Affordable New York: Phipps Houses
The names of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick are well known in New York City and beyond for Carnegie Hall and for the Frick Collection. Though the institutions built … Continue reading
Affordable New York: Harlem River Houses
The Harlem River Houses complex, located along the Harlem River Drive between 151st and 153rd Streets, is a site full of firsts. It was the first public housing development in … Continue reading
Affordable New York: Queensbridge Houses
At the beginning of 1934, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia founded the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). It was a moment of great need in the city, as its poorer residents … Continue reading
R.D Smith, the Bowery, 1970
The Bowery, like Broadway to its west, follows an original Lenape footpath spanning the island of Manhattan from south to north. In the Colonial era the area was filled with … Continue reading
Speedway Concourse and Transverse Road, AKA the Grand Concourse
In 1874 the disparate villages of Westchester County (Morrisania, Kingsbridge, et al.) were annexed to New York City and formed what we now know as the Bronx. At the time, … Continue reading
Affordable New York: Amalgamated Housing Cooperative
In 1926, when the tenements of the Lower East Side were overflowing and there was wide recognition of the unhealthy conditions created by such dense living, New York state enacted … Continue reading
Carl Van Vechten and Modern New York
A guest post this week from the City Museum’s Curator of Architecture and Design, Donald Albrecht. Earlier this year, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Edward White’s book The Tastemaker: Carl … Continue reading
Jack Stewart and the documentation of early graffiti writing
When graffiti first began to appear on subway cars in New York City in the late 1960s, Jack Stewart (1926-2005) became one of the first, along with Jon Naar, to photograph … Continue reading
Mel Rosenthal in the South Bronx
Mel Rosenthal (born 1940) grew up in the South Bronx. When he returned to the area 20 years later, after receiving a Ph.D. in English Literature and American Studies from … Continue reading
Happy 25th Birthday to the Internet
Last week the Internet turned a quarter of a century old. On March 12, 1989, a British computer scientist named Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposed what he called an “information management” … Continue reading
Riding the Subway with Stanley Kubrick
As most New Yorkers know, the subway system is the lifeline of New York City. In 1946 Stanley Kubrick set out as a staff photographer for LOOK Magazine to capture … Continue reading
MCNY Blog: New York Stories 