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Blog Posts by Subject: Real Estate

Make Your Move

There is a good chance that you are starting your summer off in a new home. May, which has been referred to as National Moving Month, kicked off the relocation season. Anyone who has ever moved knows that it is a very involved process. It is so involved, that at times (perhaps while figuring out pet transportation or carrying boxes full of books), you might want to rethink the whole thing. Flooded basement filled with zombies? A wacky obstacle you might rather live with instead of moving.

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Ghost Light: Illuminating Our City's Theaters: RKO Coliseum

A thing of beauty is a joy forever... — Keats

(quoted in opening night program, B. S. Moss' Coliseum Theatre, 1920)

The end of 2011 also brought the quiet demise of the last movie theater in Washington Heights, Coliseum Cinemas. Known to most residents as the RKO Coliseum, the large theater, occupying the entire corner of 181st and Broadway, has been a fixture of the neighborhood for over 90 years. As the community now debates the future of the Coliseum and nostalgia starts to kick in, let’s open this theater's historical file, found among the rich collections of the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the New York Public 

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You are here: 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue in 1857

I am at the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. According to plate 78 of my map atlas—Williams Perris’s 1857 “Maps of the City of New York”—the massive (2) block long stone structure at the southwest corner of this Manhattan intersection is not the grand Beaux Arts NYPL Schwarzman Building but the Distributing Reservoir of the Croton Aqueduct Department.

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