Ephemeral New York
The Fifth Avenue church that used to be a neighborhood vaudeville and silent movie theater
The world’s largest former hat factory almost looks as beautiful today as it did in 1890s Brooklyn
A tenement goes down, and a century-old chewing tobacco ad returns to the uptown cityscape
A 1940s Third Avenue Elevated entrance that looks like a storybook cottage
A slender remnant of Ebbets Field stands at a busy intersection in Downtown Brooklyn
Hidden by billboards for over 100 years, the tiny holdout building in the middle of Macy’s is back in view
The spiteful family feud behind one of New York’s oldest and most luxurious hotels
This 19th century Brooklyn house faces an early turnpike road that no longer exists
The mystery of the First Avenue tenement that had its top four floors sheared off
One writer’s melancholy visit to the “island full of idiots” in the East River in 1888
Explore the 5 Great Families of the city’s Gilded Age in a live online class with Ephemeral New York!
What you’d be wearing to Rockaway Beach or Coney Island if you were a woman in the 1860s
Surrounded by concrete and apartment houses, the last farm in Manhattan was a citywide curiosity
How a former country road in the Bronx called Featherbed Lane got its evocative name
This controversial Union Square flagpole was created to honor America’s 150th birthday in 1926
There really used to be a family’s house underneath a notorious Coney Island roller coaster
Why these quirky Gothic houses built in 1855 in Brooklyn Heights were nicknamed “honeymoon row”
What’s inside these fake row houses that blend into the New York City streetscape?
How the anchorages under the Brooklyn Bridge became hidden 19th century wine vaults
New York’s longest “step street” is this dramatic three-block concrete staircase in the Bronx
What a 19th century painter of the natural world saw from her Carroll Gardens backyard and rooftop
Vibrant color photos of 1960s Coney Island in transition, taken by a man who lived in obscurity
The story of the 19th century factory building hidden within modern Bronx high-rise towers
The teak wood carvings on a Manhattan townhouse’s front door tell an ancient epic story
All the beaches open for swimming in Depression-era New York City, according to a subway poster
The story of a nonconforming brick row house that’s stood on Grand Street for almost 200 years
A defunct Downtown tool business lives on—thanks to this faded ad on the side of its former headquarters
A Decoration Day morning of buying and selling at the Canal Street flower market
This modest Bronx memorial to a forgotten war was made with scrap metal from a sunken battleship
The midcentury street photographer who documented New Yorkers in all their raw, grotesque humanity
Themes of optimism and oppression as seen in two luminous views of the Brooklyn Bridge
Is this towering London Plane the oldest tree in Central Park?
From an 1890s settlement house to a 1980s symbol of gentrification, the rocky evolution of Christodora House
Why John Sloan painted this lush scene of a woman in Union Square battling the rain
This West Side tenement seems to be precariously perched on the past
The harmony and unity of a South Bronx street once so elite, it was nicknamed the “Irish Fifth Avenue”
The return of a 1970s Hallmark card store sign on a Yorkville street
The rise and fall of New York City’s street and public park comfort stations
The Revolutionary War-era hooks drilled into the rocks at Jeffrey’s Hook in Upper Manhattan
Riverside Drive’s first four row houses were built in 1889—these two sister houses are the only survivors
Is that a tiny house on the roof of an East 57th Street tenement?
Take a walk back to the Gilded Age on Sunday, April 26 with Ephemeral New York!
The most unusual house number in all of New York City is on West Fourth Street
A Gilded Age millionaire builds the men-only “Waldorf of the slums” hotel on Bleecker Street
Explore the city’s other Gilded Age millionaire mile this Saturday on a walk with Ephemeral New York!
A birds-eye view of Riverside Park in 1934 shows how much this slender green space has changed
A West Side woman’s devotion to two nameless “Titanic orphans” after all three survived the disaster
Once a 19th century carriage house for elite racehorses, now the Carriage House Lofts on West 150th Street
Inside the untamed hidden garden behind Washington Mews in Greenwich Village
This 1901 tobacco trading card captures the spirit of April Fools Day in New York City
Before ATMs and apps, there was “commuter banking” inside this Brooklyn subway station
The spectacular uptown apartment building from 1905 that resembles a Roman aqueduct
The ghostly remains of a legendary longtime Upper East Side movie theater
This delightful East Village faux carriage house was built in 1891 for sculptors, not horses
The enduring phantom outline of a long-gone early 19th century house on Bond Street
A 1907 luxury apartment house on Riverside Drive becomes “a slum with a view” a half-century later
A troubled recluse with a camera obsessively walked the streets to chronicle postwar New York City
The darkness at the center of an Impressionist’s snowy New York dreamscape
The most difficult to find Revolutionary War memorial hides in the woods of Upper Manhattan
An oil tycoon sees the future of Riverside Drive—and builds his family two dazzling neighboring mansions
The silk ribbon mill is long gone, but the company’s 120-year-old faded ad remains on the building
A row of harmonious uptown houses built with mirrored boudoirs for Gilded Age women
The little stories of humanity playing out on a sweltering East River pier
The story of Harlem’s last remaining wood clapboard house, built at the dawn of the Gilded Age
Subtle reminders of the Covid pandemic on an Upper East Side subway platform
What’s on the menu at the Waldorf-Astoria birthday ball to honor the U.S. President in 1939?
Inside Harlem’s “replica” Gilded Age rail station, tucked beneath the tracks over Park Avenue
An invitation to the opulent 19th century Bachelors’ Ball, held every year on Valentine’s Day
Peek into the diary of a Manhattan schoolboy growing up in the booming city of the 1870s
This prefabricated steel diner on Pearl Street is one of the last of its kind in Manhattan
The sacred stone box of a church beneath a finance company’s 1970s Midtown skyscraper
Tracing the life and legacy of an ironworker through a coal chute cover in Brooklyn Heights
How long has this faded 7Up sign been hanging on a West Side corner tenement?
The army of unemployed men who lined up to do the work of removing snow from city streets
A midcentury snow scene reveals the magic and wonder of Madison Square in winter
The hucksters, housewives, and pageant of humanity once on display at Paddy’s Market in Hell’s Kitchen
The “entirely feasible” 1911 plan to extend Manhattan four miles into New York Harbor
One of Manhattan’s last wood houses has stood on this Yorkville street since before the Civil War
This dollhouse-like holdout built in 1899 is a lonely and curious Bronx anachronism
How New Yorkers paid for a subway ride when the system first opened in 1904
What a panoramic winter landscape from the 1860s says about Central Park’s early years
The story behind a haunting 1974 photo of a bar and cocktail lounge that once existed in the West Village
Chronicling the feasting and frolicking on New Year’s Day over two centuries in New York City
The huddles of humanity on an anonymous Manhattan cross street during a wintry day in 1899
This spooky holdout built in 1896 was once a “distinctly idiosyncratic” family home in a more rural Bronx
What happened to the canal that gave Canal Street its name?
This forgotten stretch of Central Park was originally intended to be a road that celebrated winter
This tucked-away holdout house in East Midtown was built 3 years afer the end of the Civil War
A decades-old subway relic hangs from the ceiling in Brooklyn’s neglected Court Street station
Searching for the East Side store in the opening scene of 1947’s “Miracle on 34th Street”
What a remarkable candid photo of a “soap fat man” in Prospect Park says about Brooklyn in 1878
The enduring appeal of New York City’s lovely vintage letter boxes and mail chutes
The mysterious origins of Mitchell Place, possibly Manhattan’s most obscure one-block street
This building is one of the last cast-iron structures in the Financial District, and it hides an unusual backstory
The Lincoln Tunnel’s 88th birthday is almost here—and it’s time to celebrate this engineering wonder
The sweet story of the 1930s “Hansel and Gretel cottage” tucked beside the Queensboro Bridge
Reading the sides of old factory buildings from the platform of a Brooklyn elevated train
The Art Deco beauty of Bloomingdale’s 59th Street streamlined and stylized elevators
A luminous wartime scene of France’s fearless Blue Devils marching on Fifth Avenue
Inside the eerie, unfinished 1930s subway station under a South Williamsburg street
The geometry of 1940s New York City under the Third Avenue El
Drama and heartbreak in the “lost children’s room” at the Mulberry Street police headquarters
Tracing the colonial-era origins of an obscure Belgian block alley deep in the Financial District
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