Provident National Bank, built 1900 by Albert Dilks   Media, PA was incorporated in 1850 at the same time it was named the county seat of Delaware County. Located 13 miles west of Philadelphia, Media retains numerous architectural treasures from the Victorian era. Our tour will explore the grounds of the Delaware County courthouse built […]

House built in 1911 in Cadwalader Heights. Photo courtesy of Cadwalader Heights Neighborhood Association   Olmsted’s Trenton Designs Saturday, September 16, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. After an early lunch in Trenton, NJ, this bus tour will take us to Cadwalader Park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1890-92. His plan for the park left intact Ellerslie, […]

Audubon Park in February 1899 with six houses recently completed by builder Francis J. Snugg. Photo courtesy of Matthew Spady and Scott Robinson. Beyond the Grid: Manhattan's Audubon Park Neighborhood From 1841-1864, the 21 acres north of 155th street were the farmstead of John James Audubon, who is remembered for his paintings of America’s birds. […]

Bethlehem, PA street decorated for the holidays. Photo courtesy of www.HistoricBethlehem.org   Holiday Cheer In Bethlehem, PA Bethlehem, PA, calls itself Christmas City, USA and posts decorated trees on nearly every street during the holiday season. At the Moravian Museum of Bethlehem, housed in a 1741 log structure, we’ll learn about the early days in […]

A chartered bus will take us to a private home in Southampton. It boasts one of the best collections of 19th-century Aesthetic Movement paintings, ceramics and furnishings in the area and is rarely open to the public. From there we go to East Hampton for lunch. In the afternoon, we will have a guided tour […]

On July 1, 1893, President Grover Cleveland boarded a friend’s yacht, sailed into the calm blue waters of Long Island Sound and disappeared. The events of the next five days were so incredible that even when the truth was revealed, many Americans simply would not believe it. Matthew Algeo, author of The President is a […]

Photo by Jim Henderson.   Join us for a trolley tour of The Woodlawn Cemetery, a 400-acre destination in the northern part of the Bronx. Designed by James C. Sidney in the rural style on rolling hills, the nonsectarian cemetery opened during the Civil War in 1863. The ceremonial burial there of Admiral David Farragut […]

Maria Bonfati in the Black Crook. Oil on Canvas. ca. 1866. “Treading the boards” is a colloquial theatrical expression that refers to the wooden planks of the stage upon which performers ply their trade. Dr. Matthew Wittmann, curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection at Hougton Library, will highlight a simple but signficant point – much […]

Victorian times were all about the suppression of anything salacious, as Alice Sparberg Alexiou, author of the new book, Devil’s Mile: The Rich, Gritty History of the Bowery, will explain. The era’s prudery just increased the urge to experience sex and weirdness—all commodities then were readily available on the Bowery. This is where the action […]

Nancy Rosin, president of the National Valentine Collectors Association, has made a “passionate obsession” for more than 40 years out of historical love and friendship cards, keepsakes and related ephemera. Her lecture will reveal the visual and structural wonders of Victorian Valentines. Surfaces were richly textured with gilded lace and high-relief embossing, and cards were […]

When New Yorkers utter the phrase “Cooper Hewitt,” it typically brings to mind the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, housed in Andrew Carnegie’s mansion on 91st Street and Fifth Avenue. Far less renowned are the institution’s 19th-century women patrons, who made their family names synonymous with achievements in art and design. Sue Shutte, the historian […]

Zachary J. Violette focuses on what he calls the “decorated tenement,” a wave of new buildings constructed by immigrant builders and architects who remade the slum landscapes of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the North and West Ends of Boston in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on research and fieldwork of more than […]