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In the closing decades of the 19th century, New York underwent a profound physical and cultural transformation. Fueled by the wealth of the exploding financial and manufacturing sectors, the city rapidly evolved into a world-class metropolis. The bold ambitions of civic and business leaders, architects, and engineers of the era manifested in landmarks such as the vast Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the stately U.S. Custom House, the towering Municipal Building, and the original terminus of New York City’s first official subway line—the ornate City Hall stop. The sweeping interior spaces common to all of these structures, and hundreds of others, depended upon a venerable Mediterranean building technology adapted to contemporary American construction: arched tile ceilings—or vaults—that were not only self-supporting but could also bear the weight of floors or roofs above them. These vaults were designed and built by a single New York firm, founded by Spanish immigrant Rafael Guastavino (1842-1908) and later headed by his son Rafael Jr. (1872-1950). The Guastavinos’ patented system for building domes and vaults involved multiple layers of thin ceramic tiles bonded with quick-drying mortar. The resulting structures were not only exceptionally strong, but also lightweight, easy to build, and inherently beautiful, thanks to intricate patterns of exposed tile that formed finished, decorative surfaces. Guastavino vaults figured prominently in more than 1,000 projects across the nation, including 200 in Manhattan alone. During its 73-year history, the Guastavino Company helped build some of the most impressive interior spaces in America—veritable palaces for the people. This list based on MCNY's exhibition Palaces for the People, contains many of Guastavino's masterpieces in the five boroughs, both those that remain and those that have been lost to the wrecking ball.

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” 🏙️

Often thought of as a "concrete jungle," New York City also has a rich history of environmental activism--from the creation of green spaces to confronting climate change. In the decades following the first Earth Day in 1970 and the birth of the environmental movement, New Yorkers sought to make their city greener with recycling centers, community gardens, and bike lanes. Activist groups also called for improved environmental conditions and air quality that disproportionately affected people of color. Though the city is less polluted today, climate change has posed large challenges that have ignited a new generation of environmental activists. Explore key sites of eco-advocacy in the city from the 1960s to today.

The westernmost portion of Queens remained predominantly rural and undeveloped until around 1870, when Long Island City was incorporated from the nascent industrial communities of Astoria, Blissville, Hunters Point and Ravenswood. The start of this area’s growth began when the Long Island Rail Road moved its main terminus from Downtown Brooklyn to the East River waterfront in Hunters Point in 1861. A decade later, the Steinway piano factory opened a new industrial complex and worker settlement in nearby Astoria, stimulating growth and establishment of infrastructure in the area. As Long Island City grew to become a regional transportation and population center, the Queens County seat was moved from Clowesville (in present-day Nassau County) west to Long Island City around 1874. In the last quarter of the 19th century, its waterfront became home to oil refineries, lumber yards, factories and chemical plants, while the city’s population tripled from 15,609 in 1875 to 48,272 in 1900. After Queens was consolidated into Greater New York City in 1898, Long Island City’s connections to Manhattan were strengthened with the completion of the Queensboro Bridge in 1909. The elevated railway trains, trolleys, automobiles and pedestrians travelling across the bridge all converged at the new “Queensboro Bridge Plaza,” now known as Queens Plaza, which soon supplanted the rail yards of Hunters Point as the gateway to Queens. Transportation was further improved with the construction of the East River Tunnels and Sunnyside Yards in 1910, which provided Long Island Rail Road trains with a direct connection to Manhattan, as well as with the completion of new subway lines to Astoria and Corona by 1917. Banks and manufacturing firms soon gravitated towards this new central plaza, which became famous for the large electric signs that dotted the rooftops of its buildings, advertising products like Swingline Staplers, Chiclets and Pepsi Cola to travelers passing through. Hunters Point, on the other hand, saw its population peak in 1905 before starting a slow decline, becoming a primarily industrial area with the old brownstones and institutional buildings sitting in the shadow of the elevated trains rumbling past. By the post-World War II era, shifts in transportation, industry and demographics spelled the end of Long Island City’s role as the center of Queens. Deindustrialization left many factories shuttered and the waterfront underutilized, while Queens’ population growth and commercial activity was primarily concentrated farther east in the borough’s more suburban neighborhoods. However, the empty warehouses, with open floor plans and ample lighting, prompted artists to move across the river as early as the 1960s, which led to the founding of institutions like the Noguchi Museum and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Centre to secure their legacy. By the 1990s, corporations, including Citibank and MetLife, were moving to Long Island City in search of affordable office space and good transit connections, converting industrial buildings or building new structures like One Court Square, the tallest building in New York outside of Manhattan. Residential development along the waterfront began with the 1997 completion of the 42-story Citylights building, the first of several luxury residential towers along the East River that now vie for the best views of the midtown skyline. Although the neighborhood is in the midst of a large-scale transformation as development spreads outward from the subway stations and the waterfront, remnants of Long Island City’s past anchor this dynamic place to its roots and serve to keep its history alive, making it an appealing place to both live and work.

The nurses plunged her into an ice-cold bath, pulled her out sopping wet, and threw a sheer flannel slip over her head. Large black letters spelled “Lunatic Asylum, B.I., H. 6.” across the garment. Nellie Brown, the now-freezing woman, was relegated to Blackwell’s Island, Hall 6.

New York is celebrated in countless works of literature. Many buildings, whether famous landmarks or run-of-the-mill residences, have made guest appearances in the pages of American novels. Here's a list of literary locations:

By Lawrence Stelter Since the beginning of European colonization, the trade of goods and ideas created prosperity throughout the area around New York Bay. Industrialization further fueled growth and expansion, sometimes at exponential levels. As the population spread out, people worked, worshipped and took their recreation in places far from where they lived. Thus public transportation developed and inexorably grew. In 1832 the horse-drawn coach appeared, and soon thereafter came the horse car, which ran on rails. After the Civil War the horse-car network became inadequate to serve a population that was approaching one million. City leaders sought a means of transportation that would be separate from and unimpeded by the congested streets. Read this in its original format here.

The Public Design Commission (PDC) was established as the Municipal Art Commission by the New York City Charter in 1898 (following the consolidation of NYC). The Commission was tasked with the oversight of all public artworks and monuments, but its purview quickly expanded to include public structures and open spaces. Renamed in 2008, the PDC reviews the design of permanent works of architecture, landscape architecture, and art proposed on or over City-owned property. Projects are submitted by City agencies and include the construction, renovation, or restoration of buildings; the creation or rehabilitation of parks, playgrounds, and plazas; installation of lighting and other streetscape elements; signage; and the installation and conservation of artwork, including monuments and memorials. The Commission also acts as caretaker and curator of the City’s public art collection, which is located throughout the city’s public buildings and open spaces, and maintains an extensive archive documenting the history of New York City's public works. The PDC Archive maintains a collection of projects reviewed by the Commission since 1902, documenting more than 7,000 sites throughout New York City and providing a unique view into the history of the City’s public works. The designs that have been reviewed by the PDC throughout its over 120-year history are representative of the policies and focus of Mayoral administrations while simultaneously following historical trends in public design, public health, and artistic and cultural movements in the city and country at large. The following examples illustrate the breadth of projects under the PDC's purview, from large scale developments to streetscape fixtures that often go unnoticed. For an in-depth history of the Public Design Commission, see Michele H. Bogart’s book, "The Politics of Urban Beauty."

Who is the Bridge and Tunnel crowd? In more quotidian times, that moniker might call to mind tourists from New Jersey. Currently, the crowd in question might be New Yorkers themselves: Over the past several months, many New Yorkers have sped across these spans on their way out of the city. At the same time, subway-wary city-dwellers have also streamed across New York’s bridges, and through its tunnels, making what would ordinarily be public transit trips by foot, bike or car. Whether you’re in-town or out-of-town, this is a bridge and tunnel moment for New York City. Since the pandemic has redefined our relationship the city’s iconic modes of ingress and egress, let’s take this moment to recognize the bridges and tunnels that carry us in and out of the Upper East Side. Scroll on for a bridge and tunnel history of the neighborhood. Read this story in its original format here.

Queensboro Bridge ca. 1910 Restoration and reuse have saved many Guastavino projects. Originally an open-air market under the Queensboro Bridge, the Bridgemarket served the community from 1914 to 1930. For nearly 60 years thereafter, the space functioned as a storage garage. In 1999, extensive restoration returned the area to public use as a market and popular event space named in honor of the Guastavinos.

The Queensboro Bridge, viewed from Sutton Square, ca. 1930. When the Queensboro— originally named the Blackwell's Island Bridge for the island close to the Queens side of the East River— was built, the area around the Queens approach was still sparsely settled. Large portions of land in the vicinity were owned by a few wealthy families and the remainder of the borough was home to truck farms, cemeteries, and race tracks. Following the consolidation of Greater New York in 1898, consolidationist politicians sought to accelerate the development of industry and housing in Queens; completion of a bridge connecting Queens to Manhattan was essential to these ambitions. Engineer Gustav Lindenthal, who was also chief engineer for the Hell Gate Bridge, collaborated extensively with architect Henry Hornbostel to conceive a bridge both functional and architecturally appealing. Hornbostel and Lindenthal used symmetry and repetition, towers capped with spires, and falsework support in an effort to compensate for the bridge's massiveness and relative lack of decorative ornamentation. The finished structure has been described as a cantilever bridge wit suspensions bridge lines. When the Quebec Bridge, a contemporary cantilever project planned as the longest cantilever in the world, collapse in 1907, apprehensive City officials ordered exhaustive tests of Lindenthal and Hornbostel's design. Administrative misgivings led also to concern about the quality of materials, which were subjected to exhaustive reinspection.