Venue: Lincoln Arcade
Town: New York, US

The Lincoln Arcade was a commercial building near Lincoln Square on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City, just west of Central Park. Built in 1903, it was viewed by contemporaries as a sign of the northward extension of business-oriented real estate ventures, and the shops, offices, and other enterprises. Soon after it opened, however, the building was becoming known for some considerably less conventional residents. One observer styled some of these newcomers as "starving students, musicians, actors, dead-beat journalists, nondescript authors, tarts, polite swindlers, and fugitives from injustice." Many others were aspiring artists. Most of these men and women received little attention from the public either during their lives or since their deaths, but some, such as George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, Marcel Duchamp, Eugene O'Neill, and Lionel Barrymore, became famous. The Lincoln Arcade was destroyed in 1960. In the late 1700s the western part of Manhattan where the building would be constructed was known as Bloemendaal or Blooming Dale, the valley of flowers, where could be found large farms. In the early 1800s the city expanded its street network north to the district and the farms that originally dominated the area were broken up into lots that were held as investments. Through inheritance, the location where the Lincoln Arcade would later be built was transferred from the original farm owner, John Somerindyke, to the widow of one of his sons, Abigail Thorn, in 1809. Subsequent owners were John H. Talman, John G. Gottsberger, and Thomas S. Cargill. The three were businessmen who held the property along with other real estate investments. In 1819-20 commissioners named by the state government laid out the street grid for streets, avenues, and the blocks they created. An atlas published in 1868 shows the farms of 1815 overlaid by the 1819-20 grid and atlases published subsequently show the gradual expansion of building construction north