Clearpost.online It's your post, so post it!

You can’t go on a walk with a serious enthusiast of New York history without hearing the stories behind at least a few notable, beautiful, or downright strange buildings. Yet most longtime New Yorkers, famed for tuning out their surroundings to better strive for their goals of the day, tend not even to acknowledge the structures liable to catch the attention of out-of-towners. Take 58 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights: “From the outside, it looks like your typical townhouse,” says urban explorer Cash Jordan in his video above — but then you notice its blacked-out windows, bunker-like metal cladding, and apparently un-openable door.

Though it was indeed a townhouse when first built in 1847, 58 Joralemon Street was hollowed out and converted into one subway-system vent back in 1907. But the buildings right on either side remain residences, one of which, as Jordan finds, sold not long ago for $6 million.

In a co*pletely different, more isolated context stands the Strecker Memorial Laboratory on Roosevelt Island. Built in 1892 as a laboratory for City Hospital, it opened as “the first institution in the nation for pathological and bacteriological research,” an activity it makes sense to keep apart from a dense urban environment. Abandoned in the nineteen-fifties, it later became another subway facility, specifically a power conversion substation.

Jordan also visits a fake building well out on Pier 34, and one that also provides a function essential to New York transit: ventilating the smoke and exhaust out of the Holland Tunnel. Owned and operated by public agencies, these structures perform well-documented and entirely non-secret functions. The same can’t be said of the last and most striking fake building Jordan introduces, a windowless Brutalist tower constructed in 1969 at 33 Thomas Street in Lower Manhattan. Owned by AT&T, it seems once to have been a telephone switching station, but has lately been rumored to be a “huge doomsday bunker.” That’s one theory, anyway, and the building’s sinister appearance could inspire countless others. Not that many locals are imagining them, obeying as they do one of the central co*mandments of Manhattan: don’t look up.

Related content:

The Story of the Flatiron Building, “New York’s Strangest Tower”

New York’s Lost Skyscraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tower

An Introduction to the Chrysler Building, New York’s Art Deco Masterpiece, by John Malkovich (1994)

The Oldest House in New York City: Meet the Wyckoff House (1652)

Architect Breaks Down Five of the Most Iconic New York City Apartments

A 3D Animation Shows the Evolution of New York City (1524 — 2023)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.