Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society
The Greater Astoria Historical Society, chartered in 1985, is a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community. We are dedicated to preserving our past and using it to promote our community's future.
At present, the Bronx’ Kingsbridge Road runs from Marble Hill at the Bronx-Manhattan line (it’s called West 225th Street in Marble Hill) east and southeast to Fordham Road, following a meandering path defined at first by an animal trace, then a beaten path used by Native Americans through the woods, then a colonial-era road used [...]
Cul de sacs and alleyways have always held a fascination for me. However they are rather scarce in New York City, which has a grid system of streets not only in Manhattan, but in many locales in the other boroughs; service alleys behind buildings are rare as well, which means trash and refuse has to [...]
The title card shows Trimble Road, a one-block street running from 62nd to 63rd Streets along the Long Island Rail Road main line north of Woodside Avenue. Trimble Road has a counterpart, Hicks Drive, a one block street running south of the LIRR tracks between 63rd and 64th Streets. The large building used to be [...]
While careening through Canarsie this past week, searching for lost alleys, I checked Nolan’s Lane, which I hadn’t visited since 1999. For most, unless you live there, there’s no reason to visit. As you will see, though, this is one of my favorite obscure Canarsie lanes. There was a kid at grade school with me [...]
According to maps through most of the 20th Century, Smiths Lane is a narrow alley running from Rockaway Parkway southwest to East 92nd Street just south of Farragut Road in Canarsie. By 2011, though, the alley has been pretty much reduced to one block and a tiny cul de sac. This Google satellite view shows [...]
There’s probably an interesting story behind the naming of Delmonico Place in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, just below its undefended border with Williamsburg. It’s a one-block street on an odd slant between Ellery Street and Park Avenue, east of Tompkins. Unfortunately, I don’t know what that story is, but it would be notable if the street had anything [...]
March 2011: Just suffered my first layoff of the decade, which just missed being my third (1999, 2004, 2011). My last trip while employed by someone else in 2011 was to Murray Hill, a rather expensive section of Manhattan your webmaster has no business being in other than as a tourist. Even Murray Hill’s somewhat [...]
Helping fulfill a recent self-promise to tour around in places such as upper Manhattan, Bronx and Staten Island locales that have so far gotten something of the short end of the stick, FNY-wise, I was in Inwood in upper Manhattan checking out its collection of one-block streets. True, I had already covered little known Manhattan streets [...]
During my recent walk from downtown Brooklyn to Crown Heights, I was meandering down Montgomery Street when, just past Nostrand Avenue I spotted an odd little part-dirt, part Belgian blocked path issuing forth toward the southeast. Actually I was doing more than meandering because I had chosen to walk Montgomery Street specifically so I would go by [...]
When NYC had a more rural character and was dotted with farms a couple of centuries ago, grist mills, in which grain is ground into flour, were primary engines of commerce. Though none are left within the five boroughs, maps nonetheless are stocked with lanes and roads called Mill, some major, some minor — Manhattan (1), [...]
Sometimes, I’d rather be in Philadelphia. Or Boston. Or even Albany, Newark or Jersey City. I’ll explain. Manhattan, once you get north of 14th Street, just doesn’t have the sheer number of dead-ends or one-block alleys block by block that other northeast cities have. Philadelphia has a main network grid of streets — numbered north and [...]
Since the mysterious Poe Toaster did not show up this year [Jan. 19, 2010] in Baltimore at Edgar Allan Poe’s gravesite as he usually does on Poe’s birthday, I thought it appropriate to pay homage of my own in Forgotten NY. If you’re not familiar with the story, a mysterious figure, or figures (the tradition started [...]
Two dead-end lanes called Cornell Lane and Jessie Court, running north from Northern Boulevard between Marathon Parkway and Little Neck Parkway, have been there for decades — likely as much as a century. Yet, I had no idea they were there until I moved to Queens in 1993 and found Cornell Lane riding past in a [...]
Riverdale, in the northwest Bronx between approximately West 246th Street on the south, the Yonkers city line on the north, the Henry Hudson Parkway and Riverdale Avenue on the east and the Hudson River on the west (and by the communities of North and South Riverdale) is one of the city’s most piquant, and most [...]
May 2009: Most of the Bronx press attention has gone to theYankees’ new billion-dollar launching pad (where they have already lost 22-4 and more lopsided scores) where the displaced parks will be built on top of parking lots, and where dozens of prime seats are sitting empty night after night because they cost $2560 per seat, per [...]
There are entire sections of Brooklyn, probably New York City’s borough that hews most rigidly to the grid concept, that have no cul de sacs or alleys whatsoever; think of Sunset Park, Marine Park or Bensonhurst, which have only a handful between them. When it comes to one-block streets or hidden laneways, I was fortunate to [...]
Continued from Page 1 WAYFARING: BAY RIDGE ALLEYS 72nd Court 72nd Court is a dead-end on 72nd Street just east of Shore Road. Unlike its alley partners in Bay Ridge, it doesn’t have a name, but rather unimaginatively borrows the number of the street where it’s located; perhaps all the permutations of “Bay” and “Ridge” had been [...]
As a rule, you will not find any munchkins, witches or flying monkeys in the Bronx. But there is a yellow brick road, and this one looks like it’s still got its original yellow bricks (Queens’ Stockholm Street‘s yellow bricks are a loving recreation of the original). Dorothea Place, a cul de sac on Marion Avenue just [...]
“Heaven,” postulated David Byrne, “is a place where nothing ever happens.” “Being just contaminates the void,” Robyn Hitchcock riposted some years later. In that spirit, it’s just possible that the three alleyways shown on today’s ForgottenPage are still here in New York, a town that has gradually sloughed off, paved over and eliminated its alleys over the [...]
According to the Bible of Brooklyn street names, Brooklyn By Name by Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss, Williamsburg’s Dunham Place was named for David Dunham (1790-1823), a New York merchant who helped initiate an early steam ferry from Brooklyn to New York, which earned him the nickname “Father of Williamsburg.” Dunham was an indefatigable advocate for steam navigation and [...]
Making up somewhat for previous oversights, I invaded Chinatown in February in search of ancient laneways that contain hidden architectural “Easter eggs” and traces of long-vanished neighborhoods. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out perhaps the Deskey post’s most distinctive NYC contribution: in 1965 several of them were outfitted with luminaires resembling traditional Chinese [...]
When “Charlotte Street” is mentioned, anyone in NYC over age 40 can remember the two words with dread, remembering the dead landscape full of burned, crumbling buildings visited by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, and Republican candidate Ronald Reagan in the fall of 1980. Arson (some of it perpetrated by landlords and owners), crime, drugs and [...]
Well, there are a number of hidden alleys in Brooklyn (and FNY will ferret them all out eventually) but one that has continually escaped the Department of Transportation as well as nearly all the mapmakers over the years (including google maps, which is jusually pretty thorough) is a little court hidden behind Coney Island Avenue in [...]
CONTINUED FROM CREAKY ALLEYS PART 1 Before testing our courage and skulking around some more of lower Manhattan’s rare extant alleys, I thought we should pay tribute to a pair that are no longer with us…. Caroline Street was a short lane running from Duane north to Jay between West and Washington. [...]
Your webmaster recently went prowling about lower Manhattan, re-shooting the little-known laneways and alleys of the island’s underbelly. It wasn’t so much an attempt to revisit old ground–though admittedly, the first time I photographed these alleys, back in 1999, I was more of a photography amateur than I am now, and the results were rather [...]
“There are places I remember…” As I have said before in these pages, New York City is vitrually alone among East Coast cities in being “alley-poor.” Stalking the older sections of Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore (though urban renewal has cost Charm City of some of its alleys) and even Trenton and Providence will reveal netwroks of criss-crossing [...]
New York is just not an alley town. While Boston has its Crab Alleys, Quaker Lanes and Primus Avenues, Philadelphia its Crooked Billet Streets, Black Horse and Elfreth’s Alleys, and even Newark, NJ its Despoilation Alley, New York’s grid system conceals a relative few hidden lanes. That’s the reason your webmaster has attempted to ferret [...]
In a city that routinely discards its history, you will sometimes find it in overlooked alleys that are no more than modern passageways under bridge ramps, or service lanes providing access for garbage pickup. New York City has obliterated many of its alleys, most of which were concentrated Downtown and on the lower east side. [...]
FNY PREVIOUSLY VISITED TULFAN TERRACE IN 1999, when most of it was still there. The little lane off Oxford Avenue near West 236th Street in Riverdale, Bronx, lined on both sides by picturesque cottages, was built in 1926 by two real estate contractors named Tully and Fanning, hence the unusual name. Of course that was [...]
WE’RE FADING TO GRAY this week as we mourn the possible imminent death of one of Brooklyn’s last colonial links. Red Hook Lane, running diagonally in downtown from Fulton and Pearl to Boerum Place and Livingston Street, has been there even before the British and Dutch arrived in Brooklyn as an Indian trail, but it [...]
It’s a long way out there, at the end of the A Train on the Rockaway Peninsula, though its thousands of residents would differ with you about that. To them it’s just as much a New York City community as Tribeca, Fordham, Flatbush or Port Richmond. The Rockaway Peninsula was first settled by the namesake [...]
It might be argued, mostly by people who’ve never been there, that Staten Island has mostly alleys and nothing else. In fact, most of Staten Island by now has been thoroughly suburbanized and landscaped, with regular, rigid street patterns imposed, especially in the southern sections of the island. Staten differs from the other 4 boroughs [...]
Yznaga Place Quite possibly the only place name in the United States that begins with “yz”. I’ve looked at USA and world atlases and can’t find anymore initial Yz’s. Yznaga Place, at the south end of Brush Avenue near the Whitestone Bridge and Ferry Point Park, is one of those streets you see on [...]
Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay, named for the fish that used to be abundant there, has been occupied by Europeans since the 1640s when English noblewoman Lady Deborah Moody planned the village of Gravesend. Some of the first roads in the area, Gravesend Neck Road and Sheepshead Bay Road, still survive today, and roads that became streets like [...]
Unnoticed in the gold-plated greenbacked canyons in the shadow of Wall Street is a short, one-block, curved street called Stone. Remarkably immune to Lower Manhattan’s incredible cycle of renewal in the 20th Century, little Stone Street, which stretches between Coenties Alley and Hanover Square, looks remarkably like it did in the late 19th Century. It’s [...]
Believe it or not, your webmaster does enjoy the usual pleasures of Coney Island. The mermaid parade, a dog at Nathans, and a July stroll on the boardwalk are all parts of my usual summer repertoire. But Coney Island is a land inhabited by many ghosts. Strange little walkways and alleys with unusual names abound, and [...]
Tiny Stuyvesant Street, crossing E. 9th Street between 3rd and 2nd Avenues, is notable for being the one and only diagonal street in Manhattan north of 8th Street and south of Central Park except Broadway. (We’ll leave Greenwich Village out of it, since it’s always had its very own street system quite independent of the [...]
More than any other borough, Brooklyn pretty much adheres to the strict checkerboard grid system that was devised when its six towns coalesced into one city in the late 1800s. That’s why it’s all the more interesting when the occasional lane or alley breaks the mold and strikes off on its own. And, as in [...]
Borough Park is thought of today as a quiet residential neighborhood between Dyker Heights and Kensington in the southwestern quadrant of Brooklyn. But, Borough Park used to have a quite different aspect. Sure, it was always pretty quiet, but until the late 1800s it was the province of farms, hay wagons and mooing cows. Two [...]
When I do most Forgotten New York webpages, there’s usually a ready resource of publications, periodicals and newspapers, both out of print and in, through which I get my information. But when I do pages devoted to alleys–a subject of particular interest for me–I often have to resort to guesses and hunches about the backgrounds [...]
Continued from Part 1 This time, our survey of little-noticed Queens alleyways takes us from gritty, concrete-enveloped Long Island City all the way east to bucolic, rural Little Neck–which could pass for an upstate village or a small North Shore town, which, of course, it is! So let’s start in Long Island City and work [...]
Queens, in many ways, is the youngest of the five boroughs. It became a part of the city when its widely separated towns joined with the Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Manhattan in 1898 to become the five boroughs. Part of Queens, though, wanted nothing to do with New York City and so the Queens [...]
North of Fourteenth Street, Manhattan is pretty uniform, with only Broadway and Central Park interrupting the gridiron of streets between 14th Street and 110th. Still, there are a few obscure dead ends to be found on the Upper East Side, Upper West Side and Washington Heights. Henderson Place Henderson Place has its very own Landmark [...]
Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill are regarded to be the most beautiful neighborhoods in Brooklyn, though each neighborhood has its own partisans. They have dozens of landmarked 19th century brownstone buildings as well as other varieties of architecture along its narrow streets. They also have their share of blind alleys and short cobblestoned paths, which [...]
The Bronx is not to be outdone when it comes to obscure alleys and lanes. Some are in leaf-filled enclaves like Riverdale and others are to be found in teeming districts like Fordham. Wherever in the Bronx they are, each has its own story to tell. Shrady Place Doctor George Shrady, editor of the New [...]
While poking around the streets of Soho (South of Houston) and Noho (North of Houston) you can find several hidden and not-so-hidden alleyways that contain a few surprises here and there. Extra Place CBGB, the capital of underground NYC rock and roll in the 1970s, was instrumental in introducing bands like Blondie, Talking Heads and the [...]
The Indian trails and cowpaths that made up lower Manhattan from the mid-1600s are still largely there, but instead of the hilly, pastoral scenes that played along their routes in the early days, today these tiny lanes are dwarfed by immense steel and concrete structures. Every so often though, while digging foundations for yet more [...]
Greenwich Village has always had a well-developed street layout that made it impossible for city commissioners to impose the street grid plan that was given to the rest of the city in 1811. Though Greenwich Village had been very hilly in the early 1800s, its hills have been leveled over the years. Its narrow, winding [...]
above: Skidmore Lane at East 92nd Street Canarsie, a neighborhood in southeast Brooklyn at the end of the BMT L line, for many decades of its history had been derided as a backwater, a place somehow left behind on the evolutionary scale that other New York City neighborhoods were measured by. Just take a look [...]
Nestled in prosperous Murray Hill on East 36th Street between 3rd and Lexington is one of the few alleys of the midtown area. Sniffen Court was constructed between 1850 and 1860 and consists of ten handsome brick carriage houses protected behind a locked iron gate. The carriage houses were built by architect John Sniffen and [...]
Southern Brooklyn still has a number of its ancient routes preserved as hardly-surviving dirt roads and alleys. Today’s Brooklynites probably do not know that these roads existed for centuries, ever since the first Dutch settlements in the 1600s. What, you might ask, is so unusual about this intersection of Avenue Z and Jerome [...]
