This bank, founded by an ordained rabbi, apparently decided to decorate its new building (the tallest on the Lower East Side when it was finished in 1912) with a common symbol of financial stability and security: two guys sitting on toilets. The bank failed two years after this building opened.
This is one of the 26 Chinatown bus companies shuttered in the massive government crackdown a few months ago. But what has become of all those buses?
You can hear a subway train rumbling by overhead about 30 seconds in.
This sculpture indicates the route of a great circle connecting New York, China, and the Caribbean, three places of origin well represented here at the multi-ethnic Governor Alfred E. Smith Houses.
mounted on a (presumably) reappropriated base
This former synagogue, built in 1903, has served as studio and residential space for artists since 1973.
Intended "to impress both the officer and the prisoner with the majesty of the law", this building was, according to the NY Times, "a magnificent anomaly: an ornate Beaux-Arts palace of 1909 in the middle of Little Italy, its grandeur contrasted utterly with the little buildings and crooked streets around it. To come upon the building has always been something like finding the Invalides in the middle of the Marais: its formal sumptuousness didn't fit with what was around it, but somehow that made it all the more mysterious and wonderful."
After the police left in 1973, the building began to fall into disrepair. In the '80s, however, it underwent a multi-million-dollar renovation and conversion into luxury condos. Thus restored to its former glory, it continues to amaze and perplex passersby who happen upon it for the first time.
over the two-block-long alley known as Staple Street
Part of Independence Plaza, this bridge bears a remnant (the Pier 23 sign) of the old elevated Miller Highway, which once ran alongside the nearby Hudson River (almost visible beyond the trees at the end of the block).
A grizzled old-timer on the trendy streets of Tribeca
Plumed celosia blooms in the foreground at this little park named for Philip Schuyler Finn, son of the beloved "Battery Dan" Finn. On a nearby sign, the Parks Department relates some colorful tales from the life of Finn the Elder:
He became a city magistrate and police judge in 1904, dispensing advice rather than harsh sentences. Admonitions like "Don’t try to compel a girl to love you if she prefers someone else. Get another to take her place," to two youths fighting over a girl, or "Don’t wreck or sell your body and soul for diamonds and automobiles," to a prostitute endeared him to New Yorkers across the city. No incident caused more amusement than Finn’s encounter with three bulldogs on his way to a court session in the Bronx. Under attack, he climbed a lamppost and yelled for help. Local papers carried the story and New York loved it.The NY Times's obituary for Battery Dan contains an expanded version of the don't-fight-over-a-girl advice:
"You are both as foolish as the fellows who years ago fought over a girl named Helen of Troy. The one who got her had nothing but trouble. Don’t try to compel a girl to love you if she prefers some one else. Get another to take her place."
The Parks Department has plans to rehydrate this little downtown plaza that lies within the historical boundaries of Collect Pond, one of the city's primary water sources for more than 150 years. As you may recall, we previously learned about the canal that was built to drain Collect Pond in the early 1800s after it had essentially become an open sewer, polluted beyond hope.
Once emptied, the pond was filled in with dirt from the surrounding hills, including Bayard's Mount, formerly the highest point in lower Manhattan. New homes were built on the site, but the landfill was not well engineered, and poor drainage caused the ground to subside, leaving the area swampy and stagnant. The wealthier residents moved away, poor immigrants flooded in, and the neighborhood became the notorious slum known as Five Points.
We happened upon the current version of the Tombs earlier today; its first incarnation was built atop the former pond in 1838 on a raft-like foundation "imbedded in quicksand". The Prison Association of New York's 1895 annual report delivered a searing condemnation of conditions at the jailhouse:
Such treatment of dogs would be gross cruelty; and when it is considered that the men so treated have not been convicted, and in many instances never are convicted of any crime, and that the prison is only intended to be a place for safe detention and not a place for punishment, no language which can be employed can be too severe in denunciation of such an infamy. The Tombs prison, as it has existed for years past, is a disgrace to the city of New York. It ought to be immediately demolished. It cannot be made decent. It is defective in every modern appliance. It is dark, damp and ill-ventilated.A new facility, with a much more substantial foundation, was built in 1902 to take its place; remnants of that foundation were recently discovered by workers during construction here at Collect Pond Park.
