{"id":350368,"date":"2026-09-18T17:34:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T17:34:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/350368\/"},"modified":"2026-09-18T17:34:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T17:34:09","slug":"nyc-relics-the-strange-secrets-hiding-in-plain-sight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/350368\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC Relics: The Strange Secrets Hiding in Plain Sight"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York City has always been a city in motion \u2014 forever reinventing itself, tearing down the old to make room for whatever comes next<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Over time, the once-ubiquitous elevated trains disappeared underground. Horses gave way to automobiles. Factories and warehouses became coveted lofts. Neighborhoods changed names, faces and fortunes.<\/p>\n

But the city that never sleeps, as historians would agree, is terrible at letting go completely. <\/p>\n

Look closely and you\u2019ll find the ghosts of its former selves still woven into the cityscape<\/a>: tiny signs cemented into buildings that once told elevated-train passengers where they were, metal stars quietly holding brick buildings together and a park wall that owes part of its existence to a neighborhood goat.<\/p>\n

From horse poop-scraping fixtures to a fence that once protected a king, The Post rounded up some of NYC\u2019s strangest, hidden antiques, hiding in plain sight. As the weather changes and the leaves soon start falling, finding these hidden relics across NYC makes for a perfect fall outing.<\/p>\n

The little metal ghosts of horse-powered New York<\/p>\n

The metal fixtures tucked beside stoops may look like decorative leftovers from a more ornate New York, but they once had a decidedly less glamorous purpose: scraping horse manure off kicks before entering the brownstone.<\/p>\n

Bootscrapers, considered New York City relics, seen on West 11th Street. Tamara Beckwith\/NY Post<\/p>\n

Bootscrapers are a great example of something New Yorkers still walk past without knowing what it is, according to NYC tour guide, writer and historian Nicky Shapiro<\/a>, 28, who runs his own company, Nicky Tours.<\/p>\n

Shapiro, who regularly posts on social media about the city\u2019s forgotten<\/a> architectural oddities for his multigenerational audience, said modern Big Apple residents may think the city is dirty now, but 19th-century Manhattan had a particularly messy transportation problem: horses.<\/p>\n

An engraving depicts Fifth Avenue in 1877. De Agostini via Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cAs gross and smelly as we think the city gets today, things were even worse in the nineteenth century, when locals were dependent on horses to get around,\u201d Shapiro told The Post. <\/p>\n

And while today\u2019s traffic leaves behind overwhelming exhaust, its four-legged predecessors had their own far less glamorous emissions. \u201cThe equivalent \u2018emission\u2019 of a horse, of course, is horse poop,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

By the 1890s, more than 60,000 horses were depositing some 500 tons of manure onto New York City streets every single day.<\/p>\n

The stoops that were built to beat the poop<\/p>\n

Your favorite grand Greenwich Village steps weren\u2019t built just for sitting, posing or pretending you\u2019re in a Nora Ephron movie \u2014 they were a way for wealthy Gilded Age Gothamites to avoid stepping through horse manure.<\/p>\n

Today, an NYC stoop is prime real estate for coffee sipping, cigarette smoking, flirting, people-watching and the occasional \u201cSex and the City\u201d pilgrimage.<\/a><\/p>\n

Pedestrians and carriages move up and down Fifth Avenue in New York City, circa 1905. Corbis\/VCG via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Stoops, Shapiro noted, were deliberately built high off the ground, allowing residents to step straight from their carriages onto an elevated entrance instead of trekking through the muck below.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, servants living in the subterranean quarters \u2014 what we might now call \u201cgarden apartments\u201d \u2014 didn\u2019t get the same luxury.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe modern streetscape is totally shaped by the ghosts of the past, whether you know the history or not,\u201d Shapiro said.<\/p>\n

Elevated stoops seen on Perry Street. Tamara Beckwith\/NY Post<\/p>\n

The stoops eventually grew taller as the city\u2019s population \u2014 and its horse population \u2014 exploded.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, the stoops are more or less redundant today from a practical standpoint \u2014 no more horses \u2014 but so many iconic NYC neighborhoods would be unrecognizable without them \u2014 the Village, Harlem, the Upper West Side, Carroll Gardens, just to name a few,\u201d Shapiro said. <\/p>\n

These neirghborhoods Also where some of the highest historic stoops are. <\/p>\n

The subway signs that are stuck in 1873<\/p>\n

Look up on Greenwich Street in the West Village and you\u2019ll find a tiny piece of a New York that disappeared more than a century ago.<\/p>\n

Manhattan was once crisscrossed by lumbering elevated railways, their iron tracks stretching above the avenues as trains thundered past buildings and rattled the streets below.<\/p>\n

A train rides over double tracks of the elevated railway on Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village, New York City, circa 1880. Getty Images<\/p>\n

But as the modern subway system took shape, those elevated lines gradually vanished underground \u2014 leaving behind remarkably few traces of the city they once dominated.<\/p>\n

One of them is hiding in plain sight at the southwest corner of Charles and Greenwich streets. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the elevated line came down, the sign stayed up,\u201d Shapiro said, adding that this \u201cParisian-style sign\u201d is one of his favorite pieces of NYC\u2019s past.<\/a><\/p>\n

Elevated rail signs from the 1870s are seen at Greenwich and Charles Street today. Tamara Beckwith\/NY Post<\/p>\n

\u201cAround the level of the third story on the building at the southwest corner of that intersection, you\u2019ll find these tiny, gray street signs embedded with cement into the corner of the building.\u201d<\/p>\n

They date to the Ninth Avenue Elevated line, which had a station at the corner beginning in 1873. Set roughly 30 feet above the street, they were positioned at eye level for passengers rumbling past.<\/p>\n

Charles and Greenwich streets today. Tamara Beckwith\/NY Post<\/p>\n

The trains are gone and the streets have changed, but the little signs are still there, quietly pointing back to a New York that once existed above our heads.<\/p>\n

The fence that once protected a king<\/p>\n

If you want to travel even further back in time, head downtown to FiDi\u2019s Bowling Green, where an unassuming iron fence has been standing since 1771.<\/a><\/p>\n

According to Ted Knudsen, co-founder of Echoes of Revolution: NYC<\/a> and a visiting assistant professor of history at Queens College, CUNY, the fence was built in 1771 to protect a gilded lead statue of King George III, \u201cwhich had been unveiled the year before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pedestrians stroll and streetcars turn around Bowling Green Park at the foot of Broadway in Manhattan in the 1700s. Corbis\/VCG via Getty Images<\/p>\n

The irony didn\u2019t last long. The statue was commissioned by New Yorkers to thank the king for repealing the Stamp Act. But just six years later, with the colonies in open rebellion, Patriots toppled the monarch from his horse.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithin a few years, the fence was protecting the monument from the same people who had paid for it,\u201d Knudsen explained to The Post.<\/p>\n

Bowling Green Park today. Shutterstock \/ pio3<\/p>\n

Today, the statue is long gone, but the fence remains<\/a> \u2014 and if you run your fingers along the tops of its iron posts, you can still feel the rough, uneven stubs where small royal crowns were once attached.<\/p>\n

According to Knudsen, it was believed that the crowns were sawed off by Patriots in 1776. While the king lost his head, the fence kept its place.<\/p>\n

Fence posts which used to have a crown on top are pictured at Bowling Green Park. Imogen Brown<\/p>\n

Years before independence, the Sons of Liberty repeatedly raised the poles in what amounted to a very public middle finger to British rule.<\/a><\/p>\n

Soldiers kept cutting them down; the colonists kept putting them back up. The escalating tug-of-war eventually turned violent at the Battle of Golden Hill in 1770, five years before Lexington and Concord.<\/p>\n

George Washington\u2019s old pew<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s George Washington\u2019s pew at St. Paul\u2019s Chapel, where he worshipped after his 1789 inauguration, when New York was still the nation\u2019s capital.<\/a><\/p>\n

After the government moved to Philadelphia in 1790, the pew was preserved as a memorial \u2014 and it remains today, a quiet relic of the brief moment when Lower Manhattan was the center of the young American government.<\/p>\n

A woman stands by George Washington\u2019s pew on display in St. Paul\u2019s Chapel in lower Manhattan in New York City, Thursday, October 11, 2012. A new study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that just under 20 percent of Americans are not affiliated with a religion today, up from 15 percent five years ago. Mario Tama\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cWashington worshipped at St. Paul\u2019s after his inauguration in 1789, while New York was the nation\u2019s first capital,\u201d Knudsen said. \u201cHis pew is still inside, a few blocks from where he took the oath.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSt. Paul\u2019s keeps surviving disasters,\u201d Knudsen added, noting that the chapel survived both the Great Fire of 1776 and the Sept. 11 attacks and later served as a relief center for recovery workers.<\/a><\/p>\n

Those metal stars aren\u2019t just for show<\/p>\n

The next time you see a star bolted to a brick building, in former industrial neighborhoods, don\u2019t assume it\u2019s a quirky bit of old-school NYC decoration \u2014 it\u2019s helping explain why the building is still standing.<\/p>\n

Look closely and you\u2019ll see the stars hiding in plain sight. Paul Martinka<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re actually the ends of supportive bars which run across the brick buildings and hold them up,\u201d Shapiro said. \u201cIf you see stars on the side of a brick building, it almost certainly dates to the 1800s.\u201d<\/p>\n

The technique was common on 19th-century buildings, meaning those little stars can serve as architectural clues about a building\u2019s age.<\/p>\n

The Time Out Market food hall in DUMBO has stars on its brick building. Paul Martinka<\/p>\n

The Central Park fountain that has nothing to do with \u2018Friends\u2019<\/p>\n

For generations of \u201cFriends\u201d devotees, it has been associated with the show\u2019s iconic opening credits. Shapiro regularly encounters visitors who mistakenly identify it as the \u201cFriends\u2019 fountain<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Cherry Hill horse trough is pictured in Central Park. Tamara Beckwith\/NY Post<\/p>\n

In fact, the Cherry Hill fountain is a Victorian-era horse trough, designed for the city\u2019s four-legged commuters to get a drink.<\/p>\n

Which makes perfect sense when you remember that horses once ruled the streets \u2014 all 60,000-plus of them. <\/p>\n

Central Park\u2019s wall was built to keep out\u2026 goats<\/p>\n

Today, the park\u2019s exterior wall might look like a simple boundary meant to keep people out after hours. But Shapiro said that wasn\u2019t the original plan.<\/p>\n

In the 1850s, uptown Manhattan had a surprisingly large goat population. They were considered enough of a nuisance that the wall was built to keep them out of the park.<\/p>\n

Central Park\u2019s exterior walls. Tamara Beckwith\/NY Post<\/p>\n

The \u201cpests,\u201d however, weren\u2019t exactly deterred by city infrastructure. Shapiro said reports describe the animals<\/a> \u201cleaping over the wall to sneak into the grassy fields beyond.\u201d<\/p>\n

While they eventually disappeared, the wall stayed put \u2014 a 170-year-old reminder of this urban jungle\u2019s very strange past.<\/p>\n

Walls around Central Park seen today. Tamara Beckwith\/NY Post<\/p>\n

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