Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
The West Side Freight Elevated, colloquially known as the High Line (shouldn’t all elevated trains be High Lines?) has seen its share of coverage in Forgotten New York, from 1999, when the Giuliani administration wanted to tear it down, through the preparation period after Friends of the High Line secured enough money and high-powered support to preserve it, and [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
While skulking through Pelham Bay in the Bronx in July 2010, I once again pondered the origin of the heretofore mysterious B Street, which runs south to a dead end on Baisley Avenue between Hobart and Edison. Well, thanks to the efforts of ForgottenFan Mike Fornebaio the ‘mystery’ has been solved. It turns out this [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bronx Pelham Bay
I have not allowed the debilitating heat and humidity of one of the hottest New York summers in years [2010] in this age of accursed global warming to keep me indoors by the air conditioner. Indeed I have stepped up my activity if anything, with added tours and exhibitions in an effort to cram it [...]
Categorized in: Roads Street Scenes Tagged with: Bath Beach Brooklyn Coney Island Cropsey Avenue
In the summer of 2009 I was on Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, having just completed another 40 or 50 blocks in my drawn-out survey of Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn (two segments of this have already appeared in FNY) when, en route for the subway, I passed the City Reliquary at Number 370. It had been awhile since [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Staten Island
Forgotten New York is sometimes like the NFL. (Stick with me.) The NFL is divided into two conferences, the AFC and the NFC, which in turn are divided into three divisions. Your team plays the teams in its own division twice per season, and it plays the rest against teams from your own conference and [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Middletown Pelham Bay
CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Back in June [2010] I was dazedly puttering around the Middletown and Pelham Bay neighborhoods in the northeast Bronx, the kinds of New York City areas the AAA Guide or Time Out New York choose to ignore. Yet, thousands of people live and work there and these neighborhoods have their own [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Middletown Pelham Bay
Many years ago, when Queens was a collection of small towns divided by acres of farms and fields, every town and city had its own street naming and numbering system. This was a fine and dandy situation when Queens (then also comprising what is now Nassau County) was a separate and self-governing county. Once Queens consolidated [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Maspeth Queens
CONTINUED FROM PART 1 The Franny Lew As the roadbed of 47th Avenue, Rocky Hill Road crosses Francis Lewis Boulevard, the lengthiest road contained completely in Queens, stretching generally north to south from Whitestone to Rosedale. The oldest part of the road is in Whitestone and carried the name Whitestone Road when first laid out around 1900. [...]
Categorized in: Roads Street Scenes Tagged with: Auburndale Bayside Queens
I was foraging on Metropolitan Avenue recently, a couple of hours before a meeting at Dave Herman’s City Reliquary, when I found myself teetering tenuously up Havemeyer Street, which extends for a few blocks between Broadway and Union Avenue. Formerly 7th Street in Williamsburg, the street was renamed for a member of the 19th Century German immigrant [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
Forgotten NY eyes and ears are everywhere. Joe DeMarco: I walked up the Henry Hudson Parkway to Fort Tryon/Dyckman Street and walked up Broadway and across the George Washington Bridge. I came across a neat old “cyclops” light on the Henry Hudson Parkway right by the Cloisters. The light has not worked for many years, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Washington Heights
Though the hot sweltering Sunday, June 27, 2010 weather kept a number of tourgoers away (by apparent contract with the Almighty, ForgottenTours are never held in sunny, brisk, cool weather) 30 diehards still made it to Bushwick, Brooklyn for the 41st tour in a sequence that began June 1st, 1999 — on a nearby thoroughfare, Brooklyn’s [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Brooklyn Bushwick
