Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society
The Greater Astoria Historical Society, chartered in 1985, is a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community. We are dedicated to preserving our past and using it to promote our community's future.
The Forgotten NY Book of Street Necrology is a thick, dusty, ancient tome, encrusted with the grime of centuries, its lock rusting and the last flecks of gilt flaking off the bindery. Unlike the recent flimsy editions of the AIA Guide to New York City (whose pages separate from the glue binding soon after first [...]
Long Island City, Queens, which once encompassed all of western Queens west of Woodside from the East River south to Newtown Creek, was once a city on its own (beginning in 1870) before Queens was absorbed by Greater New York in 1898. Even after the coagulation, LIC loomed large in Queens affairs, as its first Borough [...]
Continued from Part 1 The beautiful Hell Gate Bridge, completed by Gustav Lindenthal in 1917, was the jewel in the crown of Alexander Cassatt’s Pennsylvania Railroad station in midtown, opened in 1910. The Hell Gate allowed the Pennsylvania RR a through route to Connecticut, Rhode Island and Boston. The Hell Gate Bridge combines with the [...]
Turning to the dusty, dogeared Book of Forgotten Street Names, making a mental note to replace the yellowed scotch tape that holds the cover together, we see that the tome plops open to… Astoria, Queens. Like Flushing, Astoria’s pedigree dates to the mid-1600s, when William Hallett received a grant for the area surrounding what is [...]
This time, as we open the ancient New York City Street Necrology with its cracked, crumbling leather cover, a dogeared page with running, streaming ink and stains from lord knows what plops open, and there, revealed on the verso, is…Fourth Avenue, and there on the recto is Avenue A. Today, Fourth Avenue is the shortest [...]
Continued from Part 1 “DOWNTOWN” BROOKLYN, FULTON FERRY, ‘DUMBO’ These three areas, on the present-day map pf Brooklyn, encompass all the territory north and east of Old Fulton Street/Cadman Plaza West, to the Brooklyn Navy Yard on the east and Fulton Mall on the south. This part of Brooklyn has seen the most change since the [...]
Much of downtown Brooklyn, which for my purposes includes Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Vinegar Hill, Red Hook and part of Fort Greene, no longer exists. It used to be home to a collection of streets wide and narrow, full of tenements, stores, and cobblestones, many overshadowed by dark forbidding elevated structures where trains rattled on their way to and across [...]
The Lower East Side of Manhattan, roughly defined by Houston Street on the north, the East River on the east and south, and by the Manhattan Bridge and the Bowery on the west, known in story and song as a teeming, bustling magnet for immigrants in the 19h and 20th Centuries, actually has a long [...]
Greenwich Village usually conjures up visions of bearded, black-clad hipsters sipping coffee in jazz clubs, but it actually had a long history before the writers, revolutionaries and bohemians made it their enclave in the early 20th Century. The original Greenwich Village was a Canarsee Indian fishing village called Seppanikan (some accounts spell it Sapokanican), centered [...]
This 1946 Hagstrom of the Wall Street area (boxed in gray) of Manhattan shows a large number of streets that have disappeared over the decades, many of which made it into the 1970s. The Sixties and Seventies were eras in which dozens of streets were eliminated to make way for developments like the World Trade [...]
Throgs Neck is named for John Throckmorton, who settled in the area in 1643, Throgs Neck is one of the least-commented on sections in the Bronx. Featuring gorgeous views of the East River (as it merges with Long Island Sound), it evinces little of the New York City of which it is officially a part. (The [...]
