Postcard Thursday: Lost Landmarks

The Leonard Jerome mansion.

The New York Merchandise Mart, which replaced the Jerome mansion

Yesterday, Curbed NY ran a story that James wrote about two New York City landmarks that were demolished in the 1960s: the Leonard Jerome mansion on Madison Square and 71 Pearl Street, a commercial building in the Financial District.

While it's not surprising that 71 Pearl was never part of a picture-postcard view (and, in fact, James was able to find only one photo of it, below), it was a little surprising that the Jerome mansion, which later housed the Union and Manhattan clubs, never warranted a postcard image.

The building in the center (slightly obscured by the El tracks) is 71 Pearl Street. Notice the arched windows on the second floor, the basis for its landmark designation.

After searching our own archives and coming up short, we looked through dozens of postcards of Madison Square hoping to find an inadvertent image of the Jerome mansion. Here's the only one we discovered:

Courtesy of the exhibition "Flatiron High and Low." (https://vanalen.org/projects/flatiron-high-and-low/)

If you look just to the right of the tower of Madison Square Garden, you can see the roof of the Jerome house peeking over the treeline.

Read James's entire story about these two demolished landmarks at http://curbed.com/archives/2015/04/29/how-some-of-nycs-first-landmarked-buildings-became-rubble.php.

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Explore more NYC history in

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,
you can order it from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or
from independent bookstores across the country.

And, of course, Inside the Apple is available at fine bookstores everywhere.