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Monthly Archives: April 2014
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COLONIAL ROAD MYSTERY CLEARED UP
July 30, 2012A mystery about Bay Ridge, Brooklyn was cleared up for me today, and I had Woody Allen, however indirectly, to thank for it. Sometimes it takes unusual convergences to come together to make up a Forgotten NY page. Today, two separate websites, my childhood nerdiness, and the 1977 Academy Award® winning picture came together to [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn Woody Allen
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HIBERNIA BANK, San Francisco
July 29, 2012Though Hibernia Bank was acquired by Security Pacific in 1988 and has been long forgotten, its 1892 “temple bank” building [Albert Pissis, arch.] still stands proudly, if a bit worse for wear, at Market McAllister and Jones Streets. Market Street’s diagonal orientation makes for many triangular intersections , where architects were able to be bold and [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Out of Town Tagged with: Downtown San Francisco
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UNION STREET, QUEENS
July 29, 2012I have always been fascinated by streets that dramatically change character from one end to the other, as well as change their level of traffic. There are a number of streets in NYC that start with just a trickle of traffic and build and build to a heavy volume, such as Staten Island’s Hylan Boulevard, [...]
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LOTTA’S FOUNTAIN
July 26, 2012One of the most beloved artifacts in downtown San Francisco is at Market Street where it meets Kearny and Third Streets, where the city’s oldest public monument, Lotta’s Fountain, can be found. Lotta Crabtree (1847-1924) was a popular singer/actress who began her career in San Fran as a child in the 1850s, her father John [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: Downtown San Francisco
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FORGOTTENTOUR #56: ST. MARKS – STUYVESANT SQUARE
July 25, 2012ForgottenTour #56 was held Tuesday, July 17th at 6:30 PM. The air was only slightly less cooler than it had been during the day, when it reached 95 degrees, but this year’s string of rain-free ForgottenTours remained intact. Our goal was to visit several sites associated with Peter Stuyvesant, the last and perhaps greatest of [...]
Categorized in: Tours Tagged with: East Village Manhattan Stuyvesant Square
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OLD MILL ROAD, Staten Island
July 24, 2012Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Richmondtown Staten Island
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LANES OF KENSINGTON
July 21, 2012Kensington, the section of Brooklyn located just south of Windsor Terrace, SW of Prospect Park and SE of Green-Wood Cemetery, is named for a western borough of London — many streets in Prospect Park South were given British names by Prospect Park South‘s developer, Dean Alvord, during the early 20th Century. Kensington lies near Bay [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Tagged with: Brooklyn Kensington
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162nd STREET, FLUSHING
July 18, 2012162nd Street runs north-south in Queens, a bit here, a bit there, from the Whitestone enclave called Beechhurst south to Jamaica (oddly it never gets south of there, even though there’s plenty of real estate south of Jamaica). Between Northern Boulevard and 46th Avenue in the eastern reaches of Flushing, it’s a two-way main drag, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Flushing Queens
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SIGNS OF 1st AVENUE
July 17, 2012While meandering down 1st Avenue, between East Houston and East 14th Streets recently, I was struck by the large number of small hole-in-the wall businesses and the handmade or old-fashioned signs that accompany them. Time for a quickie Signs page to show them to you. DeRobertis Pastry Shop/Pasticceria between East 10th and 11th boasts [...]
Categorized in: Signs Tagged with: East Village Manhttan
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COLLEGE POINT INNOVATION
July 14, 2012The Department of Transportation has come up with an unusual arrangement in downtown College Point in NW Queens. For the former WALK/DONT WALK signs, now represented by a red hand and green walking man, they have installed slightly thicker, taller stanchions, which allows the placement of other traffic signs and street signs. A harbinger of [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: College Point Queens
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THE ELOIZATION OF NEW YORK
July 14, 2012The old New York Pavilion in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, which has been allowed to rust and fall apart for 47 years, reminds me of the various Time Machine movies in which H.G. Wells, sitting in his time machine watching the years go by, sees Man’s great projects rise, prosper and then deteriorate over the centuries. [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Flushing Meadows Queens
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ONE ON ONE
July 13, 2012East Houston Street is the game-changer in Manhattan, dividing the club of streets with names of southern Manhattan Island from the fraternity of streets with numbers (and a few letters) on the island north of it. Thus, at East Houston, Columbia becomes Avenue D; Pitt becomes Avenue C; Clinton becomes Avenue B; Essex, Avenue A; [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: East Village Manhattan
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LIFE AFTER MARS
July 13, 2012From FNY’s 2011 Lower Second Avenue page… Writing in the original (2003) edition of New York’s Best Dive Bars, Wendy Mitchell writes: Despite the friendly crowd, the Mars Bar more than lives up to its reputation as New York’s King (and Queen and Prince) of dives. If you’re up for adventure, you might find it here, wrapped [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: East Village Manhattan
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STRIPPED BLEECKER
July 13, 2012As part of station renovations that will connect the Bleecker Street station (on the Lexington Avenue Line #6 train) to the IND Broadway-Lafayette station, the MTA has temporarily removed the station wall tiling, exposing blank brick walls. I imagine this situation will exist for a few months until the tiling can be reinstalled. The city [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Manhattan Noho
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FROST PHARMACY
July 12, 2012The Frost Pharamcy sign on 55th Avenue and Queens Boulevard is without a doubt one of my favorites in Queens. It’s likely a snapshot from the Fab Forties or Nifty Fifties. Rendered in my favorite color combination, black and yellow, it’s purely hand-lettered, probably by a signmaker using just a triangle and ruler to measure. [...]
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NONSHADED and FADED
July 12, 2012As the city wastes millions by changing street signs that are ALL CAPS to Upper & Lower Case — including, ridiculously, numbered signs that, at most, have a tiny “AV” or a “ST” on them, it occurs to me that the millions would be better spent on replacing the signs that actually need replacing. A [...]
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THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
July 12, 2012Other than Little Neck, the Queens neighborhood in which I spend the most time is unquestionably Astoria, where I sit on the board of the Greater Astoria Historical Society and, as such, am often summoned to one meeting or the other. To make things interesting I get off at different stops on the Astoria elevated [...]
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SUNNYSIDE OF THE WORLD
July 10, 2012Besides pawing with ever-increasing futility amongst the dregs of the online listings and interviewing with firms located for me by an agency, with briefly elevated and later inevitably dashed hopes, I have been continuing to write new pages of this site while updating the old, as well as lurching around various neighborhoods, attempting to remain [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Queens Sunnyside
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KISSENA PARK CORRIDOR
July 7, 2012Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Auburndale Flushing Fresh Meadows Queens
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QUINCE AVENUE
July 7, 2012I was meandering around the section of Flushing in which the streets are named for plants in alphabetical order from A to R. On Quince Avenue I found this compelling small cottage with a French Second-Empire style mansard roof. This is likely a recent renovation, but unusually for Queens (and I hate to sound condescending [...]
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ON BROADWAY ALLEY
July 5, 2012Manhattan’s grid, first imposed in 1811, is remarkably rigid between 14th Street and 59th, with very few interruptions from the system of north-south avenues and east-west streets. This is a situation unlike that of most Northeast cities, and indeed, many cities west of the Mississippi, when built on flat plains, also emulate the strict checkerboard [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Kips Bay Manhattan