Manhattan

HERE’S 488 Broadway at Broome Street, the Haughwout (pronounced HA-wout) Building. Some architectural experts call it the most beautiful castiron building in NYC. It has competition there especially in Soho, but…

BEGINNING a series here that I will return to from time to time about where NYC’s longest roads originate. My aim here is to show the “sources” of roads and…

THE General William Jenkins Worth Monument, on the triangle formed by Broadway, 5th Avenue, and 25th Street, not only is a memorial to the general (1794-1849), but is also his…

WHO is that guy? Two memorials to historic figures stand in WSP, one to Giuseppe Garibaldi, a founder of the united Italy, and the lesser-known 1889 Alexander Lyman Holley Memorial, featuring…

BESIDES 100 West 33rd Street itself, which faces 6th Avenue between West 32nd and West 33rd Street, the only tangible remnant of the Gimbel Brothers Department Store, known as Gimbels,…

Of the station renovations along the IRT Broadway Line done in the late 1990s and early 2000s my favorite just may be the 66th Street-Lincoln Center station, one of the…

THE late 1960s and early 1970s were, without a doubt, an era when Fun City was descending into madness and it was thought that NYC was an ungovernable city (in…

In early December 2020 it was a grey cold weekday (with wet snow later), but nonetheless I had the “Wandering Sickness” and decided to go straight up William Street in…

JOHN. It’s probably the most common given name in the English language. Most Johns walking around today are likely named for their father, or a prominent family member, who were…

PURELY guesswork on my part, but I’ll bet Five Mile Stone, a tavern on the corner of 2nd Avenue and East 85th Street in Yorkville, is named for a marker…

THE famed Silk Clock in the Schwarzenbach Building, 470 Park Avenue South, periodically disappears for repairs, but it was apparently in working order when I passed it on PAS and East…

WHAT St. Nicholas Park lacks in width, it makes up for in length, extending from West 128th Street all the way north to West 141st, but at the width of…