Stripping the grand Ansonia Hotel of its cornices

This website is a big fan of New York City building ornamentation: statues, grotesques, lanterns, and other eye-catching decorative elements. 

So it was quite a shock to come across this 1942 photo (published in Over Here: New York City During World War II, by Lorraine B. Diehl) showing workmen removing a cornice from the roof of the Upper West Side’s Ansonia Hotel.

But there was a reason: a World War II scrap metal drive. By the 1940s, the once-grand Beaux Arts gem on Broadway and 72nd Street had fallen into disrepair.

Apparently management did not think the building, which would eventually become luxe condos on the again-fashionable Upper West Side, would miss its cornices.

The lamps and lanterns at Con Ed headquarters

The Con Ed building’s handsome limestone 26-story tower, completed in 1929, sports some very appropriate ornamental elements.

Decorating the facade are images of candles and oil lamps—which makes sense for the former headquarters of a huge power company.

“At the base of the tower these include torches, lamps, and urns on the original canopy at the main entrance on Irving Place and torches, suns, candelabra, Jupiter heads, and lightning bolts on the frieze over the first-story shop windows,” states the Landmarks Preservation Commission report from 2009.

And of course, there’s the incredible 38-foot bronze lantern capping the top of the tower.

“This tower was planned to be dramatically lighted at night, advertising the wonders of the electricity that the company sold,” reports New York Architecture Images. “Known as the ‘Tower of Light,’ this was memorial to the company’s employees who had died in World War I.” 

The ladies who watch over The Cable Building

These sturdy, colossal women flank an entrance to this McKim, Mead, & White beauty, on Broadway and Houston Street. 

Opened in 1893, The Cable Building served as a power plant for the city’s growing cable car system—but its technology was obsolete just a decade later. 

Now, it houses offices, the Angelika Film Center, and Crate & Barrel.

The 19th century “Home for the Friendless”

 The New York Magdalene Asylum. The Midnight Mission. The Home for Little Wanderers.

Nineteenth century New Yorkers built scores of private charitable institutions, each serving a different group in need—and with a different grimly illustrious name.

One of those was the Home for the Friendless. Constructed by the American Female Guardian Society in 1847, the home’s mission was “to protect, befriend, and train to virtue and usefulness those to whom no one seemed to have thought or pity,” according to King’s Handbook of New York City, published in 1892.

Basically the home took in orphaned and homeless girls as well as boys under age 11. And between all the deadly illnesses, tough work conditions, and disasters back then, there were lots of them.

Located on 30th Street between Madison and Park Avenue South (above, from Impressions of New York), the home “received and cared for [children] until they could be placed in Christian homes.”

Right, a photo of the Home’s chapel on East 29th Street

In 1891, the home had 446 “inmates,” as they were called then. The Society moved the home to the Bronx in 1901, and in 1974, they merged with another charity in New York State.

Mystery messages on tenement buildings

New York City’s ubiquitous six-story walkups often have what I think of as mystery monikers: a name, initials, or word carved into the facade. 

But what’s the story behind them? Like these four letters above, strangely placed at the upper right of a Hell’s Kitchen tenement.

ELSW, shorthand for the name of the builder? Or a term whose meaning has been lost to the ages?

“Progress” proclaims the entrance to this walkup in Astoria. Compared to the kind of housing people lived in before this type of dumbbell tenement hit the scene, it definitely qualifies.

Women’s first names are all over city residences, like this one on St. Mark’s Place. Who was Juliette, the builder’s daughter? Or a lost love?

Frontier town—or Flatbush, Brooklyn?

This gorgeous postcard, stamped 1913, claims to be the “business section” of Flatbush.

The trolley tracks seem very Brooklyn, but otherwise, it could be any town or small city in the country circa 1900.

So what stretch of Flatbush is this? A search of the Brooklyn Eagle archives turned up a “to let” listing for a Kodaks (see store sign at left) at 202 Flatbush Avenue.

That would put this image at about Flatbush and Bergen Streets.

The humble beginnings of two fashion giants

Luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman has been at its current location on Fifth Avenue and 58th Street for over 70 years.

Which is why it’s easy to forget that like most massive New York City retailers, the company started small much farther down Fifth Avenue.

On a grimy, neon-lit stretch of 32nd Street just east of Fifth Avenue stands the second Bergdorf building, constructed in 1906. Here, Herman Bergdorf, immigrant tailor from Alsace, ran a successful ladies tailoring shop until he outgrew the space in the 1920s.

The Lerner company also got its start in midtown with a small namesake building.

In 1907, this once-huge mass market fashion chain—does the label even exist anymore?—opened on Seventh Avenue in the 30s as a plus-size retailer.  

See the green and yellow emblems flanking the top of the facade? They’re quite a majestic touch!

“The Glow of the City,” 1929

Australian-born artist Martin Lewis casts a magical glow on an otherwise gritty city scene of laundry, fire escapes, and tenements. 

That’s the Chanin Building, an Art Deco skyscraper on 42nd Street, the woman is gazing at dreamily.

It’s just one of Lewis’ many drypoint etchings that capture New York street life in the 1920s and 1930s.

Gilded figures on a West 57th Street roof

Who are these golden-robed ladies, and what are they doing playing the pipes and harp on top of this building?

First, the building: It’s the former Chickering Hall, built in 1924, once the showroom and concert hall of a piano manufacturer at 29 West 57th Street.

The 13-story structure fits right in with the rest of the street—until you look up at the roofline. These music-playing caryatids are the most majestic figures on the block.

Even more arresting are the giant reliefs of medals that disguise the water tower at the top of the building.

According to The City Review, they’re replicas of the Cross of the Legion of Honor that the piano company won in Paris in 1867.

Chickering Hall is long-gone; the building’s ground-floor tenant is now a Bolton’s.

Defunct city hospitals turned into homes

If St. Vincent’s Medical Center really does get made over into apartments, it won’t be the first time a city hospital was turned into residences.

That’s what happened to the old French Hospital, on 30th Street beween Eighth and Ninth Avenues.

Built in 1928 by the Societe Francaise de Bienfaisance, it replaced the original French Hospital on West 14th Street, then the city’s French section.

The hospital closed in the 1960s, and in 1981 became rentals. Section 8 rentals, according to the management company website.

But hey, how cool is it to live beside a door that says “clinic entrance?”

Probably not as cool as living in the former New-York Cancer Hospital, on Central Park West and 106th Street.

King’s Handbook of New York, published in 1892, says the hospital “. . . was founded in 1884, for the treatment of all sufferers from cancer, whose condition promises any hope of cure of relief.”

Those circular wards are lovely, but they had a medical purpose: Without room corners, doctors believed that there would be fewer germs hanging around making cancer patients sick.

The hospital, which eventually became Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, moved out in the 1930s. It sat vacant for decades before becoming luxury co-ops a few years ago.

Interested in a 5-bedroom home? Check out this Corcoran listing.