Olde Good Things

This neighborhood is the perfect location for us, with many unique and inspiring architectural buildings in the area and with a reputation for being one of New York City’s cultural and intellectual hubs with Columbia University, Barnard College and Lincoln Center housed within its borders. Over the years, we’ve had many customers from this area who appreciate antique and architectural antiques and love our line of altered antique furnishings.

The Upper West Side resides between Central Park on the East side, the Hudson River on the west and West 59th Street and West 110th Street on the south and north sides, respectively. An affluent and primarily residential neighborhood, the Upper West Side is also home to such sights as Columbus Circle, Grant’s Tomb, and the Dakota apartment building where John Lennon lived.

Throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries, the area that would become the Upper West Side contained some of colonial New York’s most ambitious houses and properties, which would eventually be filled in with smaller suburbs. Many properties such as the Apthorp farm and other small villages were stretched along Bloomingdale Road, which today we know of as Broadway (also the street our new store is located on). These farms and villages would eventually be divided into building lots and absorbed into the city by 1868. During the creation and construction of Central Park from the 1850’s to the 1870’s, the Upper West Side became a rough and ragtag collection of squatters, boarding houses and rowdy taverns, eventually seeing a major turnaround in the 1890’s with the construction of the Ninth Avenue elevated train line and the relocation of Columbia University into the area.

The Upper West Side plays home to many unique apartment buildings and structures, especially along the Central Park West area. Buildings such as the English Victorian styled Dakota, the Art Deco Century Apartments and The Majestic, and the Moderne style Normandie all sit on the famous Central Park West. Many other buildings, in a multitude of pre-war styles ranging from Art Nouveau to Beaux-Arts and Belle Époque, sit within the Upper West Side. With the abundance of fascinating architecture in this area, it’s no wonder that many movies and television shows, such as Home Alone 2, Mad Men, 30 Rock and American Psycho have all used the Upper West Side as a backdrop to their stories.