Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
This awning sign on 86th Street near 5th Avenue is actually now one of the more venerable signs on the street, dating to 1981 or so. There was originally a plastic figure of a girl trying vainly to fit into her pants. It has gradually chipped off bit by bit over the years, so that [...]
The Owls Head Sewage Treatment Plant, on the outskirts of beautiful Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, is accessible by roads from Bay Ridge Avenue (69th Street) and from the Belt Parkway. The plant had always had species of oddball lampposts on its roads — this photo is from the 1940s, and these posts, which resemble the ones [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Street Lamps Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Despite the protests of congregants, preservationists and neighbors, the Bay Ridge United Methodist Church, popularly known as the Green Church, was razed in 2008. From my Ovington Avenue page: The “Green Church” was built in 1899 by George Kramer. It is one of the last relics, along with the Episcopal Christ Church at Ridge Boulevard and 73rd Street, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
I was an altar boy as a kid, and attended Catholic schools all the way from kindergarden to Grade 16, my last year at St. Francis College. And, I even got a valve transplant at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn in 2009. Still: I have never been particularly religious, and never really ‘bought in.’ Paradoxically, [...]
A mystery about Bay Ridge, Brooklyn was cleared up for me today, and I had Woody Allen, however indirectly, to thank for it. Sometimes it takes unusual convergences to come together to make up a Forgotten NY page. Today, two separate websites, my childhood nerdiness, and the 1977 Academy Award® winning picture came together to [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn Woody Allen
Today’s featured walk sent me from Bay Ridge after a dental appointment southeast and east through Sunset Park and Borough Park at the border of Kensington. Well-worn territory for me, and suffused with familiarity and memories…since I was born, raised and spent my first 35 years there. Still, I can always find some little-trodden ground [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Walks Tagged with: Bay Ridge Borough Park Brooklyn Sunset Park
1/9/13: ***HINSCH’s DOOMED AGAIN, as its new owners couldn’t make a profit.*** 10/17/11: ***HINSCH’S SAVED, as the owners of Skinflint’s on 5th will operate it.**** I’ll admit it, I had been in Hinsch’s (pronounced HINSH’S, as if the C wasn’t there), the long-lived candy store and luncheonette, on 5th Avenue between 85th and 86th Streets [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge diners
Time to delve once more into the Bob Mulero collection of lampposts. Bob and I achieved our separate lamppost obsessions separately: while both us have been enthusiastically noting the state of NYC’s lamppost collection since childhood, Bob got the jump on me and began photographing them in the mid-1970s, a time when I was attending college [...]
I stumbled desultorily through the lost neighborhood of a vanished youth, a broken man with broken teeth. When I visit Bay Ridge these days it is mostly to visit my dentist, and work has been endless this year, with two cracked incisors, a crown falling out, an impacted wisdom tooth, and other work too gruesome [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn forts
Parts of New York City are very steep and hilly. To allow access to the hillier areas, engineers have occasionally inserted step streets into the grid to allow foot traffic acess to private houses, or just to get from one place to the other. Oftentimes, step streets are not indicated as such on maps, and running into them [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Bay Ridge is the land of my youth. It is also the land of my dentist, and I will be spending three Saturdays, at least, in Bay Ridge as my mouth continues its latest reconstruction. Bay Ridge has a number of lengthy north-south avenues and also has a number of avenues that carry names instead of numbers: [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Three boroughs have a major road called 3rd Avenue: Manhattan’s 3rd Avenue runs from Cooper Square north to the Harlem River and officially extends into the Bronx as Third Avenue (it was so named when the elevated train was extended into the Bronx in the 1880s). The Bronx even has a second 3rd Avenue in [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Tagged with: 3rd Avenue Bay Ridge Brooklyn
While walking uptown during Summer Streets 2010 I passed by two of New York City’s most picturesque relics at Park Avenue and East 46th, at the tunnel that takes the Park Avenue Viaduct through the Helmsley Building. On both sides of the street, you find two picturesque Corvington-esque light posts, but instead of a streetlight attached to the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Roads Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
There are entire sections of Brooklyn, probably New York City’s borough that hews most rigidly to the grid concept, that have no cul de sacs or alleys whatsoever; think of Sunset Park, Marine Park or Bensonhurst, which have only a handful between them. When it comes to one-block streets or hidden laneways, I was fortunate to [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Continued from Page 1 WAYFARING: BAY RIDGE ALLEYS 72nd Court 72nd Court is a dead-end on 72nd Street just east of Shore Road. Unlike its alley partners in Bay Ridge, it doesn’t have a name, but rather unimaginatively borrows the number of the street where it’s located; perhaps all the permutations of “Bay” and “Ridge” had been [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
It’s a lot cooler to not look back. I heard Van Morrison being interviewed by Don Imus [early March 2009] (about 100 years of showbiz there) and he said he never listens to his old hits, even though he was touring on his 1968 recird Astral Weeks in early 2009. But among artists, they’re supposed to say they never look [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
By 2008 the only real link I had to my home town, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, is my dentist. I have been treated at the same practice, with two different dentists, since 1964 and, since my father’s demise and the conversion of Zeke’s Roast Beef to yet another Chinese food place (like there aren’t enough of [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Your webmaster has never met a Denise, or a Denyse, for that matter, who was unattractive. At the same time, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn’s Denyse Wharf, or its remains, are not much to look at. The wharf, however, is a lost treasure of the colonial past and a Revolutionary War remnant. To arrive at the wharf, the only [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
“I am Bay Ridge.” That might sound funny coming from your webmaster, who hasn’t lived there since 1993, and whose only real-life connection to the old neighborhood is my dentist, whose office is on 4th Avenue and 75th Street (for non Bay Ridgers, Bay Ridge Parkway). I frequently go back, however, and in August 2007 chose [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn Shore Road
Corridor parks…long, narrow strips of green that go on for block after block between two streets, are relatively rare in NYC. The Bronx has two lengthy ones on either side of Mosholu and Pelham Parkways, Kissena Corridor Park in Flushing and Fresh Meadows, and perhaps even Eastern and Ocean Parkways in Brooklyn can come under [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
We’ve heard it all before…rapacious developers threaten to eliminate one more piece of New York City history’s puzzle. In the case of the Bay Ridge United Methodist Church on 4th and Ovington Avenues in Bay Ridge, however, the picture is muddied by the fact that it is the church’s own pastor who has conracted with [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Scandinavians have largely disappeared from Bay Ridge and Sunset Park, just as other neighborhoods have radically changed over the years. Immigrants from northern Europe first began arriving in Brooklyn in great numbers in the 1890s, and work was readily available in the great port city New York was at the time. The Brooklyn Navy Yard, also [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
Tour 20 in April 2005 was host to about fifty Forgotten Fans in the land of your webmaster’s upbringing. Expected showers never appeared. This tour was lengthier than most, since Bay Ridge‘s sights are spread out over about 40 blocks, but that just made the rest and the eats after the tour that much better. Our tour [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
When I was a kid, they built a bridge in my back yard. The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was built in five years between 1959 and 1964. Prior to that, there was no way to reach Staten Island from any other part of NYC except by boat. Ironically, you could reach Staten Island from the mainland via 3 bridges, [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Bay Ridge Bridges Brooklyn
BY THE THOUSANDS they came, back in the early 1960s, replacing the picturesque castiron Corvington longarms… It was a strange, exhilarating, depressing yet exciting time to be a six-year-old lamppost fan back in 1963. My street, Sixth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, was lined with the Victorian-era chocolate-colored “Corvington” long-armed mast poles (similar to the one [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: 5th Avenue Bay Ridge Belt Parkway Brooklyn Cadman Plaza Donald Deskey Fire Alarms Manhattan Queens Ridgewood Riverside Drive
Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson left Bay Ridge to serve the Stars and Bars in the “War of Northern Aggression” while Tony Manero left it only to wind up in the 1983 disaster “Stayin’ Alive.” Bay Ridge is the ancestral home of your webmaster. My parents migrated to Brooklyn from Troy, NY in 1955, though my father [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
You’ll find a lot of books on the shelves, especially during the holiday season, that have dozens of old-time postcards of New York’s most famous landmarks…the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, and all the rest. Between about 1900 and 1950, hundreds of thousands of postcards depicting painted versions, as well as [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Subways & Trains Tagged with: Bath Beach Bay Ridge Borough Park Brooklyn Downtown Brooklyn East New York Inwood Manhattan Ozone Park Queens South Beach Staten Island
When I do most Forgotten New York webpages, there’s usually a ready resource of publications, periodicals and newspapers, both out of print and in, through which I get my information. But when I do pages devoted to alleys–a subject of particular interest for me–I often have to resort to guesses and hunches about the backgrounds [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn Sunset Park
Scattered throughout New York City are streets that are composed entirely of steps, and steep ones at that. As a rule they were placed on hills that were too steep to build a road, yet in a rare concession to pedestrians, it was determined to allow them access to the streets denied to motor transportation. [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Bay Ridge Bronx Riverdale
Scattered throughout New York City are several small cemeteries. In the 1800s, a law was passed that prohibited further cemetery construction on the island of Manhattan, owing to the city’s rapid growth. Subsequently, many cemeteries began to appear in western Queens, which was close to the city. However, remnants and vestiges of several old cemeteries [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn East Village Greenwich Village Manhattan
Southern Brooklyn still has a number of its ancient routes preserved as hardly-surviving dirt roads and alleys. Today’s Brooklynites probably do not know that these roads existed for centuries, ever since the first Dutch settlements in the 1600s. What, you might ask, is so unusual about this intersection of Avenue Z and Jerome Avenue [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Roads Tagged with: Bath Beach Bay Ridge Brooklyn East Flatbush
Categorized in: Cobblestones Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights Cobble Hill Red Hook
The streets of New York City used to be paved with bricks. The term ‘cobblestones’ refers to uneven stones of varying shapes and sizes. This style of paving went out of style nearly a century and a half ago, to be replaced by even stones with a smoother finish known as “Belgian blocks.” They were [...]
Categorized in: Cobblestones Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn Manhattan Meatpacking Queens Red Hook Ridgewood
