Urban Archive

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Rooftop Oddities

While New York does not have the real estate to devote to massive roadside attractions (think Palm Springs' dinosaurs, the Long Island's Big Duck, or a picnic basket-shaped building), it does have the perfect architectural feature for displaying weird and quirky attractions and advertisements: ROOFS. For more than a century New York building owner have looked up to their highest points as not just unusable real estate, but as the perfect location for signage, fabulous rooftop gardens, theatres, and the occasional giant jug of milk!

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950 Sedgwick Avenue

This lighthouse wasn't meant to guide ships along the nearby Harlem River. Built in 1929 atop the headquarters of H.W Wilson, a library reference publisher, the lighthouse, with a book as a base, symbolizes guidance.

316 East 59th Street

For only a few years in the early 1930s this papier-mâché gnome sat atop the Gnome Products Building, a bakery on East 59th Street. The figure was best viewed from the entrance roadway to the Queensboro Bridge.

43-47 West 64th Street

In 1902, the Liberty Storage Company installed a a 47-foot-tall replica of the Statue of Liberty on the roof of its 8-story building. After 100 years, the mini Lady Liberty found new home in the parking lot of the Brooklyn Museum.

Seamen’s Church Institute

In the wake of the Titanic disaster, survivor, socialite, and philanthropist Molly Brown spearheaded the installation of a memorial for the victims on the top of the new Seamen's Church Institute building in 1913, a refuge and dormitory for sailors and seamen. The 60-foot-tall (including the large spire) memorial lighthouse graced the building until the whole structure was razed in 1968, and in 1976, the lighthouse moved to the campus of the South Street Seaport Museum.

1045-1075 Webster Avenue

This massive bottle of milk once heralded the Sheffield Farms Company pasteurization plant, one of the countries largest and most sophisticated. The milk processing functions ceased in the early 1970s, and the building was demolished in the early 1990s.