#21 dec.

Furs and top hats were de rigeur for the audience at opening night of the Metropolitan Opera's 52nd season, December 21, 1936. The elegant crowd heard Wagner's Die Walküre, starring Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior, with Artur Bodanzky conducting.

A spectacular fire on Riverside Drive near Grant's Tomb on the night of December 21, 1928, badly damaged the $2 million Riverside Church under construction to replace the Park Avenue Baptist Church. The exterior of the church, a neo-Gothic structure, was almost complete when the fire occurred.

Times Square, December 21, 1928. The view is uptown, with Broadway on the left and 7th Avenue on the right.

An unlikely Santa: Rex Harrison at the Beekman-Downtown Hospital, where 300 children who were former patients were invited to attend a Christmas party on December 21, 1948. Harrison was starring in Anne of the Thousand Days on Broadway.