West 28 St, Garment District

This stretch of 28th only runs from 6th to 5th but has quite the rich history and some great old buildings. The block from 6th to Broadway used to be known as Tin Pan Alley. It's where all the new music was published in the 20th century and the sheet music shops would hire to people to play the new stuff on the street in front of the shops. I guess it made a lot of tin pan banging noises which doesn't say much for the music at the time. There's a fun little plaque on the south side of the street. All of the great, old buildings were music publishing companies that are now things like flower shops with apartments just above. I think these are some of the coolest looking buildings in the area. 57 West 28th used to be a high end gambling den (I wonder how many people were killed in that room). There's a gross looking high rise apartment building on the south side of the block which ordered the demolition of some of these great old building in order to go up. It's a very generic looking luxury apartment building that doesn't fit in at all with the architecture. I know it's not the residents' faults but I always give them stink eye when I see one entering. Conversely, there's a great old building on the corner at Broadway which used to be a church, then a public bath house and now it's a Wholeseller outlet. It was a bath house until 1985 which is pretty cool / creepy. The building is gorgeous, though, so I'm glad it's still around.
Across Broadway, there's another stretch of great buildings starting with the Johnston Building which is scheduled to open as a boutique hotel some time shortly, here. There are a lot of little bizarre / wholesale shops on this block and one of them is in one of the few remaining brownstones in the neighborhood. It's really lovely and I believe they sell perfume here. It used to be a gambling den back when this area was crawling with them. There's a beautiful but run down looking building on the corner at 5th which has more wholesale selling involved with it but I can't imagine it was built for anything remotely like that. It has these great story high arched windows at the top which I imagine would be awesome to look out of every day if you could live in that space. This building is somewhere around where Newland Archer lived in Age of Innocence, though, I'm presuming he lived in a brownstone back when the neighborhood was fancy.
West 28th is incredibly commercial and there isn't much in the realm of things to see, eat or do. But, so many of the buildings are so cool that I wouldn't mind horribly living in one of them if it were available. This block is very old timey to me and you don't get a lot of that in commercial areas.