Never Mind The Title

Max Hubacher, on December 21, 1954, titled this photo “New York City: Third Avenue Elevated”: And, sure enough, there’s the el over Third Avenue on the right. The small park being enjoyed only by pigeons is Cooper Square, where (if you are heading south to north) the Bowery splits into Third Avenue (on its proper line) and Fourth Avenue (on a temporary diagonal that runs up to Union Square, where it straightens out). A large chunk of the Third Avenue el’s tracks south of 7th Street were over the Bowery. Anyway, let’s move on to more interesting topics. The building is the 1853-1859 Cooper Union Foundation Building, for a long time the only building of the college. It’s famous for its role at the school, for being the location of one Abraham Lincoln’s great speeches, and for other important speeches in its big auditorium. It’s also famous for being one of the first buildings in the US to use wrought iron floor beams, for having an early form of terra-cotta vault floor between those…