155 Mercer Street is an excellent example of a restoration gone right. This building dates back to 1850, when it was constructed by the city of New York as a Fireman’s Hall. Before 1865, firefighting in New York was pretty much made up of a bunch of competing fire companies, not quite Gangs of New York style with firefighters fighting in the street but not that far off. As a result of this competition, the city built this as a place for them to get together to increase their spirit of cooperation. In 1865, the FDNY was formed, officially professionalizing firefighting, making the Fireman’s Hall obsolete. A few decades later, it was converted into a regular firehouse, with a very unusual mascot, Jenny the monkey who lived in the house for 12 years. In the 1970s, the FDNY vacated the property, which had lost most of its ornamentation, leaving it with a flat and ugly facade. It would go on to be used as a mosque in the 80s, followed by a performing arts venue. In 2013, the building underwent a restoration, bringing it back in line with what it looked like in the 1850s, restoring its facade. It housed a Dolce & Gabana before being sold yet again in 2023 for $60 million and is now home to a Dyson store. I’ve included photos from 1940, 2011, and today. It was landmarked as part of the Soho Cast Iron Historic District on August 14th, 1973.

The Gilded Age caused a mansion building boom at the end of the 19th century. While they quickly fell out of favor for luxury apartment buildings, a few still remain. This particular example was a single-family home, built for Joseph Raphael De Lamar on the corner of 37th and Madison. De Lamar was born in the Netherlands and immigrated to the United States in the 1860s. He made his fortune in shipping and during the Colorado Gold Rush. He had this home commissioned in 1902 and hired renowned architect C.H.P. Gilbert to build it for him. Gilbert was the architect of many mansions, including the current home of the Ukrainian Institute and the Jewish Museum on the Upper East Side. This was one of the largest mansions built during that time period; the man dwarfed J.P. Morgan’s home right across the street. After De Lamar’s death, the building was sold first to the National Democratic Club for use as its headquarters, and in 1978 was sold to the Polish Government. It is still home to the Polish Consulate, who have maintained the interior. It was landmarked on March 25th, 1975.

Most people in New York dream of adding another bedroom to their apartment, but imagine if you had the space to double the size of your house? That’s exactly what happened here at 13 Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights. This frame home was initially two stories tall and half as wide as it is today. It was built in 1830 for a man named James Hartt; we don’t know his profession, but it is likely that he worked in Manhattan. Construction records are a bit difficult to track down this early in Brooklyn’s history, but it is likely that the home was extended longways first and the third story added in the middle of the 1800s. It was landmarked as a part of the Brooklyn Heights Historic District on November 23rd, 1965.

In 1919, William Ziegler Jr., the heir of the Ziegler Baking Soda fortune, commissioned architect Frederick Sterner to design a short house replacing three separate brownstones on 63rd Street. The resulting building would be the opulent home of the Zieglers for five years. It was arranged around a central courtyard, giving it a Mediterranean palace vibe. In 1925, the rather shocking news came out that the home was to be converted into a hospital for actors and actresses, which didn’t end up happening but did seem to contribute to the divorce between William and his wife, Gladys, a year later. William quickly remarried, a little too quickly if you get what I’m saying, and moved out of the house. The Woolworth Family purchased it and lived here until 1949, when they donated it to the New York Academy of Sciences, which it remained for decades. In 2005, it sold to billionaire Leonard Blavatnik for over $31 million. While it has been restored to a single-family home configuration, it appears to be available for rent as a movie set location and event space. It was landmarked as part of the Upper East Side Historic District on May 19th, 1981.

After seven years of Landmarks of New York, I’m starting a Patreon page. Don’t worry, my instagram will be staying exactly the same, I’m not abandoning this platform. But in the past few years I’ve been wanting to experiment with creating other types of content that don’t lend themselves to social media, such as longer videos, podcasts and just longer essays on topics. I may even dabble with more history outside of New York State. If that’s of any interest to you, or you just want to support the work I’ve been doing, hop on over and think about becoming a patron. I’ll also be announcing all tour dates there first so if you’ve been trying to get on a specific one, this might be for you. Patron or not, thank you all so much for the support you continue to give me, this is the best corner of the internet and I can’t wait to continue sharing my love of this city and state with you.

In Flatbush, Brooklyn, along the eastern part of Prospect Park, sits a few dead-end streets, one of which is Chester Court. Built in 1912 by Peter J. Collins on land that had been previously owned by the Vanderbilts, this street of 18 townhouses was built in the Tudor Revival style. This had been popular in Brooklyn single-family homes, but this was one of the first uses of that style with row houses. This accompanied a development boom in Flatbush, where many apartments and townhouses were replacing larger, older homes. When these were completed, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle called this “[the] most convenient location in the city”. They were sold for $7,750 each but were considered “equal to any $9,500 house in Flatbush.” The $7,750 equates to about $230,000 in 2022 dollars. They were also referred to as the Brooklyn version of Pomander Walk, the Upper West Side’s whimsical English-inspired development. The 18 are remarkably well preserved and were landmarked as part of the Chester Court Historic District on December 16th, 2014.

Central Park West is known for its stately and large apartment buildings, making this 25-foot-wide townhouse an extreme outlier. This is 99 Central Park West, and it was built as a part of the congregation Shearith Israel in 1897. Shearith Israel, sometimes referred to as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, is the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States, founded in 1654. This was their fifth building in New York, and this little townhouse was built as a parsonage added on to the larger building to its left. The congregation still owns this building, but it is actively rented out. In March of 2021, it was leased for a discounted $16,900 a month, down from the $21,000 in 2015 according to @streeteasy. 99 Central Park was landmarked on March 17th, 1964.

When trying to find information on a landmark building, seeing the words “sobering example” used in a sentence usually means it’s not going to be too interesting. That is exactly the case here at 72 Bedford Street. A relative new kid on the block, so to speak, this six-story apartment building was constructed between 1899-1901 for a guy by the name of Henry Glauber. That’s apparently the only thing he ever owned; he doesn’t appear anywhere else in the village records, nor does he appear in any major newspapers from the time. The building itself, on the corner of Bedford and Commerce Street, was an example of what apartment buildings at the turn of the century would have looked like. Its neighboring buildings mostly date from the 1820s, and across the street is the oldest building in the village, the Isaac Hendricks House, which dates back to 1799. The building sold in 1961 and continued to be used as apartments. In 1998, the restaurant Casa, a local favorite serving Brazilian food, opened on the ground floor. Unfortunately, it recently closed, and the retail space remains empty. The building also has recently undergone renovations. I wish I had more for you all, but sometimes a building is just a building. It was landmarked as part of the Greenwich Village Historic District on April 29th, 1969.

The area of Brooklyn now known as Sunset Park saw rapid development at the end of the 19th century. The opening of the 5th Avenue Elevated Railroad, which connected to the Brooklyn Bridge, and the opening of the massive Bush Terminal on the waterfront spurred both the creation of jobs and ease of access in and out of the neighborhood. This led to a lot of speculative development, including these homes on 44th Street. Unlike other parts of Brooklyn, where townhouses like these were being marketed to the upper classes, Sunset Park had a distinctive middle-class flavor. These homes were built in 1908 by Thomas Bennent as two-family homes. These were designed to allow people of more modest means to afford a building while renting out the upper floor, which came fully furnished with its own parlor, kitchen, etc. This is also around the time that apartment living was becoming a thing, but people weren’t too sure about it. Making these homes appear the same as a single-family townhouse helped with that stigma. The townhouses on 44th Street were landmarked as a part of the Sunset Park North Historic District on June 18th, 2019.

I generally avoid tall buildings on this page. If you’re interested in some Instagram inside baseball, they tend to perform so much worse than a two-story brick house. But I’m taking a break from that trend as this building fundamentally changed the face of Park Avenue. This is the Lever House, which was constructed on Park between E 53rd and E 54th Street in 1952. Designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois, The Lever House was one of the first buildings to buck the trend of skyscrapers utilizing setbacks, which gave them their unique wedding cake design. These designs had been influenced by the 1916 zoning code, which required buildings to incorporate these setbacks in order to allow natural light to hit the street. The Lever House took advantage of the fact that if your building only took up 25% of the lot it was on, it effectively built the setback into the building. With this new design, the office space in the tower could be standardized, making it more appealing to potential tenants as each floor would have the same floor space, whereas in older buildings, the floor space would shrink as it got taller. The Lever House was also the first building to fully incorporate a full glass facade, something that was completely original at the time, but unfortunately is now standard and rather uninspiring. After its construction, Park Avenue would see the construction of the Seagram Building in 1958, and the race to build tall glass buildings was well underway. It was landmarked on November 9th, 1982.

Standing on the corner of Henry and Amity Streets in Cobble Hill is the former Polhemus Memorial Clinic. Considered one of the first “sky scraper” hospitals, it was built in 1897 as a free clinic to serve the poor and underprivileged in the area. In addition to a clinic, it was a teaching hospital in association with the former Long Island College Hospital and had one of the first x-ray machines in the United States. The clinic was donated by Caroline Harriman Polhemus, a member of the prominent Harriman family, whose husband, Henry Ditmas Polhemus, was the regent of the hospital for nearly two decades. The building served its function until 2014 when the hospital was shut down. It was recently converted into condominiums. It was landmarked as a part of the Cobble Hill Historic District Extension on June 7th, 1988.

Adelphi Street in Fort Greene has a great collection of wood-frame houses. This one at 333 was built in 1855 for Edward W. Genung, and reflected the changing tastes in Brooklyn. The popular Greek Revival style was beginning to change into a more ornate Italianate one, ironically imported from England. This area of Fort Greene had multiple street names, named after spots in London. Adelphi Street was named after a London neighborhood, and South Portland and South Oxford were named after that city’s streets. While the neighborhood would have been substantially less developed than it is today, wooden houses like this one would not have been farmhouses, just residential investment properties. 333 Adelphi Street was landmarked as a part of the Fort Greene Historic District on September 26th, 1978.

*NEW TOUR DATES* It’s that time of year again, the days are getting longer and the weather hopefully better. I have 6 upcoming tours in March and April for my Gilded Age, Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope and Lower Manhattan Tours. Tickets are available on my website or in my bio. If you have questions around booking don’t hesitate to ask. Each tour runs 2.5 to 3 hours and is at least a 2 mile walk.

Part of the problem of being a New Yorker is this idea that you can’t look up. You need to rush to wherever you’re going, and observing your surroundings is for tourists. The issue with that is you miss buildings like this. Walking on Madison Avenue, you might notice a standard, unremarkable storefront, but go a story or two up, and you have a beautiful home. This is all that remains of five-row houses between 93rd & 94th Street on Madison Avenue. They were built in 1891 as middle-class housing when Carnegie Hill’s population began to swell. I wish this still passed as middle-class, but I digress. This house still maintains its grand entryway on 93rd Street with its beautifully engraved archway. It was landmarked by the City of New York on July 23rd, 1974.

Tucked away off Union Square on East 15th Street is this little building, the former home to the Century Club. It was built in 1869 to house the expanding literary social club. At the time, Union Square was New York’s cultural heart, making it the ideal location for the Century Club, which included artists, writers, and philosophers. The building is the oldest in the city that was designed specifically as a clubhouse. Although it looks unassuming, its design team was anything but. Henry Hobson Richardson, one of the architects, would become one of America’s most prolific architects, designing the New York State Capitol in 1875. Eventually, the Century Club outgrew its home and moved to its present location on 43rd Street. The building is now home to the Trinity Broadcast Network, a religious station. The Century Association Building was landmarked by the City of New York on January 5th, 1993.

486 Broadway is one of the most visually stunning buildings on Broome Street, with a rather dramatic past. The building that was located here prior to the current one was slated to be demolished; however, the landlord took out a $35k insurance policy, and suddenly the building just happened to burn down. The new owners of the land put up the current building in 1883. A tenant in the building was the Davis Quilting Frame Company. The President, H.T. Davis, kept getting taken advantage of by business partners and eventually became so fed up that he pulled a gun on them during a board meeting where he was getting outvoted. This led to a he said, he said between him and his partners, which eventually led to all of them getting arrested and an inconclusive trial. Today it is a mix of retail and apartments which will run you $15k a month. It was landmarked as a part of the SoHo Cast Iron Historic District on August 14th, 1973.

Today we’re wrapping up Black History Month with an extremely consequential inventor, Lewis Latimer. Latimer perfected the lightbulb filament, greatly reducing the cost and increasing the effectiveness of lightbulbs. He was also a civil rights leader at the turn of the 20th Century. His home in Queens is now a museum.

This is a post about grief and loss. Today marks three years since the worst day of my life. If you’re new here, February 27th, 2023 was when my daughter Emery, at nearly 40 weeks of pregnancy, was stillborn. She was our first child, and we found out this terrible news at Albany Medical Center the day after my mother in law’s funeral. I’ve written and posted about this a number of times on this page, it’s been a healthy way for me to reflect on this experience and connect with so many of you who have also experienced this, or have just reached out to offer your support. What I’ve wanted to say on this anniversary, was that I’m ok, but in the week leading up to this day I can confidently say that I’m not. I’ve had more panic attacks this week than I’ve had all year. I so desperately wanted to show other people who have gone through this after me that you do get better and that life feels normal. I wanted to let them know that it’s ok, probably more as a way to reassure myself. But unfortunately that’s not how life works, but it’s ok to not be ok, and in a way, I hope I never am ok. It’s so important to feel the feelings of grief, after this happened my therapist told me that it seemed like I was trying to be the perfect griever, in an attempt to speed up the process. I will say, the intense feelings have softened, but they are the only feelings I have of my daughter. To not feel them is to lose a connection with her. My memories of the night and early morning when she was delivered were traumatic, and also beautiful. I still got to hold her for hours, see her sweet face, her dark curly hair, touch her adorable little fingers and love her with every cell in my body. It was such a fleeting few hours before I had to say goodbye to her. To be ok, or at least to feel like I did before this moment, isn’t possible, and I wouldn’t want it to be. I would never trade those hours for anything, unless of course there was someway to reverse time and have her here with me, but I can’t. The pain I feel is my love for her, and I never want to lose that. Cont.

I’m revisiting a video I made years ago on one of the most important archeological finds in Manhattan, the African Burial Ground. This originally six acre site was the final resting place of enslaved and free Africans beginning in New Amsterdam and later New York, before the northward expansion of the city swallowed it up. In the 90s it was rediscovered and thanks to the tireless work of activists, we have the memorial you see today.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on Addisleigh Park. To wrap up, we’re looking at this house at 173-19 Sayers Avenue, the home to Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller. According to the Addisleigh Park Historic District Designation Report, Waller was allegedly the first Black man to purchase property in what was a restrictive white neighborhood when he moved in 1940. Waller was a musical prodigy, dropping out of high school to play piano at theaters. He is widely considered to be one of the main influences of moving ragtime to modern-day jazz. He often composed with lyricist Andy Razaf. Despite dropping out of Dewitt Clinton High School, Waller would eventually study at Juilliard. In addition to breaking down segregated barriers in real estate, Waller would also become the first Black songwriter to compose a Broadway musical designed for white audiences, Early to Bed, which premiered the year of his death, 1943. Waller died at the age of 39 from pneumonia. His eulogy was given by Adam Clayton Powell, and his ashes spread above Harlem from an airplane. His home on Sayers Avenue was built in 1931 and landmarked as part of the Addisleigh Park Historic District on February 1st, 2011.