A few weeks ago, I wrote about PS 110, an elementary school located just south of the Williamsburg Bridge… …whose roof is lined with a number of really great stone owls (a parliament of owls, to use the correct phrasing!). I notice the owls every time I cross the Williamsburg Bridge, and I mentioned in…
Next time you’re heading over the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn, either driving or on the pedestrian walkway, be sure to check out the public school on the south side. PS 110 (the Florence Nightingale school) has one of my favorite school adornments in the city… …a roof covered in owls! They’re perched everywhere, from these…
In the south-western corner on the St John The Divine property is Synod Hall, a large indoor space available for functions (movies often rent it for catering and extras holding purposes when shooting in the area). I noticed something on my last job there – the statues in the arch above the front doors can…
When I turned the corner onto West 11th Street and saw the Palazzo Chupi for the first time… …I have to admit, the first thing that came to mind was the Tower of Terror in Disney World. I know, I know, a more educated writer would be focusing on the Chupi’s neo-Mediterranean flourishes, not referencing…
In the 1930’s and 1940’s, as telephone numbers began to increase in digits, “telephone exchanges” were introduced to make it all a bit easier to remember. The first two digits of a phone number were referred by a word incorporating their related letters – for example, PEnnsylvania 6-5000 would mean to dial PE6-5000, or 736-5000….
If you go to the brownstone at 52 East 80th Street between Madison & Park… …you’ll see the decapitated limestone head of a Greco-Roman goddess in the front yard next to some trash barrels (gives you some perspective on its size). What does this sculpture have to do with New York’s incredible Ziegfeld Theater? This…
There are only four outdoor phone booths left in Manhattan – and they’re all on West End Avenue. That’s it: four. This one is at 101st Street: This is at the corner of 100th Street: This tree-shrouded booth can be found at the corner of 90th Street. Finally, this is at 66th Street. And that’s…
One of my favorite buildings in Morningside Heights is the Britannia at 527 West 110th Street. The building, built in 1909, is divided into two wings and features two rows of fantastic gargoyles below the second floor balconies: What makes this building particularly great is how low the gargoyles are to the ground. At only…
I love seeing these signs gracing lamp poles in the North Williamsburg area because, to my understanding, they were put up long before the area went through its current day gentrification. Sort of like if you put in shopping district signs, maybe a shopping district will follow? But North Williamsburg is not the only neighborhood…
I was driving down Bedford Ave around the Crown Heights area in Brooklyn when I passed this great neo-Gothic building at Sterling Place…and noticed something that made me stop and get out to take pictures. Right at the top center of the curve is this emblem: Crazy, right? Apparently, this was once an auto showroom…