Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
I stumbled desultorily through the lost neighborhood of a vanished youth, a broken man with broken teeth. When I visit Bay Ridge these days it is mostly to visit my dentist, and work has been endless this year, with two cracked incisors, a crown falling out, an impacted wisdom tooth, and other work too gruesome [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn forts
BY SERGEY KADINSKY Contributor to Forgotten NY Queens is a borough of many boulevards. Some define the borough, while others stretch for only a few blocks, stubs of once-grand plans that never came to fruition. Astoria’s Berrian Boulevard is one such example. When Queens was mapped out into a uniform grid in the early 1920s, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Queens
Parts of New York City are very steep and hilly. To allow access to the hillier areas, engineers have occasionally inserted step streets into the grid to allow foot traffic acess to private houses, or just to get from one place to the other. Oftentimes, step streets are not indicated as such on maps, and running into them [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Bay Ridge is the land of my youth. It is also the land of my dentist, and I will be spending three Saturdays, at least, in Bay Ridge as my mouth continues its latest reconstruction. Bay Ridge has a number of lengthy north-south avenues and also has a number of avenues that carry names instead of numbers: [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
As I had written on an early Forgotten New York page in 2000, NYC has a Main Street in all five boroughs: Manhattan (Roosevelt Island), Brooklyn (DUMBO), The Bronx (Edgewater Village), Staten Island (Tottenville) and Queens, in Flushing and Kew Gardens Hills. Though none of NYC’s Main Streets are renowned in history or show business, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Briarwood Flushing Kew Gardens Main Street Queens
I was slowly making my unsteady way up Clintonville Street in Whitestone one searing afternoon in the dead dog heat of the summer of 2010. My brain cells, seared nearly past comprehension, were given signal from my rheumy eyeballs through the overtaxed optic nerve that something new had appeared on the corner of 11th Avenue and [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Queens Whitestone
CONTINUED FROM PART 1 The Bronx and Pelham Parkway (such is its official name) was constructed in the early 20th Century between Bronx and Pelham Bay Parks and bears close resemblance to Mosholu Parkway, i.e. a four-lane main road with access roadways flanking it. Unlike Mosholu, though, Pelham Parkway originally ran through open country; parcels [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Allerton Bronxdale Pelham Gardens
From the ForgottenBook: Mosholu Parkway is among the many Native American place names that have been woven into the city’s fabric. Mo-sho-lu, or “smooth stones” was the Algonquin name of a rural brook running through the heart of what became the Bronx’ Spuyten Duyvil and Riverdale neighborhoods. In 1888, Mosholu Parkway was laid out as [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Bronx Fordham Norwood Pelham Bay
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
Originally a northern section of Avenue A between East 114th and East 120th Streets –cut off from York Avenue, which was also originally Avenue A, by a bend in the Harlem River — Pleasant Avenue has been anything but, during its checkered history. A day-old newborn was found here in 1884; its throat had been cut. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: East Harlem Manhattan
When my friend and FNY correspondent Christina Wilkinson wrote a Governors Island overview in 2004, I thought it was the best one I had read until that time. The website it originally appeared on has folded since then, so I thought it would be a good time to reprint it here, along with some new [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC
