These four buildings are what’s left of a group of nine houses that collectively made up La Grange Terrace, also known as Colonnade Row. In the 1830s, this was the most desirable address in New York City. John Jacob Astor had purchased this land and made Lafayette Street a cobblestone cul-de-sac. He hired either Seth Greer or Alexander Jackson Davis to design these houses, and they were built in 1832. Astor named the group La Grange Terrace in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette’s estate in France. Among some of the notable residents of the row were John Jacob Astor II, Edwin Morgan, and the grandfather of FDR. As time went on, the elite of New York began to move to Murray Hill, leaving this area in a state of decay. In 1902, the other five houses were torn down, leaving just these four. Some of the columns from these houses are now at the Delbarton School in Morristown, New Jersey. The remaining houses have been converted into a variety of purposes, including apartments, restaurants, and theaters. They were among the earliest landmarks in New York, receiving their designation on October 14th, 1965.

It might just be me, but I always find it funny to see old buildings with chain restaurants in them. Not in a funny “haha” kind of way but funny interesting. This building in particular at 70 Prince Street is one of the oldest buildings in the neighborhood. It was built for Patrick Sherryd in 1827 as a Federal style home during the rapid residential expansion in Soho, becoming one of the most populous wards in the city. In the 1880s, the ground floor was converted into a storefront. Today it is a Dig restaurant and an apartment. It was landmarked as a part of the SoHo Cast Iron Historic District Extension on May 11th, 2010.

The south side of Great Jones Street is lined with rather tall old warehouses, with Nos. 31 & 33 being the exception. Despite their size, they pack a historical punch. They were both built in 1871 by different developers. The first occupant of No. 33 on the right was Fire Patrol No. 2 of the New York Board of Fire Underwriters. The NYBFU, as I’m calling it, was effectively an insurance company combined with a private fire department, which was established in 1855. They would remain in the building until 1907, after which it was turned into apartments followed by a Ford Repair Shop. The sign on the top for Joseph Scott Trucking Company is not original to the building and was added on in 1970. No. 33. Was built for the Wilcox and Gibbs Sewing Machine company, which would remain here until 1925. It was then occupied by Bernard Beinecke & Co. a meat company which would lend its name to the sign on the top of the building. Bernard Beinecke was fascinating in his own right. He was an immigrant who worked his way up at the meat company and eventually bought it. He would go on in life to become a developer, famously being one of the men behind the redevelopment of the Plaza hotel in 1905. After the Beinecke moved out, it too was an auto mechanic. Both 31 & 33 Great Jones Street were landmarked as a part of the Noho Historic District on May 13th, 2008.

Just a few blocks south of the Manhattan Bridge is an easy-to-miss memorial. This is the Kimlau War Memorial, which is dedicated to the Chinese Americans who served in the armed forces during the Second World War. Benjamin Ralph Kimlau was a bomber pilot who was shot down in the Pacific at the age of 26 in 1944. Kimlau was born in Massachusetts and raised in Manhattan’s Chinatown. After the war, the American Legion Post in the area was named in his honor. By the 1960s, the post looked for an architect to design a war memorial to memorialize Chinatowns’ war dead. They chose architect Poy Gum Lee, a prolific Chinese American architect who grew up on Mott Street, to do just that. Lee graduated with degrees from Columbia and MIT and worked for the YMCA in China. The arch represents his style of combining modern, for the time, architectural styles with traditional Chinese designs. The arch was dedicated in 1962. While there are many landmarked buildings in Chinatown, the Kimlau War Memorial is the only one that specifically recognizes the contributions of New York’s Chinese population. It received its designation on June 22nd, 2021.

In 1897, the State of New York authorized the creation of what would become the Brooklyn Botanic Garden on a patch of land bounded by Flatbush and Washington Avenue. Part of the land was donated by the Brooklyn Museum for its creation. The Botanic Garden was founded with the idea of making research in botany accessible to the public. As a result, they needed a laboratory. William Kendall of McKim, Mead, and White was responsible for the design. The Laboratory was built in phases between 1912 and 1917 and was inspired by churches in the Lombardy region of Italy. The overhead of the original building is shaped like a cross. As the laboratory grew, additional wings were added. Today, it is home to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Library. It was landmarked on March 13, 2007. These photos are a mix of Kodak Gold 200 and Ultramax 400.

The Flatbush Dutch Reform Church is one of the oldest churches in New York and the oldest religious site in the city. There has been a church here since 1650, when the Director General of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, called for its founding. To house the clergy, there were multiple parsonages built. This one was constructed in 1853 on Flatbush Avenue on the site of the original 1699 parsonage. It was moved to its current location on Kenmore Terrace in 1918 due to rising land values on the avenue, which must have been a sight to see. It was landmarked on January 9, 1979.

In 1898, following the consolidation of the five boroughs of New York City, a municipal building boom began. With a new sense of civic pride and a necessity for increased public services, many libraries, schools, police, and fire stations were built, including this one on Broome Street. Construction began in 1898 and was completed a year later for Fire Engine Company 55. At the time it was built, it could hold four horses to draw the company’s steam engine and wagon to help fight fires throughout Little Italy. It has served continuously as a firehouse for over one hundred and twenty years. It was landmarked on October 13th, 1998.

If you’ve ever wanted to see the inside of a brownstone, now’s your chance. This is 608 2nd Street, one of 26 homes built on this side of the street in 1903. It’s currently for sale, would you live here? Full tour available on my Patreon and YT.

I was fortunate enough to see the first ever crest of New Amsterdam in the library of the New York Historical. This dates back to 1630, and has a lot of symbolism connecting it to both Old Amsterdam and the Netherlands, as well as the New World. While it was never adopted, the themes from it would be brought into the modern seal of the city of New York.

Roosevelt Island has had more names over its history than a neighborhood undergoing gentrification. During Dutch rule, it was known as Hog Island, then Blackwell Island, Welfare Island, and most recently Roosevelt Island. This is the farmhouse of James Blackwell, the owner of the island in the late 18th and early 19th century. James Blackwell had inherited the island and used it for agriculture. He built his house in 1796, which was one of a half dozen buildings on the island at the time. New York City purchased the island and built a penitentiary on it. Eventually, the island would house prisons, a smallpox hospital, asylums, and an assortment of other undesirable institutions. It’s no wonder people stopped beating around the bush and just referred to it as Welfare Island. The house fell into disrepair until the late 60s when it underwent a full renovation under the advice of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. It was made a landmark on March 23, 1976.

Did you know the largest clock factory in the world during the Gilded Age was located in Park Slope Brooklyn? @benahlers I hope @gildedagehbo has done its location scouting for season 4.

Washington Heights is one of the most underrated neighborhoods in New York City. Thanks to its unique topography, the rigid grid system becomes a little more flexible to accommodate the rolling hills. Back at the city’s founding, the area around Sylvan Terrace near 160th Street was farmland in the Village of Harlem. The area would remain very rural up until the end of the 1800s when this street was built. It was the first investor development in the area which built twenty identical row houses following the road from the neighboring Morris Jumel mansion to St. Nicholas Avenue. All of these houses were built in 1882 and remain very true to their original design. Sylvan Terrace was landmarked as a part of the Jumel Terrace Historic District on August 18th, 1970.

This is a landmark that unfortunately no longer exists. 14 Gay Street was built in 1827 by Daniel Weed and Joseph Baldwin for Curtis Hitchcock in the Federal style. The building is most famous for being the home of New Yorker writer Ruth McKenny. McKenny wrote her book “My Sister Eileen” in the basement apartment in 1938, which was then adapted into a movie and play by the same name as well as Wonderful Town. The building’s twin at 12 Gay Street was the former speakeasy of corrupt Mayor Jimmy Walker. It was landmarked as a part of the Greenwich Village Historic District on April 29th, 1969. That’s not where this story ends though. Despite being landmarked, by 2022 the building was in rough shape. The previous owner had died without a will, so the city auctioned it off. The developer who purchased the building claimed they were trying to repair it, yet unauthorized work ended up removing load-bearing walls in the basement, making it structurally unsound. If a landmark is a threat to the safety of those around it, it can be demolished, which is exactly what happened in 2023. Despite that being illegal, the developer was not fined. They are rebuilding it to look the same. That being said, 14 Gay Street had 6 studio apartments, and the new building will be a single-family home. This is an increasingly used tactic to get around the landmark laws.

One of the best aspects of Brooklyn Heights is its charming little side streets. Houses such as this one at 16 Hunts Lane feel like they’re from a completely different city. You can find a handful of these streets in the neighborhood like College Place or Grace Court Alley. The only problem is that it is nearly impossible to get much information on them. There are a few reasons why. These carriage houses generally don’t show up on early Brooklyn City records, making it almost impossible to put a date on their construction. Additionally, since these were built for horses and buggies and then converted into garages, there doesn’t seem to have been much interest in them until recently. Clay Lancaster’s book Old Brooklyn Heights: New York’s First Suburb, one of the most detailed surveys of most buildings in the neighborhood, omits Hunts Lane completely. For most landmark districts, the Landmarks Preservation Commission puts out a designation report that mentions the history of each building in said district. That is usually the best place to start while researching the city’s landmarks; however, Brooklyn Heights is unique. It was the first landmark district in New York, so the Landmarks Preservation Commission was still working out how it was going to create these reports on a neighborhood level. What results is a three-page document outlining the high-level history of the neighborhood without going into specifics around the buildings. Contrast that with Greenwich Village, the second landmark historic district, which came around four years later, in 1969, and which has a designation report of more than four hundred pages. As a result, we have to make some inferences from the sources we have. Generally speaking, these carriage houses would have belonged to whoever lived in the brownstone or mansion on a neighboring street, so it is most likely that this belonged to someone on either Remsen or Joralemon Street. Many of these homes served as garages until they were converted in housing in the later portion of the twentieth century. No. 16 Hunts Lane was landmarked as part of the Brooklyn Heights Historic District on November 23, 1965.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to, or at least that applies to elementary schools. We seem to have gone from building these to concrete buildings that look like they could be mistaken for prisons. This particular school is the former PS 9, built in 1867 by the Brooklyn Board of Education at the corner of Vanderbilt Avenue and Sterling Place in Prospect Heights. The school moved from its former home in what is now Prospect Park. When the school opened its doors, its principal was Jane Dunkley. Although not the first woman principal in Brooklyn, she was the first woman to run a school of this size. In 1895, the population had grown so much that an annex had to be opened across the street. The building now serves as a specialty high school, IS 340. It was landmarked by the City of New York on January 10th, 1978.

New York City is full of murals. This particular one is on the corner of 83rd and York and is referred to as the Yorkville Glockenspiel. It was painted in 2005 by muralist Richard Haas. The mural is a throwback to the German heritage of Yorkville and designed to look like a German clock. Instead of using knights on horseback, Haas used mounted NYPD officers. The mural was commissioned by a luxury building across the street. The developer was concerned about lower floors looking at a graffiti-covered tenement and determined a mural to be more fitting. They were able to convince the owner of the building to have it painted, and the rest is history. Neither the building nor the mural are landmarked, but it is a distinctive local attraction. One of Haas’ other works, a mural of the Brooklyn Bridge on Peck Slip, is part of a landmark historic district.

New batch of tour dates are now available and I can’t believe June is even on the schedule already. I’ve included a few weeknight tours as we have the extra light on our side. To book either head to my bio or go to Landmarksofny.com.

The West Village is a pretty good snapshot of what mid-1800s New York looked like. Manley’s Wine and Liquors has been at 33 8th Avenue since 1934, but the building it occupies dates back nearly 100 years earlier. It was built in 1845 for Abraham Soper, the building next door for his brother, William. They both made their living as carters, literally wheeling stuff around on carts. A store has existed in the building since its creation with apartments above it. While the original owners would be thrown off by the neon sign, the building would largely look the same to them today as it did over 175 years ago. It was landmarked as part of the Greenwich Village Historic District on April 29th, 1969.

One of the great “what ifs” of New York is if Frank Lloyd Wright was allowed to make the Guggenheim Red. This was a real plan during construction that was squashed by many parties involved. I’m curious if you would have preferred this to the current.

The Helmsley Building is one of the more unique buildings in Manhattan, with one of the ugliest neighbors. It was built in 1929 with the same material as Grand Central and by the same architects, Warren and Wetmore. The New York Central Rail Road used the buildings as their headquarters. One of the most interesting parts of the building is that it is both over active train tracks and has two ramps that cary Park Avenue through its base and around Grand Central. For over 20 years, it was the focal point of the avenue until the Pan Am, now Met life building was constructed in 1951. It was landmarked on March 31st, 1987.