Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
It’s not surprising, to me at least, that while the Brutalist, unadorned lamppost designs of the 1970s and 1980s are increasingly falling out of favor, their more ornate, scrolled cast iron cousins of the 1910s through 1940s have been slowly coming back to prominence. NYC first began to install new versions of the classic Bishop [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn East Flatbush Jamaica Queens
It’s a fair guess that not one person who passes this building, seemingly untenanted as of 2012, knows it is a former theater. In fact it has greatly outlived its former life as a theater. The Mardi Gras Theatre was built around 1908, apparently just before this photo was taken, on Nostrand Avenue, corner [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn East Flatbush theaters
I was heading to a birthday thing the other Saturday and found myself along Kings Highway, Brooklyn’s Mother Road, a colonial-era route built partially atop a Native American trail that once stretched from the ferry landing at today’s Old Fulton Street, running southeast then southwest to where Fort Hamilton is today. The name “Kings Highway” became appended [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: East Flatbush Marine Park Wyckoff
As I mentioned at on FNY’s Midwood slice, “southeastern Brooklyn reveals an unbroken grid of unrelenting monotony.” Still, between about 1968 (when I first jumped on a bike and began exploring Brooklyn from my Bay Ridge home) and 1993, when I moved to fab Flushing, it was MY unbroken grid, and I fully employed it [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn East Flatbush Wyckoff House
“Well it winds from Bensonhurst to Brownsville…” Even though Bobby Troup never got around to writing about Kings Highway in Brooklyn, in many ways it is every bit the mother road that Route 66 is! The road we know today as Kings Highway has a rather inauspicious beginning in Bensonhurst, where it starts as a two-lane [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn East Flatbush Flatbush Gravesend Midwood
More than any other borough, Brooklyn pretty much adheres to the strict checkerboard grid system that was devised when its six towns coalesced into one city in the late 1800s. That’s why it’s all the more interesting when the occasional lane or alley breaks the mold and strikes off on its own. And, as in [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Tagged with: Brooklyn Crown Heights Cypress Hills East Flatbush Flatbush Gravesend Windsor Terrace
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
