Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
The massive Kentile Floors neon sign, built to attract business from the passing IND trains on the viaduct, looms over 9th Street near the Gowanus Canal. It is one of a number of now-defunct large neon signs that can be found in the Gowanus and Red Hook areas, springing up from the 30s through the 50s to [...]
New York is full of Unions – not only labor unions, but streets and squares called Union. While Manhattan’s Union Square was named in the 19th Century for the encounter of Broadway and Bowery Road (now 4th Avenue), the lengthy routes Union Avenue and Union Street in Brooklyn, Union Street and Turnpike in Queens, and Union [...]
Categorized in: Roads Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Gowanus Park Slope
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Tagged with: Boerum Hill Brooklyn Gowanus
I had just crossed the miasmic, fetid Gowanus Canal one recent flaccid, sweat-inducing Sunday, on an August in one of the hottest, most humid New York summers in an uncountable string of them, having just meandered north on 3rd Avenue from the more wholesome precincts of Bay Ridge, the land of my birth where other children as well as the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Gowanus
Way back in November 2005 I went wandering about the part of Brooklyn that’s not quite Cobble Hill and not quite Park Slope, that was dangerous in the 60s and 70s and just safe enough now, along Third Avenue between Pacific and Union Streets. The area really doesn’t have a name, so I usually call it [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Gowanus
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Gowanus Park Slope
Manhattan may have its Canal Street, built over a former waterway draining the equally lost Collect Pond, but Brooklyn has its very own waterway known as the Gowanus Canal bisecting the neighborhood of the same name (which means, depending on what source you use, “a young or small pine,” or “the sleeper” in the Delaware Indian language). [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Carroll Gardens Gowanus
There’s a pretty boring-looking, undistinguished building painted gray along Third Avenue between First and Third Streets at the end of Park Slope, where it meets the Gowanus Canal. Walking past, or riding past on the bus as I did for decades, you’d never guess what the building used to be used for. Actually, the [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: baseball Brooklyn Gowanus
