57 West 28th Street, ca. 1980.

From the 1880s through the 1920s a small section of West 28th Street was the center of composing, lyric writing, and sheet music publishing. Known as Tin Pan Alley, some of the most well-known compositions in the American songbook, by the likes of Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, were written in a series of row houses between Broadway and Sixth Avenue.

The advent of phonographs and the radio in the 1920s sounded the death knell for Tin Pan Alley. Today the buildings remain, though in poor condition, with ground and second floor retail. They do not have landmark protection despite preservation efforts.