Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
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 along 6th Avenue in Bay Ridge, replacing them with Donald Deskeys, and the entire stretch of row houses across the street were torn down so [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Fresh Meadows Queens
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 unremarked-upon dead ends of Hunters Point, just across the mighty Newtown Creek. These streets are lined up along Jackson Avenue between its source at Vernon [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
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 by the green-and-white numbers since then. I’ve come to realize, though, that there were another set of directional signs right under my nose, as it [...]
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 always, lack of $$$$, throughout the era. There were rumblings in the late 1980s that the Williamsburg Bridge would have to be permanently closed, and [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: highways
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 have withstood all challengers to their prominence, from the Donald Deskey slot-shafted posts that appeared in the 1960s to the L-shaped Downtown Alliance posts that [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Kew Gardens Hills Queens
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, the Department of Transportation has granted them a great amount of flexibility, taking them where they never went before, such as producing twin versions of [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Bronx Morris Park
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 Parkway and Edgemere Avenue on the Rockaway peninsula. The Department of Transportation has since purged them all away and today, every stoplight in NYC has [...]
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. French; it replaced the former gashouse and slaughterhouse district. The lamp bears great similarity to those in Forest Hills Gardens, which was built about a [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Tudor City
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Bridges Hunters Point Queens
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 honor of his family’s ancestral house in Scotland. The word grange has its roots in the medieval Latin word for grain, granica, and has been [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Hamilton Heights Manhattan
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 foray into NYC’s first subway station. This is a photo from December 27, 1945, just a couple of days before it closed for lack of [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: City Hall Manhattan
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 a series of public bathhouses in the early 20th Century to address this need, and Brooklyn was given five. This one, on Huron Street near [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint
Grand Street and its eastern extension, Grand Avenue, is a major thoroughfare in Brooklyn and Queens, running from the East River in Williamsburg northeast to Queens Boulevard and Broadway in Elmhurst. It runs over two major bridges: a bridge over English Kills, which also serves Metropolitan Avenue traffic, built in 1931 but improved since to [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Maspeth Queens Wiliasmburg
“A stollen is a fruit cake containing dried fruit and often marzipan and covered with sugar, powdered sugar or icing sugar. The cake is usually made with chopped candied fruit and/or dried fruit, nuts and spices. Stollen is a traditional German cake, usually eaten during theChristmas season, when called Weihnachtsstollen or Christstollen.” Neiderstein’s was a German restaurant on Metropolitan Avenue near 69th Street that began as a roadhouse on the Williamsburgh & Jamaica [...]
Back in 2006, I lamented the impending loss of the Tunnel Garage, Manhattan’s first parking garage, at Thompson and Broome Streets, thusly: The Tunnel Garage was constructed in 1922 by architect Hector Hamilton. The Holland Tunnel’s construction was already well underway by the time it opened, and the garage’s builders were anticipating brisk business when the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Tribeca
In the mid-20th Century, just when NYC was replacing its ornate cast iron and wrought iron posts with more sedate aluminum octagonal-shaped lampposts, Park Avenue got a set of posts all its own with a unique streamlined design featuring then-new greenish-white mercury lamps. They didn’t last too long, however, and by the mid-1960s they had [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Grand Central Manhattan
Someone on Wythe Avenue in the north Willie paid tribute to Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746-1828) with this rendering of his Portrait of Don Manuel Osorio de Manrique Zuniga. The original is displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 5th Avenue. There’s a lot going on here…what is written on the piece of paper the magpie [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
Long before Queens officials thought of doing it, the city of Williamsburgh laid out streets that were all numbered, with the odd rare named street here and there. North-south streets were numbered 1 to 12 beginning at the street closest to the East River and running east. Then there were two sets of east-west numbered [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
Greenpoint, Brooklyn’s northernmost community, settles along the junction of the East River and Newtown Creek north of Williamsburg. It has a — for Brooklyn — unusual alphabetized street name system. While Queens has quite a number of pockets of named streets in alphabetical order, Greenpoint can claim one of Brooklyn’s 4 entries in the genre, [...]
Categorized in: Street Necrology Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint
Brooklyn Bridge Park is an over $200 million extravaganza, an 85-acre park along the East River from Atlantic Avenue north and northweat along the East River to Jay Street in DUMBO. It was formerly docklands worked by the Port Authority of NYC, which ended operations north of Atlantic Avenue in 1984. It was a bustling, [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Corona Queens
Just as archaeologists search for arrowheads to ascertain ancient Native American settlements, so do I look for arrowheads — arrowhead signs that point the way to NYC bridges. These first appeared in the 1930s, and while they have given way to larger directional signs, newer versions of these have actually appeared as painted arrowheads within [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Bronx Eastchester
Russian People’s Home of Greenpoint, 106 Clay Street off McGuinness Boulevard. This is either an old sign of great age, or may have been part of a movie set that was never removed. Most non-English signs in Greenpoint are in Spanish or Polish. At one time, there was a sizable Slavic population in Greenpoint. In [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint
One of the more unusual quirks in the NYC subway network had been alleviated by late 2012. After the IND Sixth Avenue Line was constructed in the 1930s, a free transfer was provided in 1957 between the new line and the downtown IRT Lexington Avenue Line, the #6 train, at Bleecker Street. And so it [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Manhattan Noho
A sttroll through the old Garment District (6th and 7th Avenues and side streets between 24th and 40th Streets) will reveal hundreds of painted ads on side streets advertising clothing wholesalers, 95% of which have utterly vanished or have long been bought by other companies. More and more of them fade away each year, or [...]
The slotted Donald Deskey lamppost was introduced on Broadway and Murray Street in 1958, and by the early 1960s they were being installed by the thousands on main avenues, side streets, parkways and expressways. The two slots on the shaft made it adaptable to hold fixtures like curved streetlamp masts, its most frequent use, but [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Upper East Side
This apartment building at 3rd Avenue and East 94th Street leaves no doubt about what the cross-street is. Looking at this sign, I think about typographic styles, especially the one used for the ’9.’ It occurs to me that no one writes or creates number 9′s like this anymore, typographically speaking, with that especially small [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Manhattan Upper East Side
At the very beginnings of Forgotten NY in 1998, I went around Manhattan, as well as the other boroughs, taking pictures of obscure alleyways, which have been a favorite subject of mine for decades. You never know what kind of obscurities might be lurking in alleys, from ancient signage or illumination to an out-of-the -way [...]
City Councilmembers Peter Vallone (speaking) and Elizabeth Crowley (red coat, to his left) oppose the move of Triumph of Civic Virtue to Brooklyn A number of Queens elected officials, including the now-disgraced US Representative Anthony Weiner and Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, have been critical of Frederick MacMonnies’ 1922 allegorical work Triumph of Civic Virtue, [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: Kew Gardens Queens statues
I have worked frequently in the Chelsea area, more specifically, the 7th Avenue corridor between 23rd Street and Penn Station. I have always been curious about the terra cotta gem on West 23rd just off 7th called the “Traffic Building.” [click on an image in the above Gallery for a larger photo] Daytonian in Manhattan [...]
In 2005 I found these vintage wall poster ads for Hersh’s kosher wine, the candidacy of Assemblyman Louis DeSalvio, a rally for Mayor Vincent Impellitteri and more. The NYC Tenement Museum had occupied the ground floor of the building on the corner of Orchard and Broome and the signs had been recently uncovered after more than [...]
Categorized in: Ads One Shots Tagged with: Lower East Side Manhattan
Greenpoint’s street names were once lettered, from A to Q, but in the late 19th Century were given actual names, in alphabetical order. In north Greenpoint, the names reflect the area’s industrial past next to Newtown Creek — Ash, Box, Clay; south of there, the names switch in emphasis to the formerly bustling commercial shore [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint
Continuing a recent concentration on Hunters Point that I have been indulging, in the spring of 2011 I was idling in the southern end of the neighborhood near Newtown Creek and wandered down the southern bit of Vernon Boulevard, a major road that runs along the western Queens coast from Astoria south to HP. When [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Subways & Trains Tagged with: Chinatown Manhattan
Motorists know all about the Park Avenue Tunnel, which runs beneath the avenue between 33rd and 40th Streets, but few pedestrians ever see it. It was built in 1834 as an open cut for the New York & Harlem Railroad (NY&H) which ran both steam engines and horsecars, and the cut was bridged over in [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Grand Central Manhattan Murray Hill
In the early 20th Century, Queens featured hundreds of striped poles featuring directional signs to different neighborhoods and even out-of-borough locations. This one, photographed in 1931, pointed to Flushing, Brooklyn, Richmond Hill, New York, Hollis, and Merrick Boulevard. Another sign points to “Queens,” but since we’re already in Queens, I’m unsure what was meant. Perhaps [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Fresh Meadows Queens
A better picture would be of a LIRR passenger train crossing these tracks, but I settled for a couple of work trains (actually two trucks mounted on the tracks and driven backward). This is one of a handful of remaining grade crossings in New York City that cross streets open to regular traffic (I believe [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
Accompanied by train buffs Mitch Waxman, David Silver, Emily Sharp and Mai Armstrong, In December 2012 I once again rode the MTA ‘holiday special’ in which the older cars from the Transit Museum are put together in one trainset and run between 2nd Avenue and Queens Plaza on the 6th Avenue Line. Notice I said [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains
Photos from the MTA Holiday Train, pretty much a trainset of cars from the 1930s-1950s trotted out in December and a few times a year for pleasure excursions, will leach out in FNY this month. All I’ll say about this photo is that subway cars have gone from looking like organic, living and breathing embodiments [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains
