Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
On the fifth straight ForgottenTour in 2012 featuring beautiful weather, ForgottenTour 55 met at the William H. Seward statue in Madison Park (honoring Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State who engineered the purchase of Alaska from Russia) on Sunday, June 10th and toured Madison Square Park and 5th Avenue between 23rd and 14th Streets. Among the [...]
Categorized in: Tours Tagged with: Madison Square Manhattan
Since I’m the biggest square in town, I thought it would be appropriate to do a page, or set of pages, on the five major squares in Manhattan south of Central Park: Madison, Union, Stuyvesant, Tompkins, and Washington. (Yes I know I have left out Bryant Park and Greeley and Herald Squares, which I’ll get [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Walks Tagged with: Madison Square Union Square
43 West 23rd Street was built as a warehouse in 1897 (Henry Hardenbergh) and in that Beaux Arts era, even warehouses had panache. There’s something to arrest the eye on each floor, from the big cat friezes on the ground floor to the pilasters (half columns) on the second, to the arch windows on the [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Madison Square Manhattan
Remember that episode of Star Trek when the giant microbe ate the Enterprise? At the start of the show, Mr. Spock is looking into his scanner and suddenly gets a shocked look on his face. Any emotion from the Vulcan is a notable occasion, so Kirk asked him what the matter was, and Spock explained that a Federation [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Madison Square Manhattan
photo: Flatbush Gardener The word came this week over at Jeremiah’s that the grand old M. Gordon Novelty facade, on 929-933 Broadway just south of East 22nd, had now been covered up in plywood; either its façade is being dramatically altered, or the whole shebang is going down. A drastic alteration was to be expected; pictures from the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Madison Square Manhattan
Your webmaster was recently in a “business meeting” on 23rd Street — which I hope will result in a proposal for the followup to the ForgottenBook [it didn't]– when I noticed a number of anomalies along the wide boulevard between 2nd and 5th Avenues. Along this stretch you’ll find Madison Square Park, the Metropolitan Life skyscraper, Baruch [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Madison Square Manhattan
Your webmaster has worked in the proximity of 6th Avenue off and on for years, in hole-in-the-wall Russian type shops, defunct art schools, college textbook sweatshops, gardening magazine publishers, you name it. I’ve seen 6th, between 23rd and 29th Streets, convert from phonograph needle wholesalers, mom and pop delis and junk sales to a phalanx [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Chelsea Madison Square Manhattan
In 1963, the life of a 6-year-old lamppost enthusiast changed irrevocably: the cast iron Type 24M “Corvington” poles that had dominated the streets of Bay Ridge disappeared seemingly overnight, with mostly all of them replaced by streamlined aluminum poles with octagonal shafts. Most of the shafts were topped by straightarm masts, some by cobra-necked ones, and [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bronx Brooklyn Fort Schuyler General Electric Hoboken Jackson Heights Madison Square McCarren Park Queens Rosedale Westinghouse
CONTINUED FROM PART 2 It’s been a potter’s field, an arsenal and a military parade ground. Until 1844, a major wagon route to Boston occupied its site. Madison Square opened to the public in 1847 and has, over the years, collected a variety of statues devoted to some of the lesser-known names in American [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Madison Square Manhattan statues Union Square
This time, as we open the ancient New York City Street Necrology with its cracked, crumbling leather cover, a dogeared page with running, streaming ink and stains from lord knows what plops open, and there, revealed on the verso, is…Fourth Avenue, and there on the recto is Avenue A. Today, Fourth Avenue is the shortest [...]
Categorized in: Street Necrology Tagged with: Kips Bay Madison Square Manhattan Upper East Side
At first glance, the brick building at 6th Avenue and 24th Street doesn’t appear to be all that unusual, other than the presence of the longtime strip joint Billy’s Topless on the bottom floor. But before going inside to ogle the girls, take a look at the two signs chiseled into the building on the corner, and [...]
Categorized in: Signs Tagged with: Madison Square Manhattan
Once the mainstay of multilane boulevards in the pre-expressway era, cast-iron twinlamps once decorated highways like the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and Queens Boulevard and Horace Harding Boulevard in Queens. They did appear in other situations, however, and I’ve captured two on this page. Twinlamps, and other castiron NYC lampposts, are classified by catalog. In [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: 5th Avenue City Hall Park Harlem Madison Square Manhattan Tribeca
