Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
If you ride the Long Island Rail Road Port Washington line as I have every day for the past 17 years, no doubt you have noticed the four-story brick factory on the south side of the tracks the train roars past on 94th Street, about midway between the Woodside and Shea Stadium (now Mets Willets Point) [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Elmhurst Queens
I became so enamoured of the Van Cortlandt Village/Kingsbridge Heights area while doing ForgottenTour 37 around the (temporarily dry) Jerome Park Reservoir that I resolved to return and explore these two obscure Bronx enclaves a little more in-depth, and that’s exactly what I did on September 20, 2009. There’s no clear boundary between the two [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Kingsbridge Heights Van Cortlandt Village
Of course, one of my favorite corners in Manhattan concerns a lamppost, a Type 24M Twin, as a matter of fact. Barely a dozen of these posts exist anymore, with a few concentrated on 5th Avenue between 19th and 32nd Streets. There are also a few left in City Hall Park, and since they’re so close to [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Flatiron Manhattan
Has it really been ten years since I did my first survey of Gravesend in Brooklyn for Forgotten NY? It has been, and although ForgottenTour 33 explored Gravesend in 2008 I really haven’t been back to give it real justice. Now that local historian Joseph Ditta’s new book Gravesend Then and Now has hit the shelves, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Gravesend
Despite being depicted every week for over a dozen years (admittedly in a lighthearted fashion) on TV’s M*A*S*H*, theKorean War, in which US forces defended South Korea against invasion from North Korean Communist forces from 1950 to 1953, is known in some quarters as “the Forgotten War,” perhaps because Americans were understandably war-weary in the early Fifties, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Kissena Park Queens
Now, let’s not get too beside ourselves yet. The vote the New York State Board of Preservation took to add Philip Johnson’s New York State Pavilion, which has been sitting and rusting since the Fair closed in October 1965 to add it to the state Register of Historic Places does not mean it won’t be torn down in [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Flushing Meadows Queens
There’s a storefront at 190 3rd Avenue in the Gramercy Park area between East 17th and 18th Streets that appears to have been unchanged since the 1890s, and, for once, this is a case where the storefront is, in fact, unchanged, or nearly so, instead of being a reasonable facsmile. We see here a remnant of Kleindeutschland, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Gramercy Park Manhattan
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
Along with Williamsburg and the Times Square area over the past decade, Cooper Square, the junction of the Bowery, 3rd and 4th Avenues and Astor Place, is one of NYC’s key locations for rapid, break-neck change over that time — as has been The Bowery itself. The Bowery has worn many guises — from NYC’s entertainment [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Cooper Square Manhattan
In 2005 FNY did a 2-part survey of Queens Boulevard, a borough aorta running from Queens Plaza, the landing point of the Queensboro Bridge, all the way to Jamaica. Looking at that page again, I gave its liveliest stretch surrounding the elevated viaduct in Sunnyside short shrift. I hope to alleviate that with today’s page. [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Queens Sunnyside
I love els. From Brooklyn’s New Utrecht Ave., Livonia Avenue, Broadway of Brooklyn (Manhattan’s Broadway is elled too) to Queens’ Liberty and Jamaica Avenues, Roosevelt Avenue and Queens Boulevard (that el is all shot and ready to go on a future piece) despite the noise and crowds, els hold a fascination for me…Forgotten artifacts seem [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Tagged with: Bronx Pelham Bay Westchester Avenue
Bronxdale was a small village located along Boston Post Road, surrounded by land owned by tobacco entrepreneurs the Lorillards (their snuff mill still stands alongside the Bronx River in the New York Botanical Gardens). When the Botanical Garden was developed the village disappeared, but today the name has been applied to a neighborhood roughly defined by [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bronx
