The nurse watching over West 12th Street

The scaffolding is gone and the construction vehicles have departed.

Now, the gleaming new condos (collectively called Greenwich Lane and fetching multimillion dollar prices) carved out of the former St. Vincent’s Medical Center on West 12th Street and Seventh Avenue are ready for occupancy.

Yet amid the landscaped courtyard, new bronze accents, and the cool marble lobby, a few lingering bits of the old Catholic hospital remain.

Take this nurse, carved into the facade above a doorway. Paying homage to the thousands of nurses who tended to St. Vincent’s patients from its opening in 1849 to its demise in 2010, she continues to look out solemnly for passersby on the West 12th Street side.

With St. Vincent’s gone, this faded subway sign in the 14th Street IRT station is even more of a relic.

What a photo of 1970s Union Square reveals

Is this really the south side of Union Square a mere 40 years ago? Instead of Whole Foods and glass condos, it’s a crumbling stretch of discount stores.

This photo couldn’t be older than 1979; that was the year Sugar Babies debuted on Broadway. The bus ad for this musical references “Fun City,” a slogan dating back to Mayor Lindsay’s terms in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mays, a big box cheapo department store, occupied the enormous space between University Place and Broadway. Except for a couple of Woolworth stores on opposing ends of 14th Street, they didn’t have much competition.

One thing has stayed the same: the 14th Street crosstown bus continues to lumber along.

Here’s another view of Union Square in the 1970s—and the 19th century.

The shadowy corners of a city street in 1930

“Corner Shadows,” by printmaker Martin Lewis, depicts a Depression-era city of lamp light, back streets, and regular New Yorkers absorbed in their own thoughts, even in a crowd.

It’s not clear what corner of the city we’re on, but the drugstore across the way hints that it’s ordinary and nondescript, a working class neighborhood perhaps.

Look close, and you can see ads for Ex-Lax, soda, and seltzer, plus a counter occupied by a few lonely souls.

Much of Lewis’ extraordinary drypoint prints give us a similar New York noir . . . sometimes with a bit of playfulness.

Manhattan’s lonely little holdout buildings

These walkups were once the sought-after modern buildings of the block.

Now, they’re the holdouts—sometimes well-kept, often shabby reminders of an earlier New York that refuse to bow to the wrecking ball.

Without these low-rise survivors, many more city streets would be a boring canyon of uniform buildings.

The two tenement holdouts in the top photo, on West 36th Street, have had their side exteriors raked over by developers. Yet these 19th century stalwarts refuse to go.

Nestled between two limestone apartment houses is this Upper Fifth Avenue beauty, holding its own across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On Eighth Avenue at 39th Street is this blue former townhouse, now a commercial building. It makes the block resemble a gap-tooth smile.

This three-story sliver on lower Seventh Avenue in Chelsea is a bit of a mystery. It’s architecturally the same as the building next door, which houses the Rubin Museum.

Yet it’s painted the same color as the former Loehmann’s store on the other side, being renovated into Barneys once again.

Check out more holdout buildings here, and of course, the most famous of all the holdouts—the one in the middle of Macy’s.

Getting evicted in turn of the century New York

George Grantham Bain was an early news photographer who founded his own photojournalist service in 1898.

He left an incredible collection of more than 40,000 negatives, now housed in the Library of Congress and digitized.

His photos mostly span the late 19th century through the 00s and teens, and he had a special interest in New York City, chronicling news events as well as day-to-day life among the unheralded and unfamous.

These three photos appear to capture three different apartment evictions. The first is simply “Eviction.” The second is titled “East Side Eviciton.”

And the third has no title, but it’s categorized as an eviction by the Library of Congress. I wish we knew the circumstances and how these families fared.

The horsecars and gas lamps of West 42nd Street

Fabled 42nd Street has long epitomized New York’s bright lights, glamour, and energy.

But not the 42nd Street at the turn of the last century, as this circa-1900 photo, from New York Then and Now, demonstrates.

That year, the midtown block of 42nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues was a still-residential stretch of muddy Belgian blocks, a single gas lamp, and horse-pulled streetcars.

“The horsecars were run by the 42nd Street, Manhattanville and St. Nicholas Avenue Railway as a crosstown line between the Weehawken ferries at the west terminal and the Hunters Point Ferry to Long Island City at the east end,” the caption tells us.

The church on the right is the West Presbyterian Church, and the el tracks on the left won’t be torn down until the 1930s.

By 1974, almost nothing remains, and West 42nd Street looks much more familiar to contemporary eyes.

“The building with the curved front is the Grace Building, built 1970-1972 on the site of Stern Brothers Department Store, which stood here from 1913 to 1969, having previously operated on West 34th Street for 36 years,” reads the caption.

Today, 42nd Street looking toward Sixth Avenue reveals more glass office buildings, a replica of an old street lamp, plus many of the same buildings from 1974—such as the Grace Building and the Gothic-like entrance to 11 West 42nd Street.

It’s not in the photo, but I imagine Bryant Park, which would be on the left, looks very different—this park had a bad reputation until the 1980s.

No one was taking there lunch break or watching movies on the lawn then!

Madison Square Garden moves to Eighth Avenue

This 1930ish postcard shows what was then the “new” Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue and 49th Street.

It’s the third incarnation of New York’s iconic arena, and the first one located no where near Madison Square.

It moved here in 1925, and for the next four decades hosted boxing matches, circuses, rodeos, Billy Graham revivals, ice shows, and of course the Rangers and the Knicks.

Was this a good place to watch a game? It looks awfully cramped and crowded from outside.

In 1968 the Garden moved again, this time to its current home at 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue. In its place we have the office tower Worldwide Plaza, which looks strangely similar to the old MSG.

Some great old photos of the Garden and its very cool marquee can be found at Wired New York.

Street cleaning in the turn of the century city

Turn of the 20th century, that is. Before sweeper trucks came along, New York’s roads were cleaned with a contraption like this: a flimsy, horse-pulled cart with a water sprayer, squeegee, and roller at the rear.

This photo, from the New York City municipal archives collection, is undated . . . and there’s almost no description of where it was taken.

It’s just another random moment in the early 20th century city no one could imagine would be of interest 100 years down the line.

Spooky outlines of long-gone Manhattan buildings

New and old New York collide on the sides of buildings all over the city. Sometimes the faded pattern of a dormer window or chimney is visible for years, other times just a days before developers cover these remnants forever.

The building that once stood here on the corner of Greenwich and Vestry Streets in Tribeca, below, doesn’t look fancy. It was probably just a regular walk-up with six or eight apartments in what had been a neighborhood of light industry for most of the 20th century.

But it sure left a formidable impression.

I love the sloping roof on this long-gone building on Washington Place in the Meatpacking District, below. Was it a garage? Warehouse? Meat packager?

I have no idea when it went down, but it’s being obliterated forever in favor of another restaurant or boutique or luxury hotel.

On 31st Street near Fifth Avenue is the imprint of a sturdy chimney and a roof on a slight incline. A coat of paint almost covers most of it up, but a sliver remains of what was once someone’s home.

The best thing about this bulldozed building on East 29th Street? The phantom smoke coming out of the pattern of a chimney!

Sleet and snowy stoops on a West Side street

Australian-born Martin Lewis’ “Stoops in the Snow” dates to 1930—and it perfectly balances the still beauty of a New York snowfall with the miserable struggle that ensues while trying to navigate it.

This scene could depict almost any residential New York block, with its uniform brownstone steps and elevated train platform in the distance.

Luckily Lewis’ original title for the etching, “Stoops in the Snow, West 40s,” narrows down the neighborhood for us.

Lewis tends to keep the locations of his etchings vague, as he did with this piece depicting a busy workday morning somewhere in the city.