“Let us go on again, and … plunge into the Five Points….We have seen no beggars in the streets by night or day, but of other kinds of strollers plenty. Poverty, wretchedness, and vice are rife enough where we are going now.” – Charles Dickens, American Notes Never has a slum been so notorious as that of Five Points. So ... Read More »
A country estate, a hidden hotel, a tucked away museum on the Upper East Side. All of these descriptions can be attributed to one building in New York City, The Mount Vernon Hotel Museum. Built in 1799 as the carriage house for the 23 acre estate of Colonel William Stephens Smith, and his wife Abigail Adams Smith, daughter of ... Read More »
Nestled in the tree lined Grove Street, in Greenwich Village, there is sits a white brick building with red trim. It stands out on the street full of mid-19th century townhouses not just because of its old fashioned sign and garish paint, but because late into the evenings, on any given night, the sounds of Broadway tunes can be heard ... Read More »
“I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs.” And so ends the famed holiday tale, ‘The Gift of The Magi,’ the story of a husband and wife so in love, they sell their most prized possessions to buy each other a gift for Christmas, unknowingly buying gifts to complement the exact thing that the other ... Read More »
Harlem’s history usually elicits images and memories of it as the longtime citadel of black American life, but were it not for one enterprising young man from Massachusetts, such history might have never been written. When Philip Payton arrived in New York in 1899, real estate speculators were quickly throwing up modern apartment buildings and brownstones in formerly rural ... Read More »
Stepping into a Stanford White building in New York feels like stepping into history. One has to only walk under the Washington Square Arch he designed in 1892 or into his glittering and gilded Metropolitan Club to feel in awe of an architect who during his day, built many of the city’s most important structures and whose life was a ... Read More »
Yesterday, we told you about the famous residents of Gramercy Park and among them was the Nobel Prize winning author of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck. Though Steinbeck was a California native, he made New York his home, spending much of his life there. On June 23rd, Bloomsbury Auctions in New York will offer buyers a rare glimpse ... Read More »
The most exclusive club in New York isn’t guarded with a velvet rope, instead, members are given a key to the high iron gates and it’s only with proof of address that one is allowed access. Ever since 1832, when landowner Samuel Ruggles first pled his case to the New York City government to grant him permission to turn ... Read More »
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