Ephemeral New York
Ephemeral New York
Esther Crain
Ephemeral New York, founded and edited by native New Yorker Esther Crain, chronicles a constantly reinvented city through photos, newspaper archives, and other scraps and artifacts that have been edged into New York’s collective remainder bin. Here we remember forgotten people, places, and relics of the way New Yorkers used to live. We get a big kick out of present-day urban weirdness and idiosyncrasies too.
Latest Posts
The first things I noticed about 2029 First Avenue were the decorative lintels above the second floor windows. Attractively styled for window lintels on upper First Avenue, I figured this stubby holdout wedged beside two brick buildings...
If you were a New Yorker in the 19th century and found yourself to be poor, incurably sick, homeless, or convicted of a crime, you might have been herded into a ferry and confined to one of the “islands of the undesirables” in the East...
If you’re curious about New York’s Gilded Age, then you’re familiar with certain recurring family names—like Astor, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Rockefeller, and Roosevelt. 1875: The Astor family taking tea But what made these elite families so...
Bare arms, visible ankles, a more relaxed waistline—the most fashionable “bathing dresses” of 1868 allowed a woman to strip off her day-to-day corsets, feather hats, and petticoats and luxuriate in the freedom of the seaside. This ad for...
In colonial times, almost all of Manhattan was farmland. These farms—with hundreds of acres of vegetables, fruit orchards, and livestock, anchored by a clapboard farmhouse—were slowly given over to the development of the asphalt city....
Finding your way to Featherbed Lane (below photo, 1910), in the Morris Heights neighborhood of the Bronx, means passing some seen-better-days streets that offer a history lesson about the borough’s early years. Jerome Avenue, where...
The 1876 Centennial was an all-out party in Gotham—fireworks, military parades, musical performances, and thousands of American flags and bunting draped over the windows of city buildings, houses, and hotels. But the Sesquicentennial, or...
I always thought it was a gag helped along by trick camera work. In 1977’s Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, attributes his nervous personality to having grown up in a house “underneath the roller coaster in the Coney...
First there were five houses. Completed in 1855, this unbroken row of Gothic-style loveliness stood out like an idiosyncratic interruption in a Brooklyn Heights neighborhood of refined Greek Revival brownstones. The striking three-story...
You’re forgiven if you assumed 58 Joralemon Street was just another beautifully restored Greek Revival row house in Brooklyn Heights. Built in 1847, it resembles many of the elegant single-family houses on the block, with its red brick...
The Brooklyn Bridge most New Yorkers know is a slender wonder of steel wires, stone towers, and sweeping views. But there’s a less visible part of the bridge at ground level. These are the anchorages—the masonry structures on both the...
Getting around the western Bronx by foot means encountering hilly streets, lots of hilly streets. The pitched terrain comes from ridges of bedrock formed millions of years ago extending into Northern Manhattan. Back in the early 1900s...
When Fidelia Bridges moved to 93 First Place in Brooklyn in 1854, her neighborhood was an enclave of recently built brownstones set back from the street with roomy front gardens. Years later, in 1867, something compelled her to paint...
Otto C. Dreschmeyer lived what appears to be a small, provincial kind of life. Born in New York in 1896 to German immigrant parents, he attended P.S. 81 on Cypress Avenue near the Brooklyn-Queens border. His father served as president of...
You can see it peeking out from the Harlem River Drive or through the chain-link fence of the Third Avenue Bridge: a five-story red brick building almost buried behind glass and steel apartment towers. The towers are newish luxury rental...