Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
Has it been two years since I began my Bedford Avenue survey with a walk along its entire length from Emmons Avenue in Sheepshead Bay north to its beginnings at Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint? It doesn’t seem that long, but there it is. This summer I finally completed that walk, in two sections, and I’ll [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Crown Heights Flatbush Leffets Gardens
Your webmaster is a diurnal animal. This wasn’t always the case — throughout the 1980s I worked the late shift and braved the darkest recesses of the graffiti scarred IRT on the way home every morning at 3 or 4 AM. Since that time I have evolved into a reverse vampire and am only rarely caught [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Forest Hills Queens
I don’t get into Clinton Hill often enough. I am intimidated by it — imagine a neighborhood, along with neighboring Fort Greene and to some degree, Bedford-Stuyvesant, which flank Clinton Hill on the west and east — dominated by block after block of homes dating from the post-Civil War period to the robber baron era of [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Clinton Hill
I have always wanted to do a big page on NYC’s hundreds of street clocks, big and small. At first I restricted myself to freestanding sidewalk clocks, and then I did a ForgottenSlice on some of Manhattan’s attached building clocks, but my ambition in this regard has so far outstripped my abilities — I want to do a [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Yorkville
I was slouching around Flatbush in July 2009, getting pictures of Brooklyn’s Tennis Court , the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church and its graveyard (which deserves its own page and will get one). Albemarle Rd. is one in a series of roads laid out by Dean Alvord in the late 1800s when he was developing Prospect Park [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Kensington
ForgottenTours resumed for the first time since late summer 2008 on August 16, 2009 with a walk around Jerome Park Reservoir, the Bronx’s “Education Row.” Assisting your webmaster on this tour was Brooklyn Daily Eagle managing editor and veteran tour guide (notably for the old Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment) Raanan Geberer (left), whose recollections [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Bronx Jerome Park
PHOTOS AND DESCRIPTIONS BY GARY FONVILLE, FNY corrrespondent There are many two- level stations in the NYC subway system. However, this is one where express trains are on one level and local ones are on the other: the Nostrand Avenue station at Fulton Street, Brooklyn. However: At Bergen Street on the ‘F’ the locals are on the upper [...]
Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Bronx Brooklyn Manhattan Queens Wall Street
In mid-2009 took a lengthy walk in Ridgewood and Glendale and while there, resolved to detour down Palmetto Street for a little ways, so I could ascertain the contrast between its elled and non-elled blocks. The eastern end of the old Myrtle Avenue El shrouds Palmetto for 3 blocks between Wyckoff and Onderdonk Avenues. The origins [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Queens Ridgewood
There are 6 streets named for states in Queens. They don’t come in bunches, as they do in Brooklyn (in East New York and Mill Basin); rather, they’re scattered all over the borough, helter skelter, willy nilly. There’s Delaware Avenue and Georgia Road in Murray Hill (in an alphabetical sequence in which the other avenues are [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Glendale Queens
In October 2008, having finished my survey of St. Paul’s Avenue in Staten Island, I decided to further explore the high hill behind it. A line of very high hills in succession, Fort Hill, Ward’s, Grymes, Emerson, and Todt Hill, form a sort of spine down the center of the island; those who don’t believe [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Grymes Hill Staten Island
Much of Greenpoint has rightly been named a NYC Landmarks historic district, as its side streets contain vintage architecture from the mid-1800s of a quality not being produced today in even the most lavish of new homes. Several of the neighborhood’s side streets, in particular India, Kent, Milton, and Noble have more than their fair share [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint
There’s a cluster of buildings on West 20th Street in Chelsea between 8th and 9th Avenues that are somewhat puzzling, to me at least. They stand out from the others on their side of the street in that the eschew brick cladding for stone and present a smooth, streamlined facing. Some of the windows have arched [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Chelsea Manhatatn
