It’s 1950 and on Third Avenue, the el trains rumbling overhead, like the Triceratops and Tyrannosaurs of the Cretaceous, are blissfully unmindful of their upcoming doom. The shrews, rats and moles scuttling about at the feet of the dinosaurs in that long-ago era were equally unaware of their coming hegemony, and the evolution of [...]
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Monthly Archives: May 2013
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THROWIN’ EM A CURVE. Lamppost designs at the dawn of the modern era.
July 17, 2002Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: 3rd Avenue 3rd Avenue El 6th Avenue Borough Park Bronx Brooklyn Bushwick Canarsie Cobble Hill Ditmas Park Harlem Manhattan Riverdale
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BLUESTONE AND SLATE SIDEWALKS
July 13, 2002
Before poured concrete became the de rigueur material for New York City sidewalks, they boasted unique slate bluestone plates that made a distinct hollow noise when trod upon. Older parts of town can still be recognized, in part, by the presence of such distinct and handsome bluestone slate sidewalks, as we’ll see on this page… [...]
Categorized in: Cobblestones Tagged with: Astoria Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights Carroll Gardens Flushing Maspeth Queens
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HUNTER’S RYE AND MORE
July 7, 2002photo: L. Sylvers Next to the building where Little Liberty used to raise her torch, during the spring some demolition work exposed a gigantic, brilliantly-colored 1900-1910-era ad for Hunter’s Baltimore Rye. Since then, local concerns have been quite busy covering it with run-of the-mill ads, probably for the bane of the 21st Century, cellular phones. God how I [...]
Categorized in: Ads Tagged with: Bloomingdale’s Hosiery Woolworth’s
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ISLAND OF ALLEYS
July 4, 2002It might be argued, mostly by people who’ve never been there, that Staten Island has mostly alleys and nothing else. In fact, most of Staten Island by now has been thoroughly suburbanized and landscaped, with regular, rigid street patterns imposed, especially in the southern sections of the island. Staten differs from the other 4 boroughs [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Tagged with: Eltingville Grasmere Rosebank Stapleton Staten Island Tottenville