On December 5, 2020 at about 5:00am, a fire broke out at 116 Second Avenue, a neo-Grec tenement. The six-alarm blaze spread to the 1892 Middle Collegiate Church next door to the south. Nearly 200 firefighters were dispatched and while four suffered minor injuries, thankfully the human toll did not go beyond that. However, the […]
In the years before the abolition of slavery in New York State in 1827 and the Civil War, New York was a hotbed of both pro-slavery and anti-slavery sentiment. The latter group consisted of both prominent African-American institutions and individuals (mostly associated with churches) who organized economically, politically, and socially against slavery, and whites who […]
As part of NYCLandmarks50, the celebration of this year’s 50th Anniversary of the adoption of the NYC Landmarks Law in 1965, we took a look at some of the many and varied individual landmarks in our neighborhood. On October 13, 2009 the Ralph and Ann E. Van Wyck Mead House (later Isaac T. Hopper Home […]
As Off the Grid chronicled last year, today is the anniversary of New York City’s draft riots, five days of rioting, looting, burning, and wanton violence that erupted after the Federal government instituted the Draft Act of 1863, the first instance of compulsory service in the federal military services. The riots began on July 13, […]
