Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
Other than Little Neck, the Queens neighborhood in which I spend the most time is unquestionably Astoria, where I sit on the board of the Greater Astoria Historical Society and, as such, am often summoned to one meeting or the other. To make things interesting I get off at different stops on the Astoria elevated [...]
As part of the rehabilitation and restoration of the Hunters Point Avenue #7 train station (which actually stops at 49th Avenue, which was still called Hunters Point Avenue when the station opened) a tiled sign saying “To Astoria and Corona” has been once again uncovered. Why doesn’t it say “To Astoria and Flushing”? That’s where [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Astoria Corona Queens
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Walks Tagged with: Astoria Lenox Hill Manhattan Queens
Categorized in: Walks Tagged with: Astoria Lenox Hill Manhattan Queens
CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Steinway Mansion William Steinway’s mansion, on 41st Street, still stands on a high hill that has never been leveled, unlike the surrounding area. 41st Street still looks like a country lane. 41st Street, looking north from 19th Avenue, is totally nondescript — there are a couple of manufacturers and some storage [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Walks Tagged with: Astoria Queens
I have always considered the massive concrete arches that lift railroad tracks to the Hell Gate Bridge over the streets of northwest Astoria almost as imposing as the arch bridge itself. Tracks, arches and bridge were constructed from 1914-1917 and connect Pennsylvania Station, the Sunnyside Yards, and southern Queens with the northeast United States.
Astoria Village is a small area tucked into Queens’ northwest edge, south of Astoria Park and Hell Gate, east of Roosevelt Island. The area was first settled in the 1600s by Brit William Hallett (an East River inlet was named Hallett’s Cove) and still boasts a quirky, interlocking street layout. It was named (as was [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Astoria Queens street art
Hello ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Forgotten New York Walks, a new FNY category and the first since FNY Slices was instituted in July 2007. Walks will feature what the title indicates, a walk from one neighborhood to the other — especially when the two neighborhoods are completely disparate. In 2007 I [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Grand Central Manhattan Queens Roosevelt Island
Above: Triborough Bridge at dusk, seen from the platform of the Astoria Blvd. station on the N/Q elevated Astoria Line. The station, since the mid-1930s, has been positioned over the Grand Central Parkway, which connects the Triborough to eastern Long Island. At its northern end, the station affords a view of the massive concrete viaduct [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Astoria Columbus
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 [...]
Categorized in: Signs Street Necrology Subways & Trains Tagged with: Astoria Hunters Point Queens Rockaway Sunnyside
The Department of Transportation has installed a clutch of Triborough-style lampposts (I call them ‘Tribes’) along Broadway in Astoria. I was surprised to see them as I got off the N train at 31st Street and Broadway a few weeks ago, although the DOT has been resurrecting NYC’s legacy of lightpost designs since the mid-1980s, when [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Astoria Queens Triborough Bridge
BY SERGEY KADINSKY Contributor to Forgotten NY Queens is a borough of many boulevards. Some define the borough, while others stretch for only a few blocks, stubs of once-grand plans that never came to fruition. Astoria’s Berrian Boulevard is one such example. When Queens was mapped out into a uniform grid in the early 1920s, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Queens
The Astoria el, which runs up 31st Street from Queens Plaza to just short of Ditmars Boulevard and carries the N train and the soon to be retired W (the Q will take its place, I’m told), alternates between a busy, bustling neighborhood mecca with newsstands and restaurants and a forbidding demimonde of the detritus of [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Queens
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Astoria Queens
I happen to be involved in one capacity or the other with both the Greater Astoria Historical Society and the Newtown Historical Society, both concerned with the preservation of the legacies of areas in western Queens, architectural and otherwise. Both meet in the same building, a funeral parlor on Broadway in Astoria; after periodic meetings there break up, if [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Astoria Queens
I am fond of speculating about possibilities that I will never experience. In future centuries, if we don’t snuff ourselves, there is going to be quite the sightseeing market on those satellites that orbit the bigger planets in the solar system. Imagine the view of Jupiter, with its swirling clouds and red spot (you can drop [...]
Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Astoria Queens
Continued From Part 1 Ditmars Boulevard is interrupted for a couple of blocks between 82nd and 86th Streets, partly a consequence of the construction of LaGuardia, né Glenn Curtiss Airport, in the early 1930s. 23rd Avenue (left) skirts the southern boundary of the airport for a couple of blocks and is lit by dwarf [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Astoria Queens
The name Ditmars, or Ditmas, appears more than once in the NYC street directory. The Bronx has a Ditmars Street in City Island, there’s a Ditmas Avenue in Kensington, namesake Ditmas Park and Brownsville, Brooklyn; and here in Astoria, Ditmars Boulevard, named in honor of Abram Ditmars, first mayor of Long Island City, NY who [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Astoria Queens
I haven’t done much on Astoria; it just seems as if I have. I recently walked Broadway in Queens, which cuts across the neighborhoods. And, it seems as if I’m always visiting theGreater Astoria Historical Society for book readings and exhibits. I’ve done a number of pages on Astoria Village, an unprotected 19th-Century area just south of [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Astoria Queens
The Brooklyn Museum recently donated a colonial relic to the Greater Astoria Historical Society — a door that was part of the historic Blackwell Mansion in Ravenswood, Queens, likely built in 1730 by patriarch Jacob Blackwell (1692-1744). After the Battle of Brooklyn (aka the battle of Long Island) in August 1776, the British and Hessians swept into Queens [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Astoria Queens
FNY returns to Astoria Village this week: my third page here. It’s a region the Historic Districts Council calls a “neighborhood at risk” due to the accelerating rate of teardowns and new construction. It’s a neighborhood that, despite its stock of antebellum mansions and single-family homes, has steadfastly resisted any effort at preservation — and is paying the esthetic costs [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Queens Triborough Bridge
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Astoria Kips Bay Manhattan Penn Station Queens Triborough Bridge
In a sense Forgotten New York always goes back to lampposts. When your webmaster was six I noticed the wholesale replacement of old styles by new ones in Bay Ridge and later, all around town. I filled note pads and tablets with drawings of lampposts — never ones of my own design, but slavish imitations [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Astoria Newark Queens Sunnyside
In its October 12-18th, 2006 issue, Time Out New York (which featured a cover story by your webmaster in its September 21-27th issue) presented its 50 Best Blocks of NYC story, with North Portland Avenue between Lafayette and DeKalb Avenues in Fort Greene, Brooklyn coming out the winner. It has spawned a debate in ForgottenLand [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Queens
Remsen House, 27th Avenue and 12th Street, Astoria, destroyed February 2005. The house was built in 1835. DEVELOPERS can be a hateful, despicable bunch. Quite a statement coming from a website that evades controversy like Barry Bonds evading a steroid test. But it’s the truth. I am completely ignorant regarding real estate, the price of land and housing, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Queens
Before poured concrete became the de rigueur material for New York City sidewalks, they boasted unique slate bluestone plates that made a distinct hollow noise when trod upon. Older parts of town can still be recognized, in part, by the presence of such distinct and handsome bluestone slate sidewalks, as we’ll see on this page… [...]
Categorized in: Cobblestones Tagged with: Astoria Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights Carroll Gardens Flushing Maspeth Queens
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 [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Necrology Tagged with: Astoria Queens
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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Necrology Tagged with: Astoria Queens
Queens has an abundance of small, out-of-the-way, ancient cemeteries, many of which go back to the 1700s, some of which are barely suspected by neighbors. Ancient burial grounds are alngside two-family homes, in parks and even UNDER a lot of places they wouldn’t be expected. LAWRENCE FAMILY BURIAL GROUND, Astoria Though the historical marker [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Tagged with: Astoria Cambria Heights Fresh Meadows Glendale Long Island City Middle Village Queens
Continued from Part 1 This time, our survey of little-noticed Queens alleyways takes us from gritty, concrete-enveloped Long Island City all the way east to bucolic, rural Little Neck–which could pass for an upstate village or a small North Shore town, which, of course, it is! So let’s start in Long Island City and work [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Boker Briarwood Charlotte College Point Cornell Corona Elmhurst Flushing Forest Hills Glendale Hawtree Linneaus Little Neck Queens Ridgewood South Jamaica Sunnyside Whitestone
The Steinway Family, the master piano builders, transit magnates, and resort developers, and the Kreischers, the brick makers who left their mark on far-flung New York City neighborhoods, put a personal stamp on the neighborhoods in which they resided, and these stamps are visible even today. Henry Steinweg, a German piano manufacturer, emigrated to [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Astoria Bloomingdale Kreischer Sandy Ground Steinway
Queens, in many ways, is the youngest of the five boroughs. It became a part of the city when its widely separated towns joined with the Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Manhattan in 1898 to become the five boroughs. Part of Queens, though, wanted nothing to do with New York City and so the Queens [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Tagged with: Astoria Briarwood College Point Corona Elmhurst Flushing Forest Hills Glendale Little Neck Queens Ridgewood South Jamaica Sunnyside Whitestone
Many people don’t know it but many of the buildings of the original village of Astoria still survive, in a tiny area west of 21st Street and north of Astoria Boulevard, and most are in terrific shape. Walking through the area is like taking a trip back to the mid-1800s, when may of these houses were [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Astoria Queens
New York City has preserved more of the classic Bishop Crook lampposts than any other of the cast-iron designs. In fact, the city has been busy since the 1980s bringing back the bishop crook design in newly installed posts, notably along Sixth Avenue in the Village and as far north as 23rd Street. The [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Astoria City Hall Park Financial District Manhattan Queens Riverdale Washington Heights
