Tag: history

This just in from Landmark West:

Edgar's Cafe, at 255 West 84th Street, paid homage to Edgar Allan Poe, who lived in a farmhouse on West 84th Street in the 1840's. Poe wrote The Raven in that house in 1844. The Mediterranean restaurant had a large portrait of the famous author in the dining room. It ...

By Laura Weiss Tired of sawing through onions and watching your garlic hop around the counter? All it takes is $15 for the itinerant knife grinder, Mike Palotta, to sharpen three of your very dullest chef's knives. Mike's been helping Upper West Side home cooks keep their blades in proper ...

By Maria Gorshin What if you learned that two townhouses on West 74th Street were slated for demolition? What if you knew that a 35-story hotel would soon rise in their place to loom over Broadway and tower over Fairway? No need to start a petition or book a suite ...

Editor's Note: This is the first in a monthly West Side Rag series by Marjorie Cohen. Each month, Marjorie will choose an object or document from the archives of the New-York Historical Society that references the Upper West Side and use it as a jumping off point for an article. ...

Just a little over a year go, a debate over whether to bestow landmark status upon West-Park Presbyterian Church devolved into name-calling and angry graffiti. The outside of the church on 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue was serving as an inadequate shelter for homeless people, and the congregation was holding ...

By Emily Baer The New York Historical Society recently spent $70 million trying to make the space more inviting -- but one woman who recently went there to do research is feeling snubbed. When writer and tour guide Maria Dering arrived at the coat check for the library in the ...

November 17, 2011 Weather: Showers, High of 48 Degrees.

By Marjorie Cohen Get ready for some wonderful surprises when you enter the new and vastly improved New York Historical Society on 77th Street and Central Park West. After three years and $70 million dollars worth of renovations both inside and out, this venerable institution has let in the light ...

The New York Historical Society at 77th Street and Central Park West has been renovating its facade and galleries for three years, and is about to unveil them to the public on Friday (actually at 11 a.m. on 11/11/11). The museum sent us a sneak peak, including the picture of ...

In the summer of 1982, New York photographer Daniel Weeks undertook an ambitious project -- he wanted to take a street-level portrait of New York City, block by block. So Weeks took a VW bus, mounted a camera on top, and hired a few guys to drive around and systematically ...

Twilight has just settled in, enveloping the Upper West Side in a cool embrace. Even for a Sunday evening the streets seem emptier than usual, the roar of city traffic faded to a dull white noise. A yellow crescent of a moon hangs above to complete the portrait like the ...

You’ve walked past it a million times but you might have been too busy with Upper West Side concerns like maneuvering a stroller, poop-scooping or hurrying to sunset yoga at Riverside Park to notice. It’s “Manhattan’s most mystical and intriguing building,” yet it’s familiar to hardly anyone in New York ...

Would you like to ride in a subway car with ceiling fans, no air conditioning, and windows that are wide open? You can achieve that very dream this weekend and for the rest of September, as the HBO show Boardwalk Empire puts authentic 1920's-era subway cars on the 2,3 line ...

After 27 years on 81st Street and Columbus Avenue, Maxilla & Mandible closed its doors for good on Sunday night, stuffing brown paper into the display window where skulls and fossils used to sit and slapping a tiny sign on the front saying simply "Gone Digging."

The dig, along with other historic documents, has uncovered a middle class village of over 260 people, a thriving community with a school and three churches. Records indicate that two churches were black and one was integrated.

Landmark West, the Upper West Side historic preservation group, started a very cool little project a couple of weeks ago, asking readers to send in their photos of people playing in Central Park through the ages. So far they've gotten a nice smattering of snapshots, including this one above shot in ...

The famous P&G Bar, perhaps the best-known dive bar on the Upper West Side, will shut its doors for good on August 16, the owners just announced on their Facebook page. Two years ago, P&G left its original location at the corner of West 73rd Street and Amsterdam, a space ...

By Marjorie Cohen Imagine I.M Pei designing a homeless shelter. Or Frank Lloyd Wright drawing plans for a community center. Not likely. But in the 1880's, when the women who ran the Association for the Relief of Respectable and Indigent Females, needed an architect for the charity home they were ...

After a week of uncertainty about when exactly H&H would close, city marshals seized the building on Wednesday, and the landlord slapped a sign on the front proclaiming "Store for Rent". Just like that, a neighborhood fixture since 1972 was gone. West Side Rag reader Gavan sent us photos of ...