22 Cortlandt Street, 1936. This East River Savings Bank branch was constructed in 1933. Designed by the same firm, Walker & Gillette, as the National City Bank of New York on Broadway and Canal, the two buildings share a number of features. This Art Deco structure also includes stylized eagles surrounding the bank seal, towering over the main entrance of decorate metalwork. Today the building houses a section of the enormous flagship Century 21 department store.

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.

Havemeyer Building, ca. 1910. Built in between 1891 and 1893, the Havemeyer Building was a massive structure on a long, narrow plot on Church Street between Dey and Cortlandt Streets. Designed by George B. Post, who just the year before had completed the World Building, the city's and world's tallest office building, the Havemeyer was 14-stories tall with a footprint of 47 feet by 214 feet. It was described by Kings Handbook as "a majestic pile of architecture." Developed by Theodore Havemeyer, of the sugar-refining family, the building featured seven Otis elevators, a layout that allowed for bright, light-filled offices, and a killer view from its roof. The structure survived until the early 1930s when it was razed for a branch of the East River Savings Bank.

The UK born, Cambridge educated, Israeli diplomat Abba Aubrey Solomon Eban was one of those diplomatic rock stars whose show stopping oratory seemed to articulate an entire era. For at least one week in 1953, along with the local milk driver's strike, he was in the Forward's headlines nearly daily.