Most of the images on this site were taken by the author during his teens, from a period spanning 1973 through about 1977. Most of the 100 buildings shown were located on Manhattan's Lower East Side, from 13th Street to Houston St, avenue A to avenue D. Most of these buildings were demolished over 30 years ago, only a few still stand after renovations or adaptive conversions.
There are over 150 images of gargoyles, chimera, architectural terra cotta, and other architectural elements I salvaged from 1973 through 1980 from over 500 different buildings, as well as images of some interesting antiques I own.
Keeping meticulous records of my collection was a passion, I kept notebooks listing the origin and weight of each piece; frequent moving for more storage space almost made that a necessity for truck rental planning! Around 1980 I had 50 TONS spread out in half a dozen storage spaces and lofts, and by the time I was 18 I was working 5 part time jobs to pay all the rents.
Around 1987 I sold the collection, but since then I have begin a second much smaller collection of artifacts which can be seen on two sub-pages here.
Back in the 1970s one could pick things up free at demolition sites, or obtain them for 5 or $10 to one of the workers. Many of the architectural sculptures around the city that I missed wound up in the landfill, in the 1970's no one wanted them and no one seemed to care.
Most of the buildings depicted in the photos were abandoned, remained vacant, and open to vandals and scavengers. Other buildings had structural weaknesses or fire damage and were condemned by the city.
Most of the buildings were extremely unsafe to enter, one could fall through holes in the floor or have a stairway suddenly collapse under their weight as happened to me at 215 Eldridge Street (Building photos Plate-19). The late salvager Richard Nickel of Chicago was killed by a floor collapse in an unstable building being demolished in 1972.
The camera used for most of the images was cheap by necessity, due to the neighborhoods I went to. Smart people never went to these neighborhoods at all, even the police were wary of working in them! The Kodak instamatic used 126 cartridges that unfortunately produced very grainy photos that don't enlarge well at all.
I hope they provoke some measure of awareness of what urban renewal, neglect and greed can do to that which can't be replaced.
Over 100 photos, many of the pages include photos of corresponding rescued elements, though, some elements have no corresponding building photo.
Rescued Gargoyles, Chimera etc.
NOTE: The section that was formerly here is being totally revamped, around 100 images are being embedded into the individual buildings pages. I was finding many visitors seemed to be confused about what IS for sale, or entered sub-pages through a search engine and assumed these original antiques are for sale- they are not and in fact most of these photos of NYC are over 30 year old.
The organ section, and old prints section have been phased out entirely, and some of the now closed message board contents are being reworked into the rest of the site, and the blog.
To eliminate that confusion the site is being re-worked to focus more on my sculpture sales and more clearly differentiate the historic material from the 1970's from what is available to purchase today.
All thumbnail images open the full sized version and text pages in a new browser window by default.
TENEMENT FACTS:
Number of tenements in New York City, December 1, 1888: 32,390
Number built from June 1, 1888, to August 1, 1890: 3,733
Rear tenements in existence, August 1, 1890: 2,630
Total number of tenements as of August 1, 1890: 37,316
Est 100,000 by the 1910's when constructing this form of building was phased out.
Estimated population of tenements, August 1, 1890: 1,250,000
