Thursday, November 3, 2011

☞ REMEMBER: 119th and Madison circa 1898


An archival photo from 1898 shows the north corner of 119th Street and Madison looking towards Park Avenue.  The most striking contrast between the modern and the older photo is that buildings on the entire block have been demolished at one point in time or another and new constructions dominate this section of East Harlem for the most part. This area is on the east side of the former Mount Morris Park and used to consist of brownstones, the former P.S. 103 building which also stood alongside tenements.  All are gone today and a new residential building mainly takes up the entire block alongside a row of contemporary brownstones.

Byron Company, New York, N.Y., Street Scenes - 1898. 119th St. No. Side Madison to Park Aves. via the digital collection at the Museum of the City of New York
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1 comment:

  1. Jonathan GillNovember 4, 2011 at 12:05 PM

    For those who are interested, P.S. 103 is where the novelist Henry Roth went to school. Roth remembered that moving from East 114th Street to East 108 East 119th Street in the years before World War I meant moving from an all-Jewish neighborhood to an all-Italian neighborhood. While his best-known (and best) novel, Call It Sleep, doesn't deal with Roth's uptown years, his late-in-life, multi-volume novel Mercy of a Rude Stream does (warning for anyone who wants to read it: there are a number of sexual abuse scenes that are dealt with in revolting detail).

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