Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
I should really do more on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn. It runs continuously from Flatbush Avenue at Prospect Park all the way south to Sheepshead Bay, standing in for East 20th Street. When I lived in Brooklyn I never rode a bike on the avenue because, dominated almost completely by apartment buildings, it seemed boring [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Midwood
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Midwood
Categorized in: Walks Tagged with: Coney Island Midwood Sheepshead Bay
CONTINUED FROM PART 1 WAYFARING: CONEY ISLAND TO MIDWOOD At East 14th Street, the BMT Brighton Line bridges over the Belt Parkway and in an unusual arrangement, a pedestrian walkway adjoins it, with barbed razor wire preventing miscreants from entering the tracks. Remnants of a previous lighting arrangement have been left in place, as these [...]
Categorized in: Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island Midwood Sheepshead Bay
A quick look at a map of southeastern Brooklyn reveals a nearly unbroken grid of unrelenting monotony, as city planners slavishly copied the Manhattan grid here and in most of Brooklyn. We’re in, or near, the old Kings County town of Flatlands, which describes things nearly perfectly — making the terrain ripe for a gridiron development. Hilly [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Midwood
Dahill Road runs in four separate sections in the heart of Brooklyn, in Kensington, Borough Park, Parkville and Mapleton, and serves as the dividing line between two separate street grid systems as well as being McDonald Avenue’s running buddy, accepting some of its traffic and lessening the load on the el-shrouded McDonald. If you look at [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Kensington Midwood Parkville
What’s the longest street that runs entirely in Brooklyn? It seems there are two candidates: Flatbush Avenue and Bedford Avenue. (Any drivers out there want to decide the matter using their odometers?) Some roads running east-west are pretty lengthy, but they extend all the way to Queens and beyond: Linden Boulevard, Myrtle, Metropolitan, Atlantic, and [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Bedford Avenue Brooklyn Flatbush Midwood Sheepshead Bay
“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
In 2002, Brooklyn looks seamless. Oh, sure, there are major differencesbetween neighborhoods. Some are richer or poorer than others, and some have different racial makeups than others, speaking generally. But it’s all a grid, and all the streets eventually connect to each other. But Brooklyn used to be a collection of six towns and within each [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Midwood South Greenfield
Before Hollywood became the center of the motion picture industry in the 1920s, New York City boasted several studios that produced silent motion pictures. At left we see a scene from Vitagraph Studios, which was located at East 15th St. just north of Avenue M in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, then known as South Greenfield. Photos from [...]
There are still a few of them left and some are actually working. “Crescent moon” style luminaires, called “crescents” because of their shape, were in vogue from the mid-40s until they were replaced by mercury vapor lamps in the early 60s. The “crescent moons” were very flexible in that they could be used both on [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bronx Brooklyn Eastchester Manhattan Bridge Midwood Van Cortlandt Park
