Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
BY GARY FONVILLE Forgotten NY correspondent I used to live near this location where Coney Island Avenue meets Parkside Avenue in Kensington, Brooklyn at Park Circle. Even though I used that circle for 35 years or so, I never saw these former trolley tracks. Even ‘your webmaster’ didn’t see them when when he did [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Trolleys Tagged with: Brooklyn
I’m taking it easy this weekend after a somewhat exhausting period of webhost migration hell (my bandwidth increased enough to necessitate moving to a more expensive plan) and with liquidweb, that meant some tricky maneuvers on my end of things. So, Forgotten NY correspondent Gary Fonville, a former NYC bus driver, has come up with [...]
Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Manhattan
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Bushwick
This arrow-shaped sign lurking under the Broadway Brooklyn el on Broadway and Aberdeen Street is a remaining specimen of the previous generation of one-way signs. They were in use prior to 1965 or so, and were white with the words ONE-WAY in black. Some of the signs carried the words “POLICE DEPT.” on them. This [...]
While I was lounging on the poop deck of a Seastreak ferryboat (that name has always reminded me of the old Oakland Raider, Otis Sistrunk) on Saturday, September 22, 2012, getting soaked by propeller wash and fending off other photographers on an overbooked ride to visit several NYC lighthouses, a thought occurred to me. I [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: New Jersey Staten Island
The “High Line,” more properly the West Side Improvement, consisted of the construction, in the early 1930s, of two elevated structures: the Miller, or West Side Highway and the West Side Freight Railroad serving businesses, wholesalers and manufacturers near the Hudson River waterfront. The Miller was closed in 1973 after a truck fell through a [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Chelsea Manhattan
The City began to reproduce old castiron lamppost forms during the 1980s, and they’ve generally followed those designs, which appeared as early as the 1890s in some cases, very, very closely. However, one detail has eluded them. All castiron posts — Bishop Crooks, the Twins used on 5th Avenue, other main streets, and parkways — [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps
Sunday, September 9th, 2012 turned out what you might expect, weather-wise, from that date: sunny and 78 degrees. So far in 2012 not a drop of rain has fallen on a ForgottenTour, though admittedly two tours had to be postponed because of 95-degree temperatures. This was the best-attended of any tour thus far this year, [...]
The Far West Side (did I just name a neighborhood?) from 10th Avenue west to 12th Avenue and from the high 20s north to West 34th will be the locus of new development in the upcoming decade, as the long-planned Hudson Yards development begins to take shape on trainyards used by a variety of lines [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Penn Station
The relentless heat of the summer of 2012 (every day was over 80 degrees — I would like to retire to a clime where daytime readings never exceed 70, which is a humane temperature) and the relentless anomie of joblessness have been playing on the white matter and slowly been rendering a madness resulting in [...]
Categorized in: Walks
This is the street sign style used in Manhattan and the Bronx beginning in the mid-1910s, and surviving in some cases until the early 1960s. They were navy blue and white, with the cross street placed above the main identifier street in what came to be called the ‘hump.’ That serif lettering was exquisite — [...]
[UPDATE: The 'Tiles for America' project has been removed from Mulry Square, as the MTA wants to build a ventilation project on the site. It's unknown at present what will happen to the tiles, which are in storage as of September 2012... Tiles for America Preservation Project] Mulry Square, at 7th and Greenwich Avenues in [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Greenwich Village Mulry Square
I do not remember Bryant Park during its legendary Bad Old Days of the 1970s and 1980s, when, according to all the chroniclings I have read, it was a ‘wretched hive of scum and villainy’, second only to the historic Five Points in its concentration of assorted miscreants: drug dealers, hookers, muggers, killers, bums (and [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Manhattan Midtown
I was an altar boy as a kid, and attended Catholic schools all the way from kindergarden to Grade 16, my last year at St. Francis College. And, I even got a valve transplant at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn in 2009. Still: I have never been particularly religious, and never really ‘bought in.’ Paradoxically, [...]
The Fulton Fish Market, NYC’s primary seafood wholesale market, moved to Hunts Point in the Bronx in 2005, after a tenure here of over 170 years. It’s gone now, as are Sweet’s and Sloppy Louie’s Restaurants (the old Paris Bar and Grill at South Street and Peck Slip, is still here as it has been [...]
I spotted it from across East Tremont Avenue, just east of Boston Road. Having absorbed the Bronx map and street listings from Geographia’s ‘Little Red Book’ series, since childhood I had been aware of the existence of the prosaically-named Bronx Street, which sits at what is nearly the center point of the borough east of [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Tagged with: Bronx West Farms
