Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
In the remotest section of Staten Island, on a high hill with nothing but tangled weeds, snarled vines, migrating birds and hissing insects there lies the remains of one man’s dreams to bring verdant fields and cash crops to some of the highest hills in the Northeast south of Maine. We’ll begin in Egbertville. Known [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC
While I was lounging on the poop deck of a Seastreak ferryboat (that name has always reminded me of the old Oakland Raider, Otis Sistrunk) on Saturday, September 22, 2012, getting soaked by propeller wash and fending off other photographers on an overbooked ride to visit several NYC lighthouses, a thought occurred to me. I [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: New Jersey Staten Island
CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Continuing south on Cross Island Parkway, the roadway briefly sneaks into Nassau County, and then straightens south of Belmont Racetrack, neatly delineating the Queens-Nassau border. The highway then splits into the eastbound Southern State Parkway and westbound Belt Parkway. The Laurelton segment of Belt Parkway between exits 23 and 25 has [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Bayside Flushing Laurelton Little Neck Queens Rosedale St. Albans
BY SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten NY contributor Queens is a borough containing many streams. It has numerous creeks, basins, inlets, bays, and rivers. Deeper inland are a few ponds, remnants of the last ice age, a respite from the chaotic urban development that surrounds them. The eastern half of Queens in particular still has ponds, tucked [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Bayside Flushing Laurelton Little Neck Queens Rosedale St. Albans
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
BY SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten NY contributor The Rockaway Peninsula of Queens never disappoints an urban explorer. Physically separated from the rest of New York City by water, it often feels like a forgotten sixth borough. The borough’s southwestern tip, Breezy Point is a collection of gated communities, military history, and unspoiled nature. Without a special [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: BREEZY POINT FORT TILDEN Queens ROXBURY
When my friend and FNY correspondent Christina Wilkinson wrote a Governors Island overview in 2004, I thought it was the best one I had read until that time. The website it originally appeared on has folded since then, so I thought it would be a good time to reprint it here, along with some new [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC
CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Turns out my educated guess was right…here’s a 1949 Hagstrom Staten Island showing Drumgoole Boulevard, with Ramona Blvd. in parentheses. I couldn’t come to any other conclusion; it couldn’t have been any other road. The identity of this building set back from Center Street near Arthur Kill Road is no [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Richmondtown Staten Island
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Richmondtown Staten Island
Father John C. Drumgoole (1828-1888) made the care of homeless and destitute children his life’s work, founding Mount Loretto on Staten Island’s south shore in 1882: Fr. Drumgoole was a great innovator in the field of childcare. The layout of the Mission was designed to provide plenty of light and air to each resident so [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Mount Loretto Prince's Bay Staten Island
Your webmaster has never been an oceangoer, beach comber or even gone fishing, despite my admiration of mermaids and crab cakes. New York is nearly completely surrounded by water, however, and as Herman Melville observed in Chapter 1 of Moby-Dick, there’s a pull to the shoreline…as in going down to the shore, just to look [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC
CONTINUED FROM PART 2 Leaving behind the Yellow Submarine for now, Marie, Duke and Mike pressed on east and followed Coney Island Creek to its end at Shell Road…. Exploring Coney Island Creek Coney Island Creek is actually a tidal strait (as is the much bigger Long Island Sound) and originally connected Gravesend and [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Four Corners Staten Island Sunnyside Todt Hill
Todt Hill, Staten Island’s 412-foot tall mountain, is in the center of the borough and is at once wild, wide-open and untrammeled and manages, at the same time, to be one of Staten Island’s most exclusive and expensive areas…for people on both sides of the law. Join your webmaster as he climbs and ascends the [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Four Corners Staten Island Sunnyside Todt Hill
Resembling Silver Beach along the southern edge of Throgs Neck, the Bronx community of Harding Park features inlets, reeds, and small houses and bungalows clustered along the confluence of the East and Bronx Rivers, and its topography is also shaped by Pugsley’s and Westchester Creeks. GOOGLE MAP: HARDING PARK Rocky shore of the East River; [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Bronx Clasons Point
EEKERS of solitude, abandonment and subtle disquiet will find a banquet of opportunity in mid-Staten Island. Here lie the slowly rotting wards of old Seaview Hospital, the former property of the horrific Willowbrook State School, and our destination today, the windswept ruin that was the New York State Farm Colony. Here, in a place [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Staten Island Willowbrook
In the remotest section of Staten Island, on a high hill with nothing but tangled weeds, snarled vines, migrating birds and hissing insects there lies the remains of one man’s dreams to bring verdant fields and cash crops to some of the highest hills in the Northeast south of Maine. We’ll begin in Egbertville. Known [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC
South Brother Island (foreground), North Brother Island (background) On June 15, 1904, the General Slocum, an excursion vessel on the way to Long Island for a church picnic outing, burst into flames in the East River. Over 1200 lost their lives. Slocum Captain William Van Schaick drove the vessel toward North Brother Island, one [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Bronx islands
In my NYC travels, I am occasionally drawn to untrammeled, ruined places that are awaiting renovation or demolition; only when witnessing such desolation, it seems, can I truly appreciate the revitalization that is otherwise going on in the city in this post-9/11 era (and who knows how long before we’ll be talking about another day [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Rossville Staten Island
Directly across Richmond Terrace from Mariners’ Harbor, in the far northwest shore of Staten Island up a lengthy gravel path, are the remains of docks (occasionally) covered in rime, from which new ships were launched into Kill Van Kull. The tall building in the center left is Goldman Sachs’ Jersey City headquarters; at 820 feet [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Arlington Mariners Harbor Parks Staten Island
In an otherwise undistinguished bend of Richmond Terrace between the old towns of West New Brighton and Port Richmond, a bridge carries the old Terrace (formerly part of the post road to Philadelphia and originally laid out in 1705) over a narrow creek with just a rusty fence protecting pedestrians from accidentally falling in. The [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Arden Heights Staten Island Westerleigh
Once one of New York City’s only two commercial airports (along with North Beach/LaGuardia Airport) Floyd Bennett Field now borders the southern stretch of Flatbush Avenue between Marine Park Golf Course and Jamaica Bay. Though it’s a National Historic Site, it’s little visited these days, except when flea markets are held there, and much of [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Brooklyn Marine Park
What borough has the largest amount of park acreage? Of course…the Bronx! Van Cortlandt Park, and its partner to the east, Pelham Bay Park, account for over 3800 acres of parkland…much of it undeveloped and wild. The story of Van Cortlandt Park begins in 1699, when future NYC mayor Jacobus Van Cortlandt bought a [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Bronx Riverdale
New York City has, in decades past, been well protected from foreign attack by two large forts in Queens, one at its southern coast (Fort Tilden) and the other at its northernmost point (Fort Totten). FORT TILDEN, on the western edge of the Rockaway peninsula, was conceived when the USA entered World War I in [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Queens Rockaways
Down the southeast coast of Staten Island, retreating glaciers not a few millennia ago left a number of small, unobtusive ponds that serve as way stations for migrating shorebirds, as well as havens for perennial birds, reptiles, fish and other wildlife. While they are recognized by the Parks Department, they don’t turn up on maps, [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Eltingville Grasmere Great Kills New Brighton Staten Island
At Forgotten NY, it’s been awhile since we settled into Thoreauvian mode and visited a part of town that in no way resembles the horn-honking, jolt-cola, cell-phone-yapping rest of town, got away from it all and, if not communed with nature, at least bowed our heads and let it believe it’s the true master. A [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Huguenot Beach Parks Staten Island
City Island resembles a New England seaside town transplanted into the five boroughs. Since it was first settled in 1761 its lifeblood has been the sea, with shipyards, sailmakers and oystermen predominating. It played a large part in New York City’s coastal defense until the early 20th Century. City Island was privately owned, first [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Bronx City Island
Most people think Manhattan is buried under layer upon layer of concrete, with all evidence of its primordial past vanished. There’s still hundreds of acres of natural Manhattan Island still left though! Take the IRT all the way to the last stop in Manhattan, at 215th Street, cross to Broadway, walk up the steps, go [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Inwood Manhattan
I’ve been visiting the amazing Historic Richmond Town in the heart of Staten Island for a few years now — and if you haven’t been there yet, I’d heartily recommend a visit to this enclave of 18th and 19th Century houses, businesses and establishments brought in from all over the Island. They’re all lovingly restored [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Richmondtown Staten Island
Rattlesnakes? In New York City? Not anymore. The last rattlesnakes in the Bronx, their last stronghold, died off around the turn of the last century because of encroaching civilization as streets were laid out and housing was built. People and rattlesnakes aren’t a good mix; snakes have fangs and people have pitchforks. (Smaller snakes like [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Bronx Eastchester Parks
A creek? In the streets of New York City? You better believe it. In fact, there are more than one in Staten Island, until recently the last frontier of New York City. Although rapidly developing right now, the neighborhoods of Woodrow and Pleasant Plains were mostly woods and creeks until the late 1970s. [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: creek Lemon Creek Staten Island
The Queens County Farm Museum occupies 7 1/2 acres in the heart of Glen Oaks, Queens, NY. Its croplands and orchards are being used to demonstrate the history of agriculture in New York. The Museum staff and volunteers harvest apples and grow herbs, squash, tomatoes and other standard market vegetables, which are sold from a roadside [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: farms Little Neck Queens
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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Necrology You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Bronx Throgs Neck
Until the mid-1890s, and the advent of mechanical transportation, the way to get around NYC was with horses. Though Dobbin no longer is the backbone of the transportation hub, stables dot the five boroughs, serving bridle paths in nearby parks. Shown in the title card is the corral at the West Side Chelsea Piers. Hundreds of dwellings formerly used [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Horses Stables
The Bronx is usually thought to be the most urban of New York’s five boroughs. However, several areas in NYC’s only mainland borough belie that notion… Title card: This view of the Hudson River is available just south of the Riverdale Metro-North Station. The Palisades of New Jersey are visible across the Hudson. photo: Jon [...]
Categorized in: You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Bronx Riverdale Wave Hill
Nestled in the middle of Jamaica Bay is an island community known as Broad Channel. It is the province of seagulls, roaring jets taking off from Kennedy Airport, The Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, and a proud, insular neighborhood that claims what it can from the bay, occasionally jutting into it by building on stilts. Unlike [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods You'd Never Believe You're in NYC Tagged with: Broad Channel Queens
