Cleopatra's Needle: The Egyptian Enigma in the American Garden framed mans cave art The Gilded Balconies of Mott

The Gilded Balconies of Mott Street looks down the spine of Chinatown's busiest artery

the marquees and newspaper towers of Times Square caught mid-blaze in that peculiar Manhattan dusk when the bulbs outshone the stars

or a man's bathroom built around a straight razor and a leather strop

The Barbers Contraption — Patent for Human Grooming 1871 is a small monument to the morning ritual — the kind of drawing that hung in apprentice manuals when barbering was a guild and a calling

A Lower East Side tableau caught between immigrant commerce and turn-of-the-century ornament

Cleopatra's Needle: The Egyptian Enigma in the American Garden framed mans cave art The Gilded Balconies of MottCleopatra's Needle: The Egyptian Enigma in the American Garden frames the 3,000 year old obelisk in its improbable Central Park exile, hieroglyphs weathering quietly behind the Metropolitan Museum. A Gilded Age trophy hauled across the Atlantic by Vanderbilt money, rendered here as if Thebes had wandered into Olmsted's pastoral. About the Source Bella Frye sources NYC artifacts from American photographic archives, postcard collections, and period