Often overlooked, doors are perhaps the most important feature of a building. They are the means by which we escape the often crowded and chaotic streets of the city. Every building has one (well, maybe except for the Raymond Street Jail which was accidentally constructed in 1836 sans front door), but some outfit this largely utilitarian feature with more panache than others. This collection highlights some the city's loveliest historic doorways, from the simple but classic columns of early 19th century Federal rowhouses to the gloriously geometric brickwork of Art Deco apartment houses, and everything in-between.

Originally the American Railway Express Company Building, this building remained the headquarters of the American Express Company until 1975. It now is the home of J.J. Kenny/Standard and Poors. Built in the neoclassical style, the building’s concrete and steel framed structure are faced with white brick and terra cotta over a granite base. An H shaped floor plan results in a pair of slender 23-story wings, embracing and arching over light courts fore and aft, an elegant solution to the deficiencies of electric office lighting before the introduction of fluorescent fixtures. Note the asymmetric eagle on lower arch and the symmetrical one on the arch atop the building

America adopted the bald eagle as the emblem of the United States of America in 1782. The eagle symbolized strength, beauty, long life, flight, and freedom, characterized by its lofty flight and mountain top nesting. It not surprising then, with these idolized attributes, that the eagle would become an oft-seen decorative feature in architecture and memorial sculpture. In New York, a city that prides itself on its role as a powerful, resilient, and endlessly innovative center of financial, political and cultural life, the eagle has been incorporated into the built environment. Architects, designers, and sculptors have decorated their banks, civic buildings, statues of war heroes, skyscrapers, and airports (of course) with the noble birds. To see them, you usually just need to look up.

American Express Company Building (white building at middle), ca. 1920. The American Express Company, founded in 1850, has been located at this lower Manhattan site since 1874. Housed in rental offices in two, five-story brownstones at 63 and 65 Broadway, the American Express Company purchased the lots in 1903. Constructed between 1916 an 1917, the concrete-and-steel-frame building was designed by James L. Aspinwall of the firm of Renwick, Aspinwall & Tucker. The H-shaped plan created central light courts, which allowed for maximum light and air to the interior offices. Faced in granite at the base and white brick and terra cotta on the upper floors, the massive neo-classical structure added to the canyon-esque environment on this section of Broadway. American Express moved their headquarters out of this building in 1975.

In 1900, the consolidated Greater New York City was only two years old and it was growing, not just outward but skyward. These are the ten tallest buildings in New York City in 1900. They were constructed in the decade before the turn of the century. Today half of these structures remain standing, though now dwarfed by their neighbors. This story is adapted from the Skyscraper Museum's "Ten & Taller."

By Susan Smith-Peter Using crutches because of an early bout with meningitis, Percy Loomis Sperr managed to photograph nearly all of New York City from the 1920s to the 1940s. Sperr sought to document and preserve the city as fully as possible. He was interested in telling the story of New York through the lives and environments of everyday people. This work brought him into contact with important photographers such as Berenice Abbott and, to a lesser extent, Walker Evans. And his work has deeply shaped our vision of this New York City during the Jazz Age and Depression-era. Among other things, it helped set design for such movies as The Godfather and The Great Gatsby (1974) and serves as the foundation for such popular apps as OldNYC and Urban Archive. Yet the artist himself remains little known. This blog sets out to establish the basic facts of his life, and suggests lines of possible research, using his previously unanalyzed writings and undigitized albums as well as his better-known works. Born on December 27, 1899, Sperr attended Oberlin College, where he served as the associate editor of the Annual and the managing editor of the Review. In 1916, a list of graduates places him in Columbus, Ohio, care of the Stoneman Press. As he told the Newark Sunday News in 1963, the year before his death, “the first of my sins was to teach in a small private school in California. I taught the ABCs, trigonometry and everything in between. The school closed while I was on vacation, so I wandered around in printing, freelance writing and photography.” His draft card for World War One shows that he was already living in New York in 1917, at 2887 Bailey Avenue in the Bronx. It also noted that his right leg was permanently paralyzed and that he was a printer at the Lumitone Art Company. His World War Two draft card was even blunter, simply stating, “lame.” He moved to Staten Island in 1924, during which time he was “principally a freelance writer, doing articles largely for the Sunday magazine sections of newspapers. Many of these articles concern\[ed] aspects of the New York Public Library.”

Empire Building, ca. 1905.

John Watts Jr. Statue from Trinity Courtyard, March 1, 1938. The son of a Scottish immigrant father and a mother who belonged to the city founding DeLancey family, John Watts Jr. graduated from King's College (now Columbia University) and held a number of Colonial posts. He was New York’s last Royal Recorder, a role where he served as a mayoral assistant, judge, and a player in administrative and judicial functions. Despite his father's Royalist position, Watts Jr. sided with the colonies (according to sources) and would become the only Crown official who held elected state or federal office after the Revolution in New York. Watts became a New York State Assemblyman and later Congressman. He also established the Leake and Watts Orphan Home using an inheritance from a friend left to his son, and then himself when he son predeceased him. It was one of the first private charitable institutions dedicated to child welfare in the new country. Founded in 1831, the Leake and Watts Services, Inc continues to serve children in the New York area. The statue was erected by his grandson John Watts DePeyster in 1893 in his memory at Trinity Cemetery where Watts was buried following his 1836 death.

American Express Company Building ARCHITECT: James L. Aspinwall; Renwick, Aspinwall & Tucker DATE: 1914-17 STYLE: Neo-Classical The American Express Co. Building was constructed in 1916-17 in neo-Classical design. It was built as the new headquarters of the American Express Co. The concrete-and-steel-framed building was designed with an H-shaped plan with tall slender wings arranged around central light courts, a type of plan employed from the 1880s through the 1910s to provide offices with maximum light and air. Both facades, clad in white brick and terra cotta above a granite base, are articulated in the tripartite composition of base-shaft-capital then popular for skyscrapers.

Empire Apartments, ca. 1975. Speculatively built by the O.B Potter estate and by designed by Kimball & Thompson, the Empire Building was completed in1898. From 1901 until 1976, the United Steel Corporation occupied the building. The building was converted into high-end residents prior to 2000. The AIA Guide to New York City refers to its entrance as, " a triumphant Roman ensemble."

A walking tours through Lower Manhattan's skyscraper canyons and more than a century of high-rise construction. This walk focuses on the buildings around Broadway. This story is adapted from an exhibition at the Skycraper Museum. The original version can be seen here.

Empire Building ARCHITECT: Kimball & Thompson DATE: 1895-98 STYLE: Skyscraper The Empire Building is considered one of the finest of the surviving late-nineteenth-century office towers in New York City, and is also significant as one of the earliest, as well as one of the earliest extant, steel skeletal-frame curtain-wall skyscrapers set on pneumatic caissons in the city. The building, originally 20 stories (plus basement) and clad in rusticated white granite above a polished gray granite base, features the tripartite arrangement of base-shaft-capital common to many of New York’s early skyscrapers, with a four-story base, arcaded on the long facade, a triumphal arch entrance on Broadway, a midsection ornamented by bandcourses and balconies, and an upper section with colonnaded loggias and a heavy projecting cornic