Blogroll

All City NY
Bowery Boys
City of Smoke Williams Bryk’s columns on NYC history from the NY Press and NY Sun
Frank Jump's Fading Ads
Gotham Lost and Found
Greater Astoria Historical Society
Hellbomb Music Reviews
I'm Just Walkin' A walk on every street in NYC
Infrastructure
Inside the Apple
Long Island City Millstones
Long Island Oddities
New York Daily Photo
New York Neon
New York Shitty
Newtown Historical Society
Newtown Pentacle
Queens Crap
Right Here NYC
Scouting NY
Untapped New York
Vanishing NY

Archives

  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • March 2006
  • February 2006
  • January 2006
  • December 2005
  • November 2005
  • October 2005
  • September 2005
  • August 2005
  • July 2005
  • June 2005
  • May 2005
  • April 2005
  • March 2005
  • February 2005
  • January 2005
  • December 2004
  • November 2004
  • October 2004
  • September 2004
  • August 2004
  • July 2004
  • June 2004
  • May 2004
  • March 2004
  • February 2004
  • January 2004
  • November 2003
  • October 2003
  • September 2003
  • August 2003
  • July 2003
  • May 2003
  • April 2003
  • March 2003
  • February 2003
  • January 2003
  • December 2002
  • November 2002
  • September 2002
  • August 2002
  • July 2002
  • June 2002
  • May 2002
  • April 2002
  • March 2002
  • February 2002
  • January 2002
  • November 2001
  • October 2001
  • September 2001
  • August 2001
  • July 2001
  • June 2001
  • May 2001
  • April 2001
  • March 2001
  • February 2001
  • January 2001
  • November 2000
  • October 2000
  • September 2000
  • August 2000
  • July 2000
  • June 2000
  • May 2000
  • April 2000
  • March 2000
  • January 2000
  • December 1999
  • November 1999
  • October 1999
  • September 1999
  • August 1999
  • July 1999
  • June 1999
  • May 1999
  • April 1999
  • March 1999
  • February 1999
  • January 1999
  • December 1998
  • October 1998
  • September 1998
  • August 1998
  • June 1998
  • May 1998
  • April 1998
  • March 1998
  • June 1997
    • PENNSYLVANIA STATION

      February 13, 2012
      slice.penn

      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 [...]

    • The Aged of TIMES SQUARE

      February 3, 2012

      Broadway crosses 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th Avenues south of Central Park, but the crossing with 7th Avenue is so gradual (I don’t know where to find this out, but it must be at an angle of less than 20 degrees) that there’s about a 4-block stretch when the avenues merge and become one wide [...]

    • CLOCKWISE ON 17th AVENUE

      January 12, 2012

      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 [...]

    • BMT 4th AVE LINE TILING

      January 6, 2012

      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 [...]

    • OLD KINGSBRIDGE ROAD, Bronx

      January 2, 2012

      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 [...]

    • ALICE and AGATE COURTS

      December 15, 2011

      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 [...]

    • SIGNS OF 8TH AVENUE

      December 13, 2011

      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 [...]

    • KINGSTON LOUNGE

      December 8, 2011

      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, [...]

    • BEFORE THEY DIE

      December 5, 2011

      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 [...]

    • FROM AN L TRAIN WINDOW

      December 1, 2011

      When you were a child did you ever get excited when you were riding a train and suddenly, the car was awash in sunshine when the train emerged from the tunnel and vaulted onto an el structure? My ex-line, the R train from Bay Ridge to Queens, hasn’t done that since 1987 when the R [...]

    • TRIMBLE AND HICKS

      November 17, 2011

      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 [...]

    • WILLIAM JAY GAYNOR MEMORIAL

      November 15, 2011

      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 [...]

    • UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS BRIDGE

      November 14, 2011

      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 [...]

    • 5th AVENUE TWINLAMPS

      November 9, 2011

      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, [...]

    • MURALS of ASTORIA VILLAGE

      October 31, 2011

      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 [...]

    • HUDSON STREET: best building street sign

      October 27, 2011

      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, [...]

    • NOLAN’S LANE, Canarsie

      October 25, 2011

      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 [...]

    • SMITHS LANE, Canarsie

      October 24, 2011

      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 [...]

    • HUNTERS POINT STATION

      October 19, 2011

      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 [...]

    • BORDEN AVENUE BRIDGE

      October 18, 2011

      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 [...]

    • YEAR 2011 LAMPPOSTS

      October 17, 2011

      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 [...]

    • HINSCH’S PINCHED: Brooklyn candy store closes after 6 decades

      October 4, 2011

      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 in Bay Ridge, only once in about 40 years — I was [...]

    • TREADWELL FARM

      September 21, 2011

      Forgotten NY has always been a bit sparse on Forgotten aspects of the Upper East Side. There has always been apractical side to this, as the Long Island RR brings me into Penn Station, whose various subway lines serve the west side of Manhattan, Upper and Lower. To get to the East Side I have [...]

    • COLUMBUS SQUARE, Astoria

      September 13, 2011

      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 [...]

    • TILES FOR SMILES: The Mulry Square 9/11 tile project

      September 10, 2011

      Mulry Square, at 7th and Greenwich Avenues in the Village, is named for Emigrant Savings Bank President Thomas Mulry (d. 1916), a tireless contributor to Catholic charitable causes, notably the Society of St. Vincent De Paul. The square is across the street from St. Vincent’s Hospital (who hasn’t wound up there late at night at [...]

    • WILD CHILD’S. The magnificent terra cotta ruin in Coney Island

      September 4, 2011

      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. [...]

    • EAST WILLIAMSBURG, briefly

      July 21, 2011

      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 [...]

    • FINE STREET MINING. Looking for Delmonico Place

      July 19, 2011

      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 [...]

    • FLUSHING TOUR DE CRAP

      July 13, 2011

      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 [...]

    • THE WALKING MEN: Cross signals from around the world

      July 5, 2011

      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 [...]

    • NEW FULTON: a look at the spiffed-up Fulton Mall

      June 30, 2011

      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 [...]

    • WOOSTER BOOSTER. The gang’s all here in Soho

      June 22, 2011

      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 [...]

    • LOWER 6TH and the Jefferson Market area

      June 21, 2011

      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 [...]

    • FIGHTIN’ 29th

      June 9, 2011

      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), [...]

    • U.S. BOND. Unbreakable street in NoHo

      June 1, 2011

      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 [...]

    • CRESCENT ROLL. A stroll on LIC’s Crescent Street

      May 27, 2011

      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 [...]

    • St. KEVIN’S and the Tudors of Auburndale

      May 18, 2011

      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 [...]

    • BUS BOY. A day at the MTA Bus Fair

      May 16, 2011

      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 [...]

    • 42. The avenue I’m taking you to

      May 11, 2011

      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 [...]

    • DINER AT THE END OF QUEENS. The Clinton

      May 4, 2011

      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, [...]

    • ANYONE FOR TENNIS? Brooklyn’s secret tennis courts

      April 22, 2011

      Just about every weekend when I was quite small one of my parents–most often my mother — and I would take a bus ride just to see what was out there. I didn’t know it at the time but this was the first brick in the foundation that would be Forgotten New York. In Bay Ridge, [...]

    • UN-FABULOUS 57th STREET in Maspeth

      April 19, 2011

      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, [...]

    • MARINE PARK and the Bennett-Wyckoff Homestead

      April 7, 2011

      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 [...]

    • Attention WARRANT-ed in Cobble Hill

      March 31, 2011

      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 [...]

    • BREAKING THE RULES. Odd placements of fire alarm indicators

      March 25, 2011

      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, [...]

    • POTAMOGETON POND

      March 22, 2011

      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 [...]

    • Slayin’ ‘em in DUTCH KILLS

      March 18, 2011

      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 [...]

    • UPTOWN WHIRL. IND light stanchions

      March 12, 2011

      Jump on the A train, take it uptown almost all the way to the end of the line, get out at 190th Street and exit on the Fort Washington Avenue side, and there it is in all its glory — one of the last, if not the last, freestanding subway lamp stanchions — that is, [...]

    • Can’t you see I’m TRYON in upper Manhattan

      March 11, 2011

      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) [...]

    • The Last WOODY

      March 7, 2011

      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 [...]

    • Stuck in the middle of CENTREVILLE in Ozone Park, Queens

      March 4, 2011

      I was hunting down an old road in Ozone Park just past the Brooklyn line south of the Liberty Avenue el, and followed it as far as it went. Near the end of the route, I was met by a playground and a street named Centreville, and I was in the midst of a small [...]

    • The Lost Type 40S lamppost: a mystery and a resolution

      March 1, 2011

      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 [...]

    • Five Alive, Volume II, Brooklyn

      February 16, 2011

      John Masefield famously wrote, I must go down to the seas again, and I am also a creature of habit — I am drawn to certain areas over and over, though I remain steadfast in my desire to eventually describe every neighborhood and subneighborhood in New York City to the last detail. I was at [...]

    • GANTRY FANCIERS in Long Island City

      February 3, 2011

      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 [...]

    • MIGHTY BOVANIZER and other Staten Island lanes

      February 2, 2011

      I have mentioned this before but in February 2005 I spent a week on vacation…in Staten Island. I rented a room at a B&B at the water’s edge, at the beginning of Hylan Boulevard where it meets the Narrows, just across the road from the Alice Austen House: it was a “residency” as they say [...]

    • AVENUE Zzzzzz

      January 27, 2011

      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 [...]

    • ARCTIC NECK. Winter scenes from January 2011, Little Neck, Queens

      January 25, 2011

      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. [...]

    • CALLING ON OLD FRIENDS Part 1. 6th Avenue and West 24th Street

      January 11, 2011

      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 [...]

    • CALLING ON OLD FRIENDS Part 2. 6th Avenue and West 22nd Street

      January 11, 2011

      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 [...]

    • UNION SQUARE. Colonial-era crossroads

      January 5, 2011

      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 [...]

    • UNION SQUARE

      January 4, 2011

      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 [...]

    • CHRISTMAS IN THE VILLAGE

      December 22, 2010

      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 [...]

    • STANTON STREET

      December 16, 2010

      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 [...]

    • RIVINGTON STREET

      December 15, 2010

      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 [...]

    • OLD ST. PATRICK’S

      December 9, 2010

      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 [...]

    • A walk in AUBURNDALE

      December 3, 2010

      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 [...]

    • HOLLIS HILLS, Queens

      November 25, 2010

      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.     [...]

    • WEST 30TH STREET PART 2

      November 18, 2010

      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, [...]

    • WEST 30TH STREET PART 1

      November 11, 2010

      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 [...]

    • RED SQUARE

      November 9, 2010

      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 [...]

    • WEST 57th STREET

      November 2, 2010

      Believe it or not, I have been inside Carnegie Hall only once. In the early 1980s — I forget the year now, as this was the Cambrian Era — I went to see a movie at Carnegie Hall that was accompanied by a piano player. Must have been a silent picture. (If anyone can fill me [...]

    • FOUR CORNERS of 8.30

      April 28, 2010

      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 [...]

    • JACKSON AVENUE, Hunters Point

      April 20, 2010

      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’ [...]

    • FORT HAMILTON PARKWAY

      April 17, 2010

      I try to keep Forgotten New York from turning into the Nostalgia Page of the Week, but when I am in Bay Ridge, I always have nostalgic thoughts, since I was born in Maimonides Hospital and lived in Bay Ridge the first 35 years of my life. My dentist and other dental specialists I consult [...]

    • 181st STREET

      April 7, 2010

      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 [...]

    • MIDWOOD, Brooklyn

      March 31, 2010

      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 [...]

    • REXALL and other ASTORIA SIGNS

      March 24, 2010

      Time was, you couldn’t walk down a main street of any small to medium town in America, swing a dead cat and not hit a Rexall drugstore, provided there were any dead cats on hand. Despite living in NYC for many more years than anyone can imagine I know this because there always seems to be a [...]

    • SUNNYSIDE LAMPPOST YARD

      March 21, 2010

      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 [...]

    • ASTORIA BRICKFACE

      March 18, 2010

      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 [...]

    • GM FISHBOWL BUSES

      March 15, 2010

      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 [...]

    • 26th STREET PARK

      March 10, 2010

      I’ve been aware of this rare midblock passageway between side streets in Chelsea, between West 26th and West 27th Streets, for a few years now. I was pasing by on my way to Madison Square Park a few days ago [Mach 2010] and thought I would snap a few photos — I don’t know how busy [...]

    • 123rd STREET

      March 4, 2010

      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 [...]

    • LIGHTS OUT for a classic Crook

      March 1, 2010

      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 [...]

    • WHO ARE THOSE GUYS? Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn

      February 24, 2010

      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 [...]

    • HARRIET TUBMAN MEMORIAL

      February 17, 2010

      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. [...]

    • LITTLE NECK PARKWAY

      February 15, 2010

      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 [...]

    • The heart of NEW UTRECHT

      February 10, 2010

      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 [...]

    • BENSONHURST BRIEFLY

      February 8, 2010

      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. [...]

    • BROOKLYN LIRR TERMINAL

      February 3, 2010

      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 [...]

    • SHIP GRAVEYARD, ROSSVILLE, Staten Island

      January 27, 2010

      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 [...]

    • WESTCHESTER SQUARE, BRONX, Part 2

      January 20, 2010

      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 [...]

    • WESTCHESTER SQUARE, Bronx, Part 1

      January 19, 2010

      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 [...]

    • THE BIG X IN BOROUGH PARK

      January 13, 2010

      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 [...]

    • FOREST HILLS, Queens

      January 12, 2010

      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 [...]

    • POLISH LEGION, Greenpoint

      December 29, 2009

      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 [...]

    • The TWO SHEEPSHEAD BAY ROADS

      December 22, 2009

      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 [...]

    • CORTELYOU ROAD, Brooklyn

      December 20, 2009

      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 [...]

    • BELMONT, Bronx

      December 15, 2009

      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 [...]

    • SHERIFF BISHOP CROOK

      December 9, 2009

      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 [...]

    • PAPAYA KING, 7th Avenue

      December 8, 2009

      Just a few weeks ago I went to 7th Avenue and West 14th Street to shoot the old Hotel Jeanne D’Arc and the “Cool Whip” terra cotta building on the opposite corner. At the same time, I snapped some photos of the Papaya King on the ground floor of the old hotel. I was unaware at the time [...]

    • MASPETH 2009

      December 7, 2009

      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. [...]

    • CATALPA AVENUE, Ridgewood

      November 16, 2009

      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, [...]

    • LITTLE NECK’S SURPRISE ALLEYS

      November 10, 2009

      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 [...]

    • HIDDEN BAY STREET, Staten Island

      October 27, 2009

      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 [...]

    • MOTT HAVEN, Bronx

      October 26, 2009

      If it seems as if I am revisiting a lot of areas I have previously covered this year [2009] that’s true. Many of my neighborhood profiles were done early on just after I instituted Forgotten NY back in 1999, and in NYC some areas never change much and others change at warp speed. Some areas I [...]

    • SPOOK HOUSE OF WILLIAMSBURG

      October 20, 2009

      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 [...]

    • OPEN HOUSE NEW YORK 2009 PART 2

      October 19, 2009

      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 [...]

    • OPEN HOUSE NEW YORK 2009

      October 15, 2009

      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 [...]

    • GREENWICH STREET POST

      October 7, 2009

      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 [...]

    • DURKEE FACTORY, Elmhurst

      September 30, 2009

      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) [...]

    • 5th and 19th

      September 24, 2009

      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 [...]

    • KISSENA PARK MEMORIAL

      September 17, 2009

      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, [...]

    • NEW YORK STATE PAVILION

      September 16, 2009

      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 [...]

    • SCHEFFEL HALL, Gramercy Park

      September 15, 2009

      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, [...]

    • COOPER SQUARE

      September 9, 2009

      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 [...]

    • ALLERTON AVENUE, Bronxdale

      September 3, 2009

      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 [...]

    • FOREST HILLS after dark

      August 27, 2009

      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 [...]

    • CLINTON HILL ‘DRUGSTORE’

      August 25, 2009

      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 [...]

    • CLOCKS OF YORKVILLE

      August 20, 2009

      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 [...]

    • ALBEMARLE ROAD, Kensington

      August 19, 2009

      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 [...]

    • PALMETTO STREET under the el, Ridgewood

      August 11, 2009

      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 [...]

    • INDIANA AVENUE, Glendale

      August 10, 2009

      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 [...]

    • NOBLE STREET, Greenpoint

      August 6, 2009

      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 [...]

    • WEST 20TH MYSTERY

      August 3, 2009

      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 [...]

    • PETER’S OF MADISON STREET

      July 29, 2009

      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 [...]

    • SOUTH OF PROSPECT PARK

      July 23, 2009

      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 [...]

    • SNYDER AVENUE, Flatbush

      July 21, 2009

      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 [...]

    • SANFORD AVENUE, Flushing

      July 13, 2009

      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 [...]

    • SIGNS OF MANHATTAN AVENUE

      July 8, 2009

      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 [...]

    • LORIMER STREET

      July 6, 2009

      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 [...]

    • NORTH 5TH: SACRED and PROFANE

      June 30, 2009

      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 [...]

    • 4 CORNERS: NORTH 4TH

      June 29, 2009

      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 [...]

    • LITTLE HUNGARY

      June 25, 2009

      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 [...]

    • SUNNYSIDE SIGNS

      June 17, 2009

      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 [...]

    • MASPETH Wall Ad

      June 5, 2009

      “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 [...]

    • LORELEI FOUNTAIN, Bronx

      May 17, 2009

      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 [...]

    • CEDAR LANE, Bronx

      May 15, 2009

      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 [...]

    • TRIBORO BRIDGE LAMPPOSTS

      May 11, 2009

      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 [...]

    • EAST RIVER PARK

      May 7, 2009

      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 [...]

    • MEATPACKING

      May 4, 2009

      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 [...]

    • FORT HAMILTON

      April 27, 2009

      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, [...]

    • WEST 230TH BRICKS

      April 13, 2009

      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 [...]

    • STUDLEY TRIANGLE

      April 9, 2009

      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 [...]

    • DOROTHEA PLACE

      April 6, 2009

      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 [...]

    • OLIVER PLACE, BRONX

      March 30, 2009

      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 [...]

    • BEDFORD STREET

      March 23, 2009

      “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 [...]

    • A & S REMAINS

      March 19, 2009

      I frequently mention my childhood in FNY, since there’s so much material to draw from in terms of what’s gone or what’s altered beyond recognition. About once a month when I was a kid in the Swingin’ 60s, my mother, father and I would pile on to the B37 bus on 3rd Avenue and off we [...]

    • MIXED BAG

      March 17, 2009

      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 [...]

    • WEST 12th STREET

      March 12, 2009

      Sometimes the best FNY pages happen when I’m looking for something else — one Sunday in March 2009 I am on the way to the Apple store on 9th and West 14th — I am loyal to that store because they supplied me with a power cord gratis when I left my old one on a [...]

    • 74th STREET, BAY RIDGE

      March 3, 2009

      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 [...]

    • LOWER 2nd AVENUE

      February 26, 2009

      The definitive 2nd Avenue FNY page has yet to be written — in sunnier weather I intend to walk it from Houston Street all the way to where it ends at the FDR Drive and East 128th — but till I wind up doing that, I’ll use these shots that I obtained on an east side [...]

    • 35th and 36th STREETS, ASTORIA

      February 23, 2009

      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 [...]

    • RIDGEWOOD’S PHANTOM RAILROAD

      February 19, 2009

      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 [...]

    • CARROLL STREET (one block)

      February 18, 2009

      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 [...]

    • ARROCHAR ANGELS

      February 12, 2009

      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 [...]

    • BEEKMAN TOWER

      February 11, 2009

      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 [...]

    • 3RD AVENUE, Bay Ridge

      February 11, 2009

      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 [...]

    • MUSICAL TRIANGLE, Queens

      February 9, 2009

      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 [...]

    • WINDSOR TERRACE

      February 4, 2009

      Your webmaster intends to break new ground in FNY — or, rather, cover new ground in 2009 (check back in December to see if I did!). Staten Island and the Bronx have hundreds of acres yet to be roved through and combed for traces of the past or unusual artifacts. However, I can always find new [...]

    • CATHEDRAL PREP, BROOKLYN

      January 29, 2009

      Many years ago Donald Fagen of Steely Dan indicated that he wouldn’t be going back to his old school (Bard College in upstate NY). I rarely go back to any of mine, either — I was despised at my grade school by the faculty and student body alike, and I hated them right back; I have [...]

    • SHEEPSHEAD BAY MURAL

      January 25, 2009

      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 [...]

    • END OF A CLASSIC STOPLIGHT

      January 19, 2009

      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, [...]

    • HUBBARD HOUSE, CHEYENNE DINER SAVED

      January 15, 2009

      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 [...]

    • CONEY ISLAND 2009

      January 7, 2009

      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 [...]

    • DUNNE and DOONE PLACES, Sheepshead Bay

      January 5, 2009

      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 [...]

    • PINES of 249th Street

      December 30, 2008

      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 [...]

    • HERALD SQUARE POSTER

      December 26, 2008

      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 [...]

    • MANHATTAN CLOCK SAMPLER

      December 25, 2008

      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 [...]

    • 23rd ST LAMPPOST DEMISE

      December 22, 2008

      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 [...]

    • ROOSEVELT AVENUE SIGNS

      December 17, 2008

      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 [...]

    • MOORE-JACKSON CEMETERY

      December 15, 2008

      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 [...]

    • EAR INN

      December 10, 2008

      Whenever I find myself in the Ear Inn, 326 Spring Street between Greenwich and Washington, it always seems to be a crystal clear but blustery day and that’s just as well, since this is a comforting oasis amid the rapidly-changing west end of Soho. This area has been targeted by developers and huge residential towers have been [...]

    • GORDON’S NOVELTIES, Broadway

      December 4, 2008

      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 [...]

    • HUNTERS POINT AWNING ART

      December 1, 2008

      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 [...]

    • CLAREMONT RIDING STABLES

      November 20, 2008

      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 [...]

    • 21st STREET BRIDGE

      November 19, 2008

      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 [...]

    • CRUMBLING CHERUBS of East 43rd

      November 17, 2008

      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 [...]

    • WEST 10TH BISHOP CROOK

      November 12, 2008

      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. [...]

    • DETMOLD PARK

      November 8, 2008

      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 [...]

    • DENNET PLACE, Cobble Hill

      November 6, 2008

      I’ve been aware of Dennet Place since I first started perusing Hagstrom maps, specifically September 1968 (age 11) when I acquired my first one, at Gertz on Jamaica Avenue, in precincts far from my parents’ Bay Ridge base. We were on a mission to get a wall unit for the old man to put all his [...]

    • RAPELYE STREET, Carroll Gardens

      November 5, 2008

      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 [...]

    • THE ABANDONED COURTHOUSE

      November 3, 2008

      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 [...]

    • TYPE “G” SPOT

      October 31, 2008

      Your webmaster recently took advantage of an amazing coincidence –