A city is not just buildings but the people who live there and visit - so we added your history to the map! Tap to read through the stories that we selected as part of our First NYC Memories Initiative Enjoy!

Janes Walk 2023 Our Lovely Tour Guide: Kathy Bensen-Haskins As we make our way to the first stop on the tour, we will give you some background on Landmark East Harlem. It was founded in 2015 by a coalition of organizations and individuals whose mission is to protect the special character of the neighborhood. We do this by working to secure City landmark designation and State and National Register listing for individual properties and historic districts in East Harlem. We also advocate for contextual new development and adaptive reuse of older properties. We have succeeded in getting three individual buildings designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and East Harlem’s first historic district listed on the State and National Registers. We hope the area we are about to tour will be the second historic district so listed later this year. In 2020 we commissioned a historic preservationist to conduct a reconnaissance historic resource survey for the area we are about to tour. Later this year, the New York State Board for Historic Preservation will meet and review nominations for both individual structures and districts, and we hope it will recommend the district for listing on the State Register of Historic Places. It will then be forwarded to the National Park Service for review and listing on the National Register.

Saint Andrew’s Church ARCHITECT: Henry M. Gordon DATE: 1872-73 STYLE: Gothic, Church The architectural composition of Saint Andrew’s Church is distinctive and picturesque in the Gothic manner. Constructed of rock-faced granite, the Church’s rugged appearance has a solid quality and great dignity. The interesting massing of structural elements culminates in a handsome clock tower, adjacent to the south transept on 127th Street. Two graceful pointed-arch openings on each side of the belfry give form and deep shadow to the tower, while the slate-covered spire is adorned at each corner by delicate turrets. Cruciform in shape, the plan has galleries in the transept and side aisles in the nave. Simple buttresses, at the exterior of the south aisle wall, lend structural support and considerable interest to the design.

Take your mother for a stroll around East and Central Harlem above 125th Street, straddling Fifth Avenue, the traditional dividing line between East and Central Harlem. Members of Landmark East Harlem (LEH) will introduce you to the treasures of the second historic district that LEH has proposed for listing on the National and State Registers of Historic Places. Featured sites include 19th-century wood-frame houses, Victorian-era rowhouses, landmarks associated with James Baldwin and Langston Hughes, former church buildings that have been given new purpose, and the brownstone stoop that served as the site of the iconic 1958 photograph of jazz musicians by Art Kane for Esquire magazine.

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church ca. 1912 St. Andrew's, the first Protestant Episcopal congregation in Harlem, was organized in 1829 and opened its first church on Fourth (now Park) Avenue between 127th and 128th Streets the following year. Several additions enlarged the church before fire destroyed it in 1871. The next year, the congregation broke ground on the same site for a new church designed by Henry M. Congdon (1834-1922). The Gothic-style building was completed in 1873. St. Andrew's grew along with Nieuw Haarlem, a village established in 1658 by Peter Stuyvesant and bounded by the Harlem River, Morningside heights, 110th Street, and 155th Street. Because of the congregation's steady growth and the noise and smoke of the railroad along Park Avenue, a larger building on a different site was deemed necessary for St. Andrew's. In 1888, the building firm of Mahoney and Watson was hired to dismantle the church, brick by brick, and to reassemble and enlarge it on its present site, the east side of Fifth Avenue between 127th and 128th Streets. The larger building, shown here, accommodated congregants from the "aristocratic apartment houses and the popular brownstones'" of the neighborhood, populated primary by Germans and Irish and graced by such amenities as Oscar Hammerstein's Harlem Opera House on West 125th Street.

Harlem churches have been an important part of the historical shaping of the neighborhood. For decades, they have been centers for community bonding and healing. Many of these churches have been involved with social movements like the fight for civil rights and the abolition of slavery. Many historic Harlem churches have lost some of their popularity as time has passed, but they still hold spiritual importance in their neighborhoods. As property values rise in an ever-gentrifying city, a few churches have been struggling to stay open as tithes and parishioners have dwindled. However, the members remain hopeful. On this walk, interact with structures of beauty and importance in the Harlem community.

St. Andrew's Protestant Episcopal Church, ca. 1908. In 1829, St. Andrew’s became the first Episcopal parish in the Village of Harlem. After its first church on East 127th Street was destroyed in an 1871 fire, architect Henry M. Congdon designed a new Victorian Gothic structure as its replacement. In 1889, the Congregation elected to move to a new site at 127th Street and Fifth Avenue in order to better reflect the geographic distribution of its pewholders (in the 19th century, it was commonplace for churchgoers to rent their pews). Rather than build a new church, Congdon was enlisted to develop a plan for a new building incorporating elements of the current structure. Today’s church is Congdon’s relocated St. Andrews, with additional features added and adaptations made to suit the new site, including a 125-foot slate-clad clocktower.

It's Valentine's Day! Here are some of our favorite images of lovebirds throughout the years in a few of our city's most romantic places.

My Archive Spring 2019 "My parents' wedding day in 1958." —Teri Graham