Forgotten New York has many parents. I have said before that the kernel may have been planted in 1962, when the Department of Traffic tore down all the castiron lampposts…
December 2012
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Just as I wrote about the odd lost streets of Greenpoint in December 2012, many or all of which never existed in the first place, I also explored the usually…
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I’ve made a big deal over the years about how I miss the color-coded street signs, by borough, that marked NYC streets between 1964 and 1985, which were thence supplanted…
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The blasted landscape of the old West Side Highway, closed in December 1973 and finally demolished in the 1980s, epitomizes the general deterioration NYC’s infrastructure was undergoing because of, as…
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Octagonal-shafted lampposts didn’t appear on NYC streets until 1950. They are now the predominant, go-to lampposts of NYC and have supported a flock of different luminaires over the years. They…
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Since the Corvington Longarm Type 24M — and other old forms such as the bishop crook and Type F lights — were reintroduced to NYC streets beginning in the 1980s,…
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When I began Forgotten NY in 1998, the last bastions of the two-light stoplight were along Liberty Avenue under the A train el in Woodhaven/Ozone Park, and along Shore Front…
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This is the sole remaining original lamppost of the Tudor City project, developed on the east end of East 42nd Street in the late 1920s and 1930s by Fred F.…
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This truss bridge formerly  carried Vernon Boulevard over a Long Island Rail Road open cut at 48th Avenue in Hunters Point. It was torn down in the early 1990s, and…
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In July 2012, I was wandering around Hamilton Heights on an overcast and overhumid afternoon in quest of Alexander Hamilton‘s house, built in 1802, that he called the Grange in…
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You often see photos or artwork of NYC’s original City Hall station from 1904, when it first opened, or latterday photos when the Transit Museum allows people to make a…
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Scattered around town are reminders of a time when hot water wasn’t necessarily a given, and there had to be an alternative to bathing in cold water. The city built…