Spending your lunchbreak in Midtown with a prostitute just got a little harder: the Elk Hotel, one of the last pay-by-the-hour flophouses that used to be so prevalent around Times Square, has bedded its last strung-out pilgrim. Jeremiah's Vanishing New York acted on a tip and called to confirm: "We're closed. No more hotel no more. For good." We asked the man who answered the phone at the Elk what would replace it. "No idea, no clue. Have a nice day." more ›

We've spent the past few weeks looking back through Steven Siegel's photo archive, which beautifully retells the city's story over the past three decades, from the South Bronx to Bushwick. From utter destruction to Disneyfication. Turns out that Siegel also filmed what was going on throughout all that time, and his videos are no less spectacular. You can watch them all at his YouTube page (some even tell a story), and our favorites are below: more ›

New York City has a long, long history of great writers and today we celebrate what would have been the 150th birthday of one of its greatest: Edith Wharton. Born on 23rd Street in 1862, Wharton (nee Edith Newbold Jones) was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and, along with her friend Henry James, remains one of the best Old New York writers going. A wicked, wicked writer whose style and settings, as the Times pointed out this weekend, are currently enjoying a renaissance thanks to a little something called Downton Abbey, is definitely worth revisiting. more ›

The old promotional videos about New York City are pretty amazing, as we saw with this one focusing on Greenwich Village. Now a new one has been unearthed, filmed in 1962 by the Equitable Life Assurance Society. It includes the building of their new headquarters, complete with destruction porn of old structures. The narrator explains, "Change just for the sake of change is not the purpose in the constant rebuilding and expansion, rather it is an endless effort to keep up with her people, their ideas, their energies." It actually all sounds a little... Ayn Rand. more ›

New research contends that it's not just the Lower East Side's distinctive architecture and character that are in danger — but also the neighborhood's unique dialect. Younger LES residents whose families have lived in the neighborhood for decades no longer speak with the recognizable inflection of older generations, according to a New York University linguistics student. more ›

In 1947, The New Yorker published a ten page profile on an Upper East Side grocer named Harry Dubin, who was one of the first guys in the neighborhood to get a TV. The article's author spent time with Dubin and his family, observing how the salt of the earth received this technological marvel. But with no one around to reblog it, the article was forgotten for decades—until 1993, when writer Jeff Kisseloff rediscovered it and, on a whim, decided to look up Harry Dubin and request an interview. Kismet, and these charming photos, ensued, eventually leading to an exhibit at The Museum of the City of New York! As Kisseloff tells it: more ›

In a story that reads like it was ripped from the headlines 80 years ago, a Midtown shoeshiner got into a brawl with a passerby yesterday who didn't want to hear that his kicks were dirty. The fight started at the corner of 47th Street and Sixth Avenue when the passerby objected to Don Ward's offer for a $5 deep polish and punched the 43-year-old shoeshiner. "[He] took his anger out on me because of his own dirty shoes," Ward told the Post. After the fisticuffs, the pair — as is only fitting in squabbles involving shoeshiners — spat at each other until cops arrived. more ›

As Andrew Sullivan simply stated, "Say goodbye to the rest of your day." Google is now hosting an exhausting millions of images from LIFE's archives, "stretching from the 1750s to today." Here are a few NYC gems, and if you're looking for more of old New York, we'd suggest having some search keywords in mind to make it a bit less overwhelming! more ›

With the Bowery Hotel now open, Gothamist thought it was worth taking one final look at the Bowery of the 1970s and '80s through the lens of Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York. more ›

1. From the Gothamist Newsmap: A check cashing joint robbery in Brooklyn, a confined space rescue in the Bronx, and an evidence search in Queens
2. Ugh, a lawyer asked a client for a blow job in return for taking her case; the client is trying to sue him but says the Manhattan DA's office won't take the case, even though she recorded the lawyer admitting he propositioned her!
3. Gowanus Lounge predicts the Red Hook will be at the center of Brooklyn's 2007 development fights
4. Six year old Aidan Fraser, whose father died in the World Trade Center when he was a baby, left Montefiore Hospital today after extensive surgery
5. The Ricky Van Veen way to losing weight includes electronics and various sorts of memberships to Netflix and a gym
6. Ha! With Nascar's TV ratings falling, having a track in Staten Island becomes more desired because of those hot NYC ratings
7. Old New York is being dug out in Lower Manhattan
8. And the Fort Greene ice age rock is in its new Queens home - Forgotten NY spied it!

In the year 1882 one Hyman Sarner, a clothier, who owned several lots on East 82nd Street, wished to build apartment houses on his property, which extended to within a few feet of Lexington Avenue. On the Lexington Avenue side was a very long and very narrow strip of land, absolutely valueless, he thought, for any building purpose, unless taken in conjunction with adjoining land. more ›

The New York Marble Cemetery, smack between Second and Third Streets and Avenues, is gem of Old New York hidden in the East Village. Not to be confused with its sister cemetery, the New York City Marble Cemetery which you can actually see from the street, the NYMC is the first non-sectarian cemetery in the city. It opened in 1830 and holds over 2,000 people in it's vaults. It is also the last place in Manhattan where a person could still be legally buried (the last burial was in 1937 and if you want in, uh, your family has to own a vault). more ›

Old New York institutions are, of course, always moving, changing and getting run over; it's the nature of the city to be constantly abandoning its past. Nonetheless, the fact that the odor-iffic old-school Fulton Fish Market will be leaving Lower Manhattan in June seems a major shift. more ›