Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
Vote for your favorite Partners in Preservation location at the above link!
In late winter 2012 I was wandering around downtown Brooklyn, on Fulton, Duffield, and Livingston Streets. Fulton has undergone a change lately, as the venerable Fulton Mall, instituted in 1979, has undergone a remake with curved, Dystopian-looking light poles and updated signage and shelters. It had been frozen in time for about 30 years. The [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Walks Tagged with: Downtown Brooklyn
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Walks Tagged with: Astoria Lenox Hill Manhattan Queens
CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Today’s featured walk sent me from Bay Ridge after a dental appointment southeast and east through Sunset Park and Borough Park at the border of Kensington. Well-worn territory for me, and suffused with familiarity and memories…since I was born, raised and spent my first 35 years there. Still, I can always [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Walks Tagged with: Borough Park Brooklyn Sunset Park
Today’s featured walk sent me from Bay Ridge after a dental appointment southeast and east through Sunset Park and Borough Park at the border of Kensington. Well-worn territory for me, and suffused with familiarity and memories…since I was born, raised and spent my first 35 years there. Still, I can always find some little-trodden ground [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Walks Tagged with: Bay Ridge Borough Park Brooklyn Sunset Park
Tonnele Avenue begins at a trickle in Jersey City at Van Reypen Street near Journal Square, but it soon becomes a pedal to the metal speedway hurtling north along the edge of the Meadowlands to Bergen County. The road was named for New Yorker John Tonnele (1807-1852), the first Roman Catholic member of the NJ [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Manhattan Times Square
Since I’m the biggest square in town, I thought it would be appropriate to do a page, or set of pages, on the five major squares in Manhattan south of Central Park: Madison, Union, Stuyvesant, Tompkins, and Washington. (Yes I know I have left out Bryant Park and Greeley and Herald Squares, which I’ll get [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Madison Square Union Square
CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Steinway Mansion William Steinway’s mansion, on 41st Street, still stands on a high hill that has never been leveled, unlike the surrounding area. 41st Street still looks like a country lane. 41st Street, looking north from 19th Avenue, is totally nondescript — there are a couple of manufacturers and some storage [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Walks Tagged with: Astoria Queens
After chronicling Columbus Square at the Astoria Boulevard station on the Ditmars Boulevard Astoria el I found myself with a couple of spare hours on a brilliant August afternoon. Actually I had all the time in the world, as I was unemployed at the time. I never fully take advantage of a bad situation; when [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Walks
I’m quite familiar with Canarsie and Flatlands — these neighborhoods in southeast Brooklyn were quite accessible to the Bay Ridge boy just by bicycling east a few miles, which I did readily in my years before moving to Queens in 1992. While these neighborhoods look essentially the same as they did in the 1970s and [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Walks Tagged with: Canarsie Flatbush Flatlands
Lawns in Manhattan? Homes with porches? That only happens, as a rule, in Marble Hill, the only section of Manhattan located on mainland USA — because of a massive engineering project that was finished nearly a century ago. Even though Marble Hill is politically affiliated with Manhattan, geographically and “spiritually” it’s Bronx all the way, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Manhattan Marble Hill
I lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn until age 35 and took a lot of bus rides to surrounding neighborhoods, with parents and then, after turning 17, without. (Just kidding. I was biking around the borough as early as age 10). One of the favored routes was the B16, which went from Shore Road to Prospect [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods
OFFICE SPACE AVAILABLE at the Quinn Building, 35-20 Broadway, Long Island City, NY 11106 718-278-0700 info@astorialic.org $900 / 750 square feet – EXCEPTIONAL OFFICE SPACE (37th Street – Broadway) NOTE: ALSO HAVE 250 square feet for $550 –Best address in western Queens – 15 minutes from Manhattan or Brooklyn. –Commercial Space (Non-Profit Preferred) – [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods
If you have never heard of Finn Square, that’s perfectly understandable. In NYC parlance, a “square” can be any shape, and Finn Square is a triangle in Tribeca formed by the intersection of West Broadway and Varick and Franklin Streets. Officially, there’s no actual neighborhood called Finn Square, but in my opinion there’s enough distinctive [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Walks Tagged with: Finn Square Manhattan Tribeca
I have done two previous surveys of Rosebank, a small town on the southeast edge of Staten Island bordered by the SIRT cut, the Verrazano Bridge approach, and the Staten Island Expressway. I have always enjoyed its collection of tiny streets that go nowhere, punctuated by lengthier roads like Hylan Boulevard and Bay Street that [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Rosebank Staten Island Vanderbilt
The latest ForgottenTour, 47th in a series that goes back to June 1, 1999, met at 10:30AM on Saturday, August 13th in Hunters Point, narrated by your webmaster and the Greater Astoria Historical Society‘s Rich Melnick. It was the most successful ForgottenTour of the 2011 season to date as over 40 ForgottenFans signed on for 3 hours [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
WAYFARING: 5 BRIDGES TOUR CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 Park Avenue When Eva G abor sang, “Darlin, I love ya but give me Park Avenue” she didn’t mean its lengthy Bronx stretch, which meanders along both sides of the Metro North tracks from the Major Deegan Expressway north to Third (not 3rd) Avenue and East 189th [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Bronx Harlem Manhattan Mott Haven Park Avenue
Why was this ForgottenTour different from most other ForgottenTours? Unlike eight of the previous nine tours this one did not feature clouds, rain or rumors of rain, and thus was considerably funner than Tour 45 in Riverdale/Spuyten Duyvil, after which everyone was thoroughly soaked through, and Tour 43 on Skillman Avenue in Sunnyside, after which we entered Donovans of Woodside [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Brooklyn Prospect Park
As many have guessed, I walk on the periphery in many arenas. In the spring and summer of 2010 and 2011, I maintained an ongoing survey of the Queens-Nassau line and, as mentioned on the Part 1 Little Neck page, today’s Queens-Nassau line was originally in mid-Queens and was originally a town line that was [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks
Riverdale is nestled along the Hudson River between Spuyten Duyvil on the south, Yonkers in the north and Van Cortlandt Park on the east. With its curving, quiet lanes, spectacular views of the New Jersey Palisades and spectacular estates, it seems to be more a part of suburban Westchester. The New York Times real estate section [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Bronx Riverdale Spuyten Duyvil
Over the course of six years I wound up taking two different batches of photos on 2nd Avenue between Houston Street and 34th. Like the Bowery, which it (sort of) parallels for a few blocks, it is now the theater for a new round of gentrification that promises to erase some of its unique quality. [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: East Village
Saturday, May 14th, 2011 was the second in Forgotten New York’s new Second Saturdays Series in association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a more ambitious tours program in the past, as tours are planned for the second Saturday of each month in 2011 through November. No locale will be left uninvaded as FNY continues to seek [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: New Brighton ForgottenTour 44 St. George St. George/New Brighton Staten Island
Saturday, April 16th marked the first tour of the semi-ambitious FNY Second Saturdays tour events in which Forgotten New York, in association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, will present one tour per month — all over town, not just in Astoria — on the second Saturday of each month through October. (Yes, April 16th was the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens Woodside
On April 18th, 2010 the first ForgottenTour of the season (39th in the series that began June 1st, 1999 and second in association with the Newtown Historical Society), embarked under partly cloudy and 60-degree conditions, as once again over 40 ForgottenFans and local history enthusiasts converged at the Grand Avenue-Newtown subway station. It turned out to be a 3-hour [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Elmhurst Newtown Queens
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: diners Manhattan neon
A few weeks after exploring the southern reaches of Woodside on ForgottenTour 40, the Newtown Historical Society and FNY turned north and dissected historical territory on Tour 42 (there was an intermission in Bushwick on Tour 41). Woodside, a bustling community centered at Roosevelt Avenue and 61st Street, was originally a part of Newtown, a larger colonial village. It [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Walks Tagged with: Queens Woodside
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Manhattan
I have been to Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, the two neighborhoods just to the south of downtown Brooklyn, on numerous occasions, even covering Court Street on one FNY page, and shot Clinton Street in almost its entirety in the summer of 2010 — those photos have yet to be published. I have also covered Columbia Street, another parallel [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Columbia Street
Though most of western Queens can be considered Long Island City (it was once an independent entity) there are subdivisions such as Ravenswood, which faces across the East River across Roosevelt Island to the Upper East Side; Queensbridge, just north and south of the Queensboro Bridge; Hunters Point, the small bit surrounding the mouth of the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Dutch Kills
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Inwood Manhattan
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Ozone Park
BY GARY FONVILLE Forgotten NY correspondent It would have been easy to look through a tour book and write a list of common tourist spots in Harlem and then take pictures of them. Some sites here are culled from research and some are from my personal knowledge. Many places will not even be shown by [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: armories Harlem Manhattan
In early 2010 I emerged into sudden lucidity to find myself puttering about Hunters Point, the lip of Queens just north of Greenpoint and the Newtown Creek. Hunters Point had once been a Queens hotspot, since until 1910 it was the western end of the Long Island Rail Road (ferries carried commuters across the mighty [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: gantries Hunters Point Long Island City
BY SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten NY contributor Situated on the edge of the glacial terminal moraine, Kew Gardens offers historic architecture, winding streets, and a village environment. The neighborhood is completely planned out, but has an organic centuries-old feel. A sense of place, a relationship with nature, one that gives residents pride and makes a trip [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Kew Gardens Queens
I posted a page of Little Neck in winter last year [2010], and since arctic conditions temporarily took control lof the area in mid-January 2011, I thought it would be a good idea to do it once again, especially since I didn’t have to stray extremely far from Forgotten New York Headquarters to do so. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods
I recently walked from the St. George Ferry in Staten Island through Tompkinsville, Stapleton, and West Brighton, finishing at Clove Lakes Park, and had intended originally to do a Forgotten Walks page on the entire route. I had obtained nearly 250 pictures, though, and time constraints caused me to have to split things up into [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Stapleton Staten Island Tompkinsville
Union Square was named (actually as Union Place) in 1815 at the near-junction of the Bloomingdale Road, or Post Road to Albany, and the northern part of the Bowery Road, the Post Road to Boston. In the original Commissioners’ Plan drawn up 1807-1811 by surveyor John Randel, Broadway was originally going to run “north” above Tenth [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Manhattan Union Square
Much of the southern Bronx was owned in the colonial era by the Morris family. Richard Morris, originally from Wales, purchased a large estate called Broncksland from a Samuel Edsall in 1670; his grandson, Lewis Morris (1726-1798), served in the Continental Congress from 1775-1777, and in the NY state legislature between 1777 and 1790, and [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Morrisania
So there I was, meandering around in the cold dead Brooklyn winter, when I spotted a lamppost remnant on Nostrand Avenue and Macon Street. I have a radar for these kind of things, and can spot promising lamppost stubs and remnants quite easily. This one stumped me because it didn’t look like the usual base that [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Lamps Tagged with: Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn
BY GARY FONVILLE Forgotten NY Correspondent The banking industry has gone through many changes. Look around. Twenty years ago if you had an account at Westminster Bank and keep it active, you would have automatically been a Fleet Bank customer. If you continued with Fleet, you would have instantly become a Bank of America customer. [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: banks Bronx Brooklyn Manhattan
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Cobblestones Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Crown Heights
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: 9th Avenue Manhattan Meatpacking
In 1901, Auburndale, east of Flushing, Queens, was empty farmland. Enter the New England Development & Improvement Co., which bought the 90-acre Thomas Willets farm, and lo and behold, Auburndale the community was born. The name comes from Auburndale, Massachusetts, the home of L. H. Green, who developed the community starting in 1901, when the Long Island [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Auburndale Queens
Quite a bit of Queens real estate bears the name Hollis — the neighborhoods Hollis, Holliswood, Hollis Park Gardens and Hollis Hills, the LIRR Hollis station, Hollis Avenue, Hollis Hills Terrace and Hollis Court Boulevard. The name honors a small town in southern New Hampshire with a current population of just over a thousand. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Hollis Hills Queens
BY SERGEY KADINSKY Contributor to Forgotten NY Queens is a borough of many boulevards. Some define the borough, while others stretch for only a few blocks, stubs of once-grand plans that never came to fruition. Astoria’s Berrian Boulevard is one such example. When Queens was mapped out into a uniform grid in the early 1920s, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Queens
As I had written on an early Forgotten New York page in 2000, NYC has a Main Street in all five boroughs: Manhattan (Roosevelt Island), Brooklyn (DUMBO), The Bronx (Edgewater Village), Staten Island (Tottenville) and Queens, in Flushing and Kew Gardens Hills. Though none of NYC’s Main Streets are renowned in history or show business, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Briarwood Flushing Kew Gardens Main Street Queens
After a re-examination of Bay Ridge’s 3rd Avenue in Bay Ridge in Part One, I continued along 3rd Avenue in its mid-section, under the elevated Gowanus Expressway in Sunset Park from 65th Street north to the Prospect Expressway, where some of 3rd Avenue seamlessly becomes Hamilton Avenue and the rest continues along to downtown Brooklyn. [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Tagged with: 3rd Avenue Brooklyn Sunset Park
Three boroughs have a major road called 3rd Avenue: Manhattan’s 3rd Avenue runs from Cooper Square north to the Harlem River and officially extends into the Bronx as Third Avenue (it was so named when the elevated train was extended into the Bronx in the 1880s). The Bronx even has a second 3rd Avenue in [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Tagged with: 3rd Avenue Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Tagged with: Boerum Hill Brooklyn Gowanus
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Kensington Windsor Terrace
Forgotten New York is sometimes like the NFL. (Stick with me.) The NFL is divided into two conferences, the AFC and the NFC, which in turn are divided into three divisions. Your team plays the teams in its own division twice per season, and it plays the rest against teams from your own conference and [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Middletown Pelham Bay
Back in June [2010] I was dazedly puttering around the Middletown and Pelham Bay neighborhoods in the northeast Bronx, the kinds of New York City areas the AAA Guide or Time Out New York choose to ignore. Yet, thousands of people live and work there and these neighborhoods have their own histories, stories and their [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Middletown Pelham Bay
Though the hot sweltering Sunday, June 27, 2010 weather kept a number of tourgoers away (by apparent contract with the Almighty, ForgottenTours are never held in sunny, brisk, cool weather) 30 diehards still made it to Bushwick, Brooklyn for the 41st tour in a sequence that began June 1st, 1999 — on a nearby thoroughfare, Brooklyn’s [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Brooklyn Bushwick
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), [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bath Beach Brooklyn Gravesend
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Financial District Manhattan
BY SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten New York contributor Hunters Point has been visited before quite a few times by Forgotten-NY, but like a good book, every time you read it, you always find something new in the story. With the redevelopment of Hunters Point South on the fast track to completion, we take one more look to the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
The sky was angry that day, 6/6/10, my friends, for ForgottenTour 40, the third tour under the auspices of the Newtown Historical Society, and there were even doubts that the tour would take place that day or finish, if it did start. We did get the tour started, though, and finished it with a minimum of tempestuousness. [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Queens Woodside
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights Downtown DUMBO
I visited mid-Staten Island in mid-February, a place where the NYC guidebook writers and trend seekers never visit. I was reminded about the limitations of winter photography; though it was reasonably bright, with a high cloud cover, the shadows were dark and plentiful and so I had to do more doctoring than usual, fiddling with [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Grant City New Dorp Staten Island
I was lurching about Lower Manhattan on a May 2010 Saturday, muttering various imprecations, causing the tourists to back away just a little and afford me the necessary space I require to complete my FNY self-imposed assignment — to locate every possible overlooked, forgotten-about and uncared-for detail in sight, photograph it, upload into my computer, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Financial District Manhattan
Despite having both its east and west ends chopped off in various bouts of urban renewal, Duane Street abides nicely. When it was first laid out around 1800, give or take a few years before or after, Duane Street ran from the confluence of New Chambers and Chatham Streets, curving nothwest and then running west [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Manhattan Tribeca
ABOVE: BILLOPP/CONFERENCE HOUSE, Conference House Park Although officially, New York City is the southernmost town in New York State, Tottenville, on the southern end of Staten Island, was actually the southernmost village when it was a part of Westfield Township when Staten Island was an independent county prior to 1898. The house shown above, constructed [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Staten Island Tottenville
Continuing my Tottenville perambulation documented in Part One, I followed Amboy Road to Connecticut, then right on Shore Road, which ends at Satterlee Street with this house, the Biddle Mansion, in view. Google Map: Tottenville Part 2 Captain Henry Hogg Biddle’s grand mansion at 70 Satterlee Street was built on the water’s edge between 1840-1845 [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Staten Island Tottenville
A quick look at a map of southeastern Brooklyn reveals a nearly unbroken grid of unrelenting monotony, as city planners slavishly copied the Manhattan grid here and in most of Brooklyn. We’re in, or near, the old Kings County town of Flatlands, which describes things nearly perfectly — making the terrain ripe for a gridiron development. Hilly [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Midwood
The Astoria el, which runs up 31st Street from Queens Plaza to just short of Ditmars Boulevard and carries the N train and the soon to be retired W (the Q will take its place, I’m told), alternates between a busy, bustling neighborhood mecca with newsstands and restaurants and a forbidding demimonde of the detritus of [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Queens
The western Bronx consists of a chain of high hills and valleys arrayed on the eastern banks of the Harlem River, heavily urbanized now, but formerly home to wealthy estates and thickly wooded meadows where you wouldn’t be surprised to hear ‘tally-ho’ as the hounds pursued hapless foxes, and horse-drawn carriages traveled the rare cobblestoned [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx High Bridge
As I mentioned at on FNY’s Midwood slice, “southeastern Brooklyn reveals an unbroken grid of unrelenting monotony.” Still, between about 1968 (when I first jumped on a bike and began exploring Brooklyn from my Bay Ridge home) and 1993, when I moved to fab Flushing, it was MY unbroken grid, and I fully employed it [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn East Flatbush Wyckoff House
So today, FNY is concluding its Myrtle Avenue survey, covering the five miles the road spans between downtown Brooklyn and Richmond Hill. I often walk NYC’s lengthy avenues from beginning to end, since I enjoy the contrasts along the way. In 1999 my first such walk was the length of the Bronx’ Grand Concourse — [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Glendale Queens Richond Hill
Continuing FNY’s Myrtle Avenue walk this week we rather abruptly cross into Queens and two relatively stable, peaceful neighborhoods, Ridgewood and Glendale. If you look at a map of Brooklyn and Queens, two major roads travel from western Brooklyn on almost a straight line (with a couple of gentle zigs and zags here and there) [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Glendale Queens Richond Hill
I hadn’t walked a considerable length of Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn since 1965. That year I distinctly remember some aspects of a walk my mother and I took down Myrtle, one of the lengthiest avenues in Brooklyn and Queens. In those days, and right on into the 1980s, a walk down Myrtle was a somewhat [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Bushwick Mayrtle Avenue Ridgewood
Today’s Myrtle Avenue walk extends from the leftover unused el section from Lewis Avenue east to the Madison Theatre, just past the point where the remaining active section of the Myrtle el turns off on Palmetto Street. Myrtle Avenue was laid out as a tolled plank road from Broadway east to today’s Jamaica Avenue in [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Bushwick Mayrtle Avenue Ridgewood
On the second leg of my quick Bensonhurst trip, I wandered down 84th Street into the heart of ancient New Utrecht. Brooklyn, now co-terminous with Kings County, was once just one, albeit the most important, of six towns that made up Kings County, delineated by British rulers in 1683. “KIngs” refers to the Restoration British monarch at the time, King [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bensonhurst Brooklyn New Utrecht
I lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn for 35 years, the last time in 1993 when I gravitated to Queens. I now live on the borderline of Queens and Nassau County. I work in Nassau and have many friends in Nassau; yet, since I do not have a drivers’ license, I’ll never be of Nassau, unless that situation changes. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bensonhurst Brooklyn
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Poe Cottage
In September 2008 I took a ride up north … about as far north as you can go in Manhattan and still be on Manhattan Island. Because every rule has an exception, there is a piece of Manhattan actually on the mainland, Marble Hill (although it technically had beenon the island, then was an island [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Inwood Manhattan
Having rambled through New Brighton in Staten Island a week previously, it’s time now to turn Forgotten attention to New York’s other “Brighton” named for the famed British Channel-side resort, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Civil War profiteer William Engeman was the first to develop the oceanside territory between today’s Ocean Parkway and Sheepshead Bay, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brighton Beach Brooklyn Coney Island
I know Brighton, England, only from the 1979 movie Quadrophenia, where it was depicted as the seaside resort town in southern England in which Phil Daniels as Jimmy is horrified to discover that his Mod idol, the Ace Face, played by Sting, works as a bellboy. It’s also the place where the Mods [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: New Brighton Staten Island
Bank windows at Maspeth Federal Savings Bank at Grand Avenue and 69th Street are featuring the very first Newtown Historical Society exhibit, A Walk Down Flushing Avenue in 1929. The exhibit runs December 21, 2009 through February 27, 2010. New York in the 1920s and 1930s is surprisingly well-documented and archived — the City photographed [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Maspeth Queens
After reaching Graham Avenue after duly noting the Gothic Most Holy Trinity/St. Mary’s Church and its satellite buildings after proceeding south on Manhattan Avenue, I turned north up Graham. The avenue runs from Flushing Avenue, where it meets Broadway and Marcus Garvey Boulevard (a.k.a. Sumner Avenue) north to Driggs Avenue and McGuiness Boulevard. Graham Avenue [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
A few weeks after my trip to Far East Williamsburg, I had a hankering for roughly the same territory, but this time, a little further west, where there is somewhat more of a human presence. I settled on walking down Manhattan Avenue and up Graham, in what is mostly east Williamsburg, though not far east, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
The name Boerum pops up a couple of times in the Brooklyn gazzeteer (a map, for those of you in … ah, I won’t finish that joke, I’ll get in trouble). As with so many other somewhat foreign-sounding names in NYC, it commemorates a Dutch colonial family: Willem Jacobse Van Boerum immigrated to New Amsterdam [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Boerum Hill Brooklyn Downtown
You’ve all heard of DUMBO, the formerly forbidding part of Brooklyn that’s Down Under The Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge Overpasses. The Mother Borough also has its own area between the bridges, and, with apologies to the venerable typefont, I have dubbed it BEMBO, or Between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge Overpasses. Original, I know. Manhattan’s area between [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Al Smith Civic Center Lower East Side Manhattan
In a borough that ruthlessly changed most of its street names to numbers beginning in the 1910s (beginning in Woodhaven, actually) there are, interestingly, still pockets of streets named in alphabetical order scattered throughout. There’s Elmhurst (Aske through Macnish); East Elmhurst (Butler through Humphreys); Rego Park (Asquith Crescent through Fitchett Street); Forest Hills (Austin through [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Flushing Queens
It’s one of the longest-tenured abandoned buildings in a borough full of them — see parts of Seaview Hospital, the Staten Island Farm Colony, and the St. Augustine Retreat House (into which neither your webmaster or any of my scouts have ventured into yet, at least to obtain decent photos). The castellated, turreted S.R. Smith Infirmary, later the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: New Brighton Staten Island
When I first began doing FNY in 1998 one of my original shoots was in Vinegar Hill, an improbably isolated swatch of Brooklyn found by heading east on one of the DUMBO east-west streets all the way until there’s no further to go. The brick warehouses, powerhouses and light manufacturing that make up the eastern [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Vinegar Hill
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Port Richmond Staten Island
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Mott Haven
I’ve done an East Williamsburg page before. However, I’ve been prevailed upon by Miss Heather and others that I was incorrect. She maintains that my East Williamsburg page was really southeast Greenpoint. I defer to Miss Heather in these matters. She is an area resident and what’s more, she has won the 2009 Village Voice [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn East Williamsburg
So, what were 32 ForgottenFans doing gathered around a fenced rock in soggy Ridgewood on an October 2009 Saturday? They were standing alongside the marker that divided the ancient towns of Bushwick and Newtown, or so the story goes. In the first (to my recollection) ForgottenTour that spanned two boroughs, Forgotteners gathered at the Jefferson Street station on the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Queens Ridgewood
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Bronx Riverdale
The Newtown Historical Society, in conjunction with The Newtown Pippin Project, identified 3 locations at which to plant historic Newtown Pippin apple trees, bringing the fruit back to its place of origin. The fruit trees were planted today at Maspeth Federal Savings, the Middle Village 75th Street Block Association’s community garden and at Ridgewood’sOnderdonk House. The [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Elmhurst Queens
I became so enamoured of the Van Cortlandt Village/Kingsbridge Heights area while doing ForgottenTour 37 around the (temporarily dry) Jerome Park Reservoir that I resolved to return and explore these two obscure Bronx enclaves a little more in-depth, and that’s exactly what I did on September 20, 2009. There’s no clear boundary between the two [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Kingsbridge Heights Van Cortlandt Village
Has it really been ten years since I did my first survey of Gravesend in Brooklyn for Forgotten NY? It has been, and althoughForgottenTour 33 explored Gravesend in 2008 I really haven’t been back to give it real justice. Now that local historian Joseph Ditta’s new book Gravesend Then and Now has hit the shelves, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Gravesend
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
In 2005 FNY did a 2-part survey of Queens Boulevard, a borough aorta running from Queens Plaza, the landing point of the Queensboro Bridge, all the way to Jamaica. Looking at that page again, I gave its liveliest stretch surrounding the elevated viaduct in Sunnyside short shrift. I hope to alleviate that with today’s page. [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Queens Sunnyside
Has it been two years since I began my Bedford Avenue survey with a walk along its entire length from Emmons Avenue in Sheepshead Bay north to its beginnings at Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint? It doesn’t seem that long, but there it is. This summer I finally completed that walk, in two sections, and I’ll [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Crown Heights Flatbush Leffets Gardens
ForgottenTours resumed for the first time since late summer 2008 on August 16, 2009 with a walk around Jerome Park Reservoir, the Bronx’s “Education Row.” Assisting your webmaster on this tour was Brooklyn Daily Eagle managing editor and veteran tour guide (notably for the old Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment) Raanan Geberer (left), whose recollections [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Bronx Jerome Park
In October 2008, having finshed my survey of St. Paul’s Avenue in Staten Island, I decided to further explore the high hill behind it. A line of very high hills in succession, Fort Hill, Ward’s, Grymes, Emerson, and Todt Hill, form a sort of spine down the center of the island; those who don’t believe [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Grymes Hill Staten Island
I love els. From Brooklyn’s New Utrecht Ave., Livonia Avenue, Broadway of Brooklyn (Manhattan’s Broadway is elled too) to Queens’ Liberty and Jamaica Avenues, Roosevelt Avenue and Queens Boulevard (that el is all shot and ready to go on a future piece) despite the noise and crowds, els hold a fascination for me…Forgotten artifacts seem [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Tagged with: Bronx Pelham Bay Westchester Avenue
The interesting thing is, Linden Place begins extraordinarily promisingly — as you begin at Northern Boulevard, you find yourself at several centuries-old landmarks that have somehow, somehow survived in Flushing despite its relentless overurbanization over the decades. The moment you start walking north on Linden Place, though, you quickly find yourself in what can alternately [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Flushing Queens
The name Ditmars, or Ditmas, appears more than once in the NYC street directory. The Bronx has a Ditmars Street in City Island, there’s a Ditmas Avenue in Kensington, namesake Ditmas Park and Brownsville, Brooklyn; and here in Astoria, Ditmars Boulevard, named in honor of Abram Ditmars, first mayor of Long Island City, NY who [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Astoria Queens
There’s a conclave of sorts in Crown Heights, where St. John’s, St. Charles and St. Francis Places all come together just west of Bedford Avenue. Running from 5th Avenue and Douglass Street east to 8th and Flatbush Avenues, and again from Plaza Street at Grand Army Plaza to East New York Avenue, St. John’s Place and its [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Crown Heights
The shoreline of Manhattan is almost entirely encircled by parks andbike trails. Likewise, the Brooklyn shoreline is also receiving more park space. In contrast, the decaying industrial shoreline of the College Point peninsula remains largely off-limits to the general public, with few parks on the water’s edge. The peninsula is bounded by the Flushing River, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: College Point Queens
Continued From Part 1 Ditmars Boulevard is interrupted for a couple of blocks between 82nd and 86th Streets, partly a consequence of the construction of LaGuardia, né Glenn Curtiss Airport, in the early 1930s. 23rd Avenue (left) skirts the southern boundary of the airport for a couple of blocks and is lit by dwarf lampposts [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Astoria Queens
In 2007 I visited Queens Plaza, the gateway to Long Island where the #7 and BMT N trains converge (though both issue from Times Square) and incredibly bad architecture, strip clubs, and formerly formidable buildings that are now down on their luck all come together. Things have changed somewhat — the parking garage determined (and [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Dutch Kills Queens Queens Plaza
Brooklyn’s Court Street, named for the courthouse buildings downtown, runs from Montague Street and Cadman Plaza West (which was once Fulton Street and was shadowed by the rumblings of that street’s titular el until 1942) in a straight line to Gowanus Bay in Red Hook. It encompasses the hustle and bustle of downtown, the almost [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Carroll Gardens Cobble Hill
New York City borders on an ocean, several straits and a tidal estuary (the Hudson River). This propitious location has given rise to over 400 bridges, including two of the four remaining rectractile bridges in the USA (Carroll Street in Brooklyn and Borden Avenue in Queens); High Bridge, the oldest bridge over the Harlem, favored [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Bronx Manhattan Harlem Mott Haven
Just when you think you’ve found them all… you just keep discovering even more. That’s the story of Forgotten New York’s fascination with ancient building advertising — there are still painted ads on buildings that come from as early as 1890, and new ads are added all the time that, in 50 or 60 years’ [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods
Comes the word this week (May 4, 2009) that one more butcher is leaving the Meatpacking District… as the NY Post ran it, according to Pat LaFrieda, ”A lot of people would like to see us out of here. We don’t fit no more.” Most of the butchers have moved to more welcoming territory in New Jersey and upstate [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Manhattan Meatpacking
Since 1973, Mount Morris Park, located along Madison Avenue between East 120th and East 123rd Streets (it interrupts the northern progress of Fifth Avenue for 4 blocks) has been known as Marcus Garvey Park. The roadway that forms its western boundary is still called Mount Morris Park West, however, as is the immediate surrounding area [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Harlem Manhattan Mount Morris Park
In Time Magazine this week (4/26/09) President Obama’s staffers say they think of the White House as a “living museum.” Sometimes things should be frozen right where they are, never to change. Detroit used to employ tens of thousands of people who made the best cars on the planet. The New York City waterfront used [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: St. Pauls Avenue Stapleton Staten Island
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Flushing Queens
“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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Manhattan Tribeca
With so much attention being paid to the city’s shameful land grab that threatens to put the businesses of Willets Point, the “Iron Triangle” of Queens, out of business, I thought it would be appropriate to show you a much larger ‘iron triangle’ just across the East River in the Bronx, Hunt’s Point, where auto glass, auto parts, light industry [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Hunts Point
Believe it or not Forgotten NY does get complaints. Well, one or two once in awhile. Many of them concern FNY’s stuck-in-1999 design. To your webmaster, RSS sounds like an auto parts store and twitter is what birds do. Others complain about underrepresentation of some neighborhoods. I will plead guilty in this — in ten [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Blissville Brooklyn Greenpoint Queens Sunnyside
guest post by DON GILLIGAN On March 1, 1932, 77 years ago (in 2009), at about 9:00 PM, someone placed a homemade ladder against the wall of the Lindbergh home in Hopewell, NJ and set in motion a series of events that would culminate three years later in a trial that journalist H. L. Mencken would call, with [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Pelham Parkway Woodlawn
As a Bay Ridge boy I made frequent trips by bus to Staten Island after the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in November 1964. What was then the R7 (now the S53) ran from 95th Street and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn to what was then Staten Island’s retail hotbed, Richmond Avenue in Port Richmond. And so, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Staten Island Staten Island Railway Verrazano Bridge
There are New Yorkers who have never set foot in Staten Island, and there are New Yorkers who are shocked to hear that there are people who don’t live there who have. In fact the most frequent amount of time spent by some New Yorkers is the time they spend accompanying friends are relatives from out of [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Fort Hill St. George Staten Island
Staten Island’s surviving Broadway is one of the main north-south streets of West New Brighton, running from Clove Road at St. Peter’s Cemetery generally north to Richmond Terrace. I say “surviving” because Staten Island has had a number of Broadways over the years, as this list by historian Steve Morse attests: there have also been [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Staten Island West Brighton
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 Past and present fast food The Orange Hut at Broadway and 54th Street still carries the outlines and contours of its former life as a White Tower hamburger chain restaurant. The last White Tower closed in Toledo, OH in June 2008; the chain originated in 1926, its origins detailed in a [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Elmhurst Long Island City Queens Woodside
Continuing my fascination with NYC’s non-Manhattan Broadways, which begain in June 1999 with my very first ForgottenTour on Brooklyn’s Broadway, continued on several Forgotten NY pages there, and then continued further on the Bronx’ Broadway in late 2008, I hiked Queens’ very own Broadway in December 2008 and Jaunary 2009. The route begins in Ravenswood [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Elmhurst Long Island City Queens Woodside
Because of its proximity to John F. Kennedy International Airport, I had always thought Ozone Park’s name had something to do with air travel, since the ozone layer is high in earth’s atmosphere. I couldn’t have been more wrong. When developers Benjamin Hitchcock and Charles Denton built lots of small houses immediately south of Woodhaven in [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Ozone Park Queens
Continued from Part 2 Metropolitan Forgive the blur on the image above: it was blown up from a smaller picture I obtained in 2005 on a previous walk. This is Metropolitan Avenue looking east. Some structures in the photo have been torn down, and new construction has appeared elswhere on the street. Metropolitan Avenue runs [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn Williamsburg
Continued from Page 1 Con Dead Time has proven the enemy for our magnificent brick power plants in recent years. The Long Island City Penn Station powerhouse, with its four iconic smokestacks, has been converted to residential use, minus the smokestacks, and the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit (BMT) powerhouse on 500 Kent and Division Avenues, shown [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn Williamsburg
Kent Avenue runs from the eastern end of Clinton Hill to the Williamsburg-Greenpoint border. Because of Brooklyn’s topography along the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Wallabout Channel and the East River, the route resembles a giant question mark in reverse without the dot. It’s unusual among Williamsburg’s north-south avenues like Wythe Avenue, Berry Street, and Driggs Avenue [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn Williamsburg
Jamaica Hills has to be one of the smallest neighborhoods I have profiled on FNY. It spans just a few square miles between Grand Central Parkway on the north, Hillside Avenue on the south, Parsons Boulevard on the west, and Homelawn Street on the east — a rather compact area. It sits atop the terminal moraine [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Jamaica Hills Queens
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 End of the Line The northern end of the IRT 7th Avenue line, the West 242nd Street Station, serves the #1 local. An unfortunate quirk of the 7th Avenue IRT is the fact that it is all local above the 96th Street station. The situation is alleviated somewhat by wide spacing [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Broadway Bronx Riverdale
All five boroughs have a Main Street, there are some streets you might think are in the wrong borough, and all five have a Broadway. The Bronx’ Broadway, though, is an extension of Manhattan’s Broadway, which has existed from antiquity first as an Indian trail that ran the length of Manhattan Island, then as a [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Broadway Bronx Riverdale
There’s been a Van Zandt Avenue in Douglaston, my old maps tell me, since 1910 or so, perhaps before that. The street is named for an early area settler, Wynant Van Zandt, whose ca. 1825 dwelling, now the Douglaston Club, still stands on Douglaston Parkway north of the railroad. I was roving through Little Neck and Douglaston a [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Douglaston Queens
“Bergen” comes up frequently on the Brooklyn map — there’s Bergen Street, which runs from Cobble Hill to Brownsville, Bergen Beach playground, Bergen Triangle and Bergen Avenue. The neighborhood, which is delineated by Ralph Avenue on the west, Paerdegat Basin on the north and east, Avenue U, East Mill Basin and the Belt Parkway, was [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bergen Beach Brooklyn
I recently got an angry note from a ForgottenFan that, as far as I understood it, excoriated me for not yet making it down to Gerritsen Beach for a FNY page. Fear not, with a few days off coming up during the holidays (recent losses have chastened me into doing a Staycation™ this holiday season) [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Carroll Gardens Smith Street
Kew Gardens Hills is not really close to Kew Gardens (across Flushing Meadows’ Willow Lake), is unexceptional architecturally, and is perhaps better remembered for its celebrities, songsters Paul Simon and Art Garfunkeland actors Fran “The Nanny” Drescher andMartin Landau. It does have its moments architecturally though, here and there, as we’ll see. However the neighborhood [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Kew Grdens Hills Queens
The confluence of decent weather and a ForgottenTour has been rare indeed. There was one string of about 9 or 10 Tours over a couple of years that featured uniformly overcast weather if not showers as well. All that changed for Tour 36 in Prospect Park on October 26, 2008. October usually features my favorite weather [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Brooklyn Prospect Park
I was in Rosebank, Staten Island in October 2008 to photograph the mighty Shrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel (which I did, but it deserves its own Forgotten New York page that will appear presently) and, having a couple of hours to kill before meeting a friend atKillmeyer’s in Kreischerville, decided to hike around [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Rosebank Staten Island
You might think San Francisco and Flushing have absolutely nothing in common, but they do share something. Way over in the extreme western end of Flushing, between College Point Boulevard, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Long Island Railroad and the Kissena Park Corridor, there’s a cluster of small streets unnoticed except by their residents and the people [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Out of Town Tagged with: Flushing Queens
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Manhattan Times Square
It was way back in the pre-Forgotten New York era — about 1994 or 1995 — (I know that’s ancient history now that your webmaster is becoming ancient) — when I first saw block after block of glorious red brick pavement on 89th Avenue between Jamaica Avenue and Sutphin Boulevard. It wasn’t long after that that the [...]
Categorized in: Cobblestones Neighborhoods Tagged with: Jamaica Queens
BY ALEXIS BUISSON Guest FNY columnist Describing the “Iron Triangle” other than “a place you would never go to otherwise than compelled to do so” would not be an overstatement. This small, smelly and noisy triangular neighborhood in Queens is home to warehouses, car repair and auto parts stores, and, they say, only one resident. In [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Corona Flushing Iron Triangle Queens
In January 2008 I was perusing an old Hagstrom map (yes, I do that for fun). The old Hagstrom, before the company digitized the entire NYC map, preserved some archaisms and oddities that are often worth investigation. For example, in the Bronx (either in Allerton or Bronxdale; it’s on the borderline) at Mace and Bronxwood, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Bronx Bronxdale
Continued from Part 1 Though its exterior has been renovated in recent years, heavy on the aluminum siding, Grace Church (now known as Church At The Rock) on East 92nd Street just south of Avenue J, is a Canarsie touchstone and a beloved local landmark. The Methodist Protestant Church of Canarsie, since renamed Grace, was founded [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Canarsie
I know that some cynics might think that I’m being facetious with that title card, but Canarsie and your webmaster are old pals. I was a frequent visitor to this southeastern Brooklyn neighborhood between 1974, when I first rode a bicycle from Bay Ridge, until 1993 when I moved to fab Flushing and my jaunts became [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Canarsie
Forgotten Fans gather at two Type C 1910-vintage lamps flanking entrance of 1 Hanover Square downtown Well, your webmaster is never gonna get rich writing about lampposts, taking pictures of lampposts, or leading lamppost tours. This was the most sparsely attended ForgottenTour since Tour #4 in St. George, Staten Island, November 1999 — 3 people were on that one, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Lamps Tours Tagged with: Financial District Manhattan
My relationship with Bayside, Queens has been an ambivalent one: I have worked here (albeit anywhere from one to three days a week, at the Bayside Times newspaper chain) since 1996, yet I’ve always resisted it as far as Forgotten New York is concerned since it all seemed rather…boring, but in a beautiful way; [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bayside Queens
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Bridges Brooklyn Manhattan
Roving FNY correspondent Gary Fonville has come up with yet another big catch of faded advertisements throughout the five boroughs. LEFT: This ancient relic was meant to be seen from the old 6th Avenue el and the street. Unfortunately, FNY’s camera could not get a better angle on this unintelligible sign. This as in all likelihood predates [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bedford Park Bronx
Continued from West Broadway Part 2 West Broadway and Grand Street. Once north of Canal Street, West Broadway enters Soho (no longer below Canal but now south of Houston) and changes character completely, becoming the main shopping and restaurant strip in a neighborhood jampacked with them… Prior to about 1840 the stretch of West Broadway [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Manhattan Tribeca West Broadway
Continued from West Broadway Part 1 Here’s the scene on West Broadway between Duane and Thomas Streets. All the buildings are from 1860-1875, and two have “Easter eggs” that give clues about them. “Standard Scale & Supply Co.” former business 1871, date of construction. With a 6-star shield; one star has fallen off. Duane Street [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Manhattan Tribeca West Broadway
Those who live in or who’ve been to Atlanta say that an inordinate amount of streets are called Peachtree; in Manhattan, meanwhile, there are 6 streets called Broadway, and all five boroughs, for that matter, have a Broadway. In NYC, all Broadways are a hommage to the original that begins at Bowling Green and runs [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Manhattan Tribeca West Broadway
Continued from Highland Park, Part 1 Turning the corner on to the vestigal path known as Robert Place and striding back to Highland Boulevard, we find an answer familar to all Nick Cave fans, and numerous others: God is in the house. This facility is home to the Discalced (i.e., barefoot or with just sandals) Carmelite Sisters. According to the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Highland Park
By BRIAN BERGER whowalkinBrooklyn.com In the world of lesser-known Brooklyn neighborhoods, none is more obscure, or more mysterious, than Highland Park. This is partly the result of geography, nestled as it is in the borough’s northeast corner and partly bad luck: nobody famous enough to represent the area’s hills and history has come from Highland [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Highland Park
While it seems at times that Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens are dominated by unimaginative street names… numbers, letters… in actuality vast swaths in all 4 boroughs are still dominated by streets named for real people. I had always been under the impression that Stockholm Street in Bushwick and Ridgewood was so named in honor of a [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Landmarks Queens Ridgewood
Al Deppe’s, the former Staten Island hot-dog slinger, wasn’t exactly a Tail O’ The Pup, the world-famous wiener-shaped West Hollywood, CA hot-doggery (that sadly was forced to shut down in 2005 when its lease wasn’t renewed) but it was a Staten Island touchstone for decades. Restaurateur Deppe (the Graniteville thoroughfare Deppe Place may or may not be named [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Eltingville Greenridge Staten Island
ForgottenFans at Lady Moody House, Gravesend Neck Road, Gravesend, Brooklyn April 20, 2008: With a turnout that rivalled FNY’s most-attended tour, Brooklyn Between the Bridges in October 2003, over 50 ForgottenFans turned out on an overcast day with drizzle expected (after an extraordinary run of good weather for early ForgottenTours, clouds and rain have become an inevitability the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Brooklyn Gravesend
4/12/08: a couple of weeks ago FNY walked East 3rd, 4th and 5th Streets in the East Village, and your webmaster had promised a look at East 6th and 7th Streets, which I had also photographed that day. Circumstances intervened, though, and I convened an emergency session of ForgottenFans to descend on the Cheyenne Diner [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: 6th Street 7th Street East Village Manhattan
March 2008: Believe it or not we’re beginning to consider Forgotten NY in terms of decades. Your webmaster first conceived of FNY in 1998 and did a lot of principal photography that year (I’ve discarded much of that work because I was just starting out then, had no photography experience, and a good deal of it [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Broad Channel Queens
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Dyker Heights
University Heights, Bronx, is named for a university that is no longer there; Bronx Community College moved into New York University’s spacious campus, and its collection of historic buildings, some by famed late 19th Century arhitect Stanford White, beginning in 1973. Generally speaking, University Heights is bordered by Burnside Avenue on the south, Fordham Road on [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx University Heights
Whitestone Bridge from The Boulevard, Malba According to legend, Whitestone takes its name from a large offshore rock where tides from the East River and Long Island Sound met; in other accounts the name is in honor of the White Stone Chapel, erected by townsman Samuel Leggett in 1837. For a time, Whitestone was known [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Queens Whitestone
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: 13th Street Greenwich Village Manhattan
Getting to Staten Island from Little Neck isn’t easy. Oh, the logistics of it are straightforward enough. (Bear in mind I don’t drive.) Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station; since the IRT South Ferry station isn’t open weekends (at this writing, January 2008), walk a block to 6th Avenue, board BMT “R” train, exit at [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Hamilton Park Staten Island
FNY returns to Astoria Village this week: my third page here. It’s a region the Historic Districts Council calls a “neighborhood at risk” due to the accelerating rate of teardowns and new construction. It’s a neighborhood that, despite its stock of antebellum mansions and single-family homes, has steadfastly resisted any effort at preservation — and is paying the esthetic costs [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Queens Triborough Bridge
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Sunset Park
An explanation for the title, I suppose, is in order. Your webmaster has been a NYC explorer since boyhood; I used to make my parents or grandmother take me on bus rides all over Brooklyn in the early to mid-60s, all the local lines in Bay Ridge, the B16 down Fort Hamilton Parkway and 13th Avenue; [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Sunset Park
A few months ago FNY took you on a tour of the eastern end of Jamaica Avenue in Floral Park and Bellerose, the part that was recently renamed Jericho Turnpike to match its Nassau and Suffolk County extension. This week, we’ll take a journey down Jamaica Avenue’s western end, that rides along the south end [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Jamaica Avenue Jamica Jamica Brooklyn Queens Woodhaven
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. [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan Tribeca
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan Tribeca
“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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Park Slope
I must admit…the subhead on this week’s title card is a little bit facile; after all, other neighborhoods in Brooklyn, like Midwood, East Flatbush, Flatbush, and even Brownsville can be called Brooklyn’s “heartland” since they are well within the central area of Brooklyn. While embarking on exploring the neighborhoods of southwest Brooklyn for Forgottenana, including [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Kensington
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Astoria Kips Bay Manhattan Penn Station Queens Triborough Bridge
Greenwich Village’s Perry Street is named for US naval hero Commodore Oliver H. Perry, who, after winning the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812, stated “we have met the enemy and he is ours,” later revised by Walt Kelly’s Pogo: “we have met the enemy and he is us.” Among Perry Street’s famed residents have [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Greenwich Village Perry Street
September 16, 2007 actually dawned sunny and bright–extremely unusual conditions for a ForgottenTour. When things got started the atmosphere came to its senses and dark clouds rolled in to cover an unusually cool day for September in NYC with the temperature not budging higher than 65 degrees. ForgottenFans welcomed the change, though, after the usual lengthy [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Atlantic Avenue Brooklyn
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Little Neck
Your webmaster would have to say that October, and even November, are my favorite times of year for picture taking. For one thing, those months contain my favorite weather, with a lot of days clear and cool, jacket weather in the 50s and 60s, until mid-November that is, when the weather in NYC becomes drizzle and [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Livingston Staten Island West Brighton
Hunters Point is a community in Queens on the edge — in more ways than one. It sits on the extreme western edge of the borough, just across Newtown Creek from Greenpoint (mystifyingly, both pedestrian crossings to Brooklyn were severed in the middle of the 20th Century) and can be said to be on the edge [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
Corridor parks…long, narrow strips of green that go on for block after block between two streets, are relatively rare in NYC. The Bronx has two lengthy ones on either side of Mosholu and Pelham Parkways, Kissena Corridor Park in Flushing and Fresh Meadows, and perhaps even Eastern and Ocean Parkways in Brooklyn can come under [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Not only does Staten Island never make the NYC guidebooks, there might be parts of Staten Island that even Staten Islanders don’t know about. One of these neighborhoods is Park Hill, nestled along the Grymes foothills just south of Stapleton. Fewer Staten Islanders might remember that Park Hill is the former home of the National [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: NFL Park Hill Stapleton Vanderbilt
There are some neighborhoods in NYC like Williamsburg, Greenpoint and the Lower East Side that are seemingly changing by the hour, if not the minute. There are others that are apparently changing more slowly — if not for the better — like Flushing and Astoria. And then there are the neighborhoods that look exactly the same [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Carvel clock Ridgewood
As little as a dozen years ago [as of 2007] you’d never have thought that Brooklyn would become a rock music mecca. In just the past few years though, Venues like Warsaw, Pete’s Candy Store, Union Pool, Galapagos, Asterisk Art Project, The Lucky Cat, free103point9, Tommy’s Tavern, Uncle Paulie’s, the Glasslands, the Woodser, and the McCarren [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Borough Park Grateful Dead
ForgottenTours have been, for the past year and a half, typically held under threatening skies, but the weather for the scheduled Tour 31 on July 29, 2007 not only threatened, but delivered, forcing a move to the following Sunday, August 5th. It was perhaps the nicest day of the month so far and so, in a [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Douglaston Little Neck Queens
Cord Meyer Jr. (1854-1910) was the original developer of Elmhurst and Forest Hills. In 1893 Meyer, a successful banker and lawyer, purchased acreage in what was then called Newtown from British retail magnate Samuel Lord of Lord & Taylor fame and proceeded to lay out a street pattern that still exists today, built utilities and [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Forest Hills Queens
Before the 1820s or so, New York City was pretty much confined to the area south of City Hall and indeed, City Hall was left unfinished on its north side since no one believed the city would ever extend north of that. Manhattan Island was dotted with hamlets and small villages, connected by roads like the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Manhattan Manhattanville
What’s the longest street that runs entirely in Brooklyn? It seems there are two candidates: Flatbush Avenue and Bedford Avenue. (Any drivers out there want to decide the matter using their odometers?) Some roads running east-west are pretty lengthy, but they extend all the way to Queens and beyond: Linden Boulevard, Myrtle, Metropolitan, Atlantic, and [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Bedford Avenue Brooklyn Flatbush Midwood Sheepshead Bay
Anything Can Happen® on a ForgottenTour. There was the time we wound up in the Dominican Day Parade on the Grand Concourse in a downpour and ended up in a bar on Bainbridge Avenue, watching David Cone pitch a perfect game (Tour 2). We bumped into since-disgraced Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin at the Latimer House in Flushing, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint
The Bronx’s Longwood and Hunts Point, heavily residential and, toward the East River, industrial, are remnants of country estates: Longwood Park was an 1870s estate owned by Samuel B. White, and Hunts Point was formerly a collection of country estates owned by the Casanovas, Barrettos, Spoffords, Failes, and other wealthy families, many of whose names now [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Longwood
Your webmaster admits to not traveling that often. I don’t have the money, and I don’t know the languages. I’ve never left the Northern Hemisphere, and am unlikely to in the near future. (I did make it to Pittsburgh in March ’07, and plan trips in the USA during the year, but my uncomfortability factor [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Mariners Harbor Staten Island
During the existence of Forgotten New York, which began in 1998, we’ve mourned the loss of several of New York’s grand old watering holes such asFlessel’s in College Point, Queens; Gage and Tollner in Brooklyn (seen on FNY’s Fulton Street page); and Niederstein’s (Middle Village). Regretfully the time has now come to say goodbye to another: Charlie’s in Throgs [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Silver Beach Throgs Neck
“I’m in the mood for Easter everywhere,”once sang idiosyncratic “Arch-drude” British psychedelicist Julian Cope*, and so was your webmaster as he stormed the Bronx for what must have been the first time in months on April 8, 2007. Unfortunately the weatherman wasn’t, as conditions were rather more reminiscent of Thanksgiving, with a temperature of about 40 [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx East Tremont Echo Park
Well, your webmaster finally made the team picture after 29 ForgottenTours. Can you spot where I am?* As usual, despite sunny weather predicted all week, ForgottenTour Day turned out cloudy, chance of showers. At least on 2007′s Green-Wood Cemetery tour, I didn’t have any hecklers, like I did on the 2006 tour! 30 ForgottenFans and I investigated [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Brooklyn Green-Wood Green-Wood Cemetery
On what turned out to be a cool, cloudy 4th of July, 2007 your webmaster invaded one of those Brooklyn neighborhoods that seems to have been caught between two more highly-publicized ones: that nebulous region between Brooklyn Heights and Fort Greene, anchored by the Fulton Mall and known on maps merely as “Downtown Brooklyn.” Roughly speaking, it runs [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Downtown Flatbush Avenue
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn East Williamsburg
CONTINUED FROM EAST WILLIAMSBURG PART 1 As we’ve seen in East Williamsburg Part 1, the region east of downtown Williamsburg is an intriguing amalgamation of abandoned, crumbling hospitals, dog-crap-littered parks, varied and engaging architecture, and oddly enough, a burgeoning hi-rise condo center. Pressing even further east and north we find even more of an industrial wasteland. Bear [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn East Williamsburg
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Manhattan Noho
Equal parts playground and wilderness, Kissena Park is bordered by Oak Avenue, Kissena Boulevard, 164th Street, and Booth Memorial Avenue (referred to rather comically on the Parks Department website as “Hemstead Turnpike”; the avenue hasn’t been called North Hempstead Turnpike for over 50 years!). Like Waters I have often repaired to my park for surcease from the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Flushing Kissena Park Queens
April 1, 2007, didn’t fool 48 ForgottenFans…second-most ever on a ForgottenTour (the prize goes to the 56 who turned up for Tour 14 in Dumbo, October 2003)…who turned up for FNY’s jaunt through Middle Village and Juniper Park. We were aided by FNY Correspondent Christina, the Queen of Queens, and Bob Holden, President of the Juniper Park Civic Association. [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Middle Village Queens
As much as any other neighborhood in Brooklyn, Windsor Terrace’s boundaries are rather easily defined: it’s that narrow strip, about 8 or 9 blocks at the widest, between the vast greenswards of Green-Wood Cemetery and Prospect Park. Prospect Park West (which 9th Avenue is inexplicably called here — the stretch doesn’t border the park) is [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Windsor Terrace
CONTINUED FROM PART 5 That Totten Town Tottenville can unofficially be called New York State’s southernmost town (officially, New York City is). British naval officer captain Christopher Billopp was its first European settler in 1678, and within a couple of years, had built a stone mansion at the foot of today’s Hylan Boulevard that would figure [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Subways & Trains Tagged with: Staten Island Tottenville
CONTINUED FROM PART 4 Your webmaster made fitful forays into extreme southwestern Staten Island (the old town of Westfield) in the 1960s (I seem to remember a bus ride with my parents past endless fields of nothing (likely Arthur Kill Road, which still has a lot of empty stretches) and a two-lane roadway (that was probably [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Subways & Trains Tagged with: Prince's Bay Richmond Valley Staten Island
The boundaries of Woodhaven are a little hard to define–especially the eastern end. It’s south of Forest Park, east of the Brooklyn borough line (Eldert Lane and a number of other streets), and north of Liberty Avenue; but in the east, where does Woodhaven end and Richmond Hill begin? Woodhaven Boulevard seems a bit too [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Queens Woodhaven
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Queens Richmond Hill
CONTINUED FROM PART 3 Eltingville is the name of a neighborhood on Staten Island, one of the five boroughs of New York City, USA. It is on the island’s South Shore, immediately to the south of Great Kills and north of Annadale. Originally called South Side, and later Seaside, the neighborhood owes its present name to [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Subways & Trains Tagged with: Annadale Eltingville Huguenot Staten Island
Continued from Part 3 As Beatle Paul would often say, we’d like to carry on now with five more stations of Staten Island Rapid Transit, or Staten Island railway, as it’s called now, as it dawned on the MTA after all these years that it isn’t really all that rapid. Your webmaster has been fascinated with [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Subways & Trains Tagged with: Bay Terrace Great Kills Staten Island
CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Saturday, January 27, 2007 – The Staten Island Railway cannot be called an official subway, even though it uses modified subway cars; it only travels through a short stretch of tunnel. It’s not a suburban railroad – Staten Island has been part of New York City since 1898. And it’s certainly not a rural railroad, though you’ll [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Subways & Trains
Whenever I lead a ForgottenTour through a cemetery (like Green-Wood Cemetery, Tour 24) I always tell people to peek in the windows of the mausolea. More often than not, you’ll get the ring in the Cracker Jack box — a gorgeous stained-glass panel depicting a religious scene…most of the time, but not always. The fascinating [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Neighborhoods Tagged with: Flushing Queens
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. [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: City Hall Manhattan
The city seems more determined than ever to rebuild, retool, and plan for the future, even as in 2006 entire neighborhoods like Flushing, Long Island City, and Williamsburg are being torn down and new businesses and dwellings, some decent, some awful, rise in their place. The acceleration of destruction and construction is dizzying, confusing and disorienting. As [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods
The title is a little misleading; I’m here to praise Port Richmond, not to eulogize it. It’s just that rapid change seems to be coming to this former ferry and commuter town on Staten Island’s north shore and most of it isn’t good, if you like finely detailed, meticulously crafted architectural highlights. I discovered Port Richmond…briefly…as [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Port Richmond Staten Island
I have been promising my Bronx Forgotten Fans some new material, and the fulfillment starts now. In fall 2006 I walked through Norwood, a triangle-shaped Bronx neighborhood defined by Woodlawn Cemetery on the north, the New York Botanical Garden on the east, and Mosholu Parkway on the south; Reservoir Oval, delineating a former Williamsbridge Reservoir, approximately [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Norwood
CONTINUED FROM WHERE THE STREET HAD NO NAME, PART 1 WAYFARING MAP: FROM DYKER BEACH TO BATH BEACH (open map in a separate window so you can follow my route) Where the Street Had No Name For decades, I’ve been fascinated with the broad, 4-lane route that connects 7th Avenue at Poly Place and Cropsey Avenue at [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bath Beach Brooklyn Dyker Heights
I am sure Forgotten aficionados have noticed that my trips back to “the old country”, i.e. my former neighborhood, Bay Ridge, tend to be nostalgic. I make no apologies. I am an enthusiastic nostalgist: while I sometimes cannot remember what I had for lunch yesterday, I remember who was with me on certain days 20 years [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bath Beach Brooklyn Dyker Heights
In the 80s, Tony Carey sang about “The First Day of Summer,” and I thought since this was the last day of summer, with forecasters saying this is the last 85-degree day for awhile, to seek out Rockaway Park and Rockaway Beach…former Playland and present Irish Riviera. Rockaway, depending on what translation is used, means “sandy place” or “place [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Queens Rockaway Beach
Tour 26 occurred during an auspicious week in Forgotten NY-land….the release, at long last, of the Forgottenbook and a cover appearance for the site in Time Out New York! No one told the rain gods that weather for the tour was supposed to be sunny and bright, however, so it was under windy, threatening skies that Tour #26 commenced [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Bronx Parkchester
As a neighborhood, Morris Park, located in what’s about the exact center of the Bronx, appears to be one of the borough’s most stable and long-standing, but it’s actually only a few decades old and occupies what used to be a vast racetrack – come airfield -come road racing track; many of NYC’s more “stabler” neighborhoods, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Morris Park
ForgottenTour 25, August 6, 2006, was our very first evening tour and went very well despite your webmaster’s same-day ascension and descension of his building’s steps 4 times to clean his apartment and spending six hours on his feet before, during and after the tour. This was ill-advised, since the following day a painful back ailment [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Central Park Manhattan
My first memories of Williamsburg came during ages 14-17, when our high school bowling team (on our way to getting whomped by St. Francis Prep and Xaverian) would pile into a Dodge van and trundle up Kent Avenue on our way to the lanes (in a deserted section of Greenpoint at Humboldt and Moultrie Streets). In [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Manhattan Times Square
One for the Good Guys A Victorian-era residence, the kind that have long been displaced in Flushing by boring, monolithic apartments and blond brick two-family homes (you know the type…concrete driveways and prominent water meters) has been preserved as a museum. One of the rare survivors, a small, two-story house at 149-19 38th Avenue painted pink and white, has [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Flushing Queens
At Parsons Blvd. and 37th Avenue, a block away from Kingsland Manor and the Queens Historical Society, there’s a building whose owners are, shall we say, somewhat whimsical. You first notice an eagle on the roof corner… But then you notice… Perhaps Tony Rosenthal got the idea for hisAlamo tilted cube at Cooper Square from this place. The place seems to be a [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Flushing Queens
Bowne House, Bowne Street and 37 Ave., photo: Gotham Gazette See FORGOTTENTOUR 21 for details on this 17th-Century structure It’s hard to say why, but the definitive history of Flushing has yet to be written. Plenty has been written about Flushing’s rich past centuries ago, with its struggles over religious freedom in its very early days. But very little has [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Flushing Queens
As more and more historic treasures and well-designed, well-built businesses and dwellings are destroyed or under the gun, more and more we find that the things that are preserved are there strictly by happenstance. No doubt about it: from the time Minuit swindled the island away from the Weekquaeskeeks (or perhaps the Lenape) New York City has [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Rex Cole
On the Queens-Nassau border between I-495 and Belmont Park, Hometown USA and Sodom come together in a haze of auto parts stores and multi-lane SUV speedways. Queens’ communities of Glen Oaks, Floral Park and Bellerose border Nassau County’s communities of Lake Success, New Hyde Park…and Floral Park and Bellerose. In other things, though, Queens and Nassau can’t [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Floral Park Queens
CONTINUED FROM GREEN-WOOD HEIGHTS PART 1 5th Avenue The stretch of Fifth Avenue along Green-Wood cemetery is by far its quietest, sandwiched between its incredibly bustling areas on either end: Park Slope to the north, and Sunset Park and Bay Ridge to the south. It’s hard for any Brooklynite under 70 to envision it now but this [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Green-Wood Cemetery Greenwood Heights
I confess. ”Green-Wood Heights” is a name concocted by real-estaters stumped about what to call the area on the NW side of Green-Wood Cemetery between Park Slope and Sunset Park. Some even say that the terms refer only to Prospect Avenue south to 20th Street and from 3rd Avenue southeast to about McDonald Avenue. GOOGLE MAP: [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Green-Wood Cemetery Greenwood Heights
1-2-3 skiddoo 123rd Street, for some reason, is the scene for many venerable College Point architectural survivors… Its neighbor at 13-11 123rd is rather less recognizable. It was built by Jacob Salathe, superintendent of College Point’s Openhym Silk Mill. Pretty much all its Eastlake Gothic detail has now been eliminated. College Point by Victor Lederer The grandest of 123rd [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: College Point Queens
College Point, excluding Broad Channel (which is on its own eponymous island) and the towns along the Rockaway Peninsula, is the most isolated neighborhood in Queens. It is separated from its closest neighbor, Whitestone, by the Whitestone Expressway and the giant empty field that used to be Flushing Airport, and from Flushing by the expressway [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: College Point Queens
CONTINUED FROM JACKSON HEIGHTS/EAST ELMHURST PART 1 Name That Plane Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology, between Ditmars Blvd., 23rd Avenue and 90th Street, has quite the little collection of planes parked in the back. There have to be some Forgotten Fans that can identify one or two. If you’re in the area, wander over [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: East Elmhurst Jackson Heights Queens
In a borough largely ignored by NYC’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, the magnificent garden apartments of Jackson Heights are a happy exception. Today’s Jackson Heights is a neighborhood of handsome six-story co-operative apartments, most of which surround a central garden. They appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, beginning in 1914 when the entire area was not much more [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: East Elmhurst Jackson Heights Queens
Forgotten Fans wave with Minerva In what was undoubtedly the best weather ever for a ForgottenTour (sunny and 68) forty Forgotten fans (and one heckler!) converged on Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery, a peaceful respite since 1838 as one of the first ‘rural cemteries’ or burial parks in America. Previously burials had been done in churches or in [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Brooklyn Green-Wood Green-Wood Cemetery
When I first started researching NYC history I assumed that Sheepshead Bay was named for its one-time resemblance, in outline, to a sheep’s head. After all, that’s how a peninsula on the North Shore in Nassau County, Cow Neck, was named. Only later did I discover that it was named for a fish that can no longer [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
CONTINUED FROM SHEEPSHEAD BAY, PART 2 We’ve run out of letters The town of Flatbush, absorbed into Brooklyn in the 1890s, had its own tidy street naming system: East and West numbered streets, which run north and south, separated by Gravesend (now McDonald) Avenue, with east-west streets named for letters of the alphabet, A to Z. [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
CONTINUED FROM SHEEPSHEAD BAY, PART 1 Up in the old hotels Brian Merlis, in the title of his Sheepshead Bay book, calls Sheepshead Bay “Brooklyn’s Gold Coast.” After Austin Corbin built the magnificent Manhattan Beach and Oriental Hotels in the 1870s and 1880s, enterpreneurs filled the gap for people who couldn’t afford anything quite so lavish [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
The Hempstead Swamp once occupied a vast area of land that sits just east of present-day St. John’s Cemetery in Queens. The greater area was first settled in 1653 as ‘Whitepot’ by English and Dutch farmers, including the Remsen, Furman, Springsteen and Morrell families. They found the land good for growing hay, straw, rye, corn, oats [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Queens Rego Park
A lonely outpost even by Staten Island standards is Travis, a small village of about two thousand at the western end of Victory Boulevard. In the colonial period, it was an important crossing point (New Blazing Star Ferry) over the Arthur Kill to Carteret, New Jersey, from whence horses and carriages could continue on to [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Neighborhoods Tagged with: Staten Island Travis
I have never had even a whiff of that peculiar romance most American men feel about their automobiles. When I was a teenager, my fear and apprehensiveness when attempting to learn to drive baffled and amused my teachers: the driving school instructor as well as my cousin Jim, and soon enough the lessons were shelved as [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Fresh Meadows Queens
Of course, the far west end of 14th Street isn’t dead; it’s arguably more active than it ever was, with celebrity-bait restaurants, clubs and fashion boutiques. However, with the impending closure of Western Beef on 14th Street, one of the last active links to the neighborhood’s 100 years as a slaughterhouse and meat wholesale center [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: High Line Manhattan Meatpacking
The only thing worse than irrelevance is being perceived to be irrelevant. People, places and institutions can be riding high in April and shot down in May, or, in a wonderful phrase Robyn Hitchcock snuck onto one of his albums, one day, they’re a “number in a drawer.” There’s a little enclave in Queens full of beautiful buildings [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Flushing Queens Waldheim
Editor: Kevin WalshPhotographer and writer, except where noted: Christina Wilkinson The Benjamin Rosenthal Library at Queens College features a distinctive clock tower. Walt Whitman taught school on what would later be the Queens College campus. “Paumanok” was a word used by the Algonquin tribe to describe Long Island. The exact meaning is unclear, although William Wallace Tooker, a 19th-century expert [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Flushing Paumanok Pomonok Queens
Known to most as a throwaway line in a Paul Simon song, or where you go for the Lemon Ice King, Corona, the neighborhood between Elmhurst /Jackson Heights and Flushing Meadows Park, has a well-defined history, as FNY correspondent Christina W. will relate… GOOGLE MAP: CORONA Above: sign, 37th Avenue Before the land between Elmhurst and Flushingwas developed [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Corona Queens
NEED ANY MORE proof that New York City is a strange and occasionally confusing place…that it can occasionally baffle anyone looking for common sense in urban planning…or a place that can give urban explorers fits of head scratching? Take a look at Edgemere on the Rockaway peninsula, whose mile after mile of ocean beach front has [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Edgemere Queens Rockaways
37 Forgotten fans turned out on a 65-degree November Sunday for ForgottenTour 23 in Roosevelt Island. Unlike last time at South Street Seaport when we were besieged by detours and transit delays, things got off on time and everyone was treated to fine weather and plenty of historic buildings and ruins… Many Forgotteners had never ridden on [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Manhattan Roosevelt Island
CONTINUED FROM WOODSIDE, QUEENS PART 1 “WWRL Radio took to the air at midnight on August 26, 1926 at a frequency of 1160 AM. Blue burlap was draped over the walls of the Reuman parlor at 41-30 58th St. in Woodside, Queens, and a transmitter and antenna were installed in the backyard. The Reumans continued to [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Queens Woodside
By CHRISTINA WILKINSON IN THE 17th and 18th centuries, the area known today as Woodside was filled with swamps, meadows, ponds and forests. A few colonial roads leading from the area’s waterways were forged through by those on their way to better places. A small number of brave souls decided to settle along the way. They [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Queens Woodside
QUIET, suburban Rosedale is clustered along the Queens-Nassau County border, between Laurelton in the west and Valley Stream and Woodmere in the east. When visiting the area a couple of years ago, I was struck not by its architecture, which is mostly 50s and 60s suburban sprawl; I was more impressed with its resemblance to [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Queens Rosedale
EDGED as it is between the Russian delis and nightclubs of Brighton Beach, the colonial houses and cemeteries of Gravesend, and the sideshow freaks, kiddie rides and mermaids of Coney Island, West Brighton doesn’t get a whole lot of attention. Yet the small area dominated by the Warbasse and Trump Houses has its own collection of relics (besides your webmaster, who [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Tagged with: Brooklyn West Brighton
SUNNYSIDE extends from the Sunnyside Railroad Yards along Skillman Avenue in the north to the Queens-Midtown Expressway in the south between 30th and about 58th Streets. Originally slower to develop than its immediate neighbors, Long Island City and Astoria, Sunnyside was transformed into a bustling residential neighborhood by the opening of the Queensboro Bridge and then [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Queens Sunnyside
Forgotten Fans pose at the Wavertree, one of the Seaport’s museum ships, built in Southampton, England in 1885. Despite massive subway problems, the presence of the Breast Cancer Walk and the Indian Festival, Tour 22 in the South Street Seaport area went off without a hitch, albeit just a little late. All proceeds from this tour went [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Fulton Street Manhattan Seaport
Forgotten Fans at Kingsland Manor I’M NOT certain if I have ever made peace with living in Flushing. I moved here in 1993, to be closer to a long-gone job, and there always seems to be somewhere I’d rather be. Bay Ridge, where I came from, perhaps. Hoboken. Sunnyside Gardens. Bayside. Riverdale (where I turned down [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Flushing Queens
LET ME BE absolutely clear about something: like Johnny Cougar Mellencamp, I feel most comfortable in a small town setting. That’s quite unusual coming from somebody who was born in and who has lived in New York City for over 40years. But it’s not so farfetched when you consider that my old home,Bay Ridge, was very self contained, with [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Clifton Rosebank Stapleton Staten Island
By CHRISTINA WILKINSON DURING the 17th and 18th centuries, Dutch farmers settled Newtown and Bushwick on the western end of Long Island. One of these farmers, Paulus Van Der Ende, built a house in Newtown in 1710. The restored farmhouse is located at the corner of what are today Flushing and Onderdonk Avenues; the latter [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Queens Ridgewood
YET another of New York City’s longstanding establishments is due for change in the imminent future; in July 2005 the Fulton Fish Market, in existence along either side of South Street in one form or another since 1835, was poised to relocate into a bigger, state of the art facility in Hunts Point, Bronx, joining the massive [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Fulton Street Manhattan
THE DEATH– ie., the Starbucks® and Disney®zation — of Coney Island as we know it is imminent, if you believe all the glowing press releases we’ve seen in the papers this spring. In the immediate Stillwell Avenue area, along the boardwalk but also along Surf Avenue, the so-called hodgepodge of clam bars, amusement areas and [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island
HERE are some NYC neighborhoods I find myself in again, again and again. I never tire of Coney, and I always seem to be in the Long Island City-Astoria area (the theme this year is Queens, which we’re covering from west to east as the year goes on); lower Manhattan and the Lower East Side hold a fascination; and in Staten [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Brownsville
Remsen House, 27th Avenue and 12th Street, Astoria, destroyed February 2005. The house was built in 1835. DEVELOPERS can be a hateful, despicable bunch. Quite a statement coming from a website that evades controversy like Barry Bonds evading a steroid test. But it’s the truth. I am completely ignorant regarding real estate, the price of land and housing, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Queens
46th Street and 54th Road I SERIOUSLY doubt that half of any New York City guidebooks even mention the two areas in southwest Queens we’ll visit today, ensconced on either side of Calvary Cemetery just east of Greenpoint, north of Ridgewood and in the middle of exactly nowhere. Surprises, however, can be squeezed from these unknown [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Blisville Calvary Cemetery Laurel Hill Queens
Greenpoint Savings Bank, Manhattan Avenue and Calyer St. Forgotten aspects of the Garden Spot of Brooklyn. KNOWN as the “garden spot of Brooklyn”, an eponym bestowed by theBrooklyn Eagle many years ago, Greenpoint is Brooklyn’s northernmost neighborhood, separated from Long Island City by Newtown Creek. It is the place where the country’s first ironsided warship, the Monitor, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods One Shots Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint
Metropolitan Avenue, 1976 – Photo by Middle Village artist Doug Leblang By CHRISTINA WILKINSON Forgotten NY correspondent THE Williamsburgh-Jamaica Turnpikewas completed in 1814 and operated as a toll road between the towns of Williams-burgh in Brooklyn and Jamaica in Queens, two major centers of trade in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. By 1820, the part [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Middle Village Queens
The last of Ravenswood’s farmhouses, seen on the title card, was torn down in the unstoppable name of development in mid-2004. It stood at 31st Drive and 12th Street. NEVERMORE will there be any more farms in Ravenswood, a tight section of western Queens arrayed along the East River between Keyspan’s Big Allis generating plant, just south of the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Long Island City Queens Ravenswood
Tour 20 in April 2005 was host to about fifty Forgotten Fans in the land of your webmaster’s upbringing. Expected showers never appeared. This tour was lengthier than most, since Bay Ridge‘s sights are spread out over about 40 blocks, but that just made the rest and the eats after the tour that much better. Our tour [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
TRIBECA– a neighborhood that I prefer to call the Lower West Side, which it was before it became a hipster and yuppie playground –has been raised from the dead in the past 30 years, as Independence Plaza and PS 234 have been constructed atop the former Washington Market. Let’s do a very quick assessment of [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Manhattan Tribeca
By CHRISTINA WILKINSON A REMOTE area in western Queens, filled with woods, swamps and freshwater pools, the town of Fresh Ponds was part of the land chartered by the Dutch West India Company in 1642. Cypress Hills Street (formerly ‘Old Fresh Pond Road’), which starts in Brooklyn at its southern end, was the progenitor of present-day [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Long Island City Queens Ravenswood
WHILE BEGINNING to prepare this week’s foray into irrelevance, I was on the horns of a slight dilemma. I had ventured into one of my favorite parts of town, Long Island City and Hunters Point, on several Sundays this past year, both with Christina as my guide and without, so I had a big backlog of both LIC [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Long Island City Queens
T WAS A DAY with air so crisp, it almost broke off in your fingers. And there is no better weather than to explore the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fair remnants at vast Flushing Meadows-Corona Park on a day between the snowstorms. 40 Forgotten Fans had the same idea. Where’s Walsho? Alone at the Fair, awaiting Forgotteners. Photo: Larry [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Flushing Flushing Meadows Queens
BOSTON may be known as the “Hub of the Universe” but the south Bronx has its very own Hub where four roads converge: East 149th Street and Willis, Melrose and Third Avenues, while Westchester Avenue begins its journey to Pelham Bay Park just a block to the north. Arrayed along Third is one of the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: 3rd Avenue Bronx Wesychester Avenue
By CHRISTINA WILKINSON MOST OF US CAN name famous generals of the American Revolution and the Civil War. But how many of us can name those who served in between? During his time, Winfield Scott was considered by many to be the world’s greatest general. He served in the Army for 53 years, and was the longest [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Queens Winfield Woodside
I can’t stay away from Coney Island for long. There’s just so much left over from the old days…good and bad…that it’s a Forgotten NY treasure trove. Yet, more and more of the old Coney seems to disappear year after year. So, summer after winter, winter after summer, I’m back. Above, Coney had a Playland too, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island
Once again into the breach and this time, 40+ Forgotten Fans assembled at the 145th Street IND concourse on December 12th for our second mass invasion of Harlem, this time to Harlem Heights and City College. In the tradition of two past tours, we had a guest narrator, Forgotten Fan Sergio Kadinsky, handling the tour honors [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Harlem Heights Manhattan
OUR EXPLORATIONS TODAY take us to a hilly, verdant corner of the Bronx that has had many names, yet no one knows precisely what they mean. Spuyten Duyvil is tucked into the corner of the Bronx at the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, first stop beyond Marble Hill, that strange piece of Manhattan that resides on the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Bronx Spuyten Duyvil
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Riverdale
OUR EXPLORATIONS TODAY take us to a hilly, verdant corner of the Bronx that has had many names, yet no one knows precisely what they mean. Spuyten Duyvil is tucked into the corner of the Bronx at the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, first stop beyond Marble Hill, that strange piece of Manhattan that resides on [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Spuyten Duyvil
FORGOTTEN NEW YORK hasn’t been to the Bronx nearly as much as it should have been, and we’ll see if time can correct the error. Meanwhile, we’ll depend this week on two of FNY’s more voluminous contributors, Gary of the MTA and Christina, the Queen of Queens who is touring the Bronx on this occasion, for [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Castoria
Revere Sugar Refinery, a Red Hook landmark for decades, was demolished in 2007. “It’s hot in the poor places tonight.” SO SAYS Jeff Tweedy on Wilco’s 2002 LP Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I thought the lyric was apropos to Red Hook’s situation…after decade after desolate decade, the western Brooklyn neighborhood is now in line to get some high-income spillover [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Red Hook
There’s a lot of Forgotten stuff the guidebooks want nothing to do with right under the noses of Wall Street brokers and Statue of Liberty-bound Iowans right down at the tip of Manhattan Island. We hadn’t done a Manhattan Forgottentour south of 34th Street so it was time for a Lower Manhattan march. A crowd of [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Financial District Manhattan
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Downtown Red Hook
S.R. Smith Infirmary, New Brighton, Staten Island HEY, you missed a good one. Twenty Forgotten fans…a lower total than most recent tours…visited Tompkinsville and New Brighton, two of Staten Island’s more venerable small towns, seeing its collection of Victorian-era “gingerbread” mansions, unusual architecture, abandoned relics, and ending at Snug Harbor, originated by Robert R. Randall in the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: New Brighton Stapleton Staten Island
March 21st, 2004: About thirty Forgotten Fans met in (extremely) windy Jamaica, Queens and toured a 4-acre, 350-year old cemetery and an over 250-year old mansion in the geographic center of Queens. Cate Ludlam, president of the Prospect Cemetery Association, shows off a hand-lettered tombstone from 1728. Cate has been involved with the cemetery, in which is interred [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Jamaica Queens
Part Three in a series exploring NYC’s boundaries with other municipalities. Third in the series: Queens’ Far Rockaway FAR ROCKAWAY is a Miss Havisham-esque doyenne whose beauty has long-since faded. No border between New YorCity and any surrounding community could be more stark: this is where the suburban ritziness of Nassau County’s Five Towns (Inwood, Hewlett, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Far Rockaway Queens Rockaways
On October 25, 2003, 56 Forgotten fans…our largest turnout to date…roamed through what used to be called Downtown Brooklyn, an industrial region blessed with spectacular views of two of the most spectacular bridges in the world. Follow us as we explore DUMBO, Vinegar Hill and Fulton Ferry. After two previous low-rated weather Forgotten Tours, we had [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Brooklyn DUMBO
In The Prisoner, one of the Swingin’ Sixties’ most surreal, mind-bending TV series, Astoria’s own Patrick McGoohan played a government operative who is knocked out and spirited away to a mysterious location known only as The Village, where no one goes by name…just a number, and where a succession of headmasters by turns try to [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Boston Road Bronx Eastchester
There’s a little corner of the Emerald Island in the far flung northern reaches of the Bronx, past the rolling hills of Woodlawn Cemetery, the duffers in Mosholu and Van Cortlandt Golf Courses and the roaring traffic of the Deegan. It’s in the triangle known as Woodlawn Heights, just south of Yonkers. Woodlawn Heights’ [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Wakefield Woodlawn Heights
Spring 2003′s relentless rain did not deter the busiest Forgottentour season to date on May 31, 2003 as nearly 40 Forgotten Fans set forth on a day of exploration in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a gritty outpost nestled between the Gowanus Expressway and the Buttermilk Channel. Film historian and freelance writer Mike Olshan was our Virgil in the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Brooklyn Red Hook
HELL’S KITCHEN Conducted in glorious drizzle and rain, about 20 Forgotten fans visited several surprising scenes in Hell’s Kitchen, that formerly nefarious Times Square back yard running from about 34th Street north to 57th and from 8th Avenue to the Hudson. On this tour, Your Webmaster was demoted to a mere tourist as longtime Hell’s Kitchen [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Hell’s Kitchen Manhattan
On Sunday, April 27, 2003, twenty-five Forgotten fans arrived in Van Cortlandt Park at the end of the IRT #1 line and embarked on a voyage of discovery in Riverdale… Stopping first at the Van Cortlandt Park Station on the old New York Central PutnamBranch, we imagined what it would have been like to wait for [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Bronx Riverdale Wave Hill
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Queens Rockaway
The Brooklyn Bridge as seen from Fulton Ferry Empire State Park In Disneyland, Dumbo* means a flying elephant, but in Brooklyn, a new acronym was coined in the 1980s to refer to the mostly industrial area located beneath the Manhattan Bridge: “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.” It’s rather awkward but gets the job done. Recently, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn DUMBO
New York City is a world mecca for tourism and entertainment. Throngs flock to Times Square every day of the year. Dozens of movies and TV shows are shot in NYC’s streets every week. At any given time, hundreds of musical performances and stage plays are being produced. But some of New York City’s entertainment meccas [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Addisleigh Park Queens St. Albans
Squeezed in between the Harlem River and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx is a small neighborhood known as Mott Haven, after Jordan Mott, owner of the Mott Iron Works at East 134th Street. His handiwork can be seen all over town on airshaft and manhole covers. Jordan Mott had bought the original property from Gouverneur [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Mott Haven
I’ll admit it, I love Coney Island, and I wasn’t even there during its prime days of infamy, er, popularity, from 1920, when the BMT Subway arrived, till after World War II. For our tenth Forgottoners Tour, we took a walk on Surf Avenue and the Boardwalk and took a look at some of the attractions [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island
photo: L. Sylvers Next to the building where Little Liberty used to raise her torch, during the spring some demolition work exposed a gigantic, brilliantly-colored 1900-1910-era ad for Hunter’s Baltimore Rye. Since then, local concerns have been quite busy covering it with run-of the-mill ads, probably for the bane of the 21st Century, cellular phones. God how I [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bloomingdale’s Hosiery Woolworth’s
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Eltingville Grasmere Rosebank Stapleton Staten Island Tottenville
Early British colonists in Maspeth were chased out by angry Native Americans, and found themselves where Queens Boulevard meets Broadway today. There they met a possibly more implacable foe…the Dutch, who had this thing about naming places in Dutch, and the Brits were forced to call their new settlement Middelburgh (or Middletown). That name persists as [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Elmhurst Queens Queens Boulevard
In 2002, Brooklyn looks seamless. Oh, sure, there are major differencesbetween neighborhoods. Some are richer or poorer than others, and some have different racial makeups than others, speaking generally. But it’s all a grid, and all the streets eventually connect to each other. But Brooklyn used to be a collection of six towns and within each [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Midwood South Greenfield
City Island, NY was the site of Forgottoners Tour #9. Located on a spit of an island in Eastchester Bay in the extreme northeast Bronx, City Island is a transplanted New England fishing village seemingly beamed into the New York Metropolitan area. Originally a part of Pelham, in Westchester County, City Island looks east to Long [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Bronx City Island
Maspeth, in a western corner of Queens east of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn and west of Middle Village, seems stuck between the grit of Brooklyn and the airy, almost suburban feel that its eastern and southern neighbors, Middle Village and Glendale have. Maspeth was first settled by Native Americans for centuries before the middle 1600s and [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Maspeth Queens
Continued from Part 1 The beautiful Hell Gate Bridge, completed by Gustav Lindenthal in 1917, was the jewel in the crown of Alexander Cassatt’s Pennsylvania Railroad station in midtown, opened in 1910. The Hell Gate allowed the Pennsylvania RR a through route to Connecticut, Rhode Island and Boston. The Hell Gate Bridge combines with the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Necrology Tagged with: Astoria Queens
Some more golden goodies from Brooklyn…. Photo: Gary Fonville Though Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn has tried hard to homogenize and mall-ify itself over the last 20 years, a quick glance skyward along its antiquated upper stories is like taking a trip back in time. Here, we see a former London Shoe store and, [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn liquor Pianos
In Queens, the Long Island Rail Road has certainly left remnants of its golden era of passenger trains. The Rockaway Branch is still there, waiting to be reactivated or converted into something worthwhile, and Kissena Corridor Park in Flushing traces the ancient LIRR connection from the main line through Creedmoor to the Port Washington branch (at about [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Subways & Trains Tagged with: abandoned rail routes Hunters Point Queens Sunnyside
Imagine boarding the Long Island Railroad at Penn Station or Woodside and traveling east on the Port Washington Branch. After leaving the Shea Stadium platform, the train does notgo east past Main Street, Murray Hill, Broadway and the other stations of the branch, but rather veers northeast along the Flushing River; northwest near the old Flushing Airport; [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Subways & Trains Tagged with: abandoned rail routes College Point Flushing Long Island RR Queens Whitestone
Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson left Bay Ridge to serve the Stars and Bars in the “War of Northern Aggression” while Tony Manero left it only to wind up in the 1983 disaster “Stayin’ Alive.” Bay Ridge is the ancestral home of your webmaster. My parents migrated to Brooklyn from Troy, NY in 1955, though my father [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Ft. Greene Park and the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument Fortgotten Greene on this website? Can’t be…after all, this neighborhood is emblematic of urban revitalization that has come to Brooklyn since the 1980s, starting in Park Slope and radiating out to surrounding Windsor Terrace, Lefferts Gardens, Prospect Heights and Clinton Hill…even though Spike Lee moved out years ago. Fortgotten, er, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Fort Greene
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Financial District Manhattan Stone Street
During a long summer I’ve been unable to visit as many Forgotten scenes as I’d like. To the rescue comes Forgotten Fan Gary Fonville, an MTA bus driver who gets to see many Forgotten corners of the city as yet unvisited by your webmaster. Gary has supplied us on this occasion with a new cache of [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Corsets Pianos
BROOKLYN’S HARBORSIDE RAILROADS Years ago, the bustling Brooklyn waterfront,notably in Williamsburg, under the Manhattan Bridge, and Sunset Park, was home to a number of railroads that served busy shipping and freight interests. The past couple of decades, however, have seen active railroads dwindle down to only two. We’ll have a look at a pair of [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn DUMBO Sunset Park
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Delafield Riverdale
“Few men in all history … have ever been made to suffer so bitterly and so inexpressibly as I because of the assertion of my achievement.” Was Dr. Frederick A. Cook the first American to climb Alaska’s Mount McKinley and the first explorer to reach the North Pole? Or, was he, as some detractors assert, a fake and [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Bushwick
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Brownsville
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island
Was Ichabod Crane, the scrawny schoolteacher who met the Headless Horseman in Washington Irving’s classic “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” a real person? Of course he was, and he rests in peace in Staten Island. Or rather, his namesake does. This isn’t the Ichabod Crane of fantasy and fiction, but rather, an army major who [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bulls Head Ichabod Crane New Springville Staten Island
Queens has an abundance of small, out-of-the-way, ancient cemeteries, many of which go back to the 1700s, some of which are barely suspected by neighbors. Ancient burial grounds are alngside two-family homes, in parks and even UNDER a lot of places they wouldn’t be expected. LAWRENCE FAMILY BURIAL GROUND, Astoria Though the historical marker says [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Cambria Heights Fresh Meadows Glendale Long Island City Middle Village Queens
On October 28, 2000, one of the most beautiful days ever for a Forgotten tour, we met at the 215th Street station, one of the original IRT stations on its elevated section north of Dyckmen Street. But before meeting the other 20 Forgottoners (and one pooch), I made some observations on my own… The Dyckman Street [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Inwood Manhattan
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: East Village Manhattan Stuyvesant
Tribeca, the Triangle Below Canal Street, was saved when Robert Moses’ plan to run the Cross-Manhattan Expressway over Broome Street was defeated. It saved a lot of ancient ads that call Tribeca home! New watch ad integrated on an older sewing thead ad, mural on Houston Street near Thompson Street. Soho, not Tribeca, but who’s counting. Lekow Desks and Office [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Coca-Cola Manhattan Tribeca
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Crown Heights Cypress Hills East Flatbush Flatbush Gravesend Windsor Terrace
In the heart of Jamaica, on a 4-block stretch of 89th Avenue between Jamaica Avenue and Sutphin Boulevard, there’s some gorgeous original red brick pavement that has never been sullied by macadamizing or blacktopping. Though undoubtedly once common, extant remnants of this kind of street pavement are rather rare in New York City. I’ve only [...]
Categorized in: Cobblestones Neighborhoods Tagged with: Jamaica Queens
On two separate trips, in the summers of 1999 and 2000, I walked the Grand Boulevard and Concourse, which marches north from the Major Deegan Expressway to Mosholu Parkway through Mott Haven, Concourse Village, Mount Eden, Mount Hope (the Concourse is constructed on a hill), Fordham, and Bedford Park. Eleven lanes wide from 161st Street [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Tagged with: Bronx Fordham Grand Concourse Mount Eden
I’ve slowly come to the realization that Forgotten is woefully deficient as far as the Bronx, the only borough on the mainland, is concerned. And that’s ironic, since the Bronx, street for street, probably contains more ancient mural ads than any other borough. It’s no secret that large parts of the Bronx have been slow to [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Castoria Coca-Cola
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Roads Tagged with: Borough Park Brooklyn
Though Your Webmaster has resided in Flushing since 1993, I hadn’t yet taken advantage of its many historical dwellings and locales, many of which are unknown by Flushing’s thousands of residents. On a hot, humid June afternoon, a couple dozen Forgotten Fans and I decided to remedy the situation… No, this is not the next batch of “Survivor” [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Flushing Queens
In central Staten Island there’s a place whose original residents were dedicated to stamping out demon liquor years before the Volstead Act actually did the deed from 1919 to 1933. Developed in 1887 by the National Prohibition Campground Association, what’s now Westerleigh was known as Prohibition Park and was lined with narrow, brick streets and one-family [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Staten Island Westerleigh
If there’s anything Greenwich Village is not, it’s Forgotten. Guidebooks spend dozens of pages pointing out the Village’s trendy spots and tourist attractions. But there’s a Village of centuries-old houses, hidden alleys and landmarks the guidebooks won’t show you. For example, Washington Square used to be a potters’ field and before that, a place of [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
City Island resembles a New England seaside town transplanted into the five boroughs. Since it was first settled in 1761 its lifeblood has been the sea, with shipyards, sailmakers and oystermen predominating. It played a large part in New York City’s coastal defense until the early 20th Century. City Island was privately owned, first [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Bronx City Island
Gravesend, located in Brooklyn between Bensonhurst and Coney Island, is one of the oldest populated areas on Long Island and in the nation itself. It contains numerous historic homes, and even its street plan is the original one first adopted after the area was first settled in 1643. Unfortunately, some folks disagree with the premise that [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Gravesend
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn Sunset Park
It’s quite possible that, block for block, the streets above Central Park are the best hunting grounds of all if you’re looking for ancient advertising. Quite possibly that’s because there are a lot of buildings left up there from the early 1900s and late 1800s, and what construction does occur up there tends to reveal [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Macy’s Manhattan Omega Oil
I sometimes hear the musical question, so what was at JFK Airport before JFK was built? Well, there was something there, though not a whole lot. Before the 1940s, the huge area that became home to the airport was basically a big marsh with creeks running though it, with small settlements dotting occasional roads that ran through the marsh. [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Hamilton Beach Queens Ramblersville
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Boker Briarwood Charlotte College Point Cornell Corona Elmhurst Flushing Forest Hills Glendale Hawtree Linneaus Little Neck Queens Ridgewood South Jamaica Sunnyside Whitestone
“Ok, we’re back and here it comes for ONE MILLION DOLLARS! Which former Joey Bishop sidekick, cookbook author, singer and fitness video auteur not only has the most popular show on ABC in decades, but his very own street in the Bronx?” A. Sonny Fox; B. Durward Kirby; C. Robert Q. Lewis; D. Regis Philbin? [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Signs Street Scenes Tagged with: Bronx Regis Philbin
Bowling alleys. I thought bowling was enjoying a revival in the 80s and 90s, with electronic exploding scoreboards and spiffed-up bowling establishments that put the lie to the commonly held impression that bowling alleys were smoky, dark places featuring leagues full of beer swilling drunks wearing incredibly ugly two- or three-toned shoes. I thought bowling was [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Reckitt’s Spalding
Saturday, January 29th was sunny, cold and blustery, about what you’d expect on that date. Snow and ice crunched underfoot as over a dozen Forgotten Fans set out from the Lenox (Malcolm X Boulevard) Avenue and 125th Street IRT station. The Lenox Lounge displays the best in neon signs on the outside and the coolest jazz on [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Harlem Manhattan
But we are, Dorothy. There’s a section in Manhattan with winding, quiet streets, country villas, and gently sloping hills a lifetime away from the traffic choked gridiron and honking horns usually characterized with Manhattan. It’s not Greenwich Village, not on Roosevelt Island and certainly not Central Park. In fact, it’s not on the island of Manhattan at all [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Manhattan Marble Hill
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Briarwood College Point Corona Elmhurst Flushing Forest Hills Glendale Little Neck Queens Ridgewood South Jamaica Sunnyside Whitestone
Safety considerations have forced the demolition of a Staten Island bridge that had pretty much remained unchanged for the last forty years. It had its original railings, 1960-vintage mercury lamps, and of course, its original Belgian block roadbed. Of course, here at Forgotten NY, it lives on… The Bank Street Bridge spanned the now-unused northern [...]
Categorized in: Cobblestones Neighborhoods Tagged with: New Brighton Staten Island
In early November the Forgottoners Tour swung through Staten Island. In St. George, New Brighton, Grymes Hill and Stapleton we saw dozens of beautiful buildings dating back to the 1850s or earlier, climbed hills from which you could see mountains, and saw a few surprises along the way as well. People who ride the Staten Island Ferry [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island Sea Gate
Midtown Manhattan between 5th and 7th Avenues and between about 14th Street and 42nd Street is home to hundreds of mural ads on the tall buildings that were built between 1915 and 1935. Most of them advertise long-dead clothing manufacturers and distributors although there are scattered ads for restaurants and newspapers in there as well. A. [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Automat Manhattan
In early fall some Forgotten Fans enjoyed a walk through Coney Island in which relics of its former glory and promises, perhaps, of its future regeneration were recorded. Our tour definitely had an offbeat aspect. Here’s some of what we got to see: The Coney Island Theater Building was built in 1925 and once housed a Loew’s [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island Sea Gate
Greenwich Village usually conjures up visions of bearded, black-clad hipsters sipping coffee in jazz clubs, but it actually had a long history before the writers, revolutionaries and bohemians made it their enclave in the early 20th Century. The original Greenwich Village was a Canarsee Indian fishing village called Seppanikan (some accounts spell it Sapokanican), centered [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Necrology Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Necrology Tagged with: City Hall Financial District Manhattan Tribeca
This 1946 Hagstrom of the Wall Street area (boxed in gray) of Manhattan shows a large number of streets that have disappeared over the decades, many of which made it into the 1970s. The Sixties and Seventies were eras in which dozens of streets were eliminated to make way for developments like the World Trade [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Necrology Tagged with: City Hall Financial District Manhattan Tribeca
Just a bunch more superannuated ads you can find walking around Manhattan. Not only do some of them show off now-forgotten products, they play up the stark changes that have come over the Manhattan streetscape through the decades. West 185th Street, near Broadway This one has two ads, both at least 50 years old, one printed on [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods
Trudge from the Williamsburg to the Manhattan Bridges in search of aged ads, and sink a cold Pepsi when you’re done. My home borough, Brooklyn, has its own set of ancient advertising none of which I had ever noticed until recent walks in the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridge areas. I found classic ads that [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Pepsi-Cola
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights
What ads did Forgotten Fans find on a five-hour journey down Brooklyn’s Broadway? What ads DIDN’T they find? A recent walk by about a dozen intrepid Forgotten Fans down Broadway (turned out to be ForgottenTour #1) plunged the participants into a thoroughly fascinating land where advertisements and relics of the past 100 years rub elbows against [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Brooklyn
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Baychester Bronx City Island Eastchester Fordham Kingsbridge Heights Morris Park Morrisania Norwood Riverdale Wakefield Westchester Square
Many people don’t know it but many of the buildings of the original village of Astoria still survive, in a tiny area west of 21st Street and north of Astoria Boulevard, and most are in terrific shape. Walking through the area is like taking a trip back to the mid-1800s, when may of these houses were [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Astoria Queens
Once one of New York’s most notorious slums, Hell’s Kitchen has made a comeback but some of its ancient ads remain. Hell’s Kitchen, the area west of 8th Avenue and between 30th Street and 59th Street, used to be one of the city’s most notorious slums. It was one of the roughest, toughest districts in [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Hell's Kitchen Manhattan Omega Oil Pianos
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Extra Place Freeman Manhattan Noho Shinbone Soho
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Financial District Manhattan
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Gravesend
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Roads Tagged with: Brooklyn Canarsie
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Cooper Square Hell’s Kitchen Kips Bay Manhattan Murray Hill Times Square Turtle Bay Upper East Side
If it’s possible, Sylvan Cemetery, at the end of Victory Boulevard in Staten Island in the small town of Travis, had been in even worse shape than Prospect Cemetery was in 1999, when I first photographed each. In 1999 most of the headstones in Sylvan had been knocked over. As in Prospect Cemetery, overgrown weeds [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Neighborhoods Tagged with: Staten Island Travis
Prospect Cemetery in Jamaica is probably the oldest cemetery in Queens, and perhaps the entire city. Old records show that it dates to 1668. The cemetery can boast 53 Revolutionary War veterans, 43 Civil War veterans, three Spanish-American War veterans, and many interments of prominent Long Island families such as the Lefferts. Prospect was designated [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Neighborhoods Tagged with: Jamaica Queens
Buildings that line the routes of elevated trains are always fertile ground for seekers of ancient advertising. Customers walking along Broadway in Brooklyn under the el tracks, or perhaps looking out the sides of elevated cars (which were more open in the old days than they are now) could easily be swayed by them. No elevated [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn
A view of an unusual neighborhood with an outstanding view. Industry-dominated Long Island City provides some terrific views of Manhattan, just across the East River, as well as a variety of contrasts: landmarked brownstone blocks, smokestacks, and church steeples, as well as a diesel-only Long Island Rail Road station, once the busy terminus of the railroad [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Long Island City Queens
Scattered throughout New York City are several small cemeteries. In the 1800s, a law was passed that prohibited further cemetery construction on the island of Manhattan, owing to the city’s rapid growth. Subsequently, many cemeteries began to appear in western Queens, which was close to the city. However, remnants and vestiges of several old cemeteries [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn East Village Greenwich Village Manhattan
Delancey Street, on the Lower East Side, is a repository of elderly, fading advertisements from bygone eras. Sharp-eyed observers will see this ad for Gold Medal Flour on this building set back from Delancey. I can’t quite make out the script writing above the sign, which has been weathered into illegibility. Sometimes two ads will be placed on [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Lower East Side Manhattan
The Queens County Farm Museum occupies 7 1/2 acres in the heart of Glen Oaks, Queens, NY. Its croplands and orchards are being used to demonstrate the history of agriculture in New York. The Museum staff and volunteers harvest apples and grow herbs, squash, tomatoes and other standard market vegetables, which are sold from a roadside [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: farms Little Neck Queens
Coney Island, once America’s summer playground, has become just a shadow of its former self, despite grand plans for a new subway terminal here, or a new minor league ballpark there. I enjoy going to Coney in the winter, when there’s no one else around. I look for traces of Coney’s former glory. If you [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island
At the top of a grand old building at Broadway and Washington Place in Greenwich Village is a sign that says “Treffurth’s.” Treffurth’s was a noted restaurant on Broadway at the turn of the century. The building, according to the book “A Walk On Broadway: A Journey Over Time” by David Dunlap, dates to 1882. An enterprising [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods
Bohacks was a chain of supermarkets in the five boroughs that closed in the early seventies. This smokestack is on the corner of Flushing and Metropolitan Avenues in Ridgewood, Queens. The square was formerly called Bohack Square. Forgotten Fan Doug Douglass has submitted this website devoted to the Bohack family; Forgotten Fan Allan Karr submits the ad [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bohack Manhattan Queens
Bull Durham tobacco advertised on thousands of wall murals all over the country in the early part of the Twentieth Century by the Duke family, who contributed to Trinity College which became Duke University. The above ad is so prominent because the Long Island Rail Road operated at grade along Atlantic Avenue here until 1940, and [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Coca-Cola Pepsi-Cola Queens
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 [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Roads Tagged with: Bath Beach Bay Ridge Brooklyn East Flatbush
Nestled in the middle of Jamaica Bay is an island community known as Broad Channel. It is the province of seagulls, roaring jets taking off from Kennedy Airport, The Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, and a proud, insular neighborhood that claims what it can from the bay, occasionally jutting into it by building on stilts. Unlike [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Broad Channel Queens
Walk through the Garment District (7th Avenue between 34th and 40th Streets), and you’ll see, besides the men dragging coat and clothing- laden carts through the cramped streets, a plethora of clothing storefronts and wholesalers. If you look up, you’ll see quite a few ads painted on the sides of buildings for clothing stores..some of [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Corsets Manhattan
There are more streets still sporting their original brick or Belgian block pavements than you may think. There are still dozens, as a matter of fact… here are some of them. If not for the cars, this picture could be from the 1930s! Tiny Bay Ridge Place, in Bay Ridge, is still awaiting the tar [...]
Categorized in: Cobblestones Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights Cobble Hill Red Hook
It’s 1888 and steam-powered elevated trains and horsecars were the primary means of transportation on the Bowery. In those days, the Third Avenue El ran down each side of the Bowery and would do so until 1915, when it was rebuilt and placed in the center of the street. It met its ultimate demise in 1953 [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Omega Oil
The streets of New York City used to be paved with bricks. The term ‘cobblestones’ refers to uneven stones of varying shapes and sizes. This style of paving went out of style nearly a century and a half ago, to be replaced by even stones with a smoother finish known as “Belgian blocks.” They were [...]
Categorized in: Cobblestones Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn Manhattan Meatpacking Queens Red Hook Ridgewood
Before Hollywood became the center of the motion picture industry in the 1920s, New York City boasted several studios that produced silent motion pictures. At left we see a scene from Vitagraph Studios, which was located at East 15th St. just north of Avenue M in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, then known as South Greenfield. Photos from [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Midwood
Ads for this children’s stomach remedy can be found all over the five boroughs. Most date back to the Teens or Twenties. Charles H. Fletcher began selling his Castoria, a mild stomach remedy for children, in 1871. The medicine was heavily promoted on ads and billboards in the late 1800s and early part of the 20th [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Castoria
Ads for the upscale East Side store painted 80 years ago are still good today! Picture is from New York Then and Now, © 1976 Dover Publications In decades past, Bloomingdale’s, one of the most famous stores in the world, used to advertise their location at Third Avenue and 60th Street with painted signs saying [...]
Categorized in: Ads Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bloomingdale’s Bronx Manhattan
Vinegar Hill is about a four or five block square neighborhood in Brooklyn located just east of the Manhattan Bridge anchorage. It’s a charming little area marked by brownstone buildings and Belgian-block streets that haven’t yet been asphalted. To the left we see the nominal main drag, Hudson Avenue, on a cold winter Sunday. Other [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Vinegar Hill
