Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
Between about 1964 and 1985 all street signs in Queens looked like this, with an off-white background and blue lettering. In 1964 the city installed large vinyl and metal street signs around town, replacing smaller enamel and metal signs that preceded them. The city had started color coding signs in a haphazard fashion before 1964, [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Hunters Point Long Island City
I had a meeting the other day in Astoria and thought I would walk Crescent Street down to Queens Plaza — unfortunately I couldn’t beat rush hour and let about 4 #7 trains go by till I found one with sufficient breathing space. Crescent Street has always been a puzzler for me, at least, since I’m [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Crescent Street Long Island City
In early 2010 I emerged into sudden lucidity to find myself puttering about Hunters Point, the lip of Queens just north of Greenpoint and the Newtown Creek. Hunters Point had once been a Queens hotspot, since until 1910 it was the western end of the Long Island Rail Road (ferries carried commuters across the mighty [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: gantries Hunters Point Long Island City
Long Island City, Queens, which once encompassed all of western Queens west of Woodside from the East River south to Newtown Creek, was once a city on its own (beginning in 1870) before Queens was absorbed by Greater New York in 1898. Even after the coagulation, LIC loomed large in Queens affairs, as its first Borough [...]
Categorized in: Street Necrology Tagged with: Long Island City Queens
On a mostly overcast, heavily muggy late summer weekend afternoon I wandered lonely as a clown through the concrete fields of western Queens. I had an appointment at a saloon in Long Island City, but purposely arrived in Woodside on the LIRR a couple of hours early so I could indulge the wandering sickness for [...]
Categorized in: Walks Tagged with: Hunters Point Long Island City Woodside
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 Past and present fast food The Orange Hut at Broadway and 54th Street still carries the outlines and contours of its former life as a White Tower hamburger chain restaurant. The last White Tower closed in Toledo, OH in June 2008; the chain originated in 1926, its origins detailed in a [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Elmhurst Long Island City Queens Woodside
Continuing my fascination with NYC’s non-Manhattan Broadways, which begain in June 1999 with my very first ForgottenTour on Brooklyn’s Broadway, continued on several Forgotten NY pages there, and then continued further on the Bronx’ Broadway in late 2008, I hiked Queens’ very own Broadway in December 2008 and Jaunary 2009. The route begins in Ravenswood [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Elmhurst Long Island City Queens Woodside
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, [...]
The last of Ravenswood’s farmhouses, seen on the title card, was torn down in the unstoppable name of development in mid-2004. It stood at 31st Drive and 12th Street. NEVERMORE will there be any more farms in Ravenswood, a tight section of western Queens arrayed along the East River between Keyspan’s Big Allis generating plant, just south of the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Long Island City Queens Ravenswood
WHILE BEGINNING to prepare this week’s foray into irrelevance, I was on the horns of a slight dilemma. I had ventured into one of my favorite parts of town, Long Island City and Hunters Point, on several Sundays this past year, both with Christina as my guide and without, so I had a big backlog of both LIC [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Tagged with: Hunters Point Long Island City Queens
AS WE celebrate the 100th anniversary of the New York City subway in 2004, just think about what 100 years has meant for the sheer variety of architectural styles that are represented down below. Next time you take the mugger mover, consider that the subways were built by three different companies that were once in [...]
Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Bushwick IND IRT Long Island City Manhattan mosaics Park Slope Washington Heights Williamsburg
The Sunnyside Yards is a truly magnificent place…if you’re a railroad fan…an aficionado of the New York skyline…or a follower of ancient NYC street names, because the thousands of the fomer two and the dozens of the latter can all find something of interest here! The Yards were carved out of sparsely-populated farmland, along with territory occupied [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Bridges Long Island City Queens
Queens has an abundance of small, out-of-the-way, ancient cemeteries, many of which go back to the 1700s, some of which are barely suspected by neighbors. Ancient burial grounds are alngside two-family homes, in parks and even UNDER a lot of places they wouldn’t be expected. LAWRENCE FAMILY BURIAL GROUND, Astoria Though the historical marker [...]
Categorized in: Cemeteries Tagged with: Astoria Cambria Heights Fresh Meadows Glendale Long Island City Middle Village Queens
A view of an unusual neighborhood with an outstanding view. Industry-dominated Long Island City provides some terrific views of Manhattan, just across the East River, as well as a variety of contrasts: landmarked brownstone blocks, smokestacks, and church steeples, as well as a diesel-only Long Island Rail Road station, once the busy terminus of the railroad [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Long Island City Queens
