Here is a moonlit Cooper Square under a starry sky looking north around 1905.
It’s not a square but a triangular park, a juncture of elevated train routes and avenues, a place where old neighborhood boundaries shifted (like the early 19th century Bowery Village) and new ones (Noho, anyone?) popped up.
It’s a carnival of history. On the right are modest Federal-style homes with dormer windows, built in the 1820s. Cooper Union’s 1858 Great Hall hosted presidential hopefuls going back to Abraham Lincoln.
A sketchier, pre-boutique hotel Cooper Square in late 1980s was also the site of a peddlers’ market of sorts, where the desperate put out anything they could find (or steal) for sale in an empty parking lot.
Tags: Bowery Cooper Square, Bowery Skid Row, Cooper Square old photo, East Village 1980s, Elevated Train Cooper Square, NYC Bowery, Peter Cooper NYC, vintage postcard Cooper Union
Ephemeral New York 
June 2, 2016 at 2:02 pm |
Your blog is absolutely phenomenal. BRAVO!!!
June 2, 2016 at 2:25 pm |
Thank you!
June 2, 2016 at 3:19 pm |
Love this picture
June 2, 2016 at 3:21 pm |
Me too. If only Cooper Square still looked like that!
June 3, 2016 at 9:10 am |
Always a delight to read! Thanx for sharing those gems with others and greetings from Berlin!
June 3, 2016 at 5:16 pm |
Thank you for reading…from across the world!
June 8, 2016 at 4:22 pm |
Great picture! I lived on East 6th street just off Cooper Square for almost 30 years. The modern Square has been devastated by the numerous architectural atrocities and stunts that have overtaken it in the last several years. I can hardly recognize it anymore…but I carry a wealth of memories of an older city…
June 9, 2016 at 12:52 am |
Thank you! I can’t figure out what’s been going on there with the little park behind Cooper Union, but it looks like it’s almost complete and the fencing and barriers will be down soon.
July 11, 2016 at 6:34 am |
[…] with the Astor Library (now The Public Theater) and the newly formed Cooper Institute, Bible House helped make Astor Place a hub of intellectual and literary […]