The Knickerbocker Hotel is largely designed in the Beaux-Arts style by Marvin & Davis, with Bruce Price as consultant. Its primary frontages are on Broadway and 42nd Street. These facades are constructed of red brick with terracotta details and a prominent mansard roof. The Knickerbocker Hotel also incorporates an annex on 41st Street, built in 1894 as part of the St. Cloud Hotel, which formerly occupied the site. The 41st Street facade contains a Romanesque Revival design by Philip C. Brown. Inside, the hotel contains 300 rooms, a restaurant, a coffee shop, and a roof bar. The original interior design was devised in 1905 by Trowbridge & Livingston. There are scattered remnants of the original interior design, including an entrance that formerly led from the New York City Subway's Times Square station to the hotel's basement.
The original hotel, which served as the home of Enrico Caruso and George M. Cohan, shuttered in 1920 following a decrease in business. The building was then converted to offices, becoming known as the Knickerbocker Building. It was the home of Newsweek magazine from 1940 to 1959 during which it was called the Newsweek Building. After major renovations in 1980, it became known as 1466 Broadway and was used as garment showrooms and offices. Following another renovation in 2001, it was known as 6 Times Square. The Knickerbocker was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and was designated a New York City Landmark in 1988. It was converted back to a hotel from 2013 to 2015 under its original name. (Full article...)
Barren Island remained sparsely inhabited before the 19th century, mainly because of its relative isolation from the rest of the city. Starting in the 1850s, the island was developed as an industrial complex with fish rendering plants and other industries, and also as an ethnically diverse community of up to 1,500 residents. Between the mid-19th century and 1934, the island housed industrial plants that processed the carcasses of the city's dead horses, converting them into a variety of industrial products. This activity led to the still-extant waterbody on the island's western shore becoming nicknamed "Dead Horse Bay". A garbage incinerator, which became the subject of numerous complaints because of its odor, operated on the island from the 1890s to 1921.
The Barren Island community became known as South Flatlands during its final years. By the 1920s, most of the industrial activity had tapered off, and landfill was used to unite the island with the rest of Brooklyn. While most residents were evicted in the late 1920s for the construction of Floyd Bennett Field, some were permitted to stay until 1942, when the airfield was expanded as a wartime base of the United States Navy. No trace remains of the former island's industrial use. Since 1972, Floyd Bennett Field has been part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, managed by the National Park Service. (Full article...)
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(2006)
The Hearst Tower is a building at the southwest corner of 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, near Columbus Circle, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. It is the world headquarters of media conglomerate Hearst Communications, housing many of its publications and communications companies. The Hearst Tower consists of two sections, with a total height of 597 feet (182 m) and 46 stories. The six lowest stories form the Hearst Magazine Building (also known as the International Magazine Building), designed by Joseph Urban and George B. Post & Sons, which was completed in 1928. Above it is the Hearst Tower addition, which was completed in 2006 and designed by Norman Foster.
The building's main entrance is on Eighth Avenue. The original structure is clad with stone and contains six pylons with sculptural groups. The tower proper contains a glass and metal facade arranged in a diagrid, which doubles as its structural system. The original office space in the Hearst Magazine Building was replaced with an atrium during the Hearst Tower's construction. The tower is certified as a green building as part of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program.
The Hearst Magazine Building's developer, William Randolph Hearst, had acquired the site for a theater, in the belief that the area would become the city's next large entertainment district, but subsequently changed his plans to allow a magazine headquarters there. The original building was developed as the base for a larger tower that was postponed due to the Great Depression. A subsequent expansion proposal during the 1940s also failed. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the facade of the original building as a city landmark in 1988. Hearst Communications, having considered expanding the structure again in the 1980s, finally developed its tower during the first decade of the 21st century. (Full article...)
The main facade on 44th Street is made of red brick in Flemish bond, with terracotta decorative elements. The ground floor contains the entrance, while the upper stories are asymmetrical and topped by a pediment. Belasco and his company had their offices in the western wing of the theater. A ten-room duplex penthouse apartment occupies the top of the eastern wing and contained Belasco's collection of memorabilia. The interior features Tiffany lighting and ceiling panels, rich woodwork, and expansive murals by American artist Everett Shinn. The auditorium consists of a ground-level orchestra and two overhanging balconies, with boxes at the second balcony level.
The theater was developed by Meyer R. Bimberg and operated by David Belasco as the Stuyvesant Theatre. It opened on October 16, 1907, and was expanded in 1909 with Belasco's apartment. Belasco renamed the venue for himself in 1910. After his death in 1931, Katharine Cornell and then the wife of playwright Elmer Rice leased the space. The Shuberts bought the theater in 1948 and leased it to NBC for three years before returning it to legitimate use in 1953. Through the late 20th century, despite a decline in the quality of productions hosted at the Belasco, it continued to show Broadway plays and musicals. The theater was renovated multiple times over the years, including in the 1920s, 1970s, and 2000s. (Full article...)
The building was designed by McKim, Mead, and White and completed in 1910, enabling direct rail access to New York City from the south for the first time. Its head house and train shed were considered a masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style and one of the great architectural works of New York City. The station contained 11 platforms serving 21 tracks, in approximately the same layout as the current Penn Station. The original building was one of the first stations to include separate waiting rooms for arriving and departing passengers, and when built, these were among the city's largest public spaces.
Passenger traffic began to decline after World War II, and in the 1950s, the Pennsylvania Railroad sold the air rights to the property and shrank the railroad station. Starting in 1963, the above-ground head house and train shed were demolished, a loss that galvanized the modern historic preservation movement in the United States. Over the next six years, the below-ground concourses and waiting areas were heavily renovated, becoming the modern Penn Station, while Madison Square Garden and Pennsylvania Plaza were built above them. The sole remaining portions of the original station are the underground platforms and tracks, as well as scattered artifacts on the mezzanine level above it. (Full article...)
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Seen in 2020 from the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street
The B. Altman and Company Building was designed by Trowbridge & Livingston in the Italian Renaissance Revival style. Most of the building is eight stories tall, though the Madison Avenue end rises to thirteen stories. It contains a facade made largely of French limestone, except at the Madison Avenue end, where the ninth through thirteenth stories and most of the Madison Avenue side are faced with white brick. The facade contains a large arcade with a colonnade at its two-story base.
7 trains operate at all times between Main Street in Flushing, Queens and 34th Street–Hudson Yards in Chelsea, Manhattan. Local service, denoted by a (7) in a circular bullet, operates at all times, while express service, denoted by a <7> in a diamond-shaped bullet, runs only during rush hours and early evenings in the peak direction and during special events.
The 7 route started running in 1915 when the Flushing Line opened. Since 1927, the 7 has held largely the same route, except for a one-stop western extension from Times Square to Hudson Yards on September 13, 2015. (Full article...)
Koppelman was an early student of Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy founded in 1941 by Eli Siegel, which is based on the principle, "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves". This principle informed Koppelman's art, teaching, and his work as an Aesthetic Realism consultant. About the importance of this principle to art and life, Koppelman stated, "When Eli Siegel showed that what makes a work of art beautiful – the oneness of opposites – is the same as what every individual wants, it was one of the mightiest and kindest achievements of man's mind".
The base surrounds an internal courtyard to the west, and two towers rise from the eastern portion of the base above that level. There are several cantilevered terraces with Art Deco balustrades. The first three stories are clad in cast stone, and the remainder of the facade is made of tan and brown brick with multi-paned windows. The floor slabs are cantilevered from a central core, permitting the inclusion of enclosed solariums at the northeast and southeast corners. There are vertical piers on several parts of the facade, contrasting with the horizontal solariums. When the building opened, it operated much like a short-term hotel with housekeeping and catering services. There were originally 235 apartments with two to eleven rooms, but several apartments have been split or combined over the years.
The Chanin brothers bought the site in April 1929 and constructed the building from November 1930 to May 1931. The building officially opened on October 1, 1931, and the Chanins lost the Majestic to foreclosure two years later. The New York Majestic Corporation took over the building in 1937 and operated it for twenty years, when the Majestic became a housing cooperative. The Majestic remained an upscale development after its conversion, and it has undergone several renovations throughout its history. The building's residents have included artistic personalities as well as criminals. (Full article...)
The General Electric Building (also known as 570 Lexington Avenue) is a skyscraper at the southwestern corner of Lexington Avenue and 51st Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The building, designed by Cross & Cross and completed in 1931, was known as the RCA Victor Building during its construction. The General Electric Building is sometimes known by its address to avoid confusion with 30 Rockefeller Plaza, which was once known as the GE Building.
570 Lexington Avenue contains a 50-floor, 640-foot-tall (200 m) stylized Gothic octagonal brick tower, with elaborate Art Deco decorations of lightning bolts showing the power of electricity. The tower is set back from the round-cornered base with elaborate masonry and architectural figural sculpture. The building was designed to blend with the low Byzantine dome of the adjacent St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church on Park Avenue, with the same brick coloring and architectural terracotta decoration. The crown of the building, an example of Gothic tracery, is intended to represent electricity and radio waves. On the corner above the building's main entrance is a clock with the cursive GE logo and a pair of disembodied silver arms holding bolts of electricity.
Plans for the building were announced in 1929, and it was completed two years later. The project was originally commissioned for RCA, then a subsidiary of General Electric (GE). RCA moved to 30 Rockefeller Plaza midway through construction, and 570 Lexington Avenue was conveyed to GE as part of an agreement in which RCA and GE split their properties. GE had its headquarters at 570 Lexington Avenue between 1933 and 1974, and retained ownership until 1993, when the building was donated to Columbia University. The building was extensively renovated by Ernest de Castro of the WCA Design Group in the 1990s. It was designated a New York City landmark in 1985 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. (Full article...)
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Side view
The Brooklyn Army Terminal (BAT) is a large warehouse complex in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, New York City. The site occupies more than 95 acres (38 ha) between 58th and 63rd Streets west of Second Avenue, on Brooklyn's western shore. The complex was originally used as a United States Army Supply Terminal called the Brooklyn Army Base or Brooklyn Army Supply Base. It is now used for commercial and light industrial purposes and contains an NYC Ferry stop. The complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.
The Brooklyn Army Terminal was designed by Cass Gilbert. It contains two warehouses, three piers, several smaller administrative buildings, and rail sidings for loading cargo. When built, the warehouses were among the world's largest concrete structures. The Brooklyn Army Terminal adjoins the former Bush Terminal, which was used by the United States Navy.
The Brooklyn Army Terminal's construction was originally approved in 1918, during World War I, and was completed the following year after the conclusion of the war. The terminal was subsequently leased out and used for various purposes, including as a dock, a military prison, and a storage space for drugs and alcohol during Prohibition. During World War II, the terminal was the United States' largest military supply base. The United States Army stopped using the Brooklyn Army Terminal in 1967, and the terminal was briefly used by the United States Postal Service and the Navy. The New York City government purchased the terminal in 1981; since then, the Brooklyn Army Terminal has undergone a series of renovations to make it suitable for commercial and light industrial use. (Full article...)
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Entrance to Steeplechase Park
Steeplechase Park was a 15-acre (6.1 ha) amusement park in Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York City. Steeplechase Park was created by entrepreneur George C. Tilyou in 1897 and operated until 1964. It was the first of the three large amusement parks built on Coney Island, the other two being Luna Park (1903) and Dreamland (1904). Of the three, Steeplechase was the longest-lasting, running for 67 years.
The first rides in Steeplechase Park were standalone attractions scattered around Coney Island that Tilyou had purchased in the early 1890s. Steeplechase itself opened in 1897 to unite these formerly separate attractions, and quickly gained popularity as a family-friendly destination with exhibitionist and risque undertones. It was destroyed by fire in 1907, but was quickly rebuilt. Steeplechase remained profitable as the Tilyou family continually brought in new rides and new amusements, such as the Parachute Jump. However, by the 1960s Steeplechase Park was becoming unprofitable due to high crime, the growth of suburban getaways, and the area's general trend toward residential development.
After the park closed in 1964, developer Fred Trump purchased the land and planned to develop it for residential use, but this never occurred, and the site was used seasonally for amusement rides during the 1970s. A dispute ensued over the proposed use of the Steeplechase Park site in the 1980s and 1990s, as two developers disagreed over whether to rebuild the amusement park or build a sports complex on the site. A minor-league baseball stadium called Keyspan Park (now Maimonides Park) was built in 2001. (Full article...)
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Kirby in 1992
Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg; August 28, 1917 – February 6, 1994) was an American comic book artist, writer and editor, widely regarded as one of the medium's major innovators and one of its most prolific and influential creators. He grew up in New York City and learned to draw cartoon figures by tracing characters from comic strips and editorial cartoons. He entered the nascent comics industry in the 1930s, drawing various comics features under different pen names, including Jack Curtiss, before ultimately settling on Jack Kirby. In 1940, he and writer-editor Joe Simon created the highly successful superhero character Captain America for Timely Comics, predecessor of Marvel Comics. During the 1940s, Kirby regularly teamed with Simon, creating numerous characters for that company and for National Comics Publications, later to become DC Comics.
After serving in the European Theater in World War II, Kirby produced work for DC Comics, Harvey Comics, Hillman Periodicals and other publishers. At Crestwood Publications, he and Simon created the genre of romance comics and later founded their own short-lived comic company, Mainline Publications. Kirby was involved in Timely's 1950s iteration, Atlas Comics, which in the next decade became Marvel. There, in the 1960s, Kirby created many of the company's major characters, including the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Ant-Man, Thor, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Silver Surfer and the Black Panther, among numerous others. Kirby's titles garnered high sales and critical acclaim, but in 1970, feeling he had been treated unfairly, largely in the realm of authorship credit and creators' rights, Kirby left the company for rival DC.
At DC, Kirby created his Fourth World saga which spanned several comics titles. While these series proved commercially unsuccessful and were canceled, the Fourth World's New Gods have continued as a significant part of the DC Universe. Kirby returned to Marvel briefly in the mid-to-late 1970s, then ventured into television animation and independent comics. In his later years, Kirby, who has been called "the William Blake of comics", began receiving great recognition in the mainstream press for his career accomplishments, and in 1987 he was one of the three inaugural inductees of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame. In 2017, Kirby was posthumously named a Disney Legend for his creations not only in the field of publishing, but also because those creations formed the basis for The Walt Disney Company's financially and critically successful media franchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Full article...)
Born and raised in Manhattan to a merchant family, Irving made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. He temporarily moved to England for the family business in 1815 where he achieved fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., serialized from 1819 to 1820. He continued to publish regularly throughout his life, and he completed a five-volume biography of George Washington just eight months before his death at age 76 in Tarrytown, New York.
Conduit Avenue and Conduit Boulevard were conceived in 1921 as part of the Conduit Highway, later the Sunrise Highway, with the original highway opening in 1929. The highway was expanded in 1940 as part of the construction of the Belt Parkway. The Brooklyn section was originally supposed to host Interstate 78 within its median, but this section was ultimately not built. (Full article...)
Development began in 2005, when Chiarelli wrote the script. Principal filming occurred over a period of two months from March to May 2008. The film received mixed-to-positive reviews from critics, who praised the performances and chemistry between Bullock and Reynolds, but criticized its screenplay and what was seen as a formulaic plot structure. It was a box office success, grossing over $317 million worldwide on its $40 million budget. Bullock was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical. (Full article...)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (July 23, 1967 – February 2, 2014) was an American actor. Known for his distinctive supporting and character roles—lowlifes, eccentrics, underdogs, and misfits—he acted in many films and theatrical productions, including leading roles, from the early 1990s until his death in 2014. He was voted one of the 50 greatest actors of all time in a 2022 readers' poll by Empire magazine.
A home to the Lenape indigenous people, the island was settled by Dutch colonists in the 17th century. It was one of the 12 original counties of New York state. Staten Island was consolidated with New York City in 1898. It was formerly known as the Borough of Richmond until 1975, when its name was changed to Borough of Staten Island. Staten Island has sometimes been called "the forgotten borough" by inhabitants who feel neglected by the city government. (Full article...)
Manhattan (/mænˈhætən,mən-/) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state of New York. Located near the southern tip of the State of New York, Manhattan is based in the Eastern Time Zone and constitutes both the geographical and demographic center of the Northeast megalopolis and the urban core of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass. Over 58 million people live within 250 miles of Manhattan, which serves as New York City's economic and administrative center, cultural identifier, center of glamor, and the city's historical birthplace. Residents of the outer boroughs of New York City often refer to Manhattan as "the City". Manhattan has been described as the cultural, financial, media, and entertainment capital of the world, and hosts the United Nations headquarters. Manhattan also serves as the headquarters of the global art market, with numerous art galleries and auction houses collectively hosting half of the world's art auctions.
Named after the Dutch town of Breukelen, Brooklyn is located on the westernmost edge of Long Island and shares a border with the borough of Queens. It has several bridge and tunnel connections to the borough of Manhattan, across the East River, and is connected to Staten Island by way of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. With a land area of 70.82 square miles (183.4 km2) and a water area of 26 square miles (67 km2), Kings County is the state of New York's fourth-smallest county by land area and third-smallest by total area. (Full article...)
The Bronx is divided by the Bronx River into a hillier section in the west, and a flatter eastern section. East and west street names are divided by Jerome Avenue. The West Bronx was annexed to New York City in 1874, and the areas east of the Bronx River in 1895. Bronx County was separated from New York County in 1914. About a quarter of the Bronx's area is open space, including Woodlawn Cemetery, Van Cortlandt Park, Pelham Bay Park, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Bronx Zoo in the borough's north and center. The Thain Family Forest at the New York Botanical Garden is thousands of years old; it is New York City's largest remaining tract of the original forest that once covered the city. These open spaces are primarily on land reserved in the late 19th century as urban development progressed north and east from Manhattan. (Full article...)
U.S. bank Goldman Sachs announces that it is closing its operations in Russia, becoming the first major Wall Street bank to leave the country following the invasion of Ukraine. (Reuters)
Image 12The Sunday magazine of the New York World appealed to immigrants with this April 29, 1906 cover page celebrating their arrival at Ellis Island. (from History of New York City (1898–1945))
Image 27Anderson Avenue garbage strike. A common scene throughout New York City in 1968 during a sanitation workers strike (from History of New York City (1946–1977))
... that New York City's Equitable Building, completed just before the 1916 Zoning Resolution, was described as being "more famous for what it caused than what it is"?
... that the Hearst Tower was built nearly eight decades after its base was completed?
... that while 1271 Avenue of the Americas was being built at New York City's Rockefeller Center, Marilyn Monroe re-launched the Center's long-dormant "Sidewalk Superintendents' Club"?
... that during contract bidding for structural steel for New York City's New Lots Line, all three bids were rejected partly because the chief engineer was banking on steel prices falling?
... that the Twin Parks housing project in New York City, the site of a January 2022 fire that killed seventeen people, won architectural awards after it was constructed in the early 1970s?
... that The Little Players performed invitation-only puppet shows out of a New York City living room for over 25 years?
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