Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
NYC stoplight design has pretty much been stuck in neutral since the 1960s, when cylindrical posts holding three-light stoplights as well as WALK/DONT WALK signs first appeared on street corners, joining the more massive guy-wired lamps at major corners that first appeared in the 1950s. This page will take a look at the stoplight posts [...]
Categorized in: Signs Street Lamps Tagged with: Auburndale Central Park Far Rockaway Forest Hills Grand Central Terminal Manhattan Ozone Park Queens St. Albans
Ads for this children’s stomach remedy can be found all over the five boroughs. Most date back to the Teens or Twenties. Charles H. Fletcher began selling his Castoria, a mild stomach remedy for children, in 1871. The medicine was heavily promoted on ads and billboards in the late 1800s and early part of the 20th [...]
Ads for the upscale East Side store painted 80 years ago are still good today! Picture is from New York Then and Now, © 1976 Dover Publications In decades past, Bloomingdale’s, one of the most famous stores in the world, used to advertise their location at Third Avenue and 60th Street with painted signs saying [...]
Categorized in: Ads Tagged with: Bloomingdale’s Bronx Manhattan
Appearing to be a hybrid of the bishop’s crooks and long-armed poles, these distinctive lamps originally found a home on Seventh Avenue, though today they’re generally used for decorative effect in bridges and parks. In the castiron lamppost era, Seventh Avenue boasted its own design, a sort of intermediate one between the Bishops Crook and Long-armed designs. [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: 7th Avenue 8th Street Bath Beach Brooklyn Manhattan Maspeth Queens
In 1998, a demolition in Duffy Square allowed an ancient (ca. 1880) advertisement for horse and buggy carriages to come to light in the now-high tech, Disneyfied area. In 1998, passersby ignore recently revealed history on Broadway. The recent demolition of the Central Theatre, built in 1877, on the SW corner of Broadway and 47th Street [...]
Categorized in: Ads Tagged with: Manhattan Times Square
Once the mainstay of multilane boulevards in the pre-expressway era, cast-iron twinlamps once decorated highways like the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and Queens Boulevard and Horace Harding Boulevard in Queens. They did appear in other situations, however, and I’ve captured two on this page. Twinlamps, and other castiron NYC lampposts, are classified by catalog. In [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: 5th Avenue City Hall Park Harlem Madison Square Manhattan Tribeca
Next time you are taking the Times Square Shuttle toward Grand Central, walk toward the northern end of the platform. You’ll find a locked door with the word “Knickerbocker” above it. What could it be? Where does the door go? Behind the door is a stair which led up to the rear lobby of the Knickerbocker Hotel [...]
Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Manhattan Times Square
In a very old section of Queens now called West Maspeth, formerly called Laurel Hill, can be found an old house on the corner of the two streets formerly known as Clifton Avenue (46th Street) and Waters Avenue (54th Road). The house has two very old street signs carrying the streets’ old names. (12/97) Waters Avenue [...]
Categorized in: Signs Tagged with: Laurel Hill Queens
The 145th Street Bridge, located in New York City, USA, is a four-lane swing bridge that crosses the Harlem River, connecting 145th Street and Lenox Avenue in Manhattan with East 149th Street and River Avenue in the Bronx. It once carried northbound New York State Route 22 and New York State Route 100. Additionally, this bridge, for its proximity to the eponymous avenue, was once named the “Lenox Avenue [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Bridges Bronx Harlem Manhattan Mott Haven
