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.
August 2026
September 2026
October 2026
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All posts (70)
Born into wealth and privilege on a New Jersey estate in 1864, Louis Eilshemius wasn’t your typical New York City painter. The income his father made from an importing business gave him the means to travel through Europe, study at the Art Students League, and ultimately settle down and spend the bulk of his...
The Upper West Side is an area of architectural splendor—with Beaux-Arts beauties, romantic brownstone rows, and Art Deco masterpieces. But before that, there was this simple wood-frame building on the corner of Broadway and West 100th Street. Constructed not long after the end of the Civil War, the Italianate-style...
This 1912 postcard captures a picturesque and fashionable scene: four separate riders on horseback cantering along an unpaved bridle path in Central Park. Looking at the postcard, as well as the more vigorous Edward Hopper painting from 1939 below, made me wonder. Whatever happened to the bridle path, and are...
Statues of lions flanking entryways are not unusual in New York City public and private spaces. The two most famous are probably Patience and Fortitude, the beloved lions guarding the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue (and named by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to inspire strength during the Depression). But...
River pirates, sneak thieves, pickpockets, confidence men—New York City in 1896 was grappling with rising rates of relatively new crimes that threatened the safety of Gilded Age Gotham. But tthe city’s police force, led by robust crimefighter Theodore Roosevelt, decided to crack down on another troubling offense:...
First there were four houses in this pretty colonnade row, with matching dentilled cornices, long slender windows, and thick columns in front of the facades that suggested grandeur—though the columns were made of wood, not marble. They were likely built in the 1840s when Greek Revival, colonnade-style houses were in...
Dating back to 1824 when it was a free library founded specifically for tradesmen, the Brooklyn Museum is a magnificent repository of 140,000 pieces of art spanning ancient Egypt to contemporary America. But beneath the museum at the grimy subway stop that takes you directly in front of the Beaux Arts building...
Sixth Avenue above 14th Street is a hodge-podge stretch of Manhattan, with enormous buildings that once housed the great shopping emporiums of the late 19th century interspersed with seen-better-days walkups. And then there’s this curiosity on the northeast corner of West 16th Street. Just four stories high, with a...
It wouldn’t be a stretch to call Edwin C. Litchfield the father of Park Slope. Born in 1815, Litchfield became a prominent lawyer who resided in Greenwich Village and made big money investing in railways. In 1852, he saw the potential of a new kind of investment: in land on the sleepy outskirts of Brooklyn....
It’s not the only Brooklyn manhole cover with “Catskill water” embossed in iron. But it’s the one that caught my eye when I found myself at St. Marks Place and Washington Avenue in Prospect Heights earlier this summer. And it led me to do a little research and discover that in 1917, Brooklyn began getting the bulk...
The forecast mentioned rain. But the brokers, clerks, messengers, and stenographers who left their Wall Street headquarters for lunch just before noon on September 16, 1920, were greeted by sunny skies. While the bells of Trinity Church a block away rang to mark the hour and workers headed to lunch trucks and...
Born in Brooklyn in 1918, Arthur Leipzig traveled the world with his camera to document people and tell their stories, from Yiddish theater actors in Communist Romania to Sudanese fishermen battered by a storm. “Chalk Games,” 1950 But it was his sensitive, evocative images of children at play on New York City...
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