Yesterday the NYPL announced that they expanded and improved upon their digital database by adding high-res photos, more materials, and some cool features to get lost in, some of which will break your very heart. And the most heartbreaking time-suck of them all is this then & now feature that juxtaposes a 1911 wide angle photo with a Google Street View image, almost all the way up and down 5th Avenue. Oh, 574 5th Avenue, what has become of you!
The city will always change, even the iconic 5th Avenue, and it's far from shocking to see changes over a decades time, nevermind over a century... but why do we replace everything beautiful with trash buildings? Just look at what became of the Brokaw Mansion (which was on 79th and 5th). Anyway, click through and weep.
On the other hand, we did get the Guggenheim and some other nice things.
And now a few facts about 5th Avenue you may or may not know:
- The Avenue was widened in 1908, making it less pedestrian-friendly. In June 1909, the NY Times wrote a big feature on "The New 5th Avenue."
- "The high status of 5th Avenue was confirmed in 1862, when Caroline Schermerhorn Astor settled on the southwest corner of 34th Street, and the beginning of the end of its reign as a residential street was symbolized by the erection, in 1893, of the Astoria Hotel on the site of her house, later linked to its neighbor as the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel (now the site of the Empire State Building)." (via)
- Many Midtown blocks, as you'll still see in these photos, were residential, but turned commercial after the turn of the 20th century.
- "The first commercial building on Fifth Avenue was erected by Benjamin Altman who bought the corner lot on the northeast corner of 34th Street in 1896, and demolished the "Marble Palace" of his arch-rival, A. T. Stewart. In 1906 his department store, B. Altman and Company, occupied the whole of its block front." (via)
- And did you know that 5th Avenue is "the dividing line for house numbering and west-east streets in Manhattan"?
