Built in 1852-53, this is "one of the oldest of the few intact nineteenth-century wooden houses which remain in Manhattan north of Greenwich Village, [dating] from a period in which many of the houses on the outskirts of the city were of frame construction (prior to the implementation of an overall ban in Manhattan, due to fire hazards)." According to the AIA Guide to New York City, Eartha Kitt once called this place home.

This is the national headquarters of the ASPCA and the former home of Humility of Man Before A Group of Ageless Animals. Here's a close-up of the organization's seal, above, which depicts an angel intervening to keep a man from beating his horse.

One of the city's more obscure memorials, this isolated little traffic island, accessible from the nearest sidewalk by jogging across an FDR Drive entrance ramp (Street View), is named for a Hungarian cavalry officer who fought for the Americans in the Revolutionary War.

Built in 1866 (the top floor was added later in the 19th century) for a maker of artificial limbs, this clapboard house was until recently owned by C.C. Dyer, an ex-wife of Geraldo Rivera. Interior photos here.

on Lenox Avenue. In 1887, when this area west of Mount Morris Park was being developed, an article in The Record and Guide boasted of the local soil's "substratum of sand, which is the best possible safeguard against malaria".

A subtler Los Muchachos

This minimum-security prison across 110th Street from Central Park has in recent years been home to Malcolm X assassin Thomas Hagan and disgraced former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski (he of the $6,000 shower curtain and the vodka-urinating ice sculpture of Michelangelo's David).

Constructed in 1914, today's prison was originally the headquarters of the Young Women's Hebrew Association, serving as a dormitory and education center. (The roof, now caged, featured a garden in those days.) Presaging its current role as a place of involuntary confinement, the building saw later use as Army housing and as a school. In both cases, like today, it was surely filled with inmates dreaming of their eventual freedom.

from a glassy Harlem condo onto the frozen waters of the Harlem Meer

The plaque on the wall reads:

Hunter College Campus Schools
MEMORIAL CORNER
"We will not forget..."
September 11, 2001

Sculpted cattle skulls are an unexpected sight on the frieze of this brick mansion, an "elegant amalgam of Federal and Georgian styling" (photo) constructed around 1917. The house, along with a ballroom addition to the west (photo) built around 1928, was purchased by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) in 1958 and continues to serve as the church's headquarters. ROCOR split off from the Russian Orthodox Church (whose US/Mexican headquarters we just saw a few blocks away) after the Russian Revolution, "when overseas exiles refused to accept the domestic church's subservience to the Soviet state", but the two churches re-established canonical communion in 2007.

This "sumptuous, Regency-style limestone house" was built in the early 1930s, its 55 rooms occupied by Mr. Loew, his wife, and 16 servants. Along with another massive residence erected on this block of East 93rd Street in the early years of the Great Depression, it was one of the last grand mansions constructed in Manhattan. In more recent years, it was home to the Smithers Alcoholism Treatment and Training Center before being purchased in 1999 by the private all-girls Spence School.

This Madison Avenue facade is all that's left of the old armory, which was leveled in the 1960s to make way for a new school building (just visible at the far left) now occupied by Hunter College Elementary School and Hunter College High School. The original plan was to knock down the entire armory, but the city decided to protect the facade by designating it a landmark "just as the wreckers were about to demolish it." It now stands as "a dramatic backdrop for the school's playground" (photo).