Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
Though San Francisco is much smaller in total area than New York, its strict grid street system provides ample opportunity for builders to include alleys in its street plan. While Manhattan is unaccountably alley-poor, San Fran presents multiple opportunities for intrepid alley hunters… ISADORA DUNCAN LANE, Taylor between Geary and Post, Union Square area As a rule [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: California San Francisco
BY SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten NY contributor The origin of the Flushing River predates the Pleistocene Ice Age, when the Hudson River flowed into the Atlantic Ocean using the Harlem River and Flushing River streambeds. For thousands of years, the line between the planet’s northern ice cap and terra [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Flushing Queens rivers
“Bergen” comes up frequently on the Brooklyn map — there’s Bergen Street, which runs from Cobble Hill to Brownsville, Bergen Beach playground, Bergen Triangle and Bergen Avenue. The neighborhood, which is delineated by Ralph Avenue on the west, Paerdegat Basin on the north and east, Avenue U, East Mill Basin and the Belt Parkway, was [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bergen Beach Brooklyn
It’s hard to believe it, but it’s nowhere near as easy as it used to be to ride a horse in Central Park (unless you are a mounted policeman). The only nearby stables, the Claremont, ceased operations on April 29, 2007, and an equestrian era in the park came to an end. Your webmaster must admit, while [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Stables Upper West Side
One of the most enjoyable things I do with Forgotten New York is finding unheralded and unknown infrastructure. A light post representative of a long-lost genre … a building with a hidden history … or one of New York’s over 700 bridges that goes, in effect, from nowhere to nowhere. I first “discovered” the 21st Street Bridge [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
Cherubs have always (for me at least) been some of the more bizarre touchstones in the Christian tradition. Sometimes they are depicted as full-bodied babies with wings. Other times, they are shown as babies’ heads with wings. Now, when you think about it, that’s a very bizarre image. And I say that knowing that the book [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Grand Central Manhattan
I recently got an angry note from a ForgottenFan that, as far as I understood it, excoriated me for not yet making it down to Gerritsen Beach for a FNY page. Fear not, with a few days off coming up during the holidays (recent losses have chastened me into doing a Staycation™ this holiday season) [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Carroll Gardens Smith Street
Even as NYC’s Department of Transportation has been installing retro Bishop Crooks and retro M24 longarm Corvingtons, and even some scattered reverse scroll Type F’s and Lyres around town (forgive me, you have to be a lamppost maven to understand me at times) it unconscionably permits some of its ancient treasures to rust, wither, and die. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
Kew Gardens Hills is not really close to Kew Gardens (across Flushing Meadows’ Willow Lake), is unexceptional architecturally, and is perhaps better remembered for its celebrities, songsters Paul Simon and Art Garfunkeland actors Fran “The Nanny” Drescher andMartin Landau. It does have its moments architecturally though, here and there, as we’ll see. However the neighborhood [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Kew Grdens Hills Queens
New York City at times perversely secretes its more picturesque parks in places where it’s nearly impossible to find them. One of them, Peter Detmold Park, reclines along the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive between East 49th and 51st Streets at the bottom of a sheer cliff and, therefore, it’s impossible to see it from street level. The [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Turtle Bay
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Cobble Hill
New York City and United States history can be gleaned from the most mundane, unexceptional places. There’s a tiny street on the Cobble Hill-Red Hook border that exists in two sections, having been ravaged by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and submerged under the Brooklyn Battery toll plaza, that remembers the family that produced the very first European [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Carroll Gardens
The abandoned courthouse has stood silently on Beach Channel Drive and Beach 90th Street, just east of Cross Bay Veterans Memorial Bridge, for several decades, awaiting either the day when it would once again be occupied, or a wreckers’ ball. The Magistrates’ Court sports the clean lines of the new Art Moderne buildings that were being built [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hammels Queens Rockaway
