Finished two years after the architect's death, Columbus Park (formerly Mulberry Bend Park) was Vaux's last contribution to the city's park system, ending a 40-year career in park design that started with Central Park. While the park on Bayard Street between Baxter and Mulberry has been reconfigured and renamed, the pavilion at the north end remains mostly Vaux's handiwork. On weekday mornings, you'll find neighborhood Chinese residents doing tai chi; on weekend days it is often filled with the sounds of Chinese opera. [Postcard via James Nevius]

This cast-iron gem finds Vaux and Withers working in a highly decorated, French Renaissance-inspired design that was beginning to transform cast-iron architecture at the time. As with Richard Morris Hunt's nearby Roosevelt Building (1874), which serves as today's Top Shop, Vaux and Withers were among the first architects to treat cast iron as a unique building material and not try to mimic classical stone work. Originally, the building would have housed a retail floor at street level and manufacturing above; the manufacturing floors have since been converted into lofts by Joseph Pell Lombardi. [Photo via Lombardi]

Calvert Vaux was the leading practitioner of the Victorian Gothic in New York and while this former school—one of Vaux's many educational and social service projects late in his career—may not be as grand as the Jefferson Market Courthouse, it is still a fine example of the architect's ability to work Gothic touches into any project. It's no coincidence that the school, run by the protestant Children's Aid Society, stood across the street from the original St. Patrick's Cathedral: it was a closely held belief of many 19th-century "WASP" reformers that young Irish and Italian children needed to be saved from the errant teachings of the Catholic faith. [Photo via Wikimedia Commons]

...and speaking of condo conversion, the Children's Aid Society's former Sullivan Street School building is in the process of being converted into luxurious homes—which nearly sold out in their three months on the market . (Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are potential buyers".) The building is practically a copy of the earlier 14th Ward Industrial School. In all, Vaux and Radford built six schools for the society; the three covered here, two which have been demolished, and the Rhinelander Children's Center, which still stands at 350 East 88th Street, though it's currently for sale and marketed as a potential single-family mansion. [Photo via Google Street View]

Perhaps Vaux and Withers's finest work—at least their most flamboyant—the courthouse was a mix between a Venetian Gothic church and a Bavarian castle. The building (which today houses a branch of the New York Public Library) is actually just half of the original complex. The lofty belltower was a fire watchtower. The main library building was the Third Judicial Court, which mostly handled arraignments. Now gone are two other buildings: a jail, located behind the courthouse, and the covered market that gave the complex its name. Over the main entrance sits an arched tympanum; on a church, this would feature Christ enthroned, surrounded by saints. Here, Vaux and Radford instead choose a secular, judicial theme: the climax of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice—still appropriate for the library housed there today. [Photo via Library of Congress]

After New York governor Samuel J. Tilden lost his presidential bid in 1876, he put in motion a multi-year renovation of the twin townhouses he owned on Gramercy Park. Vaux and Radford broke through the interior walls, joining the two homes into one massive mansion, and unifying the facade with red sandstone, terra cotta ornamentation, and portrait busts of Tilden’s favorite authors, including Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante. They also included Benjamin Franklin because, in Tilden’s words, he was a “representative American.” The mansion now houses the National Arts Club; the galleries usually open to the public are devoid of much charm, but if a member can get you in past the velvet ropes, the interiors that Vaux oversaw—including a massive stained glass dome over what is now the bar—are worth the visit. [Photo by James Nevius]

A century of renovations and additions have obscured almost all of Vaux and Mould's original structure, which was tiny compared to the museum's current footprint spanning from 80th to 84th streets A few charming Vaux/Mould pieces remain: a portion of an arch on the second floor near the grand staircase; the original Central Park wall in what is now the Lehman Wing; and a staircase down to the main bookstore, complete with Gothic quatrefoil arches, a typical Vaux touch. (At the companion Museum of Natural History across the park, Vaux's handiwork is even harder to spot, but if you stand in the right spot on the Columbus Avenue side, a sliver of the original facade peeks out.) [The original Vaux and Mould facade of the Metropolitan Museum, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art]

Though Vaux and Olmsted are best known for their parks, they also proposed a series of parkways in 1866 (based on the grand boulevards of Paris) to connect the public parks in Brooklyn. Though most of Eastern Parkway was constructed, the only parkway built to its full length was Ocean Parkway, which runs from Prospect Park all the way to Surf Avenue in Coney Island, nearly six miles away. Turned into a de facto racetrack by horsemen in the nineteenth century, the parkway was also home to Brooklyn’s first bike path, added in 1894. [Bike path on Ocean Parkway courtesy of the Museum of the CIty of New York]

Vaux’s only confirmed religious building is the small chapel, or Metaher house, in the fourth cemetery of Shearith Israel, America’s oldest Jewish congregation. He and Radford also designed the gates to the cemetery in an 1885 renovation of this 1851 graveyard. [Photo via Beth Olam Cemetery]