Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
When you were a child did you ever get excited when you were riding a train and suddenly, the car was awash in sunshine when the train emerged from the tunnel and vaulted onto an el structure? My ex-line, the R train from Bay Ridge to Queens, hasn’t done that since 1987 when the R [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn East New York
THE BRONX borders Nassau County.Manhattan borders Queens. The Bronx borders Queens, too. Staten Island borders Middlesex County, New Jersey. Suffolk County borders Rhode Island! But these worlds never truly come together, since all those borders are on water. Not so with Brooklyn and Queens: these twins are conjoined, land-locked through Ridgewood, the Cemetery Belt, in an [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn City Line Cypress Hills East New York Queens Woodhaven
ATTENTION has been paid, and rightly so, to the NYC subway system on its 100th anniversary in 2004, but there’s an even older transit system in New York existing alongside the subways,whose stations are neglected somewhat by the agency that’s in charge of running it. Truth be told, the 171-year-old (in 2005) Long Island Rail Road, [...]
THERE ain’t no Starbucks, fancy chocolate makers, chi-chi restaurants, velvet-rope nightclubs with 300-pound bouncers, 2-million-dollar condos, Fairways, Ikeas, hardly any IPods…just a lot of jewelry stores. Must be two to a block. Just a lot of NYC’s most intriguing architecture alternating with some of the most godawfulest you can imagine, and sprinkle in some items left [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Bedford-Stuyvesant East New York Fort Greene
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn East New York
Heavy snow in NYC winters is unpredictable. A series of winters with little snow can be followed by years of blizzardy winters. But a fearsome, freak blizzard in early March 1888 caught New York City completely unprepared, and caused property damage, injuries and death. It also changed how telephone and telegraph wires were connected to Manhattan homes [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bronx Brooklyn East New York Jamaica Avenue Morris Park Queens Radial Wave Ridgewood Riverdale Sheepshead Bay Staten Island Van Cortlandt Park West Brighton
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
New York City used to have political designations called wards, which were the smallest political units in NYC. Each ward elected an alderman and an assistant alderman to the City Council. According to The Encyclopedia Of New York City (1995, Yale University Press) the system goes all the way back to 1686, when Governor Thomas [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn East New York
