Disappearing New York, Captured in Vintage Photos

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/nyregion/newyorktoday/nyc-news-vintage-photos.html

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It’s Thursday. Today is Take Your Child to Work Day. Make sure the chatter around your water cooler is age-appropriate.

Weather: Sunny in the morning, with clouds and a small chance of rain in the afternoon. The high temperature will be in the low 60s.

Alternate-side parking: Suspended through Saturday for Holy Thursday (Orthodox), Good Friday (Orthodox) and Passover.

For years, the opening credits of “Saturday Night Live” included a shot of the SoHo restaurant known as El Teddy’s, which had a Statue of Liberty-like crown on its roof. Today, El Teddy’s is gone, its building replaced by one that is hardly unique.

Yet people still flock to the space, searching for what once was.

“Everybody’s looking for the Statue of Liberty crown,” Daniel Buduen, the manager of the hardware store that replaced El Teddy’s, told The Times.

Empires fall, animals evolve and buildings in New York City vanish. The how and why are complicated.

Through photography, we can see such changes in vivid detail. One trove of evidence comes from the city, which in the 1930s, 1940s and 1980s took photos of every building in New York in an effort to make tax assessments fairer and more accurate.

My colleague James Barron previously wrote about the photos from the 1930s and 1940s, and he recently discussed the ones from the 1980s. Consider them very early versions of Google Street View.

For example, the old Alexander’s store in Manhattan was replaced by the headquarters for Bloomberg L.P., more than 100 condominiums, a Home Depot and the fancy restaurant Le Cirque (which closed in 2017).

Studio 54 in Manhattan is now a theater.

The building that housed the Royal Furniture Company in the South Bronx is a homeless shelter.

Of course, smaller spots — the neighborhood dive bar, the local shoe repair shop — have disappeared, too. Our new series Endangered Spaces celebrates places that are closing (or just hanging on).

But perhaps the most famous of all building metamorphoses was Pennsylvania Station.

Completed in 1910, it had a concourse longer than the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and a grand staircase nearly as wide as a basketball court, The Times’s architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman, wrote.

It had “fancy portes cochères” and “84 huge, somber Doric columns, with 22 roosting eagles guarding the entrances,” he added. The building “was meant to be uplifting and monumental — like the Parthenon on steroids,” and “it was the architectural embodiment of New York’s vaulted ambition and open arms.”

But not for all. During its construction at the turn of the century, there was displacement of “thousands of residents from the largely African-American community in what was once known as the Tenderloin district in Manhattan,” Mr. Kimmelman noted.

Over time, the glory of Penn Station faded.

When the old station was demolished in the 1960s, it gave birth to a preservation movement “born of a new pessimism,” Mr. Kimmelman wrote. Today, Penn Station’s wider corridors and better lighting are “only reminders of what was lost.”

She was loyal to Chris Christie. Now she will go to prison for Bridgegate.

To save public housing, New York City considers a new approach: tear some down.

They arranged to meet underage teens for sex. Instead, the police were waiting.

The man with gas cans in St. Patrick’s Cathedral planned to burn it down, a prosecutor said.

Confused about congestion pricing? More details about the plan.

[Want more news from New York and around the region? Check out our full coverage.]

The mini crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.

Manhole fires: Officials are investigating the source of two blazes yesterday that led to the evacuation of three buildings in Midtown Manhattan. [New York Post]

Thirty-seven percent of asylum seekers in New York City were denied it so far in the current federal fiscal year — more than twice the pace of four years ago. [WNYC]

In Staten Island, Democrats are looking for a county leader. The borough helped flip a Republican congressional seat last year. [Staten Island Advance]

A public library branch in Long Island City has paid just $1 in rent since 1989. The landlord now wants market-rate rent but has not said how much that would be. [The City]

Explore the occult during a tarot and mental health workshop at Catland bookshop in Brooklyn. 6 p.m. [$30]

The blues-rock singer Moonlight Benjamin performs at the Lincoln Center atrium in Manhattan. 7:30 p.m. [Free]

Attend a live taping of the trivia and comedy podcast “Ask Me Another,” with special guests Taye Diggs and DeWanda Wise, at the Bell House in Brooklyn. 7:30 p.m. [$15]

See “The Laramie Project,” a play about the murder of Matthew Shepard, at the New School in Manhattan. 8 p.m. [Free with R.S.V.P.]

— Elisha Brown

Events are subject to change, so double-check before heading out. For more events, see the going-out guides from The Times’s culture pages.

Trans World Airlines can no longer get you to your destination.

Now it is the destination.

T.W.A. went out of business in 2001, when it filed for bankruptcy. Its assets, including its name and its logo, were purchased by an industry rival, American Airlines.

But nearly two decades later, T.W.A. is back as a 512-room hotel at Kennedy International Airport.

The rooms will be in two towers at the airport, in Queens, and an infinity pool on the roof of one building will be open year-round. The pool will have views of a runway and Jamaica Bay.

The pool will also be heated, and its “highly filtered water is purified every 30 minutes,” according to a statement from the hotel. (The rooftop is about a mile from the planes. Yes, in the rendering above, the aircraft appear much closer.)

And it seems that the hotel is banking on the rooftop being a big attraction: Reservations for tables there will be accepted starting May 15.

Inside the hotel, there are plenty of T.W.A. touches.

The employees’ uniforms were created by Stan Herman, the longest-serving president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. He made his first uniform for T.W.A. in 1974, according to Vanessa Friedman, The Times’s chief fashion critic.

Mr. Herman told Ms. Friedman that he was approached to design the hotel uniforms a few years ago.

“They were all excited because they wanted the operation to look very ’60s, and they’d found someone who was there,” he said.

It’s Thursday — enjoy the journey.

Dear Diary:

I headed off to my weekly ballroom dancing session. I had my dance shoes in a thin canvas bag on my shoulder.

When I got to the session and took off my coat, there was no bag. When I got home, I searched my apartment, and I even went to the basement to look through the trash and recycling.

One of the building’s custodians saw my distress — they were comfortable shoes! — and helped with the search. No luck.

I thanked my helper, resigned myself to the loss and went to bed.

The next morning, I headed out again. It was a bright, beautiful day. And there, hanging on a fence, was the bag with my shoes.

— Amabel James

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