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.

U.S.S. "Illinois" and Launch, July 2, 1937. Launched in 1898 and commissioned in 1901, the U.S.S. Illinois was a naval battleship. Active in the European Squadron and North Atlantic fleet through 1907, between 1907 and 1909 the ship was one a group, called the Great White Fleet, that circumnavigated the globe. After being decommissioned in late summer 1909, she became a training ship and was lent to New York State as a training vessel for the New York Naval Militia in 1919. Five years later the ship had a building-type structure constructed on its main deck when it became a floating armory, barracks, and the location of the Naval Reserves Midshipmen's School. Renamed the Prairie State in 1941 (so that a new battleship called Illinois could be commissioned) the ship would survive until 1956 when it was removed from the naval register and sold for scrap in Baltimore.

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.

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."

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.

U.S.S. "Illinois" and Wharf: Armory for Naval Reserves, July 2, 1937. The USS Prairie State docked at the 135th Pier on the Hudson River was the nation's largest floating armory. The 375-foot houseboat had been a naval battleship, the USS Illinois, from 1901 until 1920. In 1924, it was disarmed and converted into an armory with the large, barn-like shed built on the hull. The USS Prairie State remained until 1951, when it was relocated to 25th Street on the East River and eventually scrapped. In 1991, the City opened the North River Waste Water Treatment plant on this site.

527 Riverside Drive, ca. 1915. This lavish apartment house called The Ardelle no longer stands. Built in 1909 or 1910 by architects Radcliffe and Kelly, the advertisement for the building notes its proximity to the subway, surface transportation, and nearby educational institutions. It also notes the presence of "plenty of closets" suggesting that concerns about closet space are not only a contemporary problem for New Yorkers.

A fundamental role of the cemetery is to ensure a peaceful, final resting place for loved ones. They are also extraordinary living records of our society. Historic cemeteries tell us about design, ideas about mortality and death, and the historical social and political hierarchies of a locality. Especially important is the rural cemetery. Distinct from church graveyards, this is a 19th-century culmination of a movement that began in 18th-century Europe. The rural cemetery drew heavily on early garden aesthetics, embracing classical ideals of a pastoral utopia as embodied in the Greek region of Arcadia. In fact, nascent cemeteries evolved from garden memorials and burials, leading to a revolution in the way Western culture tended to its dead, and forever impacting its landscapes.

"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).