Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
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
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
Walk past most police precincts in New York City, and you will notice that almost inevitably the entrances are lit by a pair of lamps mounted on each side of the door and that, also almost inevitably, the lamps feature green plastic or glass through which the light shines. Depending on the age of the [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Signs Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
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 Owls Head Sewage Treatment Plant, on the outskirts of beautiful Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, is accessible by roads from Bay Ridge Avenue (69th Street) and from the Belt Parkway. The plant had always had species of oddball lampposts on its roads — this photo is from the 1940s, and these posts, which resemble the ones [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Street Lamps Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
One thing I’ve noticed while walking around Bayonne, Hoboken and Jersey City (I haven’t attempted Newark, Union City, Weehawken etc. yet) is that while you do see modern green and white street signs, in many places the porcelain and metal signs of the 1940s and 1950s have been allowed to remain in place…because they do [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Signs Tagged with: Hoboken New Jersey
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
Categorized in: One Shots Out of Town Tagged with: Great Neck Nassau County
City Councilmembers Peter Vallone (speaking) and Elizabeth Crowley (red coat, to his left) oppose the move of Triumph of Civic Virtue to Brooklyn A number of Queens elected officials, including the now-disgraced US Representative Anthony Weiner and Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, have been critical of Frederick MacMonnies’ 1922 allegorical work Triumph of Civic Virtue, [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: Kew Gardens Queens statues
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
Four auto traffic bridges connect Staten Island to the outside world. In order of construction, they are the Outerbridge Crossing (named for its engineer, not because it is in the outer reaches of NYC) the Goethals Bridge (opened the same day as the Outerbridge, 6/29/28), the Bayonne Bridge (11/15/31), and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (11/21/64). Though [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Walks Tagged with: Bayonne New Jersey Port Richmond Staten Island
Categorized in: One Shots Out of Town Signs Tagged with: Bronx Eastchester
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
One of the most beloved artifacts in downtown San Francisco is at Market Street where it meets Kearny and Third Streets, where the city’s oldest public monument, Lotta’s Fountain, can be found. Lotta Crabtree (1847-1924) was a popular singer/actress who began her career in San Fran as a child in the 1850s, her father John [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: Downtown San Francisco
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
Categorized in: One Shots Out of Town Tagged with: DC Washington
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
Over the years my pal Allen Dade has passed along several dozen images of the strange and varied lampposts found in the London area. I know next to nothing at all about them — except they’re in the vein of the wrought and cast ison Bishop Crook and Corvington lampposts that, in newly cast versions, [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Street Lamps Tagged with: England London Manchester
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: California San Francisco
Though San Francisco is much smaller in total area than New York, its strict grid street system provides ample opportunity for builders to include alleys in its street plan. While Manhattan is unaccountably alley-poor, San Fran presents multiple opportunities for intrepid alley hunters… ISADORA DUNCAN LANE, Taylor between Geary and Post, Union Square area As a rule [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: California San Francisco
You might think San Francisco and Flushing have absolutely nothing in common, but they do share something. Way over in the extreme western end of Flushing, between College Point Boulevard, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Long Island Railroad and the Kissena Park Corridor, there’s a cluster of small streets unnoticed except by their residents and the people [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Out of Town Tagged with: Flushing Queens
“There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run,” once sang Canadian Gordon Lightfoot, and as hard to believe as it is now, NYC and New Jersey never had a rail connection crossing the mighty Hudson until 1910, when Pennsylvania Station opened. Much of the grand architecture associated with the connection has [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: New Jersey
I arrived in Roslyn on a March day in 2007 so clear and bright it crackled. It was, in fact, Easter Sunday. Visiting the North Shore, Long Island town of about 2600 on a day like this made me bewildered why I hadn’t more often; it’s full of history, ancient buildings and landmarks, and a gaggle [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: Roslyn
There are many American Streets in Philadelphia. Or, strictly speaking, there’s one American Street in about twenty different pieces… William Penn‘s and Thomas Holme‘s original Philadelphia grid pattern, developed in the 1680s, has proven to be a major influence on city plans across the United States; Manhattan’s grid pattern owes a debt to it, and Queens adopted [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: Philadelphia Pennsylvania
It all began with a strange (to me) map notation on a Geographia Hudson County atlas, specifically, in Jersey City at Wayne and Monmouth Streets just west of downtown. “Dixon Crucible” it read, and I was drawn there just to see what this was all about. A crucible is a vessel made of a refractory substance such [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: Jersey City New Jersey
Holy Hoya! I was walking through gorgeous Georgetown, DC in December 2007 when I stumbled on an extant streatch of trolley tracks, complete with bricked pavement, on O Street…and again, a block north on P Street. A revelation to your webmaster…in New York City, most traces of our trolley legacy are routinely covered by asphalt or [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: Washington DC
Foggy Bottom, located west of the White House between E and K Streets on the north and south and the Potomac River on the west, is best known for being the home of the US Department of State, the World Bank, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and most prominently George Washington University, which owns much of the local [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: Washington DC
A February 2008 walk in Jersey City’s north side provided terrific Manhattan views, a look at a cobblestone carriageway and a view of one of New Jersey’s oldest houses… It’s much, much easier for the car-free (and loving it, as Don Adams used to say) to get to the north side of Jersey City (The Heights) from [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: Jersey City New Jersey
My first visit to Bayonne, NJ came in January 2006. I noticed a lot of interesting signage from previous eras… Bayonne, NJ is located on a small peninsula situated between Newark Bay on the west and Upper New York Bay on the east. To its south is the Kill Van Kull and beyond it, Staten Island, to [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: Bayonne NJ
In the years following the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam on the southern end of Manhattan Island in the mid-1620s, the settlers had interest in the lands surrounding it in Long Island, Staten Island and present-day New Jersey. By the 1650s, by then under the rule of Director General Peter Stuyvesant, the Netherlands had acquired from [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: Jersey City New Jersey
Your webmaster knows full well he will be ridiculed, pilloried and threatened with everything from lawsuits to bodily harm for including Hoboken on a Forgotten NY site. New Jersey, the Sixth Borough, has a large and mostly unspoken Forgotten history, and for the most part, we’ll leave it to the two Marks of Weird NJ to cover the [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Street Scenes Tagged with: Hoboken New Jersey
