2+ mon, 3+ week ago   (411+ words) Ann Street is one of New York’s oldest streets. On a recent Saturday, this three-block stretch of the Financial District resembled a slender ghost town of turn of the century commercial buildings. But look up on the western wall of…...

2+ mon, 3+ week ago   (411+ words) Ann Street is one of New York’s oldest streets. On a recent Saturday, this three-block stretch of the Financial District resembled a slender ghost town of turn of the century commercial buildings. But look up on the western wall of…...

3+ week, 2+ day ago   (888+ words) Some buildings in New York are so stunning, they make you stop in your tracks. The Knox Hat Factory, at Grand Avenue and St. Marks Place in Prospect Heights, is that kind of building. It almost looks like a castle,…...

4+ mon, 3+ week ago   (886+ words) In the early 1900s, home builders in New York focused their efforts on the northern reaches of Manhattan, churning out speculative rows of spacious brownstones and apartment houses. Some were designed with creativity and style; others hammered together as quickly as…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago   (655+ words) Jerome Avenue, where Featherbed Lane begins, was named for flashy Gilded Age financier Leonard Jerome, who built the Jerome Park Racetrack here in 1866. (Jerome’s striking daughter, Jennie, was Winston Churchill’s mother.) Macombs Road stems from the nearby Macombs Dam Bridge,…...

3+ mon, 4+ week ago   (906+ words) There’s a curious pair of limestone row houses on the lower end of peaceful, park-facing Riverside Drive. Each looks similar from afar. They share the same color of stone, and both facades have bow fronts. But on closer look, you’ll…...

1+ mon, 3+ week ago   (646+ words) I always thought it was a gag helped along by trick camera work. In 1977’s Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, attributes his nervous personality to having grown up in a house “underneath the roller coaster in the Coney…...

2+ mon, 1+ week ago   (631+ words) Otto C. Dreschmeyer lived what appears to be a small, provincial kind of life. Born in New York in 1896 to German immigrant parents, he attended P.S. 81 on Cypress Avenue near the Brooklyn-Queens border. His father served as president of the Cigar Makers…...

2+ mon, 2+ week ago   (472+ words) You can see it peeking out from the Harlem River Drive or through the chain-link fence of the Third Avenue Bridge: a five-story red brick building almost buried behind glass and steel apartment towers. The towers are newish luxury rental…...

2+ mon, 1+ week ago   (447+ words) Getting around the western Bronx by foot means encountering hilly streets, lots of hilly streets. The pitched terrain comes from ridges of bedrock formed millions of years ago extending into Northern Manhattan. Back in the early 1900s when the Bronx was…...