All the ways to get around Times Square in 1913

This is Broadway approaching Times Square in 1913. It’s hard to make out some of the store and theater signs in this postcard, but you can see the ad for the Hotel Normandie (once located on 38th Street) advertising itself as “absolutely fireproof”—a definite selling point at the time.

What strikes me most in this view is the variety of transit modes: automobiles, wagons, streetcars, horse-drawn carriages, pedestrians walking, even a bicycle or motorbike—with no traffic lights or lanes yet to facilitate getting around!

[NYPL]

Let the Brooklyn Bridge show you the way

The Brooklyn Bridge (or the East River Bridge, as this 1920 postcard charmingly calls it) is many things.

It’s a display of engineering might, a graceful web of wire over water, a symbol of New York’s unity, the embodiment of promise and possibility. Let it be a source of inspiration during this time when our city has been tested.

[MCNY F2011.33.1882]

Firefighters racing to a blaze in 1905 New York

Their engine is pulled by horses, and the long coats these smoke eaters are wearing look awfully bulky. But that’s how New York’s firefighters did it in 1905, when this postcard image was made.

Amazingly, the city’s fire department had only been professionalized since 1865. Prior to that, various volunteer engine and ladder companies put out New York’s fires, sometimes competing with one another to do so.

Find out more about the rough and tumble early days of the FDNY, when the volunteer companies also served as social and political clubs, in The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910.

The three most beautiful bridges in the world

They’re like sisters: the oldest, the Brooklyn Bridge, gets all the accolades. The Williamsburg Bridge came next; at the time it opened in 1903, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world.

This steel span has lots of charms, but it was destined to be in the Brooklyn Bridge’s shadow.

Youngest sister the Manhattan Bridge opened in 1909. It once had an approach modeled after a bridge in Paris and the colonnades on the Manhattan side modeled after St. Peter’s in Rome. These days, this workhorse bridge doesn’t get the love its sisters are used to.

1920s skyscrapers towering over Times Square

With so many skyscrapers in the city topping out with more than 70, 80, even 100 floors, the tall buildings shown in this photo of Times Square look pretty puny.

But they impressed New Yorkers at the time, and the caption on the back of the card boasts about them. “This aerial photograph of the Times Square section of New York shows many of the skyscraper office buildings located in the heart of New York,” it reads.

“Among the best known are the Times Building, the Bush Terminal Building, recently completed Loew’s State Theatre, and the famous Hotel Astor on Broadway.”

A militia marches on Battery Park in the 1920s

In this vintage postcard of lower Manhattan, some uniformed New York state militia members attract a curious crowd.

The back of the card mentions that “state militia marching in Battery Park in accordance with the ‘mobilization orders’ that were issued.”

The card is stamped 1928, and it wasn’t printed much earlier than that. The Standard Oil building, the tall structure behind the Custom House, was completed that year.

Lower Manhattan at night, seen through an arch

What a view! We’re looking through one of the arches of the Municipal Building to a Manhattan night sky.

There’s the Woolworth Building, City Hall, City Hall Park, and the Art Deco beauty known as the Transportation Building “raising [its] head in the background,” the caption of this 1940s-era postcard notes.

Too bad the postcard doesn’t offer a glimpse of the enchanting tiles on the vaulted ceiling above the Municipal Building’s arches. They are Gustavino tiles, installed before the building opened in 1914.

The chop suey tea parlor once in Times Square

Opened in 1914, the Republic Restaurant had the garish interior of a real old-school New York Chinese restaurant, based on these images on this vintage postcard.

The ad below—it comes from a 1915 guide for sailors in the U.S. Navy—sheds a little light on the menu. Chop suey and tea? Sounds like the kind of faux-authentic Cantonese cuisine New Yorkers at the time were accustomed to.

What happened to the Republic? After 50 years in the heart of Times Square, it was damaged in a fire in 1970 . . . but apparently held on at least a little longer.

A Cue magazine ad from 1973 suggests the shrimp toast and homemade egg rolls, plus the “roast pork won ton soup.”

The Third Avenue El on its way to Cooper Square

Take away the el tracks and the rickety carts, and the Bowery looking north from about Grand Street doesn’t look all that different today.

The low-rise tenement buildings on the left are still there, now occupied by lighting shops. Cooper Union looms way in the distance. Casperfelds & Cleveland, the jewelers with two signs on the left, are long gone though.

This color postcard shows the rest of the block out of view, with the Bowery Savings Bank anchoring the corner.

A view of a smaller-scale Fifth Avenue in 1900

I’m not sure when this postcard was made, but the postmark is stamped 1906; I think it has to be a bit earlier.

It’s a view of the corner of Fifth and 57th Street, then a luxe address lined with mansions and now a luxe address lined with much taller hotels and grander apartment houses (and a few surviving mansions).

The mansion on the right was owned by the very wealthy Mary Mason Jones. The building in the middle of the block is the former Savoy Hotel, later the site of the Savoy Plaza Hotel and now home to the GM Building, which houses the Apple Store and FAO Schwartz.