Thanksgiving Day
A bit more preachy than I’d prefer, but this guy knows how to write.
Blog
A Loss I’d Not Heard Of
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 …
It Looked Familiar, Part 3
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 …
Close But Not
That construction picture of the New York Public Library was taken around 1907 and shows the exterior of the building nearly complete. There’s a crane being disassembled in the courtyard adjacent to the near corner (northeast corner of the lot, at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street), the elevated terrace has not been started yet, and …
Prefiguring
That’s a low-resolution scan of the Ratzer map of New York. Bernard Ratzer was, as it says in the dedication on the upper left, a lieutenant in the Royal American Regiment, also known as the 60th Regiment, of the British army. The map was made for the governor of the New York province, based on …