferry.

136th Street, east of the northeast corner of Broadway, 1931. The four-story building in the background is part of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. In the foreground on the corner is a once common rail car diner, which has since been replaced by an equally if not more ubiquitous today market and corner fruit stand.

St. Mary's Episcopal Church, 1931. The parish of St. Mary's dates to the early 19th century when Manhattanville was its own town. Organized in 1823, the first church building, a simple wood-frame chapel with a short steeple, was constructed in 1824-1826. It was once described, "St. Mary's was white and severely plain on the outside and square and bare within." In 1831 this parish became New York's first Episcopal church to abolish pew rentals, a practice of raising funds that often created a hierarchy among the community. The first structure survived until the turn of the century, but then succumbed to the oft destroyer of wood-frame buildings: fire. A new neo-Gothic church was constructed in 1908-1909 by Theodore E. Blake, in association with Carrère & Hastings. The simple church with herringbone brickwork trimmed with concrete, was a sort of departure for all architects involved. Blake worked more commonly on homes, especially later as a individual architect, while Carrère & Hastings (Blake was long Hastings' assistant) were usually involved in much more ornate structures.

(Gaetano Ajello, 1913-1914) As evidenced by the terra-cotta movie camera and tripod in its parapet, the Claremont Theater is one of the city’s first buildings built specifically to show motion pictures. The two-story, neo-Renaissance building faced in white brick and terra cotta is distinguished by its chamfered corner, a rarity in Manhattan’s gridiron plan. Unlike the first theaters downtown which was simply nickelodeons located in storefronts, those built-in expanding neighborhoods like West Harlem were freestanding structures built by theater operators seeking to elevate the movie-going experience. Commissioned by the Wayside Realty Company, the theater was the only non-residential building by architect Gaetano Ajello, who designed roughly 30 apartment buildings on the Upper West Side. Seating between 1,200 and 1,500 people and featuring multiple shows a week, the Claremont Theater also boasted a second-floor restaurant and dance hall.

"622 West 131st Street, south side, between Broadway and Twelfth avenue. This is a three-story frame house. The first story has a brick front and the two upper stories are of wood, 1932." This brick and wood-frame structure survived until sometime between 2011 and 2013 (when it disappears from Google streetview).