Nick Carr of Scouting New York has some amazing pictures up of a building on 5 Beekman Street in NYC that has been boarded up for decades. The current owners hope to convert it into a hotel.
Here is the original NYTimes article from 1988 that he makes a reference too:
LIKE many New Yorkers, Rena M. Shulsky journeyed vicariously to the 1880’s through Jack Finney’s novel ”Time and Again,” whose climactic scene is set near City Hall, at Beekman and Nassau Streets.
She never imagined making the journey in person — to the same corner and the same era. Then one day, her father invited her to squeeze through an unmarked, child-sized doorway in a corridor of the 19th-century Temple Court office building, 5 Beekman Street, which the Shulsky family has owned for three generations.
On the other side of the threshold, entombed behind plaster walls from the 1950’s, was a nine-story atrium soaring up to a pyramidal skylight, ringed at every floor by delicate Victorian iron balustrades ornamented with flowers, wings, sunbursts, spikes and arabesques.
”I had no idea it existed,” Ms. Shulsky recalled. ”I crawled under and went back in time. For me, who’s this giant Jack Finney fan — you can imagine.” She hopes to reopen the atrium as part of a long-term renovation.
More coverage on City Room and Daily Intel. I wonder if Seattle has anything like this hiding around the downtown area.
