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The sad remains of a Harlem grammar school
Public School 186 was a gorgeous Italian Renaissance–style school on 145th Street off Broadway. There it is, with wide windows and a courtyard, circa 1920 in the photo (courtesy of the NYPL Digital...
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A last remaining mansion on Riverside Drive
When megabucks lawyer Isaac L. Rice built his four-story Georgian-Beaux Arts residence (below, in a NYPL photo) there in 1903, Riverside Drive was supposed to eclipse Fifth Avenue as the city’s most...
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Stars who started out at Seward Park High School
I wonder why so many famous actors and entertainers attended the Lower East Side’s Seward Park High School? Among its alumni: Walter Matthau, Jerry Stiller, Zero Mostel, Estelle Getty, Tony Curtis...
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City signs that should have been spell-checked
New York street signs are a fascination of this website—very old signs and wonderfully ornate ones in particular. But misspelled signs are fun too, like this one an Ephemeral reader sent over. It comes...
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A 1970s class picture from a West Village school
In the broke New York City of the 1970s, P.S. 41, on West 11th Street, was a lot rougher than it is today. Parental involvement was minimal. Big yellow school buses, not nannies, ferried kids back and...
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Music and theater on East 10th Street in the ’80s
If you found yourself looking for entertainment in the East Village 30 years ago, you might have ended up at the Limbo Lounge, described as a “gallery and performance space; serves refreshments” in...
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Stained glass beauty inside an 18th Street school
From the outside, the Bayard Rustin “educational complex”on 18th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenue looks like a fortress. Built in 1930 as The Straubenmuller Textile High School, it’s an imposing...
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What did NYU frat boys look like in the 1890s?
Meet the bros from Psi Upsilon fraternity, posing in their house at the college’s University Heights campus in the Bronx in 1897. The photo comes from a fascinating historical timeline on New York...
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Grotesque readers at a Gramercy public school
I love the Gothic entrance to P.S. 47, a city school on East 23rd Street that serves both deaf and hearing students and also goes by the name The American Sign Language and English Secondary School....
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Old signs left behind on defunct city streets
If you have no idea where Manhattan’s College Place once was, you’re not alone. This stretch of modern-day West Broadway between Barclay and Murray Streets was given the name in 1831, a likely nod to...
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A dazzling relic of an old city school building
Not only did the city used to construct light, airy, inspiring school houses a century ago, but they installed pretty sweet brass doorknobs, like this one. I imagine having these in every hallway gave...
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Cooper Square, flanked by the el and streetcars
No sleek boutique hotels stand out in this vintage postcard view of Cooper Square at the turn of the last century. Instead, there’s an elevated train on the Third Avenue side, streetcars and...
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Addresses carved into Lower East Side corners
These old-school street name carvings pop up in the city’s tenement districts—and few neighborhoods have as high a concentration of tenements as the Lower East Side and East Village. Avenue C above...
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A pioneering photographer’s Greenwich Village
Born in 1870 in Ontario, Jessie Tarbox Beals starting taking photos in 1888, the year she won a camera for selling a magazine subscription. She then scored staff photographer jobs at national...
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Life in a New York University dorm in 1897
Today’s NYU students have an array of university housing options available to them. In 1897, dorm options were probably more limited. This 1897 photo shows the inside of a dorm room at the old...
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Old Brooklyn’s adorable schoolyard gardeners
The whole farm-to-table food movement? It’s not as new to affluent Brooklyn as you’d think. In 1905, this group of young, sun-protected (look at those wide-brimmed hats and bonnets!) residents posed...
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New York’s high-school student strike of 1950
It all started with a proposed teacher pay raise. In 1950, New York City high school teachers called on Mayor William O’Dwyer to increase their 2-5K yearly salaries by $600. O’Dwyer balked, offering no...
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A beautiful Village garden on top of a garage
The four “superblock” apartment buildings collectively known as Washington Square Village received little love from the surrounding Greenwich Village neighborhood when they opened in 1959. But Sasaki...
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High-school girls in 1910 celebrate Midsummer
New Yorkers in 2014 enjoyed the summer solstice by going to the Mermaid Parade, testing out the new roller coaster at Coney Island, and cruising on Citibikes. In the 1910s, they did it by reviving an...
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New York City’s “open-air” schools for sick kids
Despite advances in sanitation, New York City at the cusp of the 20th century was a breeding ground for illness, especially in the city’s crowded downtown slums. Trash- and manure-filled streets...
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