1920

Manhattan: Park Avenue - 41st Street

Pershing Square, Park Avenue from 41st to 42nd Streets, looking west at the Hotel Belmont (1906-31) from the vacant lot where the Grand Union Hotel used to stand and where the Pershing Square building will be erected. The name Pershing Square, after General Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, was applied to this block about the time of the Armistice. The Pershing Square viaduct, shown here, conducted automobile traffic from Park Avenue and 40th Street across 42nd Street and around the left side of the Grand Central Station to Vanderbilt Avenue and 45th Street. As shown here it is quite new. The covered stairway coming up out of the vacant lot in the foreground is an entrance to the new Lexington Avenue Interborough Subway, opened in the summer of 1918. On the S.W. corner of 41st Street may be seen part of the old Murray Hill Hotel; and west on 42nd Street the Hotel Manhattan on the N. W. corner of Madison Avenue, later to be remodelled into an office building and uptown office for the National City Bank. The small building on the N. E. corner of Madison Avenue and 42nd Street is shortly to be demolished and replaced by the Liggett Drug building. About 1920. Gift of E.M. Jenks.

Photo from the New York Public Library - Milstein Collection