There’s a couple of ‘mystery poles’ in Manhattan, whose former use is hidden in the vicissitudes of time. Like this one on Broadway and West 142nd. It’s too far away …

The last time I was in DC (December 2007) I quite accidentally stumbled on these remaining streetcar rails on O and P Street in Georgetown. Looks like the city is …

There’s no mistake about where you are on Jamaica Avenue.

Norwegian-American-Irish coalition, 5th Avenue, Bay Ridge

If you want to catch the LIRR at Fresh Pond, you might think about the bus. There hasn’t been a train since March 1998.

CONTINUED FROM PART 2
Since I’m the biggest square in town, I thought it would be appropriate to do a page, or set of pages, on the five major squares in Manhattan …

Broadway crosses 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th Avenues south of Central Park, but the crossing with 7th Avenue is so gradual (I don’t know where to find this out, but …

The true miracle is that this, the last of Brooklyn’s ‘humpback’ street signs, is still in place. Out of thousands this is the last one. In fact I haven’t been …

This is Building D on Officers Row along Flushing Avenue in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Barring any further inertia, it will be torn down by NYC soon. The US  Navy …

This July we’ll be walking the George Washington Bridge to Fort Lee  in the dead dog heat of summer for hot dogs at Hiram’s. Details coming soon.

Herald Square

Other than a plaque in the Polo Grounds Houses commemorating Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard Round the World in 1951, there’s absolutely no indication in Upper Manhattan that the San Francisco …

Winter 2011-2012 has not been one for the frigid blasts and howling tempests that usually accompany the months of December and January as the weather has mostly been in the …

CONTINUED FROM PART 1
Since I’m the biggest square in town, I thought it would be appropriate to do a page, or set of pages, on the five major squares in Manhattan …

Better see me while I’m here. Looks like I won’t be around for long.

JJ’s Navy Yard Cocktail Lounge, which had been on the corner of Flushing and Washington Avenues, spent its last few years as a strip club. It is being divided up …

Ichabod Crane is just a couple of blocks away.

I’m at a place where you need to be well-prepared.

Since I’m the biggest square in town, I thought it would be appropriate to do a page, or set of pages, on the five major squares in Manhattan south of …

What’s behind the masks? 
Or in front of them?

Red Hook. It’s a Ford, that much I know.

Here’s some more examples of ancient signage found by FNY’s Gary Fonville…

As a sign enthusiast, my eye always wandered to this building on Second Avenue near 116th Street in Spanish …

I am the last of my kind. I had ten brothers, and they have all disappeared. When I am gone, there will be none to replace me, and I will …

I’m stuck in a moment and can’t get out of it.

BY GARY FONVILLE, Forgotten NY correspondent
This entry has been a long time in gestation. Unlike Kevin, your webmaster, who goes out and makes a day trip to do an entry, I take pictures …

At a dome of the purest blue

I was dazedly shambling about in Bensonhurst in August, mad with the unbearable 82-degree heat, and in a momentary spark of lucidity, I noticed a tailor shop across from the …

Somebody PLEASE tell me these two streets rhyme.
Don’t go looking at google maps or atlases. You just gotta know.

CONTINUED FROM PART 1
Steinway Mansion
William Steinway’s mansion, on 41st Street, still stands on a high hill that has never been leveled, unlike the surrounding area. 41st Street still looks like …

After chronicling Columbus Square at the Astoria Boulevard station on the Ditmars Boulevard Astoria el I found myself with a couple of spare hours on  a brilliant August afternoon. Actually …

The Swingin’ 60s were a fun time to grow up in Brooklyn, especially for kids like me, with a perplexing penchant for noticing changes in lampposts as well as subway …

There are two streets in NYC that begin with X, if you don’t count Brooklyn’s Avenue X. Both are Xenia Streets: in Corona, Queens, and Old Town, Staten Island.
Xenia (which …

At present, the Bronx’ Kingsbridge Road runs from Marble Hill at the Bronx-Manhattan line (it’s called West 225th Street in Marble Hill) east and southeast to Fordham Road, following a …

Route 101, Glen Cove, NY

Glen Street, Glen Cove, NY. Chevy, but what model/year?

In October 2011 I walked through the mid-Bronx from the Grand Concourse to Parkchester, east through Mount Hope, Tremont, Belmont, Bronx Park South and West Farms, pretty much the center …

This railroad station was taken out of service about 30 years ago. The handsome brick building with the arched windows on the right was built in the 1850s for one …

The John Lindsay campaign ad (likely dating to 1965) uncovered on Flatbush Avenue reminded me of the time back in 1998 when I was dazedly wandering the back roads of …

This Type 24M bishop crook (among the first generation of such posts first installed before 1920) can be found in Spuyten Duyvil, Bronx, on the west side of Broadway near …

Here’s a surviving 1940-era street sign on Tunnel Exit Street, an exit from the Queens Midtown Tunnel in Murray Hill. photo: Steve Garza
The tunnel was designed by Ole Singstad, and …

I’m at one of a series of bridges called the Duncomb Arches. But where are they?

I am in a land once occupied by slaughterhouses and tanneries, that has since been converted into an exclusive haunt of the 1%ers.

I am in a land where giant boulders line the curb on both sides of the street, seemingly dropped from space.
Exact location please.

I wonder what the story is with this seemingly abandoned Tudor at 115-8 Park Lane South in Kew Gardens. At least I think it’s abandoned. The grass had been unmowed …

The ground floor of this building at Manahttan and Driggs in Greenpoint used to be an auto repair shop that sold Matchless shock absorbers, and displayed a lighted sign. When …

I had missed this one until now — a plaque at the 157th Street station on the 7th Avenue-Broadway line, likely installed as the station opened in 1904, directs visitors …

I mean, one of these days, to walk 86th Street from the Narrows to Gravesend. It is the main east-west street in southwest Brooklyn, and contains many secrets of old. …

The picture windows of the Cortelyou Road station window are placed directly over the tracks, which used to be part of  asteam railroad conecting Prospect Park and Coney Island.
Through it, …

This line in the Watergate area of Washington, DC, was used by USA mapmakers to divide the world into eastern and western hemispheres between 1848-1884.
Thereafter, the USA accepted the meridian …

The Butler Brothers Warehouse (later the Morgan Industrial Center), 350 Warren Street in the Jersey City Historic Warehouse District, is one of the most imposing brick buildings in the city.
It …

Egads, I forgot to post tour photos from our latest tour, which was Number 50 in a series that goes all the way back to June 1st, 1999, when we …

December 2011: It happens every Christmas. A giant conifer is sacrificed for the Rockefeller Center tree-lighting featuring the pop teen of the moment; trampling crowds worshiping the God of Commerce; …

I’m at a longtime NYC high school that was an all-boys school until it moved to Queens, accepted girls, and the world turned color.

Cul de sacs and alleyways have always held a fascination for me. However they are rather scarce in New York City, which has a grid system of streets not only …

Red Hook is Brooklyn’s Australia: an island nation unto itself. Cut off from downtown and Park Slope by the Gowanus Expressway and forbidding housing projects, it boasts a street system …

I find myself shambling through indifferent crowds in Manhattan more often these days, as I have taken a job (as of December 2011) smack in the heart of the Flatiron …

At 95th Avenue and 106th Street in Woodhaven.
Coincidence? Who knows.

I found a series of arches that cascade into infinity, like opposing mirrors.
Where am I?

I found a greaser, and a clock with no hands.
Where am I?

In the mid-19th Century Manhattan was getting so crowded (by 1845 the island was fully built up south of about 42nd Street) that it was running out of cemetery space. …

In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Flatbush and East Flatbush, you will find a succession of avenues that run north to south that are named for major cities in New York State. …

Guest post by ForgottenFan David Silver
While walking down 7th Avenue about a month ago, I happened to look up at at the parking structure at the corner of 37th and …

I had just gotten off the train at Jay/Metrotech and was stumbling toward the starting point of my Downtown to Crown Heights epic when I spotted a chalkboard on the …

I’m quite familiar with Canarsie and Flatlands — these neighborhoods in southeast Brooklyn were quite accessible to the Bay Ridge boy just by bicycling east a few miles, which I …

As hundreds of fire alarms around town are decommissioned in the age of wireless telephony, they are being reimagined and reappropriated for new purposes. Here, a former alarm stanchion on …

When you were a child did you ever get excited when you were riding a train and suddenly, the car was awash in sunshine when the train emerged from the …

Some of NYC’s fire alarms, now being gradually grandfathered and attritioned out of existence because of the mobile phone networks, have been in place since very early in the century. …

In the 1940s and into the 1960s, a series of hand drawn, light hearted signs depicting proper subway etiquette appeared in the ad strips in the subway cars, usually under …

The MTA is running a trainset of R1/R9 cars on the 6th Avenue Line on Saturdays during the holiday season. I have a number of interior and exterior shots but …

On Thanksgiving Friday I decided to walk the Harlem River area from Yankee Stadium north into Inwood, the most northerly neighborhood on Manhattan Island. Understand, though, access to the Harlem …

A head-scratcher at the 65th Street station on the IND Queens Boulevard line (R and M trains) has a modern sign showing the exit at Rowan Street and Broadway.
65th Street …

Sadly, this view looking north on Cebra Avenue in Stapleton, Staten Island will no longer be available next month as the Samuel R. Smith Infirmary, formerly Staten Island Hospital, is …

I have always considered the massive concrete arches that lift railroad tracks to the Hell Gate Bridge over the streets of northwest Astoria almost as imposing as the arch bridge …

A pair of unusually-shaped structures along the pedestrian walkway on Flushing Bay north of Citifield, now used mainly as relief from the hot sun in sumer, were originally designed for …

Built before the Revolutionary War (1740), the Epenetus Smith Tavern, 211 Middle Country Road in Smithtown, originally stood just west of the juncture of Middle Country & North Country Roads.  This …

Greenwich Village features four streets that run northwest to southeast, in a sort of subgrid set off against Manhattan’s general grid which runs west to east. The four are Bedford, …

Despite federal guidelines elsewhere that mandate green and white reflective street signs, Brookline, Massachusetts (the birthplace of John F. Kennedy) has always been permitted to retain its handsome set of …

One of my favorite buildings in Woodside, at Laurel Hill Boulevard and 65th Place, is this frame house, with a deli on the ground floor. This type sign, with vinyl …

This sign has been by the Manhattan-bound platform at the Woodside Long Island Rail Road station since I started using it in 1992, and probably long before that. These days …

The title card shows Trimble Road, a one-block street running from 62nd to 63rd Streets along the Long Island Rail Road main line north of Woodside Avenue.

Trimble Road has a …

Over the years my pal Allen Dade has passed along several dozen images of the strange and varied lampposts found in the London area. I know next to nothing at …

The #58 trolley, the Ridgewood-Flushing Line, ended service on 7/17/1949, but here on 60th Place and Kleupfel Court (near 67th Avenue) it’s like it never left. In Ridgewood, the line …

There it stands at the north end of Cadman Plaza in downtown Brooklyn near the Brooklyn Bridge entrance, a litle-visited memorial to a little-known NYC Mayor. William Jay Gaynor (1851-1913) …

As you are going north on the Harlem River between the Bronx and Manhattan, the University Heights Bridge is the tenth in a series of eleven that includes the Willis …

In 1921, the numbering system in Queens, where most named streets were given numbers (a practice that strived to lessen confusion by eliminating different street systems in towns around the …

Thanks ForgottenFans (shown here at the Starrett-Lehigh Building) who made it through all 5 hours on Tour #50 at Hudson River Park, as well as Jessica DuLong and the crew …

I’m considered to be the father of my country.

In early 2010, just as spring was beginning to spring, I ambled slowly and haltingly north on Berry Street, the only one of Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s major ‘north-south’ (in general; streets …

Since I was hired to work in the Flatiron district in Manhattan in November 2011, I started sniffing around for places to eat lunch before actually beginning work. I will …

There are, or were, only two streets called “Row” in New York and wouldn’t you know it, they met each other. Tryon Row was a one block street between Centre …

This Bishop Crook wall bracket lamp on Nassau Street near Beekman in the City Hall Park area is one of two remaining in New York City. The other one is …

Anyone who knows me well knows that the job I always wished I could have had was a Top 40 disk jockey in the 1960s, with the jokes, the patter, …

I took this photo on Montague and Clinton Streets in Brooklyn Heights, where a quartet of old-style subway entrance lamps have been preserved (or, as I suspect, made new to …

I just stumbled on a pile of photos I took in Prospect Cemetery in Jamaica, Queens in 2004. History under our noses has been pretty much left to the vandals, …

Just a short Walk today that was part of a longer walk, from downtown Brooklyn to the edge of Williamsburg. Today I will cover the short span of Hanson Place, …

The removal of a newsstand at West 3rd Street and 6th Avenue has revealed the presence of an old-style enamel sign attached to a stairway rail. Signs of this type …

I’ll have to break my one-photo rule on the ONE SHOTS category, which I haven’t previously done. Above is a photo taken sometime in the Fab 50s by previously unheralded …

Elmhurst will be losing one of its historic buildings in the near future, as its 105-year old library on Broadway, funded, like many of its brother libraries in the 5 …

Even though the South Street Seaport area ceased to be home to NYC’s foremost fish wholesaler when the Fish Market moved to Hunt’s Point, Bronx, in 2005, there are still …

Only remaining remnant of Fishbein’s, which was either a convenience or hardware store at Astoria Boulevard and 21st Street in Queens.

Astoria Village is a small area tucked into Queens’ northwest edge, south of Astoria Park and Hell Gate, east of Roosevelt Island. The area was first settled in the 1600s …

WHEN: SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2011, 11:00 AM
WHERE: Meet in front of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal in Manhattan. Take BMT R train to Whitehall or #1 to South Ferry. Weekend …

Lawns in Manhattan? Homes with porches? That only happens, as a rule, in Marble Hill, the only section of Manhattan located on mainland USA — because of a massive engineering …

43 West 23rd Street was built as a warehouse in 1897 (Henry Hardenbergh) and in that Beaux Arts era, even warehouses had panache. There’s something to arrest the eye on …

It had been assumed that Paul’s Daughter (formerly Gregory and Paul’s) the non-chain dispenser of seaside goodies on the Coney Island boardwalk, would be closing to make way for a …

At 31st Street south of Ditmars Boulevard, the Astoria Line el passes beneath the concrete arch Hells Gate Bridge viaduct bringing freight and passenger trains over the East River.
On this …

Beach Street ranks among the Forgotten men among its neighbors in Tribeca. Two blocks between West and Greenwich were hacked off in favor of the Independence Plaza apartment house development in …

The Paul Robeson Theatre, formerly St. Casimir’s Roman Catholic Church,  at 40 Greene Avenue near Carlton in Fort Greene in Brooklyn, has been newly given Landmarks status. It’s a small, …

While careening through Canarsie this past week, searching for lost alleys, I checked Nolan’s Lane, which I hadn’t visited since 1999. For most, unless you live there, there’s no reason …

According to maps through most of the 20th Century, Smiths Lane is a narrow alley running from Rockaway Parkway southwest to East 92nd Street just south of Farragut Road in …

I lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn until age 35 and took a lot of bus rides to surrounding neighborhoods, with parents and then, after turning 17, without. (Just kidding. I …

We are somewhere in the five boroughs. Obviously on old fashioned metal street sign has been retained.
Without perusing a map, or without using the map index at least,
Where are we?
 
 

Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn between the neighborhoods of Park Slope, Sunset Park, Windsor Terrace and Kensington, has proven to be a Forgotten favorite — this was the 3rd such Green-Wood …

My interest in subway mosaics has been re-fired again, as it is every few years. I have a new admiration for the intricate mosaics that were assembled on station walls …

On Sunday, October 16, 2011 I agreed to meet up with a Open House New York-sponsored Newtown Creek walk led by the Newtown Pentacle‘s Mitch Waxman. Bloggers like Mitch fill …

It looks like the first lamppost produced by industrial design firm Thomas Phifer and Partners, the winner of the City Lights contest administered by the Museum of the City of …

The former Blue Sky Diner, 49th Avenue and 21st Street, Hunters Point, has been mostly empty beginning in the 1990s, but in 2010-2011 it took a star turn as the upscale …

The north shore of Staten Island is a fairly Godforsaken place. There, I have said it. It does have its moments, and we saw most of them on a ForgottenTour …

BY SERGEY KADINSKY and KEVIN WALSH
Collect Pond Park, a public space between Lafayette and Centre Streets and north of Leonard, has been called one of the worst public spaces in …

Though I haven’t been there in a couple of years, I enjoy hiking around Jersey City, especially to observe street fixtures like lampposts and signs. There’s still a mishmosh of …

Minetta Street is a tiny Greenwich Village lane laid out atop Minetta Brook, which formerly flowed on the surface but was subsumed into a sewer generations ago. Along with its …

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STATIONS OF THE N.Y.W.B (Dyre Avenue Line)
Between …

Many visitors to the DUMBO, Brooklyn area mistake the numerous tracks found in the Belgian-blocked streets for old trolley tracks. However, since until a few years ago DUMBO was almost …

While shuffling past a grand old brick factory building on Bridge and Front Streets in DUMBO, Brooklyn, I noticed scaffolding protecting the sidewalk, a sure sign of renovation.
I noted with …

Asser Levy Place runs for just the length of 2 blocks, from East 24th to 25th Streets west of the FDR Dive. For a short street, it is unusually wide. …

I haven’t spent much time in Norwood, Bronx over the years — it’s an interesting area that can now justifiably claim to be the new Little Italy, since the old …

Continuing my halting, wavering, and occasionally incoherent way up the Grand Boulevard and Concourse, the spine of the western Bronx broached in Grand Concourse Part 1, my first stop was …

OFFICE SPACE AVAILABLE
at the Quinn Building, 35-20 Broadway, Long Island City, NY 11106
718-278-0700
info@astorialic.org

Downsize in Style – Will Subdivide
$1650 full space / $900 half space
Furnished: Desks, chairs, cabinets included!
- 1,200 sq …

The NYC Salvage Warehouse on Berry Street north of the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn auctioned off its treasure trove of New York City artifacts to a single bidder in July, …

Wall Street has been in the news for all the wrong reasons of late. Of course, one of its iconic images is Arturo Di Modica’s Charging Bull bronze sculpture at …

I had always been under the impression that Cherokee Place, between East 77th and 78th Streets near the FDR Drive, was cut through when the Drive was constructed here in …

While scuttling furtively through the streets of New York, looking down while trying to avoid meeting the gaze of my betters, I sometimes catch sight of elements that the more …

10/17/11: ***HINSCH’S  SAVED, as the owners of Skinflint’s on 5th will operate it.****
I’ll admit it, I had been in Hinsch’s (pronounced HINSH’S, as if the C wasn’t there), the long-lived …

There are still some very old metal sidewalk compasses to be found on sidewalks around town. This one is at Hicks between Poplar and Middagh Streets at PS 8 in …

Around 2000, the Department of Transportation installed distinctive black and white signs developed by the Alliance for Downtown Manhattan that featured easy-to-read street names, house numbers found on the block …

The Grand Concourse runs up the western end of the Bronx like a zipper. Unzip it and you will find Bronx past, present and future: the grand visions of a …

The 10-columned (5 on one side, 5 on the other) Music Pagoda in Prospect Park was, once upon a time, the park’s chief concert venue. It can be found on …

Regretfully another season on Governors Island is coming to an end. The island became a public park in 2005 after the last vestiges of its role as a military defender …

Exit, or is is it entrance, at 7th Avenue and 86th Street, Nathan’s, 2005. The sign has since been replaced with something with a little more sense.

Though Green-Wood Cemetery was opened for business in 1838, there are occasional stones and memorials scattered around from earlier times.
Sometimes, a family will disinter from one cemetery and relocate in …

Baltimore natives Clifton and William Prentiss each died for their country. In 1862, with the USA and Confederate States at war, Clifton joined the Union army and later rose to …

A very large painted ad on a corner factory at Henry and Middagh Streets proclaims Peaks Mason Mints, and is the former home of the Mason, Au and Magenheimer Candy …

Throughout most of Shea Stadium’s existence in Flushing Meadows, Queens (except for the last couple of years, when Citifield was being constructed) a large, four-sided clock tower was visible beyond the …

Willets Point Boulevard between Roosevelt Avenue and Northern Boulevard is the heart of the “iron triangle” consisting of metal works, scrap metal dealers, car repair shops, and wholesalers. The city …

Wood sign announcing total height from road to elevated trestle on Roosevelt Avenue at the Mets-Willlets Point station. It’s a very old design and could have been here since the …

Before the “pooper scooper” regulation was passed in the 1980s, cleaning up after your dog was merely voluntary, and the Department of Sanitation could merely encourage people to do so.
The …

One of a pair of surviving painted ad signs on East 32nd near Lexington advertises the old Manning-Bowman Company, founded in 1832 and purchased in 1872 by Connecticutters Edward Manning …

I was aimlessly and unsteadily scarpering east on East 32nd Street a couple of years ago, looking for something interesting to photograph, when I happened on an isolated turn of …

If you have never heard of Finn Square, that’s perfectly understandable. In NYC parlance, a “square” can be any shape, and Finn Square is a triangle in Tribeca formed by …

Most younger New Yorkers know the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion on the NW corner of 6th Avenue and West 20th Street as the Limelight Disco, one of a …

One of the last enclosed public phone booths in New York City can be found, or could (this photo was taken 3 years ago) at West End Avenue and West …

On September 17, 2011, over 40 ForgottenFans met at 2nd Avenue and East 125th Street to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Robert F. Kennedy Triborough Bridge (which opened to …

I had only seen the right part of his painted ad on 8th Avenue near West 47th Street, advertising rooms with steam heat, hot and cold water, and housekeeping.
The rest …

Forgotten NY has always been a bit sparse on Forgotten aspects of the Upper East Side. There has always been apractical side to this, as the Long Island RR brings …

Baron Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand von Steuben (1730-1794) was a Prussian Revolutionary War-era military leader. He is considered one of the fathers of the Continetal army in teaching the fire points …

The Robbins Reef Lighthouse, familiar to Staten Island Ferry riders as it sits at the confluence of Upper New York Bay and the Kill Van Kull, was originally built in …

On April 10th, 1969, the second game of the 1969 World Series victory season, Mets center fielder Tommie Agee hit a HR into the upper left field deck at Shea …

The old Blue Sky Diner, a 1954 Mountainview at 21st Street and 49th Avenue in Hunters Point, took a star turn in 2010-2011 as the upscale M. Wells Restaurant, featuring …

There was a time in this fair city when Sixth Avenue did not run all the way south to Tribeca. In fact, for about the first century of its existence, …

The Cheyenne Diner began as the Market Diner at 9th Avenue and 33rd Street sometime in the early 1940s. The diner manufacturer was Paramount Modular Concepts of Oakland, NJ, in business …

Famed horror fiction writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft, usually associated with Providence, Rhode Island, lived in two residences in Brooklyn from 1924-1926. His first was in an apartment (I don’t know …

Mobil ad, Flatbush Avenue near 8th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
The word “mobile” comes from the Latin mobilis, movable and movere, to move.
Mobil Oil is a descendant of the John …

The broad building with the defunct clock tower on the east side of Flatbush Avenue just south of the Prospect Park entrance at Ocean Avenue is the former Bond Bread …

William Poole, street fighter, political kingmaker, meat cutter and pugilist (1821-1855).
More than six feet tall and weighing 200 pounds, William Poole stood out in an age of small men. He …

It appears as if the discount furniture stores that mostly  line the north side of Surf Avenue from Stillwell Avenue to West 8th Street will be moving out soon. At …

With one fast food joint or franchise every other block, it’s hard to remember a time when there weren’t a lot of them in New York. I had a meal …

Terra cotta frieze from the original South Ferry station, in use for over 90 years until it was closed in 2009. All service now runs to the modern yet bland …

Though the official name of the station is Willets Point Boulevard (for the LIRR, it’s Mets-Willets Point) Shea Stadium lives on in leftover 1964-era signage. Shea Stadium, of course, was …

Above: Triborough Bridge at dusk, seen from the platform of the Astoria Blvd. station on the N/Q elevated Astoria Line. The  station, since the mid-1930s, has been positioned over the …

Between about 1964 and 1985 all street signs in Queens looked like this, with an off-white background and blue lettering. In 1964 the city installed large vinyl and metal street …

The Ruby M. tugboat accompanies a barge in Upper New York Bay, September 10, 2011.
Built in 1967, by Jakobson Shipyard of Oyster Bay, New York (hull #433) as the Texaco Fire …

Checker cab, Forest Ave and Manor Road, Westerleigh, Staten Island.
At the height of the vehicle’s popularity in the roaring 20’s, there were as many as 8,000 Checker cabs plying the roads of …

I have done two previous surveys of Rosebank, a small town on the southeast edge of Staten Island bordered by the SIRT cut, the Verrazano Bridge approach, and the Staten …

[Located at Manor road and Martling Avenue in Castleton Corners], the Manor Road Armory and its signature three-story towers and corner turrets was noted as “a unique contributor to the …

Victory Boulevard and Jewett Avenue, Staten Island. 10 years after terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, attacked the Pentagon and attempted to level the Capitol or White House, painted murals …

I saw the USS New York from the ferry on Saturday. Though it could be mistaken by the layman for an aircraft carrier, the vessel is actually classified as an …

1936-vintage lamppost at Tunnel Entrance Street at the Queens Midtown Tunnel in Murray Hill.  Somehow, the original fixtures, futuristic-looking in the 1930s, have survived. They seem to be precursors of …

Since shortly after the 9/11/01 terrorist attack a lot at Mulry Square, the Greenwich Village intersection of 7th Avenue South, West 11th and Greenwich Avenue, had had its chain link …

Mulry Square, at 7th and Greenwich Avenues in the Village, is named for Emigrant Savings Bank President Thomas Mulry (d. 1916), a tireless contributor to Catholic charitable causes, notably the …

9/10/11: Silt running from overflowed upstate streams, courtesy Tropical Storms Irene and Lee, has left the Hudson River with an unusual reddish color.

Flatbush Avenue near 7th, Park Slope. A look at some interlocking brickwork, elaborate molding, and lettering at the peak of an apartment building. From 1880-1915 or so, architects helpfully showed …

Not a Photoshop filter — the intersection of Broadway and 73rd Street in Jackson Heights, through a colored window panel at the Bway-74th Street el station.

Bob Diamond, who explored and later instituted tours in the long-defunct Atlantic Avenue Tunnel, attempted to reinstitute a trolley line from Red Hook to downtown Brooklyn along Columbia Street in …

Griffon Cutlery Works was located at 151 West 19th Street from 1920 to about 1965, and its large painted sign can still be made out from 7th Avenue between West …

I had always thought Maretzek Court, off Bloomingdale Road north of Amboy Road in Pleasant Plains, Staten Island, honored a developer or builder but actually the court honors a long-ago …

The Newtown Historical Society toured Maspeth, Queens on July 31, 2011, a day featuring uncommonly good weather for any tour led by Your Webmaster. The Newtown Historical Society was founded to educate …

9/4/11. I do eat seafood. Thing is, though, I anti-seafood-ize it as much as possible. The more it’s sheathed in bread crumbs, butter, lemon, tartar sauce the better, to remove …

New York City opened up a second section of  its only major rail to trails project, the former West Side Freight Railroad (popularly called the High Line) in June 2011 from West 20th …

Sorry for paraphrasing your classic, Marcel, but after NYC has now replaced virtually all its everyday lamppost luminaires (light bulbs and the hardware that houses them, for 95% of FNY readers who …

I was making my way through the merciless blazing sun in East Willliamsburg the other Sunday, on my way to a radio appearance on the Mike and Judy Show [archived here] heading east …

There’s probably an interesting story behind the naming of Delmonico Place in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, just below its undefended border with Williamsburg. It’s a one-block street on an odd slant between Ellery …

WAYFARING: 5 BRIDGES TOUR
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
Park Avenue
When Eva G abor sang, “Darlin, I love ya but give me Park Avenue” she didn’t mean its lengthy Bronx stretch, which meanders …

In July 2011 I crawled through the postmodern wasteland of modern Flushing, a land increasingly scattered with empty lots testimony to the golden dreams of the go-go 2000s and a mayoral …

A fascinating exhibit has turned up on the plywood boards surrounding a construction site on Church Street downtown, between Barclay Street and Park Place. It is the second in a series …

I am quite familiar with the Fulton Mall: in fact I have walked Fulton Street in its entirety from the East River waterfront to East New York. While NYC Department of …

As many have guessed, I walk on the periphery in many arenas. In the spring and summer of 2010 and 2011, I maintained an ongoing survey of the Queens-Nassau line …

Wooster Street runs from Canal Street north to West Houston, just east of West Broadway. Its northern reaches from W. Houston to Washington Square were aken over by New York University …

Crazed from the heat, I recently stumbled on board a Long Island Rail Road train, staggered out in Penn Station, unconsciously swiped myself into a downtown subway, and staggered out on …

As a rule, I usually harbor some affection for the places I have worked, even if all of them ultimately wound up having little affection for me. There was the sepulchral …

NoHo, one of Manhattan’s smallest enclaves, is located east of Mercer Street north of Houston (giving it its name), west of the Bowery, and south of 4th Street, comprising only a …

I had a meeting the other day in Astoria and thought I would walk Crescent Street down to Queens Plaza — unfortunately I couldn’t beat rush hour and let about 4 …

Caoimhghin, since Anglicized to Kevin (the name means “handsome by birth”) was an Irish monk who lived, according to tradition, for 120 years, from 498-618, in what is now County Wicklow. According …

Given my er, ah, advanced age, I have ridden in virtually every bus make that has plied the streets of NYC for the Transit Authority and later, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, …

Over the course of six years I wound up taking two different batches of photos on 2nd Avenue between Houston Street and 34th. Like the Bowery, which it (sort of) …

With more free time during the week (after a 3/23/11 layoff) but still pretty much shackled to Queens because of usurious transit fares (I do not drive, but the usurious gas …

May 2011: Having been forced out of my job by mechanization and the fanatical desire of business to maximize profits (the cry of business is that “we are not running a …

Just about every weekend when I was quite small one of my parents–most often my mother — and I would take a bus ride just to see what was out there. …

Unlike other boroughs, trends or leanings cannot be ascribed to Queens’ numbered streets. Unlike, say, Manhattan’s 57th Street, which is a self-contained unit on which you will find icons such as Carnegie …

 
 
The Chelsea and Clinton neighborhoods on the west side of Manhattan are relatively easy to get to from lively Little Neck — the train ride to Manhattan is 22 minutes …

I was heading to a birthday thing the other Saturday and found myself along Kings Highway, Brooklyn’s Mother Road, a colonial-era route built partially atop a Native American trail that once stretched …

A few weeks after exploring the southern reaches of Woodside on ForgottenTour 40, the Newtown Historical Society and FNY turned north and dissected historical territory on Tour 42 (there was an intermission in …

Hallelujah, I’m a bum. In March 2011 my former company had a ‘reorganization’ in which the dead wood is carted out and burned. No matter how much they spin it for …

March 2011: Just suffered my first layoff of the decade, which just missed being my third (1999, 2004, 2011). My last trip while employed by someone else in 2011 was …

Allow me a litle FNY esoterica. (You can argue the whole website is esoterica but I would disagree with you). Over the past few years, the NYC Department of Transportation and …

Miss Heather, via facebook: So let’s see: my inbox is hoppin’ (this includes a missive from a college student. It is among the most grammatically nightmarish/typo-ridden tomes I have received in a …

I have been to Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, the two neighborhoods just to the south of downtown Brooklyn, on numerous occasions, even covering Court Street on one FNY page, and shot Clinton …

Though most of western Queens can be considered Long Island City (it was once an independent entity) there are subdivisions such as Ravenswood, which faces across the East River across Roosevelt …

Helping fulfill a recent self-promise to tour around in places such as upper Manhattan, Bronx and Staten Island locales that have so far gotten something of the short end of the …

Jump on the A train, take it uptown almost all the way to the end of the line, get out at 190th Street and exit on the Fort Washington Avenue …

Though NYC divested itself of most of its colonial-era “royal” names after defeating the British in the Revolutionary War, there are a few that doggedly hang on, sich as Prince …

I have just one photo today. It’s the last dodo, passenger pigeon, aepyornis, mammoth, tyrannosaur, brachiothere, trilobite, and someday, the last human. It’s the last of its type. Once, thousands …

Finding ancient routes throughout the five boroughs has been challenging and rewarding for me. Some, like Broadway in Manhattan and the Bronx, or Kings Highway in Brooklyn, are just as busy, …

I was hunting down an old road in Ozone Park just past the Brooklyn line south of the Liberty Avenue el, and followed it as far as it went. Near …

What you see in Forgotten NY’s Lampposts category is the merest scratch on a vast surface, a minuscule sampler of the manifold varieties of lampposts that have been used on …

The Forgotten NY Book of Street Necrology is a thick, dusty, ancient tome, encrusted with the grime of centuries, its lock rusting and the last flecks of gilt flaking off …

MASONIC TEMPLE
I detoured a block west on Lafayette to Clermont so I could see the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, assembled in 1908 by not one but two architectural firms, Lord & Hewlett …

Welcome to the inaugural page in the latest FNY category, the second added in the past two years, following FNY Walks in 2010. In FNY Roads I’ll be concentrating on one one …

John Masefield famously wrote, I must go down to the seas again, and I am also a creature of habit — I am drawn to certain areas over and over, …

BY GARY FONVILLE
Forgotten NY correspondent
It would have been easy to look through a tour book and write a list of common tourist spots in Harlem and then take pictures of …

In early 2010 I emerged into sudden lucidity to find myself puttering about Hunters Point, the lip of Queens just north of Greenpoint and the Newtown Creek. Hunters Point had …

I have mentioned this before but in February 2005 I spent a week on vacation…in Staten Island. I rented a room at a B&B at the water’s edge, at the …

BY SERGEY KADINSKY
Forgotten NY contributor
Situated on the edge of the glacial terminal moraine, Kew Gardens offers historic architecture, winding streets, and a village environment. The neighborhood is completely planned out, …

I’m kidding, naturally — Avenue Z is no sleepier than any of its brother lettered avenues in south Brooklyn. It runs mostly through the neighborhoods of Homecrest and Sheepshead Bay, …

I posted a page of Little Neck in winter last year [2010], and since arctic conditions temporarily took control lof the area in mid-January 2011, I thought it would be …

The Department of Transportation has installed a clutch of Triborough-style lampposts (I call them ‘Tribes’) along Broadway in Astoria. I was surprised to see them as I got off the N …

I was lurching and swaying up 6th Avenue on a January Sunday, bending an increasingly decrepit and deteriorating frame against the ceaseless and unending winter winds, on the way to the …

After contemplating the presence of Koster and Bial’s “The Corner” building on 6th and 24th Streets miraculously still standing after 123 years despite the utter transformation of the rest of …

I recently walked from the St. George Ferry in Staten Island through Tompkinsville, Stapleton, and West Brighton, finishing at Clove Lakes Park, and had intended originally to do a Forgotten …

Union Square was named (actually as Union Place) in 1815 at the near-junction of the Bloomingdale Road, or Post Road to Albany, and the northern part of the Bowery Road, the …

Union Square was named (actually as Union Place) in 1815 at the near-junction of the Bloomingdale Road, or Post Road to Albany, and the northern part of the Bowery Road, the …

Much of the southern Bronx was owned in the colonial era by the Morris family. Richard Morris, originally from Wales, purchased a large estate called Broncksland from a Samuel Edsall …

Long Island City, Queens, which once encompassed all of western Queens west of Woodside from the East River south to Newtown Creek, was once a city on its own (beginning in …

So there I was, meandering around in the cold dead Brooklyn winter, when I spotted a lamppost remnant on Nostrand Avenue and Macon Street. I have a radar for these kind …

BY GARY FONVILLE
Forgotten NY Correspondent
The banking industry has gone through many changes. Look around. Twenty years ago if you had an account at Westminster Bank and keep it active, you …

December 5, 2003 wasn’t exactly a great day in Forgottenville – it was a Saturday, I was working at Macy’s, as all of us at Macy’s had to do on Saturdays …

Stanton Street follows a parallel path with its partner, Rivington Street, from the Bowery east to Chrystie, Forsyth east to Pitt. There are various pieces of it leftover as walkways in the …

Rivington is a street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in general running from the Bowery east to Pitt Street. In 2010 it exists in three separate pieces, a one-block stretch between …

During my recent walk from downtown Brooklyn to Crown Heights, I was meandering down Montgomery Street when, just past Nostrand Avenue I spotted an odd little part-dirt, part Belgian blocked path issuing …

St. Patrick’s “old” Cathedral, 260-264 Mulberry Street between Price and East Houston, is called “old” to differentiate it from its “newer” cousin uptown, St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 5th Avenue and East …

In July 2010 I stumbled in the dead dog heat on West 30th Street (the fruits of that labor are included on West 30th Part 1 and West 30th Part …

In 1901, Auburndale, east of Flushing, Queens, was empty farmland. Enter the New England Development & Improvement Co., which bought the 90-acre Thomas Willets farm, and lo and behold, Auburndale the …

Time to delve once more into the Bob Mulero collection of lampposts. Bob and I achieved our separate lamppost obsessions separately: while both us have been enthusiastically noting the state of …

Quite a bit of Queens real estate bears the name Hollis — the neighborhoods Hollis, Holliswood, Hollis Park Gardens and Hollis Hills, the LIRR Hollis station, Hollis Avenue, Hollis Hills Terrace …

If there is a glaring weakness in the FNY canon it’s upper Manhattan. For whatever reason I have not spent enough time north of Grand Army Plaza or Columbus Circle. …

Continuing on West 30th after FNY’s survey between 7th and 8th Avenues, I had previously also chronicled the four corners of West 30th and 8th Avenue, where there’s an ancient wall dog ad …

I am quite familiar with the blocks and side streets on the west side of Manhattan in the Penn Station area. I served two separate stints in this part of town, …

In the deeply Red East Village (I’m kidding), you can find a triumphant statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the chief architect of the Soviet state that ruled much of eastern Europe from 1918-1990, …

Believe it or not, I have been inside Carnegie Hall only once. In the early 1980s — I forget the year now, as this was the Cambrian Era — I went …