Checker Cab at the Villard Houses

The Villard Houses, on Madison Avenue between 50th and 51st, were one of the earliest projects by famed New York architecture firm McKim, Mead, and White. Completed in 1884, they now house the offices of the Municipal Art Society, Urban Center Books (a great architecture and urban studies shop), and the New York Palace Hotel. The building has achieved new (and perhaps less estimable) fame as a recurring location in the Gossip Girl television series, but walking past today we saw in its forecourt a more charming piece of New York history, a Checker Cab.