Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
When Christmas comes around, my thoughts sometimes wander toward Greenpoint. I have many memories from when I was in my twenties concerning the Garden Spot of the Universe. I once accepted the keys for but never lived in an apartment on Green Street that was outfitted with a single electrical outlet and a bath tub in [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint
Division Street is one of Manhattan’s most unremarked-on thoroughfares. It hasn’t gotten much respect over the centuries and decades, either — it’s been reduced to less than half of its original length, first by placing a public park smack in its path, and the rest was later taken out by a massive housing project. In [...]
Categorized in: Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Chinatown Manhattan
There are two Sheepshead Bay Roads in Brooklyn. To add to the muddle, one of them comes in two pieces. The first Sheepshead Bay Road runs from Neptune Avenue and West 8th east one block to West 6th Street. As we’ll see, it used to be quite a bit longer. The other, more important Sheepshead Bay [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Roads Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
When I invade Flatbush, or the neighborhoods south and east of it, sometimes my thoughts turn to Brooklyn’s seemingly logical, but really very odd, street nomenclature system. While Manhattan’s grid and numbering are well documented (the grid was formulated in 1811) — the Bronx’ street numbering is a continuation of Manhattan’s, since the two were once the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Ditmas Park
December 2009: The end of another Forgotten year.I am hoping for a bigger year in 2010, more ForgottenTours and at least a couple of out of town trips. For the last couple weeks of 2009 I will be posting lightly; this is one of the weeks in which Forgotten NY correspondent Gary Fonville’s contributions come in [...]
A few years ago, in November 2006 to be precise, I found myself in the Fordham Plaza area in the Bronx, where East Fordham Road meets Webster Avenue in the shadow of Fordham University. After dusting myself off, removing the blindfold and waiting for the stars to stop spinning around my head, I set off to [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Belmont Bronx
The name Boerum pops up a couple of times in the Brooklyn gazzeteer (a map, for those of you in … ah, I won’t finish that joke, I’ll get in trouble). As with so many other somewhat foreign-sounding names in NYC, it commemorates a Dutch colonial family: Willem Jacobse Van Boerum immigrated to New Amsterdam [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Boerum Hill Brooklyn Downtown
You’ve all heard of DUMBO, the formerly forbidding part of Brooklyn that’s Down Under The Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge Overpasses. The Mother Borough also has its own area between the bridges, and, with apologies to the venerable typefont, I have dubbed it BEMBO, or Between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge Overpasses. Original, I know. Manhattan’s area between [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Al Smith Civic Center Lower East Side Manhattan
Having visited Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn and pretty much found it just like it was when I first photographed it in 1998 (except for a missing church here and a new luxury crap condo there) I then visited another FNY old favorite a few weeks later – a rusted lamppost in a narrow strip, of unclaimed territory between a park [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Lower East Side Manhattan
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Chelsea diners Manhattan
I worked on a Maspeth neighborhood page relatively early on, in about 2000 — for me it’s a typical Forgotten NY type of neighborhood — unserved by a subway line, ringed by cemeteries, expressways and parks that serve to somewhat separate it from its neighbors, Elmhurst and Ridgewood, from which it seems to have a distinct identity. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Maspeth Queens
In a borough that ruthlessly changed most of its street names to numbers beginning in the 1910s (beginning in Woodhaven, actually) there are, interestingly, still pockets of streets named in alphabetical order scattered throughout. There’s Elmhurst (Aske through Macnish); East Elmhurst (Butler through Humphreys); Rego Park (Asquith Crescent through Fitchett Street); Forest Hills (Austin through [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Flushing Queens
It’s one of the longest-tenured abandoned buildings in a borough full of them — see parts of Seaview Hospital, the Staten Island Farm Colony, and the St. Augustine Retreat House (into which neither your webmaster or any of my scouts have ventured into yet, at least to obtain decent photos). The castellated, turreted S.R. Smith Infirmary, later the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: New Brighton Staten Island
