That fine and abandoned country manor house is the Hunter Mansion, completed circa 1815 on Hunter’s Island in the Bronx. Don’t feel bad about having never heard of Hunter’s Island or the mansion: they’ve both been gone for some time, and even though I know quite a bit of NYC trivia, I had never heard …
A romanesque church next door to an Art Deco apartment house is not really very rare in New York but this is a famous block. The building on the right is 55 Central Park West, which was made famous by the original Ghostbusters. Note that the top of the building in the movie is special …
The first thing to note about the picture above is that it’s wrong. The tall building on the left is the Hotel McAlpin, at the southeast corner of 34th Street and South Avenue and the cute palazzo is the New York Herald Building between 35th and 36th Streets, Broadway and Sixth Avenue. Herald Square is …
Ladder Company 8 of the Fire Department of New York has been in this handsome little building since 1903, but that’s not why anyone knows the building. They know it because of Ghostbusters. Putting aside the fictional use of the building for paranormal investigations, it has an interesting claim to fame: it is literally half …
I like Joseph Pennell’s etchings of New York very much, but “St. Paul’s, New York” threw me for a bit. It’s a nice likeness of St. Paul’s Chapel, the uptown chapel of Trinity Church at Broadway and Vesey Streets, but the background is wrong. The spire was added to St. Paul’s after its completion, and …
