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
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- century
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- gilded
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All posts (70)
It was just another corner brownstone tenement. Empty and boarded up for years, its facade was marred by graffiti and a tattered Chinese restaurant awning hung across the ground floor. The time came to bulldoze the old building, which held court at the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 116th Street. But once the...
The pitched roofs, overhanging eaves, curlycue flower petal motifs—is this really the entrance to the Third Avenue Elevated at 28th Street, or is it a house from a fairy tale? Painted by Staats Cotsworth around 1940, this depiction of an ordinary train entrance feels fanciful, almost magical; the city itself is...
It’s kind of a sad-looking flagpole, plastered with stickers and a layer of grime at the chaotic intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues. But it once stood in Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1913 to 1957. And that makes it a welcome rescued relic from a very different Brooklyn. The flagpole...
The enormous faux shopping bag that served as an advertisement for Macy’s is mostly gone, save for a patch of red facing Sixth Avenue. Scaffolding covers the ground floor retail space, and dark netting swaths the brick and limestone upper floors. What’s going on these days at the northwest corner of 34th Street and...
A visitor to today’s recently restored Waldorf Astoria might be dazzled by the Art Deco design, the luxurious lobby, and the ghosts of all the actors, inventors, and heads of state who made it their temporary home. What that visitor might not realize is that “the hypen”—as the hotel was called before the hyphen was...
On the edge of Prospect Heights at 736 Bergen Street sits a charming slate blue row house. Just two stories high with a top half-floor (based on some Zillow interior photos), the little Greek Revival-style relic features long slender windows, an ornamental front entrance, and a cornice with decorative moldings....
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 between East 104th and 105th Streets must have been a former stable. I imagined...
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 River. In the colonial era, these islands were privately owned spits of land used...
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 influential? How did they reshape and rule the city’s business and social worlds...
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 what were also called “bathing costumes” came from Godey’s Lady’s Book, an...
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. One unusual farm is considered the last holdout. The Benedetto Farm (sometimes...
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 Featherbed Lane begins, was named for flashy Gilded Age financier Leonard Jerome, who...
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