Tag: history

If you like looking at old maps (and who doesn't?) you will want to check out a trove of 20,000 old maps recently released in digitized form by

For our Upper West Side history lesson this week we head to Sheep Meadow in Central Park, where actual sheep once grazed and lazed around. The above photo is from sometime between 1900 and 1906. The

By Jen Rubin In the summer of ’76 I was the kid every kid wanted to be. I spent the summer working at Radio Clinic, the business my grandfather opened forty years earlier. I would stand in the glass vestibule

Every once in a while, a renovation uncovers a sign from the Upper West Side of yesteryear. Luckily, our

The New York Presbytery voted to rent out part of the West-Park Presbyterian Church at 86th street and Amsterdam Avenue and to sell

Editor's note: Lifelong Upper West Side resident Jeannine Jones is writing her graduate thesis on how the neighborhood has changed since she

In the early 19th century, Columbus Circle was farmland, like much of the Upper West Side. AFter 1868, when the 9th avenue elevated train first

Editor's Note: Author Lyla Blake Ward is writing a book about growing up on the Upper West Side in the 30's and 40's, and wants to know if any of our readers

The Town Shop put up a new sign this week at their new store at 2270 Broadway (between 81st and 82nd). As the workers were getting ready to hoist the new letters, they peeled away the layers of the signs underneath

A fearless couple bought a brownstone at 46 West 94th street in 1960 for $18,000. Little could they have imagined that it would one day hit the market for $5 million. Peggy Mann Houlton and her husband William lived in the house for decades and became famous when they began ...

Sometimes history is so close to the surface, all you have to do is remove a few bricks to find it. Pioneer supermarket on Columbus Avenue between 73rd and 74th streets peeled away some of its facade because the city Buildings Department was checking out the store's structure. For a ...

By Marjorie Cohen The members of a local history group think that the name of the area from 96th street to 110th, from the river to the park, should be known as Bloomingdale. They want to differentiate this piece of the island from the rest of the Upper West Side, ...

By Marjorie Cohen Of all of the extraordinary material that has been collected for the New York Historical Society's new exhibit, WWII & NYC (October 5-May 27) what I found most striking is the 22-minute film

The city released a set of more than 800,000 photos from the municipal archives earlier this year in a searchable Internet database. The archive is frankly pretty incredible -- there are photos from the NYPD, the parks department, the mayor's office, and many more agencies, as well as shots taken ...

Each month we choose an object from the N-Y Historical Society Library's collection that relates to the history of the Upper West Side and use it as the focus of an article.  The topic for this month's column, the Lion Brewery, dovetails with the Society's latest exhibit, Beer Here: Brewing ...

The 69th Street Transfer Bridge is a glorious post-industrial wreck. Built in 1911 by the New York Central Railroad, it transported freight cars to and from barges on the Hudson River that traveled to New Jersey. As rail transport disappeared, the bridge was abandoned around the late 1960's. About a ...

Stories in Sterling, Four Centuries of Silver in New York, a new exhibit at the NY Historical Society opens to the public on Friday May 4th. This exhibit does what the

The NYPD sent us the above sketch of a man accused of robbing the Apple Bank at 73rd Street and Broadway. Police are looking for the public's help in catching him. First of all, if you've seen this guy, let the police know. The number's at the bottom. For the ...

By Tracy Kaler Thousands of restaurants have come and gone on the Upper West Side in the past fifty years since Big Nick's first opened its doors. But few have won their way into the hearts of locals like the little greasy spoon on Broadway and 76th Street. This past ...

West Side Rag columnist Maria Gorshin directed our attention to this delightful home movie made in 1971 by Nicholas West and posted on YouTube. The sleek cars, the vintage buses, the men in stylish hats, the ladies perched on benches in the median, the faded graffiti peace sign, the glimpse ...