Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
The concrete-cladded viaduct that takes the IRT #7 Flushing Line down the middle of Queens Boulevard in Sunnyside was built in 1917, and in the mid-1990s was treated to a complete overhaul with new station canopies and stained glass panels, as well as a complete replacement of the concrete and terra cotta ornamentation that left [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Queens Sunnyside
This thick-shafted, guy wired traffic light at Fresh Pond Road and 59th Drive in Maspeth is just like thousands of others around town. But when these large stoplights first appeared in NYC in the 1950s, they carried a pair of WALK/DONT WALK signals, if that much. This one has a lamp to illuminate the park [...]
For the most part, Manhattan and even most of the other NYC boroughs have eradicated their alleys. On an island, real estate is in short supply and there isn’t room for open spaces. That’s unusual for an older east coast city, and while New York doesn’t wear its age on its sleeve like Boston or [...]
Categorized in: Alleys One Shots Out of Town Tagged with: Philadelphia
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: flags Forest Hills Queens
US Representative Paul Fino (1913-2009) was elected to the State Senate from 1946-1950 and elected to Congress in 1952, where he served 8 terms, and then the State Supreme Court in 1968. A usually conservative though sometimes moderate Republican, Mr. Fino had a hard time swallowing what he considered the Manhattan-style elitism of [John V.] Lindsay, [...]
Categorized in: Ads One Shots Tagged with: Bronx Morris Park
This new street sign leaves no possibility of error in the pronunciation of Louis Nine Boulevard: it’s Louis NEEN-yay, not “Louis 9″. The street was renamed from Wilkins Avenue soon after the 1983 death of Bronx assemblyman Nine, whose name is spelled without the accents in his NY Times obituary. Louis IX, meanwhile, was a [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Bronx Crotona Park
Bridewell Prison was in what is now City Hall Park [at Broadway and Murray Streets]. It was designed by Theophilus Hardenbrook in 1775. The jail, poorhouse and another building known as the “New Bridewell” were used by the British to house American prisoners of war. Construction was interrupted by [the signing of the] Declaration of Independence. [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: City Hall Park Manhattan
Freestanding woodframe houses are the “Easter eggs” of Brownstone Brooklyn (Brooklyn Heights, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Cobble Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant, etc.) and they do stand out amidst the attached housing of these neighborhoods. This one, the 1854 James and Lucy S. Elwell House, an Italianate-style villa at 70 Lefferts Place between Grand and Classon Avenues, had [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Clinton Hill
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Subways & Trains Tagged with: Manhattan Stuyvesant Square
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Fire Alarms Queens Whitestone
St. Andrew’s Church was consecrated on Duane Street and Cardinal Hayes Place, formerly City Hall Place, in 1939, replacing an earlier church named Carroll Hall built in 1842. Just before the Civil War when the City Hall area became the center of the printing and newspaper business, the church received special dispensation to say a [...]
Adjoining the Gross pawnbroker on 8th Avenue near W. 34th is a concrete facade touting the long-gone presence of Bickford’s, one of a chain of luncheonettes and eateries founded by Samuel L. Bickford in 1922. It was a chain restaurant a bit of a step below Child’s or Schrafft’s and had they survived, a step [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Manhattan Penn Station
Passing by on a Saturday, I had thought pawnbroker S & G Gross had closed, but actually it’s not open on weekends. It even has a web presence and, like the sign says, the outfit was established in 1901. The three golden balls that signify the pawnbroker was a symbol that developed in Lombardy, a [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Manhattan Penn Station
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Chelsea Manhattan
In most parts of the country, this pleasant two-story house at the corner of Voorhies Avenue and East 22nd Street, with a wraparound porch, gables, pitched roof and dormer windows, would be seen as a neighborhood attraction and a symbol of its desirability. There would be no talk whatsoever of tearing it down — it [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
I was sniffing around Park Hill in Staten Island a few years ago when I came upon this magnificent high school building, constructed in 1894, at Steuben Street and Rhine Avenue. It anchors the rather obscure Concord neighborhood, which since 1964 has been defined by the Staten Island Expressway, Richmond Road, West Fingerboard Road and [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Concord Staten Island
A sign on the east side of Broadway, just south of West 125th and in front of the General Grant Houses, advertises the presence of a Moylan Place. However, there’s no Moylan Place — just the sign. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and this 1949 Hagstrom map segment shows that, indeed, there was a [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Manhattan Manhattanville
Though standard Philadelphia street signs are green on white, 4-sided and trapezoidal with room at the top of the sign for the cross street, Philly has never been as fanatical about eradicating older signs as the New York City Department of Transportation has been over the years, and there are plenty of examples of older [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Out of Town Signs Tagged with: Philadelphia
I should really do more on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn. It runs continuously from Flatbush Avenue at Prospect Park all the way south to Sheepshead Bay, standing in for East 20th Street. When I lived in Brooklyn I never rode a bike on the avenue because, dominated almost completely by apartment buildings, it seemed boring [...]
The station on the Brighton Line (Q train) on Gravesend Neck Road has been named simply Neck Road since its inception nearly 100 years ago. It’s one of the only cases in which the MTA succumbs to local colloquy, since I gather that neighborhood denizens shorten the name almost unanimously, though official street signs dutifully [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Gravesend
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Manhattan Midtown Penn Station
Always have a camera. Lesson learned at Broadway and West 147th in Hamilton Heights, where the old Bunny Theater has been forver stripped of its rabbits. The Bunny Theatre at Broadway and West 147th Street recollected early 20th Century comic actor and theatre impresario John Bunny (1863-1915). Bunny appeared in over 100 silents in a [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Hamilton Heights Manhattan
With its baseball and tennis racket, as far as I know this is the only MTA black-and-white subway ID or directional sign that contains anything but the name of the station; directions; ID bullet; and hours of service. If there’s an equivalent sign at Yankee Stadium I’m unaware of it. It can be found on [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Subways & Trains Tagged with: Flushing Meadows Queens
The Passerelle is the boardwalk that runs from the Mets-Willets Point #7 station across the Corona Subway Yards, as well as the Long Island Rail Road tracks, to the concrete ramp that leads into the park proper. “Passerelle” is French for walkway. I’m unsure how long it’s been here — I certainly used it during [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Flushing Meadows Queens
One of the long-razed and forgotten about notable buildings in Queens was the Chisholm Mansion, which was located in the midst of Herman MacNeil Park in northwest College Point overlooking the East River. The mansion was built in 1848 by Mrs. John Rogers and given to her daughter, Mary Rogers Chisholm, as a wedding gift. [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: College Point Queens
Two prototypes of the slotted Donald Deskey lamppost were installed at Broadway and Murray Street on opposite corners near City Hall in 1958. Besides being the first appearance of this now-iconic NYC lamppost, this also marked the first appearance of the GE M400 luminaire, which burned greenish-white — a contrast to the warm yellow incandescents [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: City Hall Manhattan
East Second Street boasts two small, well-maintained cemeteries, one visible from the street, one hidden from view. New York Marble Cemetery, organized in 1830, and New York City Marble Cemetery, from 1832, are not two locations of the same cemetery, but separate organizations! New York Marble Cemetery is located within the block bounded by the [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries One Shots Tagged with: East Village Manhattan
Here’s an item that’s been under my nose for decades and I never realized its presence. Charles Vanderveer, a scion of one of Brooklyn’s larger landholding families, constructed this home in the southeast end of Canarsie on what is now the south side of Flatlands Avenue between East 106th and 107th Streets in 1829. It’s [...]
This will turn out to be the second FNY post regarding NYC Mayor from 1913-1917, John Purroy Mitchel, in the last four months, but sometimes things turn out like that. I was attending a lecture by Manhattan Boro Historian Michael Miscione this week regarding hidden and unknown gems in NYC, when two of the items [...]
Here Victory Boulevard rolls through the Bulls Head neighborhood in northwest Staten Island. Though the road was built in 1816 as Richmond Turnpike, a toll road by a company owned by Vice-President Daniel Tompkins, who lived in Stapleton where the road begins, it’s hardly Staten Island’s oldest road — both Richmond Terrace and Amboy Road, [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Roads Tagged with: Staten Island
This faces the Holland Tunnel ramps on Broome east of Varick. The painted sign has held up fairly well over the decades. The company supplied power plant equipment such as boilers and pumping systems to the ships in the now-vanished Hudson River port in Manhattan, and also serviced pumps and other equipment. There were branches [...]
This Beekman Paper ad is familiar to motorists, at least those paying attention, traveling south on Varick Street on the way to the Holland Tunnel. The company was founded by Max and Ida Greenbaum on Beekman Street in 1907, moving to Varick Street in 1926. The Indispensable Walter Grutchfield has a photo of the ad [...]
Except for a few wholesalers on Little West 12th between West and Washington Streets, the Meatpacking District, now the home of fashion retail and super-expensive apartment houses, has pretty much expunged all traces of its old meat wholesalers and slaughterhouses. Except… … for this remaining sign at 426 West 13th, which may or may not [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Manhattan Meatpacking
Despite the rigors of over a century’s worth of wind, rain and storms, the painted sign identifying Middendorf & Rohrs Grocers is still identifiable at #1 Little West 12th Street. The building has an oddly slanted shape as it fronts on both Gansevoort and Little West 12th, which intersect here. There also seems to be [...]
Categorized in: Ads One Shots Tagged with: Manhattan Meatpacking
#1 Peck Slip in the South Street Seaport area has been condemned for a couple of years to make way for the new PS 343, but it appears this is the year it goes. The building is pretty plain architecturally, but there’s this magnifiecent Machine Age lettering above the entrance, that answers the question: how [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Manhattan South Street Seaport
Here is that magnificent old Ford ad I was talking about on the south side of Northern Boulevard east of 31st Street. You can see it out the window of a northbound N or Q. This photo is from the flickr page of rabbit571. ForgottenFan Joseph Colella: The building is the original Universal Ford dealer. The [...]
Categorized in: Ads One Shots Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens Queens Plaza
French sculptor Jean Dubuffet‘s 25-ton sculpture Group of Four Trees is featured in Chase Manhattan Plaza, between Pine, Liberty, Nassau, and William Streets, consists of fiberglass, aluminum and steel fabricated near Paris and then shipped to New York for installation in 1972. It is nearly 4 stories high, making it one of NYC’s largest pieces of [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Financial District Manhattan
Categorized in: Alleys One Shots Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
St. Ann’s Episcopal Church, St. Ann’s Avenue between East 139th and East 141st Streets, is The Bronx’ oldest church, having been built in 1841 and dedicated to Gouverneur Morris‘ mother, named, naturally, Ann. Several members of the Bronx’ most noted families of the colonial era and beyond are buried in the church’s graveyard, including Gouverneur [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Bronx Mott Haven
The Estey Piano & Organ Company was one of the most important players in the late 19th and early 20th Century piano & organ manufacturing business. Established in 1846, Estey was one of the few American manufacturers to survive over a century. For decades, Estey manufactured several lines of upright pianos, player pianos and grand pianos. [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Bronx Mott Haven
And then there was one. The 65th Street Transverse Road through Central Park used to feature a few Type 8S “Curved mast” poles, complete with their original 1950s-era Westinghouse “cuplights.” Now we’re down to just one, and it has lost its glass reflector bowl, leaving a naked light bulb. I haven’t been over there [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Central Park Manhattan
In February 2010 I wrote about the Type 1 BC bishop crook post at Centre and Grand Streets in SoHo and its accumulated rust. King of NYC Lampposts Bob Mulero reports that the rust problem hasn’t really been alleviated, and the near-century-old post, with its gaslamp ladder rest hommage, seems to be listing a bit [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Soho
A sign pointing to Red Hook’s abandoned Fishport could still be found on Columbia Street near Halleck, at least in 2008. The sign pointed the way to an ambitious fish wholesaling project that never got off the ground in the Erie Basin area. Between 1983 and 1989 the city renovated the boat basin and built [...]
When the IND Subway was built beginning in the late 1920s, designer/architect Squire Vickers decided to move away from the Beaux Arts terra cotta and multicolored mosaics that had characterized the IRT and BMT, then run by private contractors, and streamline the whole design, with stations outfitted in one color with black and/or white trim. [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Subways & Trains Tagged with: Downtown Brooklyn
The Transit Authority (it was called that once) posted small bus route maps on the nearest available utility poles at bus stops in the Swinging Sixties. This one appears at Greenpoint and Gale Avenues at the Calvary Cemetery entrance. The #24 doesn’t follow this exact route anymore, and the #29 is a dim memory. In [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Blissville Queens
Albany Crescent is a C-shaped road that runs from Kingsbridge Terrace southwest, west and finally northeast to Bailey Avenue and West 233rd Street, in fact curving right over the Major Deegan Expressway — when engineers laid out the Deegan, the crescent was left intact. The curving route is a remnant of the colonial-era Albany [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Bronx Kingsbridge Heights
In 1893, Louis Comfort Tiffany and his business partner, Arthur Nash, founded the Stourbridge Glass Company in Corona next to the railroad tracks. In 1902, the name of the enterprise was changed to Tiffany Furnaces. His patented “favrile” (handmade) glass was created and manufactured here in this factory, 43rd Avenue and 97th Place, from 1901-1932. Tiffany’s works [...]
Brooklyn Heights is known for its attached brownstones and apartment buildings, but here and there are some freestanding buildings, as well as frame and wood houses, leftovers from the very beginnings of the neighborhood. 59 Hicks Street, at Cranberry Street, is one of those relics. It was built by cooper (cabinet and furniture maker) John [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights
383-389 West End Avenue (and 301-307 West 78th around the corner) were built in 1886, when West End Avenue was still called 11th. They were among the finest buildings their architect, Frederick B. White, ever designed, for the simple reason that White died at age 24 just after the buildings were opened. According to American Architect [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Manhattan Upper West Side
72 is my favorite temperature, and it’s also the number of my favorite subway station as well, the one with the distinctive Heins and LaFarge headhouse, built during the first wave of subway construction from 1900-1908, at the tripartite intersection of Amsterdam Avenue, Broadway and West 72nd. It was given a major upgrade in the [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Manhattan Upper West Side
FDNY Engine 55 at 363 Broome Street near Mott is especially reconizable because of its large terra cotta identifying label across the top of the front entrance. The firehouse was designed by R. H. Robertson and finished in 1899. At the time architectural style was moving toward the ornate Beaux Arts style and away from [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Little Italy Manhattan
Though the Department of Transportation has now succeeded in eliminating every “olive” stoplight stanchion on the streets of NYC — they used to guard traffic, a pair to each intersection beginning in the 1920s — a few working models can still be found in Central Park, like this one on the West Drive. This [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Central Park Manhattan
In Boston, subway and surface lines are identified by color: red, blue, green and orange. Recently, an express bus system was implemented, known as the silver line. Lines can be identified by color there because trains/streetcars are assigned to specific trackage. In NYC, the system is so large and complicated that trains can be rerouted [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Out of Town Tagged with: Boston ROXBURY
Stamped-metal sign commemorating Andrew F. Hayes, who was killed during World War I, at Tremont and Parker Streets in Roxbury, Boston. I’ve become fascinated with these signs, which can be found all over town. The red globe in the background is mounted on a fire alarm so traffic can readily see it. In NYC, fire [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Out of Town Tagged with: Boston ROXBURY
Although the story of young George Washington, the cherry tree and his father is apocryphal, the first president is associated with cherries. Washington lived for a short time during his presidency at #3 Cherry Street, though the mansion is long gone and so is #3 Cherry Street: it formerly diverged from Pearl Street just north [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Lower East Side Manhattan
Although Bishop Crook lampposts have proliferated all over town again over the past couple of decades, there was a time, between about 1962 and 1980, when they almost went extinct, except for a few survivors in downtown Manhattan. In 1980 it all changed when a flock of retro-Crooks, using the original molds (now available from [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Turtle Bay
It’s a shame how 5th Avenue is deteriorating so much, lamppost-wise. At one time there was an unbroken string of these Twins (in 2 different species, admittedly) from Washington Square to Central Park. Now, just four remain. We lost this one recently. Even 5th Avenue’s set of twin Deskeys, special editions debuting in 1965, are [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Midtown
For want of a better name, I’ll call these lamps, which illuminate pedestrian walkways, “Robert Moses lamps” because they appear on pedestrian walkways located on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Clearview Expressway, and Long Island Expressway (there are probably others), all bruited through Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods by NYC traffic czar Robert Moses in the 1950s. They [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Robert Moses
Temporary lampposts, used when a regular lamp has fallen over, been crashed into, or is under repair for whatever reason, consist of simple wooden conical bases in which the electric works are contained, and a simple pipe to hold the luminaire. Temporary posts of this type have neen used for nearly a century. My [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
Bronx’ own Little Red Schoolhouse, PS 15, is at 4010 Dyre Avenue, near the end of the line on the #5 train. The architectural gem was built in 1877, designed by architect Simon Williams and was originally a school in the town of Eastchester in Westchester County before its capture by NYC in 1895. It [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Bronx Eastchester
Queens recently lost another of its classic white and blue street signs, that had been a staple between 1964 and about 1985, only to be replaced by federally mandated green signs. On a recent stumble through Hunters Point, I noticed that the pole that this sign at 2nd Street and 55th Avenue was on was [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
The massive Kentile Floors neon sign, built to attract business from the passing IND trains on the viaduct, looms over 9th Street near the Gowanus Canal. It is one of a number of now-defunct large neon signs that can be found in the Gowanus and Red Hook areas, springing up from the 30s through the 50s to [...]
Ash Wednesday crowds enter and exit St. Peter’s Church, on Church and Barclay Streets. The church represents the oldest Catholic parish in New York State and is one of the oldest Catholic church buildings in the city. It is a Greek Revival temple-like structure completed in 1840, replacing an earlier church built in 1786. The [...]
When Boston’s MBTA Green Line Arlington station in Back Bay was under renovation in 2006, one of its original mosaic signs was discovered. The sign was incorporated into the redesign, which largely kept the standard MBTA Helvetica signage with color bands. I seem to use the Green Line more than any other lines in Beantown, [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Out of Town Subways & Trains Tagged with: Boston
The NY Daily News still uses a stylized graphic of an old-style camera in its front page logo, situated between the Y and the N. In 1948, though, it was still using a pretty accurate depiction of a camera. Speed Graphic perhaps? Also notice postal codes were one or two digits then, instead of the [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: newspapers
Hopefully, Sol Moscot [formerly 118 Orchard, at Delancey, shown here] will take this iconic sign with them when they move directly across Delancey Street, to 108 Orchard. Founded on Rivington Street in 1915 after founder Hyman started selling eyeglasses from a pushcart in 1899, Moscot had occupied this location since 1935. 2/6/13
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Lower East Side Manhattan
According to Eating in Translation, Thurston & Braidich, whose faded ad can be seen at 286 Spring Street near Greenwich next to what is now the Fire Department of New York Museum, was an importer of coffee beans and gum plants from Mexico and Middle Eastern countries. The main office was at the still-standing 27 [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Central Park Manhattan
While the recently deceased [February 2013] mayor Ed Koch has had the Queensboro Bridge subnamed for him during his lifetime, and there was a push to name the 77th Street Lexington Avenue Line subway stop serving the #6 train for him after his decease, his successor also has a spot named for him. Exit the [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Flushing Meadows Queens
Prospect Park South was developed by Syracusan Dean Alvord, who purchased a parcel of land in Flatbush from the estate of Luther Voorhies and the Dutch Reformed Church in 1898. Unlike developers like Alfred Treadway White, who built Cobble Hill’s Workingmen’s Cottages, Alvord from the start built sumptuously-appointed buildings for the well-to-do. By 1898 Flatbush [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Brooklyn Prospect Park South
Prospect Park, Brooklyn, contains several decorative shelters, protecting parkgoers from both showers and hot weather, built in the days long before air conditioning. The Peristyle, also known as the Grecian Shelter, can be found on South Lake Drive, north of the newly-restored Parade Grounds. Though it looks, with its numerous Corinthian columns, as if it [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Prospect Park South
Park Crescent is a dead end off 86th Road near 164th Street in Jamaica Hills, a neighborhood rife with odd roads and dead ends, many of them connected with the formal Normal School and the old trolley line that used to rumble through. Park Crescent is straight as a string and not a crescent at [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Jamaica Hills Queens
Two institutions that between them total 594 years stand across the street from each other in Flatbush. The Flatbush Reformed Church was founded in 1654, its current church building was constructed beginning in 1796, and the oldest stone in its cemetery goes back to 1754. Erasmus Hall, meanwhile, was founded in 1786, with its present [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Flatbush
Former Mayor Ed Koch, who is profiled in a new documentary film coming out the first week in February, has, in a rather unusual move, already installed a tombstone at a burial plot he purchased in uptown Trinity Cemetery, Broadway and West 155th Street. Some have articulated some surprise at this, but I don’t think [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries One Shots Tagged with: Manhattan Washington Heights
The New York, Westchester & Boston Railway in the northeast Bronx celebrated its centennial in 2012. When conceived in 1872, it was assumed that it would eventually reach Boston, but instead at its lengthiest, it ran from southern Mott Haven in the Bronx to two terminals in Westchester County, at White Plains and at Port Chester. [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Bronx Pelham Park
Alwyn Court is a massive, French Renaissance-style building at 7th Avenue and West 58th Street constructed in the first decade of the 20th Century, that at first consisted of several huge apartments built for “country folk who live in the city.” It suffered a devastating fire shortly after it opened, and in the 1930s its [...]
On a walk up the Lower East Side in January 2013, I encountered an anachronistic building that I either hadn’t seen or hadn’t noticed before, on Madison Street a few doors away from St. James Place. It’s a tiny two-story dormered building — however, it’s not too small that it doesn’t have two separate doors [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Lower East Side Manhattan
Lefferts Homestead, a stately structure located near the Willink park entrance at Flatbush and Ocean Avenues, near the Prospect Park B/Q subway station, is one of NYC’s many remaining Dutch homesteads. It was built by the Lefferts family in an area east of the park along the Old Flatbush Road at about where Flatbush Avenue and [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Prospect Park
The 179th Street station (F train) at Hillside Avenue can claim to be the easternmost subway, as in underground, station in the city (though the Far Rockaway station (A/H) is further east, it was originally built for the Long Island Rail Road). 179th Street also can make the claim of being the final station in [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Jamaica Estates Queens
At Jamaica Avenue and Lefferts Boulevard in Richmond Hill, the Jamaica El rises high to clear the lower overpass of the Long Island Rail Road “Montauk Branch”, a spur of the main line that served western Queens locales like Richmond Hill, Glendale, Maspeth, Blissville, and Long Island City. The line currently sees one passenger train [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Queens Richmond Hill
This is one of Avenue of the Americas’ dwindling supply of lamppost medallions, installed around 1960 to honor the involvement of the USA in the Organization of American States, which includes most of the countries in North, Central and South America. Though a lamppost replacement initiative around 1992 claimed most of them, they can still [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Greenwich Village Mnahattan
One-block long Martin Luther King, Jr. Place, which runs from Marcy to Tompkins Avenues a block south of Flushing Avenue in Bedford-Suyvesant, might seem inconsequential, but it was the first street in NYC named for the famed civil rights titan, who was murdered on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, TN. It was renamed in 1974. [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn
Macy’s New York store was founded by former whaler and businessman Rowland Hussey Macy in 1858 at 6th Avenue and West 14th Street. From the start, Macy’s trademark has been a red star: Macy had one tattooed on his hand during his whaling days. On the rear of Macy’s original location on West 13th near [...]
Willow Terrace, between Clinton Street, Willow Avenue and 6th and 7th Streets, looks much as it did in 1880 when it was constructed by the Stevens family (of Stevens Institute fame) for laborers working on the nearby institute. Stevens Institute, founded in 1870, is America’s first college of mechanical engineering. It commands a spectacular view of [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Out of Town Tagged with: Hoboken New Jersey
After doing FNY for 15 years, I’ll admit there aren’t many remaining major ancient painted ads I’m not familiar with in Manhattan at least, but this one, on Clarkson Street west of Hudson, did surprise me. I knew it can’t be older than the 1960s, since the Helvetica font is prominent, but I did think [...]
Categorized in: Ads One Shots Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
Consumer activist, author, lecturer and attorney Ralph Nader has run for President for the Green Party and independently in 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008. In addition, he received one vote at the Democratic convention in 1972, and competed in the Massachusetts and New Hampshire primaries in 1992. In ’08 his running mate was San Francisco [...]
When I was working in the area last winter, I noticed this unusual fire alarm at 7th Avenue and West 19th Street in Chelsea. Most fire alarms are either mounted on their own dedicated stanchions with unique designs, such as the older ones with the torch (that looks like an ice cream cone) at the [...]
On 182nd Street just north of 73rd Avenue you will see what appears to be a weedy, empty lot, with ivy and ancient trees. This, though, is the cemetery of one of the farming families in the area, the Brinckerhoffs; there are 76 plots here dating from between 1736 and 1872. The tombstones have been [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries One Shots Tagged with: Fresh Meadows Queens
Nestled comfortably in Dongan Hills, Staten Island, alongside towering Todt Hill, NYC’s highest point, is one of the oldest buildings in NYC. The landmarked Stillwell-Perine House ar Richmond Road and Cromwell Avenue was originally begun in 1679 and has additions from 1730, 1750 and 1830, making it one of the oldest homes not only in [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Dongan Hills Staten Island
Perhaps my favorite building on Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene is the beige and brown Moderne classic Renken Milk Building at Classon Avenue, more properly known as the M. H. Renken Dairy Company offices: In 1912 Martin Renken of the M.H. Renken Dairy Company bought the whole block, and in 1923, constructed a bank of industrial [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Fort Greene
The Clinton Diner, at 58th Street and Maspeth Avenue in an otherwise godforsaken section of western Queens, is one of a vanishing breed of roadside diners, catering to workers in an industrial area and motorists who are passing through. It stands next to freight tracks of the Long Island Rail Road. The now dismantled Richard [...]
This ad for Norge Appliances, seen from the Myrtle Avenue platform on the Broadway el in Bushwick, has probably been there since the World War II era, and the clock has probably been stopped almost as long. (Norge is what Norwegians call their home country.) The brand has since passed through many hands. The Norge [...]
Ditmars Street runs for one block between Broadway and Myrtle Avenue in Bushwick. It’s unremarkable in every way, except that there is an elevated train at both ends, so it’s probably the only one-block street in NYV for which that claim can be made. Here we are facing the last remnant of the old Myrtle [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Bushwick
Categorized in: One Shots Out of Town Tagged with: Great Neck Nassau County
I have an undying fascination with Parkchester — it’s not just another housing project, but a mini-city plopped in central Bronx, with its own shopping strip and movie theater. Some residents need not ever leave it for days at a stretch. You can get there by taking the #6 train to its namesake station. It [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Bronx Parkchester
Simple bridges are a thing of beauty. This truss bridge takes White Plains Road over the Amtrak/Metro-North tracks just north of East Tremont Avenue, near Parkchester. It has a twin bridge a block away at Unionport Road. As late as about 2000 it still had a pair of Westinghouse incandescent “cuplights” illuminating the pedestrian walkway. [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Bronx Parkchester
Desert Island Comic Books, 540 Metropolitan Avenue near Union Avenue in Brooklyn, has participated in a recent trend (that I welcome): maintaining an older classic awning sign of a previous business: in this case, an Italian bakery. Signs were just better before Helvetica and its family of bold and extended took over. “Booklets” is probably [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
The blasted landscape of the old West Side Highway, closed in December 1973 and finally demolished in the 1980s, epitomizes the general deterioration NYC’s infrastructure was undergoing because of, as always, lack of $$$$, throughout the era. There were rumblings in the late 1980s that the Williamsburg Bridge would have to be permanently closed, and [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: highways
Octagonal-shafted lampposts didn’t appear on NYC streets until 1950. They are now the predominant, go-to lampposts of NYC and have supported a flock of different luminaires over the years. They have withstood all challengers to their prominence, from the Donald Deskey slot-shafted posts that appeared in the 1960s to the L-shaped Downtown Alliance posts that [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Kew Gardens Hills Queens
Since the Corvington Longarm Type 24M — and other old forms such as the bishop crook and Type F lights — were reintroduced to NYC streets beginning in the 1980s, the Department of Transportation has granted them a great amount of flexibility, taking them where they never went before, such as producing twin versions of [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Bronx Morris Park
When I began Forgotten NY in 1998, the last bastions of the two-light stoplight were along Liberty Avenue under the A train el in Woodhaven/Ozone Park, and along Shore Front Parkway and Edgemere Avenue on the Rockaway peninsula. The Department of Transportation has since purged them all away and today, every stoplight in NYC has [...]
This is the sole remaining original lamppost of the Tudor City project, developed on the east end of East 42nd Street in the late 1920s and 1930s by Fred F. French; it replaced the former gashouse and slaughterhouse district. The lamp bears great similarity to those in Forest Hills Gardens, which was built about a [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Tudor City
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Bridges Hunters Point Queens
You often see photos or artwork of NYC’s original City Hall station from 1904, when it first opened, or latterday photos when the Transit Museum allows people to make a foray into NYC’s first subway station. This is a photo from December 27, 1945, just a couple of days before it closed for lack of [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: City Hall Manhattan
Scattered around town are reminders of a time when hot water wasn’t necessarily a given, and there had to be an alternative to bathing in cold water. The city built a series of public bathhouses in the early 20th Century to address this need, and Brooklyn was given five. This one, on Huron Street near [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint
Grand Street and its eastern extension, Grand Avenue, is a major thoroughfare in Brooklyn and Queens, running from the East River in Williamsburg northeast to Queens Boulevard and Broadway in Elmhurst. It runs over two major bridges: a bridge over English Kills, which also serves Metropolitan Avenue traffic, built in 1931 but improved since to [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Maspeth Queens Wiliasmburg
“A stollen is a fruit cake containing dried fruit and often marzipan and covered with sugar, powdered sugar or icing sugar. The cake is usually made with chopped candied fruit and/or dried fruit, nuts and spices. Stollen is a traditional German cake, usually eaten during theChristmas season, when called Weihnachtsstollen or Christstollen.” Neiderstein’s was a German restaurant on Metropolitan Avenue near 69th Street that began as a roadhouse on the Williamsburgh & Jamaica [...]
In the mid-20th Century, just when NYC was replacing its ornate cast iron and wrought iron posts with more sedate aluminum octagonal-shaped lampposts, Park Avenue got a set of posts all its own with a unique streamlined design featuring then-new greenish-white mercury lamps. They didn’t last too long, however, and by the mid-1960s they had [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Grand Central Manhattan
Someone on Wythe Avenue in the north Willie paid tribute to Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746-1828) with this rendering of his Portrait of Don Manuel Osorio de Manrique Zuniga. The original is displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 5th Avenue. There’s a lot going on here…what is written on the piece of paper the magpie [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
Long before Queens officials thought of doing it, the city of Williamsburgh laid out streets that were all numbered, with the odd rare named street here and there. North-south streets were numbered 1 to 12 beginning at the street closest to the East River and running east. Then there were two sets of east-west numbered [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Corona Queens
Just as archaeologists search for arrowheads to ascertain ancient Native American settlements, so do I look for arrowheads — arrowhead signs that point the way to NYC bridges. These first appeared in the 1930s, and while they have given way to larger directional signs, newer versions of these have actually appeared as painted arrowheads within [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Bronx Eastchester
Russian People’s Home of Greenpoint, 106 Clay Street off McGuinness Boulevard. This is either an old sign of great age, or may have been part of a movie set that was never removed. Most non-English signs in Greenpoint are in Spanish or Polish. At one time, there was a sizable Slavic population in Greenpoint. In [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint
A sttroll through the old Garment District (6th and 7th Avenues and side streets between 24th and 40th Streets) will reveal hundreds of painted ads on side streets advertising clothing wholesalers, 95% of which have utterly vanished or have long been bought by other companies. More and more of them fade away each year, or [...]
The slotted Donald Deskey lamppost was introduced on Broadway and Murray Street in 1958, and by the early 1960s they were being installed by the thousands on main avenues, side streets, parkways and expressways. The two slots on the shaft made it adaptable to hold fixtures like curved streetlamp masts, its most frequent use, but [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Upper East Side
This apartment building at 3rd Avenue and East 94th Street leaves no doubt about what the cross-street is. Looking at this sign, I think about typographic styles, especially the one used for the ’9.’ It occurs to me that no one writes or creates number 9′s like this anymore, typographically speaking, with that especially small [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Manhattan Upper East Side
I have worked frequently in the Chelsea area, more specifically, the 7th Avenue corridor between 23rd Street and Penn Station. I have always been curious about the terra cotta gem on West 23rd just off 7th called the “Traffic Building.” [click on an image in the above Gallery for a larger photo] Daytonian in Manhattan [...]
In 2005 I found these vintage wall poster ads for Hersh’s kosher wine, the candidacy of Assemblyman Louis DeSalvio, a rally for Mayor Vincent Impellitteri and more. The NYC Tenement Museum had occupied the ground floor of the building on the corner of Orchard and Broome and the signs had been recently uncovered after more than [...]
Categorized in: Ads One Shots Tagged with: Lower East Side Manhattan
Greenpoint’s street names were once lettered, from A to Q, but in the late 19th Century were given actual names, in alphabetical order. In north Greenpoint, the names reflect the area’s industrial past next to Newtown Creek — Ash, Box, Clay; south of there, the names switch in emphasis to the formerly bustling commercial shore [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Subways & Trains Tagged with: Chinatown Manhattan
Motorists know all about the Park Avenue Tunnel, which runs beneath the avenue between 33rd and 40th Streets, but few pedestrians ever see it. It was built in 1834 as an open cut for the New York & Harlem Railroad (NY&H) which ran both steam engines and horsecars, and the cut was bridged over in [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Grand Central Manhattan Murray Hill
In the early 20th Century, Queens featured hundreds of striped poles featuring directional signs to different neighborhoods and even out-of-borough locations. This one, photographed in 1931, pointed to Flushing, Brooklyn, Richmond Hill, New York, Hollis, and Merrick Boulevard. Another sign points to “Queens,” but since we’re already in Queens, I’m unsure what was meant. Perhaps [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Fresh Meadows Queens
A better picture would be of a LIRR passenger train crossing these tracks, but I settled for a couple of work trains (actually two trucks mounted on the tracks and driven backward). This is one of a handful of remaining grade crossings in New York City that cross streets open to regular traffic (I believe [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
Photos from the MTA Holiday Train, pretty much a trainset of cars from the 1930s-1950s trotted out in December and a few times a year for pleasure excursions, will leach out in FNY this month. All I’ll say about this photo is that subway cars have gone from looking like organic, living and breathing embodiments [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains
Bayside Avenue in Queens is nowhere near Bayside, the neighborhood. Instead it runs between Union Street and the intersection of 154th Street and 29th Avenue in Flushing. In what is something of a feature in NYC nomenclature, the road is named for the neighborhood or town toward which it points (cf. Flushing Avenue, which isn’t [...]
Not much is known now about Hagstrom Maps (by me at least) except that it was founded by Andrew Hagstrom in 1916. A Google search reveals today more listings for Hagstrom guitars than for Hagstrom maps. I wish the company would reveal more about its rich history. I interviewed for work there twice (1981, 1992) [...]
Furman Street runs along the East River in Brooklyn from Atlantic Avenue north to (Old) Fulton, and since the 1950s, has mostly been accompanied by the stolid overhang of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. On its river side, it was formerly lined with busy docks handling goods brought in from the world over, shuttled along to distant [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights
Forest Hills Gardens, a ritzy community on the south side of the LIRR main line tracks roughly between Continental Avenue, Union Turnpike, the LIRR and Greenway South, was one of America’s first planned developments. It was begun in 1908 and its English green style setting is the work of Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., the son [...]
This is an early version of the Type F reverse-scroll NYC streetlamp at Elm and Pearl Streets in, I’d say, 1910 or so. The Type F was used on side streets in a smaller version with less ornamentation, and could sometimes be used on north-south avenues like 7th (though it was replaced by Twinlamps fairly [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Civic Center Manhattan
Theodore Roszak’s abstract sculpture ‘Sentinel’ stands on 1st Avenue opposite Bellevue Hospital, next to the Public Health Laboratories. Theodore Roszak (May 1, 1907 – September 2, 1981) was an American sculptor and painter. He was born in Posen, Prussia (German Empire), now Poznań, Poland, as a son of Polish parents, and emigrated to the United States at the age of two. From 1925 to 1926 he [...]
Boston does a great job marking war heroes and local luminaries on hundreds of street corners with these embossed black and gold signs, like this one in the West End. Max Hirshovitz was a corporal who was killed during World War I. For all I know, that gold star is also significant. Can anyone link [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Out of Town Signs Tagged with: Boston North End
I had been unaware of it, but NYC’s Department of Transportation officially refers to these type of street signs as “camelback” signs, instead of my own appellation, “humpback” signs. I suppose it’s classier that way. This sign adorns a gate at Washington and West 10th; when in use in the early to mid-20th Century, it [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
This handsome painted red, black and white sign for a marine repairs firm has hung in there on Christopher Street near Washington almost 3 decades after the demise of its parent. It faces 2 sides with an identical sign on each side. The Landmarks Prevervation Commission report for its Weehawken Street district says Meier & [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
The Sonn Brothers, Henry and Hyman, first went into business in the 1870s as grocers, but by the 1890s they were liquor dealers and operated from many downtown locations. Their offices were at 440 Washington/31 Desbrosses from 1901 to 1912, and this faded sign advertises that location. Surprisingly, Walter Grutchfield has gleaned quite a bit [...]
Rex Cole (1887-1967) was originally a lamp manufacturer, then became associated with General Electric in the 1920s and designed white enamel Monitor Top refrigerators. Famed architect Raymond Hood designed a series of buildings in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the Grand Concourse, and Northern Blvd. in Flushing for Cole’s showrooms that either looked like refrigerators or featured [...]
Some of New York’s street fire alarms date back to 1912, which is when this design first appeared. Variations on this theme have been carried down over the years, before more streamlined versions began appearing in the late 1950s. Since the 19-teens, lampposts, stoplights, and various sign stanchions have changed fashion every few years, yet [...]
Categorized in: One Shots
As you know, Hurricane Sandy has devastated the metropolitan area, especially shoreline areas in Long Island, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the New Jersey shore. Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City Office of Emergency Management AllMedia New York page on blood donations, volunteering, and donations NYC Service Crowdrise New York State Red Cross Catholic [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Hurricane Sandy
Davit lampposts, which are a single curved mast instead of a shaft with a mast attached, are becoming the new black in New York City lampposts. A flock were installed along Columbia Street in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, they dominate the streets surrounding Barclays Center, and they took over Houston Street in Manhattan [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn DUMBO
Sometimes, you don’t find something Forgotten — it has to find you. I was idly making my way through Facebook late tonight and I saw this enamel mid-20th Century sign that used to be at Amsterdam Avenue and a certain Croton Street. I had never heard of it. A quick trip to oldstreets.com filled me [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Manhattan Washington Heights
It’s hard to find “Whitestone” type lampposts anywhere in NYC these days, though in the 1940s and 1950s, they were the lampposts of choice on the then-fledgling NYC expressway system. Officially the “Type 41″ single or twin arm posts, they originated on the Whitestone Bridge and its approach roads and spread to wherever elevated expressways [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights
Periodically, I make a hajj over to 539 Driggs Avenue, not far from the buzzing hive of downtown Williamsburg. I just want to see if what I have termed the ‘spook house of Williamsburg’ is still in this wondrously deteriorated condition, with the ruined barber pole proclaiming its past life, the stars and stripes displayed [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
Categorized in: One Shots Out of Town Signs Tagged with: Bronx Eastchester
In the mid-1980s, long before there was a push to turn the West Side Freight Elevated (The High Line) along Washington Street in the West Village into a park, much of it was demolished: though it originally ran to the old St. John’s Freight RR Terminal near Houston Street, the vast majority south of Gansevoort [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
I haven’t done anything at all on New Street, which runs from Beaver north to Wall Streets between Broadway and Broad Street in the Financial District. That’s mostly because there’s not much to see there from a FNY standpoint, and it’s a somewhat grimy and uninteresting stretch. Because of its proximity to Wall Street it’s [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Financial District Manhattan
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Manhattan Soho
In the early 1980s, when the subway system was at its grimiest, cars were breaking down with regularity, graffiti taggers ran wild, crime was out of control and track fires repeatedly affected service, sets of pure white train cars began to appear on several IRT routes. They reminded you of the one white pigeon in [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains
Jamaica Avenue in 1977 during demolition of the Jamaica El. The train was rerouted in a subway under Archer Avenue in 1988; in true MTA fashion, the replacement line arrived 11 years late. I was living in Bay Ridge at the time and I’m sorry I missed out on Jamaica Avenue in transition, with the [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Subways & Trains Tagged with: Jamaica Queens
I have been complaining about new street signs in the Cleartype font, many of them in upper and lower case, that have been appearing on NYC streets in compliance with an apparently now-rescinded federal mandate, since they’re apparently easier to read if you’re in a car in motion. I have no idea if this is [...]
Here’s another one of those marvelous navy blue and white street signs used in Manhattan and the Bronx between about 1913 and 1964. Seaman Avenue and Isham Street are way up north in Inwood. It’s an incredible font. There was a real flair in the rendering. Look at those cap M’s. I’ve never before seen [...]
“A member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven.” And not a bad set of shoulders, either. Meet her, Boss Tweed, Bill the Butcher, the Soda Fountain King and a cast of colorful characters in the FNY Green-Wood Cemetery tour, Saturday, October 13 at 12 noon. This is [...]
Categorized in: One Shots
In 1908 the IRT Subway was extended to Brooklyn for the first time, and Heins and LaFarge, the architects who constructed most of the subway’s early stations and stationhouses, erected this grand entrance house in the triangle formed by Atlantic, Flatbush and 4th Avenues, known as Times Plaza after the nearby offices of a long-disappeared [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Downtown Brooklyn
I was loitering in Bayonne the other day and noticed, even as its streetlamp luminaires are being replaced with one new model, imparting a strangling uniformity, its street signs remain delightfully disparate. Some corners have brand-new vinyl signs, with Helvetica or Cleartype, those fonts of bureaucracy, while other ones, made of stamped and pressed metal [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Bushwick
This arrow-shaped sign lurking under the Broadway Brooklyn el on Broadway and Aberdeen Street is a remaining specimen of the previous generation of one-way signs. They were in use prior to 1965 or so, and were white with the words ONE-WAY in black. Some of the signs carried the words “POLICE DEPT.” on them. This [...]
The City began to reproduce old castiron lamppost forms during the 1980s, and they’ve generally followed those designs, which appeared as early as the 1890s in some cases, very, very closely. However, one detail has eluded them. All castiron posts — Bishop Crooks, the Twins used on 5th Avenue, other main streets, and parkways — [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps
This is the street sign style used in Manhattan and the Bronx beginning in the mid-1910s, and surviving in some cases until the early 1960s. They were navy blue and white, with the cross street placed above the main identifier street in what came to be called the ‘hump.’ That serif lettering was exquisite — [...]
I was an altar boy as a kid, and attended Catholic schools all the way from kindergarden to Grade 16, my last year at St. Francis College. And, I even got a valve transplant at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn in 2009. Still: I have never been particularly religious, and never really ‘bought in.’ Paradoxically, [...]
The Twin, originally produced for use on 5th Avenue at the dawn of the electrified lamppost era in the 1890s, originally had a different design (the mast of one of those originals can still be seen at the NE corner of 5th Avenue and East 23rd Street at Madison Square). Later, a modified design that [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps
These ‘humpback’ navy and white street signs were standard issue in Manhattan and the Bronx from 1913 until the early 1960s. Politically, Manhattan and the Bronx were the same county until 1914. This intersection no longer exists, as East 177th was replaced by the Cross-Bronx Expressway in the 1950s. C.L. Croes was a 19th Century [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Maspeth Middle Village Queens
The BMT Chambers Street station sits beneath the Municipal Building with City Hall across the street. It once served as the end of the line for trains crossing the Manhattan Bridge, and long ago, even saw Long Island Rail Road service. The north platform has been out of service for decades, and the City has [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: City Hall Manhattan
One of the more mysterious practices that I’ve noticed, and have mulled over in in the back of my head for years, is some banks’ practice of installing their own lampposts on the sidewalks outside their property. I’m not sure they’re maintained any more, as I do not often happen by at night. Year in [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Park Slope
One of Brooklyn’s oldest street signs is hiding in plain sight in Brooklyn’s premier residential neighborhood (or so the papers and magazines would have you believe). At the corner of 7th Avenue and 1st street on the edge of a landmarked section of Park Slope — indicated by the maroon 1st Street sign — is [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Brooklyn Park Slope
Though Hibernia Bank was acquired by Security Pacific in 1988 and has been long forgotten, its 1892 “temple bank” building [Albert Pissis, arch.] still stands proudly, if a bit worse for wear, at Market McAllister and Jones Streets. Market Street’s diagonal orientation makes for many triangular intersections , where architects were able to be bold and [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Out of Town Tagged with: Downtown San Francisco
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Richmondtown Staten Island
The Department of Transportation has come up with an unusual arrangement in downtown College Point in NW Queens. For the former WALK/DONT WALK signs, now represented by a red hand and green walking man, they have installed slightly thicker, taller stanchions, which allows the placement of other traffic signs and street signs. A harbinger of [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: College Point Queens
The old New York Pavilion in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, which has been allowed to rust and fall apart for 47 years, reminds me of the various Time Machine movies in which H.G. Wells, sitting in his time machine watching the years go by, sees Man’s great projects rise, prosper and then deteriorate over the centuries. [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Flushing Meadows Queens
From FNY’s 2011 Lower Second Avenue page… Writing in the original (2003) edition of New York’s Best Dive Bars, Wendy Mitchell writes: Despite the friendly crowd, the Mars Bar more than lives up to its reputation as New York’s King (and Queen and Prince) of dives. If you’re up for adventure, you might find it here, wrapped [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: East Village Manhattan
As part of station renovations that will connect the Bleecker Street station (on the Lexington Avenue Line #6 train) to the IND Broadway-Lafayette station, the MTA has temporarily removed the station wall tiling, exposing blank brick walls. I imagine this situation will exist for a few months until the tiling can be reinstalled. The city [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Manhattan Noho
The Frost Pharamcy sign on 55th Avenue and Queens Boulevard is without a doubt one of my favorites in Queens. It’s likely a snapshot from the Fab Forties or Nifty Fifties. Rendered in my favorite color combination, black and yellow, it’s purely hand-lettered, probably by a signmaker using just a triangle and ruler to measure. [...]
As the city wastes millions by changing street signs that are ALL CAPS to Upper & Lower Case — including, ridiculously, numbered signs that, at most, have a tiny “AV” or a “ST” on them, it occurs to me that the millions would be better spent on replacing the signs that actually need replacing. A [...]
Other than Little Neck, the Queens neighborhood in which I spend the most time is unquestionably Astoria, where I sit on the board of the Greater Astoria Historical Society and, as such, am often summoned to one meeting or the other. To make things interesting I get off at different stops on the Astoria elevated [...]
I was meandering around the section of Flushing in which the streets are named for plants in alphabetical order from A to R. On Quince Avenue I found this compelling small cottage with a French Second-Empire style mansard roof. This is likely a recent renovation, but unusually for Queens (and I hate to sound condescending [...]
As part of the rehabilitation and restoration of the Hunters Point Avenue #7 train station (which actually stops at 49th Avenue, which was still called Hunters Point Avenue when the station opened) a tiled sign saying “To Astoria and Corona” has been once again uncovered. Why doesn’t it say “To Astoria and Flushing”? That’s where [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Astoria Corona Queens
From the ForgottenBook: The Montauk Club is a slice of Victoriana that would be pretentious if it weren’t so enjoyable and fun to view when walking past. The club itself was established in 1889 as a “gentleman’s social club”; a plaque at the front entrance describes its 1891 building at 8th Avenue and Lincoln Place as [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Park Slope
From Willets Point Boulevard in the Iron Triangle, a row of auto repair and scrap metal shops just east of Citifield in what is officially Corona, Queens. The area’s only resident lives on the second floor above the deli on the right. The City has been trying to oust the scrap metal dealers for years, [...]
In 1958, a new streamlined lamppost — completely different than the ornate cast and wrought iron posts that then lit NYC streets, designed in the Beaux Arts era, 1890-1915 — appeared on Broadway on Murray Street opposite City Hall. It featured a stainless steel shaft with two slots, a curved mastarm, and a new luminaire [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: City Hall
James H. Hackett (1800-1871), whom Abraham Lincoln called his favorite actor, reposes at Prospect Cemetery in Jamaica, Queens, under a fallen monument. The Prospect Cemetery Association hopes to restore it soon. Actor Peter Riegert (Animal House, Local Hero, Sopranos) has made a short Kickstarter film about the largely forgotten entertainment figure and the now-reviving cemetery in [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries One Shots Tagged with: Jamaica Queens
This is the regional road map of Greater New York that appeared in the July 1964 National Geographic. Where to begin about this gorgeous map? Well, they include landmarks in Brooklyn like the Schenck-Crooke House (see if you can find it) and the Vanderbilt Mausoleum in Staten Island. They also get Conduit Boulevard’s name right [...]
Categorized in: One Shots
Even though your webmaster was cruelly cast out of my place of business in February and getting freelance here and there, I recently spent a few dozen dollars on the complete National Geographic on disk, 1888-2010. In the July 1964 issue (I used to have a hard copy when my father had a collection) is [...]
…. at 61st Street and Flushing Avenue. Trolley service along Fresh Pond Road began in 1896 and ended in the 1940s; the northernmost section of the line used 61st Street to reach Flushing Avenue, which had been laid out in its present form in 1893. Before that time it was the Brooklyn and Newtown Turnpike.
Once I get a critical mass of these, they’ll get their own page. This is an example of mid-20th Century traffic signs– in general, signs pointing to bridges would be arrowhead-shaped, while those referencing tunnels would be circular. They were phased out when the large green traffic signs became prevalent, but some are still in [...]
The last two working versions of New York City’s “Wheelies,” the long-armed stoplights with the auto wheel motif first introduced in the mid-1920s, have been denuded and emasculated. They still stand on East 46th and Park Avenue at Grand Central Terminal, but they now have no practical use. Their function superceded by a modern guy-wired [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Manhattan Park Avenue
From a construction site in Red Hook, Brooklyn. In the 1970s and 1980s, the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League (1971-1984), like baseball’s New York Yankees, had the financial resources to sign the cream of the crop of the world’s best soccer players. A new Cosmos franchise is in the works for [...]
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Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Midwood
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Midwood
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Douglaston Queens
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights
Throughout most of Shea Stadium’s existence (except for the last couple of years, when Citifield was being constructed) a large, four-sided clock tower was visible beyond the left-field fence with a flashing neon sign. This was the Serval Zipper Factory, for the past few years a U-Haul distributorship. The clocks, of course, stopped long ago. [...]
To paraphrase Yogi, you can observe a lot by looking. I was walking up Broadway after getting a new tour guide license when these painted window signs for Izquierdo & Vila, fabric exporters, manifested themselves at Franklin Street. The elaborate lettering for the word “Fabrics” seems to point the ad toward the 1920s, 30s at [...]
When modern octagonal-shafted poles, which are made of aluminum and are usually silver or gray-painted, first started appearing in NYC streets in 1950, the mast of choice was curved with a single thinner bracket, as shown here. In the early 1960s when GE M-400s and Westinghouse OV-25s, which were oblong and gave a greenish white [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps
A few years ago, when ForgottenTour 16 was swinging through Tompkinsville, Staten Island, we saw this ancient barn-like structure on Swan Street, labeled “Encumbrance Depot” and wondered what it was. Secret Staten Island has come up with the answer, now that it’s semi-endangered now (every old building on Staten Island is semi-endangered): In the late [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Stapleton Staten Island
A two-shot page on One Shots. Forgive the breach from format … This newsstand, on 7th Avenue and West 51st, is one of NYC’s classics with a hand-stenciled sign. It’s bursting with the promise of newspapers, magazines, snacks, cigs. I’m out of touch — I barely use a cell phone. Are phone cards still in [...]
Categorized in: One Shots
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Manhattan Washington Heights
The Donald Deskey lamppost was introduced in 1958 at Broadway and Murray Street alongside City Hall Park, and was brought out as a standard NYC lamppost in 1962. It was designed by architect and industrial designer Donald Deskey, who is most famed for the interiors of Radio City Music Hall, as well as the Crest [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps
Actually a four-shot today, as I found this battered but unbowed Checker on Gravesend Neck Road east of the el station. What year? The Checker logo depicts land masses that resemble none on the current globe. A look back to the prehistoric past, or perhaps a look into the far future after continental drift has [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
Most Animal Cannibal signs (a designation created by me: the art must feature an animal chowing down or preparing to eat meat from its own species) involve pigs; however, the pigs in Animal Cannibal ads are usually seen holding strings of sausages, perhaps wearing chef hats, without actually preparing to bring teeth down upon the [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brighton Beach Brooklyn
Subway mosaics, most of them fashioned between 1904 and 1928, sometimes depict scenes that were long vanished even before the stations in which they are displayed were built. There’s this one, at the Chambers Street 7th Avenue IRT station, where the #1, 2 and 3 stop. Mosaic plaques against the wall in the express station [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains
This is the last, or at least among the last, Lawrence Street signs on the BMT platform I’ve always known as Lawrence Street. The station name was wiped from the MTA subway maps last year, when a connection to the IND A/C/F trains at the Jay Street/Metrotech station was opened. (And that station had for [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Downtown Brooklyn
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: One Shots
There’s a couple of ‘mystery poles’ in Manhattan, whose former use is hidden in the vicissitudes of time. Like this one on Broadway and West 142nd. It’s too far away from the corner to have been a stoplight, and there’s no bank behind it — sometimes banks will install their own string of lampposts on [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps
The last time I was in DC (December 2007) I quite accidentally stumbled on these remaining streetcar rails on O and P Street in Georgetown. Looks like the city is on a street paving program, but according to this article in Greater Greater Washington, the stones and rails will be spiffed up and put back. [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Out of Town Tagged with: DC Washington
Other than a plaque in the Polo Grounds Houses commemorating Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard Round the World in 1951, there’s absolutely no indication in Upper Manhattan that the San Francisco Giants once played in NYC from the 19th Century until 1957. Or… is there? As it says in the holy texts ForgottenBook: The New York [...]
Categorized in: One Shots
JJ’s Navy Yard Cocktail Lounge, which had been on the corner of Flushing and Washington Avenues, spent its last few years as a strip club. It is being divided up into a Dunkin’ Donuts and a Subway as we speak. In a few years, all stores will be banks, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds, and Subway. [...]
Categorized in: One Shots
There are two streets in NYC that begin with X, if you don’t count Brooklyn’s Avenue X. Both are Xenia Streets: in Corona, Queens, and Old Town, Staten Island. Xenia (which I had thought was a flower, but that’s zinnia) is a Greek term meaning ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’; it frequently turns up in combined terms [...]
This railroad station was taken out of service about 30 years ago. The handsome brick building with the arched windows on the right was built in the 1850s for one of Samuel Lord’s daughters — Lord of Lord & Taylor fame. After being allowed to deteriorate into the worst sort of decrepitude, it was torn [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains
The John Lindsay campaign ad (likely dating to 1965) uncovered on Flatbush Avenue reminded me of the time back in 1998 when I was dazedly wandering the back roads of Staten Island and I located this shed on Crabtree Avenue in Bloomingdale, on which there was affixed a sign with Mayor Robert Wagner Jr.’s name [...]
Here’s a surviving 1940-era street sign on Tunnel Exit Street, an exit from the Queens Midtown Tunnel in Murray Hill. photo: Steve Garza The tunnel was designed by Ole Singstad, and it was opened to traffic in 1940 under the supervision of New York City Tunnel Authority to relieve traffic congestion on the city’s East [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Manhattan Murray Hill
I wonder what the story is with this seemingly abandoned Tudor at 115-8 Park Lane South in Kew Gardens. At least I think it’s abandoned. The grass had been unmowed for months, and the gate was wide open and I walked right onto the lawn. Been looking for a place to put the ever-growing ForgottenResearch. [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Kew Gardens Queens
The ground floor of this building at Manahttan and Driggs in Greenpoint used to be an auto repair shop that sold Matchless shock absorbers, and displayed a lighted sign. When the repair shop left and a bar moved in, they ironically called themselves Matchless, since the sign was there, and they let it stay there. [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint
I had missed this one until now — a plaque at the 157th Street station on the 7th Avenue-Broadway line, likely installed as the station opened in 1904, directs visitors to the Morris-Jumel Mansion, a colonial-era private home that George Washington used as a headquarters during the Revolution. From the ForgottenBook: This oldest private home [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Manhattan Washington Heights
The picture windows of the Cortelyou Road station window are placed directly over the tracks, which used to be part of asteam railroad conecting Prospect Park and Coney Island. Through it, we see “DRUGS” and “SODA” signs, which are a small part of a large painted sign on the side of the old GREENFIELD THE [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Ditmas Park
Categorized in: One Shots Out of Town Tagged with: DC Washington
The Butler Brothers Warehouse (later the Morgan Industrial Center), 350 Warren Street in the Jersey City Historic Warehouse District, is one of the most imposing brick buildings in the city. It was constructed about 1905 for the Chicago-based Butler Brothers retailing and wholesaling company. Butler Brothers was a retailer and wholesale supplier based in Chicago. It [...]
Categorized in: One Shots
Red Hook is Brooklyn’s Australia: an island nation unto itself. Cut off from downtown and Park Slope by the Gowanus Expressway and forbidding housing projects, it boasts a street system all its own, with few streets that stretch into other neighborhoods. Odd creatures found nowhere else in Brooklyn stammer and stumble down the streets. Efforts [...]
Guest post by ForgottenFan David Silver While walking down 7th Avenue about a month ago, I happened to look up at at the parking structure at the corner of 37th and 7th. This structure was supposed to be used for all the people who enjoyed throwing their money away at the nearby OTB. Since the [...]
As hundreds of fire alarms around town are decommissioned in the age of wireless telephony, they are being reimagined and reappropriated for new purposes. Here, a former alarm stanchion on Flatlands Avenue west of Ralph Avenue in Canarsie has been given a new lease on life as a people’s community rubbish receptacle. Occupy your neighborhood!
Categorized in: One Shots
Some of NYC’s fire alarms, now being gradually grandfathered and attritioned out of existence because of the mobile phone networks, have been in place since very early in the century. This one on Broadway in Elmhurst, Queens, still sports an original shaft that formerly held an alarm light notifying passersby of the presence of an [...]
Categorized in: One Shots
In the 1940s and into the 1960s, a series of hand drawn, light hearted signs depicting proper subway etiquette appeared in the ad strips in the subway cars, usually under the “Subway Sun” banner, all of them drawn by an artist named Amelia Opdyke “Oppy” Jones. I’ll have more of these signs on a future page. [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains
A head-scratcher at the 65th Street station on the IND Queens Boulevard line (R and M trains) has a modern sign showing the exit at Rowan Street and Broadway. 65th Street hasn’t been known by that name since the 1920s, when most Queens streets were grouped under one numbering system. Early IND signs, installed in [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Subways & Trains
Sadly, this view looking north on Cebra Avenue in Stapleton, Staten Island will no longer be available next month as the Samuel R. Smith Infirmary, formerly Staten Island Hospital, is being razed after over 30 years of abandonment. Let The Kingston Lounge tell the sad tale of why it wasn’t landmarked, as well as take [...]
Categorized in: One Shots
I have always considered the massive concrete arches that lift railroad tracks to the Hell Gate Bridge over the streets of northwest Astoria almost as imposing as the arch bridge itself. Tracks, arches and bridge were constructed from 1914-1917 and connect Pennsylvania Station, the Sunnyside Yards, and southern Queens with the northeast United States.
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Flushing Meadows Queens World's Fair
Built before the Revolutionary War (1740), the Epenetus Smith Tavern, 211 Middle Country Road in Smithtown, originally stood just west of the juncture of Middle Country & North Country Roads. This site was a popular stop on the Brooklyn to Sag Harbor stagecoach route during the 1770s, and during the Revolutionary War, the house often played [...]
Despite federal guidelines elsewhere that mandate green and white reflective street signs, Brookline, Massachusetts (the birthplace of John F. Kennedy) has always been permitted to retain its handsome set of bas relief street signs, with a silver background and black letters. Have the signs been landmarked? 11/18/11
Categorized in: One Shots Out of Town
One of my favorite buildings in Woodside, at Laurel Hill Boulevard and 65th Place, is this frame house, with a deli on the ground floor. This type sign, with vinyl letters, was distributed to many mom and pops by the Coca Cola Company; Coke ads are invariably displayed in either side. Beats the vinyl awnings [...]
The #58 trolley, the Ridgewood-Flushing Line, ended service on 7/17/1949, but here on 60th Place and Kleupfel Court (near 67th Avenue) it’s like it never left. In Ridgewood, the line had its own right of way under the el train bound for Metropolitan Avenue (this is the Nassau Street line in Manhattan, Broadway Line in [...]
In 1921, the numbering system in Queens, where most named streets were given numbers (a practice that strived to lessen confusion by eliminating different street systems in towns around the borough (ie. 2nd Street in Astoria and Flushing would thence have different numbers) had begun. As this excerpt from the list of Queens streets in [...]
Categorized in: One Shots
There are, or were, only two streets called “Row” in New York and wouldn’t you know it, they met each other. Tryon Row was a one block street between Centre Street and Park Row just south of the Municipal Building. Tryon Row’s space is now occupied by a modest sitting space with tables and chairs. [...]
I took this photo on Montague and Clinton Streets in Brooklyn Heights, where a quartet of old-style subway entrance lamps have been preserved (or, as I suspect, made new to match the old styles). At one time all subway staircase entrances carried lamps like this, with the BMT (Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit) marked with green and Interborough [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains
I just stumbled on a pile of photos I took in Prospect Cemetery in Jamaica, Queens in 2004. History under our noses has been pretty much left to the vandals, though cemetery caretaker Cate Ludlam’s tireless work has enabled the reconstruction of the cemetery chapel, which is now a concert and events hall. Still, the [...]
Categorized in: One Shots
The removal of a newsstand at West 3rd Street and 6th Avenue has revealed the presence of an old-style enamel sign attached to a stairway rail. Signs of this type were once prevalent in the subways before the current Unimark white on black signs appeared in the late 1960s. The Unimark syle gradually spread throughout [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
I’ll have to break my one-photo rule on the ONE SHOTS category, which I haven’t previously done. Above is a photo taken sometime in the Fab 50s by previously unheralded photographer Vivian Maier, showing a huge throng facing a speaker who is apparently standing in the middle of 2nd Avenue. The photo isn’t captioned, so [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: East Village Manhattan
Elmhurst will be losing one of its historic buildings in the near future, as its 105-year old library on Broadway, funded, like many of its brother libraries in the 5 boroughs, by steel industrialist/philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, will soone be torn down to make way for a larger structure. The $27.8 million, 30,000-square-foot facility will span [...]
Even though the South Street Seaport area ceased to be home to NYC’s foremost fish wholesaler when the Fish Market moved to Hunt’s Point, Bronx, in 2005, there are still ghost signs around to remind you that the overnights were once bustling with seafood dealers and sellers, like this sign on Beekman Street near South. [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Manhattan South Street Seaport
43 West 23rd Street was built as a warehouse in 1897 (Henry Hardenbergh) and in that Beaux Arts era, even warehouses had panache. There’s something to arrest the eye on each floor, from the big cat friezes on the ground floor to the pilasters (half columns) on the second, to the arch windows on the [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Madison Square Manhattan
