Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
One of the most beloved artifacts in downtown San Francisco is at Market Street where it meets Kearny and Third Streets, where the city’s oldest public monument, Lotta’s Fountain, can be found. Lotta Crabtree (1847-1924) was a popular singer/actress who began her career in San Fran as a child in the 1850s, her father John [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Tagged with: Downtown San Francisco
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 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Downtown
Around 2000, the Department of Transportation installed distinctive black and white signs developed by the Alliance for Downtown Manhattan that featured easy-to-read street names, house numbers found on the block where the sign was installed, and a stylized representation of a local landmark. The signs went from the Battery up to about Fulton Street. After [...]
Sometimes, I’d rather be in Philadelphia. Or Boston. Or even Albany, Newark or Jersey City. I’ll explain. Manhattan, once you get north of 14th Street, just doesn’t have the sheer number of dead-ends or one-block alleys block by block that other northeast cities have. Philadelphia has a main network grid of streets — numbered north and [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights Downtown DUMBO
The name Boerum pops up a couple of times in the Brooklyn gazzeteer (a map, for those of you in … ah, I won’t finish that joke, I’ll get in trouble). As with so many other somewhat foreign-sounding names in NYC, it commemorates a Dutch colonial family: Willem Jacobse Van Boerum immigrated to New Amsterdam [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Boerum Hill Brooklyn Downtown
Heaven, as XTC has told us, is paved with broken glass. That means that as a resident of New York City, I’ll feel right at home if I ever get there. Today we’ll take a walk on downtown Brooklyn’s Willoughby Street, which shares the title of main business street along with Fulton Street, the big [...]
Categorized in: Roads Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Downtown Willoughby Street
The ghost of George Washington is all over New York City. There he is taking the oath of office at Federal Hall at Wall and Nassau Streets…he’s bidding farewell to his charges at Fraunces Tavern…he’s on horseback in Union Square and at the Williamsburg Bridge…two of him at Washington Square Arch…wearing his Masonic apron in [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Downtown Manhattan Tribeca
Atlantic Avenue runs from the Brooklyn waterfront at the East River to the Van Wyck Expressway in Jamaica, Queens; along the way it separates several neighborhoods and comprises many architectural styles. As downtown Brooklyn remakes itself, the FNY camera caught it on the cusp of what could be major change along its westernmost three miles. [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Bedford-Suyvesant Brooklyn Heights Cobble Hill Downtown Fort Greene
On what turned out to be a cool, cloudy 4th of July, 2007 your webmaster invaded one of those Brooklyn neighborhoods that seems to have been caught between two more highly-publicized ones: that nebulous region between Brooklyn Heights and Fort Greene, anchored by the Fulton Mall and known on maps merely as “Downtown Brooklyn.” Roughly speaking, it runs [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Downtown Flatbush Avenue
WE’RE FADING TO GRAY this week as we mourn the possible imminent death of one of Brooklyn’s last colonial links. Red Hook Lane, running diagonally in downtown from Fulton and Pearl to Boerum Place and Livingston Street, has been there even before the British and Dutch arrived in Brooklyn as an Indian trail, but it [...]
Fulton Street, which runs in Lower Manhattan from Church Street east to theSouth Street Seaport, is a crazy quilt of mom and pop businesses, souvenir tourist traps, historic cast iron and late 19th Century buildings and some of the weirdest architectural juxtapositioning you’ve ever seen. Let’s scratch the surface and work our way east to west. [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Downtown Manhattan Seaport South Street Seaport
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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Necrology Tagged with: Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights Cobble Hill Downtown
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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Necrology Tagged with: Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights Cobble Hill Downtown
