Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
Fresh from staggering up and down North 4th in Williamsburg, I next turned my attention a block away on North 5th, where I found some fare that presented a more varied appearance, with new million-dollar condos sharing space with aluminum-sided houses that have not changed appearance since the Truman Administration, and brick churches that haven’t been significantly [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
June 2009: I spent a recent Saturday in rapidly-changing Williamsburg, which has evolved from hard-scrabble industrial- somewhat-residential neighborhood dominated by breweries and powerhouses, with the Navy Yard looming to the south and west — to the East East Village — to the Brooklyn Gold Coast. Even with all the rapid change, some aspects of the neighborhood [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
During explorations of Lascoff’s Drugstore, the remains of the German-American neighborhood Yorkville, and the old signage of the Lexington Candy Shop a couple of winters ago, ForgottenFan Vicki and I also discovered the remnants of a Hungarian-American enclave on East 82nd Street in the vicinity of 3rd and Lexington Avenues. I shouldn’t have been surprised – the Upper East Side [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Upper East Side
As most New Yorkers who have been here for the past 40 years or so know, most of our major projects that get proposed never see the light of day. The 2nd Avenue Subway is coming along very slowly, but has been planned for nearly 80 years. A perfectly manageable project to convert the James Farley Post Office [...]
Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Chelsea High Line Manhattan
6/09. Catching up on some older stuff while I am gradually recovering from surgery. In December I was out for lunch and a short walk in Sunnyside, Queens and in just that brief time, mainly on Skillman and Roosevelt Avenues, I was able to find a number of examples of old-school signage…some of which looked as [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Queens Sunnyside
Brooklyn’s Court Street, named for the courthouse buildings downtown, runs from Montague Street and Cadman Plaza West (which was once Fulton Street and was shadowed by the rumblings of that street’s titular el until 1942) in a straight line to Gowanus Bay in Red Hook. It encompasses the hustle and bustle of downtown, the almost [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Carroll Gardens Cobble Hill
CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Park Avenue When Eva Gabor sang, “Darlin, I love ya but give me Park Avenue” she didn’t mean its lengthy Bronx stretch, which meanders along both sides of the Metro North tracks from the Major Deegan Expressway north to Third (not 3rd) Avenue and East 189th Street. Is has [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Bronx Harlem Manhattan Mott Haven
New York City borders on an ocean, several straits and a tidal estuary (the Hudson River). This propitious location has given rise to over 400 bridges, including two of the four remaining rectractile bridges in the USA (Carroll Street in Brooklyn and Borden Avenue in Queens); High Bridge, the oldest bridge over the Harlem, favored [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Bronx Manhattan Harlem Mott Haven
“Cadet,” according to The Word Detective, is derived from the Latin ”capitellum,” a diminutive of Latin “caput,” meaning “head.” It was later applied to young men entering the military and interstingly, was also condensed to “cad,” a young man who doesn’t dance with the woman he brought to the party. For decades the word also delineated a [...]
Categorized in: Ads Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Maspeth Queens
