Ephemeral New York

The Brooklyn Bridge is celebrating its 143rd birthday on May 24, the day Gilded Age New Yorkers could finally walk across this wondrous span and celebrate the uniting of Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Over close to a century and a half, the Brooklyn Bridge has taken the honor of the city’s most painted and photographed structure. I’d bet it’s also one of the most popular subjects for artists all over the world.

The Brooklyn Bridge over peaceful waters, the bridge and its smoky harbors, the turbulent river and the sturdy bridge lighting the way, the Ashcan school bridge, the Abstract bridge—every artist sees and creates something different when they portray this steel, granite, and limestone beauty.

The various takes on the bridge really hit me when I came across the two paintings in this post. Though both were completed in the early 20th century with the Brooklyn Bridge as a focal point, they conjure very different emotions and insight.

The first is by Jonas Lie, entitled “Path of Gold” and completed in 1914. Lie, a Norway-born artist, gives us an Impressionist bridge as a gateway to good fortune, with tugs and other crafts all heading in the same direction without confusion.

“Lie painted this work from slightly above the boats heading upriver—a perspective that seems to include the viewer along the path to prosperity,” states the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, which has the painting in its collection.

A very different painting from 1931 is “The Bridge Pier” by Robert Ryland. Grainy and textured, Ryland’s Brooklyn Bridge is less a gateway to prosperity than a steel barrier to it.

“‘The Bridge Pier,’ in which a man in a white shirt seems to slump beneath the weight of the city,” wrote the New York Times in 2013, when both paintings were featured in an exhibition at the Hudson River Museum called “Industrial Sublime: Modernism and the Transformation of New York’s Rivers, 1900-1940.”

Lie’s Brooklyn Bridge celebrates its magnificence, showing the entire span, the industrious Brooklyn harbor, and the steel skyscrapers of business on the Manhattan side.

Meanwhile, Ryland’s Brooklyn Bridge disappears into the chaos and melancholy of the modern world, with a forgotten man wondering if there’s a place for him.

“Painted during the Great Depression, it looks up at the dark, hulking forms of the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan’s Municipal Building and sees oppression,” the Times wrote.

It’s an immense beauty rooted under grass and gravel that spreads its canopy of leaves across the northeastern end of the Central Park reservoir.

And this London Plane tree, mostly minding its business in this popular neck of the park, just might be the oldest tree in Central Park.

That’s according to NYC Parks, which notes the tree’s massive measurements: the diameter of its trunk is 65 inches, and it soars 95.94 feet into the sky.

So what makes this towering tree the oldest in the park? First, it helps to understand that as natural as Central Park seems, it’s almost entirely manmade.

The lake and pond were dug out, and the water has always been fed through underground pipes. As for the land the park is on, it was originally too swampy and rocky to support groves of trees or forests.

To transform the park according to co-designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Greensward plan, more than 500,000 trees, shrubs, and vines had to be planted during construction from 1858 to 1873, according to the Central Park Conservancy.

London Planes were a popular choice for the park, and this survivor might have been planted in 1862, the year the reservoir was dug, according to nature writer Dennis Burton via Untapped New York.

That makes it an impressive 164 years old, dating back to the Civil War. Of course, it’s not the oldest tree in New York City, nor is it the most striking.

I’m going to give Brooklyn’s circa-1872 camperdown elm the latter honor, while Washington Square Park’s Hangman’s Elm and Alley Pond Park’s tulip poplar can duke it out for the title of oldest.

And the London Plane in Central Park has some competition. One guide, Great Trees of New York, says that the Black Tupelo in the Ramble at 78th Street was planted in 1858. If so, it edges out the London Plane by four years!

Some New York City buildings become more than buildings—they transform into symbols.

Christodora House, a 16-story fortress completed in 1928 on Avenue B in the East Village, become a symbol of gentrification in the late 1980s—when a new owner converted the then-empty structure on the edge of Tomkins Square Park into condominiums.

Protestors sprang into action on the heels of the Tompkins Square Park riot in August 1988, chanting “die yuppie scum” in front of the building and smashing its brass-framed front doors.

The condos were an unexpected change in a neighborhood long defined by artists and immigrants living in tenement walkups and public housing. But Christodora House itself wasn’t the interloper many East Villagers assumed.

Its roots go back all the way to the 1890s, when the neighborhood was considered part of the Lower East Side, and various immigrant communities struggled to secure a foothold amid overcrowding, substandard housing, and deep poverty.

Christodora House’s story begins with a reformer named Christina MacColl (below). Born in 1864 into a Presbyterian family that put a high value on public service, she took a job after college at a city YWCA.

There she met another young woman, Sarah Carson, and the two joined forces to found a settlement house in Lower Manhattan, according to the VCU Libraries Social Welfare History Project.

What exactly is a settlement house? Replacing the religion-focused mission houses that ministered to the poor a generation earlier, settlement houses were private institutions set up in impoverished areas that offered education and healthcare to the local community.

Late 19th century New York City—with no reliable safety net of civic social services to help the needy—was becoming a city of settlement houses, largely founded by educated, service-oriented young women like MacColl and Carson.

The University Settlement opened in 1886 on the Lower East Side. The East Side House Settlement was founded in 1891 to serve Yorkville. Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement got its start in 1893.

And in 1897, MacColl rented a few basement rooms at 163 Avenue B in a walkup, named it the Young Women’s Settlement, and set out to “respond to the needs of young (mostly immigrant) women and girls who lived on the Lower East Side,” states christodora.org.

“MacColl saw firsthand that the reality of life in the slums had shattered many immigrants’ dreams of the good life in American and she declared that she hoped to keep these beleaguered, hardworking people from becoming embittered over what she called their ‘lost dreams,'” per the VCU Libraries.

A year later, the Young Women’s Settlement purchased for $23,000 a house down the block at 147 Avenue B.

Boys were now admitted, and the name was changed to Christodora, which means “gift of love.” Eventually, “house” was added to the name as well. (Below, kids undergo a weigh-in and dental exams)

“Christodora is intended for the amusement, instruction, and moral elevation” of “working girls,” as the New York Herald described them in an 1898 article. Those working girls were mostly school-age kids and teenagers who lived in the vicinity of Tompkins Square Park (above photo, about 1910).

Girls (the clientele seemed to be predominantly female early on) were divided into “clubs” based on age, and each club offered different opportunities.

Twenty volunteer teachers offered instruction in “millinery, dressmaking, plain sewing, stenography and typewriting, arithmetic and grammar, bookkeeping, English literature, physical culture, elocution, music, and cooking,” MacColl told the Herald. (Above, an adult English class in 1941)

Wealthy benefactors and fundraisers provided the support to keep the settlement going. Within a few years, a neighboring home for working girls and a separate gymnasium were established, and in 1909 a summer camp in New Jersey joined the offerings.

In 1922, Christodora House celebrated its 25th year. The New York Times penned a short tribute.

“It was a settlement before that word became popular, and ever since the old brownstone fronts on the once-aristocratic Avenue B were converted into classrooms, gymnasium, and apartments for the workers who live there, it has been a landmark in that densely populated section.”

“Miss C.I. MacCool, its founder, is still head worker, with a staff of helpers which has increased from year to year.”

MacCool died in 1939, but she lived long enough to see the new Christodora House—dubbed the “skyscraper settlement”—rise on the settlement’s former site in brick and limestone over Tompkins Square Park (above photo).

“The upper floors of the building provided inexpensive housing for male and female students,” states Christodora.org. “The principle was that the residents were to volunteer part of their time at the community center below.”

“The lower floors of the building were alive with activity ranging from health services to swimming, art and drama, and numerous clubs for music and poetry.” (Above, about 1940)

It would only exist as a settlement house for another 20 years. “Following World War II, the building fell into disrepair and eventually the city took it over,” states a 2005 article in The Villager.

Various community and political groups, including the Black Panthers, “continued to occupy the building through the 1960s, until water damage to the building’s electrical system caused it to be condemned around 1969.” (Above, in 1976)

Abandoned in the 1970s, it was sold by the city in 1986 for $3.5 million to developers, who renovated the settlement house into 85 apartments.

Community leaders and many residents resented the condo-ization of Christodora House, stating that it would have been better served as much-needed affordable housing.

That resentment boiled over during the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riots, as well in May 1991 during a rowdy night when demonstrators gathered in front of the building.

Since then, a host of semi-famous characters and full-on celebrities have resided there, including Iggy Pop—who acknowledges in his 1993 mini-documentary tour of the East Village that the fact that he lives in a “nice” building “gets up a lot of people’s tree.”

Thirty-five years later, with gentrification entrenched through much of the East Village, the space outside Christodora House is largely quiet and peaceful, with more activity from the dog run across the way then on the street.

Its century-old building (home to humans and a family of hawks in 2015, according to Village Preservation) continues to dominate the low-rise block.

But aside from its long-empty swimming pool, Christodora House doesn’t seem to contain any of the relics of its settlement-house start.

[Top photo: MCNY, 88.1.1.528; second image: Christadora House, M.A.Tricca; third image: Christadora.org via Gotham Center; fourth image: Bain Collection/LOC; fifth image: LOC; sixth image: Daily World; seventh image: MCNY, X2010.29.175; eighth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; ninth image: MCNY, 2013.3.1.59; tenth image: NYU Journalism Projects]

John Sloan was a Village resident and something of a voyeur in the early 1900s, discreetly watching from his window or walking nearby streets in search of scenes to commit to canvas.

He never lacked material, finding inspiration in the ordinary: a woman hanging laundry, men drinking in McSorley’s saloon, the elevated train snaking through Greenwich Village, a stone-faced nun passing a shuttered theater.

In 1912, it was the quick sight of a red stocking that compelled Sloan to create the lush, luminous “Spring Rain.” An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association from 2009, oddly, tells the story.

“One day the unexpected glimpse of a red stocking in the rain caught his eye,” wrote physician Thomas B. Cole. “Stepping briskly along a path, a woman carrying an umbrella picked up her skirt to protect it from a puddle.”

“Back in his studio, [Sloan] called the image to mind and painstakingly recreated the mood of Union Square on a blustery morning. . . . The eye-level perspective suggests that Sloan might have been following her on one of his long walks.”

“In the painting,” continued Cole, “the pavement is wet with reflections, new leaves billow in fluorescent green, a ring of red tulips blooms around a still fountain, and the archway of a barren tree catches a first glimpse of morning sun.”

[Delaware Art Museum]

”

You can see it from the Henry Hudson Parkway: the back of an ordinary seven-story tenement built on a primitive stone foundation that’s almost as tall as the tenement itself.

The foundation is made from the kind of uneven stones that form the walls of colonial-era houses. It’s built into the cliff, which is part of the natural topography of this stretch of Upper Manhattan.

But it seems a lot more primitive that the tenement on top of it. The tenement and its foundation look like a mismatch. Was that stone foundation part of much earlier structure?

One clue might have to do with the three small, slender windows that span the foundation. Perhaps this was the basement of an older building?

The circa-1927 tenement is officially at 80 Haven Avenue, a slender residential street that winds its way from Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center around 168th Street to 181st Street just before Castle Village.

Could that primitive stone foundation date back to the days of when the Paterno Castle lorded over Upper Manhattan, or one of the other great estates constructed here before urbanization in the early 20th century?

I’m sure the west-facing residents of 80 Haven Avenue enjoy fabulous Hudson River sunset views. But I’d be unnerved by the platform built around the ground floor and that steep drop into the dirt down the cliff below.

[Fourth photo: from Holdouts! via author Andrew Alpern]

They look like the kind of row houses that make Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side so picturesque—elegant stone facades, rounded archways, pops of stained glass, and cast iron railings on stoops and balconies.

But this four-block span of loveliness, built between the 1860s and the 1890s, is part of the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx.

Though it’s just across the Harlem River from Manhattan, Mott Haven is an enclave that still lives with its 1970s reputation of brokenness. Not many New Yorkers know of its remarkably well-kept Gilded Age houses whose lines, shapes, and colors create a rhythm of flow and beauty.

All this harmony is centered around Alexander Avenue between 137th and 141st Streets. In the late 19th century, this stretch earned the nickname “the Irish Fifth Avenue” for the well-off second- and third-generation Irish immigrants who made their homes here.

Alexander Avenue was also known as “Politicians’ Row” and “Doctors’ Row,” which can give you an idea of the elite professionals who occupied the parlors and bed chambers of these fine houses.

The houses are a far cry from the rural Mott Haven of the early 19th century, when the Bronx was part of Westchester County. In 1828, the landowning Morris family sold a vast tract of countryside to ironworks pioneer Jordan Mott, who invented the first “practical” coal oven.

“Mott was the first major industrialist to locate in The Bronx,” states the 1966 Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report on Mott Haven. “Although the Morris family sold Mott the land for his foundry, his industrialism was resented as a crass intrusion into the quiet, rural countryside.”

That didn’t stop Mott, who renamed the area after himself and reshaped the riverfront by building canals where ships could deliver raw materials to his foundry.

He also took advantage of his proximity to the new New York and Harlem Railroad line, according to the Historic Districts Council.

With business growing, his foundry (at left) attracted workers—particularly unskilled immigrant laborers, many of the them Irish, who came to live in newly christened Mott Haven.

The first of the row houses, numbers 276-274 between 139th and 140th Streets, went up during the Civil War (second photo). They likely weren’t occiupied by the unskilled laborers.

“This row represents an important bit of urban design because, although the concept of ‘suburbs’ had not really developed in the 19th century, the owner foresaw that this prlmarily rural area would one day become strictly urban and, accordingly, constructed his houses in a uniform row,” notes the LPC report.

“The houses were built in tho local vernacular with French Second Empire influence and were designed as a block front, rather than as distinct, individual houses.”

After the 1874 annexing of Mott Haven and other Bronx neighborhoods to New York, as well as the arrival of the Third Avenue El in the 1880s, more rows went up. Numbers 263-273 are a Victorian Gothic riot aligned at the cornices and slate roofs.

It’s almost unreadable now, but on the tower at the end of the row (third photo) is a pediment that once spelled out “tower block” in terra cotta.

Another row of 12 (fifth photo), described as “French neo-Grec to Queen Anne,” span numbers 277 to 299. “All the paired stoops, except those at Nos. 281-283, retain their original iron hand railings and imposing cast iron newel posts,” per the LPC.

The Irish Fifth Avenue remained prominent as the 1900s began, and new rows joined older houses. Three churches framed the row: St. Jerome’s, a Catholic church; Alexander Avenue Baptist Church; and St. Mary’s Episcopal Church.

By the early decades of the 20th century, population density brought tenement buildings, and soon the doctors and politicians were relocating from their row houses.

Families of various ethnicities, including a sizable number of Puerto Rican residents, began replacing the Irish.

The two black and white photos show the former Irish Fifth Avenue around 1940. In the second photo, St. Mary’s church is visible on the left; the church and the row adjacent to it would eventually fall to the wrecking ball and be replaced by one of the many high-rise NYCHA buildings that now ring Alexander Avenue.

These days, there’s a small-scale vitality to this stretch of Alexander Avenue. Not all the houses are in perfect shape, but almost all retain their historical detail, which allows curious New Yorkers to time-travel to Irish Fifth Avenue in its heyday.

It’s not just the historical backstory that gives the row its appeal but the symmetry and harmony of so many homes.

“Despite the fact that designs range through a wide variety of revival styles and include those buiIt in the local vernacular, there are common denominators of scale, materials, and the high quality of craftsmanship, which give the district a remarkable degree of unity,” states the LPC report.

[Fourth image: PICRYL-Public Domain Media; sixth photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; seventh photo: NYPL Digital Collections]

The upside to a constantly changing city is the sudden resurfacing of a faded store sign. Case in point: the outline of the “Cards-U-Like” Hallmark store on First Avenue between 75th and 76th Streets.

I’m placing it in the late 1970s because of the cute cursive letters, and the earliest newspaper ads I could find for the store date to 1980.

The sign stirs up some nostalgia. I’d never visited this store when it was in business, but I suddenly miss the old Hallmark stationery stores that stocked everything a schoolkid needed—notebooks, pens, stuffed animals, and yep, last-minute cards for holidays and birthdays.

The current store at this address is Rainbow, a hardware, drugstore, gift, and card store that spans most of the block.

They don’t seem to be going out of business. I think the awning went down, and until they fix or replace it, Cards-U-Like will be visible—a Yorkville ghost sign.

It’s a piece of street furniture from another era—grimy granite blocks, white brick, and Romanesque faux doorways that give the little structure a connection to Classical architecture.

But what exactly is this locked and rundown building in the middle of Broadway between 96th and 97th Streets?

A close look reveals faded letters above each door that say “men” and “women.” It was once a comfort station—a very Victorian term for a public restroom—in the small park that threads the Upper West Side known as the Broadway Malls.

This park comfort station isn’t the only one that seemingly has been abandoned to pigeons. The comfort station in the photo below sits inside a similar mall on the Lower East Side’s Allen Street.

Made of red brick and with the same Romanesque arches, it likely started its life as safe and functional. In more recent decades it’s been abused, defaced, and apparently permanently closed.

And hiding in plain site opposite the Metro-North train station on 125th Street in Harlem is another remnant of a comfort station built by the city in the early 1900s in the center of Park Avenue—see the photo below.

It too is locked shut, not that anyone would want to try to use it.

The story of public restrooms in New York seemed to start out well. Central Park opened with sex-segregated comfort stations (like the woman’s comfort station in the photo below), and subway stations were built with restrooms as well.

The need for public privies in the rapidly expanding metropolis was a constant topic in newspapers of the era. The dignified comfort station in Longacre Square, seen below in 1900, was one of many built across Gotham.

During the Depression, New York City went on a park-building spree—and comfort station building really ramped up.

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (with the help of federal funds and WPA labor) gave residents thousands of acres of new green spaces to play, socialize, and enjoy the serenity a park could offer.

Central to the success of these new parks was the creation of comfort stations that would allow park goers to “move beyond their homes and fully participate in the life of the city,” according to a 2021 report from the office of the New York City comptroller.

Increasing crime in the postwar city contributed to the shuttering of many of these comfort stations. The 1970s fiscal crisis is also blamed for the dismal state of public restrooms, as the city locked many to save money on upkeep. Park restrooms that weren’t closed became creepy and scary.

Experiments in the 1990s and early 2000s with pay toilets and self-cleaning public toilets never proved viable because of cost and their unpopularity with the public.

When the comptroller’s report (appropriately titled “Dis-comfort Stations”) came out five years ago, it counted hundreds of broken toilets, sinks, walls, ceilings, and changing tables in more than 1,400 park comfort stations.

Since then, new public restrooms have been installed in a handful of parks, and the current administration has announced a program that will add 2,100 “modular bathrooms” across the city, according to a January article in Hell Gate.

Each of these modular bathrooms will run $1,000 a piece, reported Hell Gate. Perhaps the city simply renovates the existing comfort stations for a much cheaper price tag?

Meanwhile, one park in New York City got the public toilet experience right. Bryant Park’s original comfort station is a gorgeous remnant of the Gilded Age (photo above).

Shuttered in the 1970s and 1980s when the park was in bad shape, it’s now the nicest place to go in Midtown—and there always seems to be a line.

[Fourth photo: Urbanomnibus.net; fifth photo: MCNY, X2011.11.951]

New York is a city of hooks—Red Hook in Brooklyn, Corlears Hook on the Lower East Side, Tubby Hook in Inwood, for example.

Okay, Tubby Hook is a name that hasn’t been widely used for a century. But in the colonial era, Dutch settlers gave the name “hoek”—later anglicized to “hook”—to the many irregular-shaped spits of land jutting into the East and Hudson Rivers.

Most of these hooks disappeared from maps by the early 1900s. In some cases the water surrounding the hook was reshaped with landfill, and therefore the hook no longer existed.

Others were de-mapped because forward-thinking New Yorkers chose to rebrand a neighborhood long known as a hook into something less old-world Dutch, which is how Tubby Hook became Inwood.

One surviving hook, however, is Jeffrey’s Hook (sometimes spelled Jeffery’s Hook), a prominence just south of the George Washington Bridge inside the parameters of Fort Washington Park.

Jeffrey’s Hook—who Jeffrey was seems to have been lost to history—is a lesser-known, smoothed over place along the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway to relax, take in view of the river, and feel the ghosts of history.

This hook has a long backstory. As the above map shows, Jeffrey’s Hook in the late 18th century was a longer, more jagged spot surrounded by military fortifications.

Because of its geography, it served as a strategic site where important events in the Revolutionary War played out.

“Located just to the south of the highest elevation in Manhattan, named Mount Washington in 1775, the small point of land was an element in the defensive plans of the colonial army during the Revolutionary War,” states a 1991 Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report. (Third photo, Jeffrey’s Hook in 1900)

“In conjunction with the construction of Fort Washington in 1776, a small demi-lune battery with a single gun was erected at the extreme end of Jeffrey’s Hook and a rifle redoubt was constructed on the rocky slope above the point.”

After the war, Jeffrey’s Hook and the land surrounding it became part of a country estate owned by John A. Haven, according to the LPC report. Haven was the man whose name graces Upper Manhattan’s Haven Avenue today.

By the end of the 19th century, Jeffrey’s Hook was included in the new Fort Washington Park, and in 1921 got its iconic red lighthouse.

This sweet little lighthouse (above) functioned as a crucial navigational aid for the increased ship traffic in this treacherous part of the river—until the brilliant lights of the George Washington Bridge made it irrelevant.

All of this background leads me to something mysterious. What are these rusted old hooks drilled into the shoreline rocks of Jeffrey’s Point?

A 2011 post from Untapped Cities might hold the answer: These hooks date all the way back to the Revolutionary War and were part of a failed attempt in 1776 to block British ships from moving up the Hudson.

“Under the direction of General Israel Putnum, American ships were sunk in a line across the Hudson River between Fort Washington in Manhattan and Fort Lee in New Jersey to stop the British advancement up the Hudson,” explains the post, written by Benjamin Waldman.

“In order to sink the ships they first had to be moored and weighted.”

The rusted hooks in the rocks at Jeffrey’s Hook were used to moor these ships, according to historian David Freeland, author of Automats,Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville, per the Untapped Cities post.

The blockade of sunken ships didn’t deter the British warship brigade, unfortunately. But the rusted hooks left behind—and another rounded hook on a nearby rock (sixth image)—seem to be small yet tantalizing connections from the Upper Manhattan of today to its rich Revolutionary War backstory.

[Second image: Library of Congress; third image: MCNY, x2010.11.1987]

There’s a curious pair of limestone row houses on the lower end of peaceful, park-facing Riverside Drive.

Each looks similar from afar. They share the same color of stone, and both facades have bow fronts.

But on closer look, you’ll notice that each sports different ornamental bells and whistles. One has a conical roof and a top floor porch walled in with glass. The other features a set of dormers and has had its stoop removed.

Despite their cosmetic differences, they stand together like sisters between Wset 75th and 76th Streets, surrounded on both sides by tall prewar apartment buildings.

It turns out they actually are sisters. These two beauties are all that remain of a quartet of limestone row houses completed in 1889, according to Peter Salwen, author of Upper West Side Story.

They are the first row houses to be built on the Drive, states Salwen, and a harbinger of the dozens of lovely attached houses of various architectural styles to line the drive in the 1890s and through the early 20th century.

To tell the story of 35 and 36 Riverside Drive means dialing back to 1880, the year the Drive officially opened as Riverside Avenue. (Below, the houses all together in 1894)

At the time, the hope was that Gilded Age millionaires would purchase parcels of land on the Drive and develop posh houses, overtaking Fifth Avenue as the city’s wealthiest avenue.

But luring New Yorkers with deep pockets was slow going. Riverside Drive and neighboring West End Avenue were untested, harder to access by mass transit, and still had a lingering rural, countryside feel.

By the end of the decade, two businessmen stepped forward.

George and Clarence Lowther (left), owners of one of New York’s biggest coal dealerships, commissioned architects Lamb and Rich to design four attached houses on the Drive between 75th and 76th Street, per Salwen.

Lamb and RIch had deep experience building Gotham row houses. They’re the geniuses behind tiny Henderson Place on the Upper East Side. They also designed college buildings at Barnard and Pratt, as well as several row houses on West End Avenue.

For the quartet, the architects chose the Romanesque/Renaissance Revival style. The two outer houses would be mirror images, while the inner houses would also be twins.

Completed in 1889, the four single-family homes with lots of stylish embellishments, all in harmony with one another.

The Lowthers were pioneers on Riverside Drive. But as the Drive become more populated, the row houses began to change hands.

Selling off some of the property might have to do with the fact that Clarence Lowther was being sued by another man for “stealing” the man’s wife, but that’s a story for another post.

In 1904, Numbers 35 and 38 were purchased by a Daniel B. Freedman “from the Lowther estate.” Number 36 went up for sale in 1906.

In the 1920s, Numbers 37 and 38 were demolished. In their place went another elegant prewar apartment building, now the preferred way New Yorkers wanted to live.

Residents came and went in the two remaining row houses, which experienced several alterations, including the removal of the stoop. At least one, Number 36, was carved into separate apartments.

In the 1980s, 36 Riverside Drive became a bed & breakfast. By 2013, it was on sale as an apartment building with eight studio, one- and two-bedroom units.

Then came a proposal. The new owner of Number 36, a Broadway producer, planned to convert it back to single-family use. This required the Landmarks Preservation Commission to grant approval. The plan hit the news in 2017, but it’s unclear if it went through.

These sister survivors are not the only row houses on the Drive dating back to the Gilded Age. Clusters of fanciful and roomy homes continue to delight passersby from 72nd Street all the way up to Grant’s Tomb.

But they were among the first, predating the others by a decade or two. They’ve experienced more New York City history, and with their landmark status, will bear witness to Gotham’s next chapters.

Curious about the backstory of other delightful houses on Riverside Drive? Join Ephemeral New York on a breezy and insightful walking tour in partnership with the Bowery Boys: “The Gilded Age Mansions and Memorials of Riverside Drive.” Next tour is Sunday, May 3 at 1 pm—find out more info here.

[Third image: New York Yimby; fourth image: New York Sun; fifth image: NYPL Digital Collections; sixth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

Ever since the concept of the penthouse became fashionable in the 1920s, New York City rooftops have hosted lots of creative domicile styles.

There’s a pink fairybook-like cottage on the top floor of a prewar building on East 52nd Street (once home to John Lennon in the mid-1970s), for example.

And what would the East Village be without this homey cabin with a brick chimney perched on the roof of 105-109 Third Avenue, the walkup with Kiehl’s on the ground floor?

Usually these rooftop houses sit on the top of already pricey apartment buildings. So it’s always been a surprise to me that someone at some point seemed to have constructed a little house on top of a five-story tenement just past First Avenue on East 57th Street.

See the shingles and a skylight on the slanted roof, an awning over the front door where a window likely once was, and two air conditioners in the front windows.

The little house is set back, creating a terraced front. (That sign by the door says “Mets fan parking,” by the way.)

Is it a separate house though? That street-facing facade might simply mimic the look of a home, something fun a previous tenants or owner made. Yet inside is a storage space or supply area for the building’s needs.

The little house in not new. This photo, from 1940, reveals that the shingled roof and front terrace already existed, and whoever ostensibly lived there set out a lounge chair and umbrella.

The interior of this unusual residence is a mystery; the building itself one of thousands of otherwise unremarkable places New Yorkers over the past century have made their home.

It’s kind of a whimsical sight to come across on this end of 57th Street, though—an antidote to the vertical bank vaults in the form of supertall towers west of Fifth Avenue, which gave the area its nickname of Billionaire’s Row.

[Third photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

Spaces are still available on tomorrow’s Gilded Age Mansion & Memorials RIverside Drive walking tour. We’ll explore the backstory of this winding, scenic drive and the houses and monuments that marked it as millionaire mile that rivaled Fifth Avenue.

The forecast is for spring sunshine—join us at 1 pm for an insightful walk on the city’s most beautiful avenue! Click the link for more info.

Fractional house numbers can be found across New York’s older brownstone and townhouse neighborhoods. Usually the half refers to an adjacent carriage house or backhouse, or sometimes even a basement apartment.

But as far as I can tell, this is the only 3/4 fractional on a Gotham doorway or entryway.

It’s at 184 3/4 West Fourth Street—an appropriately old Manhattan street that depending on the block was originally known as Chester Street, William Street, and then Asylum Street. In the 1830s, this crooked, then-residential thoroughfare finally got its current name.

So what’s behind that heavy black door with the 184 3/4 painted above it? A closer look shows it’s something of an alley lined with garbage receptacles rather than an actual attached living space.

But who knows, New Yorkers are known to squeeze into some pretty small places and make them their homes. This one does have a roof. Maybe someone does live in or behind this space, and their mail is delivered to 184 3/4 West Fourth Street.