Ephemeral New York

A brick facade is all that remains of a counting house that held out on Pearl Street for nearly 200 years

The beauty of Bleecker Street’s pushcarts, captured by an artist who preferred the city’s gritty side

Going on a “midnight ramble” with Teddy Roosevelt in his quest to reform the city’s corrupt police force

The Halloween trick mischief-making city kids at the turn of the century played on hapless adults

Why the glorious doors of Riverside Church depict angels, saints, kings—and Albert Einstein

The Upper East Side tailor who took poetic street scene photos over six decades from his shop window

The eccentric Hungarian princess who moved into the Plaza Hotel with 12 servants and a lion cub

The tenement is a menace to all, according to a dark and blunt illustration from 1901

Unhappily married to a UK royal, this Gilded Age dollar princess became the great-grandmother of Princess Diana

A ghostly old house on the edge of the Hudson River, and the boxer who lived there with his family

The oldest street sign still functioning in New York City might be this one in Murray Hill

What a 1912 painting might be saying about the changing social rules of New York’s public spaces

A Gilded Age sugar baron and his wife build a Fifth Avenue “house of fantasy” for their family and art collection

The enchanting stained glass luring drinkers into one of Midtown’s dwindling workingman’s taverns

Inside the Gilded Age childhoods of six clever siblings raised in “zany confusion” on Riverside Drive

The solemn 9/11 memorial hidden behind the corporate office towers of Sixth Avenue in Midtown

Tracking the 19th century granite milestones that marked the distance from City Hall to Upper Manhattan

A two-letter Manhattan phone exchange spotted in Midtown: what does it stand for?

A disappointment to his family, this Gilded Age Vanderbilt heir ended his life in a Broadway hotel