If the Alwyn Court apartment building in New York was a wedding cake, you might look at it and say, “Somebody went nuts with the icing.” Is it beautiful or it is too much? The creators of this 12-story confection of a building, constructed from 1907-1909 at the corner of West 58th Street and Seventh […]

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“Children laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile”…so go the lyrics of “Silver Bells,” the classic Christmas song from the 1950s that paints an idyllic scene of the holidays in the city. This picture of New York City at the holidays lives within many of us. Its images are of softly falling snow, carolers, bright […]

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An angel, calm and serene, is playing an instrument, perhaps heralding an arrival. Indeed, those worshiping inside the church where the angel is on the front exterior wall were awaiting a coming – the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. They believed it was going to happen imminently. The years of the 19th century came and […]

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f the artists who developed the Rodin Studios building on New York City’s West 57th Street or the architect who designed it had favorites among the structure’s terra cotta characters, we may never know. Was it the frog, the man reading his book, or the ancient character holding a palette? We do know that nearly […]

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One hundred years from now, most of those who walk on West 29th Street in Manhattan may not know what Fern Luskin, Julie Finch, and a small group of local citizens did to preserve the block between Eighth and Ninth avenues. But in all likelihood they will see, largely intact, the mid-19th century row houses […]

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In the mid-19th century, runaway slaves found protection in an Underground Railroad “safe house” on West 29th Street in New York, as they fled northward to freedom. A century and a half later, a group of Bronx high school students plan to take a journey of their own in defense of this house.
The students, from […]

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Is the architectural and historical integrity of a New York City mid-19th century row house that served as a “safe house” for the Underground Railroad during the Civil War being imperiled again? Neighbors and local historic preservationists certainly believe so, and they’re again fighting to stop construction at the Hopper-Gibbons House, at 339 W. 29th […]

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Stand in Bowling Green Park in New York City and look around at the park and the buildings on its perimeter. At one time or another over the centuries here, Native American tribes gathered in council, men and women bought tickets for ocean passage in a couple of the nearby buildings, and John D. Rockefeller […]

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On the November night that the United States elected Barack Obama as its new President, NBC News anchorman Brian Williams called it “a seismic shift in American politics.” Yes, it is. Yet seismic shifts are, ultimately, created by many forces and actions that culminate in a particular moment. This seemed particularly poignant while walking along […]

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Outside, it was a post-Christmas, rush-hour frenzy, throngs crowding near the revolving doors and the holiday windows of Macy’s or walking speedily to Penn Station. Inside St. Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic Church in New York in the midst of all of this, you’d never know it. Two men were slowly and carefully […]

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Tinos green marble is a vivid green-blue with wide white veins, mined from the quarries of a small mountainous Greek island in the Aegean Sea. Briar Hill sandstone is an earthy stone of warm red, rust, brown, and buff-colored tones taken from quarries in Glenmont, Ohio. Missouri is the source of Napoleon gray marble, […]

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H. Douglas Ives once placed swarms of bees in the midst of midtown Manhattan, but to inspire, not to sting.
High above the thousands who scurry and stroll along Fifth Avenue sit two beehives surrounded by buzzing bees. But they’re not live – they’re part of the dazzling decoration atop the Fred F. French Building at […]

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