City Beautiful Blog

When the United Nations chose New York for its permanent headquarters, it faced an extraordinary challenge: how do you design a home for an organization meant to represent the world? The answer was quite ambitious: the UN brought together some of the greatest architectural minds of the twentieth century and asked them to create while cooperating. The result was a unique expe...

Along the East River in Manhattan’s Turtle Bay neighborhood stands one of New York’s most unusual architectural complexes: the United Nations Headquarters.

The complex stretches from First Avenue to the East River, between East 42nd and East 48th Streets. Although lo...

The glorious Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, connecting Staten Island and Brooklyn, marks the entrance to New York Harbor. Nearly every cruise ship and many of the largest container ships arriving at the Port of New York and New Jersey must pass beneath its span.

A beautiful, head-turning façade on Fifth Avenue at 48th Street belongs to one of New York’s most venerable publishing houses –  Scribner’s. Scribner Book Store was located on the ground floor, while the publishing company’s offices occupied the floors above. The buildin...

In 1896, New York got a new kind of attraction: a department store so enormous, so extravagant, and so ambitious that it was designed to be a destination in its own right.

Siegel-Cooper wasn’t simply a place to buy things. It was a “shopping resort”—a place where you could eat, send a telegram, make a telephone call, exchange foreign currency,...