House of Collection

The second I heard about the House of Collection, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I knew I had to find a way to see inside of the 2,000-square-foot loft often called "a live-in cabinet of curiosities." Luckily, my mom and I were able to take a tour of the private apartment via the New York Adventure Club, and as soon as we walked through her front door, I felt at home with Paige Stevenson and her eclectic style. 

Stevenson moved into the then 5,000-square-foot loft almost 30 years ago, when Williamsburg was far from becoming the desirable neighborhood that it is today. She shared the former factory space with as many as 12 other people, but in 1996 the apartment was divided and Stevenson has lived alone or with a partner (and a few cats) ever since. She recently won a 12-year-long court battle to keep the property rent stabilized, and she told the Times in 2011 that she expected "to pay about $2,000 a month in rent."

Most of the pieces in Stevenson's home are found, gifted or donated. She has a preference for metal objects, and she has hundreds tools in various stages of rustiness hung in intricate displays above her couch and in her kitchen. There's a loose method to her madness: if something catches her eye, she'll keep it. She has taxidermy, old photographs, medical objects, mannequins, cash registers, chemistry glass, skulls, dolls, books, vintage clothing, a jungle of living plants and pretty much anything and everything else you can imagine in her ever-evolving collection.

You might not guess by her offbeat tastes in decor, but Stevenson is a bookkeeper by trade. She also rents the loft as an event space and had just finished up a movie shoot in the days before we visited. She sees the house as a gathering space for friends and strangers alike, and said that if you know the address, you're invited to the Easter and Thanksgiving pot-luck dinners that she hosts annually (my mom and I are very seriously considering taking her up on the offer). 

Stevenson gave us a guided tour, answered our questions and also let us explore on our own. You could spend days inside of the apartment and just scratch the surface of what she has collected. Someone on our tour asked her how she possible keeps up with all of the dusting and her answer was simple: she doesn't. Stevenson's tastes are obviously not for everyone, but I am enamored with people who live unapologetically on the margins of what society deems as "normal."  

I jump on any opportunity I get to see inside of someone's living space, and I think the way that people choose to live says a lot about who they are and what's important to them. New York City is full of interesting people packed into non-traditional spaces and I wish there was a way for me to take a peek inside of every single one of them. 

New York is also the perfect place to curate a collection of found objects—apartments as large as this loft are a rarity and stoop sales or taking a carload of donations to Goodwill are often too much of a hassle. I've found several excellent pieces in the trash that I've given a new life to, and I've had to pass on countless others simply because I don't have the space or the means to transport them. I'm glad there are people in the world like Paige Stevenson to give these discarded and overlooked objects a place to shine.

Philadelphia City Hall Tower Tour

Construction of Philadelphia's ornate, Second Empire-style City Hall began in 1871 and it wasn't finished until 30 years later. It's currently the largest municipal building in the country—the ground floor is made of 22-foot-thick solid granite and the 548-foot tower is the tallest masonry structure without a steel frame in the world. 

It wasn't until I was researching for this travel guide of Philadelphia that I discovered that the tower has an observation deck. I'm not afraid of heights and I love surveying cities from above, so I was eager to get back to Philly and take the tour. Tower tours are offered Monday-Friday 9:30am-4:15pm and only on "select Saturdays." We were in Philly for July 4th and our train didn't leave until 2pm the next day so I took a 10:15am tour on Thursday. 

The most difficult part of the tour is finding the visitors' center in City Hall—I wandered in and out of the ground floor before I finally found it. Tickets for the tower tour can be purchased in the gift shop, and be aware that they are extremely limited. Although the official closing hour is 4:15pm, the tower was closing at noon on Thursday, probably due to the heat. You have to meet an elevator operator on the 7th floor no later than 15 minutes before your scheduled tour time, and the extremely small elevator only holds four people (including the operator). 

The elevator operator asked if any of us were claustrophobic or afraid of heights and I lied when I said no to the former—enclosed spaces are not thrilling to me on a regular day, but in the extreme heat and humidity the tiny, airless elevator ride could not have been over soon enough for me. The inside of the tower itself is mainly just filled with support structures and a few pieces of communications equipment, but you pass behind the four, 26-foot-wide clock faces—bigger than Big Ben—as you ascend to the top. 

The observation deck is small and mostly enclosed but the 360 views of the city are spectacular. The deck sits right under the 37-foot-tall, 27-ton statue of Penn, one of 250 sculptures created by Alexander Milne Calder for City Hall. In 1894, the statue was hauled to the top of the tower in fourteen separate sections and it is still the largest statue to sit atop any building in the world. A gentleman's agreement dictated that no building in the surrounding skyline was to rise higher than the top of Penn's hat—an agreement that held for nearly 100 years, until 1986 with the construction of One Liberty Place. 

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City Hall Tower Tour
1400 John F Kennedy Blvd
Philadelphia, PA 19107
Tours every 15 minutes Mon-Fri, 9:30am-4:15pm and select Saturdays

Rowan Oak

When my dad told me that he was planning on us driving from Clarksdale to Tupelo, Mississippi, I immediately started looking up stops along the way. It's only a two-hour drive but I'm always on the lookout for interesting things to see on any roadtrip, no matter how short—it's always more about the journey, right? I didn't find much, but I'm always up for a historic home so we put Rowan Oak, located in Oxford, Mississippi, on the list.

Known as "The Bailey Place" when it was purchased by William Faulkner in 1930, Rowan Oak is a Greek revival house on 29 acres of cedar and hardwood trees. The home was built in the 1840s by Colonel Robert Sheegog, an Irish immigrant and Tennessee farmer. Faulkner renamed the house after the rowan tree, a symbol of peace and security. 

Faulkner, along with his wife and three children, lived at Rowan Oak until his death in 1962. While living at the house, Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1954. Anecdotes included in the house brochure make Faulkner sound like quite the pill. He fought with his daughter over her possession of a radio and he hated air conditioning so much he refused to have it in the house—the window unit in his wife's bedroom was installed the day after his funeral.

Faulkner's daughter Jill sold the house in 1972 to the University of Mississippi and you can take a self-guided tour for $5 (students get in free). The house is beautiful but feels lived-in in a way that Gilded-age "houses" like The Breakers in Newport never could. I love touring opulent mansions but I also love seeing places like Rowan Oak—it's historic and grand but it still feels like home for real people.

In fact, my favorite parts of the home were the ones that felt the most ordinary. In Faulkner's writing room, he actually wrote the plot outline for A Fable on the wall in graphite and red grease pencil. In a corner of the kitchen sits a rotary telephone, surrounded by handwritten phone numbers for family, friends and local businesses, including the hospital.

Of course I would move into the house in a heartbeat, but the grounds of Rowan Oak are the real attraction. There are several outbuildings on the property known as Bailey's Woods, including a detached kitchen, barn, servants' quarters, stable and multiple gardens. But it's the walkway leading up to the house that really stole my heart—lined with huge eastern red cedar trees, they were planted after a yellow fever epidemic swept through the South because it was believed that cedars had air cleansing properties.

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Rowan Oak
916 Old Taylor Road
Oxford, MS 38655
Summer Hours: June 1 through August 1, Mon through Sat, 10am-6pm, and Sun 1pm-6pm

St. Patrick's Old Cathedral

St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, completed in 1815 was the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York until 1897, when the now more well-known Saint Patrick's Cathedral opened uptown. Old St. Patrick's—a gothic-revival church and designated landmark since 1966—is located on Mulberry Street between Prince and Houston Streets. The cathedral complex includes a Federal-style building across the street that was once the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum and later the St. Patrick's Convent and Girls School; a graveyard—Manhattan's only Catholic cemetery; and catacombs beneath the church. 

We recently took a tour of the cathedral complex—although the church is still active, the only way to see the cemetery and catacombs is to pay for a tour. I'd been aware of the cemetery and had gazed at it longingly through the always-closed gates so I was excited to finally be able to see the early 1800s headstones up close. The cemetery is surrounded by a brick wall, which was also a designated landmark, in 1968.

Due to space restrictions, interments in the churchyard eventually stopped, but in 2013 they constructed new columbaria "intended primarily but not exclusively for the cremated remains of Roman Catholics." My main complaint about most tours is that I always feel rushed, and unfortunately we spent very little time in both north and south cemeteries.

The remains of one of the churchyard's most famous residents—The Venerable Pierre Toussaint, a former slave on his way to becoming the first African-American saint—were moved to the crypt below the main altar of St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. In addition to being one of New York Society's leading hairdressers, Toussaint sheltered orphans, fostered children and devoted his life to charity work. A headstone still marks the spot where Toussaint's remains were buried before they were moved to St. Patrick's, a place of honor normally reserved for bishops.

In 1866, a fire destroyed the interior of the church, which was rebuilt and re-opened on St. Patrick’s Day in 1868. Currently, services are given in English, Spanish, and Chinese and the church was awarded Basilica status by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010. If the side altar looks familiar, it's because it was the filming location of the famous baptism scene in The Godfather.

The crown jewel of the church is its pipe organ, the last remaining large, intact piece of its kind built by New Yorker Henry Erben. The nearly 2,500 pipes were carried by horse and carriage and installed by hand just after the Civil War. The organ is in need of a pricey restoration, and the non-profit organization Friends of the Erben Organ (honorary chair: Martin Scorsese) was formed to raise $2 million to ensure its preservation.  

The official name of the tour is the Catacombs by Candlelight, but once again I felt as if we didn't have nearly enough time to explore beneath the church (the tour and guide were great, I just require a lot of time to poke around). These catacombs aren't like the bone-filled niches of Europe, but more like the ones at Green-Wood Cemetery—underground tunnels lined with hermetically sealed crypts and marked with carved stones. There are 35 family crypts and five clerical vaults, in addition to the newly-built columbaria. 

Notable interments include: members of the Delmonico family, founders of Delmonico's, the first American restaurant to allow patrons to order from a menu; Countess Annie Leary, one of the only Catholics to be included in Mrs. Astor's "The 400," a list of fashionable socialites; and Tammany Hall boss and Congressman "Honest John" Kelly.

The tour concludes with a visit inside of the beautiful vault of General Thomas Eckert, a confidant and bodyguard of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation in Eckert's office, and after the war he became president of the Western Union. The walls and ceiling of his spacious vault—I'm not exaggerating when I say it's almost as big as my studio apartment—are lined with Guastavino tiles and the light fixtures still have working, original Edison light bulbs.

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St. Patrick's Old Cathedral
Corner of Mott and Prince Streets
New York, NY
Cemetery and catacombs accessible by tour only.

New Yorker Hotel

Recently we took an Untapped Cities "behind the scenes" tour of the New Yorker Hotel. The New Yorker Hotel was built in 1929 on 34th Street and 8th Avenue. It's 43-stories tall, 1-million square feet and has 1,083 rooms. The hotel is an Art Deco gem, with an enormous and iconic marquee sign that can be seen from miles away. I actually stayed at the New Yorker once when I visited the city with my friends years ago, but on this tour we got to see parts of the hotel usually off-limits to visitors.

One of the first places that we visited was the sky lounge and the rooftop. I'm not really afraid of heights but being 43-stories above the city on a windy, cold night was as scary as it was thrilling. The sign is crazy big when you're right next to it, and the different perspective was really fascinating. I think I could live here my entire life and still be wowed by the skyline—even Madison Square Garden manages to look charming from above.

We also got to explore the lower levels of the hotel, including remnants of the original DC power plant. When it was built, the hotel was powered by coal-fired steam boilers and generators in what was then the largest private power plant in the US—it was later modernized to AC power in the 60s, and now sits abandoned.

The best part of the tour, however, was seeing the entrance to a tunnel that once connected the hotel to the subway and Penn Station. The tunnel is blocked off now—and the New Yorker is now rebranded as a Wyndham hotel—but in my dreams I would be able to traverse the tunnel and magically emerge on the other side into the original Pennsylvania Station.

Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast

We had been planning to visit the Lizzie Borden house for a few years, and we finally made it happen as a stop on the way to Salem in October. Fall River, Massachusetts is about an hour and a half south of Salem, and about three hours northeast of New York City. The Bordens—Andrew and his second wife Abby, along with Andrew's daughters, Emma and Lizzie—lived at 92 Second Street in downtown Fall River from 1872 to 1892. The house has operated as a bed and breakfast since 1996, although we opted to just take a tour instead of staying overnight.

On Thursday, August 4, 1892, Abby and Andrew Borden were murdered with a hatchet in separate rooms of the house—Abby in an upstairs bedroom, and Andrew in the sitting room. Lizzie was tried and acquitted of the crime nearly a year later, and the murders remain unsolved. Lizzie and Emma moved out of the Second Street house but didn't go very far, moving to "The Hill" neighborhood, where Lizzie started going by Lisbeth. 

The house tour was really thorough and our tour guide was great. My only complaint is that our group was much too large, but we weren't surprised that it's a popular late-October destination. Almost none of the furnishings are original, but they're period-specific to what the Bordens may have had. There are a few artifacts scattered throughout the house, including replicas of Andrew and Abby's skulls (the originals were reburied after being exhumed for the trial), the dress Elizabeth Montgomery wore in "The Legend of Lizzie Borden," family photographs and a book once owned (and initialed) by Lizzie.

I knew the basics of the story before the tour and had my own theories, but after actually seeing the house I'm even more convinced that Lizzie did it. The trial itself was the first to be reported on a national level, and one of the first to use photographic evidence—it was basically the OJ Simpson case of the 1890s. The all-male jury couldn't accept that a woman was capable of such savagery, and in the absence of any real physical evidence, moved to acquit. Too much time has passed to ever really know if it was the right decision, but if you're curious, you could stay overnight and see if the Ouija board has any answers.

See also: Lizzie Borden's Grave

Lent-Riker-Smith House

Recently we took a tour of the Lent-Riker-Smith house, located in East Elmhurst, Queens. Built by Abraham Riker in 1656, when New York was still New Amsterdam, the house was one of many farmhouses owned by the Rikers (Rikers island was part of their farmland). In 1729, Abraham Lent (a Riker descendant) made additions to the house, and it was one of the first structures to be given landmark status after the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission was formed in the '60s.

Marion Duckworth Smith moved into the house when she married Michael Smith in the 80s, and she's lived there ever since, making the property the oldest privately owned residence in the borough of Queens and maybe even the entire city. Marion opens her home occasionally for tours to offset maintenance costs, and we signed up a few months ago for a Saturday at the end of September.

In addition to a very old, important and historical home, the tour features Marion's collections of antiques and oddities, and — most importantly — a backyard cemetery (deserving of its own post)! This was the holy trinity of things I look for in a tour, and the LRS house and Marion did NOT disappoint. Because of its location and relative obscurity, we thought we might be the only ones on the tour, but there were ten of us total, including five actual Rikers, who drove in from New Jersey.

Marion is as much of a draw as the house itself—she's a true New York character, and her collections and stories made the tour one of the best I've ever taken. It wasn't long after we entered the house that I realized that we shared a similar taste for the eccentric and macabre. She said she wasn't precious about portions of the house (the original two rooms are period-specific), and has filled them with collections of chalkware Snow Whites (given out as prizes at Coney Island), ventriloquist dummies and funeral items. I also noticed at least one glass eye, a skull from her mother's artist studio, nuns, priests, bulldogs and a mannequin hand from B. Altman's on Fifth Avenue.

Not only did the house come with a cemetery, but the property comprises more than an acre of land which certainly is a novelty in New York. The yard is slightly overgrown but in a secret-garden, whimsical way, and is filled with garden ornaments from all over—she even has two cows from Cow Parade and multiple set pieces from the original production of Cats. She also has real cats that roam the property—I counted at least six different ones while we were there.

I can't encourage you enough to make the trek out to Queens for a tour—come for the history, stay for the stories and buy a postcard or two to help Marion stay in the house she loves until it's time for her to move into the cemetery, where her mother, brother and husband (and 131 Rikers) are waiting.

The Players Club

We recently took an Untapped Cities-sponsored tour of the Players Club, a members-only social club founded in 1888 by famed Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth. Booth had the unfortunate distinction of also being the brother of John Wilkes Booth, who was also an actor—one whose career was overshadowed when he became Abraham Lincoln's assassin in 1865.

The Players Club doesn't just admit actors, in fact the entire idea of the club is to allow actors to socialize with people from other professions including prominent businessmen, writers, artists and many others in art- and non-art-related fields. The long list of famous current and past residents includes Mark Twain, Kevin Spacey, Rue McClanahan, Carol Burnett, Liza Minnelli, Walter Cronkite, Ethan Hawke and Jimmy Fallon. The Players Club didn't allow women to be fully participating members until 1989.

The building is located at 16 Gramercy Park, and its interior and part of its exterior were designed by Stanford White. The Club maintains some of the last remaining gaslights in the city and is neighbors with the National Arts Club. The interior is just as fancy as you'd imagine a private arts club to be, filled with portraits of past members and stocked with treasures from the acting world, including a real human skull used by Booth in his portrayal of Hamlet and various costumes and other props.

From the beginning, Booth retained an upper floor of the club as his private residence. He lived there until his death in 1893, and the room has remained just as he left it ever since. Our tour guide was really lovely, although two people were not allowed on our tour because they were wearing shorts—apparently a violation of the strict dress code. While I do have issues with the snooty exclusivity, I do appreciate a chance to peek into a world usually so foreign to me—especially one filled with interesting people, world-class art and even a few life/death masks.

Kentuck Knob + Falling Water

While the main reason for our recent Ohio-bound roadtrip was our friend Katie's wedding, Jim and I were both really looking forward to our tours of neighboring Frank Lloyd Wright houses, Kentuck Knob and Falling Water. Falling Water had been on my radar since college, and it's only a 3-hour drive from my hometown in Ohio. I'm not sure why I'd never made the trip, but I'm so glad that I finally did.

I hadn't heard of the lesser-known Kentuck Knob, but it's only 15 minutes from Falling Water and touring both made traveling a bit out of our way to the middle of nowhere totally worth it. Kentuck Knob was finished in 1956, designed by Wright after the Hagan family fell in love with their friends' house, Falling Water, and wanted a Wright creation of their own. The houses are very different in some ways, but similar in others. Both are built organically, honoring and integrating into their surroundings in interesting ways.

Kentuck Knob has only been sold once, from the Hagans to the current owner, Lord Palumbo in 1986. The house is currently filled with his various collections, including a few pieces of Wright-designed furniture from some of his other famous projects like the Imperial Hotel and Coonley Playhouse. The house sits on 80 acres above Uniontown in Western Pennsylvania, and Palumbo's sculpture collection is scattered about the grounds, which includes The Red Army installation and a piece of the Berlin Wall.

After Kentuck Knob, we headed to the star of the day: Falling Water. There were no photos allowed on our tour, but believe me when I say that it's breathtaking in ways I never thought a house could be. I had a basic knowledge of what to expect, but I was blown away by how emotional the house made me feel. It is just so incredibly beautiful and unlike anything I've ever seen. Our tour guide was really knowledgeable, and the tour is really thorough. Unlike Kentuck Knob, Falling Water is no longer privately owned—it was donated to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963 by Edgar Kauffman Jr., the owners' son.

Although the forecast called for rain, the weather cooperated for most of the afternoon. It did, however start to pour down rain just as our Falling Water tour was ending, affording us the opportunity to see falling water on Falling Water. We didn't witness any of the leaks that the house is notorious for, although I suppose having to set out a few buckets would be a small price to pay to live somewhere so life-changing.

Brooklyn Brewery

My uncle was in town this weekend, and Saturday was his birthday. To say he loves beer is an understatement, so we planned to take a tour of the Brooklyn Brewery. The brewery is located near the waterfront in Williamsburg, and was founded in 1988. The tours are free, but there was some initial drama involving tickets—we didn't know we needed them, or where to get them, and after waiting in two lines were told the tour was sold out until a kind employee took pity on us and let us join the one in progress.

The tour is short and a little uneventful—I can see why it's free—but the brewery has an interesting history and essentially brought brewing back to Brooklyn after the industry had all but disappeared from the borough. I've always been a fan of their Milton Glaser-designed logo (he still designs all of the labels) and the story of how it came to be is pretty great.

In addition to making/bottling a portion of the beer in Williamsburg (another portion is made upstate) there is a tasting room attached to the brewery where you can try out all the different varieties. It's actually pretty cheap, by New York standards (about $5/beer) and the ones we tried were all great. It was really crowded, but the line moved quickly—you can also take your beer with you on the tour, which I think should be standard for every tour I take from now on.

Bartow-Pell Mansion

I've been sorting through all of my photos recently and realizing there are places I meant to write about, but never did. The Bartow-Pell Mansion is one of those things—Trent, Alisha and I toured it almost a year ago, before continuing on to explore City Island.

The mansion is located in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, and is (sort of) on the way to City Island. The estate dates back to 1654, but the current house was built between 1836-1842, sold to the city in 1888 and opened as a museum in 1946. To get there, you take a bus from the end of the 6 line, which is the same bus that, if you stay on it, will take you out to City Island.

When we arrived, we were a little early for the first tour, so the tour guide asked us if we liked cemeteries. Of course Trent and Alisha's heads whipped around to look at me, and I was already saying something resembling "YASSSSS." Turns out there's a Pelham family cemetery down a little path in the back of the house, so we spent some time there before our tour started.

Once we were back in the house, we basically had a private tour (

pro-tip: always be early

) and free reign to ask questions and take photos. I loved the clover-and-lion head carpeting that covered the beautiful spiral staircase, and most of the gorgeous furniture pieces had claw feet, which I want on everything I own.

As if a surprise cemetery wasn't enough, there were also two really wonderful pieces of embroidered mourning art hanging in the house that I fell in love with. The grounds were lovely and peaceful, with fountains, large iron gates and a stable house with carriages and (faux) horses. I love places like the Bartow-Pell mansion—far enough from the city to make you feel like you're in another world, but close enough to get to with just a little bit of effort.

Ellis Island Hospital: Part 4

I have thought about the incredible Ellis Island hospital tour many, many times since we took it in January. I don't imagine any tour topping it for a very long time—it was just so, so good. I've already shared my photos from inside of the abandoned hospital complex, the lonely chairs that I fell in love with and the beautiful JR art installation, but I never shared my photos from the hospital grounds.

The south side of the island isn't very large but it packs a lot into a relatively limited space. The main building, which houses the immigration museum, was restored in the 90s but the south side buildings remain in various states of decay and have never been open to visitors until now (and only as part of the hard hat tour that we took). It's kind of awesome to be able to see the unrestored buildings in the same view as the restored main hall—it's like a real-life before-and-after show.

The broken and boarded up windows, piles of forgotten construction materials, ivy-covered brick and even the lonely bird house all added to the eerie feeling of the complex. As much as I loved the buildings themselves, it's really the views from the grounds—of the Statue of Liberty, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and Lower Manhattan—that make the trip to Ellis Island a must-do.

I don't think I'll be able to stop thinking about this tour for a very long time (like, probably never) and I keep wondering if I should just pull the trigger and book another ticket. As cold as our tour was, I loved that we got to see it in the snow and bright winter light but I'm already dreaming of getting the chance to explore these buildings in the spring.

Cathedral of St. John the Divine: Vertical Tour

I have been to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine many times—on tours before I lived here, to see the Xu Bing exhibit and I often stop in while I'm on a walk around my neighborhood since I live so close. I am very much not a religious person, but I've always loved grandiose churches and St. John the Divine is one of the grandest. It's tied with the Liverpool Church for largest Anglican cathedral, and it is the fourth largest Christian church in the world. Its construction was halted by the start of World War II and has remained unfinished ever since.

You can tour the interior at your leisure, but to go up inside of the cathedral you have to take what they call a "vertical tour." Francesca, Trent and I took the 12pm tour on Saturday and I highly recommend it. Our tour guide was knowledgeable and interesting, giving us a history of the architecture and construction, as well as explaining some of the intricate stained glass themes.

We climbed to a few different levels of the church via a very tight spiral stone staircase and the views were incredible. There were a few stops on balconies outside of the church, and the view of snowy rooftops in Morningside Heights and the Upper West side was perfect.

We even got to see the attic of the cathedral, which protects the vaulting from the elements and offered a behind-the-scenes look at the back of the famous Guastavino tiling on the ceiling of the church. When you're standing on the main floor of the cathedral it's hard to get a good feeling of just how soaring everything is, and it was nice to get to experience it all from a different perspective. We also got to see some of the amazing stained glass up close, pieces that you can barely see at all from the floor. Like I said, I'm not much for religion, but I'm grateful that if I ever did suddenly decide that I needed a place to worship, a place as beautiful as St. John the Divine is just a few blocks away.

Ellis Island Hospital: Part 3

During our tour of the abandoned hospital complex on the South Side of Ellis Island we were also lucky enough to be able to see the art exhibit "Unframed—Ellis Island" by JR scattered throughout the buildings. Life-size photographs of Ellis Island immigrants are pasted all around the complex—on broken windows, rusty lockers, walls—all interacting with their environments in interesting and surprising ways.

Usually I'm wary about installation pieces, especially if the building is something so extraordinary that it doesn't need any further embellishment, but this exhibit was spot-on. There were just enough of the pieces to keep you hunting for them, and to make them compelling when you did catch a glimpse as you turned the corner. Part of this has to do with the actual immigrants themselves—it's hard to beat the impact of seeing the people in situations and rooms in which they may have actually been.

Like all of the abandoned chairs, seeing the photographs really helped to humanize the spaces and allow us to better imagine what life must have been like when the buildings were operational. Our tour guide said that she had had descendants of some of the people in the photographs on her tours, which is pretty awesome. I've read quite a bit about Ellis Island, but this tour and exhibit left me wanting to know even more about the millions of people who passed through here and all of their fascinating stories.

Ellis Island Hospital: Part 2

As I was looking through my (massive amount of) photos from the incredible Ellis Island hospital tour that I took recently, I kept noticing chairs. Sometimes alone, sometimes in piles, sometimes neatly arranged, sometimes missing legs or splintered or covered in peeling paint—there were chairs everywhere.

There wasn't much in the way of actual objects in any of the buildings, apart from toilets, sinks, cabinets and other fixtures that were still attached in some way but there's something about an empty chair in an abandoned space that strikes me as especially creepy. Furnishings of any kind help make a space feel lived in and make it easier to imagine what the place was like when it was operational.

Some of the chairs felt purposeful, others felt tossed aside, but they always made me stop and look a little longer and a little differently than I might have in a completely empty space. Some even looked like they were just patiently waiting for their former occupants to return at any minute.

My favorite was actually a little stool—worn, cracked, covered in dust and missing half of one leg but still standing somewhat impossibly upright, basking in the bright sunlight.

Ellis Island Hospital: Part 1

On Saturday Jim, Katie, Grace and I took a tour of the abandoned hospital complex on the south side of Ellis Island. I had booked our tickets the day they became available—back on balmy October 1st. Saturday was very cold, but brilliantly sunny, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that the tour was the best tour I've ever taken in my entire life.

This was due partly to us lucking into a private tour when the other people scheduled for our time never showed up, partly due to our incredibly knowledgable, friendly and all-around awesome tour-guide, and partly due to the fact that the buildings are in such a beautiful state of decay.

The sunlight streaming in from open doors, broken windows and holes in the ceilings made every single angle more interesting than the last and as usual I took more photos than I thought humanly possible. I have a few more posts planned for the grounds and a wonderful art installation that was sprinkled around the buildings, but these are my favorites from the interior spaces.

The complex reminded me so much of Eastern State Penitentiary, and as much as I adored our tour-guide, I do wish I had had free reign and more time to spend taking photos. It's probably better that I had some parameters, however, because I most definitely would have just never left.

Our tour was long—even longer than the allotted 90 mins because our guide was that awesome—but I could have spent days inside of the crumbling autopsy room, mortuary, doctors' quarters, laundry, infectious disease wards and all of the other fascinating corridors winding around the island.

Surprising no one, my favorite room was the autopsy room with its four huge body freezers, sinks, lights and theater-like set-up. Ellis Island was a state-of-the-art medical facility and teaching hospital in its heyday and was one of the largest public health hospitals in the US.

In 1930 the hospital closed, and the entire complex was abandoned in 1954—this is the first time that the public has ever been allowed to tour the buildings. Some of the complex is still far too unstable to allow visitors and everyone must sign a waiver and wear a hardhat before beginning the tour.

I would absolutely take the tour again in a heartbeat. Even if the ticket price might seem pricey ($43), all of that money goes to Save Ellis Island, a group whose mission it is to help protect and preserve the historic hospital complex.