There’s something about New York right now, with its (mostly) emptied streets and deserted sidewalks, that makes the phantom buildings of an earlier Gotham come out of hiding.
You know these phantom tenements and walkups—their faded outlines tend to reappear at construction sites, giving us a glimpse of the low-rise city of another era.
Sometimes they’re a longtime ghostly imprint overlooking the empty lot left behind when the building was torn down—like the one above on East 45th Street, with its distinctive chimney.
This one above, on Lafayette Street, is another unusual one, perhaps it’s the ghost of a Federal-style house from the first half of the 19th century, when many of these little homes were built (and still survive) in Lower Manhattan.
Here’s another stubby building at the corner of Lafayette and Bleecker, its chimney just visible against the lovely and much taller Bayard-Condict Building, constructed in 1899.
What will take the place of this low-rise walkup on York Avenue and 86th Street, old enough to have been dwarfed by century-old tenements?
This phantom building down at Hudson Yards might be gone by now. The building it left its outline on may have met the bulldozer, or a shiny new tower is obscuring it once again.
The slight slope to the top floor of this outline makes me think it was once a stylish brownstone or rowhouse, probably one in a group built in the late 19th century on a block in Midtown East.
Finally, on East 57th Street is this little guy, likely a 19th century apparition clinging to a more modern apartment building while haunting the bright busy Whole Foods at street level.
Tags: Building Outlines Manhattan, faded building outlines, Ghost buildings New York City, Ghost Tenements New York City, New York tenements, old buildings New York City, Torn Down Buildings 19th Century NYC
April 13, 2020 at 10:17 pm |
love all of these, interested in the second picture. it shows a window and doorway (maybe), each with shutters but going into the building now demolished?
April 14, 2020 at 1:27 am |
That one is a hard one to figure out. My impression is that once the building was demolished, the other building put up shutters.
April 14, 2020 at 2:05 pm
ah, right.
April 13, 2020 at 10:53 pm |
a perfect moment for ghosts. ghastly.
April 14, 2020 at 1:27 am |
Indeed
April 14, 2020 at 2:29 am |
Are the phantoms shared Walls with the buildings that are still standing? The newer buildings being built
Right around the older?
April 15, 2020 at 5:00 am |
I think most were neighbors. Then the older building was torn down, leaving its ghostly impression behind.
April 14, 2020 at 6:00 pm |
I recall some where you could even see the outlines of stairways.
Peter
April 15, 2020 at 5:00 am |
I’ve seen those…you can see the floors and stairways, as if the building was ripped at the seams.
April 20, 2020 at 2:35 pm |
I see those photos and expect the wraiths of the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment of “Fantasia” to appear from those spectral chimneys.
That portion of the movie terrified me when I was a kid.
February 15, 2021 at 3:49 am |
[…] year this site does a roundup of ghost buildings—the faded outlines of chimneys, flat or peaked roofs, windows, and staircases that were left […]