The railroad that would head up 4th Avenue – Park Avenue – and eventually become Metro-North, started off at the New York and Harlem Railroad. Looking at the image below of the depot at Park and 26th Street, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is an image of a western frontier town. You almost expect to see sagebrush and men in Stetsons.
It’s for sale on Ebay
When Harlem’s identity shifted from village-outside-New-York, to suburb of New York in the late 1800’s, the ethnic makeup of its residents displayed striking patterns.
Looking at the map below you immediately notice the blue lines following avenues (more likely to have commercial space below with business owners or employees living above). These blue dots represent people who told the US Census that their birthplace was Germany. We don’t know if they were ethnically Jewish, Polish, or other minority groups living in the German lands, however.
Lastly it’s important to note that the buildings built along Avenues tended to be larger, and more likely to hold more people. We see this today walking around Harlem. While 3 story brownstones are typically found on streets. Brownstones on Avenues can reach 4 or even 5 stories tall.
There is some green scattered about (indicating a birthplace in England), but the pink dots (birthplace in Ireland) really stand out on the streets.
Zooming in a bit, you can see the pattern/s for 1880 birthplaces more clearly:
A great mural found on Park Avenue, just south of 116th Street.
In the early 19th century, a kind of health clinic – the Harlem Dispensary – was located on Fourth (or Park) Avenue between 124th and 125th Streets.
You can read more about the make-up of the board who ran this medical facility in what was a rural village well outside the City of New York, here:
https://archive.org/details/manualofcorpora1870newy/page/378/mode/2up?view=theater
Here is the view, today:
The current show at MOMA’s PS1 – Greater New York – has a number of Harlem artists/images on display. One particularly great collection is a wall of photos from Hiram Maristany, who filmed the unrest and revolution in East Harlem during the Young Lords Era of 1969-70.
Maristany was born in East Harlem and became the official photographer of the Young Lords Party (founded in 1969). His photos of dental clinics, TB testing trucks, the Garbage Offensive, and the takeover of the United Methodist Church (Lex/111), have become the images of this period that captured the frustration, anger, spirit, and pride of the Puerto Rican residents of East Harlem.
The work will be up (in LIC, Queens) until April.
If you’ve been on Park Avenue above Metro-North you may have seen excavation underway for a new residential building. The building will be 18 stories, face Park Avenue, and have a couple of floors of commercial space below. Artimus is the general contractor.
Ephemeral New York has a great piece on the history and charm of Manhattanville:
The print of activity along the road from Central Park to Manhattanville is great – if for no other reason than it depicts goats hanging out in Harlem:
Artimus, the developers who are building the new commercial+residential on Park Avenue between East 126th and East 127th Streets, came to our February HNBA meeting and discussed their plans for the new building. As a follow-up, some additional questions were posed. Below are the questions and the answers, along with two different views of the building.
– Re: the blank wall facing the E. 126th Street side – it would be nice to apply a wall treatment that adds an enhanced architectural design to the wall – i.e. – a waterfall running down that wall (doesn’t have to be the full height) and have it lit with uplighting to make for an attractive look to the facade. Close off the lot with a nice iron fence could be quite appealing. It will be a brick façade with windows, and will have a design as per the attached elevation. As far as the HPD area, we also believe there will need to be something done to make sure that space is properly taken care of.
– Will there (or can there) be cameras all around the building? Especially the facing out towards the vacant lot. There will be 200+ cameras in the building between inside and outside and they will have full coverage of inside and outside including the vacant area.
– Please no billboards or painted murals on that wall – We don’t have any intention of doing a mural at this point.
– What type of landscaping will be incorporated? i.e. are you planting any trees? We will be planting trees wherever the city Parks Dept allows it.
– Will there be a 24-hour doorman? There will not be a doorman.
– Can you provide 360 degree renderings of the building? The renderings shown at the meeting really didn’t give us a clear view of the building. Include aerial views, too. Those we presented are the final renderings, but we have some elevations attached here to give better perspective.
– Lastly, do you know who owns the parking lot across the street from the building? Would love to reach out to the owner regarding upkeep. I do not know the owner across, we built the Corn Exchange, but are not working with the parking lot owner.
Kristin Jordan replaces Bill Perkins as Harlem’s New City Council member.
YIMBY reports that a new residential tower will be built on a vacant lot at the corner of 120/Park with 57 residences:
The New York and Harlem Railroad was the first public streetcar service – mass transit – in New York City. The first line of horse-drawn carriages traveled from Prince Street to the Harlem Bridge on 4th Avenue (Park Avenue), reaching Harlem in 1837.
Below is an image of the early depot that serviced the horse-drawn streetcars.
Among the company’s founders was John Mason, a wealthy banker and president of Chemical Bank who was among the largest landowners in New York City. They decided to build their railroad on the eastern side of Manhattan Island, convinced that it would never be able to compete with steamboat traffic on the Hudson River.
The New York and Harlem Railroad eventually became the New York Central Railroad and then the Metro North we know today.
4th Avenue (Park Avenue) presented a challenge with the drop from Yorkville down to East Harlem, so initially a trestle was built of wood – eventually to be replaced by the masonry structure we know today (98th Street to 111th Street). Beyond that is an increasingly fragile iron and steel structure that extends to the Harlem River (Metro North) Bridge.
You can see the 1950 film, here:
that shows a train coming into New York City, crossing the Harlem River, then going through East Harlem, and eventually entering the Park Avenue Tunnel.
The Harlem Community Advisory Board’s 2022 Annual Public Meeting
Wednesday, January 19, 2022
5:00pm Live via Webex
All are welcome to join. For more information, please call (212) 939-1369
Landmarks East Harlem and the Urban Archive have a great piece on St. Cecilia’s Church on East 106th Street between Park/Lexington:
https://www.urbanarchive.org/stories/YXyVct8Ucm7
Here is the church in the 19th Century:
By the 1940’s the area had built up (note the white hospital complex on 5th Avenue and Central Park in the distance, above the Metro North train viaduct):
Today, the bright red brick facade highlights St. Cecilia in the center, under the pediment.
Spooky Stories. You and your little ones are invited to Jackie Robinson Park Wed Oct 27th 2pm to hear Spooky Stories read by NYC nannies!!!
When you vote on November 2, you’ll be asked about ballot initiatives. Gothamist breaks them down for you, here:
https://gothamist.com/news/five-ballot-proposals-breakdown-november-2021?
The location of this Double V photo intrigued me as it was only labeled as being taken in “Harlem”.
The Double V campaign attempted to draw attention to the racism that kept Black Americans unable to work in many (lucrative) industries in the US, while permitting them to risk their lives fighting fascism abroad (in, albeit, segregated units).
The racial terror that threatened Black Americans before, during and after WWII had many aspects that paralleled wartime rhetoric about Axis society. The Double V Campaign sought to force white America to reckon with this issue and to ensure that Black GI’s coming back from risking their lives, would not return to another ‘Red Summer‘ – the intense, racial violence that sought to intimidate Black Americans who returned from the battlefronts of WWI.
The photo was dated from 1942. The exact address on 119th Street, between Lenox and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd is tough to pin down – notice how there are so many more trees on the street.
A recent listing for the top-floor penthouse at 1,396-foot-tall tower 432 Park Avenue has been publicly listed for the first time ever, asking $169 million. It is the most expensive listing currently in New York City, and if it fetches the asking price, it would become the second-biggest sale in the city’s history and set a record with its $20,500 per square foot price tag.
The 96th-floor unit is currently owned by billionaire Saudi real estate developer Fawaz Alhokair, who bought the apartment for only $88 million in 2016. The apartment unit has 8,225 square feet and has six bedrooms and seven bathrooms, as well as 240 linear feet of glass windows. The home is being sold with all of its art and furniture, which includes pieces from Hermes, Fendi, and Bentley.
As you likely know, the mayoral race in NYC is almost overwhelmin. To help voters navigate options, THE CITY has created Meet Your Mayor, which shows you how the candidates’ stands fit with how you are seeing the race.
Here’s what to do: You answer a few short multiple-choice questions on some of the most pressing matters facing the city — from COVID recovery to public school admissions to NYPD discipline and much more.
The major candidates have already answered the same questions.
Voila: Meet Your Mayor will reveal your best match or matches among the candidates
To get started, click below on any of the 3 topics. Answer questions with how you feel about these issues. Then the candidates that agree most with your answers will be displayed:
You may have heard about the fire last week on Park Avenue between 128/129. Given the presence of the Metro North tracks, the trucks had to extend ladders and evacuation buckets in an odd configuration with one extended a number of storefronts, but essentially parallel to the ground:
