The Curious Engineer

Ephemeral New York

2014–2016

535 posts

2017–2026 →

2016 215

December 2016

  1. Happy 1969 from a Diamond District drugstore
  2. An ode to the original Second Avenue subway
  3. Why 1970s New York was nicknamed “Fun City”
  4. The bums and barflies on a 10th Avenue corner
  5. Peek into a travel diary of colonial New York
  6. Times Square before it became Times Square
  7. New York kids, toy windows, and holiday dreams
  8. A vintage pharmacy relic on University Place
  9. Shopping for Christmas dinner in the 1870s city
  10. This street by the East River needs a better name
  11. A cast-iron jewel sits behind this glass facade
  12. Santa as we know him was invented in New York
  13. Slumming it with the 1898 Bowery Burlesquers
  14. The missing terra cotta bank clock on Avenue C
  15. East 26th Street: New York’s “Misery Lane”
  16. Christmas sidewalk vendors of Sixth Avenue
  17. Who killed this pretty East Side model in 1937?
  18. Meet the original Upper West Side old-timers

November 2016

  1. Feel the nostalgia for these Manhattan store signs
  2. This is the first Rockefeller Center Christmas tree
  3. A hidden magical garden behind the FDR Drive
  4. Times Square used to be a festival of neon light
  5. A turkey dinner at the Municipal Lodging House
  6. 4 minutes of Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, 1945
  7. Firefighters racing to a blaze in 1905 New York
  8. An odd 1848 building known as Odd Fellows’ Hall
  9. Ghost signs lurking along the Lower East Side
  10. The first children’s court was in the East Village
  11. A modern facade hides a 19th century building
  12. The 1870 murder trial that transfixed New York
  13. 5 houses from the East Village’s shipbuilding era
  14. Rock-throwing and gunfire on Election Day 1864
  15. The beginning and end of the Brooklyn Marathon

October 2016

  1. Hanging up the wash in a Brooklyn backyard
  2. The sauciest society hostess of the Gilded Age
  3. This little witch sends her Halloween greetings
  4. Broadway’s delightful bend at East 10th Street
  5. The bloody past of Manhattan’s West 39th Street
  6. Loveliness in turn of the century Bryant Park
  7. Is this the city’s oldest intact apartment building?
  8. RIP New York’s elevated West Side Highway
  9. Climbing up the Jefferson Market clock tower
  10. Haunting emptiness of the city’s lone tenements
  11. New York inspired this 1930s masterpiece mural
  12. The most delicious ad on a Little Italy building
  13. What remains of Jefferson Market’s police court
  14. New York’s painter of “cheery street urchins”
  15. Edgar Allan Poe’s haunted walks on High Bridge
  16. The Art Deco health clinic sign off Worth Street
  17. That time a Dodgers fan beat an umpire in 1940
  18. Electric lights in the rain at Columbus Circle
  19. Stand here and feel the ghosts of Five Points
  20. Remnants of four obsolete Brooklyn street names

September 2016

  1. Taking the 3rd Avenue El to the Botanical Garden
  2. The faded, falling apart signs for city laundries
  3. The kindest landlord Greenwich Village ever had
  4. A stunning family portrait of Gilded Age privilege
  5. Brooklyn’s “most perfect” 1886 apartment house
  6. The mess halls for inmates on Blackwell’s Island
  7. The three most beautiful bridges in the world
  8. The meaning behind Grand Central’s chandeliers
  9. The yellow trolley cars of Columbus Circle
  10. Where fashionable Gilded Age ladies lunched
  11. Subway riding in the 1940s with Stanley Kubrick
  12. Walking along Madison Square after the rain
  13. The rich activists of New York’s “mink brigade”
  14. The nurse watching over West 12th Street
  15. Join Ephemeral New York for upcoming events!
  16. The magic of Coney Island’s Dreamland at night
  17. A Bank Street building once held prisoners of war
  18. First day of school in New York: then and now
  19. A Yorkville deli’s wonderful vintage soda sign
  20. An “almost accurate” map of the Village in 1925
  21. One of the worst jobs in 19th century New York

August 2016

  1. Fifth Avenue’s most insane Gilded Age mansion
  2. The first confidence man was a New Yorker
  3. A Salvation Army Art Deco fortress on 14th Street
  4. Bathing beauties of the 1896 Sunday Journal
  5. Before a playground came to Bleecker Street
  6. The cat rescued from a Hell’s Kitchen mailbox
  7. A curious detective agency sign on Ninth Street
  8. A painter renders Union Square’s sea of humanity
  9. Taking a “century ride” with the city’s wheelmen
  10. A solitary statue before the Williamsburg Bridge
  11. A massive menu at the Manhattan Beach Hotel
  12. A peek inside Grand Central Terminal in 1939
  13. A robber baron gunned down in a Broadway hotel
  14. The 1872 “horse plague” cripples New York City
  15. Taking a spin on Coney Island’s “Witching Waves”
  16. The 1852 stable-turned-synagogue in the Village
  17. Manhattan street names on tenement corners
  18. Two enchanting views of New York’s High Bridge
  19. Discount store Korvettes lives on in the subway
  20. 1930s posters pleading for “planned housing”
  21. What lunch looked like on Fifth Avenue in 1950
  22. Washington Square Park’s first, forgotten arch
  23. The New Yorker who captured John Wilkes Booth
  24. The transients of Depression-era New York City
  25. The sad fate of these Lafayette Street columns
  26. A grisly murder and a city society scion in 1841

July 2016

  1. The adults-only slide that thrilled Coney Island
  2. The artists and writers of 1920s St. Luke’s Place
  3. Pickets and protests at a New York Woolworth’s
  4. Why city monuments blazed with light in 1909
  5. A desperate appeal to save the city’s sick babies
  6. A weird, popular sport in 19th century New York
  7. The mystery of these Washington Place fire relics
  8. Fencing team practice high over the Village
  9. A sign of a 1920s speakeasy on Sixth Avenue
  10. A beautiful day in Central Park one century ago
  11. The globe and quill in the Meatpacking District
  12. The mystery of a Tammany Hall “good fellow”
  13. Get Ephemeral New York’s newest book!
  14. The magical colors of a New York sky at twilight
  15. The curious fireplace in McSorley’s back room
  16. Moving the Brighton Beach Hotel was amazing
  17. A dangerous way to sleep during a city heat wave
  18. 1930s New York made Sunday brunch very trendy
  19. Four ghost store signs in the Village and Brooklyn
  20. Overlooking the sea at a Gilded Age beach resort
  21. Sick of Prohibition, New York holds a beer parade
  22. Random sightings of old phone exchange signs

June 2016

  1. Wining, dining, and celebrating at Little Hungary
  2. The lost Gimbels sign in a Midtown train station
  3. The 1904 horse auction house in the East Village
  4. An early city bus motors down Fifth Avenue
  5. An Avenue A artists enclave called Paradise Alley
  6. The best place for swimming in the East River
  7. Congrats to the 1889 Yale grads from New York
  8. A Village eccentric’s popular 1920s speakeasy
  9. The 17th century millstones inside a Queens park
  10. Reading the newspaper on the subway in 1914
  11. Smart advice from an 1871 New York travel guide
  12. A July Fourth bomb goes off at the World’s Fair
  13. Capturing a dog’s life in 1940s New York City
  14. Confusion and despair in the Tenderloin District
  15. A Gilded Age mansion goes down in the 1960s
  16. Girls picnic on the beach at Coney Island, 1905
  17. The two vintage cannons on a Central Park bluff
  18. Three centuries, four views of a Village tavern
  19. A spooky old house on traffic-free Riverside Drive
  20. The luxe apartment building with a rooftop farm
  21. The “poet sisters” host a Gramercy literary salon
  22. Solitary browsing on Fourth Avenue’s Book Row
  23. The Gilded Age excess of Manhattan’s first mall
  24. Darkness and light in Central Park in 1905
  25. The magic of old Cooper Square by moonlight
  26. A Coney Island pie maker invents the hot dog
  27. The never-built East River bridge at 77th Street

May 2016

  1. Soft drinks and socializing for GIs in Times Square
  2. Bits of a Brooklyn hamlet named for a freed slave
  3. Vintage signs from a rough around the edges city
  4. Escaping the day in the Bleecker Street Cinema
  5. The remains of a luxury ship at a Brooklyn church
  6. A hidden Village memorial to a 1930s sports hero
  7. A creepy bat on a West End Avenue row house
  8. A rocky West Side knoll inspires Edgar Allan Poe
  9. A Gilded Age painter’s springtime New York
  10. An old Brooklyn phone exchange comes into view
  11. A 1947 mob murder on Grove Street jolts the city
  12. Madison Square Garden’s massive bowling alley
  13. The beautiful apartment house hidden from view
  14. Making 1970s Midtown a giant pedestrian mall
  15. Girls playing games in Central Park in springtime
  16. Music and magic at the city’s first roof gardens
  17. New York’s last remaining soda fountain signs

April 2016

  1. Beautiful ruins of a Brooklyn ketchup factory
  2. Tracing a Village writer through her apartments
  3. What an 1895 photo of a Midtown shop tells us
  4. A Village church’s secret presidential wedding
  5. The glam rock star who cleaned up Riverside Park
  6. Mystery ship anchors on a Greene Street building
  7. Down on his luck at the Brooklyn docks in 1938
  8. St. Marks Place was once a posh New York street
  9. The story behind three faded ads in Manhattan
  10. Who is the man on a Greenwich Village building?
  11. A Little Italy painter’s colorful, complex city

March 2016

  1. Spring comes to brownstone Brooklyn in 1949
  2. The prewar mailing address on a Village window
  3. The tearjerker Titanic Memorial inside Macy’s
  4. Hauling clothes in the Garment District in 1955
  5. New York’s most charming holdout buildings
  6. Stopping at the Buckhorn Tavern on 22nd Street
  7. When S. Klein’s store dominated Union Square
  8. A desperate Mrs. Lincoln visits New York in 1867
  9. “Victory gardens” bloom across the 1940s city
  10. A witness paints the tragic Triangle shirtwaist fire
  11. A New York bus driver takes a joy ride to Florida
  12. The oldest street scene photos of New York City

February 2016

  1. Subway riders at the new Grand Central Terminal
  2. How bicycles helped liberate women in the 1890s
  3. The Roaring Twenties nightclub in Central Park
  4. A Midtown bar’s neon sign lights up New York
  5. Mystery and misery in a forgotten painter’s city
  6. What a photo of 1970s Union Square reveals
  7. The Eskimo boy who lived in a New York museum
  8. The most charming building on East 13th Street
  9. The old city along the East River waterfront
  10. The most tragic day of Teddy Roosevelt’s life
  11. Evel Knievel jumps across Madison Square Garden
  12. Inside a rathskeller in New York’s Little Germany
  13. Album covers from the 1970s shot in New York
  14. Grand Central is filled with acorns and oak leaves

January 2016

  1. Magical color lights of a New York City night
  2. Why Midtown has a tiny Sixth-and-a-Half Avenue
  3. Unemployed men shoveling New York’s snow
  4. 1880s New York’s most insane fancy ball costume
  5. New York is a brick and mason wall ghost town
  6. Catching a West Side horse car in a winter storm
  7. Snow lions flank the New York Public Library
  8. The meaning of a 200-year-old Central Park bolt
  9. Two Brooklyn memorials to one 1960 plane crash
  10. Alienation and anxiety in a 1950s subway station
  11. Welcome to Poverty Gap, a 19th century slum
  12. What remains of a 1930 Upper West Side automat

2015 157

December 2015

  1. A New Year’s night in a wintry Gilded Age city
  2. The one-cent coffee stands for poor New Yorkers
  3. When Brooklyn teams played baseball on ice
  4. Santa has been spotted all over Manhattan
  5. Welcome aboard the “muggers’ express” train
  6. What’s a warplane doing on this office tower?
  7. 1920s skyscrapers towering over Times Square
  8. New York inspires “The Night Before Christmas”
  9. “The problem of living in New York” explained
  10. A New Yorker in “Little Syria” tells his story
  11. The most spectacular mansion on Riverside Drive
  12. The silk workers of a Fourth Street loft building

November 2015

  1. The coolest neon green subway sign in Brooklyn
  2. The insane 1934 plan to fill in the Hudson River
  3. A New York painter’s magical wintertime city
  4. A view of an unfinished Central Park in 1862
  5. The Thanksgiving ragamuffins of old New York
  6. From wealthy socialite to women’s rights activist
  7. A traffic-free Queensboro Bridge in the 1950s
  8. Touring Manhattan’s 19th century French Quarter
  9. Faded outlines of an infamous Flatiron love nest
  10. Listening to the orchestra play in Central Park
  11. The slow fade of Brooklyn’s Times Plaza district
  12. A plane collides with a Macy’s Thanksgiving float
  13. The old-school soda sign of a Brooklyn grocery
  14. The tramp: a new kind of homeless in the 1870s
  15. An East 10th Street townhouse inspired by India

October 2015

  1. Haunting desolation on South Street in the 1930s
  2. Body parts wash ashore the East Side in 1897
  3. Three ghostly faded ads in Downtown Brooklyn
  4. Trying to cross bustling Herald Square in 1902
  5. The last remnant of a colonial Brooklyn road
  6. New York is dazzled by its first luxury hotel
  7. When New York celebrated “Columbus Week”
  8. Hard times on Depression-era East 61st Street
  9. A lovely 1855 schoolhouse in Greenwich Village
  10. Grand Central Station like you’ve never seen it
  11. This might be the spookiest house in Soho
  12. Vintage signs from 1960s and 1970s New York

September 2015

  1. The Greenwich Village vision of artist Alfred Mira
  2. A bumpy dedication of the Statue of Liberty
  3. Visiting the 1884 original Gansevoort Market
  4. A rainy September evening at Madison Square
  5. Reading a 1960s Village writer’s “Lunch Poems”
  6. Bits of Medieval France in the Joan of Arc statue
  7. A faded toothpaste ad reappears on 43rd Street
  8. Coney Island’s “disaster spectacles” thrill crowds
  9. The East Village hippie who ran for president
  10. Back to school on the Lower East Side, 1890
  11. 107 colorful years at a Meatpacking District motel
  12. The whispering gallery in Grand Central Terminal
  13. Faded ad reveals an old Brooklyn phone exchange
  14. Art Deco beauty of an East Side subway entrance

August 2015

  1. A Brooklyn street named for a president’s son
  2. An 1843 orphanage behind a Manhattan cathedral
  3. The go-go bar of The Odd Couple’s closing credits
  4. A Central Park bison is on the buffalo nickel
  5. The loveliest Victorian bridge in Central Park
  6. A bomb goes off at a Union Square rally in 1908
  7. Studio 54 invites you to a party in the 1980s
  8. A Spanish dancer captivates 1890s New York
  9. Madison Square’s sensuous “throbbing fountain”
  10. A 1930s daredevil dives off the Brooklyn Bridge
  11. The appeal of a West Side parking garage sign
  12. A relic of a 1920s theater on East 80th Street
  13. “Eclectic elegance” of a Madison Avenue building

July 2015

  1. Sipping cool water from a city fountain in 1900
  2. The mysterious Star of David on Upper Broadway
  3. The luxury power center of the Gilded Age city
  4. What Brooklyn looked like in summer 1820
  5. The short life of Strangers’ Hospital on Avenue D
  6. The piece of Plymouth Rock in a Brooklyn church
  7. A rat attack near City Hall in 1970s New York
  8. The summertime beauty of Brooklyn in the 1880s
  9. An iconic TV commercial from 1980s New York
  10. Rocky remains of Central Park’s 1842 reservoir
  11. The gaudy elephant hotel of 1880s Coney Island
  12. The mystery name behind the Starbucks sign

June 2015

  1. What if the West Side Airport had been built?
  2. New York moms: don’t toss trash out the window
  3. An early photographer’s shadowy, soft-focus city
  4. Something beautiful hiding under City Hall
  5. A Bronx serial killer escapes from prison in 1916
  6. A daring drunk lands a plane in Upper Manhattan
  7. The magic of the Queensboro Bridge at night
  8. Delivering blocks of ice to an overheated city
  9. The man who dove off the Flatiron Building
  10. Getting out of the water at Rockaway Beach
  11. Art Nouveau beauty on a gritty Midtown corner
  12. Congratulations to these old New York graduates
  13. The stillness and solitude of a New York rooftop
  14. The Theater District’s 1982 Broadway Massacre
  15. A historic “sip-in” at a West Village bar in 1966

May 2015

  1. A 1951 stamp explains the Battle of Brooklyn
  2. The day McSorley’s bar finally admitted women
  3. Two 19th century slums known as “Battle Row”
  4. The reason Morningside Park became a park
  5. The claw hammer murder rocks 1930s New York
  6. The old-school store signs of Washington Heights
  7. Miniature yachts set sail inside Central Park
  8. When the Yankees were on top (of 168th Street)
  9. A Tribeca eyesore built to withstand nuclear war
  10. An apartment house evokes “memories of Paris”
  11. The girls leading New York’s maypole dances
  12. The beloved city poet you’ve never heard of
  13. Behind the Starbucks sign on Lexington Avenue

April 2015

  1. A close-up look down Cortlandt Street in 1908
  2. A tough painter depicts a tender New York
  3. A missing Brooklyn woman transfixes the city
  4. The shadowy corners of a city street in 1930
  5. A thief called the “cleverest woman in America”
  6. Step into the remains of a Gilded Age hotel
  7. Glowing beauty of the Brooklyn Bridge at night
  8. The fate of two brothers watching Lincoln’s funeral procession
  9. West Village modern brownstone makeovers
  10. Hanging laundry on a New York tenement roof
  11. Is this really the shortest street in Manhattan?
  12. A bit of the London Blitz adorns a downtown gate

March 2015

  1. The “water-gazers” strolling Battery Park
  2. A young socialite goes down with the Titanic
  3. Easter menus from New York’s restaurant past
  4. Enchanting rainy evenings in the Gilded Age city
  5. Meet the shiny new Port Authority Bus Terminal
  6. What became of the Triangle factory owners?
  7. The Mall: the only straight path in Central Park
  8. What remains of the East River’s long-gone slips
  9. The most sensational actress of the 1860s
  10. A settlement of shacks on upper Fifth Avenue
  11. A wood telephone booth hides on 54th Street
  12. An 1860s fashion accessory for New York ladies
  13. Who was crowned Miss Brooklyn in 1939?
  14. What the Fifth Avenue bus looked like in 1920
  15. The final days of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

February 2015

  1. The Gilded Age elite strolling old Fifth Avenue
  2. Where New Yorkers met for coffee in the 1790s
  3. Neglected subway signage from another New York
  4. Holdout buildings that survived the bulldozer
  5. Churchill’s all-night restaurant in Times Square
  6. When New York winters were spent on the ice
  7. A winter view of the Depression-era East River
  8. A new president is sworn in on Lexington Avenue
  9. The Manhattan Bridge’s two lost lovely ladies
  10. New York’s 1849 skyline seen from Union Square
  11. The building designed to look like a punchcard
  12. Three subway scenes from a 1930s painter

January 2015

  1. Is this New York’s first motorized snowplow?
  2. Just how bad was Central Park in the 1970s?
  3. A piece of the 1830s city on West Fourth Street
  4. Looking down Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village
  5. A Times Square neon sign through the years
  6. 8 uses for Central Park’s second-oldest building
  7. The tigress and her cubs feasting in Central Park
  8. A gruesome prank sparks the city’s weirdest riot
  9. Faded outlines of long-gone Manhattan buildings
  10. Blue snow on the Battery in wintertime
  11. A chilling holocaust memorial at Madison Square
  12. The sudden demise of New York’s organ grinders

2014 163

December 2014

  1. Times Square at night, as 1941 becomes 1942
  2. A little girl’s very busy New Year’s Day in 1850
  3. From Gothic-style church to infamous nightclub
  4. Celebrating a New York Christmas, 1920s style
  5. A tasty Christmas menu from 1885 Brooklyn
  6. A crime of passion in 19th century Little Italy
  7. Lining up for Salvation Army Christmas baskets
  8. The Commodore: “New York’s Newest Hotel”
  9. Five hero firehouse dogs of old New York City
  10. The 1913 Lincoln Highway began in Times Square
  11. Rainy sidewalks and streetcar tracks in 1945
  12. Granite remains of the 1842 Croton reservoir
  13. 1970s New York’s favorite morning kids’ show
  14. A militia marches on Battery Park in the 1920s
  15. Christmas shopping in New York 100 years ago
  16. The bears and foxes in a Garment District lobby

November 2014

  1. A Gilded Age writer’s home is now a Starbucks
  2. Roasting a Thanksgiving turkey in a coal stove
  3. A 30th Street memorial to a martyred president
  4. Why Gotham stuck as New York’s nickname
  5. Where in colonial Manhattan was Inclenberg?
  6. An abstract painter’s lonely, melancholy city
  7. Looking at the new bridge at Blackwell’s Island
  8. How Five Points became the city’s worst slum
  9. An old subway sign points the way to New Jersey
  10. Car-free Greeley Square and the Sixth Avenue El
  11. An 1838 East Village townhouse’s radical history
  12. Fine ladies hats for sale at a Broadway millinery
  13. is this the most wonderful sign in Soho?
  14. Harpo Marx on Yorkville’s corrupt Election Days
  15. A 1915 “hotel for hobos” opens on Worth Street

October 2014

  1. A wet and windy night in Washington Square
  2. The rich widow haunting an uptown mansion
  3. Why a Turtle Bay YMCA is the “railroad branch”
  4. A glorious vintage color view of Times Square
  5. Halloween greetings from an older New York City
  6. A city library designed to look like an open book
  7. Skating on the Central Park Lake under twilight
  8. A 34th Street renovation reveals a 1902 facade
  9. Sailing up New Amsterdam’s Broad Street Canal
  10. A spooky Gothic skyscraper next to Trinity Church
  11. A former thief dedicates his life to the city’s poor
  12. A dazzling City Hall fountain sprays Croton water
  13. The remains of two streets no longer on the map
  14. A serial killer stalks Times Square in the 1970s
  15. Bands booked at Irving Plaza in October 1983
  16. A wintry view of the end of Christopher Street
  17. A bold bull makes a run for it in 1913 Manhattan
  18. The literary past of a once-seedy Gramercy hotel

September 2014

  1. Beautiful sailing ships at the South Ferry station
  2. Centre Street at Park Row: five views, 150 years
  3. The most radical woman in 1870s New York City
  4. The lost dinosaurs buried under Central Park
  5. One painter’s dreamy scenes of New York at play
  6. A faded ad hangs on in the Meatpacking District
  7. Why is City Hall decked out in flags and bunting?
  8. The firemen tomb in a former Village cemetery
  9. The beautiful fortress near Gramercy Park
  10. A faded store sign emerges on Hudson Street
  11. New York City’s “open-air” schools for sick kids
  12. What remains of a once-proud Bronx borough hall
  13. Gilded Age nightlife venues live on in today’s city
  14. One photographer’s abstract, shadowy New York
  15. A long-gone Chelsea alley called Franklin Terrace
  16. The fading 9/11 Memorial under Union Square
  17. A winter view of the Brooklyn Waterfront in 1934
  18. A golden goddess topping Madison Square Garden
  19. Four beauties in a row an Upper East Side block

August 2014

  1. The Labor Day parade hits Union Square in 1887
  2. Was a beloved book written on Macdougal Street?
  3. The roller skating craze fades in 1880s Brooklyn
  4. Lower Manhattan at night, seen through an arch
  5. Hidden waterfalls in the tiny parks of Turtle Bay
  6. What was the NYPD phone number before 911?
  7. Peeking into the Brooklyn Bridge subway station
  8. The end of a Madison Square Gilded Age mansion
  9. A “distinctly vulgar scene” at Coney Island
  10. A city street photographer’s loners and misfits
  11. A Riverside Park Holocaust memorial never built
  12. Ghost signs hanging over storefronts in Manhattan
  13. Fall fashion: must-have clothes for men in 1911
  14. The brothel above an 1880s Gramercy saloon
  15. Is this the oldest iron fence in New York City?
  16. A treetop view of Washington Square Park
  17. The rocking-chair riot that riled up New Yorkers
  18. Defunct city addresses on vintage real estate ads
  19. Going for a swim at Madison Square Garden
  20. A 1930s painter’s gentle, downtrodden New York
  21. The bicycle “scorchers” menacing the 1890s city
  22. Browsing the Flat Iron Restaurant menu, 1906
  23. The short life of a lower Broadway footbridge
  24. A 19th century New Yorker invents toilet paper

July 2014

  1. Magic and motion of 1920s Broadway at night
  2. A century of fire hydrants cooling New York kids
  3. How Columbus Circle almost became Hearst Plaza
  4. How to outsmart the heat in summer 1899
  5. A map of the trendy 1983 East Village art scene
  6. What a 19th century manhole cover has to say
  7. Fifth Avenue and the original Waldorf-Astoria
  8. A Village poet and the hospital she’s named for
  9. Swingset and sandbox on the East River in 1901
  10. The ices vendor setting up on East 110th Street
  11. The anonymous men who built Central Park
  12. A little girl goes missing in 1960s Chelsea
  13. Leaping off the roof and into the Hudson River
  14. Two towers that almost replaced Grand Central
  15. The “Jews’ Highway” crossing the East River
  16. Three centuries of Broadway and Murray Street
  17. A fading sign of Williamsburg’s industrial past
  18. Herman Melville imagines the brutal Draft Riots
  19. These tenements are always ready for July 4th
  20. The High Line could have been a swimming pool
  21. Watching Simon and Garfunkel in Central Park

June 2014

  1. Explaining Coney Island to the rest of the world
  2. Buying produce from Bleecker Street pushcarts
  3. Shooting James Dean all around New York City
  4. Gorgeous neon signs illuminating the West Village
  5. The mystery quote on the Daily News building
  6. Is this patch of green New York’s smallest park?
  7. Sunbathing on a Midtown tenement’s tar beach
  8. What happened after landing at Castle Garden
  9. High-school girls in 1910 celebrate Midsummer
  10. New York’s mounted police go out on patrol
  11. A teenager leads the great rent strike of 1907
  12. Lovely, empty skybridges linking city buildings
  13. The elite “carriage parade” in 1860s Central Park
  14. The 13th Street building that used to be Macy’s
  15. A row of trees in Union Square mark a genocide
  16. Come to Ephemeral New York’s book launch!
  17. An “arcade railway” never built below Broadway
  18. Ghostly reminders of New York’s old buildings
  19. East Side kid Harpo Marx recalls his tailor father
  20. Summer night enchantment on Riverside Drive
  21. The legendary appetite of Diamond Jim Brady
  22. Walker Evans’ “lineup of faces” on the subway
  23. The “pleasure seekers” of Broadway at night
  24. The swimmobiles that cooled off a hot city
  25. A colonial-era plan to build “Delancey’s Square”
  26. The first ambulance hits the streets of Manhattan
  27. A piece of the Berlin Wall hidden downtown
  28. New York’s old-school food trucks and carts

May 2014

  1. A dazzling sunset from a West 23rd Street roof
  2. Manhattan’s lonely little holdout buildings
  3. The jet-age Airlines Terminal on 42nd Street
  4. The NYPD’s pioneering 19th century mugshots
  5. The controversial royal Queens is named for
  6. A faded war memorial in Grand Central Terminal
  7. The sad decline of an Art Deco movie theater
  8. Seven East Villagers hanging out on Ninth Street
  9. The uptown Museum Row no one knows about
  10. Boss Tweed’s brazen escape from a city jail
  11. A faded apartment ad on a Murray Hill building
  12. A peek into a New York boyhood in the 1850s
  13. Riverside Drive and the lazy Hudson beside it
  14. How New York City invented the penthouse
  15. A Central park lamp inspired by a German bridge
  16. A new book by Ephemeral New York!
  17. Thousands of kids mob the city’s first playground
  18. Decades of ads asking New Yorkers not to litter
  19. An incredible map of 1930s Greenwich Village
  20. Why New York taxis are (almost all) yellow
  21. A beautiful Village garden on top of a garage
  22. The Skyscraper Daredevil dangles over Midtown

2017–2026 →