Ephemeral New York
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.
Latest Posts
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,...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...