Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
Though there are examples of previous stoplight stylings, such as the short Olive posts with their Ruleta signals (a few of those can still be found in Central Park, and when I began FNY there were a few samples still hanging around local streets) … … variances from the thick-shafted, guy wire masted heavy-duty [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Manhattan
Shown in the title card is the intersection of Ocean and Parkside Avenues, where one of four subway stations facing Prospect Park can be found. This one serves the Q local, which currently runs, when it is running a complete route, from Ditmars Boulevard in Astoria to Coney Island, where it shares a terminal with [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Lefferts Gardens
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Roads Tagged with: Brooklyn Dyker Heights
I first encountered a very odd Bishops Crook post in 1998, during the first flush of ForgottenMania, at the NW corner of Hudson and Duane Streets, opposite Duane Park. From the base to the top of the shaft it resembled most other regulation Bishop Crook posts, with the ornamented candy cane or bishop’s staff curving [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Tribeca
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Bronx Parkchester
I have been thinking about doing this page for some time, almost from the beginnings of FNY 15 years ago. I would come across a street in an out-of-character scene, in a neighborhood or a state in which it is completely unfamiliar. These type of scenarios are relatively rare in NYC and are sprawled out [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Broklyn Bronx Manhattan Queens Staten Island
There seems to be some strange stuff, lamppost and luminaire-wise, increasingly happening in Sunnyside, Queens. While NYC’s streets until mid-2009 were a glorious mish mosh of lighting styles, from the green-white mercury bulbs of the 1960s GE M400 and Westinghouse OV25 “Silverliners”on up to the brilliant yellow sodium lamps first seen in the 1970s and [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Queens Sunnyside
The Type 24 Bishop Crook lamppost is the most common of the remaining older NYC bishop crook posts, and it’s the model on which the many thousands of repro crooks that have been populating NYC streets were based on. It’s notable, though, that the form used to have nearly a dozen different variations, only a [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: City Hall Manhattan
After a bracing walk in the “new” Coney Island boardwalk area in March 2013, my fears that the Brooklyn Riviera would be starbucked, mcdonaldsed and condo’d into a comatose state were somewhat allayed. Stalwarts like Cha Cha’s and Shoot The Freak were gone but longtime mainstays like Ruby’s Bar, Lola Star and Paul’s Daughter had [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island Gravesend
I was loitering around Lafayette Street in late March 2013, before and after recording a voice track for the New Museum New York 1993 Pay Phone installations, when it occurred that Lafayette Street between East 4th and Astor has a whole lot of nice-looking buildings. Indeed, many are landmarked, most dating to the 1880-1900 period, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Noho
Following a tip about ‘ugly, futurisic’ lampposts appearing on the 9th Avenue and West 14th Street area, I found instead on West 15th a small clutch of the new davit-style lampposts of which the Department of Transportation is becoming increasingly proud. By definition, a davit-style post is one in which the shaft curves out to [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Chelsea Manhattan
Hagstrom Maps used to produce an incredibly detailed map of lower Manhattan, which showed all major buildings and adresses, subway lines and their entrances and exits, and even subtle curvatures and widenings and narrowings of streets. Manhattan, of course, was a different world in the early 20th Century when this map was produced, and [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices
Since we recently lost another of 5th Avenue’s classic 1910s-era Twin lampposts, at 32nd Street, there re just 4 left from a proud history of hundreds. Classic Twin: 5th and 19th Demise of a classic at 5th and 23rd “Five for Lighting” Donald Deskey posts of 5th Avenue However, soon we may be pronouncing the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: 5th Avenue Midtown
While meandering aimlessly in upper Manhattan in February 2013 I came upon a single intersection, Broadway and Isham Street, where there are several leftover relicts from several different ages that still survive. Before getting into those, I’d like to dispute the pronunciation of the name Isham, which, I’m told, is EYE-sham. This is plainly ridiculous. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Inwood Manhattan
I regret to mention that one of 5th Avenue‘s last original Twin lampposts, on the SW corner of 5th and West 32nd Street, has been removed and replaced with a temporary stoplight. Between 1892 and 1965, 5th Avenue was lit by dozens of Twinlamps of two separate species, one designed in the 1890s and another [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Midtown
When the Rouse Company remade the South Street Seaport area between 1981-1983, rehabilitating buildings, adding new buildings, and opening the tourist-friendly Pier 17 (where I still get tuna and pasta for lunch every so often) it attempted to add authenticity to the streets of the Seaport by adding a number of lampposts, unique to NYC, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Mnahattan Seaport
It’s no secret that both Brooklyn’s and Queens’ street numbering and naming systems are a bit of a mess, confusing out- of-towners and residents alike. Brooklyn has several sets of numbered streets: numbers with no prefixes, and North, South, East, West, Bay, Beach, Plumb, Flatlands, and Paerdegat numbered streets, and I’ve likely missed a few. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Flatbush. Brooklyn
As part of its centennial celebrations in early 2013, Grand Central Terminal, at East 42nd Street between Vanderbilt and Lexington Avenues, has restored a 1919 lamppost that was taken out of service in 1985… The Park Avenue Viaduct, seen here at its southern end at East 40th Street during the August 2010 Summer Streets [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Grand Central Manhattan
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bedford Park Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights Eltingville Glendale Queens St. Albans Staten Island
The name “William Trist Bailey” will probably engender not a whiff of recognition by all except true Queens historians these days, but you have him to thank for the far-off (by NYC standards) town of Bayswater, located northwest of downtown Far Rockaway. Bayswater was laid out around 1878 by Bailey, who built homes and a [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bayswater Queens Rockaways
While meandering through eastern Bushwick, dazed by the unbearable 80-degree heat in the late summer of 2011, I was pleased to find something I hadn’t previously known about: the almost-garishly turned out Engine 252 on Central Avenue at Covert Street, which is also covered in red paint, something also guaranteed to attract. When Bushwick was [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Bushwick firehouses
January 30, 2013 is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 131st birthday, and what better way to celebrate in a FNY manner than to finally nail down the source, or the southern end, of where the Drive begins — at least as far as the Department of Transportation determines it. For me, that’s always been a gray [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Lower East Side Manhattan
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Chinatown Manhattan
Tucked away at the west end of Grand Street where it meets the East River and punctuated by a tall smokestack you’ll find a small oasis that indirectly remembers the founder of Williamsburg, once a city on its own before being absorbed by Brooklyn in 1855. Williamsburg grew out of a ferry service instituted in [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Parks Williamsburg
One of Brooklyn’s abiding mysteries (probably for me and no one else) is the presence of Highlawn Avenue, which runs in the northern edge of Gravesend, from Stillwell Avenue east to West 3rd Street. It stands in the place of Avenue R, which begins at Kings Highway and East 5th Street and runs east and [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Gravesend
Forgotten New York has many parents. I have said before that the kernel may have been planted in 1962, when the Department of Traffic tore down all the castiron lampposts along 6th Avenue in Bay Ridge, replacing them with Donald Deskeys, and the entire stretch of row houses across the street were torn down so [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Fresh Meadows Queens
I’ve made a big deal over the years about how I miss the color-coded street signs, by borough, that marked NYC streets between 1964 and 1985, which were thence supplanted by the green-and-white numbers since then. I’ve come to realize, though, that there were another set of directional signs right under my nose, as it [...]
Back in 2006, I lamented the impending loss of the Tunnel Garage, Manhattan’s first parking garage, at Thompson and Broome Streets, thusly: The Tunnel Garage was constructed in 1922 by architect Hector Hamilton. The Holland Tunnel’s construction was already well underway by the time it opened, and the garage’s builders were anticipating brisk business when the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Tribeca
One of the more unusual quirks in the NYC subway network had been alleviated by late 2012. After the IND Sixth Avenue Line was constructed in the 1930s, a free transfer was provided in 1957 between the new line and the downtown IRT Lexington Avenue Line, the #6 train, at Bleecker Street. And so it [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Manhattan Noho
Continuing a recent concentration on Hunters Point that I have been indulging, in the spring of 2011 I was idling in the southern end of the neighborhood near Newtown Creek and wandered down the southern bit of Vernon Boulevard, a major road that runs along the western Queens coast from Astoria south to HP. When [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
Accompanied by train buffs Mitch Waxman, David Silver, Emily Sharp and Mai Armstrong, In December 2012 I once again rode the MTA ‘holiday special’ in which the older cars from the Transit Museum are put together in one trainset and run between 2nd Avenue and Queens Plaza on the 6th Avenue Line. Notice I said [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains
I went to high school in Clinton Hill in the Super Seventies, but rarely ventured around the neighborhood — it was tougher than tough then. Today, 40 years later, it’s the toniest of tony enclaves, with the brownstones, Queen Annes, clapboard houses and everything else that were drug dens and hooker havens converted by gentrification [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Clinton Hill
The H train has made a return to the Rockaway peninsula, though hardly a triumphant one. In October 2012, when “Superstorm” Sandy effectively trashed the bridge that connects the A train to the Rockaway peninsula, service on the A line into the peninsula was curtailed south of Howard Beach, and the peninsula’s thousands of residents [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Arverne Far Rockaway Hammels Queens
I remember 1973 somewhat, but not well. I was fifteen and still in high school. Most of my life revolved around schoolwork and following the Knicks, who had just won their last championship to date, and the Mets, who went to their second World Series and dropped a 7-game tilt to Oakland. I was just [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Manhattan Noho
Despite the protests of congregants, preservationists and neighbors, the Bay Ridge United Methodist Church, popularly known as the Green Church, was razed in 2008. From my Ovington Avenue page: The “Green Church” was built in 1899 by George Kramer. It is one of the last relics, along with the Episcopal Christ Church at Ridge Boulevard and 73rd Street, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
There had indeed been a Lexington Avenue Line in Brooklyn — an el that shrouded the entire length of the Bedford-Stuyvesant avenue that runs from Grand Avenue east to Broadway. Seen on this 1920s map, the Lexington el split from the Myrtle Avenue El at Grand Avenue and then ran south and east, over Grand [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn
The beetling, discomfiting and windowless AT&T Long Lines Building looms over tiny Trimble Place looking north. The building is a telephone exchange or wire center building which contains three major 4ESS switches used for interexchange (long distance) telephony, two owned by AT&Tand one owned by Verizon. The building is said to have the largest blank wall in America, and is also thought to be able [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Tribeca
11/7/12: I am slowly getting back into posting after Hurricane Sandy (and today’s freak snowstorm)… Today, I’ll take a look at NYC’s rarest castiron post revival. The city has brought back many classic forms over the past 30 years, from the longarmed “Corvingtons”, Bishop Crooks, Type Fs and Twins, and even new versions of the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps
While passing through the Financial District seeking out locations to feature on Forgotten NY the past 15 years, I had always noticed a green and white street sign saying “Temple Street” attached to a lamppost on Liberty Street between Broadway and Trinity Place/Church Street. I duly listed it on my downtown Manhattan alleys entry as [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Financial District Manhattan
I thought I’d expand the occasional FNY feature into a ForgottenSlice, with the aid of FNY Correspondent Gary Fonville, who shot and researched these scenes. 1. I witnessed a giant step in transportation in NYC. I’ve been watching it since October, 1904. Where am I? 2. I reside uptown, near a former circus boss. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Greenwich Village
BY GARY FONVILLE Forgotten NY correspondent I used to live near this location where Coney Island Avenue meets Parkside Avenue in Kensington, Brooklyn at Park Circle. Even though I used that circle for 35 years or so, I never saw these former trolley tracks. Even ‘your webmaster’ didn’t see them when when he did [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Trolleys Tagged with: Brooklyn
The “High Line,” more properly the West Side Improvement, consisted of the construction, in the early 1930s, of two elevated structures: the Miller, or West Side Highway and the West Side Freight Railroad serving businesses, wholesalers and manufacturers near the Hudson River waterfront. The Miller was closed in 1973 after a truck fell through a [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Chelsea Manhattan
The Far West Side (did I just name a neighborhood?) from 10th Avenue west to 12th Avenue and from the high 20s north to West 34th will be the locus of new development in the upcoming decade, as the long-planned Hudson Yards development begins to take shape on trainyards used by a variety of lines [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Penn Station
[UPDATE: The 'Tiles for America' project has been removed from Mulry Square, as the MTA wants to build a ventilation project on the site. It's unknown at present what will happen to the tiles, which are in storage as of September 2012... Tiles for America Preservation Project] Mulry Square, at 7th and Greenwich Avenues in [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Greenwich Village Mulry Square
I have always been a big fan of inter-building bridges, by which I mean bridges that connect two buildings without accessing the ground, even though I have not had the privilege of actually traversing any except one: it was a pedestrian bridge that connected the World Trade Center with the World Financial Center over West [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Penn Station
I was circumnavigating Gramercy Park (a small parcel of a private park between East 20th and 21st Streets and 3rd Avenue and Park Avenue South), preparing for a possible tour or new ForgottenBook Again entry. Mere commoners are not permitted into Gramercy Park. You must be a keyholder at any of the buildings surrounding the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Gramercy Park Manhattan
The I’s have it in northern Manhattan, where seemingly everywhere you go, something begins with an I. There’s Inwood, the neighborhood; Inwood Hill Park; Isham Park; and Indian Road, which runs two blocks (actually a very short block and a much longer block) from West 214th to W. 218th Streets one block west of Seaman [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Inwood Manhattan
A mystery about Bay Ridge, Brooklyn was cleared up for me today, and I had Woody Allen, however indirectly, to thank for it. Sometimes it takes unusual convergences to come together to make up a Forgotten NY page. Today, two separate websites, my childhood nerdiness, and the 1977 Academy Award® winning picture came together to [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn Woody Allen
162nd Street runs north-south in Queens, a bit here, a bit there, from the Whitestone enclave called Beechhurst south to Jamaica (oddly it never gets south of there, even though there’s plenty of real estate south of Jamaica). Between Northern Boulevard and 46th Avenue in the eastern reaches of Flushing, it’s a two-way main drag, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Flushing Queens
Besides pawing with ever-increasing futility amongst the dregs of the online listings and interviewing with firms located for me by an agency, with briefly elevated and later inevitably dashed hopes, I have been continuing to write new pages of this site while updating the old, as well as lurching around various neighborhoods, attempting to remain [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Queens Sunnyside
Manhattan’s grid, first imposed in 1811, is remarkably rigid between 14th Street and 59th, with very few interruptions from the system of north-south avenues and east-west streets. This is a situation unlike that of most Northeast cities, and indeed, many cities west of the Mississippi, when built on flat plains, also emulate the strict checkerboard [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Kips Bay Manhattan
Spring Street, which runs in Soho from the Bowery west to West and Canal Streets, is named for an actual spring that has been contained in the sewer system for the past couple of centuries. Like the rest of NYC, some interesting signs and buildings can be found along its length. A peculiar attribute [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Manhattan Soho
Though College Point, in northern Queens east of LaGuardia Airport and bordering the East and Flushing Rivers, is served by four bus lines, it’s considered one of Queens’ out-of-the-way outposts, since it’s severed from the rest of the borough by the old Flushing Airport site and the Whitestone Expressway. Only three main roads lead there: [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: College Point Queens
Metropolitan Avenue is one of the lengthiest routes between Brooklyn and Queens. It was first built in 1816 as a toll road and was known as the Williamsburg and Jamaica Turnpike until the mid-1800s, when it was bestowed its current name. It runs from the East River to Jamaica Avenue and along the way, marks [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
One of my new favorite spots while hiking the twisting and turning length of Richmond Terrace on Staten Island’s north shore — home to a brand new pedestrian walk facing Upper New York Bay and a long-abandoned railroad, as well as the remains of gypsum plants and plumbing supply firms — is the hole-in-the-wall Leidy’s [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: New Brighton Staten Island
Word comes from NYC’s King of Lampposts, Bob Mulero, that the perhaps centuries-old set of Special Iron Twin Standards on the Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard ramp to the Harlem River Driveway just south of the Macomb’s Dam Bridge have been altered and replaced. As first described in Forgotten NY in 2001, “they sort of represent [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Harlem Manhattan
I’ve been asked to cover locales selected by Partners in Preservation, an organization sponsored by American Express that, in a partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, awards preservation grants to historic locales across the country. After six years in existence, Partners in Preservation has selected New York as its focus in 2012. Through the partnership, American [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bronx Norwood Woodlawn
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: City Hall Manhattan
It’s a fair guess that not one person who passes this building, seemingly untenanted as of 2012, knows it is a former theater. In fact it has greatly outlived its former life as a theater. The Mardi Gras Theatre was built around 1908, apparently just before this photo was taken, on Nostrand Avenue, corner [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn East Flatbush theaters
In 2003 I did a series of photographs for a page on the BMT Chambers Street station, the original southern terminal of what is today the J train that runs from Broad Street to Jamaica via the Williamsburg Bridge. However, what had been an important terminal experienced a change in fortunes when tracks were extended [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains
Back in 1999, the Dawn of Forgotten New York, I did a page on Stuyvesant Street, one of the very few routes that flouts New York City’s strict street grid (which celebrated its bicentennial in 2011). I explained its former role as the driveway to the Stuyvesant estate, and why and how it survived. A [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: East Village Manhattan
If you’re unfamilar with the INDependent subway, IND stations are instantly recognizable in contrast to BMT and IRT stations, which were built earlier. In fact, I’m beginning to hear from people who no longer know the old subway divisions, which is understandable since the subways have, since 1940, been consolidated in the same system — which [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights
6th Avenue between West 17th and 23rd Streets is known as the Ladies’ Mile, after the gigantic emporiums such as the Siegel-Cooper Building (now home to Bed, Bath and Beyond) and the original B. Altman Building that can be found on both sides of the street, attracting shoppers from all over the metropolitan area, that [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: 6th Avenue Ladies' Mile
One of my favorite developments in the ongoing renovations in NYC subway stations is the stained glass artwork that has been installed on elevated station windscreens. I consider the #7 Flushing Line branch my local line (along with the 7th Avenue Line trains, #1,2,3) and 8th Avenue Line trains (A, C, E) I board at [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Queens Sunnyside
By the first decade of the 19th Century, New York City was beginning to outgrow the small area at the tip of Manhattan Island that had defined the city limits ever since a permanent European settlement was established in 1625, give or take a year. The rest of the island was divided up among landed [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan
Southern Brooklyn stations in Midwood and Sheepshead Bay on the BMT Brighton line have all been rehabilitated with new windscreens and lighting, as well as a spruce-up of fare control areas — a lengthy process that took the better part of 3 years. I was passing through Sheepshead Bay and caught a train back home [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
Word came to my unbelieving ears that some younger viewers of the Grammy Awards ceremony in February 2012 were stumped when the sprightly figure of Paul McCartney appeared on their television screens. Never before had they been forced to deal with anyone quite this old, and never having heard of the Beatles or pop rock [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Manhattan Penn Station
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Manhattan Times Square
I was dazedly shambling about in Bensonhurst in August, mad with the unbearable 82-degree heat, and in a momentary spark of lucidity, I noticed a tailor shop across from the 79th Street el station at New Utrecht and 17th Avenues – more specifically, its one-handed clock, of which more later. It wasn’t till months later [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bensonhurst Brooklyn
The Swingin’ 60s were a fun time to grow up in Brooklyn, especially for kids like me, with a perplexing penchant for noticing changes in lampposts as well as subway signage. One day in 1962, the whole neighborhood’s 1920s-era Corvingtons had been hauled away and slot-shafted, curved neck Donald Deskey posts appeared. Likewise, in 1969 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains
At present, the Bronx’ Kingsbridge Road runs from Marble Hill at the Bronx-Manhattan line (it’s called West 225th Street in Marble Hill) east and southeast to Fordham Road, following a meandering path defined at first by an animal trace, then a beaten path used by Native Americans through the woods, then a colonial-era road used [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices
Cul de sacs and alleyways have always held a fascination for me. However they are rather scarce in New York City, which has a grid system of streets not only in Manhattan, but in many locales in the other boroughs; service alleys behind buildings are rare as well, which means trash and refuse has to [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn Crown Heights
I find myself shambling through indifferent crowds in Manhattan more often these days, as I have taken a job (as of December 2011) smack in the heart of the Flatiron District, formerly a down-at-heel stretch containing anonymous offices on 5th Avenue, and a stretch of mostly abandoned, monumental stores on 6th. When I first encountered [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Flatiron Manhattan
In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Flatbush and East Flatbush, you will find a succession of avenues that run north to south that are named for major cities in New York State. Graciously, city planners acceded to put New York Avenue first, as you travel from west to east. It’s followed by Brooklyn, Kingston, Albany, Troy, Schenectady, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Crown Heights jazz
I had just gotten off the train at Jay/Metrotech and was stumbling toward the starting point of my Downtown to Crown Heights epic when I spotted a chalkboard on the side of the triangle building at Fulton, Adams and Willoughby and gave it the once over. It’s filled with the words Before I Die I [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Downtown
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn East New York
The title card shows Trimble Road, a one-block street running from 62nd to 63rd Streets along the Long Island Rail Road main line north of Woodside Avenue. Trimble Road has a counterpart, Hicks Drive, a one block street running south of the LIRR tracks between 63rd and 64th Streets. The large building used to be [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Queens Woodside
There it stands at the north end of Cadman Plaza in downtown Brooklyn near the Brooklyn Bridge entrance, a litle-visited memorial to a little-known NYC Mayor. William Jay Gaynor (1851-1913) was from upstate Oroskany, NY, served as the 92nd NYC Mayor after a stint on the NY State Supreme Court from 1910 to 1913, dying [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Cadman Plaza Downtown Brooklyn
As you are going north on the Harlem River between the Bronx and Manhattan, the University Heights Bridge is the tenth in a series of eleven that includes the Willis Avenue Bridge, 3rd Avenue Bridge, Metro-North railroad bridge, Madison Avenue Bridge, 145th Street Bridge, Macombs Dam Bridge, High Bridge, Alexander Hamilton Bridge, Washington Bridge, University [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bronx Inwood Manhattan University Heights
Since I was hired to work in the Flatiron district in Manhattan in November 2011, I started sniffing around for places to eat lunch before actually beginning work. I will be doing a number of posts from the Flatiron as it has spectacular architecture; although boxy glass towers have now begun to dot the landscape, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Flatiron Manhattan
Astoria Village is a small area tucked into Queens’ northwest edge, south of Astoria Park and Hell Gate, east of Roosevelt Island. The area was first settled in the 1600s by Brit William Hallett (an East River inlet was named Hallett’s Cove) and still boasts a quirky, interlocking street layout. It was named (as was [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Astoria Queens street art
Beach Street ranks among the Forgotten men among its neighbors in Tribeca. Two blocks between West and Greenwich were hacked off in favor of the Independence Plaza apartment house development in the early 1970s (depriving present-day New Yorkers, perhaps, of a monument commemorating the landing of the very first steam locomotive in America, the Stourbridge Lion, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Manhattan Tribeca
While careening through Canarsie this past week, searching for lost alleys, I checked Nolan’s Lane, which I hadn’t visited since 1999. For most, unless you live there, there’s no reason to visit. As you will see, though, this is one of my favorite obscure Canarsie lanes. There was a kid at grade school with me [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Canarsie
According to maps through most of the 20th Century, Smiths Lane is a narrow alley running from Rockaway Parkway southwest to East 92nd Street just south of Farragut Road in Canarsie. By 2011, though, the alley has been pretty much reduced to one block and a tiny cul de sac. This Google satellite view shows [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices
My interest in subway mosaics has been re-fired again, as it is every few years. I have a new admiration for the intricate mosaics that were assembled on station walls and signage in the subways between about 1914 and 1928 (after the initial Beaux Arts terra cotta and mosaics done in original IRT stations from [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
On Sunday, October 16, 2011 I agreed to meet up with a Open House New York-sponsored Newtown Creek walk led by the Newtown Pentacle‘s Mitch Waxman. Bloggers like Mitch fill in the cracks left over from more mundane and humdrum NYC chroniclers, who steer crowds toward the King of All Buildings and Lady Liberty, which [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
It looks like the first lamppost produced by industrial design firm Thomas Phifer and Partners, the winner of the City Lights contest administered by the Museum of the City of New York to replace the familiar octagonal pole with cobra head or straight mast lamppost has been installed on Church Street near Warren, south of [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Tribeca
1/9/13: ***HINSCH’s DOOMED AGAIN, as its new owners couldn’t make a profit.*** 10/17/11: ***HINSCH’S SAVED, as the owners of Skinflint’s on 5th will operate it.**** I’ll admit it, I had been in Hinsch’s (pronounced HINSH’S, as if the C wasn’t there), the long-lived candy store and luncheonette, on 5th Avenue between 85th and 86th Streets [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge diners
Above: Triborough Bridge at dusk, seen from the platform of the Astoria Blvd. station on the N/Q elevated Astoria Line. The station, since the mid-1930s, has been positioned over the Grand Central Parkway, which connects the Triborough to eastern Long Island. At its northern end, the station affords a view of the massive concrete viaduct [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Astoria Columbus
9/4/11. I do eat seafood. Thing is, though, I anti-seafood-ize it as much as possible. The more it’s sheathed in bread crumbs, butter, lemon, tartar sauce the better, to remove as much as the fish-iness as possible. I’m a big fish and chips guy. Needless to say, I’ve never quite grasped the appeal of sushi. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Coney Island restaurants
I was making my way through the merciless blazing sun in East Willliamsburg the other Sunday, on my way to a radio appearance on the Mike and Judy Show [archived here] heading east on Moore Street, which runs from Broadway and Lorimer east to Bushwick and then, from a bit further south on Bushwick east to Bogart, in [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn East Williamsburg
There’s probably an interesting story behind the naming of Delmonico Place in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, just below its undefended border with Williamsburg. It’s a one-block street on an odd slant between Ellery Street and Park Avenue, east of Tompkins. Unfortunately, I don’t know what that story is, but it would be notable if the street had anything [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Delmonico
In July 2011 I crawled through the postmodern wasteland of modern Flushing, a land increasingly scattered with empty lots testimony to the golden dreams of the go-go 2000s and a mayoral initiative of 9 million New Yorkers by 2011, and signs peppered with broken English that you are not sure were written by recent high school/college [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Flushing Queens
A fascinating exhibit has turned up on the plywood boards surrounding a construction site on Church Street downtown, between Barclay Street and Park Place. It is the second in a series called Walking Men 99™ created by Israeli artist Maya Barkai and curated by the Alliance for Downtown New York. Many pedestrian traffic signals throughout the globe have switched over [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs
I am quite familiar with the Fulton Mall: in fact I have walked Fulton Street in its entirety from the East River waterfront to East New York. While NYC Department of Transportation traffic-calmer Janette Sadik-Khan was still a teenager in 1979, Fulton Street between Adams Street and Flatbush Avenue banned cars, only allowing buses and delivery [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Fulton Street
Wooster Street runs from Canal Street north to West Houston, just east of West Broadway. Its northern reaches from W. Houston to Washington Square were aken over by New York University in the 1960s, which built residential housing towers, but the old path of the street can be easily discerned. It was named for Revolutionary-era General David [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Soho Wooster Street
Crazed from the heat, I recently stumbled on board a Long Island Rail Road train, staggered out in Penn Station, unconsciously swiped myself into a downtown subway, and staggered out on West 14th, where, on Lower Sixth Avenue between West 8th and West 14th can be found living and dead ghosts of emporiums, businesses, and prisons [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: 6th Avenue Greenwich Village
As a rule, I usually harbor some affection for the places I have worked, even if all of them ultimately wound up having little affection for me. There was the sepulchral passport photo office where I swept up and developed pictures, or the type shop where I worked nights for 8 years (I still love type), [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Chelsea
NoHo, one of Manhattan’s smallest enclaves, is located east of Mercer Street north of Houston (giving it its name), west of the Bowery, and south of 4th Street, comprising only a few square blocks. Nevertheless, there are two separate landmarked districts found there. The name NoHo is an example of the trend of naming neighborhoods by [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bond Street Noho
I had a meeting the other day in Astoria and thought I would walk Crescent Street down to Queens Plaza — unfortunately I couldn’t beat rush hour and let about 4 #7 trains go by till I found one with sufficient breathing space. Crescent Street has always been a puzzler for me, at least, since I’m [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Crescent Street Long Island City
Caoimhghin, since Anglicized to Kevin (the name means “handsome by birth”) was an Irish monk who lived, according to tradition, for 120 years, from 498-618, in what is now County Wicklow. According to legend, he was educated by St. Petroc and established a monastery in Glendalow, helping Christianity gain a foothold in the Emerald Island. It eventually [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Auburndale churches
Given my er, ah, advanced age, I have ridden in virtually every bus make that has plied the streets of NYC for the Transit Authority and later, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, since 1960 or so, from the sinuous GM and boxy Macks from the 1950s, the fishbowl GMs of the 1960s and 1970s; the flimsy Flxibles [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: buses
With more free time during the week (after a 3/23/11 layoff) but still pretty much shackled to Queens because of usurious transit fares (I do not drive, but the usurious gas prices would further shackle) I have found myself stalking the roads of Queens even more than before, now that the weather has marginally improved. The [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: 42nd Avenue Bayside
May 2011: Having been forced out of my job by mechanization and the fanatical desire of business to maximize profits (the cry of business is that “we are not running a charity here” and my answer is, why don’t you?) I had gravitated, as I often do, toward the fetid and miserable waterways of western Queens, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: diners Maspeth restaurants
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Flatbush Tennis
Unlike other boroughs, trends or leanings cannot be ascribed to Queens’ numbered streets. Unlike, say, Manhattan’s 57th Street, which is a self-contained unit on which you will find icons such as Carnegie Hall, the Art Students League Building, Rodin Studios, and for many years the Russian Tea Room, 57th Street in Queens, like its brother numbered streets, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Maspeth Railroads
I was heading to a birthday thing the other Saturday and found myself along Kings Highway, Brooklyn’s Mother Road, a colonial-era route built partially atop a Native American trail that once stretched from the ferry landing at today’s Old Fulton Street, running southeast then southwest to where Fort Hamilton is today. The name “Kings Highway” became appended [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: East Flatbush Marine Park Wyckoff
Hallelujah, I’m a bum. In March 2011 my former company had a ‘reorganization’ in which the dead wood is carted out and burned. No matter how much they spin it for you, this is their way of saying that you are unnecessary to the operation and no longer desired. I favor a much more drawn-out process [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Cobble Hill Warren Street
Allow me a litle FNY esoterica. (You can argue the whole website is esoterica but I would disagree with you). Over the past few years, the NYC Department of Transportation and the FDNY have been removing fire call boxes (or decommissioning them) in an era of mobile wireless call devices. There has also been a misguided, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Fire Alarms
Miss Heather, via facebook: So let’s see: my inbox is hoppin’ (this includes a missive from a college student. It is among the most grammatically nightmarish/typo-ridden tomes I have received in a long time.) It’s now apparently accepted that spelling isn’t all that big a deal and with texting abbreviations and the lack of spelling drills in [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Hollis Hills Ponds Queens
Though most of western Queens can be considered Long Island City (it was once an independent entity) there are subdivisions such as Ravenswood, which faces across the East River across Roosevelt Island to the Upper East Side; Queensbridge, just north and south of the Queensboro Bridge; Hunters Point, the small bit surrounding the mouth of the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Dutch Kills
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: IND lampposts subway
Though NYC divested itself of most of its colonial-era “royal” names after defeating the British in the Revolutionary War, there are a few that doggedly hang on, sich as Prince Street in Soho, Kings Highway in Brooklyn, and Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan, which was named for British fort commemorating Sir William Tryon (1729-1788) [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Fort Tryon
I have just one photo today. It’s the last dodo, passenger pigeon, aepyornis, mammoth, tyrannosaur, brachiothere, trilobite, and someday, the last human. It’s the last of its type. Once, thousands of these wooden posts lined the parkways of New York and Long Island, built when they were literally parkways, running through wooded enclaves with tiny [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Woody lampposts
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Ozone Park
What you see in Forgotten NY’s Lampposts category is the merest scratch on a vast surface, a minuscule sampler of the manifold varieties of lampposts that have been used on NYC streets from the early gaslights to the new Matrix-era curved overlords of Fulton Street in Brooklyn (mark my words, they will someday gain sentience [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Scenes Tagged with: 5th Avenue Brooklyn
In early 2010 I emerged into sudden lucidity to find myself puttering about Hunters Point, the lip of Queens just north of Greenpoint and the Newtown Creek. Hunters Point had once been a Queens hotspot, since until 1910 it was the western end of the Long Island Rail Road (ferries carried commuters across the mighty [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: gantries Hunters Point Long Island City
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Staten Island
I’m kidding, naturally — Avenue Z is no sleepier than any of its brother lettered avenues in south Brooklyn. It runs mostly through the neighborhoods of Homecrest and Sheepshead Bay, with a very small piece running a few blocks east of the Belt Parkway in south Bath Beach. The bulk of Avenue Z runs from [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Avenue Z Sheepshead Bay
I posted a page of Little Neck in winter last year [2010], and since arctic conditions temporarily took control lof the area in mid-January 2011, I thought it would be a good idea to do it once again, especially since I didn’t have to stray extremely far from Forgotten New York Headquarters to do so. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods
I was lurching and swaying up 6th Avenue on a January Sunday, bending an increasingly decrepit and deteriorating frame against the ceaseless and unending winter winds, on the way to the Home Depot to buy lightbulbs. In the subways, the city’s youth was going pants-free, but your webmaster, who prefers the fall and winter because I can [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: 6th Avenue
After contemplating the presence of Koster and Bial’s “The Corner” building on 6th and 24th Streets miraculously still standing after 123 years despite the utter transformation of the rest of 6th Avenue (as of 2011; for me, the years now seem like science fiction; we aren’t on Mars, as some have marveled about, but we [...]
Categorized in: Ads Forgotten Slices Tagged with: 6th Avenue
Union Square was named (actually as Union Place) in 1815 at the near-junction of the Bloomingdale Road, or Post Road to Albany, and the northern part of the Bowery Road, the Post Road to Boston. In the original Commissioners’ Plan drawn up 1807-1811 by surveyor John Randel, Broadway was originally going to run “north” above Tenth [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Union Square
Union Square was named (actually as Union Place) in 1815 at the near-junction of the Bloomingdale Road, or Post Road to Albany, and the northern part of the Bowery Road, the Post Road to Boston. In the original Commissioners’ Plan drawn up 1807-1811 by surveyor John Randel, Broadway was originally going to run “north” above Tenth [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Manhattan Union Square
December 5, 2003 wasn’t exactly a great day in Forgottenville – it was a Saturday, I was working at Macy’s, as all of us at Macy’s had to do on Saturdays during the holiday season, and I was screamed at by the boss, an almost comically ill-tempered woman, over a ridiculous matter. It was, however, snowing [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Christmas Greenwich Village
Stanton Street follows a parallel path with its partner, Rivington Street, from the Bowery east to Chrystie, Forsyth east to Pitt. There are various pieces of it leftover as walkways in the Gompers and Baruch Houses, constructed in the 1940s. Many streets in this neighborhood are named for associates of colonial-era James de Lancey, who owned most [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Lower East Side Manhattan
Rivington is a street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in general running from the Bowery east to Pitt Street. In 2010 it exists in three separate pieces, a one-block stretch between Bowery and Chrystie, a main section from Forsyth east to Pitt, and a small piece remaining at Columbia. It was originally laid out as one [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Lower East Side
St. Patrick’s “old” Cathedral, 260-264 Mulberry Street between Price and East Houston, is called “old” to differentiate it from its “newer” cousin uptown, St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 5th Avenue and East 50th, designed by James Renwick Jr., opened 1878 and finished in 1888. Old St. Pat’s, NYC’s original Catholic cathedral, is quite a bit older, having started construction [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Little Italy Manhattan
In 1901, Auburndale, east of Flushing, Queens, was empty farmland. Enter the New England Development & Improvement Co., which bought the 90-acre Thomas Willets farm, and lo and behold, Auburndale the community was born. The name comes from Auburndale, Massachusetts, the home of L. H. Green, who developed the community starting in 1901, when the Long Island [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Auburndale Queens
Quite a bit of Queens real estate bears the name Hollis — the neighborhoods Hollis, Holliswood, Hollis Park Gardens and Hollis Hills, the LIRR Hollis station, Hollis Avenue, Hollis Hills Terrace and Hollis Court Boulevard. The name honors a small town in southern New Hampshire with a current population of just over a thousand. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Hollis Hills Queens
Continuing on West 30th after FNY’s survey between 7th and 8th Avenues, I had previously also chronicled the four corners of West 30th and 8th Avenue, where there’s an ancient wall dog ad for the Hotel Irvin, with rooms starting at $2.50 a night. There’s also the home of NYC Human Resources Administration and Department of Social Services, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Penn Station area
I am quite familiar with the blocks and side streets on the west side of Manhattan in the Penn Station area. I served two separate stints in this part of town, the first from 1988-1991, when I worked in a tiny type shop called ANY Phototype, which specialized in foreign language typesetting, though it did have [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Penn Station area
In the deeply Red East Village (I’m kidding), you can find a triumphant statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the chief architect of the Soviet state that ruled much of eastern Europe from 1918-1990, atop an apartment building on the north side of East Houston Street between Avenues A and B, opposite Norfolk Street. There is also a large clock looming [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: East Village Manhattan
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan West 57th Street
Parts of New York City are very steep and hilly. To allow access to the hillier areas, engineers have occasionally inserted step streets into the grid to allow foot traffic acess to private houses, or just to get from one place to the other. Oftentimes, step streets are not indicated as such on maps, and running into them [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Bay Ridge is the land of my youth. It is also the land of my dentist, and I will be spending three Saturdays, at least, in Bay Ridge as my mouth continues its latest reconstruction. Bay Ridge has a number of lengthy north-south avenues and also has a number of avenues that carry names instead of numbers: [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
I was slowly making my unsteady way up Clintonville Street in Whitestone one searing afternoon in the dead dog heat of the summer of 2010. My brain cells, seared nearly past comprehension, were given signal from my rheumy eyeballs through the overtaxed optic nerve that something new had appeared on the corner of 11th Avenue and [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Queens Whitestone
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
Originally a northern section of Avenue A between East 114th and East 120th Streets –cut off from York Avenue, which was also originally Avenue A, by a bend in the Harlem River — Pleasant Avenue has been anything but, during its checkered history. A day-old newborn was found here in 1884; its throat had been cut. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: East Harlem Manhattan
About ten years ago – at the Dawn of Forgotten New York (ca. 2000) I was aimlessly wandering around Red Hook Brooklyn — long before Fairway, long before IKEA, before the Todd Shipyards were dismantled, when the abandoned Revere Sugar factory still stood and the remains of a lightship where still floating in Erie Basin. A familiar [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Trolleys Tagged with: Brooklyn Red Hook
In the evening of September 16, 2010, a large storm front swept through the general NYC area with high winds and heavy rain and the storm was strong enough to produce two tornadoes, one of which struck mid-Brooklyn, the other mid-Queens including Forest Hills and Flushing, leaving toppled trees in its wake. The storm also left structural [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: churches Flushing Queens
Desperate from some surcease from the baking, broiling madness that was the summer of 2010 in New York, a summer that saw over a month total lof plus-90 degree weather, a summer in which thunderstorms were harder to find than New York Met grand slams, a summer in which your webmaster nearly liquefied: one Sunday I [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
I had just crossed the miasmic, fetid Gowanus Canal one recent flaccid, sweat-inducing Sunday, on an August in one of the hottest, most humid New York summers in an uncountable string of them, having just meandered north on 3rd Avenue from the more wholesome precincts of Bay Ridge, the land of my birth where other children as well as the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Gowanus
The Who, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Costello, Don Budge, Rod Laver, Billie Jean King and Jimmy Connors have all held court at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium at 69th Avenue and Burns Street, Queens. The U.S Open was held here for many decades before it decamped to Louis Armstrong Stadium in 1978 and later to Arthur [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Forest Hills Queens
On the first three Saturdays in August the Department of Transportation shuts down Lafayette Street, 4th Avenue, Park Avenue South, Park Avenue and part of West 72nd Street in theSummer Streets program, designed to give New Yorkers the run of these streets without threat of auto traffic. It’s been a smashing success after its 2009 institution, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Lenox Hill Manhattan
On the first three Saturdays in August the Department of Transportation shuts down Lafayette Street, 4th Avenue, Park Avenue South, Park Avenue and part of West 72nd Street in theSummer Streets program, designed to give New Yorkers the run of these streets without threat of auto traffic. It’s been a smashing success after its 2009 institution, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Grand Central Terminal Manhattan
On the first three Saturdays in August the Department of Transportation shuts down Lafayette Street, 4th Avenue, Park Avenue South, Park Avenue and part of West 72nd Street in theSummer Streets program, designed to give New Yorkers the run of these streets without threat of auto traffic. It’s been a smashing success after its 2009 institution, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Turtle Bay
On the first three Saturdays in August the Department of Transportation shuts down Lafayette Street, 4th Avenue, Park Avenue South, Park Avenue and part of West 72nd Street in theSummer Streets program, designed to give New Yorkers the run of these streets without threat of auto traffic. It’s been a smashing success after its 2009 institution, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Murray Hill Union Square
On the first three Saturdays in August the Department of Transportation shuts down Lafayette Street, 4th Avenue, Park Avenue South, Park Avenue and part of West 72nd Street in theSummer Streets program, designed to give New Yorkers the run of these streets without threat of auto traffic. It’s been a smashing success after its 2009 institution, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Cooper Square Manhattan Union Square
On the first three Saturdays in August the Department of Transportation shuts down Lafayette Street, 4th Avenue, Park Avenue South, Park Avenue and part of West 72nd Street in theSummer Streets program, designed to give New Yorkers the run of these streets without threat of auto traffic. It’s been a smashing success after its 2009 institution, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Noho
On the first three Saturdays in August the Department of Transportation shuts down Lafayette Street, 4th Avenue, Park Avenue South, Park Avenue and part of West 72nd Street in theSummer Streets program, designed to give New Yorkers the run of these streets without threat of auto traffic. It’s been a smashing success after its 2009 institution, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: City Hall Civic Center Manhattan
I was desultorily ambling south on Lexington Avenue on the Monday afternoon of August 2, 2010 after a meeting with the director of the Museum of the City of New York on 5th and 104th (if my aims at the meeting bear fruit, I’ll let you know*, but there’s no reason to even hint at what may transpire, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Upper East Side
I was slowly and furtively making my way on a looping route from Bartel-Pritchard Square (really a traffic roundabout) at the western end of Prospect Park south and southwest to Borough Park, when the shoes started to pinch too much at last (I don’t like the way conventional sneakers look, so I always buy black sneakers [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Subways & Trains Tagged with: Borough Park Brooklyn
The West Side Freight Elevated, colloquially known as the High Line (shouldn’t all elevated trains be High Lines?) has seen its share of coverage in Forgotten New York, from 1999, when the Giuliani administration wanted to tear it down, through the preparation period after Friends of the High Line secured enough money and high-powered support to preserve it, and [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
While skulking through Pelham Bay in the Bronx in July 2010, I once again pondered the origin of the heretofore mysterious B Street, which runs south to a dead end on Baisley Avenue between Hobart and Edison. Well, thanks to the efforts of ForgottenFan Mike Fornebaio the ‘mystery’ has been solved. It turns out this [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bronx Pelham Bay
In the summer of 2009 I was on Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, having just completed another 40 or 50 blocks in my drawn-out survey of Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn (two segments of this have already appeared in FNY) when, en route for the subway, I passed the City Reliquary at Number 370. It had been awhile since [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Staten Island
Many years ago, when Queens was a collection of small towns divided by acres of farms and fields, every town and city had its own street naming and numbering system. This was a fine and dandy situation when Queens (then also comprising what is now Nassau County) was a separate and self-governing county. Once Queens consolidated [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Maspeth Queens
I was foraging on Metropolitan Avenue recently, a couple of hours before a meeting at Dave Herman’s City Reliquary, when I found myself teetering tenuously up Havemeyer Street, which extends for a few blocks between Broadway and Union Avenue. Formerly 7th Street in Williamsburg, the street was renamed for a member of the 19th Century German immigrant [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
Forgotten NY eyes and ears are everywhere. Joe DeMarco: I walked up the Henry Hudson Parkway to Fort Tryon/Dyckman Street and walked up Broadway and across the George Washington Bridge. I came across a neat old “cyclops” light on the Henry Hudson Parkway right by the Cloisters. The light has not worked for many years, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Washington Heights
On a way more brutally hot Saturday than my post-operational stamina had any right to be enduring, I weaved my way pitifully through Pelham Bay in the Bronx, a mendicant seeking what crumbs the neighborhood would toss an amateur seeker of hidden urban secrets. After gingerly crossing a broken glass-strewn, pockmarked, graffiti-smeared expressway overpass, I saw [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Bronx Pelham Bay
Saturday, June 26, 2010 marks the end of service of Little Neck’s sole north-south bus route, the Q79, which covered almost the entire length of Little Neck Parkway, northeast Queens’ easternmost main street, from 40th Avenue south to Jericho Turnpike. The Q79 carried passengers from the Long Island Rail Road Little Neck station to neighborhoods south [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Little Neck Queens
BY SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten New York contributor Hunters Point has been visited before quite a few times by Forgotten-NY, but like a good book, every time you read it, you always find something new in the story. With the redevelopment of Hunters Point South on the fast track to completion, we take one more look to the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
I have often marvelled at Hunter’s Point’s 45th Avenue, which is lined on both sides with fine Italianate brownstone row houses constructed from 1871-1890. 45th Avenue deserves a much more detailed treatment thann it has received in FNY to date — fortunately, the Hunters Point Historic District Landmarks Preservation Commission report, done very early in the LPC’s history [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
After recently stumbling (or was I pushed?) off the J train at Marcy Avenue, the first stop in Brooklyn, I walked up and down the platform, snapping away at what met my gaze. There’s a panoply of Brooklyn architecture from the classic era visible from here, and in perfect weather, who could resist. In the mid-2000s most of [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
The Department of Transportation, in its unceasing effort to expunge all remnants of vintage street signage (taking time off from building more bicycle lanes or pedestrian plazas in heavily trafficked parts of town) has eliminated two more nonstandard street signs on its hit list, both in my neighborhood of Little Neck. The sign on the title [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Little Neck Queens
BY SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten NY contributor The Borough of Queens was once a patchwork collection of villages divided among the major towns of Flushing, Jamaica, Newtown, Far Rockaway, and Long Island City. In 1898, Newtown merged into Greater New York, and was renamed Elmhurst. Its outlying neighborhoods, Winfield and Nassau Heights were absorbed into Elmhurst. In 1915, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Elmhurst Middle Village Queens Rego Park
University Place fills a north-south street slot between Broadway and 5th Avenue from the east side of Washington Square and the west side of Union Square. It could be thought of as a northern extension of Wooster Street (which it originally was), or a Madison Avenue South, but the street has been called University Place since [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Union Square
Soho’s Prince Street runs west from the Bowery to 6th Avenue at Macdougal and Charlton Streets. In the pre-Revolutionary era, there were a number of streets named for the British royalty, such as Queen, Duke, etc, and most eventually were renamed– but not Prince, making this street an interesting pre-Revolutionary relic. (King Street is named for [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Soho
In downtown Brooklyn, there are a pair of streets called Fleet Street and Fleet Place — and even an additional alley on York Street in DUMBO called Fleet’s Alley. I had suspected that they were called Fleet in honor of London, England’s Fleet Street, the former newspaper and press capital there, as well as the street where Sweeney [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Downtown Brooklyn
On the outskirts of Chinatown and Little Italy (the two Manhattan neighborhoods bleed into each other), at Centre and Grand Streets, stands one of the oldest examples of the oldest working variety of NYC lamppost, the bishop crook. This particular specimen is classified as a Type 1BC, recognized for several archaic elements that later Crooks dispensed [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Tribeca
May 2010: I was stumbling around Fort Greene and Clinton Hill on a recent Saturday, mumbling incoherently, no doubt frightening all the yuppies and richies who had recently moved in, when after passing my old high school, a fortress-like Gothic pile on Atlantic and Washington that was condo-ized years ago, found myself on Pacific and Vanderbilt [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Downtown Brooklyn
Uncharacteristically stumped for a Slice for the midweek period I turned to a familiar corner I went past all the time when I worked in the Penn Station area between 1988-1991 and again from 2000-2004, a grungy, grimy, gritty mid-Manhattan intersection just south of Penn Station on 8th Avenue, perhaps my least favorite of all of [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Penn Station
I find myself on Jackson Avenue quite a bit as it is the main diagonal artery from Vernon Boulevard in Hunters Point to Queens Plaza, where under the tangle of elevated trains it changes its name to Northern Boulevard and commences to run the length of Long Island. The short but busy stretch is among Queens’ [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Roads Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Early 2010 in NYC has featured some crazy weather — three feet of snow in February, which fell in three storms; sunny and very warm in March, accompanied by several rounds of flooding rain; and at this writing on April 7, 85 degrees is expected for a high temperature in the afternoon. Your webmaster took advantage [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Washington Heights
A quick look at a map of southeastern Brooklyn reveals a nearly unbroken grid of unrelenting monotony, as city planners slavishly copied the Manhattan grid here and in most of Brooklyn. We’re in, or near, the old Kings County town of Flatlands, which describes things nearly perfectly — making the terrain ripe for a gridiron development. Hilly [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Midwood
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Astoria Queens
Those of you who have followed FNY for a long time know about my predilection for lampposts — an affinity I am hard pressed to explain. I do know I have been a fan of NYC lampposts, and by extrapolation stoplights, fire hydrants, street signs, and other ancillary materials, nearly since birth. Their lore and history [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Queens Sunnyside
I happen to be involved in one capacity or the other with both the Greater Astoria Historical Society and the Newtown Historical Society, both concerned with the preservation of the legacies of areas in western Queens, architectural and otherwise. Both meet in the same building, a funeral parlor on Broadway in Astoria; after periodic meetings there break up, if [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Astoria Queens
General Motors’ so-called “new-look” “fishbowl” buses were introduced in 1959 and almost immediately made a, er, splash on NYC streets, with selected routes getting them the very next year. The “fishbowl” moniker came from their large front windows, which bowed out and allowed a good look at the driver. The interiors were a departure from the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Chelsea Flatiron Manhattan
I fell onto West 123rd Street almost by accident, but it was most likely a consequence of the men who built the parks in the mid-19th Century, the general topography, and the engineers who laid out NYC’s street grid in 1811. The street runs through the northern stretches of Morningside Heights, the neighborhood built around Morningside [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Harlem Manhattan
When NYC’s Department of Transportation wants something gone, it’s gone, and there’s not much you can do. Even though the DOT has been spending a couple of decades installing retro versions of the major genres of old-fashioned NYC lampposts that dominated the streets from 1910-1950 — bishop crooks, long-armed Corvingtons, Twinlamps and Type F reverse-scrolls, it [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Financial District Manhattan
On a drab 15-degree January day in 2010 I made my way up Flatbush Avenue and grabbed the statues that ring Grand Army Plaza, where Flatbush meets the northern end of Prospect Park. We find some usual suspects, and some wild cards as well. Tucked away on Plaza Street East and St. Johns Place, across the street [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Grand Army Plaza
Up until a couple of years ago, Anna Huntington’s Joan of Arc statue on Riverside Drive and West 93rd Street was the only one depicting a historic female personality. And, up until a couple of days ago, I thought it still was*. I was rolling past Frederick Douglass Boulevard and West 122nd Street, where they meet St. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Harlem Harriet Tubman Manhattan
After moving to Little Neck in 2007, I have taken a lot of photos in my new town, but have been saving them for the right time to use them, which would coincide with getting sufficient research. I’ve been frustrated in that — sources are scattered about and have been hard to pull together. I live [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Little Neck Queens
On the second leg of my quick Bensonhurst trip, I wandered down 84th Street into the heart of ancient New Utrecht. Brooklyn, now co-terminous with Kings County, was once just one, albeit the most important, of six towns that made up Kings County, delineated by British rulers in 1683. “KIngs” refers to the Restoration British monarch at the time, King [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bensonhurst Brooklyn New Utrecht
I lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn for 35 years, the last time in 1993 when I gravitated to Queens. I now live on the borderline of Queens and Nassau County. I work in Nassau and have many friends in Nassau; yet, since I do not have a drivers’ license, I’ll never be of Nassau, unless that situation changes. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bensonhurst Brooklyn
At one time, railroad stations, especially terminals in large cities, were thought of as magnificent gateways or portals to new realms, welcoming travelers from far and wide to places they had only read about in books, or places of inspiration for commuters from far-off locales: though their work may be drudgery, they could aspire to something [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Downtown Brooklyn
I have been a frequent visitor to what I call The Dead Pool, a bend in the Arthur Kill, the waterway separating the west and south of Staten Island from New Jersey. It is located at about Arthur Kill Road and Rossville Avenue in the formerly dying town of Rossville, which has since been revitalized by [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Rossville ships Staten Island
After our earlier ramble on Westchester Square’s southern edge, it’s time now to explore the northern end of Westchester Square, formerly the town center of the Dutch village of Oostdorp, renamed by the British Westchester when they took over the joint lock stock and barrel, as well as a few raccoons, in 1664. “Oostdorp” in Dutch means [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bronx Westchester Square
Just as you can’t swing a dead cat (sorry, PETA) without hitting something called “Richmond” in Staten Island, The Bronx is filled with place names ending in “-chester,” as in Westchester, Eastchester, Parkchester. Until 1874, The Bronx was a part of Westchester County — New York County annexed the portion of Bronx County west of the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bronx Westchester Square
Borough Park has been oddly overlooked during my Forgottenhood, and strangely enough — I lived in Bay Ridge from 1957-1993 and Borough Park, a vast area roughly defined by the old Bay Ridge Long Island Rail Road line, 18th Avenue, 9th Avenue, and Green-Wood Cemetery/Dahill Road, was what I passed through on bus or bike to [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Borough Park Brooklyn
Actually this quick walk came in July 2007, but I’ve been caught short of new material of late. That’s OK — I always have a big backlog of material, although it’s been shrinking somewhat lately — the winter weather and sun angle has kept the Forgotten camera indoors for the most part. So, as I write [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Forest Hills Queens
When Christmas comes around, my thoughts sometimes wander toward Greenpoint. I have many memories from when I was in my twenties concerning the Garden Spot of the Universe. I once accepted the keys for but never lived in an apartment on Green Street that was outfitted with a single electrical outlet and a bath tub in [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint
There are two Sheepshead Bay Roads in Brooklyn. To add to the muddle, one of them comes in two pieces. The first Sheepshead Bay Road runs from Neptune Avenue and West 8th east one block to West 6th Street. As we’ll see, it used to be quite a bit longer. The other, more important Sheepshead Bay [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Roads Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
When I invade Flatbush, or the neighborhoods south and east of it, sometimes my thoughts turn to Brooklyn’s seemingly logical, but really very odd, street nomenclature system. While Manhattan’s grid and numbering are well documented (the grid was formulated in 1811) — the Bronx’ street numbering is a continuation of Manhattan’s, since the two were once the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Ditmas Park
A few years ago, in November 2006 to be precise, I found myself in the Fordham Plaza area in the Bronx, where East Fordham Road meets Webster Avenue in the shadow of Fordham University. After dusting myself off, removing the blindfold and waiting for the stars to stop spinning around my head, I set off to [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Belmont Bronx
Having visited Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn and pretty much found it just like it was when I first photographed it in 1998 (except for a missing church here and a new luxury crap condo there) I then visited another FNY old favorite a few weeks later – a rusted lamppost in a narrow strip, of unclaimed territory between a park [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Lower East Side Manhattan
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Chelsea diners Manhattan
I worked on a Maspeth neighborhood page relatively early on, in about 2000 — for me it’s a typical Forgotten NY type of neighborhood — unserved by a subway line, ringed by cemeteries, expressways and parks that serve to somewhat separate it from its neighbors, Elmhurst and Ridgewood, from which it seems to have a distinct identity. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Maspeth Queens
Catalpa Avenue, a street running west-east in Ridgewood, slots between 68th Road and 69th Avenue between Seneca and Myrtle Avenues and 65th Place. Catalpas are large-leafed trees that generally grow to a height of 60 feet and can be found in North America, the Caribbean, and East Asia. The proper name is actually a Native American word, catawba, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Queens Ridgewood
Two dead-end lanes called Cornell Lane and Jessie Court, running north from Northern Boulevard between Marathon Parkway and Little Neck Parkway, have been there for decades — likely as much as a century. Yet, I had no idea they were there until I moved to Queens in 1993 and found Cornell Lane riding past in a [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Little Neck Queens
Bay Street, one of the few main streets in Staten Island not named Richmond (Hylan Boulevard is another) takes its name from the route it runs on the eastern shore of the island, facing the water, though only the stretch of Bay Street in the vicinity of the ferry is actually in sight of Upper New [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: St. George Staten Island
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bronx Mott Haven
With Halloween approaching I thought it appropriate to highlight one of Brooklyn’s more notable ‘haunted houses’ or at least one of its more mysterious. Growing up in Bay Ridge I knew of at least two decrepit old piles, one on Fort Hamilton Parkway and 88th Street, the other on Parrott Place near 92nd — both have [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
While walking around town between one Open House NY venue and the other, I managed to snap a few scenes of objects that interested me. Some of this stuff is arguably more interesting than the offerings OHNY proffered. Most of these shots come from those nebulous regions of no great identity in Manhattan, the outskirts of [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Flatiron Hell's Kitchen Manhattan
Unlike 2008, which was mostly overcast with a threat of showers both days, Open House New York weekend 2009 in NYC was spectacular weatherwise, with partly cloudy Saturday morning giving way to full sun by midafternoon, with Sunday a carbon copy. Unfortunately the MTA did its best, as is its wont, to be the dog in [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: East Village Manhattan Manhattan Bridge
News came this week [2009] that a 600 year old tree in Douglaston was rotting — it wasn’t dead yet, but it was getting there finally, and before more branches cracked off, it was decided to chop it down. (I must have passed that tree a number of times since moving to neighboring Little Neck, and damned if [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
If you ride the Long Island Rail Road Port Washington line as I have every day for the past 17 years, no doubt you have noticed the four-story brick factory on the south side of the tracks the train roars past on 94th Street, about midway between the Woodside and Shea Stadium (now Mets Willets Point) [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Elmhurst Queens
Of course, one of my favorite corners in Manhattan concerns a lamppost, a Type 24M Twin, as a matter of fact. Barely a dozen of these posts exist anymore, with a few concentrated on 5th Avenue between 19th and 32nd Streets. There are also a few left in City Hall Park, and since they’re so close to [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Flatiron Manhattan
Despite being depicted every week for over a dozen years (admittedly in a lighthearted fashion) on TV’s M*A*S*H*, theKorean War, in which US forces defended South Korea against invasion from North Korean Communist forces from 1950 to 1953, is known in some quarters as “the Forgotten War,” perhaps because Americans were understandably war-weary in the early Fifties, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Kissena Park Queens
Now, let’s not get too beside ourselves yet. The vote the New York State Board of Preservation took to add Philip Johnson’s New York State Pavilion, which has been sitting and rusting since the Fair closed in October 1965 to add it to the state Register of Historic Places does not mean it won’t be torn down in [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Flushing Meadows Queens
There’s a storefront at 190 3rd Avenue in the Gramercy Park area between East 17th and 18th Streets that appears to have been unchanged since the 1890s, and, for once, this is a case where the storefront is, in fact, unchanged, or nearly so, instead of being a reasonable facsmile. We see here a remnant of Kleindeutschland, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Gramercy Park Manhattan
Along with Williamsburg and the Times Square area over the past decade, Cooper Square, the junction of the Bowery, 3rd and 4th Avenues and Astor Place, is one of NYC’s key locations for rapid, break-neck change over that time — as has been The Bowery itself. The Bowery has worn many guises — from NYC’s entertainment [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Cooper Square Manhattan
Bronxdale was a small village located along Boston Post Road, surrounded by land owned by tobacco entrepreneurs the Lorillards (their snuff mill still stands alongside the Bronx River in the New York Botanical Gardens). When the Botanical Garden was developed the village disappeared, but today the name has been applied to a neighborhood roughly defined by [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bronx
Your webmaster is a diurnal animal. This wasn’t always the case — throughout the 1980s I worked the late shift and braved the darkest recesses of the graffiti scarred IRT on the way home every morning at 3 or 4 AM. Since that time I have evolved into a reverse vampire and am only rarely caught [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Forest Hills Queens
I don’t get into Clinton Hill often enough. I am intimidated by it — imagine a neighborhood, along with neighboring Fort Greene and to some degree, Bedford-Stuyvesant, which flank Clinton Hill on the west and east — dominated by block after block of homes dating from the post-Civil War period to the robber baron era of [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Clinton Hill
I have always wanted to do a big page on NYC’s hundreds of street clocks, big and small. At first I restricted myself to freestanding sidewalk clocks, and then I did a ForgottenSlice on some of Manhattan’s attached building clocks, but my ambition in this regard has so far outstripped my abilities — I want to do a [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Yorkville
I was slouching around Flatbush in July 2009, getting pictures of Brooklyn’s Tennis Court , the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church and its graveyard (which deserves its own page and will get one). Albemarle Rd. is one in a series of roads laid out by Dean Alvord in the late 1800s when he was developing Prospect Park [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Kensington
In mid-2009 took a lengthy walk in Ridgewood and Glendale and while there, resolved to detour down Palmetto Street for a little ways, so I could ascertain the contrast between its elled and non-elled blocks. The eastern end of the old Myrtle Avenue El shrouds Palmetto for 3 blocks between Wyckoff and Onderdonk Avenues. The origins [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Queens Ridgewood
There are 6 streets named for states in Queens. They don’t come in bunches, as they do in Brooklyn (in East New York and Mill Basin); rather, they’re scattered all over the borough, helter skelter, willy nilly. There’s Delaware Avenue and Georgia Road in Murray Hill (in an alphabetical sequence in which the other avenues are [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Glendale Queens
Much of Greenpoint has rightly been named a NYC Landmarks historic district, as its side streets contain vintage architecture from the mid-1800s of a quality not being produced today in even the most lavish of new homes. Several of the neighborhood’s side streets, in particular India, Kent, Milton, and Noble have more than their fair share [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint
There’s a cluster of buildings on West 20th Street in Chelsea between 8th and 9th Avenues that are somewhat puzzling, to me at least. They stand out from the others on their side of the street in that the eschew brick cladding for stone and present a smooth, streamlined facing. Some of the windows have arched [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Chelsea Manhatatn
EV Grieve has some troubling news this week…Peter’s of Madison Street, which featured a classic, old school painted sign, has closed, apparently for good because the interior has been cleaned out. Admittedly, I have never bought anything in Peter’s but I passed by often and have almost as often snapped this tremendous sign, which really should [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Lower East Side Manhattan
It seems as if I have an awful lot of Brooklyn photos laying around — I shot extensively in the neighborhoods and subneighborhoods south of Prospect Park beginning in the fall of 2006 and continuing into the spring of 2007, and I haven’t used them yet — mainly because I feared that dumping them on Forgotten [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Kensington Prospect Park South
Snyder Avenue runs from the heart of Flatbush, Flatbush Avenue just south of the Dutch Reformed Church, all the way east to Ralph Avenue. Originally known as Grant Street, it was renamed to honor a prominent Dutch landowning family (as so many of Brooklyn’s streets have been); it wasn’t named for the Brooklyn Dodgers’ cleanup hitter Duke [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Flatbush
Having moved to Flushing in 1993 I have witnessed, to my continuing disgust, the demolition of what was formerly Flushing’s great east-west residential thoroughfare, Sanford Avenue; year by year, more and more of its charming 19th and early 20th Century structures falls victim to overdevelopers’ relentless thirst for multi-family dwellings that, since they’re built on the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Flushing Queens
Though luxury developers have had their eyes on Greenpoint, Brooklyn’s northernmost neighborhood, making inroads here has not been quite as easy here as it was in the rezoned Williamsburg, immediately to the southwest. And so, the Garden Spot of Brooklyn has been mostly successful in holding fast to its mom and pop shops and decidedly Polish [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint
McCarren Park, on the border of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, is, geographically speaking, one of Brooklyn’s more unusual parks. It is trisected by three streets, Bedford Avenue, Driggs Avenue, and Lorimer Street (the streets once had trolley lines and so, were not demapped when the park was created in the 1800s) and is thus in four [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint
Fresh from staggering up and down North 4th in Williamsburg, I next turned my attention a block away on North 5th, where I found some fare that presented a more varied appearance, with new million-dollar condos sharing space with aluminum-sided houses that have not changed appearance since the Truman Administration, and brick churches that haven’t been significantly [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
June 2009: I spent a recent Saturday in rapidly-changing Williamsburg, which has evolved from hard-scrabble industrial- somewhat-residential neighborhood dominated by breweries and powerhouses, with the Navy Yard looming to the south and west — to the East East Village — to the Brooklyn Gold Coast. Even with all the rapid change, some aspects of the neighborhood [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
During explorations of Lascoff’s Drugstore, the remains of the German-American neighborhood Yorkville, and the old signage of the Lexington Candy Shop a couple of winters ago, ForgottenFan Vicki and I also discovered the remnants of a Hungarian-American enclave on East 82nd Street in the vicinity of 3rd and Lexington Avenues. I shouldn’t have been surprised – the Upper East Side [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Upper East Side
6/09. Catching up on some older stuff while I am gradually recovering from surgery. In December I was out for lunch and a short walk in Sunnyside, Queens and in just that brief time, mainly on Skillman and Roosevelt Avenues, I was able to find a number of examples of old-school signage…some of which looked as [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Queens Sunnyside
“Cadet,” according to The Word Detective, is derived from the Latin ”capitellum,” a diminutive of Latin “caput,” meaning “head.” It was later applied to young men entering the military and interstingly, was also condensed to “cad,” a young man who doesn’t dance with the woman he brought to the party. For decades the word also delineated a [...]
Categorized in: Ads Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Maspeth Queens
Forgotten NY has always supported mermaid-themed art (currently I’m compiling a page full of mermaids used in posters, architecture and advertising) and Beaux-Arts sculptors and architects have also, from the looks of things, been fond of homo ichthyus as well; in the New York Botanical Garden, the Lillian Goldman Fountain of Life and Queens’ much-derided Civic Virtue, at Borough Hall, use [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bronx fountains
May 2009: Most of the Bronx press attention has gone to theYankees’ new billion-dollar launching pad (where they have already lost 22-4 and more lopsided scores) where the displaced parks will be built on top of parking lots, and where dozens of prime seats are sitting empty night after night because they cost $2560 per seat, per [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bronx Concourse Village
Avail yourself of a walk down the new Hudson River Park walkway along West Street, 11th and 12th Avenues (stay out of the bike lane — they’ll kill ya) and you’ll see some nifty new T-shaped, aquamarine-painted walkway lamps. Note the bases and finials — they’re shaped like ziggurated NYC skyscrapers. It’s not a new design [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Harlem Manhattan Triborough Bridge
With NYC apparently preparing to finish the East River walkway from the Battery all the way to the northern end of the island, and Cy Adler’s “Great Saunter,” a 32-mile walk around the entire island, in the books for 2009, I thought it appropriate to turn to some of the photos that your webmaster shot with ForgottenFan Vicki along [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: East River Manhattan
Comes the word this week (May 4, 2009) that one more butcher is leaving the Meatpacking District… as the NY Post ran it, according to Pat LaFrieda, ”A lot of people would like to see us out of here. We don’t fit no more.” Most of the butchers have moved to more welcoming territory in New Jersey and upstate [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Manhattan Meatpacking
In Bay Ridge, the southbound B63 has to make a slight jog to 4th Avenue here because 5th is one-way northbound for a block between 94th and 95th. The triangle formed by 4th, 5th and 93rd, known officially as Fort Hamilton Triangle for the nearby still-active US Army base, was known unofficially for years as Pigeon Park, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Fort Hamilton
According to the late, legendary Bronx historian John McNamara, writing in History in Asphalt, West 230th Street in KIngsbridge Heights and Riverdale has had an active history. It once led to an island: Hummock Island (Native American name Paparinimen) was part of the estate of Alexander Macomb, scion of a milling family who operated a dam bridge [...]
Categorized in: Cobblestones Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bronx Kingsbridge Heights
If you’ve never been to the Broadway-Flushing section of Queens, it’s worth a visit — it’s home to some of Queens’ finest architecture, having been part of the Rickert-Finley real estate development around the turn of the 20th Century. Large plots, wide lawns, and beautiful, eclectic buildings. I’ll have a proper Foergottenpage on it soon enough [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Flushing Queens
As a rule, you will not find any munchkins, witches or flying monkeys in the Bronx. But there is a yellow brick road, and this one looks like it’s still got its original yellow bricks (Queens’ Stockholm Street‘s yellow bricks are a loving recreation of the original). Dorothea Place, a cul de sac on Marion Avenue just [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bronx Fordham
ForgottenFan Dennis Harper recently found one of those rarest of birds in the NYC street paving canon — a red bricked street with a median shown by alternating bricks in white! I had only seen this treatment done on a couple of streets in Jamaica, Queens, and, though I have made a number of visits to Bedford [...]
Categorized in: Cobblestones Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bronx Norwood
“Bedford” is perhaps a better-known appellation on Brooklyn, where Bedford Avenue is the borough’s longest, running from Greenpoint to Sheepshead Bay, or the Bronx, where Bedford Park borders Fodham University and the NY Botanical Gardens. Bedford Street is one of Greenwich Vilage’s more unsung throughfares, running northwest from 6th Avenue and Houston Street to Christopher. The [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
Time for one of FNY’s periodic closet-cleaning sessions — I select several photos that are disconnected to each other, yet show an out-of-the-way NYC locale, or something that disappeared long ago. I shot some of them myself and people worldwide send them in — some I acquired quite some time ago so forgive me if I [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan West Village
It’s a lot cooler to not look back. I heard Van Morrison being interviewed by Don Imus [early March 2009] (about 100 years of showbiz there) and he said he never listens to his old hits, even though he was touring on his 1968 recird Astral Weeks in early 2009. But among artists, they’re supposed to say they never look [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: East Village Manhattan
I haven’t done much on Astoria; it just seems as if I have. I recently walked Broadway in Queens, which cuts across the neighborhoods. And, it seems as if I’m always visiting theGreater Astoria Historical Society for book readings and exhibits. I’ve done a number of pages on Astoria Village, an unprotected 19th-Century area just south of [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Astoria Queens
A recent topic thread in Subchat, the subway blog, made me revisit one of FNY’s long-cherished talismans, the remainders of the old Long Island Rail Road’s “Evergreen” branch, which was a one-track freight line that ceased operation, I believe, sometime in the 1980s. In the long ago and far away, it was a ctually a passenger line [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Queens Ridgewood
When the topic about Brooklyn’s longest streets comes up (and admittedly, that’s once in a blue moon) Flatbush, Atlantic, Bedford Avenues and Fulton Street come up most often. But there are a group of streets that run from the waterfront at Buttermilk Channel all the way east to Brownsville, running through Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Park [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Park Slope
I haven’t dealt much with 9/11/01 on Forgotten NY. The reasons for this are many. Whatever a lone weblog developer scribbling away in Little Neck says will ultimately mean little. I made a pledge to not even give the hint of exploiting the attack to sell books or T-shirts or get google ad clicks; and [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Arrochar Staten Island
The Beekman Tower, at 1st Avenue and Mitchell Place, is one of NYC’s first, and best, examples of Art Deco architecture. It was designed by John Mead Howells, an architect who worked closely with the famed Raymond Hood, and is 28 stories of orange and tan brick and vertical striping. ABOVE: The tower in 1929. As [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Turtle Bay
By 2008 the only real link I had to my home town, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, is my dentist. I have been treated at the same practice, with two different dentists, since 1964 and, since my father’s demise and the conversion of Zeke’s Roast Beef to yet another Chinese food place (like there aren’t enough of [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Recent trips through Staten Island and Queens have reminded me that there are areas of the city, the five boroughs, that may as well be anywhere else — they have nothing at all to do with Manhattan and its glittering attractions like the King of All Buildings, the Metropolitan Museum, the NY Public Library. They’re stable [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Queens Woodside
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Windsor Terrace
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn Fort Greene
Sometimes, NYC history can be preserved in the unlikeliest of ways and in the most unusual places. Take a large mural along East 15th Street in the shadow of the BMT Brighton line (B, Q) just north of Sheepshead Bay Road. The mural, entitled “Sheepshead Bay’s Historic Future,” depicts Emmons Avenue as it was in 1994 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
I was in Forest Hills/Rego Park the other day (January 2009), 108th Street and 69th Road to be precise, when I vaguely remembered I had found a classic flute-bottomed, olive-colored stoplight about a block away, on 110th Street, in June 2005. Of course, I wanted to go over and say hello to my old friend. Instead, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Forest Hills Queens
In early 2009, in a real estate environment that has seen home prices and rents drop precipitously and sales slow to a crawl, battle to maintain New York City’s character is still being waged, it seems, neighborhood by neighborhood and house by house. The second week of 2009 saw designations given to several buildings by the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Gravesend Manhattan Penn Station
I suspect Coney Island will weather its current difficulties. It always seems to. Recent developments, however, have put several Coney Island aficionados in deep despair. To recap, quite sketchily, developer Joseph Sitt (chairman and CEO of Thor Equities) has purchased numerous parcels along Surf Avenue, some streets and the Boardwalk, with hopes of building high rise [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island
The naming of Brooklyn streets – well, NYC streets — is a topic of constant fascination. Well, for your webmaster, at least. A glance at the Brooklyn map in the Sheepshead Bay area reveals a couple of score* short “places” and one-block streets. They’re not alleys, per se, since they’re wide enough for cars to be [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
The London plane tree, a variety of the sycamore, is the street tree of choice in New York — to the point of exhaustion, since street after street features so many of them. You’ll also find quite a number of oaks. Chestnut and elm, not so much; these have had their numbers cut into by disease over the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Little Neck Queens
December 2008: Just got a special ForgottenAlert from FFan David Sanders: I was returning from upstate NY today and got off the PATH train at 33rd Street, heading to the N train…at the top of the stairs there were two large vertical posters whose ads had been removed, and there were 4 small posters, two in [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Herald Square Manhattan
A little tortured analogy – Dali’s The Persistence of Memory featured melting watches, depicting the survival of memory despite the demise of the devices used to record it, and here’s an FNY page about the persistence of the devices themselves. (OK, it’s early in the day…). I eventually hope to do a full-blown page on the various clocks and [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices
Remember that episode of Star Trek when the giant microbe ate the Enterprise? At the start of the show, Mr. Spock is looking into his scanner and suddenly gets a shocked look on his face. Any emotion from the Vulcan is a notable occasion, so Kirk asked him what the matter was, and Spock explained that a Federation [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Madison Square Manhattan
It may have come across before but I enjoy New York City’s elevated trains. Not every American city has them anymore, or has them to the extent that New York does. Boston tore down its Orange Line el over Washington Street in the late 1980s, and the last remnant of the Green Line el over Causeway [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Queens Woodside
Queens is dotted with minuscule cemeteries, some still existing, some as dead as the people who were buried within, whose remains are blown in the breeze now. Corona used to have a small cemetery on Alstyne Avenue that is long forgotten. TheBunn Cemetery on 46th Avenue and 165th Street in Flushing was recently rededicated after being cemented [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Queens Woodside
photo: Flatbush Gardener The word came this week over at Jeremiah’s that the grand old M. Gordon Novelty facade, on 929-933 Broadway just south of East 22nd, had now been covered up in plywood; either its façade is being dramatically altered, or the whole shebang is going down. A drastic alteration was to be expected; pictures from the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Madison Square Manhattan
I don’t mind street art. That might be news to some ForgottenFans, who perhaps think that, as the all-American boy and world’s oldest Boy Scout that I have always been, not venturing far away from the straight and narrow (my life story is extraordinarily snore-inducing, incidentally; I have no ‘past’), that I should be naturally opposed [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
It’s hard to believe it, but it’s nowhere near as easy as it used to be to ride a horse in Central Park (unless you are a mounted policeman). The only nearby stables, the Claremont, ceased operations on April 29, 2007, and an equestrian era in the park came to an end. Your webmaster must admit, while [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Stables Upper West Side
One of the most enjoyable things I do with Forgotten New York is finding unheralded and unknown infrastructure. A light post representative of a long-lost genre … a building with a hidden history … or one of New York’s over 700 bridges that goes, in effect, from nowhere to nowhere. I first “discovered” the 21st Street Bridge [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hunters Point Queens
Cherubs have always (for me at least) been some of the more bizarre touchstones in the Christian tradition. Sometimes they are depicted as full-bodied babies with wings. Other times, they are shown as babies’ heads with wings. Now, when you think about it, that’s a very bizarre image. And I say that knowing that the book [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Grand Central Manhattan
Even as NYC’s Department of Transportation has been installing retro Bishop Crooks and retro M24 longarm Corvingtons, and even some scattered reverse scroll Type F’s and Lyres around town (forgive me, you have to be a lamppost maven to understand me at times) it unconscionably permits some of its ancient treasures to rust, wither, and die. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
New York City at times perversely secretes its more picturesque parks in places where it’s nearly impossible to find them. One of them, Peter Detmold Park, reclines along the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive between East 49th and 51st Streets at the bottom of a sheer cliff and, therefore, it’s impossible to see it from street level. The [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Turtle Bay
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Cobble Hill
New York City and United States history can be gleaned from the most mundane, unexceptional places. There’s a tiny street on the Cobble Hill-Red Hook border that exists in two sections, having been ravaged by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and submerged under the Brooklyn Battery toll plaza, that remembers the family that produced the very first European [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Carroll Gardens
The abandoned courthouse has stood silently on Beach Channel Drive and Beach 90th Street, just east of Cross Bay Veterans Memorial Bridge, for several decades, awaiting either the day when it would once again be occupied, or a wreckers’ ball. The Magistrates’ Court sports the clean lines of the new Art Moderne buildings that were being built [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Hammels Queens Rockaway
Your webmaster recently took advantage of an amazing coincidence – a day off combined with pleasant weather – to walk 14th Street from west to east and then enter Stuyvesant Town to plunder — photographically –its cache of Type G lampposts. The Type G, seen here in a 1936 city catalogue of lampposts, closely resembled the Type 24M Corvington [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Stuyvesant Town
Having heard that Columbia Street, a lengthy stretch that runs along the Brooklyn waterfront for much of its route, was finally free of construction after three years of rough driving, bus reroutes and general chaos [as of 2008], I decided to take a look. Freebird Books, seen above, at Columbia and Kane Streets, was the site [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Cobble Hill Red Hook
Hidden deep in Staten Island’s Rosebank neighborhood is the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto, a 30-foot high shrine made of concrete spangled with smooth round stones, glass marbles, shells, plastic flowers. Some of the shrine is decorated with religious icons of saints, some behind glass, some not. You arrive at the shrine by walking down a hidden, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Rosebank Staten Island
I know what you’re thinking…Shea Stadium…Radio City Music Hall? Is he running out of Forgotten places to root around in? Not even close. The modus operandi of FNY, besides finding places in New York where the buses don’t run and that the guidebooks don’t list is also to provide Forgotten aspects to eminently familiar NYC [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Radio City
In New York we’ve just finished the 6th annual Open House New York, run by the organization of the same name each first weekend in October. OHNY celebrates NYC’s built environment, and mostly succeeds in getting some property owners to open doors that ordinarily wouldn’t open to the likes of your webmaster. The event is getting increasingly popular [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices
Coffey Street in Red Hook and your webmaster have never been close associates, but have been, shall we say, acquaintances over the years. I first laid eyes on it sometime in the Super 70s, in high school, when the van transporting us kids made a pit stop there to pick up a classmate, Ed Burkard. Remember [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Red Hook
Your webmaster has never met a Denise, or a Denyse, for that matter, who was unattractive. At the same time, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn’s Denyse Wharf, or its remains, are not much to look at. The wharf, however, is a lost treasure of the colonial past and a Revolutionary War remnant. To arrive at the wharf, the only [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Your webmaster spent the dying summer embers of 2008 in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a neighborhood I had not been in in about three years (since 2005). The reason being… I was holding out and waiting for the latest round of sweeping changes that have taken hold here to be completed: more than any other Brooklyn [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Red Hook
There he stands at Queens Boulevard and Union Turnpike opposite Kew Gardens Road, near Queens Borough Hall and the county courthouses… a strapping youth, a sword in his right hand held casually behind his neck, standing astride two writhing mermaids atop a four-sided fountain on a crumbling, pigeon-crap-strewn basin. It’s my favorite statue in town. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Kew Gardens Queens
If you haven’t been to Parkchester you’re in for a treat. Visiting the Bronx’ s premier apartment complex is an experience that will delight anyone with an interest in urban planning and a sharp eye for detail. Take the #6 train into the Bronx, exit at the Parkchester station and you will find yourself at Hugh Grant Circle, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bronx Parkchester
Dahill Road runs in four separate sections in the heart of Brooklyn, in Kensington, Borough Park, Parkville and Mapleton, and serves as the dividing line between two separate street grid systems as well as being McDonald Avenue’s running buddy, accepting some of its traffic and lessening the load on the el-shrouded McDonald. If you look at [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Kensington Midwood Parkville
FNY doesn’t spend enough time in the Bronx – your webmaster freely admits guilt. With today’s Slice I’ll present a batch of photos I shot in High Bridge mostly in January 2005, a time when I was getting photographs for the ForgottenBook — I found that most of my previous pictures were unusable for print for [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bronx High Bridge
You have to hand it to Nassau and Suffolk Counties…both of those counties mark many of their historic locales with blue and gold signs giving brief details of the building, when it was built, et cetera. Queens used to have quite a few of them, too…these days there are only a couple of the older [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Queens Richmond Hill Woodhaven
There has been a gradual coalescing of my observations as I walk through Brooklyn in the mid to late 2000s. The era when Brooklyn worked — as in manufacturing and supplying the world with the fruits of American know-how and technical expertise — is coming to an end. It’s being replaced by service industries, housing, and [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Park Slope
A venerable relic of the era when outings to cemeteries were the Sunday rage, Niederstein’s Restaurant stood on Metropolitan Avenue (formerly the Williamsburg and Jamaica Turnpike) from the early 1850s to 2005. At first a roadhouse on the Brooklyn & Jamaica Turnpike just east of 69th Street, it later served travelers journeying to nearby Lutheran Cemetery. Over [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Middle Village Queens
9th Avenue, Hell’s Kitchen between West 42nd and West 57th Streets, is known for restaurants showcasing cuisines from around the globe…European, Asian, Caribbean, you name it. On a recent walk south on 9th, I wasn’t particularly hungry and so skipped all the restaurants and bistros, and instead snapped photos of all the terrific signage to be [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Hell's Kitchen Manhattan
On July 5, 2008 ForgottenFan Vicki and I met on a rather desultory day, with heavy, humid air and frequent showers. After ducking in to see Get Smart (the Steve Carrell version) things cleared up temporarily and it was off to the new Riverside Park along the Hudson River between West 59th and West 72nd. I didn’t see [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Columbus Circle Manhattan
Riverside Drive is justly famed for its undulating route along the Hudson; Riverside Park — New York’s longest; its Beaux Arts and Art Deco apartment buildings; and Grant’s Tomb, the massive memorial to the Ohioan at West 122nd Street. Grant and his wife are entombed, not buried there … Less famed, though no less beautiful, is the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Upper West Side
I was staggering around the Briarwood-Jamaica border a few weeks ago (in July 2008) ignoring the drizzle and humidity and getting images for a possible Briarwood page and picking up possible ideas for a long-planned Jamaica page when I spotted some unusual sights and signs along Jamaica Avenue, which I had earlier chronicled in its Brooklyn stretch late [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Jamaica Queens
Unlike apparently everyone else in the NYC blogosphere I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Williamsburg the past couple of years — until a couple of weekends ago (writing this August 11, 2008) when a too-long wait for the B61 caused me to ditch my planned visit to Red Hook and walk down Willoughby, through Ft. Greene [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
I was surprised, and disappointed, to see one of NYC’s iconic painted walldog ads is gone, as the giant Wellner Motors ad on Greenwich Avenue facing 8th opposite Jackson Square has been cruelly sandblasted out of existence. For decade after decade, long after its titular garage had left the scene, it had advertised sales, service and [...]
Categorized in: Ads Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Greenwich Village
According to the Bible of Brooklyn street names, Brooklyn By Name by Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss, Williamsburg’s Dunham Place was named for David Dunham (1790-1823), a New York merchant who helped initiate an early steam ferry from Brooklyn to New York, which earned him the nickname “Father of Williamsburg.” Dunham was an indefatigable advocate for steam navigation and [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
I did a story on FNY the other day about the changes befalling Manhattan’s largest Belgian-blocked surface, the huge plaza where Greenwich, Gansevoort, Little West 12th Streets and 9th Avenue all meet — a changing of the guard, so to speak, of Manhattan street patterns — and, as is my wont I touched upon the fate [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Meatpacking
Two separate Manhattan street grid systems come together at a 4-street intersection in the West Village, where Greenwich Street, Gansevoort Street, Little West 12th Street and 9th Avenue all meet. Here, Greenwich Street finishes a northbound run from Battery Place and Ninth Avenue begins a climb up the West Side all the way to Cathedral [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Meatpacking
In September 2007 FNY, on the Lullaby of Broadway Slice, chronicled the impending demolition and restoration of the Broadway (Flushing) Long Island Rail Road station. Between 1993 (preceding that actually) and 2007, the MTA had allowed the station to become a horror show of crumbling platforms and fences as well as urine-soaked waiting sheds. Things got so bad [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Flushing Queens
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Trolleys Tagged with: Kew Gardens Park Slope
I conceived of Forgotten NY in 1998 out of the floating images of rusted lampposts, hidden alleys, bricked streets, ancient business signs, NYC neighborhoods that the guidebooks don’t acknowledge such as Georgetown, Eastchester, Throgs Neck, Winfield and Eltingville, as well as the ghost ads advertising long-deceased businesses that can still be found on walls all over [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Frank Jump
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
St. George, Staten Island is an oasis of urbanity in a borough that, until about 25 years ago, was largely rural and has today transformed into teh worst aspects of suburb-anity, or perhaps suburb-inanity or even siburb-insanity, with its main drags like Hylan Boulevard, Forest Avenue and Richmond Avenue having become a concrete strip full of [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: St. George Staten Island
The fraternal organization Order of the Knights of Pythiaswas instituted in 1864 by Justus H. Rathbone and was actually the first such organization to be granted a charter by the US Congress. The name was inspired by the story of Damon and Pythias, an old story of loyalty: in ancient Syracuse, Pythias was accused of [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Upper West Side
6th Avenue in the Greeley Square area…from 29th north to 33rd… is undergoing change extremely rapid even by NYC standards, as structures from the early to mid 20th Century are quickly being razed and luxury towers, many with retail and restaurants on the ground floor, are replacing them. Sixth Avenue’s old Flower District and Sewing Machine [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Penn Station
It’s widely known – at least to Queens history buffs, at any rate — that beginning in 1915 and continuing gradually over the next 15 years or so, Queens jettisoned its old street names (with a couple of historic districts, such as downtown Flushing, being allowed to keep their names) and repalced them all with numbers, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Elmhurst Queens
On a recent ramble through my adopted home town, Little Neck, Queens I discovered an element peculiar to NYC’s more suburban locales: the grassy central median, or as they say in England, “roundabout.” I’ve only found one or two other than the ones shown on this page, both in Riverdale, Bronx. There’s a HUGE one in Brooklyn, where [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Little Neck Queens
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bronx NY Botanical Garden
Once a year the burghers of Brooklyn in the Prospect Park South, Ditmas Park, Fiske Terrace, Midwood Park, and Beverl(e)y Squares East and West neighborhoods open their doors to allow the hoi-polloi to see what residential architecture looked like when houses were built when aesthetic principles, not economic ones, were paramount. The streets of Brooklyn south of [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Flatbush Prospect Park South
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Coney Island Avenue is among Brooklyn’s lengthiest routes, extending from Ocean Parkway and Parkside Avenue where Prospect Park meets the Parade Grounds and runs generally straight south all the way to the Coney Island boardwalk (officially called the Riegelmann Boardwalk for the borough president when it was completed in the 1920s). As this 1873 map [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island Sheepshead Bay
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bedford Park Bronx
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Making up somewhat for previous oversights, I invaded Chinatown in February in search of ancient laneways that contain hidden architectural “Easter eggs” and traces of long-vanished neighborhoods. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out perhaps the Deskey post’s most distinctive NYC contribution: in 1965 several of them were outfitted with luminaires resembling traditional Chinese [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices
I had gone past Claremont Terrace thousands of times — literally –without giving it a second thought about what it was. It’s an alley that is hidden along another dead end in the heart of Elmhurst, one of Queens’ busiest, most populated and diverse neighborhoods — it’s buzzing with energy day and evening. I would [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Elmhurst Queens
For such a huge city, NYC is short on roadside oddities. You know, like the World’s Biggest Lightbulb in Menlo Park NJ, or the Big Duck of Flanders, NY in Suffolk County, or the Paul Bunyan Muffler Man of Elmsford in Westchester County. Sure, we’ve got that statue of Vladimir Lenin on the rooftop at East Houston and Avenue A, along with the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Queens Woodside
ForgottenFan Victoria and I were on Cherokee Place (I’ll let you rack your brains for a minute to figure out where that is) and East 77th and 78th Streets in spring 1978 to take a look at the Shively Sanitary Apartments, now known as simply the Cherokee. It’s a magnificent building constructed with plenty of light [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Manhattan Upper East Side
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Prospect Park
Who was “Great Scott,” anyway? Which Scott was it? Most pundits have come to the conclusion that it was none other than General Winfield Scott of the Mexican and Civil Wars, and it so happens that there’s an old neighborhood in Queens. part of Woodside, named for him. The phrase “Great Scott” was commonly found in superherocomic [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn East Williamsburg
When “Charlotte Street” is mentioned, anyone in NYC over age 40 can remember the two words with dread, remembering the dead landscape full of burned, crumbling buildings visited by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, and Republican candidate Ronald Reagan in the fall of 1980. Arson (some of it perpetrated by landlords and owners), crime, drugs and [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Queens Ridgewood
While it seems at times that Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens are dominated by unimaginative street names… numbers, letters… in actuality vast swaths in all 4 boroughs are still dominated by streets named for real people. I had always been under the impression that Stockholm Street in Bushwick and Ridgewood was so named in honor of a [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Landmarks Queens Ridgewood
