Landmark sights in New York City
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Ellis Island
An icon of mythical proportions for the descendents of those who passed through here, this island and its hulking building served as New York’s main immigration station from 1892 until 1954, processing the amazing number of 12,000 individuals daily, from countries including Ireland, England, Germany and Austria. The process involved getting the once-over by doctors, being assigned new names if their own were too difficult to spell or pronounce, and basically getting the green light to start their new, hopeful and often frighteningly difficult lives here in the teeming city of New York. In its later years, after WWI and during the paranoia of the ‘Red Scare’ in this…
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Fillmore East
Visit the site of the long-defunct Fillmore East, a seriously big-time, 2000-seat live-music venue run by promoter Bill Graham from 1968 to 1971, where the Who premiered their rock opera Tommy. In the ’80s the space was transformed into the Saint – the legendary, 5000-sq-ft dance club that kicked off a joyous, drug-laden, gay disco culture that continues today through a phenomenon known as circuit parties.
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Merchants’ Gate
Scattered among the many natural sculptures otherwise known as trees are a host of wonderful, freestanding, crafted works of art. If you enter the park at the Merchants’ Gate, you’ll see the mighty Maine Monument, a tribute to the sailors killed in the mysterious explosion in Havana Harbor in 1898 that sparked the Spanish-American War.
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Flatiron Building
Built in 1902, the 20-story Flatiron Building, designed by Daniel Burnham, has a uniquely narrow triangular footprint that resembles the prow of a massive ship, and a traditional beaux arts limestone facade, built over a steel frame, that gets more complex and beautiful the longer you stare at it. Best viewed from the traffic island north of 23rd St between Broadway and Fifth Ave, this unique structure dominated the plaza back in the skyscraper era of the early 1900s. In fact, until 1909 it was the world’s tallest building.
The construction of the Flatiron building (originally known as the Fuller Building) coincided with the proliferation of mass-produced picture…
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CBGB
See what’s become of CBGB, the famous music venue, opened in 1973 and shuttered in 2006, that launched punk rock via the Ramones. Today, not shockingly, it’s a John Varvatos boutique, where racks of rock-inspired $3000 leather jackets have supplanted scraggly headbangers. The old walls of fading posters and wild graffiti, though, remain untouched.
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Scholars’ Gate
Scattered among the many natural sculptures otherwise known as trees are a host of wonderful, freestanding, crafted works of art. At the Scholars’ Gate, there is a small plaza dedicated to Doris Chanin Freedman, the founder of the Public Art Fund, where you can see a new sculpture every six months or so.
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Umberto's Clam House
Mulberry St is still the heart of the Little Italy ’hood and the home of landmarks such as Umberto’s Clam House, where mobster Joey Gallo was shot to death in the ’70s.
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Dime Savings Bank
At a point where DeKalb Ave meets the Fulton St Mall sits the neo-classical Dime Savings Bank building from 1908. The interiors feature elaborate coffered ceilings and Corinthian columns crafted from red marble. It’s now a working branch of the Chase bank, but you can still pop into the lobby for a gander. No pictures allowed.
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Times Square
Love it or hate it, the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Ave (better known as Times Square) is New York City's hyperactive heart; a restless, hypnotic torrent of glittering lights, bombastic billboards and raw urban energy. It's not hip, fashionable or in-the-know, and it couldn't care less. It's too busy pumping out iconic, mass-marketed NYC – yellow cabs, golden arches, soaring skyscrapers and razzle-dazzle Broadway marquees. This is the New York of collective fantasies – the place where Al Jolson 'makes it' in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, where photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt famously captured a lip-locked sailor and nurse on V-J Day in 1945, and where…
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Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower
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