A rural-looking Fifth Avenue at 44th Street

Ye Olde Willow Cottage, the wood-frame building with the shutters and porch in this 1902 New-York Historical Society photo, looks like the kind of tavern you’d find in an upstate hamlet, not the center of New York City.

But there it is next to another small-town kind of shop, Tyson’s Fifth Avenue Market.

Strangely, this is Fifth Avenue and 44th Street—at the time lined with mansions and other designations of contemporary luxury yet containing pockets that “still looked almost rural,” notes New York: A Guide to the Metropolis, which published the photo.