Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
The London plane tree, a variety of the sycamore, is the street tree of choice in New York — to the point of exhaustion, since street after street features so many of them. You’ll also find quite a number of oaks. Chestnut and elm, not so much; these have had their numbers cut into by disease over the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Little Neck Queens
By GARY FONVILLE Washington Heights is ideally situated in New York City.†Depending on driving conditions, a motorist can whisk westward to New Jersey across the George Washington Bridge in minutes. The George Washington Bridge Bus Station is located near the A train where thousands of commuters can go to the many suburban communities in New [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Art Deco Manhattan
Do architects design house numbers as parts of buildings anymore? Today house numbers are usually indicated by metal numbers attached separately above the door, or if we’re really talking cheap, by glued-back numbers that get slapped on transoms or on front doors. In a recent stroll on Broadway on Open House NY weekend, I noticed [...]
December 2008: Just got a special ForgottenAlert from FFan David Sanders: I was returning from upstate NY today and got off the PATH train at 33rd Street, heading to the N train…at the top of the stairs there were two large vertical posters whose ads had been removed, and there were 4 small posters, two in [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Herald Square Manhattan
A little tortured analogy – Dali’s The Persistence of Memory featured melting watches, depicting the survival of memory despite the demise of the devices used to record it, and here’s an FNY page about the persistence of the devices themselves. (OK, it’s early in the day…). I eventually hope to do a full-blown page on the various clocks and [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices
Remember that episode of Star Trek when the giant microbe ate the Enterprise? At the start of the show, Mr. Spock is looking into his scanner and suddenly gets a shocked look on his face. Any emotion from the Vulcan is a notable occasion, so Kirk asked him what the matter was, and Spock explained that a Federation [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Madison Square Manhattan
With little warning or fanfare, the MTA is about to shutter one of its most venerable stations to passenger traffic in just a couple weeks [as of December 2008], the South Ferry terminal, as it prepares to open a state of the art terminal with straight platforms, a center island, and a transfer to the nearby N/R BMT [...]
Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Manhattan plaques South Ferry
It may have come across before but I enjoy New York City’s elevated trains. Not every American city has them anymore, or has them to the extent that New York does. Boston tore down its Orange Line el over Washington Street in the late 1980s, and the last remnant of the Green Line el over Causeway [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Queens Woodside
Queens is dotted with minuscule cemeteries, some still existing, some as dead as the people who were buried within, whose remains are blown in the breeze now. Corona used to have a small cemetery on Alstyne Avenue that is long forgotten. TheBunn Cemetery on 46th Avenue and 165th Street in Flushing was recently rededicated after being cemented [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Queens Woodside
Jamaica Hills has to be one of the smallest neighborhoods I have profiled on FNY. It spans just a few square miles between Grand Central Parkway on the north, Hillside Avenue on the south, Parsons Boulevard on the west, and Homelawn Street on the east — a rather compact area. It sits atop the terminal moraine [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Jamaica Hills Queens
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 End of the Line The northern end of the IRT 7th Avenue line, the West 242nd Street Station, serves the #1 local. An unfortunate quirk of the 7th Avenue IRT is the fact that it is all local above the 96th Street station. The situation is alleviated somewhat by wide spacing [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Broadway Bronx Riverdale
All five boroughs have a Main Street, there are some streets you might think are in the wrong borough, and all five have a Broadway. The Bronx’ Broadway, though, is an extension of Manhattan’s Broadway, which has existed from antiquity first as an Indian trail that ran the length of Manhattan Island, then as a [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Broadway Bronx Riverdale
photo: Flatbush Gardener The word came this week over at Jeremiah’s that the grand old M. Gordon Novelty facade, on 929-933 Broadway just south of East 22nd, had now been covered up in plywood; either its façade is being dramatically altered, or the whole shebang is going down. A drastic alteration was to be expected; pictures from the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Madison Square Manhattan
There’s been a Van Zandt Avenue in Douglaston, my old maps tell me, since 1910 or so, perhaps before that. The street is named for an early area settler, Wynant Van Zandt, whose ca. 1825 dwelling, now the Douglaston Club, still stands on Douglaston Parkway north of the railroad. I was roving through Little Neck and Douglaston a [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Douglaston Queens
I don’t mind street art. That might be news to some ForgottenFans, who perhaps think that, as the all-American boy and world’s oldest Boy Scout that I have always been, not venturing far away from the straight and narrow (my life story is extraordinarily snore-inducing, incidentally; I have no ‘past’), that I should be naturally opposed [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
