Tony Cenicola/The New York Times  FOR New Yorkers drawn to old houses and apartments, the reminders that they are hardly the first to inhabit their rooms can be thrilling. If those people had their way, no one would ever empty a cellar or clear out an attic.  “It’s the dream of someone who buys an old house to find things other owners had left behind,” said Chris Kreussling, a computer programmer who, in the basement of his Victorian home in Flatbush, Brooklyn, unearthed a trove of brochures, tickets and newspaper clippings from the 1939 World’s Fair.  From the tenements of the Bronx to the prewar apartments of Manhattan and the frame cottages of Staten Island, signs of earlier generations lurk in unexpected corners, “like cave drawings providing traces of previous habitations,” said Richard Rabinowitz, president of the American History Workshop. “And these finds are especially meaningful in a city like New York, where we always have the sense that we’re walking in the footsteps of those who came before us.”  New York City, home to a disproportionately large number of people living in buildings constructed decades ago, is especially rich in reminders of those who occupied our houses and apartments long before we did. According to the 2008 Census housing survey, 85 percent of New Yorkers live in buildings erected before 1970, compared with 42 percent of Americans generally. More remarkably, 39 percent of New Yorkers live in buildings predating 1930 and 17 percent in buildings predating 1920. Luckily for New Yorkers with a taste for past lives, many of these dwellings function as palimpsests of the city’s history.  As a place where the friendly ghosts of the past refuse to depart, it would be hard to top the blue frame house on City Island in the Bronx where John and Linda Nealon Woods have lived for 33 years.  Snatches of words in Gaelic, courtesy of Irish-American students who used to rent rooms in the basement, are visible on the walls. When Mr. Woods removed plaster from a bathroom wall as part of a renovation, he unearthed a Depression-era Boy Scout catalog, with boys’ names scribbled on the order form. A hanging brass lighting fixture projected the Star of David on the ceiling of the foyer, an indication that the house may have been used for religious services.  Today, only a few letters of the Gaelic inscription are still visible. The ingenious lighting fixture has been dismantled. And Mr. Woods has no idea what became of the catalog. Nevertheless, these accidental reminders of the house’s 80-year-long history retain their power to haunt.  “As far as we know, no great triumphs or tragedies took place here,” Mr. Woods said. “But it was a place where people led their lives, where they raised children. And it’s nice to have little fragments reminding you of people who were here before.”  The reminders can be as mundane as junk mail and even packages delivered decades after their intended recipients have moved on. Sometimes the reminders are grim, like bullet holes in windows that recall a rougher, more disorderly city.  Sometimes the reminder is something forgotten when the former residents cleared out, like yellowing documents in a basement safe.  Sometimes it’s impossible to explain why a particular item was left behind. Or maybe all too easy, as was the case for Anne Marie Salmeri, who moved into her Murray Hill co-op seven years ago.  “When I bought the apartment,” said Ms. Salmeri, a broker with the Corcoran Group, “the former owner left behind a few odds and ends, including a silly ostrich egg on its own stand. I couldn’t imagine why she even had it in the first place.”  Yet Ms. Salmeri still has the egg, which sits on her bookshelf. “It isn’t that I like it so much as that I just can’t seem to throw it away,” she said. “Seven years later it’s exactly as the former owner left it. Only now it’s mine.”  The flower holder that Don MacLeod, a law librarian, found when he rented a walk-up on Elizabeth Street was similarly baffling.  “In 1980, when I moved into our old Little Italy apartment,” Mr. MacLeod said, “there was a ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary that had been a flower holder for a funeral arrangement. The prior tenant was a very old Italian man who had died in the apartment. Now, I have no religious convictions at all, but I did not have the heart to evict Mary.”
In New York City buildings, many of which were built before 1930, evidence of earlier tenants lurks in unexpected corners.