A former insane asylum despised by Nelly Bly and Charles Dickens is now fashionable apartments.

On this island, you suck away your garbage via an elaborate pneumatic tube system.

One of only two commuter aerial tramways in the United States.

This Fifth Avenue church has long been the favored worshiping place of Broadway actors and vaudeville performers.

The site of the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

This 19th century brick building in Brooklyn stands out like the anachronistic landmark that it is.

Built hundreds of years ago this downtown iron barrier once protected a much despised king.

Wall Street has a new heroine, a bronze statue of a small but fierce girl.

American bison herd descending directly from a Bronx Zoo breeding program that saved the species from extinction.

A sculpture of a salmon swimming through a brick building.

The first statue of Christ sleeping on a bench in the United States confused its affluent parish.

A winding district gerrymandered into the shape of a mantis.

Formerly the most gerrymandered district in the U.S., it twisted and turned along racial borders.

A dilapidated dock tells the story of Titanic’s missed arrival.

This historic building housed the surviving crew members of the Titanic, who were left destitute after the wreck.

Down a stairway in the East Village, you could once read a plaque describing an alternate history of a fictional version of Manhattan.

A partially hidden wall graffitied by spectators of the 1976 Bicentennial, recently rediscovered.

A reminder to choose water over wine since 1888.

Monument to a forgotten NYC disaster that claimed the lives of 1,000.

One of the few remaining American elm trees in New York’s Tompkins Square Park was the birthplace of a new religion.

Salute the leader of the proletariat.

One of only two remaining Victorian-era greenhouses in New York.

A mass grave for victims of one of the city’s worst fires.

A Manhattan courthouse hides a small but scathing memorial to Holocaust injustice.