A February 2008 walk in Jersey City’s north side provided terrific Manhattan views, a look at a cobblestone carriageway and a view of one of New Jersey’s oldest houses… It’s much, much easier for the car-free (and loving it, as Don Adams used to say) to get to the north side of Jersey City (The Heights) from [...]
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Monthly Archives: June 2013
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JERSEY CITY HEIGHTS/Van Vorst House
February 28, 2008Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: Jersey City New Jersey
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RUNNING THE NUMBERS NYC telephone exchanges
February 28, 2008
By GARY FONVILLE Forgotten NY Correspondent Once upon a time, telephone customers were assigned alphanumeric telephone numbers. For example, the numbers were such as FOundation 8-3556 (now 368-2556), MOnument 2-2491 (now 662-2491) or NEvins 8-3886 (now 638-3886). The letters and first digit designated a certain geographic area and were referred to as exchanges. Numbers beginning with FOundation [...]
Categorized in: Signs Tagged with: Bronx Brooklyn Manhattan telephone exchanges
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BAYONNE, NJ SIGNS
February 23, 2008My first visit to Bayonne, NJ came in January 2006. I noticed a lot of interesting signage from previous eras… Bayonne, NJ is located on a small peninsula situated between Newark Bay on the west and Upper New York Bay on the east. To its south is the Kill Van Kull and beyond it, Staten Island, to [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: Bayonne NJ
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NYC SUBWAY SUBSTATIONS
February 23, 2008By GARY FONVILLE Forgotten NY correspondent FNY has highlighted trains and stations on the original IRT line. This time FNY will take a look at the most overlooked structures of the subway system. These edfices housed critical components of its power distribution system — the substations and the original power house on Manhattan’s west side. [...]
Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Bronx Manhattan
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RUNNING THE NUMBERS – Part 2 More NYC Telephone Exchanges
February 23, 2008Once upon a time, telephone customers were assigned alphanumeric telephone numbers. For example, the numbers were such as FOundation 8-3556 (now 368-2556), MOnument 2-2491 (now 662-2491) or NEvins 8-3886 (now 638-3886). The letters and first digit designated a certain geographic area and were referred to as exchanges. Numbers beginning with FOundation were in the vicinity of Lenox [...]
Categorized in: Signs Tagged with: Bronx Brooklyn Manhattan telephone exchanges
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BERGEN SQUARE, JERSEY CITY, NJ
February 22, 2008In the years following the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam on the southern end of Manhattan Island in the mid-1620s, the settlers had interest in the lands surrounding it in Long Island, Staten Island and present-day New Jersey. By the 1650s, by then under the rule of Director General Peter Stuyvesant, the Netherlands had acquired from [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: Jersey City New Jersey
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SKIDDOO 2. 23rd Street’s Grand Saloon
February 21, 2008Your webmaster was recently in a “business meeting” on 23rd Street — which I hope will result in a proposal for the followup to the ForgottenBook [it didn't]– when I noticed a number of anomalies along the wide boulevard between 2nd and 5th Avenues. Along this stretch you’ll find Madison Square Park, the Metropolitan Life skyscraper, Baruch [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Madison Square Manhattan
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FORT GREENE SCENES at the Navy Yard and Brooklyn Tech
February 20, 2008During the fall (2007) I visited one of my favorite parts of Brooklyn, Fort Greene, which has evolved from a place where you would need a tank to ride in for safety in my youth to a place I couldn’t afford without a MegaMillions victory today, and passed two places in particular: Brooklyn Tech along DeKalb Avenue [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Fort Greene Navy Yard
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WHITESTONE, Queens
February 18, 2008Whitestone Bridge from The Boulevard, Malba According to legend, Whitestone takes its name from a large offshore rock where tides from the East River and Long Island Sound met; in other accounts the name is in honor of the White Stone Chapel, erected by townsman Samuel Leggett in 1837. For a time, Whitestone was known as [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Queens Whitestone
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MARATHON RUN in Little Neck
February 18, 2008Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: libraries Little Neck Queens schools
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LAMP SAMPLER from the Bob Mulero collection
February 14, 2008Lampposts are where Forgotten NY began, ever since the Department of Transportation replaced nearly every castiron post in Brooklyn and the rest of NYC with streamlined octagonal-shafts and Deskeys between 1950 and 1964 (the process started with a trickle in ’50 and gained steam with new expressway projects in the Swingin’ Sixties). The whole thing inspired [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan
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Iron fronted buildings of LOWER BROADWAY
February 13, 2008Unfortunately, most of NYC’s beautiful buildings date to between 1850 and 1940, the castiron, Beaux Arts and Art Deco-Art Moderne periods. Thereafter, minimalism took hold with the International Style’s glass boxes, which have become the rage now in tall residential towers. Ironically I’ve always loved Frank Lloyd Wright’s streamlined designs that looked toward the mid-century [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Broadway Manhattan Noho Soho
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The architecture of the FLATBUSH TRIANGLES
February 11, 2008Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Flatbush Avenue Park Slope theatres
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18th AVENUE, Brooklyn
February 10, 2008Your webmaster lived in Bay Ridge between 1957 and 1993 (with an neighborhoodus interruptus in Dyker Heights in 1990-1991) and yet, the adjacent region to the east, Bensonhurst, the vast area between 14th Avenue, 65th Street and the Belt Parkway and Bay Parkway and Stillwell Avenue) largely remains unplumbed territory for me. I had had [...]
Categorized in: Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: 18th Avenue Bensonhurst Brooklyn Kensington
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LASCOFF’S: leeching on Lex since 1899
February 8, 2008The Upper East Side along Lexington, 2nd and 3rd Avenues is still a “real” NYC neighborhood, meaning it hasn’t been Starbucked and HomeDepoted into bland equilibrium; there are still businesses that have been around for decades, working on centuries, and they still maintain the same accoutrements they always had. Until Starbucks buys the joint. Pharmacist J. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: drugstores Lexington Manhattan
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SODA & CANDY on Lexington
February 7, 2008Having read yesterday’s Slice (that ran on Feb. 5, 2008) on Lascoff’s Pharmacy on Lexington and East 82nd, in which I committed logorrhea regarding the Upper East Side’s neighborhoody atmosophere in which the chain stores haven’t yet taken command, a ForgottenFan told me that there were 16 or more Starbucks on the Upper East Side alone. Not [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: candy Lexington Upper East Side
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YORKVILLE — Eine kleines Deutschland
February 4, 2008Your webmaster and ForgottenFan Vicki went for a walk in the east 80s looking for traces of Yorkville the other day. The neighborhood, concentrated from about East 78th to 90th between 3rd Avenue and the East River, used to be NYC’s largest bastion of German immigrants, who flooded the region and in fact, in the mid-20th [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: groceries Manhattan Yorkville
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THE DONALDS: Remaining Fifth Avenue Double Deskey lamps.
February 3, 2008CONTINUED FROM PART 1: 5 For Lighting, Streetlight Themes on the Queen of Avenues On the previous page in this series, FNY explored Fifth Avenue’s status as the great repository, and ultimately, graveyard, of some of the city’s most notable lamppost styles. Various eras have seen styles that represented the architectural styles of their time installed on [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: 5th Avenue Donald Deskey Manhattan