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
Top Words
- york
- street
- brooklyn
- house
- city
- century
- west
- park
- houses
- gilded
- built
- avenue
All posts (70)
On a traffic island at Hudson and Bank Streets is a small dark plaque. Obscured by tree branches, it’s a low-key memorial to a 31-year-old man killed in the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. “In Memory of David Harlow Rice, World Trade Center II,” it reads, with Rice’s birth date and “9-11-01” embossed in bronze....
Ever since it officially opened in 1880, Riverside Drive has promised bigness: spacious lots, roomy mansions, and towering prewar apartment houses with expansive views across the Hudson River. So how did this one-story stub of a house end up on the south corner of Riverside Drive and West 107th Street, nestled...
It’s always 1993 at this 4 train stop on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. That’s where an above-ground station still sports a pay phone on the mezzanine level. Surprisingly, the phone is in decent condition. The cord hasn’t been ripped from the wall, the coin slot was free of debris, and the area surrounding the phone...
One of the attractions of walking through the Financial District is realizing how many of these mostly nonconforming, cow path-like streets got their start 400 years ago in the colonial outpost of New Amsterdam. Broadway, Broad Street, Maiden Lane, Wall Street—these are their anglicized names, but they all date back...
The clubhouse, once a sportsman’s retreat with a skylit staircase and a rotunda that hosted annual dinners and dances, sits like an empty shell. The second-floor balcony, from which members and guests watched the Regattas and aquatic shows, looks like a ghost of the Gilded Age—overshadowed by the stately apartment...
They’ve been dubbed the Maryland 400: a regiment of volunteers considered the state’s most disciplined and well-equipped military force. In July 1776, with thousands of British soldiers already in New York readying themselves for war against a woefully unprepared Continental Army, the men in the First Maryland...
If you’ve ever found yourself waiting for a downtown 4, 5, or 6 train at Union Square, then you’ve seen them. At the platform edge every 10 feet or so are sets of steel grills. When there’s no train, they don’t move. But when a train pulls in and comes to a stop, the steel grills automatically extend to fill in the...
He’s hardly a household name today. But Utah-born John Held, Jr. helped create the popular imagery of the 1920s. Held made Jazz Age icons out of bobbed-hair flappers, college guys in raccoon coats, sporty women wielding tennis rackets, and tuxedoed partygoers dangling cigarette holders from their lips. His gently...
Facing it head-on from the sidewalk, 1001 Fifth Avenue is impressive enough—a 23-story residential building clad in a limestone facade topped by what looks like a mansard roof that stretches into the sky. Viewed from the side, however, and this mansard roof is just a massive limestone slab supported by steel...
Getting to Coney Island from Manhattan could take a long time in the 1890s. Depending on where you were coming from, you’d likely have to board a streetcar or elevated train, or more than one, and then catch one of the Brooklyn railroads that then delivered you to a beachfront terminal. The shorter way to get to...
New York is a graveyard of former theater houses, and in recent years these vacant venues have been repurposed into retail shops, boutique hotels, a workout studio, and even a Starbucks. So why not a one-time dramatic stock and vaudeville theater transformed into a church? A Pentecostal Christian congregation...
Some buildings in New York are so stunning, they make you stop in your tracks. The Knox Hat Factory, at Grand Avenue and St. Marks Place in Prospect Heights, is that kind of building. It almost looks like a castle, with the yellow brick factory walls fortified to protect the interior, and a corner watchtower to help...
Page 2 of 6