If I’m lost somebody can give me a ride home.

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 [...]

I’m in 1939.

I’m where they put el pillars right in the middle of the street.

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 [...]

I’m downtown, way downtown

A remnant of the Seven Seas Restaurant, Surf Avenue and West 16th, Coney 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 [...]

The Ministry of Love, maybe?

I’m descending into the depths. I may never come back out again.

The painted ponies go up and down, just to the west.

The true miracle is that this, the last of Brooklyn’s ‘humpback’ street signs, is still in place. Out of thousands this is the last one. In fact I haven’t been by here in a few months — I hope it’s still there. Really, the Brooklyn Museum or a local outfit should claim it before the [...]

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 [...]

Better see me while I’m here. Looks like I won’t be around for long.

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. [...]

Ichabod Crane is just a couple of blocks away.

I’m at a place where you need to be well-prepared.

What’s behind the masks?  Or in front of them?

I am the last of my kind. I had ten brothers, and they have all disappeared. When I am gone, there will be none to replace me, and I will be forgotten.

I’m stuck in a moment and can’t get out of it.

At a dome of the purest blue

Somebody PLEASE tell me these two streets rhyme. Don’t go looking at google maps or atlases. You just gotta know.

Route 101, Glen Cove, NY

Glen Street, Glen Cove, NY. Chevy, but what model/year?

I’m at one of a series of bridges called the Duncomb Arches. But where are they?

I am in a land once occupied by slaughterhouses and tanneries, that has since been converted into an exclusive haunt of the 1%ers.

I am in a land where giant boulders line the curb on both sides of the street, seemingly dropped from space. Exact location please.

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 [...]

I’m at a longtime NYC high school that was an all-boys school until it moved to Queens, accepted girls, and the world turned color.

I found a series of arches that cascade into infinity, like opposing mirrors. Where am I?

I found a greaser, and a clock with no hands. Where am I?

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!

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 [...]

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 [...]

This sign has been by the Manhattan-bound platform at the Woodside Long Island Rail Road station since I started using it in 1992, and probably long before that. These days the closest Alcol Realty is in Ornageburg, NY in Rockland County. IL stands for ILlinois.

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 [...]

Thanks ForgottenFans (shown here at the Starrett-Lehigh Building) who made it through all 5 hours on Tour #50 at Hudson River Park, as well as Jessica DuLong and the crew of the John J. Harvey Fireboat, who gave us a thorough tour. A lengthier writeup will appear soon.

I’m considered to be the father of my country.

Anyone who knows me well knows that the job I always wished I could have had was a Top 40 disk jockey in the 1960s, with the jokes, the patter, the jingles and the greatest pop music in history. In the 1960s a variety of radio stations employed the Top 40 pop format, among them [...]

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 [...]

Only remaining remnant of Fishbein’s, which was either a convenience or hardware store at Astoria Boulevard and 21st Street in Queens.

The Paul Robeson Theatre, formerly St. Casimir’s Roman Catholic Church,  at 40 Greene Avenue near Carlton in Fort Greene in Brooklyn, has been newly given Landmarks status. It’s a small, compact midblock building converted to a theatre by Robeson Theatre head Dr. Josephine English in 1980. The theatre houses local community productions and events — [...]

We are somewhere in the five boroughs. Obviously on old fashioned metal street sign has been retained. Without perusing a map, or without using the map index at least, Where are we?    

Though I haven’t been there in a couple of years, I enjoy hiking around Jersey City, especially to observe street fixtures like lampposts and signs. There’s still a mishmosh of streets signs from several decades in different styles. Some of the oldest are these hand painted signs — and when the sun starts bleaching them, [...]

Asser Levy Place runs for just the length of 2 blocks, from East 24th to 25th Streets west of the FDR Dive. For a short street, it is unusually wide. It was originally laid out as part of Avenue A; parts of the avenue run intermittently from the East Village north to Harlem and are [...]

While scuttling furtively through the streets of New York, looking down while trying to avoid meeting the gaze of my betters, I sometimes catch sight of elements that the more industrious, competent and confident New Yorkers fail to see. One of these is the sidewalk plates that were installed by long-ago concrete pourers and sidewalk [...]

A very large painted ad on a corner factory at Henry and Middagh Streets proclaims Peaks Mason Mints, and is the former home of the Mason, Au and Magenheimer Candy Company. According to advertisement researcher Walter Grutchfield, the company was in business here between 1892 and 1949 and was founded by confectioners Joseph Mason and [...]

Willets Point Boulevard between Roosevelt Avenue and Northern Boulevard is the heart of the “iron triangle” consisting of metal works, scrap metal dealers, car repair shops, and wholesalers. The city has been trying to get the businesses evicted for years, but the owners have fought back with lawsuits. Powerful interests have wished to build housing [...]

Wood sign announcing total height from road to elevated trestle on Roosevelt Avenue at the Mets-Willlets Point station. It’s a very old design and could have been here since the 1920s, when the el was extended out to main Street.

Before the “pooper scooper” regulation was passed in the 1980s, cleaning up after your dog was merely voluntary, and the Department of Sanitation could merely encourage people to do so. The DSNY went through several sign designs in that effort. This one from the 1960s is still in place.

Most younger New Yorkers know the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion on the NW corner of 6th Avenue and West 20th Street as the Limelight Disco, one of a flock of Limelights run by impresario Peter Gatien in the 1980s and 1990s; other Limelights had been opened in Hollywood, FL; Atlanta, Chicago; and London. [...]

On April 10th, 1969, the second game of the 1969 World Series victory season, Mets center fielder Tommie Agee hit a HR into the upper left field deck at Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadows. No batter, before or since, reached the upper deck there. Tommie Agee passed away in 2001, The Expos played their last [...]

The old Blue Sky Diner, a 1954 Mountainview at 21st Street and 49th Avenue in Hunters Point, took a star turn in 2010-2011 as the upscale M. Wells Restaurant, featuring haute cuisine and snobby service. In the summer of 2011, M. Wells’ owners announced they were moving out (seeking another space in Hunters Point) and [...]

Terra cotta frieze from the original South Ferry station, in use for over 90 years until it was closed in 2009. All service now runs to the modern yet bland South Ferry station, where there is a new connection from the IRT to the BMT, as well as the ferry.

I saw the USS New York from the ferry on Saturday. Though it could be mistaken by the layman for an aircraft carrier, the vessel is actually classified as an amphibious transport dock. Shortly after 11 September 2001, Governor of New York George E. Pataki wrote a letter to Secretary of the Navy Gordon R. Englandrequesting that the Navy bestow [...]

Flatbush Avenue near 7th, Park Slope. A look at some interlocking brickwork, elaborate molding, and lettering at the peak of an apartment building. From 1880-1915 or so, architects helpfully showed dates of construction, as well as the original name of the building, sometimes the first owner, and occasionally even the architect himself. Details like this [...]

Griffon Cutlery Works was located at 151 West 19th Street from 1920 to about 1965, and its large painted sign can still be made out from 7th Avenue between West 19th and 20th Streets, even though it has faded considerably in recent years. Pinking shears are scissors, the blades of which are sawtoothed instead of straight. They [...]