Photos courtesy of New York State Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation

The National Park Service this month placed a Staten Island farmhouse once owned by Frederick Law Olmsted on the National Register of Historic Places. Formerly part of a 130-acre farm, the property, known as the Olmsted-Beil House, is significant for the role it played in Olmsted’s discovery of landscape design and parks as a public good, which later influenced his ideas for Central Park and Prospect Park. Despite its designation as a city landmark in 1967, the house, while intact, has deteriorated over the years and requires significant restoration work.

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Dorrance Brooks Square Historic District, St. Marks United Methodist Church. Image courtesy of NY State Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

Gov. Andrew  Cuomo announced on Friday that the New York State Board for Historic Preservation has recommended adding 18 properties, resources, and districts to the State and National Registers of Historic Places. The new nominations include the Upper West Side home of author and civil rights activist James Baldwin, the Dorrance Brooks Square Historic District and the former 32nd Precinct Station House complex in Harlem, and the Fourth Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in addition to 14 other nominated places throughout the state.

Find out how New York continues to recognize varied historic places

Photos via Public Domain Pictures and Flickr cc

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced yesterday that New York City’s Central Park-adjacent monument to Christopher Columbus has been listed on the State Register of Historic Places by the New York State Board for Historic Preservation. Cuomo also recommended the 76-foot rostral column statue, erected in 1892 by the city’s Italian-American community, for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. The statue was the subject of controversy earlier this year after violent white supremacist groups in Charlottesville, Virgina protested the city’s plan to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee. Mayor Bill De Blasio announced the statue would remain, following a 90-day review of the city’s monuments by a mayoral advisory commission.

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The Ramones outside of CBGB, photo via CBGB

On August 16, 1974, four men dressed in leather motorcycle jackets and Converse high-tops hit the stage at CBGB, an iconic East Village dive bar, for the very first time. After this debut performance, the Ramones, who hailed from Forest Hills, Queens, became the first regulars at CBGB, a spot known for the cutting edge punk rock musicians that played there, like Talking Heads, Patti Smith and Blondie. In the year 1974 alone, the Ramones played there over 70 times.

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This flexible one-bedroom duplex at 49 Downing Street has two claims to fame: the Greenwich Village stable house in which it resides is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and Yoko Ono once called the penthouse home. This unit’s current owner has lived in the space since 2006, and now it’s on the market for $1.975 million.

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It’s hard to imagine a place as crowded and cosmopolitan as New York City once being filled with the clip-clop of equine hooves, but at the turn of the century it is estimated there were 130,000 horses working in Manhattan—more than 10 times the number of taxicabs on the streets here today! In most cases, the stables that housed our four-legged friends have long since been razed to make way for buildings more suitable to modern commercial enterprise or human occupancy.

Fortunately, the Feuchtwanger Stable located at 159 Carlton Avenue in Fort Greene didn’t meet a similar fate. Nearly a century after its construction in 1888, this gorgeous Romanesque Revival building was designated by the National Register of Historic Places and subsequently underwent a stunning condo conversion now home to a lovely one-bedroom apartment.

Read on to see one stable that survived