A collection of schools across New York City.

The Ludlow Street Jail, New York City's 19th-century federal prison, opened in 1862 at the corner of Ludlow and Broome Streets. Intended as a prison for civil offenders, most inmates were debtors. The infamous Tammany Hall politician Boss Tweed was held at Ludlow Street, where he died of pneumonia in 1878, at the time unable to repay some $6 million of embezzled city funds. Victoria Woodhull, the first female presidential candidate, was also imprisoned for six months in 1872, accused of sending obscene material in the mail. The jail closed in December 1927 and was subsequently demolished. Today, the Department of Education’s Seward Park Campus, built in 1929, occupies the site.

By Robert Pigott When most New Yorkers think of courthouses, they visualize Foley Square in lower Manhattan or perhaps Court Street in Brooklyn. But there was a time when the City’s courthouses were not so centralized. If you travel to Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood and walk along 42nd Street towards the East River, when you get to Fourth Avenue, you will come upon a truly majestic building. An apparently recent sign out front says “Community Board 7.” But engraved in stone over the entrances on opposite sides of the building are the words “MAGISTRATES COURT” and “MUNICIPAL COURT.” This building unlocks the story of New York City’s lost neighborhood courthouses. Until a 1962 amendment of the New York State Constitution, there were Magistrates’ Courts handling minor criminal matters and Municipal Courts for small civil cases. By 1962, these courts had been abolished, and the City’s courthouses were largely centralized in each Borough. But from the late 19th century through the early 1960s, you could find courthouses in every corner of New York City. Some were very modest structures that you would not expect to have been preserved. Others were very grand structures that either has been put to new uses or are sadly lying fallow. Read this in its original format here.

Seward Park High School, 350 Grand Street, ca. 1972. Constructed in 1929, the building was built to house a high school whose origins dated back to 1905 and the opening of Public School 62. P.S. 62 was an intermediate school located at the intersection of Essex, Hester, and Norfolk Streets. Originally only seventh and eighth graders, in 1916 a ninth grade class was added it became the Seward Park Junior High School. In 1923 it was made an experimental school that was both an intermediate and high school. By the late 1920s the intermediate students had been transferred and the first school building was razed in the construction of the Sixth Avenue Subway. The new lot for the school, bound by Essex, Grand, Brooms and Ludlow Streets, had formerly housed a school, the Alimony Jail, a court house, and some tenements.