Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
Your webmaster used to grab the express bus to work back around 1989-1990 (financially speaking, I shouldn’t have, but I enjoyed walking a block to Bay Ridge Parkway and getting the coveted “one seat ride” to work on 6th Avenue and West 29th Street). Back then, the express bus company still used rickety old GM “fishbowl” [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Trinity
Your webmaster is usually the one with the answers (well, some of the time) but when I set up ForgottenSlices in the summer of 2007 it was also for the purposes of asking questions about buildings and objects I don’t know about…for example, today’s feature in Little Neck. Little Neck, of course, has one of the two [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: farms Little Neck Queens
From the ForgottenBook: The New York Botanical Garden and New York Zoological Park (known to all as the Bronx Zoo) are the two main divisions of Bronx Park, which was acquired by the city (mostly from the Lorillard estate in the center of the Bronx) in late 1888 and early 1889. By 1891, the city had allocated fully 250 acres [...]
Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Bronx model trains
A few weeks ago ForgottenFan Chris Beal passed along some pictures of some of NYC’s corner building street signs, and since things move glacially in Forgottenville (it’s a 1956 kind of world around here) just now your webmaster is getting around to posting them. (Above, Hicks and Orange Streets.) I’ve been criminally ignorant of these signs, only [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices
For such a narrow spit of land, the Rockaway Peninsula is home to many separate communities: Neponsit, Belle Harbor, Rockaway Park, Rockaway Beach, Arverne, Edgemere, Bayswater, and where it meets the rest of Long Island, Far Rockaway. Beach 116th Street is the main street of Rockaway Park, extending two short blocks from Beach Channel Drive [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Queens Rockaway Park
ALERT! The world scientific community will be forced to acknowledge the existence of a “living fossil” as a creature thought to be extinct for 80 million years recently appeared in a swamp in southern Brooklyn. The plesiosaurs were a group of large marine reptiles that possessed extremely long necks and tails. They roamed the open surface waters [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Marine Park
October 4, 1969. The Mets beat the Atlanta Braves in Atlanta 9-5, beginning a ‘miraculous’ postseason run for the Amazin’s in which they won 7 of 8 games against the NL West Champion Braves and AL Champion Baltimore Orioles, winning the World Series. While the USA had put two astronauts on the moon in July, [...]
Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn elevated Myrtle Avenue
Your webmaster will admit straight out that autumn is my favorite time of year; I somehow make it through every summer while waiting for the time when I can wear a jacket again. I feel naked without one. Other than Coney Island I haven’t been to a beach in decades. My skin is translucent. I check [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Forest Hills
Howard Street is something of an anomaly as far as Soho east-west cross streets go. It’s the shortest of them all, running only 4 blocks, from Mercer east to Lafayette just north of Canal. At its eastern end, it ventures into Chinatown’s northern edge. If you look at the map, it seems as if it should extend [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Soho
FNY returns to Astoria Village this week: my third page here. It’s a region the Historic Districts Council calls a “neighborhood at risk” due to the accelerating rate of teardowns and new construction. It’s a neighborhood that, despite its stock of antebellum mansions and single-family homes, has steadfastly resisted any effort at preservation — and is paying the esthetic costs [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Queens Triborough Bridge
