Look at all that open sky just waiting to be scraped!

I've noticed in other skyline photos like this one, lots of bare flagpoles. Were flags only flown during flag holidays?

Also, the exposed crossbeams are an interesting touch on that one building.

A gritty departure from some of the other photographs of New York that have a more genteel mood to them. The packed sidewalks, the smoke, the horses (and their effluvia), particularly in the summertime, must have created an atmosphere that was not for everybody.

The statues at the top of the Park Row building are no longer there. Does anyone know why they were taken down and what happen to them?

If this photo was taken before May 26, 1901, those are the last of the Broadway cable cars.

Check out the guys in white suits. There seems to be one about every block and there's one in the middle of the street who seems to be sweeping something, so I would presume that these are sanitation workers.

At the lower left is the Western Union Building of 1872-1875, the first skyscraper completely designed by the great George B. Post. At the time of its completion it was 230 feet high, only slightly shorter than Richard Morris Hunt's contemporaneous New York Tribune Building over on Park Row. The Western Union was a handsome essay in the red-and-white "Neo-Grec" style with a huge mansard roof on top (which contained the telegraph room). The mansard roof was destroyed in a fire in 1890 and replaced by the top 4 stories seen here (designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh, architect of the Plaza Hotel and many other buildings). The Western Union was demolished in 1913 to make way for the first phase of the old AT&T Building, which is still standing at Broadway and Dey Street.