Old school Carvel with revolving ice cream cones, Metropolitan Avenue near Fresh Pond Road. C.P. The Celestial Person: I once got the old man an ice cream cake for Father’s Day and he didn’t like it.
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Tag Archives: Ridgewood
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EXPOSED TROLLEY TRACK
April 19, 2012…. at 61st Street and Flushing Avenue. Trolley service along Fresh Pond Road began in 1896 and ended in the 1940s; the northernmost section of the line used 61st Street to reach Flushing Avenue, which had been laid out in its present form in 1893. Before that time it was the Brooklyn and Newtown Turnpike.
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#58 TROLLEY
November 16, 2011The #58 trolley, the Ridgewood-Flushing Line, ended service on 7/17/1949, but here on 60th Place and Kleupfel Court (near 67th Avenue) it’s like it never left. In Ridgewood, the line had its own right of way under the el train bound for Metropolitan Avenue (this is the Nassau Street line in Manhattan, Broadway Line in [...]
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WOODHAVEN, Queens to WILLIAMSBURG, Brooklyn Part 2
January 23, 2011CONTINUED FROM PART 1 The Road to Ridgewood At Jamaica and Euclid Avenues, a four-lane road, Cypress Hills Street, climbs the glacier-born hills, connecting the vast gulfs that comprise the Queens Cemetery Belt comprising seventeen cemeteries (a few of them located in Brooklyn). At this point we are still in the Borough of [...]
Categorized in: Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Cypress Hills Queens Ridgewood Williamsburg Woodhaven
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WOODHAVEN, Queens to EAST WILLIAMSBURG, Brooklyn
January 23, 2011Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Cypress Hills Ridgewood Williamsburg Woodhaven
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MYRTLE AVENUE Part 1: Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant
February 21, 2010I hadn’t walked a considerable length of Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn since 1965. That year I distinctly remember some aspects of a walk my mother and I took down Myrtle, one of the lengthiest avenues in Brooklyn and Queens. In those days, and right on into the 1980s, a walk down Myrtle was a somewhat [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Bushwick Mayrtle Avenue Ridgewood
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MYRTLE AVENUE, Part 2: under the el in Bushwick
February 21, 2010CONTINUED FROM PART 1 Today’s Myrtle Avenue walk extends from the leftover unused el section from Lewis Avenue east to the Madison Theatre, just past the point where the remaining active section of the Myrtle el turns off on Palmetto Street. Myrtle Avenue was laid out as a tolled plank road from Broadway east to [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Bushwick Mayrtle Avenue Ridgewood
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CATALPA AVENUE, Ridgewood
November 16, 2009Catalpa Avenue, a street running west-east in Ridgewood, slots between 68th Road and 69th Avenue between Seneca and Myrtle Avenues and 65th Place. Catalpas are large-leafed trees that generally grow to a height of 60 feet and can be found in North America, the Caribbean, and East Asia. The proper name is actually a Native American word, catawba, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Queens Ridgewood
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ForgottenTour 38, Ridgewood West, Queens
October 18, 2009So, what were 32 ForgottenFans doing gathered around a fenced rock in soggy Ridgewood on an October 2009 Saturday? They were standing alongside the marker that divided the ancient towns of Bushwick and Newtown, or so the story goes. In the first (to my recollection) ForgottenTour that spanned two boroughs, Forgotteners gathered at the Jefferson Street station on the [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tours Tagged with: Queens Ridgewood
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PALMETTO STREET under the el, Ridgewood
August 11, 2009In mid-2009 took a lengthy walk in Ridgewood and Glendale and while there, resolved to detour down Palmetto Street for a little ways, so I could ascertain the contrast between its elled and non-elled blocks. The eastern end of the old Myrtle Avenue El shrouds Palmetto for 3 blocks between Wyckoff and Onderdonk Avenues. The origins [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Queens Ridgewood
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LAMPPOSTS BY THE LETTER: Types A through G
April 5, 2009Paleontologists tell us that the legions of birds twittering in the trees, paddling in streams and migrating worldwide in the air are directly descended from the dinosaur line and are all that remains of the group of animals that brought the planet the marauding Tyrannosaurus Rex, plodding Brachiosaurus and brave Triceratops many millions of years ago. [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Clinton Hill Manhattan Parks Ridgewood Sutton Square
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RIDGEWOOD’S PHANTOM RAILROAD
February 19, 2009A recent topic thread in Subchat, the subway blog, made me revisit one of FNY’s long-cherished talismans, the remainders of the old Long Island Rail Road’s “Evergreen” branch, which was a one-track freight line that ceased operation, I believe, sometime in the 1980s. In the long ago and far away, it was a ctually a passenger line [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Queens Ridgewood
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WYCKOFF AVENUE, Brooklyn-Queens
May 18, 2008Categorized in: Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Bushwick Queens Ridgewood Wyckoff Avenue
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GOOD CHARLOTTE. A Ridgewood cul de sac
April 23, 2008When “Charlotte Street” is mentioned, anyone in NYC over age 40 can remember the two words with dread, remembering the dead landscape full of burned, crumbling buildings visited by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, and Republican candidate Ronald Reagan in the fall of 1980. Arson (some of it perpetrated by landlords and owners), crime, drugs and [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Queens Ridgewood
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STOCKHOLM SYNDROME. Ridgewood’s landmarked block
April 18, 2008While it seems at times that Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens are dominated by unimaginative street names… numbers, letters… in actuality vast swaths in all 4 boroughs are still dominated by streets named for real people. I had always been under the impression that Stockholm Street in Bushwick and Ridgewood was so named in honor of a [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Landmarks Queens Ridgewood
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VANISHING CREAM in Ridgewood?
August 8, 2007There are some neighborhoods in NYC like Williamsburg, Greenpoint and the Lower East Side that are seemingly changing by the hour, if not the minute. There are others that are apparently changing more slowly — if not for the better — like Flushing and Astoria. And then there are the neighborhoods that look exactly the same [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Neighborhoods Tagged with: Carvel clock Ridgewood
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RIDGEWOOD, Queens
July 28, 2005By CHRISTINA WILKINSON Forgotten NY correspondent DURING the 17th and 18th centuries, Dutch farmers settled Newtown and Bushwick on the western end of Long Island. One of these farmers, Paulus Van Der Ende, built a house in Newtown in 1710. The restored farmhouse is located at the corner of what are today Flushing and Onderdonk [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Queens Ridgewood
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FLUSHING AVENUE, Brooklyn-Queens
April 22, 2004The Long Island Rail Road, celebrating its 170th anniversary in 2004, crosses Flushing Avenue in style at 56th Street in Maspeth The first thing to remember about Flushing Avenue is that it doesn’t go to Flushing; in fact, it doesn’t approach within five miles of it. Flushing Avenue takes its unusual name because of the relative isolation of [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn Fort Greene Maspeth Queens Ridgewood
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TALES OF THE T-POLES. NYC’s variety of telephone pole lighting fixtures over the decades.
March 18, 2002Heavy 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
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DESKEYS. 1958′s lamppost of the future, in its twilight
September 28, 2001BY THE THOUSANDS they came, back in the early 1960s, replacing the picturesque castiron Corvington longarms… It was a strange, exhilarating, depressing yet exciting time to be a six-year-old lamppost fan back in 1963. My street, Sixth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, was lined with the Victorian-era chocolate-colored “Corvington” long-armed mast poles (similar to the one [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: 5th Avenue Bay Ridge Belt Parkway Brooklyn Cadman Plaza Donald Deskey Fire Alarms Manhattan Queens Ridgewood Riverside Drive
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EVERGREEN BRANCH: another lost LIRR line
October 8, 2000In the 1990s, the Long Island Rail Road made great strides in improving things for its customers…a brand new terminal in Penn Station, rebuilt and restored station houses, and brand new cars. Few consider, though, that Brooklyn is a part of Long Island as well. Looking at the defunct Brooklyn branches of the LIRR shows [...]
Categorized in: Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Queens Ridgewood
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QUEENS ALLEYS part 2
April 2, 2000Continued from Part 1 This time, our survey of little-noticed Queens alleyways takes us from gritty, concrete-enveloped Long Island City all the way east to bucolic, rural Little Neck–which could pass for an upstate village or a small North Shore town, which, of course, it is! So let’s start in Long Island City and work [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Astoria Boker Briarwood Charlotte College Point Cornell Corona Elmhurst Flushing Forest Hills Glendale Hawtree Linneaus Little Neck Queens Ridgewood South Jamaica Sunnyside Whitestone
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RIDGEWOOD TROLLEY RELICS
January 4, 2000Deep in the heart of Ridgewood, a beautiful neighborhood filled with brick and brownstone buildings that straddles the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, there lurks a relic of the trolley days of yesterday. The fact that the tracks aren’t on a city street proper have probably saved them from oblivion…so far. These two views of Woodbine [...]
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ALLEYS OF QUEENS. Part 1
December 27, 1999Queens, in many ways, is the youngest of the five boroughs. It became a part of the city when its widely separated towns joined with the Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Manhattan in 1898 to become the five boroughs. Part of Queens, though, wanted nothing to do with New York City and so the Queens [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Tagged with: Astoria Briarwood College Point Corona Elmhurst Flushing Forest Hills Glendale Little Neck Queens Ridgewood South Jamaica Sunnyside Whitestone
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DWARVES. Lampposts that fit in small spaces
January 3, 1999Throughout the five boroughs, there are scattered some streetlamps that look as if they didn’t eat their spinach during their formative years. Their growth seems stunted. Actually, the city has valid reasons to install such short poles. The above pictures were taken in the vicinity of 23rd Avenue and 82nd Street near LaGuardia Airport. Lampposts [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Jackson Heights Jamaica Ozone Park Queens Ridgewood
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BRICK STREETS
August 23, 1998The streets of New York City used to be paved with bricks. The term ‘cobblestones’ refers to uneven stones of varying shapes and sizes. This style of paving went out of style nearly a century and a half ago, to be replaced by even stones with a smoother finish known as “Belgian blocks.” They were [...]
Categorized in: Cobblestones Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn Manhattan Meatpacking Queens Red Hook Ridgewood