Everything has a story
The bookshops, bars, libraries and rooms of New York, and how they came to be. 304 stories on the map so far.
A storyTap a heart to read it.
Museum
Unlike every other Smithsonian museum in the country, this one charges admission. It began in 1895 when three granddaughters of Peter Cooper—Sarah, Eleanor, and Amy—approached Cooper Union with an unusual request: space for a Museum for the Arts of Decoration, modeled on the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
Museum
In 2026, the Neue Galerie announced it would merge with the Metropolitan Museum of Art by 2028 — a striking fate for a museum that opened only in 2001. It began as a dream shared by two friends: art dealer Serge Sabarsky and collector Ronald S.
Museum
In March 2025, readers of Newsweek voted the American Folk Art Museum the best art museum in the country — and admission is free. It began with a provisional charter in 1961, at first without a permanent collection or endowment.
Museum
Cornell Capa founded this place to keep dead photographers alive. After losing his brother Robert Capa and colleagues Werner Bischof, Chim, and Dan Weiner in the 1950s, he built an institution around their humanitarian documentary work — what he called Concerned Photography.
Museum
Before it became a museum, this building briefly served as the seat of the United Nations General Assembly. Constructed as New York City's pavilion for the 1939 World's Fair, it spent the 1940s and 1950s as a skating rink — except during those five years when the world's nations gathered inside it.
Museum
The museum's first major exhibit, 'Old New York', was staged not in a museum at all but in the American Fine Arts Building on 57th Street in 1926. Henry Collins Brown had founded the institution just three years earlier, originally housing it in Gracie Mansion, where space ran out almost immediately.
Venue
The New Amsterdam Theatre has two faces: a Beaux-Arts limestone front on 42nd Street and an Art Nouveau interior that the city has declared a landmark in its own right. Built between 1902 and 1903 by architects Herts & Tallant, it was among the first Broadway venues to open in Times Square.
Venue
Lincoln Center once stripped a philanthropist's name from its concert hall to sell the rights to the highest bidder. Avery Fisher had donated $10.5 million to the New York Philharmonic in 1973, earning his name on the building for four decades — until 2014, when officials announced they would remove it as part of a…
Venue
Broadway's largest theater lives on the second floor of an office building, reached by escalator. Opened in 1972 as the Uris Theatre, it was among the first venues built under the Special Theater District amendment of 1967, which encouraged developers to include theaters in commercial projects.
Venue
David Belasco built himself a ten-room duplex penthouse above his own theater, filling it with memorabilia while running his empire from the western wing below. Opened in 1907 as the Stuyvesant Theatre and designed by George Keister, the house announced itself with Tiffany lighting, ceiling panels, rich woodwork, and…
Museum
In 2005, New York's oldest museum mounted its largest thematic exhibition in 200 years on a subject it had never once addressed: slavery in New York. Founded in 1804, the institution spent two centuries looking elsewhere before finally turning toward that history.
Library
Despite its name, the Hispanic Society of America has never functioned as a learned society. Philanthropist Archer M. Huntington founded it in 1904, and by 1908 it had a home in a Beaux Arts building on Audubon Terrace in Washington Heights.
Venue
One of the very few Broadway theaters actually sitting on Broadway, this 1,763-seat house opened on Christmas Day 1924, designed by Eugene De Rosa for Benjamin S. Moss as a movie theater.
Bar
The building that ignited a civil rights movement was originally a horse stable, built in the 1840s. Four members of the Genovese crime family bought a Christopher Street restaurant in 1967 and reopened it as a gay bar — one of very few in New York City at the time.
Bookshop
Patti Smith worked here and hated it — she said the Strand 'wasn't very friendly.' Tom Verlaine, by contrast, was fond of the discount carts sitting outside. That tension feels right for a store that has quietly shaped New York literary life: family-owned, more than 230 employees, a unionized workforce for over 35…
Café
Bob Dylan played pool here, watched performances, and occasionally took the stage circa 1961. Fred Weintraub opened The Bitter End that same year at 147 Bleecker Street, starting as a coffeehouse before folk hootenannies filled its Tuesday nights with performers who would become legends — Joni Mitchell, James Taylor…
Café
The Gaslight Cafe began as a basket house, where unpaid performers passed a literal basket through the crowd and hoped for coins. John Mitchell opened it in Greenwich Village in 1958, first as a stage for beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, then as a folk-music club.
Bar
The space was a plumbing school before it became one of the most important venues for loud music in the entire world — Kerrang.'s words, not hyperbole. Arty Shepherd, Justin Scurti, and George Souleidis opened Saint Vitus in Greenpoint in April 2011, hiring Matthew Maddy to design a heavy metal atmosphere for what…
Bookshop
Claude Lévi-Strauss picked the building. In 1952, the structural anthropologist persuaded the French government to purchase the landmark Payne Whitney House on Fifth Avenue, a Stanford White Italian Renaissance palazzo that now shelters something improbable: the largest collection of French-language books and…
Café
Caffe Reggio owns a bench from a Medici palazzo, which sets the tone for everything else here. When Domenico Parisi opened the coffeehouse on Macdougal Street in 1927, he brought with him a 1902 espresso machine that still stands against the back wall — and, by most accounts, introduced cappuccino to America in the…
Bar
A piano store once stood here, and Pianos kept the name and sign as a kind of affectionate fossil — a reminder that such a shop could once survive on the Lower East Side. The two-story bar, restaurant, and live music venue at 158 Ludlow Street follows the same logic as Arlene's Grocery: honor what was there.
Bookshop
The worn carpeting was only occasionally visible beneath waist-high piles of paperbacks. Community Bookstore opened in Brooklyn Heights in 1974, then moved to Cobble Hill in 1985 after rent spiked, bringing its mountains of donated books along.
Bar
Bartenders in monastic robes will shush you if you speak above a whisper. That is the deal at Burp Castle, a monastery-themed beer bar in the East Village where Gregorian chants play and Belgian taps rotate through offerings like La Chouffe alongside bottles of Chimay and selections from Germany and Britain.
Library
The New York Public Library holds nearly 53 million items — more than most countries archive — yet it is technically a private, nonprofit corporation, not a government institution.
Venue
Before the velvet rope and the disco ball, this address housed a bankrupt opera house, a Depression-era nightclub called Casino de Paree, a federal music project, and a CBS television studio.
Venue
The plot Radio City Music Hall stands on was meant for a Metropolitan Opera house — a plan scrapped in 1929. What opened instead, on December 27, 1932, became something grander in popular imagination: a 5,960-seat Art Deco monument designed by Edward Durell Stone and Donald Deskey, nicknamed The Showplace of the…
Library
Belle da Costa Greene ran this library for more than four decades — a remarkable tenure for the first librarian of what began as one banker's private obsession. J. P.
Venue
When the Apollo opened in 1913, Black performers were not allowed inside — it was a whites-only burlesque house developed by Jules Hurtig and Harry Seamon. That changed in 1934, when Sydney Cohen acquired the theater and opened its stage to Black performers.
Venue
More than 7.5 million people passed through this circular sandstone fort before Ellis Island ever opened. Built between 1808 and 1811 on an artificial island off Lower Manhattan, it was designed by John McComb Jr. and garrisoned in 1812, yet never fired a shot in war.
Library
The Brooklyn Public Library began not as a civic institution but as a private club. In 1852, prominent citizens established the Brooklyn Athenaeum and Reading Room specifically for the instruction of young men — a subscription library where the rising mercantile class could continue whatever formal education they had…
Venue
Alice Tully, a New York performer turned philanthropist, essentially built this hall with her own donations — and then had her name put on it. Pietro Belluschi's Brutalist structure opened in 1969 on the Upper West Side, seating 1,086 inside a building that once turned its back on Broadway.
Venue
The Imperial Theatre's main entrance is a lie of sorts: that elegant three-story white terracotta facade on 45th Street is merely a narrow lobby, while the actual house sits almost entirely around the corner on 46th Street, where a buff-brick wall once welcomed carriages. Herbert J.
Venue
The theater at 256 West 47th Street has worn three names, but its Spanish Revival bones — buff brick, terracotta, Palladian windows, murals above the box seats — have never changed. Herbert J. Krapp designed it for Irwin Chanin, and it opened as the Mansfield on February 15, 1926.
Venue
The Beacon Theatre's plain brick facade gives almost nothing away — inside, Greek columns, Roman arches, Rococo ornament, and a Wurlitzer organ in the orchestra pit announce something closer to a palace. Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel developed it, Walter W.
Library
An Afro-Puerto Rican scholar's personal collection became the foundation of the world's foremost archive of Black life. The Schomburg Center, named for Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, sits on Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem and holds five divisions spanning art, manuscripts, rare books, photographs, and recorded sound.
Venue
A vaudevillian built one of Broadway's most architecturally ambitious theaters. Constructed for Martin Beck in 1924 and designed by G. Albert Lansburgh in a Moorish and Byzantine style, the building was conceived as a unified whole — facade and stage house treated as a single composition, with cast-stone columns, red…
Venue
The Booth shares its stage house with the Shubert Theatre next door — an unusual architectural intimacy hiding behind one of Broadway's most elegant facades. Henry Beaumont Herts designed the Italian Renaissance building in 1913 for the Shubert brothers, finishing the brick and terracotta exterior with sgraffito…
Venue
To play the Palace was vaudeville's highest ambition — every performer measured their career against this one stage. Funded by Martin Beck and designed by Milwaukee architects Kirchhoff & Rose, it opened in 1913 at the north end of Times Square.
Library
In a single fiscal year, Queens Public Library loaned 13.5 million items — making it one of the largest library systems in the world by circulation. It began in 1858 as a subscription library, with the first branch in Flushing, and the original Central Library in Jamaica didn't open until 1930, eventually expanded…
Venue
The Ambassador Theatre sits on a plot just 100 by 100 feet, so architect Herbert J. Krapp angled the entire building on a diagonal axis to squeeze in 1,125 seats. The Shubert brothers built it after World War I as part of a theatrical complex around 48th and 49th Streets, opening it on February 11, 1921.
Venue
The rear of the orchestra sits a full story above ground, the result of stadium seating so steep it reshaped how audiences experienced a Broadway house. Herbert J. Krapp designed the Majestic in a Spanish style for developer Irwin S.
Venue
The Shubert Theatre was built as a memorial — Lee and J. J. Shubert named it for their brother Sam, who died in an accident before it opened. Henry Beaumont Herts designed it in the Italian Renaissance style, and it debuted in 1913 with a brick-and-terracotta facade, sgraffito stucco decorations, and mythological…
Venue
A Broadway theatre rose from the bones of a horse exchange. The American Horse Exchange, completed in 1896, became the Winter Garden Theatre when it opened in 1911, designed by William Albert Swasey. The real transformation came in 1922, when Herbert J.
Venue
The oldest continuously operating legitimate theater in New York City has an apartment built into it. Impresario Daniel Frohman lived above the lobby when the Beaux-Arts house opened in 1903, watching his stage through a peephole — a detail that gives the whole building its particular character.
Venue
The David H. Koch Theater was built not for ballet but for a World's Fair. New York State funded it as part of its cultural contribution to the 1964–1965 World's Fair, and Philip Johnson and John Burgee designed it. It opened on April 23, 1964, and the New York City Ballet has called it home ever since.
Venue
Birdland was named not for birds but for a man: Charlie 'Yardbird' Parker, whose nickname the founders borrowed to capitalize on his profile. Irving Levy, Morris Levy, Oscar Goodstein, and six other partners bought the Broadway basement space in 1949 from a man known as Joe the Wop.
Venue
The name Alvin was never a person — it was a merger of two men: Alex Aarons and Vinton Freedley, who built this Broadway house in 1927 and stitched their first names together above the door. Herbert J.
Venue
The Broadhurst Theatre is named for a man who never owned it. British-American producer George Broadhurst simply leased the space before it opened in 1917, and the name stuck. Herbert J.
Venue
The Eugene O'Neill Theatre opened in 1925 not as a standalone house but as part of a hotel and theater complex named after 19th-century tragedian Edwin Forrest. Herbert J.
Venue
The rear of the orchestra sits a full story above ground — a consequence of the steep stadium seating Herbert J. Krapp engineered when he designed this neo-Renaissance house for Irwin Chanin in 1925.
Venue
Frank Costello, one of New York's most powerful mob bosses, was the silent partner behind the Copacabana when it opened on November 10, 1940, at 10 East 60th Street. His name never appeared on the lease — Monte Proser's did.
Venue
A theater named after a living actress is unusual enough, but the Ethel Barrymore came with a deal attached: the Shubert brothers built it after Barrymore agreed to let them manage her career. Herbert J.
Venue
A Shriners' Moorish temple — complete with terracotta arabesques and a sandstone facade on West 55th Street — became one of New York's essential performing arts homes. Developed between 1922 and 1924 as a Masonic meeting house, it passed into city government hands and was repurposed for the stage.
Venue
A Broadway theater built into a basement might seem like a compromise, but Circle in the Square made the underground its signature. Co-founded around 1950 by Theodore Mann and José Quintero, it began at 5 Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village — a theater in the round that Women's Wear Daily would call the "center of…
Venue
The proscenium arch here is fitted with art glass that can illuminate during performances — a quietly theatrical touch embedded in a house built in 1912. Architect Thomas W. Lamb designed it for impresario John Cort, giving the 48th Street facade a colonnade and the lobby marble paneling and a coved ceiling.
Venue
One building quietly contains the bones of two others. When the current Lyric Theatre opened in 1998, it was built almost entirely from scratch on West 43rd Street — yet government regulations required preserving enough of what stood before that two prior theaters live inside it: the Apollo, built in 1920, and the old…
Venue
When the Stanley Theater opened on March 24, 1928, its 4,300 seats made it the second largest theater on the entire East Coast, behind only Radio City Music Hall. That first night, Mayor Frank Hague sat in the audience as actress Norma Talmadge greeted them from the screen, while organist James F.
Venue
Webster Hall has been recognized as the first modern nightclub — a distinction that anchors everything else about it. Built in 1886 as a plain "hall for hire" on East 11th Street, it spent over a century shapeshifting through social events of every kind.
Venue
A movie palace designed to resemble a Spanish and Mexican Baroque fantasy now holds Sunday services. John Eberson built the Loew's Valencia Theatre at 165-11 Jamaica Avenue in Queens, opening it on January 11, 1929, as one of five Loew's Wonder Theatres in New York City.
Venue
A Netflix comedy special was filmed in this 850-seat university theater on LaGuardia Place, which tells you something about how NYU Skirball operates — serious but unpredictable.
Venue
The waiters at Smalls Paradise roller-skated orders to your table, then broke into the Charleston between deliveries. Ed Smalls opened this basement club on Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Venue
A white canvas tent erected in public pleasure grounds in 1823 became the first serious rival to New York's prestigious Park Theatre. Hippolite Barrière pitched it in Chatham Gardens, charged 25¢ admission, and ran drama through the summer — perhaps the first summer theatre in the United States.
Venue
A 65-seat room in TriBeCa has earned a Pulitzer Prize, multiple Obie and Drama Desk Awards, and a reputation the New York Times distilled into six words: a safer home for dangerous plays.
Venue
The only sign was the words 'The Stone' in small gold lettering on a door, visible only after a metal security gate rolled up a few hours before each show. John Zorn founded the not-for-profit experimental music space in April 2005, naming it for Irving Stone, an inveterate concertgoer in the New York City music…
Venue
Most Broadway theaters sit above ground — this one burrows beneath a skyscraper. The Stephen Sondheim Theatre, at 124 West 43rd Street, is mostly underground, tucked below the Bank of America Tower and holding 1,055 seats.
Venue
Before it was a Broadway house, the Walter Kerr spent decades as a radio and television studio — CBS, NBC, then ABC cycled through it until 1965, leaving it abandoned for years. Herbert J. Krapp designed it for the Shubert brothers in 1921, and it opened as the Ritz Theatre with Mary Stuart.
Venue
This theater has had six names — and one of them honored a bank that no longer exists. Opened in 1968 as the Felt Forum, named for then-company president Irving Mitchell Felt, the venue tucked beneath Madison Square Garden's main arena has since cycled through corporate christenings that read like a timeline of…
Venue
The six-story Selwyn Building, which once served as the entrance to this theater, collapsed at the end of 1997. Brothers Edgar and Archibald Selwyn developed the house in 1918, naming it after themselves; George Keister designed it in Italian Renaissance style with a brick-and-terracotta facade.
Venue
The Plymouth Theatre opened in 1917 under a name it kept for 87 years, until the Shubert Organization renamed it for Gerald Schoenfeld, the organization's longtime president. Herbert J.
Venue
The John Golden Theatre is clad in golden brick, terracotta, and stone in a Spanish style — an unlikely choice for a Broadway house on West 45th Street. Herbert J. Krapp designed it in 1927 for real-estate developer Irwin S.
Venue
The Longacre Theatre carries the ghost of a name the city erased: it is named for Longacre Square, what Times Square was called before it became Times Square. Harry Frazee acquired the site in 1911 and built it to house musicals, though it opened in 1913 with a play called Are You a Crook? Henry B.
Venue
The Hudson Theatre has two official addresses — 139–141 West 44th Street for its entrance, and 45th Street for the auditorium hidden behind it — a split identity that hints at how much the building holds. Built between 1902 and 1903, its exterior came from J. B.
Library
The New York Public Library's Main Branch stands on the bones of a reservoir. The Croton Reservoir once occupied this Fifth Avenue site before Carrère and Hastings raised a Beaux-Arts marble facade in its place, opening the doors on May 23, 1911.
Venue
The room where Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mae West all performed began its life as the Palais Royale in 1900, then housed the Cotton Club after it left Harlem.
Venue
Stage 42 has exactly 499 seats — one short of the threshold that would make it a Broadway house. The Shubert Organization built it in 2002 as part of a residential tower on West 42nd Street, and it was the first Off-Broadway theatre they ever owned, and the first they built from the ground up.
Venue
A savings bank built to outlast its money now holds stories instead. The Union Square Savings Bank building, designed by Henry Bacon and completed between 1905 and 1907, began its life far more humbly — the institution was founded in 1848 as the Institution for the Savings of Merchants' Clerks.
Venue
A Russian ballet school shares a campus with a public college in Brooklyn — and that unlikely pairing has shaped Brighton Ballet Theater since 1987. Situated at Kingsborough Community College in the Manhattan Beach neighborhood, the nonprofit enrolls three hundred students and reaches five hundred more through New…
Library
Squeezed between the Metropolitan Opera House and the Vivian Beaumont Theater, this library holds one of the world's largest collections of materials on the performing arts.
Venue
The nation's longest-running passion play is performed here every year, on the same stage a German Catholic parish built in 1931 as an extension of Holy Family Church. The driving force was Msgr. Joseph Grieff, reputed to have a taste for theater.
Venue
The theater where the Charleston became an international dance craze opened in 1905 as the Colonial Music Hall, built by Frederic Thompson and Elmer "Skip" Dundy and designed by George Keister with 1,293 seats in the San Juan Hill neighborhood. Thompson and Dundy sold it within weeks.
Venue
One of only five Loew's Wonder Theatres ever built, Kings Theatre opened on September 7, 1929, as a movie palace designed by Rapp and Rapp — its interior decor supervised alongside Harold Rambusch, its stage anchored by a Wonder Morton pipe organ from the Robert Morton Organ Company.
Venue
A cast-iron bank that outlasted its own failure became one of Off-Broadway's most enduring addresses. Built for the Atlantic Savings Bank between 1873 and 1874, the Henry Engelbert–designed Italianate building on Bowery at Bond Street collapsed financially by 1879, then served German immigrants through the Exchange…
Venue
MTV made its debut at The Ritz. Jerry Brandt founded the club in 1980 inside the historic Webster Hall ballroom on East 11th Street, and he installed a 30-foot video screen and projector that cost $120,000 — one of the first clubs anywhere to weave screens into the experience itself.
Venue
Off-Broadway's first corporate sponsorship opened its marquee on May 22, 2006, with Wendy Kaufman — the Snapple Lady — flipping on the lights. Actress and producer Catherine Russell built the complex in partnership with Snapple, a deal that was genuinely new territory for the form.
Venue
In 1998, an entire Broadway theater was picked up and moved 168 feet west down 42nd Street so a movie megaplex could use it as a lobby entrance. The building, originally the Eltinge Theatre, opened in 1912 and was named for Julian Eltinge, a female impersonator with whom impresario A. H. Woods was closely associated.
Venue
The auditorium is gone, but the facade remains — now the face of Madame Tussauds. Built in 1914 inside the Candler Building, this 1,200-seat Thomas W. Lamb design was commissioned by Coca-Cola's Asa Griggs Candler and leased to George M. Cohan and Sam H. Harris.
Venue
A movie palace designed by Thomas W. Lamb in 1927 became, across seven decades, almost every kind of place New York nightlife ever needed. William Fox opened it as a deluxe cinema; rock crowds filled it after the Fillmore East closed in 1971.
Venue
A Palme d'Or-winning director once ran the projector here as a high school kid in the 1980s. The Wellmont opened in 1922 for live entertainment, switched to movies in 1929, and Sean Baker threaded film through its booth somewhere in between those eras and this one.
Venue
A room that holds only 250 people has made Billboard Magazine's top-ten venue lists — and somehow that smallness is the whole point. The Mercury Lounge opened on the Lower East Side in 1993, founded by Michael Swier, Michael Winsch, and Brian Swier, who built it on acoustics and no-frills rock-and-roll conviction.
Venue
Oscar Hammerstein I built this West 42nd Street theater in 1900, and within a century it had cycled through Broadway ambitions, David Belasco's ornate interior touches, burlesque under the Minsky name, and decades of decline. The 1995 renovation kept the original facade while honoring Belasco's 1902 details inside.
Venue
The Casino Theatre was the first in New York to be lit entirely by electricity — a Moorish Revival landmark rising fifteen blocks north of where Broadway's theatre district then centered itself.
Venue
Amy Winehouse and Adele both made their U.S. headlining debuts on this stage. Joe's Pub opened October 16, 1998, with an inaugural concert by Carl Hancock Rux, tucked into the side door of the Astor Library Building on Lafayette Street — an iron-fenced portal apart from the Public Theater's grander revolving entrance.
Venue
A financier bought a theater as an anniversary present. In 1955, Louis Schweitzer acquired what was then called the Theatre de Lys and gave it to his wife, actress-producer Lucille Lortel. The building had started as a 590-seat movie house in 1926, then reopened in 1953 as an off-Broadway stage.
Library
A Carnegie-funded library designed to look like a Florentine palazzo sits on a Harlem street corner, its rusticated stone facade and bronze lamps still intact after more than a century.
Library
The building that houses Brooklyn's memory was constructed by the same man who built Madison Square Garden. David H. King Jr. raised this Romanesque Revival landmark at Pierrepont and Clinton Streets between 1878 and 1881, from a design by George B. Post.
Library
The first Carnegie library in Manhattan opened here in December 1902, tucked into the middle of a block on East 79th Street rather than commanding a corner. James Brown Lord designed the building in the Italian Renaissance style, its three-story limestone facade earning it a reputation as one of New York's most…
Venue
Since 1913, water from the miraculous spring at Lourdes has been sent directly to this church on Morningside Drive — a living link between upper Manhattan and one of Catholicism's holiest sites.
Venue
The Gramercy once barred audiences from entering near the end of a film — a policy eccentric enough to define it as a true art house. Built in 1937 and designed by Charles A.
Venue
A sculpture of Saint George fighting a fire-breathing dragon guards the entrance. Designed by Rapp and Rapp, the Loew's Jersey opened on September 28, 1929, as one of five Loew's Wonder Theatres in the New York City area — a movie palace built for spectacle, with elaborate terracotta facades, a mechanical Seth Thomas…
Venue
Merkin Hall seats 449 people, yet draws 70,000 concertgoers a year — a number that speaks to how relentlessly it programs. It opened in 1978 inside the Abraham Goodman House, part of what was then the Hebrew Art School, and quickly separated itself from the Lincoln Center world nearby without ever affiliating with it.
Library
The limestone was so deeply rusticated it looked carved from a single Harlem block. McKim, Mead & White designed this Neo Italian Renaissance building for Andrew Carnegie's citywide library initiative — one of 65 branches he funded, 11 of them by the same firm.
Venue
It opened in the basement of Studio 54, which means the room that launched a thousand disco legends now hosts Broadway's most intimate nights. 54 Below opened on June 3, 2012, shaped by a team that included set designer John Lee Beatty and lighting designer Ken Billington.
Venue
A farm silo built in 1817 became a brewery, then a tobacco warehouse, then a box factory — before Edna St. Vincent Millay and her collaborators decided it should be a theater. They converted the Commerce Street structure and opened the Cherry Lane Playhouse in 1923.
Venue
Two theaters once shared a single limestone face on 42nd Street, their symmetrical colonnade making them appear as one grand building. Designed by Eugene De Rosa and developed by brothers Edgar and Archibald Selwyn, the Times Square Theater opened in 1920 alongside the now-demolished Apollo Theatre next door.
Venue
The building that houses Playwrights Horizons once held a burlesque house, then became the off-Broadway Maidman Playhouse, then a different kind of stage altogether.
Venue
A mechanical Seth Thomas clock and a sculpture of Saint George fighting a fire-breathing dragon once greeted anyone walking up the Grand Concourse. John Eberson designed the Paradise as a movie palace, and it opened on September 7, 1929, as one of five Loew's Wonder Theatres in the New York City area.
Venue
Before the Ramones ever played here, a future pope stood on this stage. The Polish Army Veterans of America purchased the building in 1948 and made it a community center; in 1976, the man who would become Pope John Paul II was among the distinguished Poles who appeared there.
Venue
A Pulitzer Prize winner, a Tony-winning musical, and an Obie-winning show all began in a space that started as a 1,700-square-foot former storeroom. Barbara Zinn Krieger founded the Vineyard Theatre in 1981 inside the Phipps Plaza West apartment complex, with the explicit goal of giving daring artists a safe space to…
Venue
Al Pacino was a newcomer when he took the stage here on January 17, 1968, opening Israel Horovitz's The Indian Wants the Bronx and announcing what the Astor Place Theatre would become: a room where unknown work turns into something necessary.
Venue
Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana once decorated the walls of this theater, which began life as the Theaterama at the 1964 New York World's Fair. Audiences stood — no seats — watching a travelog of New York State projected across screens lining the interior.
Library
The Newark Public Library is home to Philip Roth's collections — a quiet, potent fact for a library that began as something far more exclusive. Its roots trace to the Newark Library Association, a private organization chartered in 1847.
Venue
A German Baptist congregation built this Romanesque Revival church in 1890, then nightclubs moved in after the 1960s, and now actors perform where worshippers once prayed and dancers once sweated. Henry Franklin Kilburn designed the building at 407 West 43rd Street in Hell's Kitchen.
Venue
The Atlantic Garden was built on the bones of New York's old cattle market, where the Bull's Head Tavern once served as headquarters for the city's livestock trade.
Library
Some of the original bookshelves are still there. Built in 1907 for $93,481, Macon Library was the eleventh Carnegie library in Brooklyn, designed by Richard A. Walker in Classical Revival style using red brick, limestone trim, and a slate roof.
Venue
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis joined the board of the organization that built this place, elected in 1977 to help push pornographic businesses off 42nd Street. Fred Papert had founded the 42nd Street Development Corporation a year earlier with exactly that mission.
Library
A private donor shaped what Hoboken reads. The library was established in 1889, then expanded through the philanthropy of Martha Bayard Stevens — a detail the building still wears quietly.
Library
A department store became one of New York's most-used libraries. The branch moved into the former Arnold Constable & Company building in 1981, already carrying the circulating collection that the NYPL's grand Main Branch across the street had held for decades.
Venue
This neo-Georgian building was erected at the height of Tammany Hall's power, when the political machine counted a U.S. senator, a governor, and a mayor among its members. Built in 1928–1929 and designed by Thompson, Holmes & Converse and Charles B. Meyers, it stands as Tammany's oldest surviving headquarters.
Venue
Built in 1889 to give New York City a dedicated symphony hall, the Lenox Lyceum opened on January 2, 1890, and almost immediately became something more complicated than its founders intended. Its ballroom and theatre made it useful for dances, banquets, and exhibitions alongside orchestral concerts.
Venue
Murals by Arthur Crisp still line the walls of a space that once held 598 seats facing a movie screen. Thomas W. Lamb designed the Embassy Theatre, which opened in 1925 on the ground floor of a building that served as headquarters for the Actors' Equity Association — an unlikely pairing of Hollywood glamour and labor…
Venue
The Harlem Alhambra was designed with a reproduction of the Brunheil Rathskeller in Leipzig built into its basement — an unlikely flourish for a Harlem vaudeville house. Construction began in 1902 under the Harlem Auditorium Amusement Company, but litigation stalled the project before it opened. Percy G.
Restaurant
Agern served Scandinavian food in what was once the men's smoking lounge of Grand Central Terminal. It opened in 2016, tucking fine Nordic cooking into a room built for an entirely different kind of ritual.
Venue
The building that held Area was originally built in 1866 as stables for American Express. By 1983 it was something else entirely: a themed nightclub on Hudson Street where 5,000 invitations arrived in capsules for opening night, and where the entire decor reinvented itself every six weeks around themes like…
Venue
Bungalow 8 never officially closed. When Amy Sacco shut the doors of her Chelsea nightclub in 2009, she cited renovations — the same excuse she'd used every year — and simply never reopened. That ambiguity was always part of the atmosphere.
Library
The oldest public library in New Jersey was not handed down from above — citizens of Paterson voted it into existence on April 13, 1885. Before that, libraries existed in the city as early as 1828, but most required subscription fees to enter.
Venue
The speaker cabinets at The Shelter were larger than the dancers moving beneath them. That 37,000-watt sound system, installed by David Soto, set the tone for what the club became after Paradise Garage closed in 1991: a sanctuary where race and sexual orientation did not matter.
Venue
The train tracks are still there, sunken into the floor, a ghost of the freight terminal this building once was. Tunnel took its name from the shape of that main room, rails and all, when it opened in 1986 at 220 Twelfth Avenue in Chelsea.
Venue
Palisades was shut down mid-festival — during Northside 2016 — in what was later described as the final raid in a series of M.A.R.C.H. multi-agency inspections targeting the venue.
Library
A group of German immigrants founded this society in 1866 as the Deutscher Uhrmacher Verein, conducting all business in German and offering working watchmakers something practical: life insurance and training. George Schmidt and Frederick Ruoff were among them.
Venue
One of the first buildings the city ever designated a landmark, this brick-and-stone structure at 425 Lafayette Street was built in three stages across nearly thirty years, its wings added so carefully that later architects matched the original design almost seamlessly.
Library
The largest library in the Bronx is also the first green library in New York City, earning LEED Silver certification when it opened in January 2006. It replaced the Fordham Branch Library, tripling the space its predecessor had offered.
Venue
A. H. Purdy created a dedicated seating section for African American patrons at a time when most New York theatres offered them nothing. The Chatham opened in 1839 on what is now Park Row, a neighborhood house built by Thomas Flynn and Henry Willard.
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Theater for the New City named itself after a John V. Lindsay speech imagining a new city for all. Crystal Field, George Bartenieff, Theo Barnes, and Lawrence Kornfeld founded it in 1971 after deciding Judson Poets Theatre had peaked — they wanted a stage for poetic work with a community soul.
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It cost $250,000 to build and was immediately hailed as one of the largest and most beautiful theaters in greater New York. Thomas W. Lamb designed it in 1917 for Loew's Corporation as a 2,394-seat palace for vaudeville and motion pictures, complete with an organ, backstage dressing rooms, and all the provisions a…
Venue
The Pershing Square Signature Center sits more than a mile west of the Manhattan square whose name it shares — both on 42nd Street, never quite meeting. The name came with a price: the Pershing Square Foundation donated $25 million, and Frank Gehry designed what followed.
Library
One of the first libraries in New York City to display books in a merchandising format, Cortelyou arrived only after Flatbush residents spent fourteen years advocating for it — pushing from 1969 until the branch finally opened in 1983.
Venue
The 1945 film Diamond Horseshoe was shot in this basement. Opened in 1938 beneath the Paramount Hotel as Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe nightclub, the room later became a burlesque house, then a Broadway theater under three different names.
Restaurant
A 1926 Variety article accused Eva Kotchever of being financed by 'a ring of rich women cultists' — and the scandal only deepened her legend. The Polish-Jewish feminist had already run a tearoom in Chicago before opening Eve's Hangout at 129 MacDougal Street in 1925, planting it squarely in Greenwich Village's growing…
Venue
There may have been a concert garden on this Second Avenue corner as early as the 1880s, which makes the Orpheum one of the oldest continuously theatrical sites in Manhattan. It rose through Yiddish theatre's golden age as part of the Jewish Rialto, spent decades as a film house, then converted back to drama in 1958.
Venue
A former stable and wine-bottling plant became the room where American theater changed. The Provincetown Players converted the 19th-century building at 133 MacDougal Street in 1918, gathering Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Djuna Barnes under one roof. Paul Robeson performed here.
Library
A library perched on a precipice above the Lincoln Tunnel Helix began its life as a private home. It became a library in 1942, was extensively renovated and expanded in 1997–1998, and now holds about 43,000 volumes, circulating more than 40,000 items a year. It is also home to the town's historical commission.
Venue
Jeff Buckley played here, and so did Carly Simon — which tells you something about the range of a room. The Fez lived beneath the Time Cafe on Lafayette and Great Jones Streets in NoHo, a nightclub and restaurant that somehow held comedians like Jonathan Ames and Stella alongside singers like Rufus Wainwright, Nona…
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The theatre takes its name from a brook — Minetta Brook, which once flowed beneath this stretch of Greenwich Village before the city buried it. When the building opened in 1984, Helen Hayes cut the ribbon and Mayor Edward I. Koch declared it Minetta Lane Theater Week.
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The audience was meant to stroll during intermissions, promenade-style, listening to musicians play from a bandstand on Music Island — an island that no longer exists.
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A theatre that staged The Wizard of Oz became a pornography venue. Opened in 1904 at 254 West 42nd Street as the Lew Fields Theatre, it was built on land purchased by Oscar Hammerstein I, who had already put up seven Manhattan theatres before this one.
Gallery
The Forbes Galleries were more popular with visitors than with New Yorkers — a quiet, telling fact about a place that held 12,000 toy soldiers, 500 ships, and one of the original Monopoly boards under one Fifth Avenue roof.
Venue
The lobby once held fountains stocked with goldfish. Paramount Pictures built this rococo palace in 1928, handing the design to Chicago architects Rapp and Rapp, who filled it with 4,084 burgundy-velvet seats, a cloud-painted ceiling, a 60-foot stage curtain embroidered with satin pheasants, and chandeliers large…
Venue
Bruce Willis was a bartender here before the venue became what it is. Opened in 1983 by Steve Olsen in the basement of the West Bank Cafe, the 90-seat dinner theater sits inside Manhattan Plaza, a complex built specifically to house people active in New York's theater scene — which meant Tennessee Williams, Arthur…
Library
The building that once housed this library is now an event space with a rotunda dome, a remnant of when New York University occupied the campus. The current library opened on September 21, 2012, when North Hall held its ribbon-cutting ceremony, making it only the second building on campus to serve as the library.
Venue
The theater opened as a movie house on November 22, 1926, then sat vacant after United Artists closed it in 1973. What rescued it was one man's stubborn dream. John Harms — organist, teacher, one-man impresario since 1941 — had spent decades personally telephoning or corralling over 1,200 contacts to arrange concerts…
Venue
The interior was gutted, but the face that replaced it on Broadway never changed. Designed by Boak and Paris between 1932 and 1933 in the Art Deco style, the Metro Theater rose three and a half stories at 2626 Broadway, its terracotta facade divided into three vertical sections and crowned with a polychromed…
Venue
The building spent decades rotting in silence after a sawdust factory closed mid-century, its massive timbers given over to dry rot and stillness. Composer Paola Prestini and attorney Kevin Dolan founded National Sawdust here in 2015, a nonprofit that kept the original tenant's name and transformed the abandoned…
Library
The Brooklyn Heights Branch Library traces its roots to 1852, before the Brooklyn Public Library itself existed. Prominent citizens founded the Brooklyn Athenaeum and Reading Room for the instruction of young men.
Venue
The building was a parking and garbage truck repair facility before it became one of Manhattan's most storied nightclubs. Jason Strauss and Noah Tepperberg spotted the Chelsea space and built Marquee inside it, opening in December 2003 with $2 million invested.
Library
In 2004, the Princeton Review ranked this Bronx library fifth in the country — ahead of Yale, Harvard, and Columbia. The Walsh Family Library opened in 1997 after Duane Library, Fordham's original collection, simply ran out of room. Duane sat empty after that until its renovation into a visitors' center.
Library
A former parking garage became an award-winning library. When the New Rochelle Public Library opened on September 19, 1979, sixty percent of its structure was a refurbished parking garage — low ceilings and all. Architects Pomeroy, Lebduska Associates and Fred W.
Venue
An architect founded a jazz club. Misha Saradoff, who had tended bar at an off-Broadway theater watering hole called Phebe's, opened The Tin Palace on the Bowery at Second Street in the fall of 1973.
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A Moorish Revival palace built in 1925–1926 for Yiddish theatre stands on the corner of Second Avenue and 12th Street, its cast-stone facade easy to miss among the East Village storefronts.
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A firehouse designed by Napoleon LeBrun & Sons in 1888 is now one of Hell's Kitchen's most distinctive stages. Built for Fire Engine Company No. 54, the building sat abandoned until Miriam Colon revived it in the early 1970s as the home of the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater.
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The 21 Club kept a hidden wine cellar stocked with the private collections of celebrities including Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren. It began in Greenwich Village in 1922 as a small speakeasy called the Red Head, run by cousins Jack Kriendler and Charlie Berns.
Restaurant
The Halal Guys began as a hot dog cart in 1990, then abandoned hot dogs entirely. Founder Mohamed Abouelenein decided a hot dog simply wasn't a satisfying meal, so in 1992 he and his partners switched to chicken, gyro meat, rice, and pita.
Restaurant
A 47-story skyscraper was built around P. J. Clarke's rather than through it. The saloon at 915 Third Avenue dates to 1884, making it one of New York's oldest continuously operating restaurants. Patrick J. Clarke, an Irish immigrant, was hired by a Mr.
Venue
Houdini once performed in a building that later became a bowling alley, then a print shop, then a glass factory. Thomas W. Lamb designed the Strand Theatre at 647 Fulton Street for vaudeville, giving it a capacity of nearly 4,000.
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Rockwood Music Hall closed in November 2024 without a formal announcement — no goodbye, no last call, just silence on Allen Street. Ken Rockwood, known as The Professor, had opened the small bar and venue in 2005, tucking three stages into a Lower East Side address: one intimate room downstairs, two larger ones above.
Venue
The New York Times called it 'the powerful locus for Latino art' in the Bronx, which is a heavy designation for a venue tucked inside a community college. Gwathmey Siegel & Associates designed the building, earning the 1988 Excellence in Design Award from the Art Commission of the City of New York.
Venue
John Hodgman filmed his Netflix comedy special here on December 21, 2012, a date chosen because it marked the end of the Mayan calendar. The Bell House opened in Brooklyn in September 2008 and quickly became a room where things got recorded — NPR's Ask Me Another taped here regularly, Charlotte Gainsbourg played it…
Venue
The Tank charges artists nothing to use its stage — a policy that, since 2003, has quietly shaped New York theater from the outside in. Eight recent college graduates, most of them from Yale, Oberlin, and Harvard, founded it that May, including playwrights Amy Herzog and Alex Timbers.
Restaurant
Katz's Delicatessen is not kosher — a quietly radical fact for a place that has anchored Jewish Lower East Side life since 1888. Two brothers named Iceland founded it on Ludlow Street, but the name only became Katz's after Willy and his cousin Benny bought out the Icelands in 1910.
Restaurant
The Pizza Hall of Fame calls Lombardi's the first pizzeria in America, though later research suggests other pizzerias predate it by more than a decade. The founding story itself grew murky in 2019, when records revealed that Gennaro Lombardi first arrived in America in November 1904, at seventeen, classified as a…
Gallery
A family business that outlasted the Russian Revolution, A La Vieille Russie was founded in Kiev in 1851 and rebuilt in Paris around 1920 by Jacques Zolotnitsky, grandson of the founder, with his nephew Léon Grinberg. The Paris shop became a focal point for Russian émigré aristocracy and intellectual life.
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A building donated in 2002 became three stages before most New Yorkers noticed it existed. Architect Leo Modrcin carved Theater A, B, and C out of 59 East 59th Street, and the complex opened in February 2004 with a production of The Stendhal Syndrome.
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The columns flanking the entrance at 56 Beaver Street were said to have been imported from the ruins of Pompeii. That detail alone tells you what the Delmonico brothers were after. Giovanni and Pietro, Swiss-Italian immigrants, opened their first spot in a rented pastry shop on William Street in 1827.
Venue
It looked like a mustard-yellow warehouse — a characterless steel box about 20 feet high that Marvin Carlson said suggested a storage facility from the outside. Inside, though, it had no curtain and a thrust stage tilted toward an audience sitting on three sides.
Restaurant
The blue door at Per Se's entrance is not an accident — it is a deliberate echo of the blue door at Thomas Keller's French Laundry in Napa Valley, a quiet signal that both rooms belong to the same imagination.
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Eleven Madison Park held the top spot among the World's 50 Best Restaurants in 2017 — the same year its doors were closed for renovation. Danny Meyer opened it in 1998 inside the Metropolitan Life North Building, a grand address facing Madison Square.
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The Russian Tea Room was founded not by a Russian, but by Albertina Rasch — whose name appears alongside the original shopfront photographs — though the place was opened in 1927 by former members of the Russian Imperial Ballet as a cafe and chocolate store.
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The idea for the Tony Award was devised inside a continental restaurant on West 44th Street. Vincent Sardi Sr. and his wife Jenny Pallera had run a place nearby since 1921 before moving to this location on March 5, 1927.
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The name comes from a Persian fairy tale — The Three Princes of Serendip — and something of that enchantment stuck. Calvin L. Holt, Patch Caradine, and Stephen Bruce opened Serendipity 3 on East 60th Street in 1954, folding a boutique selling one-of-a-kind fashion and art objects into a restaurant where Marilyn…
Restaurant
Someone once staged the entire Iliad as an experiment in Breakfast Theatre here. The Cornelia Street Cafe opened in July 1977 at 29 Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village and spent 41 years producing some 700 shows a year — Shakespeare at Midnight, Afro-American poetry, Latin jazz, members of Monty Python reading to…
Restaurant
When 30 Rockefeller Plaza opened in 1933, the space above the 64th floor was meant to be a public amusement center. What it became was something stranger and more lasting. Wallace K.
Gallery
When it opened in 1849, this Gothic Revival synagogue was the largest in the United States. After more than a century of congregations, the building was vandalized, passed through city ownership, and sold three times before Spanish sculptor and painter Angel Orensanz bought it in 1986 — roughly twelve years after its…
Restaurant
The steak tartare was prepared at tableside, to order — a small, almost theatrical act that defined what Les Halles was. José de Meirelles, Philippe Lajaunie, and Jean-Michel Diot opened the brasserie at 411 Park Avenue South in 1990, naming it after the historic central wholesale marketplace in Paris.
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The name Le Bernardin comes from a folk song about monks who loved the good life — a lyric a father sang to his children that would eventually name one of New York's most celebrated restaurants.
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Mark Thompson opened this ice cream shop in 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks, inside a 1922 fireboat house on the Fulton Ferry Landing — the oldest ferry landing in Brooklyn.
Gallery
The Invisible Dog Art Center was once a factory that made invisible dogs — those trick leashes designed to look like they're walking a pet that isn't there. Lucien Zayan discovered the Boerum Hill building in 2008, pitched his idea to the owner, and when he took over, held a flea market to clear it out.
Gallery
The name means friendship — taken from ancient Greek — and that quiet warmth is built into everything the Attali brothers created when they founded Galerie Philia in 2015. The gallery spans Mexico, Geneva, New York, and Singapore, organizing exhibitions that treat design as art and art as conversation.
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At its peak, Lundy's served a million patrons annually — a number that still startles. Irving Lundy founded the place on the Sheepshead Bay waterfront in 1926, but the original building was condemned five years later to make way for a bay redevelopment.
Gallery
Bitforms gallery gave new media art a room of its own in New York before most institutions knew they needed one. Steven Sacks founded it in 2001, staking a claim for artists working critically with technology at a moment when that work was still finding its footing.
Restaurant
For nearly six decades, one man made every single pizza himself. Domenico DeMarco emigrated from the Province of Caserta, Italy, in 1959 and opened Di Fara Pizza on Avenue J in Midwood, Brooklyn, in 1965. He ran it until his death in 2022. The New York Times called it one of the most acclaimed pizza shops in the city.
Restaurant
Jean-Georges once held three Michelin stars, a height few American restaurants have touched. Named for its owner Jean-Georges Vongerichten, it opened on the lobby level of the Trump International Hotel and Tower at 1 Central Park West and accumulated honors relentlessly — four New York Times stars, multiple James…
Restaurant
The Bridge Cafe bore its name for nearly a century before the Brooklyn Bridge existed. Built in 1794 as a grocery and wine and porter bottler at 279 Water Street, the wooden building cycled through groceries, porterhouses, and liquor establishments — and, between 1847 and 1860, a brothel run by Henry Williams, whose…
Restaurant
Forbes once called Daniel the top-ranked restaurant in America, yet Michelin currently awards it just one star — a gap that says everything about how fiercely this room is argued over.
Restaurant
The person handling reservations has been stalked by strangers desperate for an earlier table — that is the temperature of want surrounding Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare. Moe Issa opened it next to a grocery store in Downtown Brooklyn with chef César Ramírez, seating just 18 guests around a counter.
Restaurant
Truman Capote burned his entire social world to the ground inside this restaurant without ever leaving his desk. His unfinished novel's chapter "La Côte Basque 1965," published in Esquire in 1975, depicted a catty luncheon among thinly disguised socialites — the very women who lunched there, including Babe Paley and…
Restaurant
Patsy's claims to have originated the idea of selling pizza by the slice. Pasquale Lanceri opened this coal-oven pizzeria in Italian Harlem in 1933, having learned his craft at Lombardi's brick-walled coal oven. It stood alongside Lombardi's, Totonno's, and John's as one of New York's earliest.
Restaurant
The Stage Deli once accused its rival Carnegie Deli of making pastrami with New Jersey water. Two blocks from Carnegie Hall, this beloved delicatessen was opened in 1937 by Russian-Jewish immigrant Max Asnas and became a gathering place for celebrities whose names ended up on the menu — Dolly Parton, Adam Sandler…
Restaurant
Antonio Veniero opened his East Village address in 1894 not as a bakery but as a pool emporium and caffè, where pastries were almost an afterthought. The man from Sorrento baked well enough that demand overtook everything else, and his cakes eventually won awards in Rome, Bologna, and at the New York World's Fair.
Restaurant
The walls are lined with photographs of past Miss Subways winners, and somewhere inside sits a 1956 Predicta television. When Ellen's Stardust Diner opened in 1987 — the first 1950s theme restaurant in New York City — waitresses wore poodle skirts and the retro fantasy felt genuinely new.
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A restaurant called Gerdes became a music venue almost by accident. Mike Porco opened it in 1960, then partnered with Folklore Center director Izzy Young to present occasional music under the name The Fifth Peg.
Gallery
James Cohan's first exposure to art dealing came through his uncle Carl Solway, who ran an avant-garde gallery — a childhood introduction that eventually led Cohan across an Atlantic.
Gallery
The gallery's first Chelsea space was a converted single-story garage with skylights, opened in 1994 with a show of Ellsworth Kelly. Before that, Matthew Marks had worked at Pace Gallery in New York and Anthony d'Offay in London, then returned to open a 1,000-square-foot Madison Avenue space in 1991, debuting with an…
Restaurant
Aquavit was a pioneer in New York for something now taken for granted: two entirely distinct dining rooms under one roof — a casual café and a cutting-edge modern room — when Håkan Swahn opened it in 1987. The concept came from Stockholm's Operakällaren, whose owner, Tore Wretman, was an original partner.
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Sylvia Woods's mother mortgaged her farm so her daughter could buy a Harlem luncheonette — and Woods paid her back within a year of opening. That was 1962, and the restaurant at 328 Malcolm X Boulevard has never left the family since.
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Umberto's Clam House had been open just two months when a rival gangster spotted Joe Gallo inside and sent in hitmen. It was April 7, 1972, early morning, and Gallo had stopped in with his wife, daughter, and bodyguard after celebrating his 43rd birthday at the Copacabana.
Restaurant
An Irish immigrant named James "Red Dog" Dorrian opened this Second Avenue bar in 1960, and three generations of his family have run it since. What began as a neighborhood anchor for the Upper East Side's preppy teenagers and young professionals has never stopped being exactly that — chummy, clubby, unchanged in…
Gallery
Before it showed Andy Warhol or Robert Indiana, the Stable Gallery sold mannequins. Founded in 1953 by Eleanor Ward in a West 58th Street livery stable — the source of its name — it pivoted from fashion photography toward something harder to categorize. Christian Dior encouraged Ward early on.
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Every Monday night for years, three Mingus ensembles rotated through the basement at 116 East 27th Street — a de facto residency that turned a restaurant downstairs into something rarer. Danny Meyer opened Jazz Standard in the fall of 1997, when the upstairs room was still just called Standard.
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The Empire Diner opened on Leap Day — February 29, 1976 — a fitting birth date for a place that would become something singular. Built by the Fodero Dining Car Company in 1946 and later abandoned, it was refurbished that year with one telling addition: a stylized Empire State Building outline on its roof.
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Gray's Papaya endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008 — a move that said something about the place's confidence in its own cultural weight. Founded in 1973 by Nicholas Gray, a former partner of Papaya King, it planted its flag at Broadway and 72nd Street and never really needed to explain itself.
Restaurant
The soup is hidden inside the dumpling. At Joe's Shanghai, xiaolongbao are made by chilling a gelatinous broth until solid, wrapping it in dough, then steaming it — so the filling melts back into liquid inside the sealed bun.
Restaurant
During Prohibition, Pete's Tavern hid in plain sight as a flower shop. The building at 129 East 18th Street had been serving drinks since at least the 1850s, first as a grocery and grog store, then as Healy's after Tom and John Healy bought it in 1899. O.
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On the evening of December 16, 1985, Gambino crime family boss Paul Castellano and underboss Thomas Bilotti were shot dead outside the front entrance, a hit ordered by John Gotti.
Gallery
New York City's oldest alternative non-profit art space began in 1970 as 112 Workshop/112 Greene Street, founded in SoHo by artists Jeffrey Lew and Gordon Matta-Clark. It has moved four times since, shedding its original name for White Columns when it relocated to Spring Street in 1979.
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The oven runs at 850 degrees, and no one will sell you a single slice. Founded in 1915 by Filippo Milone — not, as long believed, by John Sasso in 1929 — John's of Bleecker Street has been quietly correcting its own mythology for over a century.
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Cosme was built inside a former strip club — its floor and poles removed, the space remodeled in nine months into a minimalist room of white and gray, shelves lined with books and bottles.
Gallery
The gallery named after a father's nickname — 'Pacey' — was founded by a 22-year-old in Boston in 1960. Arne Glimcher ran it with his wife, Milly, and his mother, Eva. In 1963 he partnered with Fred Mueller and, with help from friend Ivan Karp, opened on East 57th Street in Manhattan.
Gallery
Andy Warhol showed some of his earliest New York work here, starting with two exhibitions in 1956. The Bodley Gallery ran from the late 1940s through the early 1980s, owned by Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Braun and directed during its heyday by David Mann.
Gallery
The first organization of its kind in the United States was founded in 1974 by book artist and master bookbinder Richard Minsky, who believed the book itself could be art. That founding premise became a model — similar institutions spread across the country in CBA's wake.
Restaurant
A union dispute and subsequent fire destroyed the original building, which is how Kossar's ended up at Grand and Essex Streets. Founded in 1936 by Isadore Mirsky and Morris Kossar, the bakery traces its dough to Polish Jewish bakers who arrived in New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, carrying with them…
Restaurant
Ludovico Barbati sold spumoni and Italian ice from a horse and wagon before he ever owned a building. That was 1938. A year later he bought a vacant lot on 86th Street in Gravesend, and by the mid-1950s the stand had grown into a full compound: spumoni factory, pizzeria, luncheonette.
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The diner sitting on Tonnele Avenue in Jersey City is the same physical building that debuted at the 1939 New York World's Fair, where it was called the "diner of the future" and an "introduction to fast food." Louis Bridges bought it after the fair and opened it as the first White Manna, eventually owning five diners…
Restaurant
The Colony's upstairs gambling room became one of New York's most fashionable haunts only after Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt discovered it — a space originally where men met their mistresses.
Gallery
David Zwirner launched one of the world's most expansive contemporary art galleries with a single one-man show of Austrian sculptor Franz West in a SoHo ground-floor space in 1993.
Gallery
Its name is an Australian Aboriginal word for dreamtime, chosen to suggest timelessness and open possibilities — an ambitious idea for a gallery in Newark, New Jersey. Founded in 1983, Aljira made space for both established and under-represented artists, and in 1993 was chosen to organize the U.S.
Gallery
Before it housed art and inter-American debate, 680 Park Avenue served as the Soviet Mission to the United Nations. The building, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was originally the Percy Rivington Pyne House — part of one of the few remaining unified architectural ensembles on Park Avenue…
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A linden tree planted by Václav Havel grows in the beer garden here. The Bohemian Citizens' Benevolent Society was founded in 1892 in Astoria, Queens, to support Czech and Slovak immigrants and preserve their culture — schools, dramatics, libraries — while blending it with American life.
Restaurant
The apartments in the Hotel des Artistes tower had no kitchens, so in 1917 the building opened a restaurant at street level to feed its residents. That practical necessity became Café des Artistes, one of Manhattan's most enduring dining rooms. A kitchen fire late in 1985 forced a closure, but the café reopened.
Gallery
A joiner by trade, Florian Papp arrived at Ellis Island on May 6, 1903, listed on the ship's manifest simply as Floryan Pap, age 20, having sailed from Bremen aboard the Kronprinz Wilhelm. That craftsman's eye for wood and form quietly became the foundation of one of America's oldest antiques galleries.
Gallery
The original FusionArts Museum on Stanton Street succeeded in one of Manhattan's most restless neighborhoods before the space was converted into a commercial gallery in 2012.
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Gallagher's was founded by a former Ziegfeld girl and a colorful gambler — an unlikely partnership that quietly made it one of Prohibition's first speakeasy gathering spots for Broadway stars, sports figures, and gamblers.
Gallery
Paula Cooper opened her Prince Street gallery with $4,400 and was told she was crazy to do it. Downtown in 1968 was not yet an art destination, and she knew it. The gallery's first show was a benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, splitting sales proceeds equally between artists and…
Restaurant
Barbetta was the first restaurant in America to receive landmark status from the Locali Storici d'Italia — an Italian honor for a kitchen on West 46th Street. Sebastiano Maioglio founded it in 1906, making it the oldest restaurant in the Theater District.
Gallery
CRG Gallery began in a townhouse on the Upper East Side — an unlikely birthplace for a space that would introduce New York to Mona Hatoum and Jim Hodges for the first time.
Restaurant
A haunted house crossed with Chuck E. Cheese's, the Jekyll & Hyde Club dressed itself as a 1930s British explorers club gone gloriously wrong. Owned by Eerie World Entertainment in Manhattan, it drew its name from Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 Victorian gothic novel.
Restaurant
Getting a table at Rao's is considered one of the hardest things to do in New York City. Joshua Anthony Rao founded the restaurant in 1896 after moving with his parents from Italy, buying a small shop on the corner of Pleasant Avenue in what was then a vast Italian-American community in East Harlem.
Gallery
A gallery named for the first Secretary-General of the United Nations sits ten blocks north of UN headquarters, inside a Norwegian Seamen's Church with more than 130 years of history in New York City.
Gallery
Two wells drilled 1,260 feet beneath a Greenwich Village sidewalk heat and cool this gallery dedicated to the built world. Construction crews spent three weeks in the summer of 2003 boring through gravel, pea stone, overburden soil, and bedrock before connecting the shafts into a closed geothermal loop.
Restaurant
The corner where Kiev Restaurant stood was once home to the candy shop that helped invent the egg cream. A Soviet emigrant named Michael Hrynenko opened Kiev there in 1978, and for most of its life the place never closed — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, serving pierogi, blintzes, kasha varnishkis, and matzah brei…
Restaurant
A pushcart on 54th Street and Fifth Avenue beat every white-tablecloth contender: in 2004, New York magazine named Hallo Berlin one of the city's four best power lunches. The cart then won the Vendy Award in 2005, ranking first among all New York street food vendors.
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Papaya King began as a tropical fruit drink stand in 1932, then the neighborhood changed everything. Constantine 'Gus' Poulos opened on the corner of 86th Street and Third Avenue, pouring fresh fruit juices — until the surrounding German-American community nudged him toward hot dogs.
Gallery
Talwar Gallery opened in New York City in September 2001, just weeks after the city was changed forever. Founded by Deepak Talwar, it quietly became a bridge between the Indian subcontinent, its diaspora, and Western museum culture.
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An Italian opened one of New York's most celebrated French restaurants. Sirio Maccioni launched Le Cirque in March 1974 at the Mayfair Regent Hotel on East 65th Street, and the family ran it for more than four decades. Daniel Boulud served as executive chef through the late 1980s and early '90s.
Restaurant
Totonno Pero timed his exit from Lombardi's perfectly — shortly after the subway started running out to the hinterlands of Coney Island, he opened his own place there. That was 1924, and the pizza has been made the same way ever since.
Gallery
Zach Feuer started out on a fourth floor on 26th Street in Chelsea, not even carrying his own name — the gallery was called LFL, founded in 2000 with partners Nick Lawrence and Russell LaMontagne.
Restaurant
A German bartender bought the café where he worked. That was 1882, and August Lüchow's name stayed above the door on East 14th Street for a full century — long enough for columnist O. O. McIntyre to write, in the 1930s, that in a changing world, nothing changes at Lüchow's.
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Union Square Cafe lost its Michelin star consideration entirely in 2005 — never receiving one — and the snub sparked a genuine debate about whether the guide was biased toward French cuisine and formal presentation.
Gallery
Woodward Gallery held its inaugural exhibition not in a gallery at all, but in Times Square at the Roundabout Theatre Company. That was April 1994, when John and Kristine Woodward incorporated under the name Gallery of Living Artists and set out to show emerging and established artists across movements as varied as…
Restaurant
Nell's opened inside a former electronics store on West 14th Street in the fall of 1986, and that unlikely shell became one of Manhattan's most influential rooms.
Restaurant
In the mid-1980s, The Water Club ranked as the tenth largest grossing restaurant in the United States — not bad for a place built on two barges. It began with a 1978 city request for proposals on a site that had been nothing but parking lots, and developer Buzzy O'Keeffe, who already knew the particular headaches of…
Restaurant
On May 30, 2009, Barack and Michelle Obama had dinner here, in a quietly landmarked evening for a Greenwich Village room that had only been open since April 2000. Dan, David, and Laureen Barber built Blue Hill around ingredients sourced partly from Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture in Pocantico Hills.
Gallery
An 1897 neo-gothic schoolhouse on Suffolk Street is home to what may be the only bilingual puppet theatre in the United States. Designed by Charles B. J. Snyder, the building sat empty after a 1970s fire until Solidaridad Humana began using it to educate Spanish-speaking immigrants in 1981.
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Neir's Tavern kept pouring drinks even during Prohibition, operating as a speakeasy at 87-48 78th Street in Woodhaven, Queens — just one chapter in a run that began in 1829.
Restaurant
John F. Kennedy ordered La Caravelle's vichyssoise and chicken in champagne sauce as takeout to eat on the plane. The restaurant opened on September 21, 1960, at 33 West 55th Street, founded by Fred Decré and Robert Meyzen with Roger Fessaguet as head chef.
Gallery
The gallery's name is a piece of coded grief: when Otto Kallir fled Vienna after the 1938 Nazi invasion, he named his Paris refuge after the cathedral near his original Neue Galerie, carrying the old address into exile.
Restaurant
The earliest known mention of the caffè macchiato comes from a 1988 review of this place. Tucked beneath a restored Greenwich Village townhouse on MacDougal Street, the Bar Next Door lives in a basement of low ceilings, exposed brick, and romantic lighting — easy to walk past, impossible to forget once you've found…
Restaurant
The River Café runs its own ferry from Wall Street — and has since 1981, long before the neighborhood now called Dumbo had any public water access. Michael "Buzzy" O'Keeffe spent twelve years securing permits before opening the restaurant on a former coffee barge beneath the Brooklyn Bridge in summer 1977.
Museum
Marcia Tucker founded the New Museum in 1977 inside a Graduate Center space at the New School for Social Research on Fifth Avenue — a borrowed room, not a building of its own. It moved to SoHo in 1983, then briefly to Chelsea, before settling at 235 Bowery on the Lower East Side.
Library
A library tunneled into the architecture of global diplomacy, the Dag Hammarskjöld Library connects physically to the Secretariat and Conference buildings through corridors above and below ground. Founded in 1946, it moved into its current building in 1961 and was named for the UN's second secretary-general.
Venue
A Swedish model schoolhouse built for an 1876 Philadelphia exposition ended up, by Frederick Law Olmsted's design, in Central Park. Olmsted spotted it among the Centennial Exposition exhibits and moved it to the park the following year.
Venue
A Broadway house built on a piano factory site, Central Theatre hosted Oscar Hammerstein II's debut as librettist in January 1920 with Always You — before he became the Hammerstein. Herbert J.
Venue
The name came from a joke. Bob Appel had worked in an actual knitting factory, and when childhood friends sat around riffing on that fact, a legendary New York club was accidentally named. Michael Dorf and Louis Spitzer founded the Knitting Factory in 1987, with John Zorn shaping its creative direction early on.
Venue
The Nederlander is the southernmost Broadway theater in the Theater District, a geographic footnote that belies its outsized history. Designed by William Neil Smith and opened in 1921 for operator Walter C. Jordan, it wore three other names before 1980, when it was renamed for impresario David Tobias Nederlander.
Venue
A diagonal aisle cuts through the auditorium at the Faison Firehouse Theater — an architectural quirk that makes it unlike almost any other stage in Harlem. The building itself began as a Beaux Arts firehouse completed in 1909, designed by Philadelphia architect Howard E.
Venue
The Greenwich Village Theatre seated only 450 people, yet it launched the first Off-Broadway musical to gain wide recognition in New York. Built in 1917 by architect Herman Lee Meader at Sheridan Square, it was originally home to Frank Conroy's Greenwich Village Players.
Gallery
ABC No Rio was born from an eviction. After the 1979–80 Real Estate Show was shut down, artists squatted 156 Rivington Street and opened a collectively-run space that housed a zine library, darkroom, silkscreening studio, public computer lab, and weekly hardcore punk matinees alongside the city's Food Not Bombs…
Museum
A museum dedicated to film, television, and digital media lives inside a former building of the historic Astoria Studios — the same complex where movies were made long before Hollywood dominated the industry.
Venue
A Broadway theater sits on the third floor of an office tower, with an entire building section resting directly on its roof. The Minskoff opened in 1973 inside One Astor Plaza, named after the building's developers, Sam Minskoff and Sons.
Bookshop
Unnameable Books made the cover of The New Yorker before many people had heard of it — cartoonist Adrian Tomine drew it for the June 2008 issue, cementing its place in the city's literary imagination.
Venue
The auditorium was deliberately designed to resemble a cathedral — domed ceiling with ribs, walls with stained glass — an unusual ambition for a Broadway house. Arthur Hammerstein built it between 1926 and 1927 as a memorial to his father, Oscar Hammerstein I, with architect Herbert J.
Library
The world's largest architecture library exists because a young New York architect died and his grieving parents wanted to leave something behind. Henry Ogden Avery was a friend of William Robert Ware, Columbia's first architecture professor.
Venue
Barney Josephson named his Greenwich Village nightclub to mock Clare Boothe Luce and the upscale world she called 'café society' — then advertised it as 'The Wrong Place for the Right People.' Open from 1938 to 1948 on Sheridan Square, it was the first racially integrated nightclub in the United States, built…
Library
A railroad magnate saved a library that an entire village refused to accept. Peter C. Van Schaick left money in his will to build a free reading room for West Chester, in what is now the Bronx. The building was constructed between 1882 and 1883, then sat vacant after local townspeople declined to pay for its upkeep.
Venue
When it opened in 1929, the St. George Theatre outshone even Manhattan's Capitol Theater on Broadway. Solomon Brill, who already owned 15 theaters across greater New York, built it as his showpiece rival to the city across the water.
Restaurant
The building that hosts one of Manhattan's most famous restaurants was originally a sheepfold, built in 1870 to house the animals that grazed Sheep Meadow. Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould designed it. In 1934, parks commissioner Robert Moses evicted the sheep and opened Tavern on the Green in their place.
Place
Its facade is almost entirely black brick, trimmed with gold at the setbacks and pinnacles — a color combination so audacious it stopped Midtown cold in 1924. Raymond Hood and André Fouilhoux designed the 23-story Gothic and Art Deco tower for the American Radiator Company, and Hood insisted on treating it as a…
Bar
The wishbones hanging above the bar at McSorley's belong to boys who never came home from World War I. They hung them there before shipping out, meaning to collect them on return. The uncollected ones stayed. No piece of memorabilia has left the walls since 1910, which is how the place works: accumulation as memory.
Venue
Built to be a high-end shoe store and haberdashery just before the 1929 Wall Street crash, 6 Delancey Street stood vacant until the end of World War II, then slowly faded with its neighborhood.
Venue
Broadway's smallest house began as an intentional act of restraint. Impresario Winthrop Ames commissioned the Little Theatre in 1912, designed by Ingalls & Hoffman in neo-Georgian red brick, with just 299 seats on a single level — intimate by design. Herbert J.
Gallery
The Terrain Gallery opened on February 26, 1955 with a question, not a manifesto: Eli Siegel's fifteen questions, published as "Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?" Painter Dorothy Koppelman directed the SoHo space from the start, grounding it in Siegel's Aesthetic Realism and his Theory of Opposites.
Gallery
For three years in the early 1990s, this gallery ran a Los Angeles outpost in partnership with Galerie Max Hetzler — 4,500 square feet in a refurbished Santa Monica building on 4th Street, an ambitious transatlantic experiment that didn't last but signaled what the gallery would become.
Venue
A Broadway house dressed like a Spanish palace, the Jacobs Theatre opened in 1927 with golden brick, terracotta, and a vaulted ceiling painted with murals by Willy Pogany. Herbert J. Krapp designed it for developer Irwin S.
Venue
Irving Berlin helped build his own Broadway house. Proposed in 1919 by producer Sam H. Harris specifically to host their collaborations, the Music Box Theatre opened in 1921 as a rare thing: a commercial theater conceived for a single songwriter's work. Architect C.
Venue
The Marquis Theatre sits on the third floor of a hotel, reached by escalator, with wings smaller than city building codes require, no freight elevator, and no dedicated restrooms. Architect John C. Portman Jr. added it to the Marriott Marquis simply to increase the hotel's size.
Venue
The Billie Holiday Theatre was the first Black theatre to transfer a hit play to Broadway — and it brought half the financing from the Black community itself. Founded in 1972, with roots in both the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements, the Billie has cultivated Samuel L.
Library
The first library in the United States devoted exclusively to botany, the LuEsther T. Mertz Library opened in 1899 inside a Renaissance Revival building Robert W. Gibson had designed three years earlier.
Venue
A merchant-governor's wooden playhouse on Nassau Street was probably the first purpose-built theatre in Manhattan. Rip Van Dam opened it on December 11, 1732, with a performance of The Recruiting Officer.
Venue
Jimi Hendrix once sat in with blues harp player James Cotton in a basement on Bleecker Street — that kind of unplanned collision was ordinary at Cafe Au Go Go. Howard Solomon opened it in February 1964 beneath what became the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre building at 152 Bleecker Street.
Library
A $15,000 grant made on March 16, 1915 by the Carnegie Corporation built this library — one of only 36 Carnegie libraries in all of New Jersey. It opened in 1916, and above its entrance the words Edgewater Free Library are still engraved in stone.
Venue
A New York theater devoted to 'lost' American plays began in a high school auditorium on West 49th Street. Founded in 1992 by Parsifal's Productions, Inc., Metropolitan Playhouse relocated to the East Village in 1997 and spent the next quarter century rescuing forgotten work — Eulalie Spence one-acts, Pulitzer winners…
Venue
The cast-iron loggia climbing St. James Theatre's facade was never decorative — it masks the fire escapes. Built in 1927 for A. L. Erlanger and designed by Warren and Wetmore in neo-Georgian style, the house at 246 West 44th Street holds up to 1,709 seats across three levels, its auditorium lined with murals and…
Venue
The Metropolitan Opera once paid Oscar Hammerstein I $1.2 million simply to stop competing with them. That was 1910, and it effectively ended the Manhattan Opera House as a serious opera venue — the elaborately decorated theater he'd built in 1906 drifted into vaudeville, then changed hands, then became a ballroom.
Venue
A Broadway publicist has his name on the marquee. The Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, known for decades as the Biltmore, was designed by Herbert J. Krapp in the neo-Renaissance style and built for Irwin Chanin, opening in 1925.
Venue
A Broadway house designed to look like a 15th-century Tuscan villa contains classrooms, a library, and a bookstore — because it was built not just as a stage but as a home for the Theatre Guild. C.
Venue
More than one million children have walked through its doors — a number that sets this Newark landmark apart from almost any comparable venue in the country. NJPAC opened in October 1997 on the site of the former Military Park Hotel, giving New Jersey Symphony Orchestra a permanent home and anchoring a cultural…
Restaurant
Grand Central Terminal hadn't even officially opened when the Oyster Bar held its first dinner — February 1, 1913, one day early, arranged for the architects Warren and Wetmore and 100 guests. The restaurant has occupied the terminal's lower level ever since, surviving a 1997 fire and a brief closure for renovations.
Restaurant
When El Faro closed in 2012, New York lost its oldest Spanish restaurant — an 85-year run ended not by indifference but by an inability to raise $80,000 in fines and expenses.
Venue
In 2003, Richard Linklater filmed the opening scene of School of Rock here, when the place was still called Northsix. It had opened just two years earlier, in the spring of 2001, as one of the first venues to bring indie rock and avant-garde concerts to Brooklyn — Manhattan had owned that world until then.
Gallery
Storefront for Art and Architecture opened in a tiny SoHo storefront in 1982 with an explicit conviction: art and design carry a responsibility to shape public policy and the future of cities. Kyong Park founded it with R.L. Seltman and Arleen Schloss at 51 Prince Street.
Restaurant
A Jewish kid from Syosset, New York became one of Tokyo's most celebrated ramen chefs. Ivan Orkin moved to Japan in the 1980s to teach English, eventually attending the Culinary Institute of America and cooking at Mesa Grill and Lutèce before grief and love pulled him back to Japan.
Restaurant
The management of Julius actively harassed gay customers until 1966, which makes its reputation as New York's oldest continuously operating gay bar a complicated inheritance.
Restaurant
The building at 144 Second Avenue once hosted a robbery so notorious it sent three teenagers to their executions — the 1937 case of 'the East Side Boys.' Seventeen years later, Ukrainian refugees Wolodymyr and Olha Darmochwal purchased what was then a candy shop and newsstand on that same corner, partly to help Plast…
Restaurant
No New York politician in the last fifty years has been elected to office without at least one photograph showing him on the Lower East Side with a knish in his face. That line, cited in The Underground Gourmet, tells you everything about this place.
Gallery
William Acquavella's first real coup was buying 22 paintings from the estate of Pierre Bonnard — and selling 17 of them by mail before the show even opened. The gallery began in 1921 when Nicholas Acquavella, a Neapolitan who had arrived in the United States just two years earlier, opened at 598 Madison Avenue dealing…
Gallery
The gallery that closed over a Neo-Nazi controversy opened with a song. Mitchell Algus and Amy Greenspon launched their West Village space in fall 2010 with Gene Beery's paintings and a live musical performance by Emily Sundblad and Pete Drungle — an unusual double debut that signaled the multidisciplinary ambition to…
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