Staple Street Skybridge

Staple Street is barely a street — two blocks, one lane wide, more alley than thoroughfare — and spanning it, three stories up, is a small enclosed footbridge connecting two brick buildings. It was built in the early 1900s for New York Hospital's House of Relief, letting staff cross between buildings without touching the street. The hospital is a century gone; the bridge stayed, now joining private residences.

It has become one of downtown's most photographed slivers precisely because everything about it is wrong for Manhattan: a private bridge, over a street the width of a truck, in a canyon of old warehouse brick. Morning light drops into the slot from the east and the whole composition — cobbles, loading docks, bridge — assembles itself. You can't cross it; you're here for the looking.