# NEW YORKERS by MLow > A living painted census of New York City by the artist MLow: 7,541 characters across 19 eras, every one with a story and a place, a walkable 3D museum of 111 New York rooms, and a reading room of sourced New York history. Every New Yorker gets a portrait. Even the villains. Dynamic tokens on ERC-7160. The claim (mint) date is recommended for October 8, 2026 and not yet signed. The census is art, not a survey of real residents and not an investment product. Quote with attribution to NEW YORKERS by MLow. Images are copyright MLow. ## Start here - [For bots and AI agents](https://n3wyorkers.com/agents): the canonical facts, endpoints, how to cite - [Census summary JSON](https://n3wyorkers.com/api/census.json): counts, eras, families, boroughs - [Every piece JSON](https://n3wyorkers.com/api/pieces.json): 7,541 records - [Museum rooms JSON](https://n3wyorkers.com/api/rooms.json): 111 rooms with sourced history - [Articles JSON](https://n3wyorkers.com/api/articles.json): the reading room, full text with sources - [Full text for LLMs](https://n3wyorkers.com/llms-full.txt) - [Print catalogue feeds](https://n3wyorkers.com/feeds/catalog.json): the same data as [Google Merchant](https://n3wyorkers.com/feeds/google-merchant.xml) and [Meta catalog](https://n3wyorkers.com/feeds/meta-catalog.csv) ## The site - [Home](https://n3wyorkers.com/) - [The Census](https://n3wyorkers.com/census): every record in 3D and a gallery - [The Atlas](https://n3wyorkers.com/map): every piece on the map of the five boroughs - [The Museum](https://n3wyorkers.com/museum): 111 walkable rooms; #room=random spins the slot machine - [The FAQ](https://n3wyorkers.com/faq): the idea, the lore, the eras and sets, the traits, the release, what you own - [The Reading Room](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn): sourced New York history - [Prints](https://n3wyorkers.com/shipping): NEW YORKERS prints are not released yet, and MLow's other print catalogue is a separate body of work - [The allowlist](https://n3wyorkers.com/whitelist): put your name down for the census release - [Get Counted](https://n3wyorkers.com/counted): the quiz, the Resident card, the nomination form - [The Count](https://n3wyorkers.com/count): the countdown - [Press](https://n3wyorkers.com/press) - [Brand](https://n3wyorkers.com/brand) ## The reading room - [The Consolidation of 1898](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/consolidation-1898.html): How Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island became one city on January 1, 1898, and what the merger changed. - [The Subway Opens, 1904](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/the-subway-1904.html): The IRT opened on October 27, 1904 with a nickel fare; how three systems became one in 1940 and how the map came to be. - [The Brooklyn Bridge, 1883](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/brooklyn-bridge-1883.html): The Roeblings, the caissons, the opening day of May 24, 1883, and what the first East River bridge did to Brooklyn. - [The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/liberty-and-ellis-island.html): The gift from France, Bartholdi and Eiffel, Emma Lazarus, and the immigration station that processed about 12 million people from 1892 to 1954. - [Grand Central Terminal, 1913](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/grand-central-1913.html): Electrification, air rights, the painted sky on the concourse ceiling, and the 1978 Supreme Court case that kept Grand Central standing. - [Central Park and the Greensward Plan](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/central-park-greensward.html): Olmsted and Vaux's 1858 plan, the village it displaced, Bethesda Terrace, Belvedere Castle and the Conservancy that rebuilt the park. - [The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, 1911](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/triangle-fire-1911.html): The fire of March 25, 1911 killed 146 garment workers in the Asch Building and drove the laws that remade the American workplace. - [The Harlem Renaissance and the Apollo](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/harlem-renaissance-apollo.html): The Great Migration made Harlem, the writers and musicians of the 1920s made it famous, and Amateur Night at the Apollo has run since 1934. - [The Birth of Hip Hop, 1973](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/birth-of-hip-hop-1973.html): A back to school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue on August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc, and the four elements that grew from the Bronx. - [Coney Island](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/coney-island.html): Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland, the Wonder Wheel of 1920, the boardwalk of 1923, the Cyclone of 1927 and Nathan's nickel hot dog. - [The Blackout of July 13, 1977](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/blackout-1977.html): What happened when New York lost power on July 13, 1977, the looting and fires that followed, and how the 1965 and 2003 blackouts differed. - [Stonewall, June 28, 1969](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/stonewall-1969.html): The Stonewall Inn, the police raid of June 28, 1969, the nights that followed, the first march in 1970, and the National Monument of 2016. - [The Bodega and the Corner Store](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/the-bodega.html): Where the word bodega came from, the Puerto Rican, Dominican and Yemeni owners who built the corner store, the cat, and why nobody agrees how many there are. - [The Staten Island Ferry and the Harbor](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/staten-island-ferry.html): The ferry's route, the fare that went from a nickel to free in 1997, the Verrazzano bridge, and what the harbor was to the city. - [The Race to the Sky, 1930 to 1931](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/race-to-the-sky-1930.html): The Woolworth Building, the 1916 zoning law, the Chrysler Building's secret spire, and the Empire State Building's 13 month climb to the top of the world. - [Times Square and the Ball Drop](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/times-square-ball-drop.html): Longacre Square, the New York Times tower of 1904, the first ball on December 31, 1907, the decline, and the remake of the 1990s. - [Counting New York](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/counting-new-york.html): The decennial census from 1790 to 2020, the 2020 figure of 8,804,190, what the count decides, the undercount, and how a painted census differs. - [Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/jane-jacobs-and-robert-moses.html): The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the Lower Manhattan Expressway fight, the Cross Bronx Expressway, and what each of them built. - [Before the City: Lenape, Mannahatta, New Amsterdam](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/before-the-city-lenape-new-amsterdam.html): The Lenape and Mannahatta, what the 1626 purchase documents actually say, New Amsterdam from 1624 to 1664, and the wall that named Wall Street. - [The High Line and the Rewilded City](https://n3wyorkers.com/learn/high-line-rewilded-city.html): The West Side freight line, Friends of the High Line, the park's opening on June 9, 2009, Hudson Yards and the Vessel, and Little Island in 2021. ## The eras - Era I The Originals (numbers 1 to 766): The founding census. Legends, neighbors, places, villains. The city assembled its cast. - Era II The Eye Flower Era (numbers 767 to 816): The flowers arrive. The city starts visibly watching. Myth enters the frame: the Rat King is crowned, the Trash Mountain rises. - Era III The City Expands (numbers 817 to 966): The heroes and lost trades. The city remembers who built it and who keeps it alive at 4am. - Era IV The Brand Batch (numbers 967 to 1166): Protection and community arrive as symbols. The evil eye starts watching from every frame. Number 1000, The Subway Samaritan, states the whole thesis: strangers save strangers here. - Era V The Masterworks (numbers 1167 to 1466): Every character gets its own color story and its own decisive moment. The collection learns chiaroscuro and grief and joy: the Oath Ceremony, the Orange Sky, the Angel of the Waters. - Era VI The Mythos (numbers 1467 to 1866): The origin stories, the illusions, the hidden city. The world explains itself. Love arcs pay off. The Rat King marries the Pigeon Queen and the kingdoms of above and below unite. - Era VII The Deep City (numbers 1867 to 2266): The collection swallows the calendar and the clock: the Hours, the Months, the Moons, the Decades, the Lines, the Tarot. History enters: the Boatlift, the Miracle on the Hudson. The chapter closes with the Curtain Call, and then refuses to close. - Era VIII The Fabric (numbers 2267 to 2666): The Second Glance wedding, the 56 card Minor Arcana, all 59 community boards, and the Guarantor, the devil number villain who earns a second look. - Era IX The Bloom (numbers 2667 to 3066): The Painter waters a blank canvas and the whole city goes trippy. Harbor Lights, the Scents of New York, Street Games, and the Full Bloom at 3000 when every eye flower opens at once. - Era X The Look (numbers 3067 to 3466): After the Bloom went citywide the city started dressing for the flowers. The Houses, the Diaspora Blocks, the Uniforms, the Landmark Crowns, the Soles. Self presentation as love, armor and survival. - Era XI The Waking (numbers 3467 to 3966): The eye flowers open in things that were never alive. Traffic cones, turnstiles, griddles, screens and church bells wake up and discover they were watching all along. - Era XII The Arrival (numbers 3967 to 4366): Time coupes land on the Brooklyn Bridge, androids wear cashmere, and the city absorbs whatever arrives, the way it always has. - Era XIII The Deep City (numbers 4367 to 4766): Cast iron facades step down from their buildings. The buried, structural, stacked New York comes forward with its ghosts and its craft. - Era XIV The Second Skin (numbers 4767 to 4966): An augmented layer painted over the real city. The Watchers, new ways to move, the Gadget Bazaar, the Melting Pot Protocols, Viral, the Icons Awake, Mystery and Illusion. - Era XV The City That Answers Back (numbers 4967 to 5466): Infrastructure with opinions. The grid asks for a minute, the traffic light waits, the water main remembers the creek. The city finally answers, and the census closes on The Answer at 5466. - Era XVI The Twenty Houses (numbers 5491 to 6490): One thousand New Yorkers built as people who can walk out of the frame: a name, a want, a flaw, a signature. Twenty houses of fifty, each a working world with its own thesis. The Seam, the Lease, the Feed, the Care, the Hands, the Inheritance. - Era XVII The Ten Rooms (numbers 6491 to 6990): Five hundred New Yorkers inside the institutions the city is defined by. The appetizing counter, the red sauce room, the slice, the stool, the list, the oyster bar, four in the morning, the cart, last call, and the small badly lit room where the culture got made. - Era XVIII The MLow Show (numbers 6991 to 7490): Five hundred New Yorkers from crypto art culture in ten houses, opening with an homage to every guest of The MLow Show. The green room, the mint, the vault, the trash block, the machine studio, the painter's floor, the lens, the depth stage, the chain and the degen floor. The honoree is named in the title and never painted. - Era XIX The Trait Layer (numbers 7491 to 7990): Five hundred New Yorkers of the ninety seconds, the number, the second face, the rule, the open tab, the vanishing, the hanging, the twelve words, the thirty hour day and the long record. Each carries one of thirty one painted traits, worn the way the city wears everything: as a fact. ## The rooms - [The Bowery](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/bowery.html): Lower Manhattan. Manhattan's oldest road began as a Lenape trail and a Dutch farm lane. - [Below the city](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/subway.html): The Subway. The first train left City Hall on October 27, 1904, and the system never closed. - [Above the park](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/met.html): The Met Roof Garden. The Met's roof has hosted one artist's commission each season since 1987. - [Across the river](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/brooklyn.html): Brooklyn Waterfront. The park under the bridge was working shipping piers until 2010. - [Electric crossroads](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/times.html): Times Square. It was Longacre Square until a newspaper moved in and the city renamed it in 1904. - [The harbor crossing](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/ferry.html): Staten Island Ferry. The city has run the boats since 1905, and the ride has been free since 1997. - [The living city](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/botanical.html): New York Botanical Garden. The glass conservatory opened in 1902, modeled on the Palm House at Kew. - [Arrivals / departures](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/penn.html): Penn / Moynihan Train Hall. The trusses over the hall once held up a mail sorting room. - [Under the stars](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/grand.html): Grand Central Terminal. The zodiac on the ceiling is painted backward, and it has been since 1913. - [The city, rewilded](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/highline.html): The High Line. Freight trains ran here until 1980. The park opened in 2009. - [At the edge of it all](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/coney.html): Coney Island. The boardwalk opened in 1923. The Wonder Wheel had already turned for three years. - [The painted threshold](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/bethesda.html): Bethesda Arcade. The tile ceiling is the only Minton tile ceiling in the world. - [White ribs, infinite city](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/oculus.html): The Oculus. The skylight along the spine opens once a year, on September 11. - [Endless ascent](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/guggenheim.html): The Guggenheim Spiral. Wright died six months before his spiral opened in 1959. - [City of stories](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/library.html): Nypl Rose Reading Room. The reading room is nearly two blocks long under a painted sky. - [After the applause](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/apollo.html): The Apollo. Ella Fitzgerald won Amateur Night here in 1934 at age 17. - [The boroughs in orbit](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/unisphere.html): Flushing Meadows. The steel globe stands 140 feet tall on the ground of two World's Fairs. - [Suspended New York](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/tram.html): Roosevelt Island Tram. Built in 1976 as a stopgap until the subway came. The subway came. The tram stayed. - [The quiet city](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/cloisters.html): The Cloisters. Rockefeller bought the cliffs across the river so the view would never change. - [The dry dock cathedral](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/navyyard.html): Brooklyn Navy Yard. The USS Missouri was built here. The war ended on its deck. - [The harbor observatory](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/governors.html): Governors Island Hills. The island was sold to New York for one dollar in 2003. - [The crown and the lobby](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/chrysler.html): The Chrysler Building. The spire went up in secret and made it the tallest building on earth for eleven months. - [The prow](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/flatiron.html): The Flatiron. At its point the building is about six feet wide. - [Bottom of the ninth](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/bleachers.html): The Bronx Ballpark. Babe Ruth hit the first home run here on opening day, 1923. - [Take a number](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/deli.html): The Appetizing Counter. Appetizing is fish and dairy. Deli is meat. Kosher law made them two shops. - [Under the arch](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/washington.html): Washington Square. The lawn covers a potter's field. The arch came later, in 1895. - [The Lullwater](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/boathouse.html): Prospect Park Boathouse. Olmsted and Vaux called Prospect Park their best work, better than Central Park. - [The colonnade](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/halloffame.html): Hall Of Fame For Great Americans. The first hall of fame in the country is a colonnade of 98 bronze heads in the Bronx. - [Departures, 1962](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/twa.html): Twa Flight Center. Saarinen's terminal opened in 1962, a year after he died. - [The sailors' rest](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/snug.html): Snug Harbor. A home for old sailors, opened 1833, with five Greek temples facing the harbor. - [Ice under the towers](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/wollman.html): Wollman Rink. New Yorkers skated on the Pond here for ninety years before the rink opened in 1950. - [The bend](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/doyers.html): Doyers Street. The bend was called the Bloody Angle. Nom Wah has served dim sum on it since 1920. - [The parlour floor](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/strivers.html): Strivers' Row. Built in 1891 for buyers who never came. Harlem's strivers filled it after 1919. - [Seventy floors up](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/rock.html): Top Of The Rock. The deck was styled after an ocean liner in 1933, then closed for nineteen years. - [The garden court](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/frick.html): The Frick. The Garden Court was the carriage court until the house became a museum in 1935. - [The tall ship](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/seaport.html): South Street Seaport. The fish market ran on this cobbled street for 183 years. - [The climb](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/vessel.html): Hudson Yards. 154 flights of stairs that lead nowhere, opened over the rail yards in 2019. - [The tulips](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/littleisland.html): Little Island. Titanic survivors landed at this pier. Now it holds a park on 132 concrete tulips. - [The unfinished nave](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/cathedral.html): St. John The Divine. Begun in 1892, still unfinished, and one of the largest churches on earth. - [The elevated](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/queensboro.html): Queensboro Plaza. Two subway companies once shared these elevated tracks. Now three lines meet here. - [The roof](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/bushwick.html): A Bushwick Rooftop. The walls below have been repainted every year since 2011. - [The ride](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/cyclone.html): The Cyclone. A wooden coaster from 1927 with an 85 foot first drop, and still running. - [Between the cables](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/brooklynbridge.html): The Brooklyn Bridge. Emily Roebling ran the site for a decade while her husband watched from a window. - [The city on a table](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/panorama.html): The Queens Museum. Every building in the city in miniature, made for the 1964 fair. The UN met here first. - [The climb to the crown](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/liberty.html): Liberty Island. Eiffel built the iron inside her. The crown has 25 windows. - [Under the tile vaults](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/oysterbar.html): Grand Central Oyster Bar. Whisper into one corner of the arch outside and it lands in the opposite corner. - [Three tiers of books](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/morgan.html): The Morgan Library. Three tiers of walnut shelves, built for one banker, opened to everyone in 1924. - [The great stage](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/radiocity.html): Radio City Music Hall. The arches over the stage are a sunrise, and they have been since 1932. - [The cathedral of commerce](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/woolworth.html): The Woolworth Building. Woolworth paid cash for the tallest building in the world in 1913. - [The canyon](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/wallstreet.html): Wall Street. A wall, a tree, a handshake in 1792, and a stock exchange. - [The plaza at eight](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/lincolncenter.html): Lincoln Center. The chandeliers rise into the ceiling before every performance. - [The castle on the rock](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/belvedere.html): Belvedere Castle. The castle had no purpose but the view. Since 1919 it has also read the weather. - [The aqueduct walk](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/highbridge.html): The High Bridge. The city's oldest bridge carried water, not people, and it opened in 1848. - [The market hall](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/arthuravenue.html): Arthur Avenue. La Guardia moved the pushcarts indoors in 1940. The stalls are still there. - [The pergola over the river](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/wavehill.html): Wave Hill. Mark Twain rented this house. Toscanini lived here. The city got it in 1960. - [The gantries](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/gantry.html): Gantry Plaza. The gantries lifted railcars onto barges. The Pepsi sign came from the plant next door. - [Surf at the end of the A](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/rockaway.html): Rockaway Beach. The only beaches in New York City where surfing is allowed, at the end of the A. - [The gothic gate](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/greenwood.html): Green-Wood Cemetery. Wild parrots nest in the gate of a cemetery founded in 1838. - [The refinery](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/domino.html): Domino Park. A sugar refinery that once led the world, kept as a park on the Williamsburg shore. - [The ships in the marsh](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/boatgraveyard.html): The Arthur Kill. Tugs and ferries left to rust in the marsh on Staten Island's western shore. - [The flight deck](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/intrepid.html): The Intrepid. A carrier that took kamikaze hits in 1944 and now holds a space shuttle. - [Live from New York](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/studio8h.html): Studio 8H. Toscanini's radio studio became the home of Saturday Night Live in 1975. - [The horseshoe](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/carnegie.html): Carnegie Hall. Tchaikovsky conducted on opening night in 1891. - [The wedge downstairs](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/vanguard.html): The Village Vanguard. A basement wedge that has held jazz since 1935. - [The court](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/rucker.html): Rucker Park. A Parks worker's 1950 tournament made a Harlem court famous. - [The rec room](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/sedgwick.html): 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. A 1973 rec room party in the Bronx started hip hop. - [The night before the parade](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/balloons.html): Central Park West. The night before Thanksgiving, the balloons lie under nets beside the museum. - [Christopher Street](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/stonewall.html): Sheridan Square. The 1969 uprising here became the first national monument to LGBTQ history. - [The feast on Mulberry](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/sangennaro.html): The Feast Of San Gennaro. Neapolitan immigrants started the Mulberry Street feast in 1926. - [The lobby of the hotel](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/chelseahotel.html): The Chelsea Hotel. Residents paid in paintings, and the lobby still shows them. - [Eighteen miles of books](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/strand.html): The Strand. The last survivor of Fourth Avenue's Book Row, open since 1927. - [The courtyard and the mosaic](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/dakota.html): The Dakota. An 1884 apartment fortress and the mosaic across the street. - [The world's most famous arena](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/garden.html): Madison Square Garden. Built over Penn Station in 1968, it has hosted the Knicks ever since. - [The temple by the window](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/dendur.html): The Temple Of Dendur. A Roman era Egyptian temple given to the United States in 1965. - [The garden on 54th](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/moma.html): The Sculpture Garden. Philip Johnson's 1953 court named for a MoMA founder. - [The terraces over the High Line](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/whitney.html): The Whitney. Founded by a sculptor in 1930, moved to the end of the High Line in 2015. - [The registry room](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/ellis.html): Ellis Island. Twelve million people came through this hall between 1892 and 1954. - [Mile one](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/marathon.html): The Verrazzano. Fifty thousand runners cross the bridge in the first mile. - [Sixth Avenue after dark](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/halloween.html): The Village Halloween Parade. A puppeteer's neighborhood walk in 1973 became a parade of a million. - [The parkway on Labor Day](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/easternparkway.html): Grand Army Plaza. Olmsted's first parkway carries the Caribbean carnival every Labor Day. - [The sun down 42nd](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/manhattanhenge.html): Manhattanhenge. Twice a year the sunset lines up with the 1811 street grid. - [The Great Hall](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/metgreathall.html): The Met. Hunt's 1902 hall of three domes, with flowers paid for by a bequest. - [The Engelhard Court](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/metamerican.html): The Met. A Wall Street bank front from 1824 stands inside a glass court. - [The skylit suite](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/meteuropean.html): The Met. Five Vermeers hang under skylights rebuilt in 2023. - [Under the whale](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/oceanlife.html): Natural History. A 94 foot whale has hung here since 1969. - [The sphere in the cube](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/rosecenter.html): The Rose Center. An 87 foot sphere in a glass cube, opened in 2000. - [The atrium](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/momaatrium.html): Moma. Three women founded it in 1929; the atrium came in 2004. - [The stacked boxes](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/newmuseum.html): The New Museum. Seven stacked boxes on the Bowery, opened in 2007. - [The gold room](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/neuegalerie.html): Neue Galerie. Klimt's gold portrait hangs in a 1914 Fifth Avenue mansion. - [The Carnegie garden](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/cooperhewitt.html): Cooper Hewitt. Andrew Carnegie's mansion, a design museum since 1976. - [The inverted ziggurat](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/breuer.html): The Breuer. Breuer's 1966 granite ziggurat has housed three museums and an auction house. - [The Warburg mansion](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/jewishmuseum.html): The Jewish Museum. The Warburg mansion of 1908 has held the museum since 1947. - [The spiral stair](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/rubin.html): The Rubin. Himalayan art on a spiral stair inherited from Barneys. - [The shell rolls out](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/theshed.html): The Shed. The building's shell rolls out on rails to make a hall. - [The drill hall](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/armory.html): Park Avenue Armory. Tiffany rooms and a drill hall of 55,000 square feet, built 1881. - [The rotunda at Bowling Green](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/customhouse.html): The Custom House. Cass Gilbert's 1907 rotunda, painted by Reginald Marsh in 1937. - [The lollipop building](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/mad.html): Museum Of Arts And Design. The lollipop building at Columbus Circle, reclad in 2008. - [The terracotta court](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/hispanicsociety.html): The Hispanic Society. Goya and Sorolla in a terracotta court on 155th Street since 1908. - [The new building on 125th](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/studiomuseum.html): The Studio Museum In Harlem. Founded in 1968, in its first purpose built home since 2025. - [The courtyard on Fifth](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/elmuseo.html): El Museo Del Barrio. Born in East Harlem in 1969, with camels on Fifth Avenue every January. - [The city's museum](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/mcny.html): Museum Of The City Of New York. The city's own museum, in a Georgian building since 1932. - [The oldest museum in the city](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/nyhistorical.html): New-York Historical Society. The city's oldest museum, founded in 1804. - [The long light](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/diachelsea.html): Dia Chelsea. Dia came to West 22nd Street in 1987, before the galleries followed. - [Thursday openings on 24th](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/chelseablock.html): West 24Th Street. Former garages turned into the city's densest run of galleries. - [The mission house](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/fotografiska.html): Fotografiska. A photography museum in an 1894 mission house. - [The old school](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/ps1.html): Moma Ps1. An 1892 public school turned into galleries in 1976. - [The stone garden](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/noguchi.html): The Noguchi Museum. A sculptor built his own museum around a garden in 1985. - [Sculpture on the river](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/socrates.html): Socrates Sculpture Park. Artists cleared a dump on the East River in 1986 and made a park. - [The Beaux-Arts Court](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/brooklynmuseum.html): The Brooklyn Museum. McKim, Mead and White's 1897 palace on Eastern Parkway. - [The ironworks in Red Hook](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/pioneerworks.html): Pioneer Works. An 1866 iron works in Red Hook, an art center since 2012. - [The Concourse museum](https://n3wyorkers.com/rooms/bronxmuseum.html): The Bronx Museum Of The Arts. A free museum on the Grand Concourse since 1982. --- # Full text ## The Consolidation of 1898 How Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island became one city on January 1, 1898, and what the merger changed. ### Two cities on one harbor Before 1898 New York City meant Manhattan and the part of the Bronx it had annexed. Brooklyn was a separate city with its own mayor, its own police, and one of the largest populations in the country. Queens and Richmond (now Staten Island) were counties of farms, villages and shore towns. The five places shared a harbor, a river and an economy, but not a government. The Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883 and tied the two big cities together with a road. Ferries had crossed the East River for two centuries, but the bridge made the crossing ordinary. Commuters, freight and capital moved daily between the two shores, and the case for one city grew with every trip. ### The Father of Greater New York Andrew Haswell Green, a lawyer and civic planner who had helped run Central Park, pushed the idea for decades. He argued that one government could plan streets, water, docks and transit across the whole harbor. He chaired the state commission that drew the plan. Later generations called him the Father of Greater New York. In 1894 voters in the affected areas answered a nonbinding question on the merger. Brooklyn said yes by a margin of fewer than 300 votes out of roughly 129,000 cast. Some Brooklyn residents fought the result for years and later called the merger the Great Mistake of 1898. ### The charter The state legislature passed the Greater New York Charter and Governor Levi P. Morton signed it in 1897. It took effect on January 1, 1898. The new city had five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Richmond. Each borough elected a president, and a Board of Aldermen and a mayor governed the whole. Robert A. Van Wyck became the first mayor of the consolidated city. The 1900 census counted 3,437,202 people in the new city, which made it the second largest city in the world after London. The eastern towns of Queens County declined to join and became Nassau County in 1899. The boroughs were unequal from the start. In 1900 Manhattan held 1,850,093 people and Brooklyn 1,166,582, while the Bronx had 200,507, Queens 152,999 and Richmond 67,021. The merger multiplied the city's land many times over, from the 23 square miles of Manhattan to roughly 300 square miles of farms, marsh, villages and shore. ### What consolidation built One city could borrow on one credit and build at one scale. Within a decade it opened the first subway line (1904), the Williamsburg Bridge (1903), the Manhattan Bridge (1909) and the Queensboro Bridge (1909). It unified water supply, fire and police, and it began the park and school systems the boroughs still use. The borough names outlasted the politics. Richmond became Staten Island in name in 1975. The Bronx remains the only borough with a definite article, after the Bronx River and the Bronck family who farmed there in the 1600s. The five borough map has not changed since 1898. ### In the census This history lives in three museum rooms. The Panorama room holds the model of all five boroughs that the Queens Museum built for the 1964 World's Fair, the clearest picture of what 1898 joined. The Custom House room and the MCNY room show the civic and museum buildings that the consolidated city put up in the years that followed. On the atlas, every borough carries its share of painted New Yorkers: the clerks, ferry hands and borough presidents of the census. Facts: - The City of Greater New York took effect on January 1, 1898, uniting Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island under one government. (Source: Museum of the City of New York, https://www.mcny.org) - The 1900 census counted 3,437,202 residents in the newly consolidated New York City. (Source: US Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov) - Brooklyn was an independent city with its own mayor until it joined New York in 1898. (Source: Brooklyn Public Library, https://www.bklynlibrary.org) - Andrew Haswell Green chaired the commission that drafted the consolidation plan and is known as the Father of Greater New York. (Source: Britannica, https://www.britannica.com) - The eastern towns of Queens County did not join the city and became Nassau County in 1899. (Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov) - The Panorama of the City of New York, a scale model of all five boroughs, was built for the 1964 World's Fair and is on view at the Queens Museum. (Source: Queens Museum, https://queensmuseum.org) Sources: - Museum of the City of New York: https://www.mcny.org - US Census Bureau: https://www.census.gov - Brooklyn Public Library: https://www.bklynlibrary.org - Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov - Queens Museum: https://queensmuseum.org - Britannica: https://www.britannica.com ## The Subway Opens, 1904 The IRT opened on October 27, 1904 with a nickel fare; how three systems became one in 1940 and how the map came to be. ### October 27, 1904 At 2:35 on the afternoon of October 27, 1904, Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. took the controls of the first train at City Hall station. He was meant to hand them to a motorman after a short run. He kept driving most of the way uptown. That evening the public paid a nickel apiece and rode until after midnight. The first line ran 9.1 miles from City Hall north under Lafayette Street and Park Avenue to Grand Central, west under 42nd Street to Times Square, then north under Broadway to 145th Street. It had 28 stations. The company that built and ran it was the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, the IRT. ### Digging the tunnel The city already had trains in the air. Elevated railroads had run on iron trestles over Second, Third, Sixth and Ninth Avenues since the 1870s, and they darkened the streets beneath them and shook the buildings beside them. Planners wanted a line that was faster and out of sight. The answer was to go under the street and to give the new line four tracks, two for local trains and two for express. The state's Rapid Transit Act of 1894 let the city build a subway with public money and lease it to a private operator. William Barclay Parsons served as chief engineer. Contractor John B. McDonald won the bid, and financier August Belmont Jr. backed him. Ground broke on March 24, 1900 in front of City Hall. Crews used cut and cover. They opened the street, dug a trench, built a steel and concrete box, and put the street back. Most stations sat just below the surface, so passengers walked down a short flight of stairs. Tiled name plaques and mosaics by the design firm Heins and LaFarge decorated the stations, and City Hall station had vaulted Guastavino tile and skylights. ### Three systems The IRT was one of three. In Brooklyn the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company ran elevated and surface lines and later became the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit Corporation, the BMT. The Dual Contracts of 1913 split a vast expansion between the IRT and the BRT and pushed lines into every borough except Staten Island. The city built the third system itself. The Independent Subway System, the IND, opened its first line under Eighth Avenue on September 10, 1932. Its stations were plain and its trains were wider than the IRT's. That is why the numbered lines and the lettered lines still use different cars today. ### The nickel and unification The fare stayed at five cents from 1904 until 1948, through two wars and a depression. The frozen fare drained the private companies. In June 1940 the city bought the BMT and the IRT and folded them into the IND under the Board of Transportation. The fare rose to ten cents on July 1, 1948. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has run the system since 1968. ### The map Each company printed its own map until unification. In 1972 the MTA issued Massimo Vignelli's diagram, which drew every line as a straight or 45 degree colored stroke and set stations as dots. Riders complained that it bent the city. In 1979 a committee led by John Tauranac replaced it with a geographic map, the ancestor of the one in stations now. The system today has 472 stations and runs 24 hours a day. ### In the census The Subway room hangs the Underground family: the conductors, the straphangers, the platform musicians and the late night riders. The Grand Central and Penn Station rooms hold the commuters who pass through the two terminals that the first line and the later lines were built to serve. On the atlas the subway characters cluster along the old IRT route from City Hall to Harlem, and along every line that followed. Facts: - The first New York subway line opened on October 27, 1904, running from City Hall to 145th Street with 28 stations. (Source: MTA, https://new.mta.info) - The subway fare was five cents from 1904 until July 1, 1948, when it rose to ten cents. (Source: New York Transit Museum, https://www.nytransitmuseum.org) - The city took over the BMT and IRT in June 1940 and unified them with its own IND system. (Source: MTA, https://new.mta.info) - The city owned IND opened its first line under Eighth Avenue on September 10, 1932. (Source: New York Transit Museum, https://www.nytransitmuseum.org) - Massimo Vignelli's diagrammatic subway map was issued in 1972 and replaced by a geographic map in 1979. (Source: MTA, https://new.mta.info) - The original City Hall station, with Guastavino tile vaults and skylights, is a designated New York City landmark. (Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc) - The subway has 472 stations and runs 24 hours a day. (Source: MTA, https://new.mta.info) Sources: - MTA: https://new.mta.info - New York Transit Museum: https://www.nytransitmuseum.org - NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission: https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc - Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov - Britannica: https://www.britannica.com ## The Brooklyn Bridge, 1883 The Roeblings, the caissons, the opening day of May 24, 1883, and what the first East River bridge did to Brooklyn. ### A river with no bridge In 1869 the East River carried more ferry traffic than almost any water in the world. Winter ice stopped the boats. Fog stalled them. New York and Brooklyn were two of the largest cities in the country and no bridge joined them. The East River is a tidal strait, deep and fast, and the ships that used it needed clearance. John A. Roebling, a German born engineer who had built suspension bridges at Niagara and Cincinnati, proposed a span with a deck high enough for masts and a main span longer than any yet built. The New York Bridge Company hired him in 1867. In June 1869, while surveying the Brooklyn tower site, a ferry crushed his foot against a piling. Tetanus killed him within weeks. ### Down in the caissons His son Washington Roebling took over at 32. To found the towers on bedrock the crews sank two timber caissons, huge upside down boxes filled with compressed air, and dug out the riverbed from inside while the masonry rose on top. The Brooklyn caisson reached 44 feet below the water; the Manhattan caisson stopped in sand at about 78 feet. Men who came up from that pressure too fast got caisson disease, now called the bends. Several died. Washington Roebling was struck in 1872 and never fully recovered. From a room in Brooklyn Heights he directed the work by letter and by watching through a telescope. His wife, Emily Warren Roebling, carried his instructions to the site and taught herself the mathematics and engineering to answer questions in his place. For more than a decade she was the daily link between the chief engineer and the bridge. On opening day she rode across in the first carriage. ### Steel and stone The towers rose 276.5 feet above high water in granite and limestone, with Gothic arches for the roadways. Four main cables, each spun from thousands of steel wires, carried the deck. This was the first major bridge to use steel wire rather than iron. The main span measured 1,595.5 feet, the longest in the world at the time. ### May 24, 1883 The bridge opened on May 24, 1883 after 14 years of work and about $15 million. President Chester A. Arthur and Governor Grover Cleveland walked across. Brooklyn declared a holiday. Fireworks lit the towers that night. Pedestrians paid one cent to cross on the elevated promenade. Six days later a rumor that the bridge was collapsing started a panic on the stairs and 12 people died in the crush. The next year P. T. Barnum marched 21 elephants across to show the span was sound. It has carried traffic every day since. ### What it did to Brooklyn The bridge made Brooklyn a place a Manhattan worker could live. Row houses and trolley lines spread east and south. Brooklyn's population, about 400,000 in 1870, passed 1,000,000 by 1900. The bridge also made the case for a single city, and the two shores it joined merged in 1898. The city named it a landmark in 1967 and the federal government named it a National Historic Landmark in 1964. ### In the census The Brooklyn Bridge room paints the crossing itself: the walkers, cyclists and the people who stop at the towers to look back at Manhattan. The Brooklyn room holds the borough the bridge built, and the Seaport room keeps the ships and dockhands of the river the bridge had to clear. On the atlas the bridge characters stand on the walkway between City Hall Park and Dumbo. Facts: - The Brooklyn Bridge opened on May 24, 1883 with a main span of 1,595.5 feet, then the longest in the world. (Source: NYC Department of Transportation, https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot) - John A. Roebling designed the bridge and died in 1869 of tetanus after a ferry crushed his foot during surveying. (Source: Britannica, https://www.britannica.com) - Washington Roebling, the chief engineer, was disabled by caisson disease in 1872 and directed the rest of the work from his home. (Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov) - Emily Warren Roebling relayed her husband's instructions to the site for more than a decade and rode across first on opening day. (Source: Brooklyn Public Library, https://www.bklynlibrary.org) - The Brooklyn Bridge was the first major bridge built with steel wire cables. (Source: National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov) - On May 30, 1883, a panic on the bridge stairs killed 12 people. (Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov) - The Brooklyn Bridge was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and a New York City landmark in 1967. (Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc) Sources: - NYC Department of Transportation: https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot - Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov - National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov - NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission: https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc - Brooklyn Public Library: https://www.bklynlibrary.org - Britannica: https://www.britannica.com ## The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island The gift from France, Bartholdi and Eiffel, Emma Lazarus, and the immigration station that processed about 12 million people from 1892 to 1954. ### A gift with a deadline The idea came from Édouard de Laboulaye, a French scholar who admired the American republic and proposed a monument to mark the friendship of the two nations. The sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi took it on. France would pay for the statue; the United States would pay for the pedestal. Bartholdi chose Bedloe's Island, in the harbor every ship passed, on his first visit in 1871. The statue is copper sheet, hammered thin over wooden forms and riveted to an iron skeleton. Gustave Eiffel, before his tower, designed that skeleton: a central pylon with a flexible secondary frame that lets the skin move with wind and temperature. Bartholdi finished the arm and torch first and showed it at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. ### The pedestal and the poem American fundraising stalled. Richard Morris Hunt designed a granite pedestal inside the star shaped walls of Fort Wood, but money ran out. In 1885 Joseph Pulitzer used his newspaper, the World, to ask ordinary readers for pennies and printed every donor's name. More than 120,000 people gave, and the pedestal was finished. Emma Lazarus wrote the sonnet 'The New Colossus' in 1883 for an auction that raised pedestal money. It was largely forgotten until 1903, when a bronze plaque with the poem was placed inside the pedestal. Its lines became the statue's meaning for the people arriving past it. > Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. (Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus, 1883) ### October 28, 1886 The statue crossed the Atlantic in 1885 aboard the French ship Isère, packed in 214 crates. Crews reassembled it on the pedestal, and President Grover Cleveland dedicated it on October 28, 1886. The figure stands 151 feet 1 inch from base to torch; from the ground to the tip of the flame it is 305 feet. The tablet in her arm reads July IV MDCCLXXVI, and the crown has seven rays. The copper turned green within decades. Congress made the island a national monument in 1924, renamed it Liberty Island in 1956, and the National Park Service has run it since 1933. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984. ### Ellis Island, 1892 to 1954 Federal immigration inspection opened on Ellis Island on January 1, 1892. The first arrival recorded was Annie Moore, a girl from County Cork, Ireland. The wooden station burned in 1897, and the brick and limestone building by the architects Boring and Tilton opened on December 17, 1900. Its Registry Room, under a Guastavino tile vault, is where inspectors questioned newcomers. About 12 million immigrants passed through the island before it closed on November 12, 1954. The peak came in 1907, when more than 1,000,000 arrived. Most were inspected in a few hours. Roughly 2 percent were turned back, for disease or for the likelihood of becoming a public charge. First and second class passengers were usually cleared aboard ship and never saw the Registry Room. Quota laws in 1921 and 1924 cut arrivals sharply and moved inspection to consulates abroad. The island stood empty for decades. It joined the Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1965, and the restored main building opened as a museum on September 10, 1990. ### In the census The Liberty room and the Ellis room hold the arrivals: the families at the rail, the inspectors, the interpreters and the ferry crews who worked the harbor. The Ferry room paints the Staten Island Ferry riders who still pass the statue every half hour, free of charge since 1997. On the atlas the harbor pins mark Liberty Island, Ellis Island and the ferry terminals at Whitehall and St. George. Facts: - President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty on October 28, 1886. (Source: National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/stli) - Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi sculpted the statue and Gustave Eiffel designed its internal iron framework. (Source: National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/stli) - The statue measures 151 feet 1 inch from base to torch and 305 feet from the ground to the tip of the flame. (Source: National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/stli) - Emma Lazarus wrote 'The New Colossus' in 1883; a plaque bearing the poem was placed in the pedestal in 1903. (Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov) - Ellis Island opened as a federal immigration station on January 1, 1892 and closed on November 12, 1954. (Source: National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/elis) - About 12 million immigrants were processed at Ellis Island during its years of operation. (Source: Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Foundation, https://www.statueofliberty.org) - The Ellis Island main building opened as a museum on September 10, 1990. (Source: National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/elis) - The Staten Island Ferry has been free to ride since 1997. (Source: NYC Department of Transportation, https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot) Sources: - National Park Service, Statue of Liberty National Monument: https://www.nps.gov/stli - National Park Service, Ellis Island: https://www.nps.gov/elis - Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Foundation: https://www.statueofliberty.org - Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov - NYC Department of Transportation: https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot - Britannica: https://www.britannica.com ## Grand Central Terminal, 1913 Electrification, air rights, the painted sky on the concourse ceiling, and the 1978 Supreme Court case that kept Grand Central standing. ### Smoke in the tunnel On January 8, 1902 a New York Central train ran past signals in the smoke filled Park Avenue tunnel and struck a stopped train. Fifteen people died. The state responded with a law that banned steam locomotives from Manhattan south of the Harlem River after 1908. The railroad had to electrify or leave. William J. Wilgus, the railroad's chief engineer, turned the order into a plan. Electric trains need no smoke vents, so the yards could go underground on two levels and the land above could be sold or leased. Wilgus called it taking wealth from the air. The office and hotel blocks along Park Avenue north of the terminal rose on those air rights. ### February 2, 1913 The old Grand Central Station came down while trains kept running. The new terminal opened on February 2, 1913. Reed and Stem laid out the ramps and the loop tracks, and Warren and Wetmore designed the Beaux Arts exterior and the main concourse. The terminal has more than 40 platforms on two levels, more than any other station in the world. On the 42nd Street facade Jules Coutan's sculpture group, with Mercury at its center, surrounds a clock 13 feet across. Inside, ramps rather than stairs carry passengers from the street to the trains, and a four faced opal glass clock crowns the information booth at the center of the concourse. ### The ceiling The concourse ceiling shows the winter sky in gold on green, with 2,500 stars, after a design by the French painter Paul César Helleu. The constellations appear reversed, as if seen from outside the heavens. A commuter noticed within weeks of the opening. The railroad kept the painting as it was. Decades of soot and cigarette smoke blackened it. Restorers cleaned the ceiling in the 1990s and left one small dark rectangle in the northwest corner, near the crab of Cancer, to show how dirty it had been. The restoration of the whole terminal finished in 1998. ### The case that saved it The original Pennsylvania Station, McKim, Mead and White's building of 1910, was demolished beginning in October 1963. The loss moved the city to pass the Landmarks Law in 1965, and the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated Grand Central in 1967. The next year the terminal's owner, Penn Central, proposed a 55 story tower by Marcel Breuer above the concourse. The Commission refused. Penn Central sued, arguing that the designation took its property without compensation. Preservationists, with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as the most visible voice, rallied to the terminal's defense. In Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City, decided in 1978, the Supreme Court upheld the landmarks law by a vote of 6 to 3. The decision remains the foundation of landmark law across the country. ### The terminal now The Metro North Railroad has run the terminal since 1983. In January 2023 the Long Island Rail Road began service to Grand Central Madison, a new station built deep beneath the terminal. The National Park Service named Grand Central a National Historic Landmark in 1976. ### In the census The Grand Central room paints the commuters under the painted sky: the people at the clock, the rail crews and the travelers on the ramps. The Penn Station room holds the other terminal and the memory of the one that was torn down. On the atlas the two stations sit twelve blocks apart on the map of Midtown, and the census places its rail characters at both. Facts: - Grand Central Terminal opened on February 2, 1913. (Source: Grand Central Terminal, https://www.grandcentralterminal.com) - A 1902 collision in the Park Avenue tunnel killed 15 people and led to a state ban on steam locomotives in Manhattan. (Source: MTA, https://new.mta.info) - The concourse ceiling depicts the constellations in reverse, with about 2,500 stars, after a design by Paul César Helleu. (Source: Grand Central Terminal, https://www.grandcentralterminal.com) - The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated Grand Central Terminal a New York City landmark in 1967. (Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc) - In Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City (1978), the Supreme Court upheld the city's landmarks law by a vote of 6 to 3. (Source: Britannica, https://www.britannica.com) - Grand Central became a National Historic Landmark in 1976. (Source: National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov) - Long Island Rail Road service to Grand Central Madison began in January 2023. (Source: MTA, https://new.mta.info) Sources: - Grand Central Terminal: https://www.grandcentralterminal.com - MTA: https://new.mta.info - NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission: https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc - National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov - Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov - Britannica: https://www.britannica.com ## Central Park and the Greensward Plan Olmsted and Vaux's 1858 plan, the village it displaced, Bethesda Terrace, Belvedere Castle and the Conservancy that rebuilt the park. ### A park before the city reached it In the 1850s the built city ended near 38th Street. Newspapers and civic leaders argued that New York needed a great public park like those of London and Paris, and in 1853 the state legislature set aside more than 700 acres in the middle of the island for it. The land was rocky, swampy and partly settled. The city took it by eminent domain. ### Seneca Village The largest settlement on the site was Seneca Village, founded in 1825 when free Black New Yorkers began buying lots near what is now West 82nd to 89th Street. By the 1850s about 225 people lived there, most of them African American, along with Irish and German immigrants. The village had three churches, a school and a cemetery. Property owners there could vote, which few Black men in the state could do. The city paid the landowners and cleared the village in 1857. Its residents scattered and its history was largely forgotten until historians and archaeologists recovered it in the 1990s and 2000s. The Central Park Conservancy now marks the site with signs. ### The Greensward Plan The park's commissioners held a design competition in 1857. Frederick Law Olmsted, then the park's superintendent, and Calvert Vaux, an English born architect, entered a plan they called Greensward. It won on April 28, 1858. Their idea was a pastoral landscape, with meadows, woods and water, that made the city disappear from view. Their most original move was to sink four transverse roads below grade so that crosstown traffic passed under the park unseen. They separated carriage drives, bridle paths and footpaths and joined them with bridges, each one different. Crews moved millions of cartloads of earth and rock, planted hundreds of thousands of trees and shrubs, and laid drains under the whole site. Skaters used the Lake in the winter of 1858 while work went on around them. ### Bethesda Terrace and the Castle Vaux and the designer Jacob Wrey Mould made Bethesda Terrace the park's one formal set piece, a two level plaza at the center of the park with a tiled arcade and carved stone. At its heart stands the Bethesda Fountain and its statue, Angel of the Waters, by Emma Stebbins, unveiled in 1873. It was the first major public art commission given to a woman in New York City. Belvedere Castle, a miniature castle of schist and granite by Vaux, rose on Vista Rock in the early 1870s as a lookout over the Ramble. Since 1919 it has housed the instruments that produce the official Central Park weather readings. Wollman Rink opened in 1950, and the Loeb Boathouse on the Lake opened in 1954. ### Decline and the Conservancy By the 1970s the park was worn and unsafe, with bare lawns, broken benches and graffiti on the Terrace. In 1980 civic leaders founded the Central Park Conservancy, a private nonprofit, with Elizabeth Barlow Rogers as its first head. The Conservancy raised money, restored the landscapes one by one, and since 1998 has managed the park under contract with the city. The park covers 843 acres and draws more than 40 million visits a year. ### In the census Four museum rooms belong to the park. The Bethesda room paints the people at the fountain and the arcade, the Belvedere room the walkers at the lookout, the Wollman room the skaters, and the Boathouse room the rowers on the Lake. On the atlas, the park is the densest green on the map, with characters spread from the Pond at 59th Street to the Harlem Meer. Facts: - The Greensward Plan by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the Central Park design competition on April 28, 1858. (Source: Central Park Conservancy, https://www.centralparknyc.org) - Central Park covers 843 acres in the middle of Manhattan. (Source: NYC Parks, https://www.nycgovparks.org) - Seneca Village, a community founded by free Black New Yorkers in 1825, stood on park land until the city cleared it in 1857. (Source: Central Park Conservancy, https://www.centralparknyc.org) - Emma Stebbins's Angel of the Waters, unveiled at Bethesda Fountain in 1873, was the first major public art commission awarded to a woman in New York City. (Source: Central Park Conservancy, https://www.centralparknyc.org) - Belvedere Castle has housed the instruments for the official Central Park weather readings since 1919. (Source: Central Park Conservancy, https://www.centralparknyc.org) - The Central Park Conservancy was founded in 1980 and has managed the park under contract with the city since 1998. (Source: Central Park Conservancy, https://www.centralparknyc.org) - Central Park was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1963. (Source: National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov) Sources: - Central Park Conservancy: https://www.centralparknyc.org - NYC Parks: https://www.nycgovparks.org - National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov - Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov - NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission: https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc - Britannica: https://www.britannica.com ## The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, 1911 The fire of March 25, 1911 killed 146 garment workers in the Asch Building and drove the laws that remade the American workplace. ### Saturday, near closing time The Triangle Waist Company occupied the top three floors of the ten story Asch Building at Washington Place and Greene Street, a block east of Washington Square. It made shirtwaists, the tailored blouses that working women wore. About 500 people worked there, most of them young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, some as young as 14. At about 4:40 on the afternoon of March 25, 1911, a fire started in a scrap bin under a cutting table on the eighth floor. Cotton scraps and tissue paper fed it. Workers on the eighth floor got out and the tenth floor was warned by telephone. No one warned the ninth floor. By the time its workers saw the flames, the fire filled the stairs. ### Thirty minutes The door to the Washington Place stairway on the ninth floor was locked, a practice the owners used to stop theft and keep workers at their machines. The one fire escape twisted and collapsed under the weight of the people on it. The two freight elevators made trips until they failed. Fire Department ladders reached only the sixth floor. Dozens of workers jumped from the ninth floor windows to the pavement in front of a crowd. The fire was out in about half an hour. In all 146 people died: 123 women and girls and 23 men. The bodies were laid out at a pier on the East River for families to identify. ### The trial and the march The owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were tried for manslaughter over the locked door. A jury acquitted them in December 1911. A civil settlement in 1913 paid about $75 for each life lost. On April 5, 1911 a funeral procession for the unidentified dead moved through the rain, and hundreds of thousands lined the streets. A week after the fire, at a memorial meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House, the union organizer Rose Schneiderman told a wealthy audience that public sympathy was not enough. > I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. (Rose Schneiderman, April 2, 1911) ### The Commission The state legislature created the Factory Investigating Commission in June 1911. State Senator Robert F. Wagner chaired it and Assemblyman Al Smith served as vice chair. Its investigators walked through hundreds of factories across the state and questioned workers on the record. Over four years its findings became dozens of new laws on fire exits, sprinklers, hours, and the labor of women and children. Frances Perkins had watched the fire from Washington Square. She worked for the Commission as an investigator, later ran the state's labor department under Governor Smith and Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in 1933 became Secretary of Labor, the first woman in a presidential cabinet. She called March 25, 1911 the day the New Deal began. ### The building The Asch Building survived the fire, since its structure was fireproof. New York University bought it and named it the Brown Building; it holds science laboratories today. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 1991 and a New York City landmark in 2003. In 2023 a permanent memorial, a steel ribbon with the names of the dead, was dedicated on its facade. ### In the census The Washington Square room paints the square where Perkins stood and the students and neighbors who pass the Brown Building each day. The Bowery room holds the tenement and garment district life that the Triangle workers came from, the peddlers, seamstresses and union hands of the Lower East Side. On the atlas, the pin at Washington Place and Greene Street marks the corner. Facts: - The Triangle fire on March 25, 1911 killed 146 workers, 123 women and girls and 23 men. (Source: Cornell University ILR School, Remembering the Triangle Fire, https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu) - The factory occupied the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the Asch Building at Washington Place and Greene Street. (Source: Cornell University ILR School, Remembering the Triangle Fire, https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu) - Owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were tried for manslaughter and acquitted in December 1911. (Source: Cornell University ILR School, Remembering the Triangle Fire, https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu) - The New York State Factory Investigating Commission, created in June 1911, was chaired by Robert F. Wagner with Al Smith as vice chair. (Source: Cornell University ILR School, Remembering the Triangle Fire, https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu) - Frances Perkins, who witnessed the fire, became Secretary of Labor in 1933, the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet. (Source: US Department of Labor, https://www.dol.gov) - The Asch Building, now NYU's Brown Building, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1991 and a New York City landmark in 2003. (Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc) Sources: - Cornell University ILR School, Remembering the Triangle Fire: https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu - US Department of Labor: https://www.dol.gov - NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission: https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc - National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov - Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov - Britannica: https://www.britannica.com ## The Harlem Renaissance and the Apollo The Great Migration made Harlem, the writers and musicians of the 1920s made it famous, and Amateur Night at the Apollo has run since 1934. ### How Harlem became Harlem Developers overbuilt Harlem in the 1890s and early 1900s, betting on the subway. When the market collapsed, landlords held empty apartment houses. In 1904 Philip A. Payton Jr. founded the Afro American Realty Company and leased buildings to Black tenants, who were shut out of most of the city. Block by block, Harlem filled. The Great Migration supplied the people. Between the 1910s and 1970 about 6 million African Americans left the South for the cities of the North and West. New York took a large share, and by 1930 more than 200,000 Black residents lived in Harlem. Churches, newspapers, lodges and businesses moved uptown with them. ### The Renaissance In the 1920s Harlem produced a body of literature, art and music that the era itself named the New Negro movement and later generations called the Harlem Renaissance. Alain Locke's 1925 anthology The New Negro set out its aims. Langston Hughes published The Weary Blues in 1926. Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen wrote in and about the neighborhood. The music ran all night. Duke Ellington led the band at the Cotton Club from 1927, where the audience was white and the performers were Black. The Savoy Ballroom on Lenox Avenue, open from 1926 to 1958, admitted everyone and gave the Lindy Hop its home. In 1926 the New York Public Library bought the collection of Arturo Schomburg, the seed of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on 135th Street. ### The Apollo and Amateur Night The theater at 253 West 125th Street opened in 1914 as Hurtig and Seamon's New Burlesque Theater, and it did not admit Black patrons. In 1934 Sidney Cohen reopened it as the Apollo, with Black performers on stage and Black audiences in the seats, at a time when 125th Street was the shopping street of Harlem. Amateur Night began that same year. Contestants rub the Tree of Hope, a stump of a Harlem elm kept on stage for luck, and the audience decides. In November 1934 a 17 year old named Ella Fitzgerald came to dance, sang instead, and won. Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and the Jackson 5 all played the Apollo early in their careers. The city named the theater a landmark in 1983. ### Strivers' Row On West 138th and 139th Streets, between what are now Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Frederick Douglass Boulevards, stand three rows of houses built between 1891 and 1893 for the developer David H. King Jr. Three firms designed them: James Brown Lord; Bruce Price with Clarence Luce; and McKim, Mead and White. The rear alleys still carry signs that read Walk Your Horses. The houses stood partly empty until they were sold to Black buyers beginning in 1919. Doctors, lawyers, musicians and ministers moved in, among them the composer W. C. Handy, and the blocks earned the name Strivers' Row. The city designated the St. Nicholas Historic District in 1967. ### Harlem now The Studio Museum in Harlem, founded in 1968 to show the work of artists of African descent, opened a new building on West 125th Street in 2025. The Apollo runs as a nonprofit and Amateur Night still fills its Wednesdays. ### In the census The Apollo room paints the marquee crowd and the contestants at the Tree of Hope. The Strivers room holds the brownstone families of 138th and 139th Streets, and the Studio Museum room the artists and curators of 125th Street. On the atlas, Harlem's pins run from Central Park North to the Harlem River, with the thickest cluster along 125th Street. Facts: - The Great Migration moved about 6 million African Americans out of the South between the 1910s and 1970. (Source: National Museum of African American History and Culture, https://nmaahc.si.edu) - The Apollo Theater opened in 1914 as Hurtig and Seamon's New Burlesque Theater and was renamed the Apollo in 1934. (Source: Apollo Theater, https://www.apollotheater.org) - Amateur Night at the Apollo began in 1934, and Ella Fitzgerald won it in November of that year at age 17. (Source: Apollo Theater, https://www.apollotheater.org) - The New York Public Library acquired Arturo Schomburg's collection in 1926, the foundation of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. (Source: New York Public Library, https://www.nypl.org) - The Strivers' Row houses on West 138th and 139th Streets were built from 1891 to 1893 and designated the St. Nicholas Historic District in 1967. (Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc) - The Studio Museum in Harlem was founded in 1968. (Source: Studio Museum in Harlem, https://www.studiomuseum.org) - Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro, a founding text of the Harlem Renaissance, was published in 1925. (Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov) Sources: - Apollo Theater: https://www.apollotheater.org - New York Public Library, Schomburg Center: https://www.nypl.org - National Museum of African American History and Culture: https://nmaahc.si.edu - NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission: https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc - Studio Museum in Harlem: https://www.studiomuseum.org - Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov - Britannica: https://www.britannica.com ## The Birth of Hip Hop, 1973 A back to school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue on August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc, and the four elements that grew from the Bronx. ### The Bronx in 1973 The Cross Bronx Expressway had cut through the borough's neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s. Landlords abandoned buildings and fires burned whole blocks in the 1970s. Jobs left and the city neared bankruptcy. In that Bronx, teenagers with turntables and a microphone built a culture from records their parents owned. ### August 11, 1973 Cindy Campbell wanted money for school clothes. She rented the recreation room of her apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in Morris Heights near the expressway, and threw a back to school party on August 11, 1973. Her brother Clive, who called himself Kool Herc, ran the music. Hip hop dates its birth to that night. Clive Campbell was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1955 and moved to the Bronx in 1967. He had watched the sound system parties of Kingston and brought their volume to the Bronx. He noticed that dancers waited for the break, the stretch of a funk record where the band drops out and the drums carry the beat. ### The break Herc played two copies of the same record on two turntables and switched between them to stretch the break for as long as the floor wanted it. He called the technique the Merry Go Round. The dancers who saved their best moves for the break became break boys and break girls, and the dance became breaking. A friend, Coke La Rock, talked over the beats to hype the crowd, and the master of ceremonies became the MC. Herc's parties moved from the rec room to Cedar Park and then to clubs, and other Bronx DJs studied his set. ### The four elements Grandmaster Flash, born Joseph Saddler, worked out how to cue a record by ear with the crossfader and made the DJ precise. Afrika Bambaataa, a former gang member from the Bronx River Houses, founded the Zulu Nation in 1973 and turned rival crews into competing dancers and DJs. He named the culture's four elements: DJing, MCing, breaking and graffiti writing, with knowledge as the fifth. For six years hip hop lived at parties and on cassette. The Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight, released in 1979, put it on the radio. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's The Message, in 1982, put the Bronx itself into the lyrics. The Library of Congress added The Message to the National Recording Registry in 2002 and Rapper's Delight in 2011. Graffiti had its own beginning. In July 1971 the New York Times wrote about TAKI 183, a Washington Heights teenager who had written his name across the city, and tagging spread through the schools. By the mid 1970s writers painted whole subway cars in the yards at night. The MTA declared the fleet free of graffiti in 1989, and the style moved to walls, galleries and print. ### The birthplace 1520 Sedgwick Avenue is still an apartment building. In 2007 New York State recognized it as the birthplace of hip hop and found it eligible for the state and national registers of historic places. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted DJ Kool Herc in 2023, the culture's fiftieth year, and that August 11 a concert at Yankee Stadium marked the anniversary. ### In the census The Sedgwick room paints the party: the DJ at two turntables, the crowd, the breakers on the floor. The Bronx Museum room holds the borough's artists, and the Rucker Park room holds the Harlem court where summer basketball and the same crowd met. On the atlas, the hip hop pins run along the Grand Concourse, the Bronx River Houses and Sedgwick Avenue. Facts: - Hip hop traces its origin to a party DJ Kool Herc played at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx on August 11, 1973. (Source: National Museum of African American History and Culture, https://nmaahc.si.edu) - DJ Kool Herc, born Clive Campbell in Kingston, Jamaica in 1955, moved to the Bronx in 1967. (Source: Britannica, https://www.britannica.com) - Herc extended the drum breaks of funk records by switching between two copies of the same record, a technique he called the Merry Go Round. (Source: National Museum of African American History and Culture, https://nmaahc.si.edu) - Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's The Message (1982) was added to the National Recording Registry in 2002. (Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov) - The Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight (1979) was added to the National Recording Registry in 2011. (Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov) - Rucker Park in Harlem is named for Holcombe Rucker, who started its basketball tournament in 1950. (Source: NYC Parks, https://www.nycgovparks.org) - The Bronx Museum of the Arts was founded in 1971 on the Grand Concourse. (Source: Bronx Museum of the Arts, https://www.bronxmuseum.org) Sources: - National Museum of African American History and Culture: https://nmaahc.si.edu - Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov - Bronx Museum of the Arts: https://www.bronxmuseum.org - NYC Parks: https://www.nycgovparks.org - New York Public Library: https://www.nypl.org - Britannica: https://www.britannica.com ## Coney Island Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland, the Wonder Wheel of 1920, the boardwalk of 1923, the Cyclone of 1927 and Nathan's nickel hot dog. ### A beach at the end of Brooklyn Coney Island is the sandy south shore of Brooklyn, once a true island and now joined to the mainland by fill. Resort hotels and bathhouses arrived after the Civil War, and railroads brought day trippers from the city. Charles Feltman, a Coney Island restaurant owner, is credited with selling the first sausages in a roll there in the 1860s. By the 1890s the beach had racetracks, dance halls and a reputation. ### Three parks George C. Tilyou opened Steeplechase Park in 1897 around a ride in which pairs of riders raced mechanical horses on a rail. The park's grinning Funny Face became the symbol of Coney Island. Steeplechase closed in 1964. Its Parachute Jump, a 250 foot steel tower moved from the 1939 World's Fair in 1941, still stands and is a city landmark. Frederic Thompson and Elmer Dundy opened Luna Park in 1903, a fantasy city of towers and spires lit by more than 200,000 electric bulbs. Dreamland, larger and whiter, opened across Surf Avenue in 1904. Dreamland burned to the ground on May 27, 1911. Luna Park burned in 1944 and never reopened. A new Luna Park, unrelated to the first, took the name in 2010. ### The Nickel Empire The subway reached the Stillwell Avenue terminal in 1920, and a nickel fare put the beach within reach of every tenement in the city. Summer Sundays drew crowds in the hundreds of thousands. Newspapers called it the Nickel Empire. The New York Aquarium moved to the boardwalk in 1957 and is still there. Nathan Handwerker, an immigrant from Poland who had worked at Feltman's, opened a hot dog stand at Surf and Stillwell Avenues in 1916 and charged a nickel, half of Feltman's price. Nathan's Famous still stands on the corner. Its July 4 hot dog eating contest has run as an annual event since 1972. ### The Wonder Wheel and the boardwalk The Wonder Wheel opened in 1920, a 150 foot steel wheel built by the Eccentric Ferris Wheel Company to a design by Charles Hermann. Sixteen of its 24 cars slide inward and outward along curved tracks as the wheel turns, and eight stay fixed. It has run every summer since and became a city landmark in 1989. The Riegelmann Boardwalk opened on May 15, 1923, named for Brooklyn Borough President Edward Riegelmann, who pushed the city to buy the private beachfront and open it to all. It runs about 2.7 miles from West 37th Street to Brighton Beach. The city designated it a scenic landmark in 2018. ### The Cyclone The Cyclone opened on June 26, 1927 on the site of the country's first roller coaster, the Switchback Railway of 1884. Vernon Keenan designed it and Harry C. Baker built it: a wooden coaster with 2,640 feet of track and a first drop of 85 feet at about a 60 degree angle. A ride cost 25 cents. It became a city landmark in 1988 and joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1991. It still runs on its original steel and wood frame. ### Rockaway Across Jamaica Bay in Queens, the Rockaway peninsula grew as the other working beach, reached today by the A train. Its boardwalk was rebuilt in concrete after Hurricane Sandy struck in October 2012, and the surf breaks off Rockaway Beach draw the city's surfers. ### In the census The Coney room paints the boardwalk crowd: the bathers, the Nathan's line, the Wonder Wheel operators and the Mermaid Parade marchers. The Cyclone room holds the riders at the top of the first drop. The Rockaway room paints the surfers and the A train beachgoers of the Queens shore. On the atlas, the pins run the length of the boardwalk from Sea Gate to Brighton Beach and out along the Rockaway peninsula. Facts: - The Cyclone roller coaster opened on June 26, 1927 with 2,640 feet of track and an 85 foot first drop. (Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc) - The Wonder Wheel opened in 1920 and stands 150 feet tall; it was designated a New York City landmark in 1989. (Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc) - The Riegelmann Boardwalk opened on May 15, 1923 and was designated a scenic landmark in 2018. (Source: NYC Parks, https://www.nycgovparks.org) - Nathan Handwerker opened his hot dog stand at Surf and Stillwell Avenues in 1916 and sold hot dogs for a nickel. (Source: Nathan's Famous, https://www.nathansfamous.com) - Dreamland burned down on May 27, 1911, seven years after it opened. (Source: Brooklyn Public Library, https://www.bklynlibrary.org) - Steeplechase Park operated from 1897 to 1964. (Source: Coney Island History Project, https://www.coneyislandhistory.org) - The Parachute Jump was built for the 1939 World's Fair, moved to Steeplechase Park in 1941, and is a New York City landmark. (Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc) Sources: - NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission: https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc - NYC Parks: https://www.nycgovparks.org - Coney Island History Project: https://www.coneyislandhistory.org - Brooklyn Public Library: https://www.bklynlibrary.org - Nathan's Famous: https://www.nathansfamous.com - Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov - Britannica: https://www.britannica.com ## The Blackout of July 13, 1977 What happened when New York lost power on July 13, 1977, the looting and fires that followed, and how the 1965 and 2003 blackouts differed. ### The night the grid failed On the evening of July 13, 1977, lightning struck Consolidated Edison transmission lines north of the city. A second strike followed. Protective relays tripped, the system shed load, and it lost the ties to neighboring utilities that could have carried it. At about 9:30 p.m. the lights went out across the five boroughs. Only pockets served by other utilities stayed lit. The blackout lasted about 25 hours. Con Edison restored the last customers on the night of July 14. The city had gone dark in the middle of a heat wave, in the middle of a fiscal crisis, and in the middle of the Son of Sam summer. The heat and the mood together made the night unlike any blackout before it. ### The looting and the fires Looting began within minutes in some neighborhoods and spread through the night. Crowds broke into stores along Broadway in Bushwick, along Utica Avenue and Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, along Third Avenue in the Bronx, and along 125th Street in Harlem. Some took televisions and clothing. Some took food. Some set fires after the shelves were empty. The fire department answered more than 1,000 alarms that night and the next day. Police made 3,776 arrests, the largest mass arrest in the city's history, and the courts and jails could not hold them. Damage estimates ran past $300 million. Bushwick took the worst of it. Whole stretches of Broadway burned, and many stores never reopened. The neighborhood had already lost population and jobs through the 1970s, and the blackout sped the decline. Its recovery took decades. ### 1965: the polite blackout New York had lost power before. On November 9, 1965, a relay failure at a station near Niagara Falls set off a cascade that blacked out most of the Northeast and Ontario, about 30 million people. In New York the lights failed at the evening rush hour and stayed out through the night, about 13 hours in most of the city. The city stayed calm. Commuters slept in hotel lobbies and train stations. Strangers directed traffic with flashlights. Crime that night was low. The contrast with 1977 became the standard way to describe how much the city had changed in 12 years. ### 2003: the grid fails again On August 14, 2003, a cascade that began in Ohio blacked out about 50 million people in eight states and Ontario. New York lost power in the afternoon and got it back through the next day. Again the city stayed mostly calm. People walked home over the bridges. Bars sold warm beer on the sidewalk. Neighbors grilled what was in the freezer. The joint United States and Canada task force blamed an Ohio utility that had let trees grow into its lines and had lost its alarm system at the moment it needed it. The lesson of 1977 had been about the city. The lesson of 2003 was about the grid. ### Hip hop and the blackout: myth and fact A story holds that the 1977 blackout made hip hop. Looters, it says, took turntables and mixers from electronics stores, and the new equipment put DJ sets in the hands of hundreds of teenagers who could never have afforded them. Some early DJs have told the story about their own neighborhoods, and documentaries and books have repeated it. The record says hip hop was already four years old. DJ Kool Herc played the party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx on August 11, 1973, that most histories mark as the beginning. Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa were working in the Bronx before 1977. The blackout may have put more equipment on the street. It did not start the music. The safe claim is the narrow one: the blackout was one of many things that happened to a culture already growing. ### In the census The blackout lives in the Bushwick room of the museum, where the census hangs the block characters, the corner kids and the shopkeepers who rebuilt Broadway. The Bowery room holds the city of the 1970s, the night people and the people who slept through it. The Times Square room shows the marquee crowd the night the bulbs went out. The atlas at map.html pins each character to the street where the painting sets them. Facts: - The 1977 blackout began on the evening of July 13, 1977, after lightning struck Con Edison transmission lines, and lasted about 25 hours. (Source: Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/New-York-City) - Police made 3,776 arrests during the 1977 blackout, the largest mass arrest in the city's history. (Source: Museum of the City of New York, https://www.mcny.org) - The fire department answered more than 1,000 alarms during the 1977 blackout, and Bushwick's Broadway was among the hardest hit streets. (Source: Brooklyn Public Library, https://www.bklynlibrary.org) - The Northeast blackout of November 9, 1965, cut power to about 30 million people across the Northeast and Ontario. (Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov) - The blackout of August 14, 2003, began in Ohio and affected about 50 million people in eight states and Ontario. (Source: U.S. Department of Energy, https://www.energy.gov) - DJ Kool Herc's party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx on August 11, 1973, is the date most histories give for the birth of hip hop, four years before the blackout. (Source: Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, https://nmaahc.si.edu) Sources: - Britannica, New York City: https://www.britannica.com/place/New-York-City - Museum of the City of New York: https://www.mcny.org - Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History: https://www.bklynlibrary.org - Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov - U.S. Department of Energy: https://www.energy.gov - Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture: https://nmaahc.si.edu ## Stonewall, June 28, 1969 The Stonewall Inn, the police raid of June 28, 1969, the nights that followed, the first march in 1970, and the National Monument of 2016. ### A bar on Christopher Street The Stonewall Inn stood at 51 and 53 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, across from Christopher Park. In 1969 it operated without a liquor license, under Mafia ownership, and served a crowd that other bars turned away: gay men, lesbians, drag queens, transgender people, and street kids with nowhere else to go. The State Liquor Authority then treated serving homosexuals as grounds to pull a license, so gay bars ran outside the law almost by definition. Police raids were routine. Bars paid off officers, got a warning call, and cleared the dance floor. On the night of Friday, June 27, 1969, the warning did not come. ### The raid At about 1:20 a.m. on Saturday, June 28, 1969, officers of the New York Police Department entered the Stonewall Inn. They checked identification, separated patrons by the sex on their papers, and began making arrests. Patrons who were released did not go home. They gathered on Christopher Street and watched. The crowd grew as the police loaded a patrol wagon. Coins flew, then bottles. The officers retreated into the bar and barricaded the door. The crowd broke the windows and tried to set the building on fire before the Tactical Patrol Force arrived and cleared the street. The fighting lasted until dawn. ### The nights that followed The next night the crowd came back, larger. Protests and street fighting continued on and off for several nights, into the first days of July. The Village Voice ran its account that week. The Mattachine Society, which had worked for gay rights through petition and polite picketing for two decades, chalked a message on the boarded window asking for calm. > We homosexuals plead with our people to please help maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the Village. (Mattachine Society sign in the Stonewall Inn window, 1969) The uprising did not invent the movement. Homophile groups had picketed in Washington and Philadelphia since 1965. What Stonewall changed was the tone. Within weeks activists formed the Gay Liberation Front. By December the Gay Activists Alliance followed. The demand shifted from tolerance to liberation. ### The first march, 1970 On June 28, 1970, the first anniversary, marchers walked from Christopher Street up Sixth Avenue to Central Park for Christopher Street Liberation Day. Organizers expected hundreds. Thousands came, and the march stretched for dozens of blocks. Los Angeles and Chicago held marches the same weekend. The annual march grew into the Pride marches now held around the world each June. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, both present in the Stonewall years, founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries in 1970 to house homeless queer youth. Their names are now on the record beside the bar. ### The monument, 2016 The Stonewall Inn joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1999 and became a National Historic Landmark in 2000. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated it a city landmark on June 23, 2015, the first designation made for a site's role in LGBT history. On June 24, 2016, President Obama proclaimed the Stonewall National Monument, the first unit of the National Park System devoted to LGBTQ history. The monument takes in Christopher Park and the streets around the bar. A visitor center opened at 51 Christopher Street in June 2024. ### In the census Stonewall has its own room in the museum, where the census hangs the Christopher Street characters: the bar crowd, the marchers, the kids who slept in the park. The Washington Square room holds the wider Village, the chess players and the folk singers who shared the neighborhood. The atlas at map.html pins each character to the corner where the painting places them. Facts: - Police raided the Stonewall Inn at 53 Christopher Street in the early morning of June 28, 1969, and the crowd outside fought back. (Source: National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/ston/index.htm) - The first Christopher Street Liberation Day march took place on June 28, 1970, from Greenwich Village to Central Park. (Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov) - The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Stonewall Inn a New York City landmark on June 23, 2015. (Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/index.page) - President Obama proclaimed the Stonewall National Monument on June 24, 2016, the first national monument devoted to LGBTQ history. (Source: National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/ston/index.htm) - The Stonewall Inn was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999 and named a National Historic Landmark in 2000. (Source: National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/ston/index.htm) - The Gay Liberation Front formed in New York in the weeks after the uprising, and the Gay Activists Alliance followed in December 1969. (Source: New York Public Library, https://www.nypl.org) Sources: - National Park Service, Stonewall National Monument: https://www.nps.gov/ston/index.htm - NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission: https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/index.page - New York Public Library: https://www.nypl.org - Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov - Britannica, Stonewall riots: https://www.britannica.com/event/Stonewall-riots ## The Bodega and the Corner Store Where the word bodega came from, the Puerto Rican, Dominican and Yemeni owners who built the corner store, the cat, and why nobody agrees how many there are. ### The word Bodega is Spanish for a storeroom, a wine cellar or a warehouse. The word descends from the Latin apotheca and the Greek apotheke, a place where things are put away, the same root that gives English the word apothecary. In Spain a bodega is a winery. In the Caribbean it became a small grocery. In New York it became the corner store. The New York meaning arrived with Puerto Rican migrants in the years after World War II. Today New Yorkers apply the word to almost any small store that sells milk, beer, lottery tickets and a sandwich, whatever the owner's origin. ### Who owns the store Puerto Ricans, United States citizens since the Jones Act of 1917, moved to New York in large numbers from the 1940s through the 1960s. Many opened groceries in East Harlem, the South Bronx, Williamsburg and the Lower East Side. The stores sold plantains, rice, coffee and the brands people had known at home, and they extended credit to neighbors who ran short before payday. Dominicans followed. Migration from the Dominican Republic grew after 1961 and again after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Dominican families came to own a large share of the city's bodegas, concentrated in Washington Heights and across the Bronx, and many bought their stores from the Puerto Rican owners who had opened them. Yemeni immigrants came in a third wave, from the 1970s onward, and by the 2010s Yemeni families owned thousands of the city's corner stores. On February 2, 2017, about 1,000 Yemeni owned bodegas closed for the afternoon to protest a federal travel ban, and owners rallied at Brooklyn Borough Hall. The Yemeni American Merchants Association formed in the wake of that strike. ### The bodega cat The cat sleeps on the chip rack, or on the cases of seltzer, or in the window. Owners keep cats to control mice and rats, and customers photograph them. The city health code bars live animals from food stores, so a cat can cost the owner a citation. Inspectors also cite stores for signs of rodents. Owners have said they would rather pay for the cat. The cat is also the mascot of a kind of store that runs on trust. The owner knows the regular's order, holds packages, lends a phone charger, and stays open when nothing else on the block does. ### How many bodegas Nobody agrees on the number. Estimates in circulation run from about 7,000 to more than 13,000. The spread comes from definitions, not from bad counting. No law defines a bodega. New York State licenses retail food stores of every size, from supermarkets to gas station marts, and the license does not say which of them are bodegas. Studies that count bodegas set a rule first: fewer than a certain number of registers, or a certain floor area, or a certain share of packaged goods, or a Spanish name on the awning. Change the rule and the count changes by thousands. Public health researchers, city agencies and merchant groups have used different rules, which is why the numbers they publish disagree. The count also moves. Stores open and close every month. Chain pharmacies and dollar stores compete for the same shelf. What the numbers agree on is scale: several thousand small stores, one on most commercial corners in the outer boroughs, and a share of the city's daily groceries that no supermarket chain approaches. ### In the census The bodega hangs in the Deli room of the museum, where the census paints the counter, the coffee, the sandwich order and the cat. The Bowery and Bushwick rooms hold the corner store as street furniture, the awning that anchors a block. The Arthur Avenue room holds the older Italian version of the same store. The atlas at map.html pins each shopkeeper to a corner. Facts: - Bodega is a Spanish word for a storeroom or wine cellar, from the Latin apotheca and the Greek apotheke. (Source: Merriam Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bodega) - Puerto Ricans have been United States citizens since the Jones Act of 1917, and their migration to New York peaked in the decades after World War II. (Source: Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu) - Dominican migration to New York grew after 1961 and after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and Dominican families came to own a large share of the city's bodegas. (Source: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/dsi) - On February 2, 2017, about 1,000 Yemeni owned bodegas closed for the afternoon in protest and owners rallied at Brooklyn Borough Hall. (Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov) - The New York City Health Code prohibits live animals in food stores, so a bodega cat can bring a citation. (Source: NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/index.page) - New York State licenses retail food stores of all sizes, and no state or city license defines a bodega, which is why counts range from about 7,000 to more than 13,000. (Source: New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, https://agriculture.ny.gov) Sources: - Merriam Webster, bodega: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bodega - Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College: https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu - CUNY Dominican Studies Institute: https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/dsi - NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/index.page - New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets: https://agriculture.ny.gov - Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov ## The Staten Island Ferry and the Harbor The ferry's route, the fare that went from a nickel to free in 1997, the Verrazzano bridge, and what the harbor was to the city. ### The route The Staten Island Ferry runs 5.2 miles between Whitehall Terminal at the tip of Manhattan and St. George Terminal on Staten Island. The crossing takes about 25 minutes. Boats leave every 15 to 30 minutes, around the clock, every day of the year. The city's Department of Transportation runs the service, and it carries more than 20 million passengers in a normal year. The boat passes the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island on one side, Governors Island on the other, and the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge ahead. It is the cheapest harbor cruise in the world because it costs nothing. ### The fare Ferries have crossed the Upper Bay since the Dutch, first by sail and oar, then by steam. Cornelius Vanderbilt, a Staten Island native, ran a boat across the harbor as a young man in the 1810s. Private companies and railroads held the route through the nineteenth century. The City of New York took over the ferry in 1905, after Staten Island joined the consolidated city in 1898. The city charged a nickel. The fare stayed at five cents from 1897 until 1975, long after the subway had left the nickel behind. It rose to 25 cents in 1975 and to 50 cents in 1990. On July 4, 1997, the city made the ferry free. It has stayed free since. The boats are painted orange so they can be seen in fog. The fleet carries names from the boroughs and from the island's history. ### The Verrazzano The Verrazzano Narrows Bridge opened on November 21, 1964. It joined Staten Island to Brooklyn across the Narrows, the channel where the harbor meets the ocean. Its main span of 4,260 feet was the longest suspension span in the world when it opened. Othmar Ammann designed it. Robert Moses, as chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, built it. The name honors Giovanni da Verrazzano, the Florentine navigator who sailed into the harbor in 1524, the first European known to have done so. The bridge carried his name with one z for 54 years, until New York State corrected the spelling in 2018. The bridge ended the island's isolation. Staten Island's population grew from about 222,000 in 1960 to about 379,000 in 1990. ### What the harbor was The harbor made the city. It is deep, sheltered, and free of ice most winters, and it sits where the Hudson meets the sea. After the Erie Canal opened in 1825, goods from the Great Lakes came down the Hudson and out through New York, and the port handled more cargo than any other in the country. Ships from Europe landed here because the return cargo was waiting. The islands record the city's work. Governors Island held the Army and then the Coast Guard until 1996. Ellis Island processed about 12 million immigrants between 1892 and 1954. Liberty Island has held the Statue of Liberty since its dedication on October 28, 1886. On the Staten Island shore, Sailors' Snug Harbor opened in 1833 as a home for aged and infirm seamen, paid for by a sea captain's bequest, and its Greek Revival halls now house a cultural center and botanical garden. The shipping moved to New Jersey after the 1950s, when container ships needed room the Manhattan and Brooklyn piers did not have. The harbor is still one of the busiest in the country. It is just quieter from the ferry deck. ### In the census The Ferry room of the museum hangs the deckhands, the commuters and the tourists who ride out and ride back. The Liberty room holds the statue's keepers and the harbor crowd, the Governors Island room holds the picnic day people, and the Snug Harbor room holds the old sailors and the gardeners. The atlas at map.html pins each character to a pier, a deck or a shore. Facts: - The Staten Island Ferry runs 5.2 miles between Whitehall Terminal in Manhattan and St. George Terminal on Staten Island, a crossing of about 25 minutes. (Source: NYC Department of Transportation, https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/ferrybus/staten-island-ferry.shtml) - The Staten Island Ferry has been free since July 4, 1997; before that the fare was 50 cents. (Source: NYC Department of Transportation, https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/ferrybus/staten-island-ferry.shtml) - The City of New York took over operation of the ferry in 1905. (Source: NYC Department of Transportation, https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/ferrybus/staten-island-ferry.shtml) - The Verrazzano Narrows Bridge opened on November 21, 1964, with a main span of 4,260 feet, then the longest suspension span in the world. (Source: MTA Bridges and Tunnels, https://new.mta.info) - The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886. (Source: National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/stli/index.htm) - Sailors' Snug Harbor opened on Staten Island in 1833 as a home for retired seamen. (Source: Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden, https://snug-harbor.org) - Staten Island's population grew from about 222,000 in 1960 to about 379,000 in 1990, the decades after the bridge opened. (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov) Sources: - NYC Department of Transportation, Staten Island Ferry: https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/ferrybus/staten-island-ferry.shtml - MTA Bridges and Tunnels: https://new.mta.info - National Park Service, Statue of Liberty: https://www.nps.gov/stli/index.htm - Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden: https://snug-harbor.org - Trust for Governors Island: https://www.govisland.com - U.S. Census Bureau: https://www.census.gov ## The Race to the Sky, 1930 to 1931 The Woolworth Building, the 1916 zoning law, the Chrysler Building's secret spire, and the Empire State Building's 13 month climb to the top of the world. ### The tallest before them The Woolworth Building opened on April 24, 1913, at 233 Broadway, across from City Hall Park. Cass Gilbert designed it in Gothic dress for Frank W. Woolworth, who paid for it in cash. At 792 feet it was the tallest building in the world, and it held the title for 17 years. A minister called it the Cathedral of Commerce, and the name stuck. President Wilson pressed a button in Washington to light it on opening night. ### The 1916 rule In 1915 the Equitable Building rose straight up from its lot at 120 Broadway with no setbacks and threw a shadow over acres of neighboring property. The next year the city adopted the 1916 Zoning Resolution, the first comprehensive zoning law in the United States. It divided the city into use districts and, for tall buildings, drew a sky exposure plane: a tower had to step back as it rose so that light reached the street. The rule produced the setback skyline. Architects treated the stepped envelope as a form, and the ziggurat tops of the 1920s and 1930s are the law drawn in stone. Rockefeller Center, built from 1930 through 1939, is the largest single expression of it. The 1961 Zoning Resolution replaced the 1916 rule with the plaza bonus and the sheer glass slab. ### The race of 1929 Two men who had once been partners raced each other to the sky. H. Craig Severance designed 40 Wall Street for the Bank of Manhattan Company. William Van Alen designed the Chrysler Building at Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street for Walter P. Chrysler. Each revised his plans upward as the other's building rose. In 1929 Severance topped out at 927 feet, sure he had won. Van Alen had a secret. Inside the Chrysler Building's fire shaft his crews assembled a 185 foot steel spire. In October 1929, days before the stock market crash, they raised it through the roof and bolted it in place in about 90 minutes. The Chrysler Building stood 1,046 feet, higher than 40 Wall Street and higher than the Eiffel Tower. It opened in May 1930 as the tallest building in the world. Its crown of stainless steel arches and triangular windows, and its gargoyles modeled on Chrysler hood ornaments, made it the ornament of the Art Deco skyline. Chrysler refused to pay Van Alen his full fee. The architect sued and won, and never built another major tower. ### The Empire State The Chrysler Building held the title for 11 months. The Empire State Building rose on the site of the old Waldorf Astoria Hotel at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, designed by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon and financed by a group led by John J. Raskob, with former Governor Alfred E. Smith as its public face. Construction took about 13 months. Crews set steel at a pace of more than four floors a week. The building opened on May 1, 1931. President Hoover pressed a button in Washington to turn on its lights. It stood 1,250 feet to the roof, 102 stories, with a mooring mast for airships that never worked as one. An antenna added later raised the total to 1,454 feet. It was the tallest building in the world until the World Trade Center's north tower passed it in 1970. It opened into the Depression with much of its office space empty, and New Yorkers called it the Empty State Building. Its observatory earned more than its rents for years. ### The one that started it The Flatiron Building, finished in 1902 at the wedge where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street, is not tall by later measure: 22 stories. Daniel Burnham's firm designed it with a steel frame and a limestone and terra cotta skin. Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen photographed it as a symbol of the new city, and it belongs at the start of the story the Empire State Building finishes. ### In the census The museum hangs the skyscraper characters in four rooms: the Chrysler room, the Woolworth room, the Rockefeller Center room and the Flatiron room. The census paints the ironworkers, the elevator operators, the window washers and the office crowds who fill them. The atlas at map.html pins each character to the block under the tower. Facts: - The Woolworth Building opened on April 24, 1913, at 792 feet, and was the tallest building in the world until 1930. (Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/index.page) - The 1916 Zoning Resolution was the first comprehensive zoning law in the United States and required tall buildings to step back as they rose. (Source: NYC Department of City Planning, https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/index.page) - The Chrysler Building's 185 foot spire was assembled inside the building and raised through the roof in October 1929, bringing it to 1,046 feet. (Source: Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chrysler-Building) - The Empire State Building opened on May 1, 1931, at 1,250 feet to the roof and 102 stories, after about 13 months of construction. (Source: Empire State Building, https://www.esbnyc.com) - The Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world until the north tower of the World Trade Center passed it in 1970. (Source: Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Empire-State-Building) - The Flatiron Building, designed by Daniel Burnham's firm, was completed in 1902 at 22 stories. (Source: The Skyscraper Museum, https://skyscraper.org) Sources: - Empire State Building: https://www.esbnyc.com - NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission: https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/index.page - NYC Department of City Planning: https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/index.page - The Skyscraper Museum: https://skyscraper.org - Britannica, Chrysler Building: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chrysler-Building - Britannica, Empire State Building: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Empire-State-Building - Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov ## Times Square and the Ball Drop Longacre Square, the New York Times tower of 1904, the first ball on December 31, 1907, the decline, and the remake of the 1990s. ### Longacre Square Before 1904 the crossing of Broadway and Seventh Avenue at 42nd Street was Longacre Square, named for the carriage district of London. It was the city's horse trade: stables, carriage shops, harness makers. Theaters had begun moving north up Broadway toward it in the 1890s, but the square itself was a place to buy a horse. In 1904 the New York Times moved from Park Row to a new tower on the triangle between Broadway and Seventh Avenue at 42nd Street. The publisher, Adolph S. Ochs, persuaded the city to rename the square for the paper, and the city did so in April 1904. The first subway opened on October 27, 1904, with a station named Times Square, and the name was fixed. ### The first ball, 1907 Ochs celebrated the new building on December 31, 1904, with fireworks from the roof at midnight. The crowd was large enough that the party replaced the old custom of gathering at Trinity Church to hear the bells. After a few years the city banned the fireworks, and Ochs needed something else. On December 31, 1907, a ball of iron and wood, five feet across, weighing 700 pounds and lit by 100 bulbs, slid down the flagpole on the roof of One Times Square at midnight to welcome 1908. Jacob Starr, an immigrant metalworker, built it. The idea came from the time balls that ports dropped to signal the hour to ships. The ball has dropped every year since except 1942 and 1943, when the city dimmed its lights for the war and the crowd stood in silence for a minute at midnight. The Times left the tower in 1913 for 43rd Street. The ball stayed. ### The square in the twentieth century Times Square became the theater district's front door and then the city's billboard. Electric signs went up before 1910, and by the 1920s the stretch of Broadway was known as the Great White Way for its lights. Radio City Music Hall opened at Rockefeller Center on December 27, 1932, with 5,960 seats, and the Rockettes have danced there since its first season. After World War II the square declined. Theaters on 42nd Street turned to grind house films and then to pornography. By the 1970s the block was a byword for crime, and city officials counted it among the most dangerous streets in the city. ### The remake of the 1990s The 42nd Street Development Project, a state and city plan, condemned the block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in the early 1990s and leased its theaters to new tenants. The New Victory Theater reopened in 1995, the first of the restored houses. The Walt Disney Company took the New Amsterdam Theatre, restored it and reopened it in 1997. The Times Square Business Improvement District, formed in 1992, put sanitation crews and security on the street; it is now the Times Square Alliance. Zoning rules for the district required the new towers to carry lit signs, so the remade square kept its glare by law. Pedestrian plazas closed Broadway to cars through the square in 2009. The square now counts hundreds of thousands of pedestrians a day. The ball changed with the square. A crystal ball replaced the old one for the 2000 celebration, and the current ball, 12 feet across and covered in Waterford crystal, sits on the roof of One Times Square all year. ### In the census The Times Square room of the museum hangs the census characters of the crossroads: the costumed hustlers, the tourists in the plaza, the ticket line, the stagehands. The Radio City room holds the ushers and the dancers. The atlas at map.html pins each to the corner where the painting sets them. Facts: - Longacre Square was renamed Times Square in April 1904 after the New York Times moved to its new tower there. (Source: Times Square Alliance, https://www.timessquarenyc.org) - The first subway line opened on October 27, 1904, with a station at Times Square. (Source: MTA, https://new.mta.info) - The first New Year's Eve ball, made of iron and wood and lit by 100 bulbs, dropped on December 31, 1907, to welcome 1908. (Source: Times Square Alliance, https://www.timessquarenyc.org) - The ball did not drop in 1942 and 1943 because of the wartime dimout. (Source: Times Square Alliance, https://www.timessquarenyc.org) - Radio City Music Hall opened on December 27, 1932, with 5,960 seats. (Source: Radio City Music Hall, https://www.radiocity.com) - The New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street was restored by the Walt Disney Company and reopened in 1997. (Source: Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Times-Square) Sources: - Times Square Alliance: https://www.timessquarenyc.org - MTA: https://new.mta.info - Radio City Music Hall: https://www.radiocity.com - New York Public Library: https://www.nypl.org - Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov - Britannica, Times Square: https://www.britannica.com/place/Times-Square ## Counting New York The decennial census from 1790 to 2020, the 2020 figure of 8,804,190, what the count decides, the undercount, and how a painted census differs. ### Why the country counts The Constitution requires it. Article I, Section 2 orders an enumeration of the population within three years of the first meeting of Congress and every ten years after. The first census ran in 1790 under Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, with United States marshals riding the districts. It counted about 3.9 million people in the country, and 33,131 in New York City. The count has run every ten years since, through wars and epidemics, 24 times by 2020. The Census Bureau keeps individual answers confidential for 72 years, then releases them. The 1950 records opened in 2022. ### The city's numbers New York was the largest city in the country by 1790 and has never given up the title. Within its old borders it passed 500,000 in 1850 and 1,000,000 in 1880. Consolidation on January 1, 1898, joined Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, and the 1900 census counted 3,437,202 in the new city. The city passed 7 million in 1940. The count fell in the 1970s, to 7,071,639 in 1980, then climbed for four decades: 8,008,278 in 2000, 8,175,133 in 2010, and 8,804,190 in 2020. The 2020 figure was the largest population ever recorded for the city. ### What the count decides The count decides seats. The 435 seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states by population after each census, and each state's share of the Electoral College follows. After 2020 New York State lost one seat. The Bureau's apportionment figures showed the state fell 89 people short of keeping it. The count decides money. Federal programs use census data to distribute hundreds of billions of dollars a year, for Medicaid, highways, school lunches, housing vouchers and more. A person not counted is a share not sent. The count also draws the lines: City Council districts, State Senate and Assembly seats, and the boundaries of many local services follow the numbers. ### The undercount Some people are harder to count than others. Renters, young children, immigrants, people in crowded apartments, and people who distrust the government answer at lower rates. The Bureau measures its own error afterward with a survey that recounts a sample of blocks. For 2020 it found the national count had undercounted Black, Hispanic and Native American residents and overcounted white and Asian residents. New York City ran its own campaign in 2020, with a budget of $40 million, to push the response rate in neighborhoods that had been missed before. The pandemic hit in the middle of the count, and door knockers worked into October 2020. The debate over how many New Yorkers the count missed, and where, went on after the numbers were published. ### A painted census A census counts everyone once, by address, with the same questions. It records where people live and what they say about themselves. It does not record what they look like on the platform at 8 a.m. or what they carry home from the bodega. NEW YORKERS is a painted census. It counts by type rather than by person: 7,541 characters across 19 eras, each a role the city contains, each assigned a place on the map. It is not a sample and it claims no statistics. It is a portrait of the categories the official count has no column for. ### In the census The Panorama room of the museum stands over the model of the city built for the 1964 World's Fair, the count in miniature, and hangs the surveyors and the counters. The Custom House room holds the clerks and the harbor tallies. The Museum of the City of New York room holds the records. The atlas at map.html is the count itself, one pin per character. Facts: - The 2020 census counted 8,804,190 people in New York City, the largest population ever recorded for the city. (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov) - The first federal census in 1790 counted 33,131 people in New York City. (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census.html) - The 1900 census, the first after consolidation, counted 3,437,202 people in the five boroughs. (Source: NYC Department of City Planning, https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/index.page) - After the 2020 census New York State lost one seat in the House of Representatives, falling 89 people short of keeping it. (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov) - Individual census records are kept confidential for 72 years; the 1950 records were released in 2022. (Source: National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/research/census) - The Panorama of the City of New York, built for the 1964 World's Fair, models every building in the five boroughs. (Source: Queens Museum, https://queensmuseum.org) - The Census Bureau's 2020 Post Enumeration Survey found a national undercount of Black, Hispanic and Native American residents and an overcount of white and Asian residents. (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov) Sources: - U.S. Census Bureau, Decennial Census: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census.html - U.S. Census Bureau: https://www.census.gov - National Archives, Census Records: https://www.archives.gov/research/census - NYC Department of City Planning: https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/index.page - Queens Museum: https://queensmuseum.org - Museum of the City of New York: https://www.mcny.org ## Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the Lower Manhattan Expressway fight, the Cross Bronx Expressway, and what each of them built. ### Two ways to see a street Robert Moses never held elected office. From 1924 to 1968 he held appointed posts, sometimes a dozen at once: state parks chairman, city parks commissioner from 1934 to 1960, city construction coordinator, chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. He controlled the toll money, and the toll money built the city. Jane Jacobs held no office at all. She wrote for Architectural Forum, lived at 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, and watched her block. In 1961 she published The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It argued that planners had it backward: the crowded, mixed, old, short blocks they wanted to clear were the healthy ones, and the towers in parks they built were the dead ones. ### What Moses built The list is long. Jones Beach opened in 1929. The Triborough Bridge opened in 1936, the Bronx Whitestone in 1939, the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in 1950, the Throgs Neck in 1961, the Verrazzano Narrows in 1964. He opened 11 city pools in the summer of 1936 alone, Highbridge Pool in Washington Heights among them, along with hundreds of playgrounds, the parkways of Long Island and Westchester, Lincoln Center, Shea Stadium and the 1964 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows. He also built the expressways. The Cross Bronx Expressway, planned in the 1940s and opened in sections through 1963, cut a trench across the Bronx from the George Washington Bridge to the Bruckner interchange. It ran through East Tremont, a working class neighborhood, and took the homes of about 1,500 families along one stretch. Residents proposed a route a few blocks south that would have spared them. Moses refused it. The neighborhood emptied in the decade that followed. ### The Village fights Moses wanted a road through Washington Square Park to feed a housing project to the south. Village residents, Jacobs among them, fought the road through the 1950s and won. The park closed to traffic in 1958 and the fountain became the center of the neighborhood. Then came the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Moses planned an elevated highway from the Holland Tunnel to the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges along Broome Street. It would have cleared much of what is now SoHo and cut Little Italy from the Village. Jacobs chaired the committee that fought it. In April 1968, at a state hearing, police arrested her after the crowd she led surged onto the stage and the stenographer's record came apart. The city killed the expressway in 1969. Jacobs moved to Toronto in 1968, in part so her sons would not be drafted, and fought an expressway there too. Moses lost the last of his power the same year, when the Triborough Authority was folded into the new Metropolitan Transportation Authority. > Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody. (Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961) ### What each left Robert Caro's The Power Broker, published in 1974, fixed the verdict on Moses for a generation: a builder who moved highways through people and never learned to drive. The verdict has softened since. The parks, the pools and the beaches are still in use, and the city has not found another way to build at that scale. Jacobs's ideas became the planning orthodoxy she had attacked: mixed use, short blocks, eyes on the street, old buildings kept. Her critics note that the neighborhoods she defended became the most expensive in the country. Both fights were about who decides what a street is for. Neither is over. ### In the census The Washington Square room of the museum hangs the Village characters Jacobs wrote about: the shopkeepers who watch the sidewalk, the parents at the fountain, the chess players. The Highbridge room holds the pool, one of the 11 Moses opened in 1936, and the swimmers and lifeguards of the census. The Hall of Fame room stands on the Bronx ridge above the Cross Bronx trench. The atlas at map.html pins each character to its block. Facts: - Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. (Source: Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jane-Jacobs) - Robert Moses served as New York City Parks Commissioner from 1934 to 1960 and chaired the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. (Source: NYC Parks, https://www.nycgovparks.org) - Moses opened 11 city swimming pools in the summer of 1936, including Highbridge Pool in Washington Heights. (Source: NYC Parks, https://www.nycgovparks.org) - The Cross Bronx Expressway opened in sections through 1963 and displaced about 1,500 families in East Tremont. (Source: Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Moses) - Washington Square Park closed to through traffic in 1958 after residents defeated a planned roadway. (Source: NYC Parks, https://www.nycgovparks.org) - The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority became part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1968. (Source: MTA, https://new.mta.info) Sources: - NYC Parks: https://www.nycgovparks.org - MTA Bridges and Tunnels: https://new.mta.info - Britannica, Jane Jacobs: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jane-Jacobs - Britannica, Robert Moses: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Moses - Museum of the City of New York: https://www.mcny.org - NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission: https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/index.page ## Before the City: Lenape, Mannahatta, New Amsterdam The Lenape and Mannahatta, what the 1626 purchase documents actually say, New Amsterdam from 1624 to 1664, and the wall that named Wall Street. ### Lenapehoking The people who lived on the island when Europeans arrived were Lenape, speakers of Munsee, one of the Lenape languages. Their homeland, Lenapehoking, ran from the lower Hudson to Delaware Bay. They planted corn, beans and squash, fished the rivers and the harbor, harvested oysters by the ton, and moved with the seasons between the shore and the interior. Their trails crossed the island; the route that became Broadway follows a Lenape path for part of its length. Mannahatta is the name Europeans recorded for the island, written down in the log of Henry Hudson's 1609 voyage. The most common reading is island of many hills, though the etymology is not settled. The island then had streams, ponds, marshes and a hilly spine, most of it graded flat in the nineteenth century. ### The Dutch arrive Giovanni da Verrazzano, sailing for France, entered the harbor in 1524 and left. Henry Hudson, sailing for the Dutch East India Company, came in 1609 and went up the river that bears his name, looking for a route to Asia. He found beaver instead, and Dutch traders followed for the furs. The Dutch West India Company, chartered in 1621, sent settlers in 1624. About 30 families, most of them Walloons, arrived that year and were placed at posts along the rivers, including Governors Island and Fort Orange, near present Albany. In 1625 the company laid out Fort Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan, and the town of New Amsterdam grew around it. ### The purchase story The story says Peter Minuit bought Manhattan from the Indians in 1626 for 24 dollars in beads. Here is what the documents show. One letter survives, written by Pieter Schagen to the States General in The Hague on November 5, 1626, reporting that a ship had arrived from New Netherland and that the colonists had bought the island of Manhattes from the natives for goods worth 60 guilders. No deed survives. The letter does not name Minuit, does not name the sellers, and does not say beads. The 24 dollar figure is a nineteenth century conversion of 60 guilders, and it has stayed fixed while the dollar has not. The Lenape did not hold land as private property to be sold outright, and it is likely they understood the transaction as a right to share the island's use. What is documented is a transaction of about 60 guilders in 1626. Everything more colorful is later invention. ### New Amsterdam, 1624 to 1664 New Amsterdam was small, a few hundred people for its first decades and about 1,500 by the end. It was also mixed from the start. A Jesuit visitor in 1643 reported 18 languages spoken in a town of a few hundred. Enslaved Africans arrived in 1626 and built much of the fort and the wall; some later won partial freedom and land on the edge of town. The first Jews arrived in 1654. Peter Stuyvesant, director general from 1647, ran the colony with a hard hand and tried to keep out Quakers and Lutherans; the company overruled him. In 1653 Stuyvesant had a wall of wooden palisades built across the island at the town's northern edge, to hold off an English attack from New England that never came. The road along it became Wall Street. The English pulled the wall down in 1699. In August 1664 English warships anchored in the harbor and demanded the town. Stuyvesant wanted to fight. The townspeople, his own son among them, petitioned him to surrender, and he did, on September 8, 1664, without a shot. The English renamed the town New York for James, Duke of York. The Dutch took it back in 1673, held it for a year as New Orange, and gave it up in the Treaty of Westminster in 1674. ### In the census The Wall Street room of the museum stands on the line of the 1653 wall and hangs the traders and the clerks of the census. The Custom House room, in the building on the site of Fort Amsterdam, holds the harbor characters. The Seaport room holds the waterfront. The Museum of the City of New York room holds the maps. The atlas at map.html pins each character to the modern street that follows the old shoreline. Facts: - The Lenape, speakers of Munsee, lived on Manhattan and across a homeland called Lenapehoking when Europeans arrived. (Source: Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, https://americanindian.si.edu) - Henry Hudson sailed into the harbor and up the river in 1609 for the Dutch East India Company. (Source: New Netherland Institute, https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org) - The only surviving document of the 1626 purchase is Pieter Schagen's letter of November 5, 1626, which reports that the island was bought for goods worth 60 guilders. (Source: New Netherland Institute, https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org) - The Dutch West India Company sent its first settlers, about 30 families, to New Netherland in 1624. (Source: New Netherland Institute, https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org) - Peter Stuyvesant had a wooden wall built across the island in 1653; the street along it became Wall Street. (Source: Museum of the City of New York, https://www.mcny.org) - Stuyvesant surrendered New Amsterdam to the English on September 8, 1664, and the town was renamed New York. (Source: Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/New-Amsterdam) - The Mannahatta Project reconstructed the ecology of the island as it stood in 1609, with its hills, streams and marshes. (Source: Welikia Project, Wildlife Conservation Society, https://welikia.org) Sources: - New Netherland Institute: https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org - Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian: https://americanindian.si.edu - Welikia Project, Wildlife Conservation Society: https://welikia.org - Museum of the City of New York: https://www.mcny.org - New York Public Library: https://www.nypl.org - Britannica, New Amsterdam: https://www.britannica.com/place/New-Amsterdam ## The High Line and the Rewilded City The West Side freight line, Friends of the High Line, the park's opening on June 9, 2009, Hudson Yards and the Vessel, and Little Island in 2021. ### Death Avenue Through the nineteenth century the New York Central Railroad ran freight trains at street level down the West Side avenues. The trains killed so many people that the papers called the route Death Avenue, and the railroad hired men on horseback, the West Side Cowboys, to ride ahead of each train waving a flag. The West Side Improvement, agreed among the city, the state and the railroad in 1929, lifted the tracks off the street. The elevated freight line opened in 1934. It ran from 34th Street south to a terminal at Spring Street, about 30 feet above the ground, and it passed through the middle of the blocks rather than over the avenue, so that trains could roll into the upper floors of warehouses and the Nabisco factory that is now Chelsea Market. ### The line falls quiet Trucks took the freight. The southern section was torn down in the 1960s. The last train ran in 1980, carrying three carloads of frozen turkeys. For 20 years the structure stood empty over the Meatpacking District and West Chelsea, and a meadow of self seeded grasses, trees and wildflowers grew in the ballast. Property owners under it pressed for demolition, and in the 1990s the city signed papers to tear it down. In 1999 two residents of the neighborhood, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, met at a community board meeting and founded Friends of the High Line to save it. Photographs by Joel Sternfeld of the wild meadow on the tracks made the case in public. The Bloomberg administration reversed course in 2002, and the city won federal approval to convert the line to a trail in 2005. ### The park, 2009 The design team was James Corner Field Operations with Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf. The plan kept the rails in the paving, replanted the self seeded meadow as a designed one, and pulled the walkway through the buildings the trains had passed through. The first section, from Gansevoort Street to West 20th Street, opened on June 9, 2009. The second, to West 30th Street, opened on June 8, 2011. The third, around the West Side rail yards to 34th Street, opened on September 21, 2014, and the Spur over Tenth Avenue at 30th Street opened in 2019. The park runs about 1.45 miles. Friends of the High Line operates it under a license from the Parks Department and raises most of its budget. The park drew millions of visitors a year and a wall of new towers along it. Cities around the world copied it. Critics noted that the rents under it rose with the visitor count, and that the neighborhood the founders had wanted to keep changed anyway. ### Hudson Yards and the Vessel The rail yards the third section wraps around became Hudson Yards, built on a platform over the working tracks, the largest private real estate development in the country. Its first phase opened on March 15, 2019. At its center stood the Vessel, a 150 foot structure of 154 interconnected flights of stairs designed by Thomas Heatherwick. The Shed, an arts center whose outer shell rolls out over the plaza on rails, opened the following month. The Vessel closed in 2021 after a series of deaths by suicide from its upper levels and reopened in 2024 with higher barriers and steel mesh on the climbable levels. ### Little Island, 2021 South of the High Line's start, on the site of Pier 54 in Hudson River Park, Little Island opened on May 21, 2021. Heatherwick Studio designed it with the landscape architects MNLA. It rests on 132 concrete pots shaped like tulips, on piles driven into the river, and holds a 2.4 acre park with a 687 seat amphitheater. Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg paid for most of it and committed to fund its upkeep. The Hudson River Park Trust owns the site. Together the High Line, Hudson Yards and Little Island turned a working waterfront the city had abandoned into a strip of parks, and did it mostly with private money. The rewilded city is a built one. ### In the census The High Line room of the museum hangs the joggers, the gardeners and the tourists of the park. The Vessel room and the Shed room hold Hudson Yards, its climbers, its ushers and its cranes. The Little Island room holds the amphitheater crowd and the river. The atlas at map.html pins each character to a pier or a block on the West Side. Facts: - The elevated West Side freight line opened in 1934 and its last train ran in 1980, carrying three carloads of frozen turkeys. (Source: The High Line, https://www.thehighline.org) - Friends of the High Line was founded in 1999 by Joshua David and Robert Hammond to save the structure from demolition. (Source: The High Line, https://www.thehighline.org) - The first section of the High Line, from Gansevoort Street to West 20th Street, opened on June 9, 2009. (Source: The High Line, https://www.thehighline.org) - The High Line's third section, around the rail yards to 34th Street, opened on September 21, 2014, bringing the park to about 1.45 miles. (Source: NYC Parks, https://www.nycgovparks.org) - Hudson Yards opened its first phase on March 15, 2019, with the 150 foot Vessel at its center. (Source: Hudson Yards, https://www.hudsonyardsnewyork.com) - The Shed opened at Hudson Yards in April 2019 with a movable outer shell that rolls over the plaza. (Source: The Shed, https://theshed.org) - Little Island opened on May 21, 2021, on 132 concrete pots at the site of Pier 54 in Hudson River Park. (Source: Little Island, https://littleisland.org) Sources: - The High Line: https://www.thehighline.org - NYC Parks: https://www.nycgovparks.org - Hudson Yards: https://www.hudsonyardsnewyork.com - The Shed: https://theshed.org - Little Island: https://littleisland.org - Hudson River Park Trust: https://hudsonriverpark.org - Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov ## The museum rooms, with sources ### The Bowery (Lower Manhattan) The Bowery is the oldest thoroughfare in Manhattan. It began as a Lenape trail and took its name from the Dutch bouwerij, the farm road that led to Peter Stuyvesant's estate. In the 19th century it held theaters and beer halls, and later became the city's skid row. The club CBGB opened at 315 Bowery in 1973 and launched punk rock in New York. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/place/Bowery Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=bowery ### Below the city (The Subway) The first subway line opened on October 27, 1904, run by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. It ran from City Hall north to 145th Street. The architects Heins and LaFarge designed the original stations with ceramic tile and mosaic name plaques. The system now runs 24 hours a day on more than 470 stations. Source: Metropolitan Transportation Authority https://new.mta.info Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=subway ### Above the park (The Met Roof Garden) The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 and opened its Fifth Avenue building in 1880, designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould. The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden opened in 1987 above the modern wing. Since then the museum has invited one artist each season to make a work for the roof. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=met ### Across the river (Brooklyn Waterfront) Brooklyn Bridge Park covers 85 acres of former shipping piers along the East River in Brooklyn Heights and Dumbo. Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates designed it. The first section, Pier 1, opened in 2010, and Jane's Carousel opened in its glass pavilion the next year. Granite from the old Roosevelt Island bridge went into the park's steps and seating. Source: Brooklyn Bridge Park https://www.brooklynbridgepark.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=brooklyn ### Electric crossroads (Times Square) The crossroads at Broadway and Seventh Avenue was called Longacre Square until 1904, when The New York Times moved into its tower there and the city renamed it. The first New Year's Eve ball dropped from that tower on December 31, 1907. The red glass steps above the TKTS booth opened in 2008. Source: Times Square Alliance https://www.timessquarenyc.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=times ### The harbor crossing (Staten Island Ferry) Ferries have crossed between Staten Island and Manhattan since the early 1800s. The City of New York took over the service in 1905. The fare was dropped in 1997, and the ride has been free since. The boats carry cars no longer, only people, on a 25 minute crossing past the Statue of Liberty. Source: NYC Department of Transportation https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/ferrybus/staten-island-ferry.shtml Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=ferry ### The living city (New York Botanical Garden) The New York Botanical Garden was founded in 1891 on 250 acres in the Bronx. Its glasshouse, now the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, opened in 1902. The firm Lord and Burnham designed it after the Palm House at Kew. The garden also holds a 50 acre stand of old growth forest that was never cleared. Source: New York Botanical Garden https://www.nybg.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=botanical ### Arrivals / departures (Penn / Moynihan Train Hall) Moynihan Train Hall opened on January 1, 2021, inside the James A. Farley Post Office. McKim, Mead and White designed the post office, which opened in 1914 across Eighth Avenue from the original Pennsylvania Station. That station was demolished in 1963, and its loss helped start the city's landmarks law. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill designed the new hall under a skylight held by the old mail sorting trusses. Source: Moynihan Train Hall https://moynihantrainhall.nyc Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=penn ### Under the stars (Grand Central Terminal) Grand Central Terminal opened on February 2, 1913. Reed and Stem and Warren and Wetmore designed it for the New York Central Railroad. The ceiling of the main concourse shows the zodiac, painted backward, after a sketch by Paul Helleu. In 1978 the Supreme Court upheld the terminal's landmark status in Penn Central v. New York City. Source: Grand Central Terminal https://www.grandcentralterminal.com Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=grand ### The city, rewilded (The High Line) The High Line opened in 1934 as an elevated freight railroad along Manhattan's west side. The last train ran in 1980. Joshua David and Robert Hammond founded Friends of the High Line in 1999 to save it. The first section of the park opened in 2009, designed by James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio and Renfro, and the planting designer Piet Oudolf. Source: Friends of the High Line https://www.thehighline.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=highline ### At the edge of it all (Coney Island) Coney Island became the city's seaside playground in the late 1800s, with Steeplechase Park opening in 1897, Luna Park in 1903, and Dreamland in 1904. The Riegelmann Boardwalk opened in 1923. The Wonder Wheel has turned since 1920 and the Cyclone since 1927, and both are city landmarks. Source: NYC Parks, Coney Island Beach and Boardwalk https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/coney-island-beach-and-boardwalk Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=coney ### The painted threshold (Bethesda Arcade) Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould designed Bethesda Terrace as the formal heart of Central Park, built in the 1860s. The arcade ceiling holds about 16,000 Minton encaustic tiles, the only such tile ceiling in the world. Emma Stebbins's fountain, Angel of the Waters, was dedicated in 1873 to mark the Croton Aqueduct that brought clean water to the city. Source: Central Park Conservancy https://www.centralparknyc.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=bethesda ### White ribs, infinite city (The Oculus) The World Trade Center Transportation Hub opened in March 2016. Santiago Calatrava designed it, and it cost about four billion dollars, the most ever spent on a train station. Its ribs form a skylight 355 feet long that opens each September 11. It connects the PATH trains to the subway and the towers of the rebuilt site. Source: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey https://www.panynj.gov Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=oculus ### Endless ascent (The Guggenheim Spiral) The Guggenheim Museum opened on October 21, 1959, on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street. Frank Lloyd Wright designed it as a single ramp spiraling up a quarter mile under a skylight. Wright died six months before it opened. In 2019 UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List with seven other Wright buildings. Source: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum https://www.guggenheim.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=guggenheim ### City of stories (Nypl Rose Reading Room) The library's Fifth Avenue building opened on May 23, 1911, designed by Carrere and Hastings. The main reading room is 78 feet wide, 297 feet long and 52 feet high, with painted skies in the ceiling. It was named for the Rose family in 1998 and reopened in 2016 after a two year restoration. The stone lions at the door were named Patience and Fortitude by Mayor La Guardia. Source: The New York Public Library https://www.nypl.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=library ### After the applause (The Apollo) The building opened in 1914 as a burlesque house for white audiences. In 1934 it reopened as the Apollo Theater and admitted Black audiences, and Amateur Night began the same year. Ella Fitzgerald won Amateur Night in 1934 at age 17. James Brown, Billie Holiday, and Aretha Franklin all played the stage, and the theater became a National Historic Landmark. Source: Apollo Theater https://www.apollotheater.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=apollo ### The boroughs in orbit (Flushing Meadows) The Unisphere was the symbol of the 1964 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens. Gilmore D. Clarke designed the stainless steel globe, 140 feet tall and 120 feet across, and United States Steel built it. The park had also hosted the 1939 World's Fair on what had been an ash dump. The Unisphere became a city landmark in 1995. Source: NYC Parks, Flushing Meadows Corona Park https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/flushing-meadows-corona-park Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=unisphere ### Suspended New York (Roosevelt Island Tram) The Roosevelt Island Tramway opened in 1976 as the first aerial tramway used for public transit in the United States. It was meant as a stopgap until the subway reached the island, which took until 1989, but riders kept it. The cabins cross the East River beside the Queensboro Bridge in about three minutes. New cabins and towers replaced the originals in 2010. Source: Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation https://rioc.ny.gov Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=tram ### The quiet city (The Cloisters) The Met Cloisters opened in 1938 in Fort Tryon Park at the north end of Manhattan. John D. Rockefeller Jr. paid for the building and the park, and he bought the New Jersey Palisades across the river to keep the view. Charles Collens designed the museum around pieces of five medieval French cloisters. It holds the Unicorn Tapestries. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Met Cloisters https://www.metmuseum.org/visit/plan-your-visit/met-cloisters Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=cloisters ### The dry dock cathedral (Brooklyn Navy Yard) The federal government bought the site on Wallabout Bay in 1801 and built warships there for 165 years. The yard launched the USS Maine, the USS Arizona and the USS Missouri, where Japan surrendered in 1945. About 70,000 people worked there at the peak of the Second World War. The Navy closed it in 1966, and it is now an industrial park with more than 500 businesses. Source: Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation https://brooklynnavyyard.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=navyyard ### The harbor observatory (Governors Island Hills) Governors Island was an Army post from 1794 and a Coast Guard base from 1966 until 1996. In 2003 the federal government sold 150 acres of it to the people of New York for one dollar. The Hills opened in 2016, designed by the Dutch firm West 8 on fill from demolished buildings. Outlook Hill rises 70 feet and looks straight at the Statue of Liberty. Source: Trust for Governors Island https://www.govisland.com Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=governors ### The crown and the lobby (The Chrysler Building) The Chrysler Building was completed in 1930 to a design by William Van Alen. Its steel spire was assembled in secret inside the tower and raised through the roof to reach 1,046 feet and claim the title of world's tallest building. It held the title for eleven months until the Empire State Building. The lobby ceiling carries a mural by Edward Trumbull, and the elevator doors are inlaid wood. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chrysler-Building Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=chrysler ### The prow (The Flatiron) The Flatiron Building was completed in 1902 on the wedge where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street. Daniel Burnham's Chicago firm designed it, and it was first called the Fuller Building. It rises 22 stories on a steel frame and is only about six feet wide at the point. The plaza in front of it was turned over to pedestrians in 2008. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/Flatiron-Building Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=flatiron ### Bottom of the ninth (The Bronx Ballpark) This room stands for Yankee Stadium. The original opened on April 18, 1923, on 161st Street, and Babe Ruth hit its first home run that day. It was the first ballpark in the country to be called a stadium. The team moved across the street to the new Yankee Stadium in 2009, and the old site is now Heritage Field, a public park. Source: New York Yankees https://www.mlb.com/yankees/ballpark Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=bleachers ### Take a number (The Appetizing Counter) This room stands for the appetizing store, a New York trade in smoked fish, cured salmon, herring, and cream cheese, the foods eaten with bagels. Kosher law kept fish and dairy apart from the meat of the delicatessen, so the two became separate shops. Joel Russ opened his store on the Lower East Side in 1914 and renamed it Russ and Daughters in 1933, the first business in the country with 'and Daughters' in its name. Barney Greengrass has sold sturgeon on the Upper West Side since 1908. Source: Russ and Daughters https://www.russanddaughters.com Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=deli ### Under the arch (Washington Square) The land was a potter's field from 1797 until 1825, and thousands are still buried under the lawn. It became a parade ground and then a park. Stanford White designed the marble arch, dedicated in 1895 to replace a wooden one built for the centennial of Washington's inauguration. In 1958 neighbors led by Shirley Hayes and Jane Jacobs won the fight to close the park to cars. Source: NYC Parks, Washington Square Park https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/washington-square-park Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=washington ### The Lullwater (Prospect Park Boathouse) The Boathouse on the Lullwater opened in 1905, designed by Helmle, Huberty and Hudswell in white terracotta, after the Library of Sannazaro in Venice. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux laid out Prospect Park itself in 1867 and called it their best work. The Boathouse was saved from demolition in the 1960s and since 2002 has housed the Audubon Center. Source: Prospect Park Alliance https://www.prospectpark.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=boathouse ### The colonnade (Hall Of Fame For Great Americans) The Hall of Fame for Great Americans is a 630 foot stone colonnade on a bluff above the Harlem River in the Bronx. Stanford White designed it, and it opened in 1901 on the University Heights campus of New York University, wrapped around his Gould Memorial Library. It holds 98 bronze busts of Americans chosen by vote. The campus became Bronx Community College in 1973. Source: Bronx Community College https://www.bcc.cuny.edu Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=halloffame ### Departures, 1962 (Twa Flight Center) Eero Saarinen designed the TWA Flight Center at Idlewild Airport, now JFK. It opened in 1962, a year after his death, with a concrete roof shaped like wings and red carpeted tubes leading to the gates. Trans World Airlines used it until the airline ended in 2001. It reopened in 2019 as the lobby of the TWA Hotel, with a 1958 Lockheed Constellation parked outside as a bar. Source: TWA Hotel https://www.twahotel.com Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=twa ### The sailors' rest (Snug Harbor) Sailors' Snug Harbor opened in 1833 on the north shore of Staten Island as a home for aged and worn out seamen, funded by the will of Robert Richard Randall. Its row of five Greek Revival temples faces the harbor; Minard Lafever designed the central building. They were among the first buildings protected under the city's landmarks law in 1965. The site is now a cultural center with the New York Chinese Scholar's Garden, which opened in 1999. Source: Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden https://snug-harbor.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=snug ### Ice under the towers (Wollman Rink) Wollman Rink opened in 1950 in the southeast corner of Central Park, paid for by a gift from Kate Wollman in memory of her family. It replaced skating on the Pond, which had drawn crowds since the park opened. The rink sits below the towers of Central Park South and has appeared in many films. Source: Central Park Conservancy https://www.centralparknyc.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=wollman ### The bend (Doyers Street) Doyers Street is a 200 foot lane in Chinatown with a sharp bend in the middle. It takes its name from Hendrik Doyer, who ran a distillery there in the 1700s. In the early 1900s the bend was known as the Bloody Angle for its tong wars. Nom Wah Tea Parlor opened on the street in 1920 and is the oldest dim sum restaurant in the city. Source: Museum of Chinese in America https://www.mocanyc.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=doyers ### The parlour floor (Strivers' Row) The developer David H. King Jr. built these four rows of houses on West 138th and 139th Streets from 1891 to 1893. Three firms designed them: James Brown Lord, Bruce Price with Clarence Luce, and McKim, Mead and White. They were built for white buyers and stood half empty until they were sold to Black New Yorkers around 1919. The doctors, musicians and lawyers who moved in gave the block its name. It became the St. Nicholas Historic District in 1967. Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/index.page Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=strivers ### Seventy floors up (Top Of The Rock) 30 Rockefeller Plaza, first the RCA Building, was completed in 1933 as the centerpiece of Rockefeller Center. Raymond Hood led the design. Its observation deck on the 70th floor opened the same year, styled after the deck of an ocean liner. It closed in 1986 and reopened in 2005. The deck faces Central Park to the north and the Empire State Building to the south. Source: Top of the Rock https://www.topoftherocknyc.com Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=rock ### The garden court (The Frick) Henry Clay Frick built his mansion on Fifth Avenue at 70th Street in 1913 and 1914, designed by Carrere and Hastings. His will left the house and its paintings to the public. John Russell Pope turned it into a museum, and the Garden Court with its fountain was built over the old carriage court. The Frick Collection opened in 1935 and reopened in 2025 after a renovation that opened the family's upstairs rooms. Source: The Frick Collection https://www.frick.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=frick ### The tall ship (South Street Seaport) South Street was the city's main port in the age of sail. Schermerhorn Row, the brick counting houses on Fulton Street, was built in 1811 and 1812. The Fulton Fish Market traded here from 1822 until it moved to the Bronx in 2005. The South Street Seaport Museum was founded in 1967 and keeps the 1885 ship Wavertree at Pier 16. Source: South Street Seaport Museum https://www.southstreetseaportmuseum.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=seaport ### The climb (Hudson Yards) Vessel opened in March 2019 as the centerpiece of Hudson Yards, built over the West Side rail yards. Thomas Heatherwick designed it: 154 flights of stairs, 2,500 steps and 80 landings in a copper colored steel frame 150 feet tall. It closed in 2021 after a series of deaths and reopened in 2024 with mesh barriers. Source: Hudson Yards https://www.hudsonyardsnewyork.com Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=vessel ### The tulips (Little Island) Little Island opened in May 2021 on the Hudson River at 13th Street, on the site of the old Pier 54, where survivors of the Titanic came ashore. Heatherwick Studio designed the park and MNLA the landscape, on 132 concrete tulips rising from the water. Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg paid for it. The amphitheater seats 687 and faces the river. Source: Little Island https://littleisland.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=littleisland ### The unfinished nave (St. John The Divine) The cornerstone was laid in 1892 on Amsterdam Avenue at 112th Street. Heins and LaFarge began it in the Romanesque style, and Ralph Adams Cram recast it as Gothic after 1911. The nave opened in 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor. At 601 feet long it is one of the largest churches in the world, and it is still unfinished. Source: The Cathedral of St. John the Divine https://www.stjohndivine.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=cathedral ### The elevated (Queensboro Plaza) Queensboro Plaza is a two level elevated station in Long Island City at the Queens end of the Queensboro Bridge. It was built under the Dual Contracts of the 1910s, when the city's two subway companies shared the tracks here. The bridge itself opened in 1909, designed by Gustav Lindenthal with Henry Hornbostel. The N, W and 7 trains meet on the platforms with Midtown across the river. Source: Metropolitan Transportation Authority https://new.mta.info Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=queensboro ### The roof (A Bushwick Rooftop) This room stands for the rooftops of Bushwick, Brooklyn. The Dutch chartered the town as Boswijck in 1661, and in the 1800s it became the city's brewery district. Since 2011 Joseph Ficalora has invited artists to paint the walls around Troutman Street and St. Nicholas Avenue as the Bushwick Collective, an open air mural gallery that changes every year. Source: Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History https://www.bklynlibrary.org/center-for-brooklyn-history Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=bushwick ### The ride (The Cyclone) The Cyclone opened on June 26, 1927, at Surf Avenue and West 10th Street. Vernon Keenan designed it and Harry C. Baker built it, a wooden coaster with an 85 foot first drop. The city saved it from demolition in the 1970s and made it a landmark in 1988. It is on the National Register of Historic Places and still runs each summer. Source: Luna Park in Coney Island https://lunaparknyc.com Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=cyclone ### Between the cables (The Brooklyn Bridge) The Brooklyn Bridge opened on May 24, 1883. John A. Roebling designed it and died of an injury at the site before work began. His son Washington Roebling took over, and when caisson disease left him bedridden, his wife Emily Roebling carried his instructions to the site for a decade. Its 1,595 foot main span was the longest in the world, and it was the first suspension bridge hung on steel wire. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/Brooklyn-Bridge Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=brooklynbridge ### The city on a table (The Queens Museum) The Panorama was built for the 1964 World's Fair at the order of Robert Moses. Raymond Lester and Associates made it: every building in the five boroughs at a scale of one inch to 100 feet, on 9,335 square feet. It was updated in 1992 and holds about 895,000 buildings. The hall around it is the New York City Building from the 1939 fair, where the United Nations General Assembly met from 1946 to 1950. Source: Queens Museum https://queensmuseum.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=panorama ### The climb to the crown (Liberty Island) The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886, a gift from the people of France. Frederic Auguste Bartholdi sculpted the copper figure, and Gustave Eiffel engineered the iron frame inside. Richard Morris Hunt designed the pedestal, which stands inside the star shaped walls of Fort Wood. The crown has 25 windows and seven rays, and visitors reach it by a spiral stair. Source: National Park Service, Statue of Liberty National Monument https://www.nps.gov/stli Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=liberty ### Under the tile vaults (Grand Central Oyster Bar) The Oyster Bar opened in 1913 with the terminal, under vaulted ceilings of tile by Rafael Guastavino. The arches outside its door form the Whispering Gallery, where a murmur into one corner carries to the opposite one. It closed in 1972 and reopened in 1974 under Jerome Brody, who rebuilt it as a seafood house. A fire in 1997 closed it again, and it reopened within a year. Source: Grand Central Oyster Bar https://www.oysterbarny.com Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=oysterbar ### Three tiers of books (The Morgan Library) Charles McKim designed the library for J. Pierpont Morgan next to his home on Madison Avenue at 36th Street, built from 1902 to 1906. The East Room holds three tiers of walnut bookcases under a painted ceiling. Morgan's son made it a public institution in 1924. Renzo Piano's expansion in 2006 joined the buildings, and the collection holds three Gutenberg Bibles. Source: The Morgan Library and Museum https://www.themorgan.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=morgan ### The great stage (Radio City Music Hall) Radio City Music Hall opened on December 27, 1932, as part of Rockefeller Center. Edward Durell Stone was its architect and Donald Deskey designed the interiors. Its proscenium arches rise like a sunrise over a stage 144 feet wide, and the house seats about 6,000. The Rockettes have danced here since it opened. The city made it a landmark in 1978 after plans to close it. Source: Radio City Music Hall https://www.msg.com/radio-city-music-hall Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=radiocity ### The cathedral of commerce (The Woolworth Building) The Woolworth Building opened in 1913 on Broadway across from City Hall Park. Cass Gilbert designed it in terracotta Gothic, 792 feet tall, the tallest building in the world until 1930. Frank Woolworth paid for it in cash. President Wilson lit its lights from the White House on opening night, and a preacher named it the Cathedral of Commerce. The lobby is vaulted in gold mosaic. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/Woolworth-Building Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=woolworth ### The canyon (Wall Street) Wall Street runs along the line of the wooden wall that closed the north side of New Amsterdam in the 1650s. Twenty four brokers signed the Buttonwood Agreement under a tree here on May 17, 1792, the start of the New York Stock Exchange. The Exchange's columned front at 11 Wall Street opened in 1903, designed by George B. Post. Across the street at Federal Hall, George Washington took the oath as first president in 1789. Source: National Park Service, Federal Hall National Memorial https://www.nps.gov/feha Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=wallstreet ### The plaza at eight (Lincoln Center) Lincoln Center was built on 16 acres of the Upper West Side cleared under urban renewal in the 1950s, the neighborhood of San Juan Hill. President Eisenhower broke ground in 1959. Philharmonic Hall opened in 1962, and the Metropolitan Opera House opened in 1966, designed by Wallace K. Harrison with two murals by Marc Chagall in its lobby. Its chandeliers rise to the ceiling before each performance. Source: Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts https://www.lincolncenter.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=lincolncenter ### The castle on the rock (Belvedere Castle) Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould designed Belvedere Castle as a folly on Vista Rock, the second highest point in Central Park, completed in 1872. It was built to be looked at from the Mall and had no use but the view. The National Weather Service has taken the city's official weather readings here since 1919. The Conservancy restored it in 1983 and again in 2019. Source: Central Park Conservancy https://www.centralparknyc.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=belvedere ### The aqueduct walk (The High Bridge) The High Bridge opened in 1848 to carry the Croton Aqueduct across the Harlem River into Manhattan, and it is the oldest standing bridge in the city. Its stone arches were built after the Roman model. A steel arch replaced the river spans in 1928 to clear shipping. The Highbridge Water Tower rose on the Manhattan side in 1872. Closed to walkers in 1970, the bridge reopened in 2015. Source: NYC Parks, Highbridge Park https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/highbridge-park Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=highbridge ### The market hall (Arthur Avenue) Arthur Avenue in the Belmont section of the Bronx has been the center of an Italian community since the early 1900s. The Arthur Avenue Retail Market opened in 1940, built by the city under Mayor La Guardia to bring pushcart vendors indoors under one roof. Butchers, cheese makers and bakers still run stalls there. The street is named for President Chester A. Arthur. Source: Bronx County Historical Society https://bronxhistoricalsociety.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=arthuravenue ### The pergola over the river (Wave Hill) Wave Hill House was built in 1843 by William Lewis Morris on a bluff above the Hudson in Riverdale, the Bronx. Theodore Roosevelt's family summered there, Mark Twain rented it from 1901 to 1903, and Arturo Toscanini lived there in the 1940s. The financier George W. Perkins assembled the estate and its gardens. His family gave it to the city in 1960, and it opened as a public garden in 1965. Source: Wave Hill https://www.wavehill.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=wavehill ### The gantries (Gantry Plaza) Gantry Plaza State Park opened in 1998 on the East River in Long Island City, Queens. Its two iron gantries, built in 1925, once lifted railcars onto barges bound for Manhattan. The Pepsi-Cola sign came from the bottling plant that stood nearby from 1936; it was moved to the park in 2009 and became a city landmark in 2016. The piers face Midtown across the water. Source: New York State Parks https://parks.ny.gov Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=gantry ### Surf at the end of the A (Rockaway Beach) Rockaway Beach runs along the Atlantic side of the Rockaway peninsula in Queens, and NYC Parks calls it the largest urban beach in the United States. Hurricane Sandy destroyed the wooden boardwalk in October 2012, and the city rebuilt it in concrete, finishing in 2017. It holds the only beaches in New York City where surfing is allowed. Source: NYC Parks https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/rockaway-beach-and-boardwalk Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=rockaway ### The gothic gate (Green-Wood Cemetery) Green-Wood Cemetery was founded in 1838 on 478 acres of hills in Brooklyn, laid out by David Bates Douglass. Richard Upjohn designed the Gothic Revival main gate at 25th Street in the 1860s, and a colony of monk parakeets now nests in its spires. Battle Hill, the highest point in Brooklyn, saw fighting in the Battle of Brooklyn in 1776, and the cemetery became a National Historic Landmark in 2006. Source: Green-Wood Cemetery https://www.green-wood.com Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=greenwood ### The refinery (Domino Park) The Havemeyer family's sugar refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront was rebuilt in brick after a fire in 1882, and at its peak it refined more sugar than any plant in the world. The refinery closed in 2004 and the city landmarked the building in 2007. Domino Park, designed by James Corner Field Operations, opened on the site in 2018 with the old syrup tanks and gantry cranes kept as relics. Source: Domino Park https://www.dominopark.com Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=domino ### The ships in the marsh (The Arthur Kill) The Arthur Kill is the tidal strait between Staten Island and New Jersey. A marine scrap yard in Rossville took in decommissioned tugboats, ferries and barges for decades, and many were left to settle in the marsh instead of being broken up. The rusting hulls are visible from the shore and from the water, and kayakers and photographers visit them. Source: Wikipedia, Staten Island boat graveyard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staten_Island_boat_graveyard Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=boatgraveyard ### The flight deck (The Intrepid) USS Intrepid, an Essex class aircraft carrier, was commissioned in 1943 and survived kamikaze attacks in the Pacific during World War II. It later served in Vietnam and recovered Mercury and Gemini space capsules. The ship opened as a museum at Pier 86 on the Hudson in 1982, and the Space Shuttle Enterprise joined it on the flight deck in 2012. Source: Intrepid Museum https://www.intrepidmuseum.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=intrepid ### Live from New York (Studio 8H) Studio 8H was built in 1933 as the largest radio studio in the world, and Arturo Toscanini conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra there from 1937 to 1954. Saturday Night Live first aired from the studio on October 11, 1975, created by Lorne Michaels, with George Carlin as the first host. The show has broadcast live from the same room ever since. Source: NBC, Saturday Night Live https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=studio8h ### The horseshoe (Carnegie Hall) Carnegie Hall opened in May 1891, paid for by Andrew Carnegie and designed by William Burnet Tuthill, with Tchaikovsky conducting on opening night. Isaac Stern led the campaign that saved it from demolition in 1960, and the city bought the building. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1962, and its main hall now carries Stern's name. Source: Carnegie Hall https://www.carnegiehall.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=carnegie ### The wedge downstairs (The Village Vanguard) Max Gordon opened the Village Vanguard in a basement at 178 Seventh Avenue South in 1935, first for poetry and folk music, then for jazz alone from the late 1950s. Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Bill Evans all recorded live albums there. Lorraine Gordon ran the club after Max died in 1989, and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra has played Monday nights since 1966. Source: The Village Vanguard https://villagevanguard.com Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=vanguard ### The court (Rucker Park) Holcombe Rucker, a Parks Department worker, started a summer basketball tournament in Harlem in 1950 to keep young players in school. The park at 155th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard was later named for him. Julius Erving, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kobe Bryant and Kevin Durant have all played on the court. Source: NYC Parks https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/holcombe-rucker-park Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=rucker ### The rec room (1520 Sedgwick Avenue) On August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc played a back to school party for his sister Cindy Campbell in the rec room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. He isolated and repeated the breaks in records so dancers could keep going, a technique that became the foundation of hip hop. The building beside the Cross Bronx Expressway is widely recognized as the birthplace of the culture. Source: Britannica, hip-hop https://www.britannica.com/art/hip-hop Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=sedgwick ### The night before the parade (Central Park West) The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade began in 1924, and the first giant balloons appeared in 1927. The night before the parade, crews inflate the balloons on the streets around the American Museum of Natural History, and the public walks past them under nets. This room interprets that inflation night, not the parade itself. Source: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade https://www.macys.com/s/parade/ Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=balloons ### Christopher Street (Sheridan Square) Police raided the Stonewall Inn at 53 Christopher Street on June 28, 1969, and patrons fought back over several nights. The first pride march followed one year later. Christopher Park across the street holds George Segal's Gay Liberation sculpture, and in 2016 the site became Stonewall National Monument, the first national monument to LGBTQ history. Source: National Park Service, Stonewall National Monument https://www.nps.gov/ston/ Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=stonewall ### The feast on Mulberry (The Feast Of San Gennaro) Immigrants from Naples first held the Feast of San Gennaro on Mulberry Street in 1926 to honor their patron saint, whose feast day falls on September 19. The festival runs eleven days each September along Mulberry Street in Little Italy. A statue of the saint is carried in procession through the street. Source: Feast of San Gennaro https://www.sangennaronyc.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=sangennaro ### The lobby of the hotel (The Chelsea Hotel) The Hotel Chelsea at 222 West 23rd Street opened in 1884 as one of the city's first cooperative apartment buildings, designed by Philip Hubert, and became a hotel in 1905. Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith lived there, and Andy Warhol filmed Chelsea Girls in its rooms. The city landmarked it in 1966, and it reopened as a hotel in 2022 after a long renovation. Source: Hotel Chelsea https://www.hotelchelsea.com Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=chelseahotel ### Eighteen miles of books (The Strand) Benjamin Bass opened the Strand in 1927 on Fourth Avenue's Book Row, where dozens of bookshops once stood. The store moved to 828 Broadway at 12th Street in 1957 and claims eighteen miles of books. The city landmarked the building in 2019, and the store is still run by the Bass family. Source: Strand Book Store https://www.strandbooks.com Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=strand ### The courtyard and the mosaic (The Dakota) The Dakota at 1 West 72nd Street was completed in 1884 for Edward Clark of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh. John Lennon lived there and was shot at its gate on December 8, 1980. Strawberry Fields, the memorial across the street in Central Park with its Imagine mosaic, was dedicated in 1985. Source: Central Park Conservancy https://www.centralparknyc.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=dakota ### The world's most famous arena (Madison Square Garden) The current Madison Square Garden, the fourth to carry the name, opened in 1968 above Penn Station on the site of the demolished original Pennsylvania Station, designed by Charles Luckman. It is home to the Knicks and the Rangers. Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fought there in March 1971, and Willis Reed limped onto its floor for game seven of the 1970 NBA Finals. Source: Madison Square Garden https://www.msg.com Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=garden ### The temple by the window (The Temple Of Dendur) The Temple of Dendur was built in Nubia around 15 BC under the Roman emperor Augustus and dedicated to Isis and two deified local brothers. Egypt gave it to the United States in 1965 in thanks for help saving monuments from the waters of the Aswan High Dam. The Met's Sackler Wing, designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, opened around it in 1978. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=dendur ### The garden on 54th (The Sculpture Garden) MoMA's first sculpture garden opened in 1939. Philip Johnson redesigned it in 1953 and named it for Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, one of the museum's three founders. Its marble court, pools and trees hold works by Picasso, Rodin, Matisse and Maillol. Source: The Museum of Modern Art https://www.moma.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=moma ### The terraces over the High Line (The Whitney) Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney founded the Whitney in 1930 after the Met declined her collection, and it opened on West 8th Street in 1931. The museum moved to Marcel Breuer's building on Madison Avenue in 1966 and to Renzo Piano's building at 99 Gansevoort Street in 2015. The Whitney Biennial, its survey of American art, dates to 1932. Source: Whitney Museum of American Art https://whitney.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=whitney ### The registry room (Ellis Island) Ellis Island opened as the federal immigration station on January 1, 1892, and Annie Moore of Ireland was the first to pass through. After a fire, the current main building by Boring and Tilton opened in 1900, and the Guastavino tile vault of the Registry Room went in during 1918. About twelve million immigrants passed through before the station closed in 1954, and the museum opened in 1990. Source: National Park Service, Ellis Island https://www.nps.gov/elis/ Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=ellis ### Mile one (The Verrazzano) The first New York City Marathon in 1970 ran loops of Central Park with 127 starters, organized by Fred Lebow and New York Road Runners. The race went through all five boroughs in 1976 and now starts at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. Runners cross the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, opened in 1964 and designed by Othmar Ammann, then the longest suspension span in the world. Source: New York Road Runners https://www.nyrr.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=marathon ### Sixth Avenue after dark (The Village Halloween Parade) Puppeteer Ralph Lee began the Village Halloween Parade in 1973 as a walk through Greenwich Village for his children and neighbors. Jeanne Fleming has directed it since 1981. It moves up Sixth Avenue from Spring Street to 16th Street with giant puppets, bands and anyone in costume. Source: Village Halloween Parade https://halloween-nyc.com Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=halloween ### The parkway on Labor Day (Grand Army Plaza) Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux laid out Eastern Parkway in the 1870s as the first road to be called a parkway. The Soldiers' and Sailors' Arch at Grand Army Plaza, designed by John H. Duncan, was dedicated in 1892. Brooklyn's West Indian American Day Carnival parade has come up the parkway on Labor Day since 1969, after earlier Caribbean carnivals in Harlem. Source: NYC Parks, Grand Army Plaza https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/grand-army-plaza Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=easternparkway ### The sun down 42nd (Manhattanhenge) Manhattanhenge is the twice yearly evening when the setting sun lines up with Manhattan's east west streets. The street grid comes from the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 and is rotated about 29 degrees from true east west, which puts the alignments in late May and mid July rather than at the equinoxes. Neil deGrasse Tyson of the Hayden Planetarium named and popularized the event. Source: American Museum of Natural History, Hayden Planetarium https://www.amnh.org/research/hayden-planetarium/manhattanhenge Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=manhattanhenge ### The Great Hall (The Met) The Met was founded in 1870 and opened its first building on this site in Central Park in 1880, designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould. Richard Morris Hunt designed the Fifth Avenue facade and the Great Hall, completed in 1902 after his death under his son Richard Howland Hunt. The fresh flowers in the hall's urns are paid for by a bequest from Lila Acheson Wallace. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=metgreathall ### The Engelhard Court (The Met) The Met's American Wing opened in 1924. The Charles Engelhard Court, a glass roofed garden court by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, opened in 1980 and was renovated in 2009. Its centerpiece is the marble facade of the Branch Bank of the United States, built on Wall Street in 1824 and moved to the museum, with a loggia by Louis Comfort Tiffany from his estate Laurelton Hall. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=metamerican ### The skylit suite (The Met) The Met hangs its European paintings in a long run of skylit galleries on the second floor above the Great Hall. The collection holds five paintings by Vermeer, along with Rembrandt, El Greco, Velazquez, Bruegel and the Impressionists. A five year project to replace the skylights finished in 2023, and the galleries reopened rehung under the new light. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=meteuropean ### Under the whale (Natural History) The Hall of Ocean Life opened at the American Museum of Natural History in 1933. The 94 foot fiberglass blue whale model was hung from the ceiling in 1969, and the hall was renovated and renamed for the Milstein family in 2003. Dioramas of sea life line the walls on two levels beneath the whale. Source: American Museum of Natural History https://www.amnh.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=oceanlife ### The sphere in the cube (The Rose Center) The Rose Center for Earth and Space opened in February 2000 on 81st Street, designed by James Stewart Polshek's firm. An 87 foot sphere holding the Hayden Planetarium floats inside a glass cube. The original Hayden Planetarium had opened on the site in 1935. Source: American Museum of Natural History https://www.amnh.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=rosecenter ### The atrium (Moma) MoMA was founded in 1929 by Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. Its 53rd Street building by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone opened in 1939. Yoshio Taniguchi's expansion opened in 2004 with a 110 foot atrium at the center, and Diller Scofidio and Renfro's expansion followed in 2019. Source: The Museum of Modern Art https://www.moma.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=momaatrium ### The stacked boxes (The New Museum) Marcia Tucker founded the New Museum in 1977 to show living artists. Its building on the Bowery, seven shifted boxes wrapped in aluminum mesh, was designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA and opened in 2007. An expansion by OMA next door opened in 2025. Source: New Museum https://www.newmuseum.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=newmuseum ### The gold room (Neue Galerie) Ronald Lauder and Serge Sabarsky founded the Neue Galerie for German and Austrian art, and it opened in 2001 in the William Starr Miller mansion at 1048 Fifth Avenue, built in 1914 by Carrere and Hastings. In 2006 Lauder bought Gustav Klimt's 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I after its restitution to Maria Altmann. Cafe Sabarsky on the ground floor serves Viennese food. Source: Neue Galerie New York https://www.neuegalerie.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=neuegalerie ### The Carnegie garden (Cooper Hewitt) The Hewitt sisters founded the museum in 1897 as part of Cooper Union, and it joined the Smithsonian in 1967. Since 1976 it has occupied Andrew Carnegie's mansion on 91st Street, built between 1899 and 1902 by Babb, Cook and Willard, with its own garden. It is the only museum in the United States devoted to historic and contemporary design. Source: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum https://www.cooperhewitt.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=cooperhewitt ### The inverted ziggurat (The Breuer) Marcel Breuer designed the granite building at 945 Madison Avenue with Hamilton Smith, and it opened in 1966 as the Whitney Museum. The Met ran it as the Met Breuer from 2016 to 2020, and the Frick showed its collection there from 2021 to 2024 while its mansion was renovated. Sotheby's bought the building in 2023. Source: Whitney Museum of American Art https://whitney.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=breuer ### The Warburg mansion (The Jewish Museum) The Jewish Museum began in 1904 with a gift of objects to the Jewish Theological Seminary. Since 1947 it has occupied the French Gothic mansion at 92nd Street and Fifth Avenue built in 1908 for Felix and Frieda Warburg, designed by C. P. H. Gilbert. Kevin Roche's expansion in 1993 extended the mansion's limestone facade, and the collection holds about 30,000 objects. Source: The Jewish Museum https://thejewishmuseum.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=jewishmuseum ### The spiral stair (The Rubin) Donald and Shelley Rubin opened the Rubin Museum in 2004 in the former Barneys New York store at 150 West 17th Street, keeping the spiral staircase Andree Putman had designed for the store. The museum showed art of the Himalayas, Tibet and India. It closed its building in October 2024 to continue as a museum without walls, lending and touring its collection. Source: Rubin Museum of Art https://rubinmuseum.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=rubin ### The shell rolls out (The Shed) The Shed opened in April 2019 at Hudson Yards, designed by Diller Scofidio and Renfro with Rockwell Group. Its outer shell, clad in translucent plastic cushions, rolls out on rails over the plaza to enclose a hall called the McCourt. The building commissions new work across performance, visual art and music. Source: The Shed https://theshed.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=theshed ### The drill hall (Park Avenue Armory) The Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue was built between 1877 and 1881 to designs by Charles W. Clinton, with interiors by Louis Comfort Tiffany, Stanford White and the Herter Brothers. Its drill hall spans 55,000 square feet under iron arches. A conservancy took over the building in 2007 and runs it as a venue for large scale art and performance. Source: Park Avenue Armory https://www.armoryonpark.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=armory ### The rotunda at Bowling Green (The Custom House) Cass Gilbert designed the Custom House at Bowling Green, built between 1902 and 1907, with Daniel Chester French's four seated figures of the continents at the entrance. The oval rotunda has a Guastavino tile dome and murals by Reginald Marsh painted in 1937. Since 1994 the building has housed the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. Source: National Museum of the American Indian https://americanindian.si.edu Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=customhouse ### The lollipop building (Museum Of Arts And Design) Aileen Osborn Webb founded the museum in 1956 as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. Its building at 2 Columbus Circle was built in 1964 by Edward Durell Stone for Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art and was nicknamed the lollipop building for its ground floor columns. Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works reclad it, and the museum opened there in 2008. Source: Museum of Arts and Design https://madmuseum.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=mad ### The terracotta court (The Hispanic Society) Archer Milton Huntington founded the Hispanic Society of America in 1904 and opened its building at Audubon Terrace on Broadway at 155th Street in 1908, designed by his cousin Charles Pratt Huntington. His wife Anna Hyatt Huntington made the bronze El Cid on the terrace. The collection holds Goya's Duchess of Alba and Sorolla's Vision of Spain murals. Source: Hispanic Society Museum and Library https://hispanicsociety.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=hispanicsociety ### The new building on 125th (The Studio Museum In Harlem) The Studio Museum in Harlem was founded in 1968 to show artists of African descent, and its artist in residence program has run since its early years. The museum's first purpose built home on West 125th Street, designed by Adjaye Associates with Cooper Robertson, opened in 2025. Its terraces step down toward the street. Source: The Studio Museum in Harlem https://www.studiomuseum.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=studiomuseum ### The courtyard on Fifth (El Museo Del Barrio) Raphael Montanez Ortiz founded El Museo del Barrio in 1969 in East Harlem to show Puerto Rican and Latino art. Since 1977 it has occupied part of the Heckscher Building at 1230 Fifth Avenue at 104th Street, and it began its Three Kings Day parade the same year. The parade brings camels and giant puppets through East Harlem each January. Source: El Museo del Barrio https://www.elmuseo.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=elmuseo ### The city's museum (Museum Of The City Of New York) The Museum of the City of New York was founded in 1923 and first shown at Gracie Mansion. Its Georgian Colonial Revival building on Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, designed by Joseph H. Freedlander, opened in 1932. The museum collects the city's own history, from Dutch settlement to the present. Source: Museum of the City of New York https://www.mcny.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=mcny ### The oldest museum in the city (New-York Historical Society) The New-York Historical Society was founded in 1804 and is the oldest museum in New York City. Its granite building on Central Park West at 77th Street, designed by York and Sawyer, opened in 1908. The collection includes John James Audubon's watercolors for The Birds of America and a large group of Tiffany lamps. Source: New York Historical https://www.nyhistory.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=nyhistorical ### The long light (Dia Chelsea) Dia Art Foundation was founded in 1974 to support ambitious long term projects by artists. Dia opened its first Chelsea exhibition building at 548 West 22nd Street in 1987, years before galleries filled the neighborhood. Its current Dia Chelsea, joined former warehouses across the street at 535 to 541 West 22nd, reopened in 2021 after a renovation by Architecture Research Office. Source: Dia Art Foundation https://www.diaart.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=diachelsea ### Thursday openings on 24th (West 24Th Street) This room interprets the gallery blocks of West Chelsea between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, a district that grew after Dia opened on West 22nd Street in 1987 and SoHo rents pushed dealers north in the 1990s. Gagosian opened its West 24th Street gallery in 1999, and Gladstone and other galleries share the block. The city designated the West Chelsea Historic District in 2008. Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/index.page Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=chelseablock ### The mission house (Fotografiska) The Church Missions House at 281 Park Avenue South was built between 1892 and 1894 to designs by Robert W. Gibson and Edward J. Neville Stent, and the city landmarked it in 1979. Fotografiska, the photography museum founded in Stockholm in 2010, opened its New York branch in the building in December 2019. Its galleries are kept dark so the prints carry the light. Source: Fotografiska https://www.fotografiska.com Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=fotografiska ### The old school (Moma Ps1) Alanna Heiss founded the Institute for Art and Urban Resources in 1971 and in 1976 opened P.S.1 in a Romanesque Revival public school built in 1892 in Long Island City. The classrooms became galleries, and James Turrell cut his skyspace Meeting into the building in 1986. It joined MoMA in 2000, and its summer Warm Up parties fill the courtyard. Source: MoMA PS1 https://www.momaps1.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=ps1 ### The stone garden (The Noguchi Museum) Isamu Noguchi designed and opened his own museum in 1985 in a converted factory building across from his Long Island City studio. The galleries and walled garden hold his stone, metal and wood sculpture, his Akari light sculptures and models for his gardens and playgrounds. He died in 1988, and the museum stays as he arranged it. Source: The Noguchi Museum https://www.noguchi.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=noguchi ### Sculpture on the river (Socrates Sculpture Park) Sculptor Mark di Suvero led a group of artists and neighbors who turned an abandoned landfill on the East River in Long Island City into Socrates Sculpture Park in 1986. It became a city park in 1998. It shows large outdoor sculpture and stays free and open every day. Source: Socrates Sculpture Park https://socratessculpturepark.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=socrates ### The Beaux-Arts Court (The Brooklyn Museum) The Brooklyn Museum traces its origins to the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library of 1823. Its Beaux Arts building by McKim, Mead and White opened in 1897, and the glass entrance pavilion by Polshek Partnership opened in 2004. The museum is known for its Egyptian collection and holds Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party. Source: Brooklyn Museum https://www.brooklynmuseum.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=brooklynmuseum ### The ironworks in Red Hook (Pioneer Works) Artist Dustin Yellin founded Pioneer Works in 2012 in a three story iron works building from 1866 on Pioneer Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The center hosts residencies, exhibitions, science programs and concerts in its open hall and garden. Admission is free. Source: Pioneer Works https://pioneerworks.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=pioneerworks ### The Concourse museum (The Bronx Museum Of The Arts) The Bronx Museum of the Arts was founded in 1971 and moved in 1982 into a former synagogue at 1040 Grand Concourse at 165th Street. Arquitectonica's 2006 expansion gave it the folded metal and glass front on the Concourse. The museum focuses on artists of the Bronx and of African, Asian and Latin American descent, and admission is free. Source: The Bronx Museum of the Arts https://www.bronxmuseum.org Enter: https://n3wyorkers.com/museum#room=bronxmuseum