Whenever we go through an epic heatwave, my millennial subconscious will always pull the Sears air conditioner commercial from the 90s from the depths of my memory. With that said, it’s as good an excuse as any to talk about the last Sears in New York, which was located in Flatbush and operated from 1932 to 2021. Despite its closing, the building is landmarked and is currently undergoing construction to become apartments. This is one of the entries in my book Hidden Landmarks of New York, which explores the history of New York through its buildings. #nychistory #historytok #brooklyn #searsairconditionercommercial

Since it’s hotter than the surface of the sun in New York City, let’s take a trip down to Coney Island. What was once America’s largest amusement park has a fascinating history. There are multiple theories on where its name came from; the most popular is that it comes from the Dutch word for rabbit, “konijn.” However, even that is disputed. The island was a part of Gravesend and didn’t really begin development until the 1820s. For the middle of the 19th century, it became a high-end getaway for Manhattan’s wealthy residents, with multiple luxury hotels and later race tracks. The horse racing attracted a different crowd, which caused the island’s reputation to suffer. Couple that with multiple fires destroying some of the hotels, and it was in need of a rebranding. Enter George C. Tilyou, who decided to open Steeplechase Park in 1897, which unified a bunch of attractions on the boardwalk. His sons would purchase this tower, the parachute jump, from the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens. The ride literally had parachutes that would be guided up and down from the top of the tower. It’s a miracle people survived this thing. Steeplechase Park closed in 1964, and the tower went inactive. It was landmarked on May 23rd, 1989. I can’t imagine voluntarily parachuting at an amusement park, guide lines or no guidelines but curious if you would. Let me know.

Last night marked the return of @gildedagehbo for its third season, so I thought it would be a fun idea to cover some Gilded Age mansions still standing in New York City for the next few Mondays. Our first mansion brings us to the Clinton Hill Neighborhood of Brooklyn. This home located at 229 Clinton Avenue belongs to Frederic Pratt, one of the sons of Charles Pratt. The Pratt family were new money industrialists, with Charles making the family fortune in oil, founding Charles Pratt and Company, which later merged with John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in 1874. Charles Pratt built homes in Clinton Hill for himself and his sons; there are four surviving ones on this stretch of Clinton Avenue. Frederic Pratt was the second son of Charles and benefited immensely from his father’s fortune. Not only did he receive this beautiful mansion as a wedding present in 1895, designed by the firm of Babb, Cook & Willard who would also design Andrew Carnegie’s 5th Avenue Estate, but he became president of the board of the Pratt Institute in 1893. Frederic would serve in that role for 44 years, and because of the death of his father shortly after the founding of the college, Frederic guided it through its formative years. Frederic married his wife Caroline Ladd in 1895. She outlived her husband and continued to donate to the Pratt Institute, which included donating this house, which had the full backing of the family. It was used for a time as a dormitory for international students, and today is the home to the president of the Pratt Institute. According to the Clinton Hill Historic District designation report, much of the interior has been preserved, so if the @prattinstitute wants to invite me over for an interior tour, I would gladly accept. The Frederic and Caroline Ladd Pratt house was landmarked on November 10th, 1981. #gildedage #gildedagemansions #brooklynhistory #nychistory

This house on 85th Street looks like someone tried to squeeze some history in between two buildings. Well, that’s exactly what this is. The house was built around 1860 on an old farm back when Yorkville was mostly rural. As time went on, waves of German immigrants transformed the neighborhood into a little Germany. Many of them worked at breweries and piano factories across the river in Astoria, which was an easy ferry ride away. As time went on, wooden buildings like these were considered a blight on the neighborhood, and many were torn down. Only 9 remain above 59th Street on the Upper East Side by my count. 412 East 85th has been a single family home, apartments, and a marble shop. It is currently a single family home and was restored as accurately as possible in 1996. It was landmarked on December 13th, 2016.

Sitting inside this 1908 townhouse in Park Slope is one of the most important archives documenting the lives of lesbians in the United States, the Lesbian Herstory Archive. The archive was created in 1974 by a group of women who had been members of the Gay Academic Union. There were allegations of sexism, and that the GAU was not doing enough to promote women’s voices. They founded their own society “In memory of the voices we have lost.” Because of draconian laws related to the LGBTQ community in New York, many queer women were forced to conform to a heteronormative lifestyle, and the actual tangible history, the stories of lesbians in the community, were being erased. The Lesbian Herstory Archive sought to document those hidden stories, and as a result is home to the largest collection of material relating to, and created by, lesbians. The original archive was hosted in cofounder Joan Nestles’ Upper West Side Apartment until the space became too small. In 1991, this townhouse on 14th Street in Park Slope was purchased, and the archives moved here. In addition to Joan, the early archive was greatly assisted by Judith Schwarz and Mabel Hampton. The townhouse was originally landmarked as part of the Park Slope Historic District in 1979; however, the Lesbian Herstory Archive was given its own, individual designation on November 22nd, 2022.

These two buildings stick out in Brooklyn Heights, which is saying something considering how beautiful the buildings in that neighborhood are. 140 and 142 Clinton Street are the only two surviving houses of an original group of five built in 1855. They reportedly had 13 rooms each and were primarily marketed towards families. I’m lucky to have a 2 bedroom in a basement, but I digress. The homes, including the now demolished ones, experienced extreme tragedy in 1872 when two children who lived at No. 138 perished in the sinking of a ship off the coast of Newport RI, they were returned to No. 142 before their burial. I wasn’t able to find out if the family owned both houses. They were landmarked as a part of the Brooklyn Heights Historic District on November 23rd, 1965. If you’d like to see more buildings like this in person, join me on my Brooklyn Heights tour tonight at 6. The link to the tickets is in my bio.

You may be familiar with 70 Willow Street from some of my previous posts or my book, probably most famous for being the home (partly) of Truman Capote when he wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood. What you might be less familiar with is this home’s connection to the Abolition movement and the first Black graduate from Yale. When this home was built around 1839, it was purchased by Adrian Van Sinderen. Van Sinderen came from an old Dutch New York family, with his father being the pastor at the Dutch Reform Church in Flatbush. Van Sinderen was an early proponent of a form of abolition in the beginning of the 1800s. He was a member of The American Colonization Society, which advocated for the repatriation of Freed and recently emancipated Africans back to Africa. While Van Sinderen lived at this house, he employed a man named James Pennington. Pennington was an enslaved man in Maryland who escaped to Brooklyn. On his way, he was helped by Quakers in Pennsylvania who taught him how to read and write as well as provided him with a wage. When he arrived in Brooklyn, he was employed by Van Sinderen as a coachman. He attended night classes to teach himself Greek and Latin and was eventually employed as a school teacher in Newtown, Queens. While under the employment of Van Sinderen, Pennington attended an abolitionist convention in Philadelphia. He publicly denounced his employer’s efforts to remove African Americans to Africa and is credited with Van Sinderen moving his efforts away from the Colonization Society and to push for full and immediate emancipation. Caption continued in the comments.

Did you know that Tribeca used to be home to a park like Gramercy? St. John’s Park was a key only accessible private park built on land owned by Trinity Church. This attracted some of New York’s wealthiest families making it the most desired neighborhood in the city. However within a few decades the park and surrounding buildings would be demolished to make room for a Vanderbilt train terminal and eventually the Holland Tunnel exit. You can still see the square from above and on maps. #nychistory #tribeca #nyc #manhattan

I’m sticking with the trolley theme this week. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out my post from yesterday. These first trolleys rolled down Brooklyn streets beginning in 1854. At this time, they were pretty simple: a rail car pulled by horses. Eventually, they would go electric and have rail lines crisscrossing the city and eventually the borough. This gave rise to the nickname of the local National League baseball team, the Trolly Dodgers, which was eventually just shortened to Dodgers. Much like the Dodgers, trolleys in Brooklyn would leave in the 1950s. This is the last evidence of that past, located on the waterfront in Red Hook, and ironically, it’s from Boston. This is what remains of the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association, which at its peak had 17 historic trolleys from around the country and had laid new rail in Red Hook in an attempt to revive this form of transit while connecting the neighborhood with the rest of Brooklyn. Funding disappeared at the start of the Bloomberg administration, and most of the tracks were ripped up. Following Hurricane Sandy, the remaining rail cars parked behind the Fairway were flooded with over five feet of salt water, leading to more corrosion and forcing them to be sent to other museums. Trolley 3033, that used to run on Boston’s Green Line, is all that remains of this dream. You can still see this one, which is now in pretty rough shape, behind the Food Bazaar on Van Brunt Street. This photo was taken with Kodak #portra400. Would you want to see trolleys back or stick with buses?

This carriage house, turned actual house, at 433 Waverly Avenue, is one of those buildings that is incredibly difficult to find information on. We don’t know when it was built, and unfortunately, about half of the buildings on the street have the same issue. The buildings that we do have dates for range from the 1840s to the 1880s, so it’s probably a safe bet that it was built in that 40 year stretch. However, while researching this house, I did find some interesting things about its former occupants, namely that one family was involved in multiple transportation mishaps. On Wednesday, April 5th, 1911, Thomas Eagan of 433 Waverly was driving an automobile owned by John Hallenbeck, who lived on Washington Avenue. An unidentified woman was attempting to cross the street when she was hit by Eagan and the car. Eagan was hauled off to the local police precinct, while the woman was brought to a hospital unconscious. Unfortunately, I was unable to find what happened to that woman or if Eagan was charged. The Eagans still called Waverly Avenue home in 1927 when their son, John, was returning home via one of Brooklyn’s many street cars. The car that John Eagan was on, was part the St. Johns line, today’s B45 bus line, which missed a switch and began running out of control down a hill. Apparently, many of the passengers tried to assist the motorman with pulling the brakes when the car collided with another streetcar, injuring 35. John and his fellow passengers would recover, with most being released from the hospital the same day. Today, this is listed as a duplex, although when a sale was attempted in 2019, the listing agents mentioned how easy it would be to convert it into one single-family home. 433 Waverly Avenue was landmarked as part of the Clinton Hill Historic District on November 10th, 1981.

If you’ve ever seen the mansions of Newport, or those still lining 5th Avenue, you’d be in awe of how grandiose and elaborate they were. But did you ever wonder what kind of house the people who designed those mansions would live in? Here’s one example. The Odgen Codman House was built in 1913 for Architect Odgen Codman Jr. His resume is basically a who’s who of gilded age clients. He designed one of the floors for the Breakers Mansion in Newport, helped the Rockefellers design their Westchester County Estate and the Vanderbilts with theirs in Hyde Park. The cherry on top was his collaboration with author Edith Wharton on her home in Newport as well as co-authoring The Decoration of Houses with her. Codman’s house at 7 East 96th Street has been home to a few organizations since he moved out. It was the site of the Nippon Club, an organization for Japanese Americans and nationals, followed by the Manhattan School and the Wetherby-Pembridge School. Today it is home to the SAM school. It was made a New York City Landmark on May 25th, 1967.

These brownstones were part of the later wave of development in the Jumel Terrace Historic District. This area was comprised of farms and weekend homes for wealthy New Yorkers up until after the Civil War. The first row houses here weren’t built until the 1870s on Sylvan Terrace, one block south. These homes were built in 1896 by William Watkins as a part of further residential development and the new access to mass transit. The newest building in this historic district is from 1909; it’s a very surreal departure from the hustle and bustle of the surrounding neighborhood. The houses were landmarked by the City of New York on August 8th,1970.

Have you ever wondered how New York got it’s grid? While New York was far from the first city to impliment it, the layout if its streets might be the most famous example. Some have called it the most forward thinking piece of urban planning in the US with others criticizing the lack of flexibility and poor use of space. What do you think?

I didn’t realize when I took this photo, but this is actually the rear of the House of the New York City Bar Association. At some point, I’ll run back to get a photo of the front, but to be honest with you, I think this entrance is more aesthetically pleasing. The New York City Bar Association was founded back in the 1870s with the goal of “maintaining the dignity of the profession of the law.” Part of the mission involved networking, which is why they rented a series of locations in lower Manhattan before deciding to purchase a plot in midtown in the 1890s. While this entrance faces 43rd Street, the main entrance was put on 44th Street between 5th and 6th to strategically locate it near some of the other Gilded Age clubhouses, such as the Harvard Club and New York Yacht Club. The building opened in 1896 and was designed by architect Cyrus Eidlitz and cost nearly $600,000, close to $220 million today. To celebrate the opening, the Bar Association hosted a lavish gala, with over one thousand guests in attendance. It was landmarked on June 7th, 1966. #nychistory#nyc#gildedage

This collection of buildings on Front Street in the Seaport contains some of the oldest buildings in Manhattan, with a few dating to before 1800. No. 204 and 206 date from 1799, with the other buildings dating from around 1800-1815. They all survived a fire in 1821, which destroyed most of the buildings on the eastern portion of the street. Front Street would be the waterline until 1810 when South Street was created, making these plots prime commercial real estate. All of these buildings were used as shops with residences on top of them, with many merchants and grocers occupying the storefronts. In the early decades of the 1800s, the Greek Revival style of architecture became very “in,” so a few of these were renovated by slapping some columns on the front and calling it a day. There were various additional renovations in the 1880s as well. This group was landmarked as a part of the South Street Seaport Historic District on May 10th, 1977.

Imagine you’re on the subway, and all of a sudden someone comes over the loudspeaker and says that the Mayor of New York is driving your train. That probably wouldn’t inspire confidence but that’s exactly what happened when the first subway opened in 1904 and apparently George McClellan Jr. had a lead foot

For over 170 years, the Church of the Holy Apostles has served Chelsea. The neighborhood has changed tremendously since it was built in 1848 on the corner of 28th Street and 9th Ave. The parish was formed to serve poor dock workers on the Hudson River as an offshoot of Trinity Church on Wall Street. That mission of social justice continued over the centuries. It was a rumored stop on the Underground Railroad, and also helped the formation of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, a synagogue dedicated to ministering to the LGBTQ community. It was the first Episcopalian Church in New York to ordain a woman and lesbian minister in 1982. Additionally, in 1982, the church started a soup kitchen that has served daily meals and is now the largest in the city. The Church of the Holy Apostles was landmarked by the City of New York on October 19th, 1966. #nychistory#pride#chelsea#manhattan

There’s truly few things that I enjoy more in this city than the summer parks series conducted by the New York Philharmonic, which has been going on since 1965. When the series began, the Philharmonic was already over a century old. Founded in 1843 by local New York musicians, the New York Philharmonic claims the title of oldest symphony orchestra in the United States. Over its history it’s had a variety of music all-stars at its helm, with names like Mahler, Dvořák, Strauss, Copeland, Stravinsky and Bernstein just to name a few. And in case you wonder what the difference between a symphony orchestra is vs a Philharmonic, the answer is there isn’t one, a Philharmonic is always part of a proper name, and usually helps differentiate multiple orchestras in the same city.

Sitting just south of Grand Central on Park Avenue, between 37th and 38th Street, is the former home of Adelaide T. Douglas. Adelaide Townsend married William Proctor Douglas in 1879, a partnership that wouldn’t stand the test of time due to an alleged affair. William Douglas was an avid yachtsman, winning the Americas Cup in 1871, and owned over 300 acres of land in Little Neck, Queens. This was perfect for his boating passions, but eventually, he decided to subdivide the property, which would become Douglas Manor and Douglaston, Queens. Adelaide, on the other hand, was a classic New York socialite and was said to have an affair with J.P. Morgan, funny how that isn’t mentioned in the designation report. After they separated, Adelaide decided to build her home here, not far from Morgan’s mansion on Madison Avenue. Further lending credence to the validity of the affair, Morgan was the original name on the mortgage. Furthermore, members of the Douglas Family stated that Morgan only entered the home through the back door when he called on them. Adelaide hired the Philadelphia-based architect Horace Trumbauer to design the home for her, which was completed in 1911. After Adelaide Douglas moved out, the home was converted into office space and was occupied for a time by the US Olympic Committee. In 1979, it was purchased by Guatemala to serve as its mission to the United Nations. It was landmarked on September 11th, 1979.

If you want to learn more about New York and its history, join me for one of my upcoming walking tours. These tours are designed to give New Yorkers a better sense of their city, generally speaking 90% attendees live in the five boroughs. These will be my last of the summer since July and August the past few years have been brutally hot. I’m also working on new tours this summer. So come on a tour because my son’s daycare is stupid expensive. If you have a neighborhood you want to learn more about let me know in the comments. #nyctours #nyc #nychistory