I first learned about the growth of the Tribune Buiding on Park Row reading Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen’s book The Skyward Trend of Thought. The fact that the book’s subtitle is “The Metaphysics of the American Skyscraper” tells you that it’s a polemic rather than a more straightforward history, which is fine. A lot …
Looking north on Broadway from Dey Street in 1900 is not so very different than the same view today. Most of the buildings are different (the big red-brick building on the left is the Western Union Building, long since replaced by the old AT&T headquarters, but St. Paul’s Chapel is still there, with its colonnade …
That’s the long-demolished Stuyvesant Apartments on East 18th Street, generally accepted as the first apartment house in New York. It was built in 1870, and there were plenty of multiple dwelling already around by then, so what does “first” mean, exactly? The Stuyvesant wasn’t a residential hotel (furnished, with services), it wasn’t a boarding house …
I don’t often show such bucolic pictures, but once in a while they make a nice a change of pace. In 1900: a country stream, an old mill, some trees… It’s the Bronx River, and the mill is the Lorillard Snuff Mill, while used the water power from the river to grind tobacco into snuff. …
That’s a newsstand in 1903, looking very much as they did in 1970 and not all that much different than they do today. Over the years, more and more items for sale other than newspapers and magazines have been added, to the point where the majority of items at most newsstands today are not news. …
