9. There Used to Be a Brewery Where Carnegie Hall Is

Carnegie Hall in 1910. Photo in Public Domain from Wikimedia Commons.

When Carnegie Hall was built, the Midtown area was then known as Goat Hill and some in the press decried the location of the hall, saying that nobody would ever go because it was so far uptown. (14th Street at the time was the heart of the entertainment industry). But Carnegie, the Astors and others saw the future and were building in Midtown and even further north. You can see the Dakota (named so for being so far away) rising next to Central Park in the construction photographs of Carnegie Hall.

For the expansion of Carnegie Hall, an existing brewery, built there because of a natural spring that was located there, was purchased and demolished.