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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All posts (70)
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 America’s 150th birthday? By comparison, it was much more low-key. The big...
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 Island section of Brooklyn.” Turns out there really was such a house—not under the...
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 houses, with their arched roofs, tall windows, and cast-iron lintels, were also...
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 facade, long windows, and brownstone trim around the entryway. But take a closer...
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 Manhattan and Brooklyn sides that secure the cables supporting the bridge while...
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 the Bronx was undergoing urbanization, all these hills posed a challenge to...
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 that front garden. Perhaps it was the contrast between the delicate yellow buds on...
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 the Cigar Makers Union, and the family resided at 20-14 Stanhope Street in...
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 residences built on the Bronx side of the Harlem River. Shiny and modern, they...
At the foot of East 58th Street is Sutton Square—a jewel box of a cul-de-sac overlooking the East River and flanked by luxurious townhouses. All of the townhouses—they share a private garden with another group of homes on Sutton Place, one of which is the official residence of the secretary-general of the United...
Say what you want about Robert Moses. But as Parks Commissioner in the 1930s, he opened 11 new public municipal pools across the five boroughs—helping residents keep cool and resist the lure of swimming in the East or Hudson River, which amazingly people used to do. Moses, a swim fan himself, also championed and...
New York in the 1820s was an energetic, optimistic city. The opening of the Erie Canal made Gotham richer, elite families were relocating as far north as Bond Street, and the population surged past 100,000 residents. All of these changes brought on a wave of speculative real estate development. James Lent and his...
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