Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
Tucked away at the west end of Grand Street where it meets the East River and punctuated by a tall smokestack you’ll find a small oasis that indirectly remembers the founder of Williamsburg, once a city on its own before being absorbed by Brooklyn in 1855. Williamsburg grew out of a ferry service instituted in [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Parks Williamsburg
Desert Island Comic Books, 540 Metropolitan Avenue near Union Avenue in Brooklyn, has participated in a recent trend (that I welcome): maintaining an older classic awning sign of a previous business: in this case, an Italian bakery. Signs were just better before Helvetica and its family of bold and extended took over. “Booklets” is probably [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
Someone on Wythe Avenue in the north Willie paid tribute to Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746-1828) with this rendering of his Portrait of Don Manuel Osorio de Manrique Zuniga. The original is displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 5th Avenue. There’s a lot going on here…what is written on the piece of paper the magpie [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
Long before Queens officials thought of doing it, the city of Williamsburgh laid out streets that were all numbered, with the odd rare named street here and there. North-south streets were numbered 1 to 12 beginning at the street closest to the East River and running east. Then there were two sets of east-west numbered [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Signs Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
Periodically, I make a hajj over to 539 Driggs Avenue, not far from the buzzing hive of downtown Williamsburg. I just want to see if what I have termed the ‘spook house of Williamsburg’ is still in this wondrously deteriorated condition, with the ruined barber pole proclaiming its past life, the stars and stripes displayed [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
Metropolitan Avenue is one of the lengthiest routes between Brooklyn and Queens. It was first built in 1816 as a toll road and was known as the Williamsburg and Jamaica Turnpike until the mid-1800s, when it was bestowed its current name. It runs from the East River to Jamaica Avenue and along the way, marks [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
In early 2010, just as spring was beginning to spring, I ambled slowly and haltingly north on Berry Street, the only one of Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s major ‘north-south’ (in general; streets wind around to match the overall East River shoreline here) to be called a “street” not an Avenue. Before the 1900s or so, Williamsburg’s streets [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
The NYC Salvage Warehouse on Berry Street north of the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn auctioned off its treasure trove of New York City artifacts to a single bidder in July, and will be torn down to make way for condos. The place is something of an artifact itself, as the outside sports a sign going [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Williamsburg
During the same foray that produced the Eckford Street photos in April 2011, I was really there for a quick trip the length of Union Avenue. The avenue runs from the junction of Marcy and Flushing Avenue north to Driggs Avenue in McCarren Park, and if you look at the map, it forms the boundary [...]
Categorized in: Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Greenpoint Williamsburg
CONTINUED 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
Forgotten NY has blazed a trail of urban web photography and commentary for over a decade but sometimes I shudder when I think of the opportunities I missed out on. In 1998 Times Square was a wasteland in transition from the sleazy porn era to the shined up, Disneyfied tourist mecca that it became. They [...]
Categorized in: Walks Tagged with: Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn Williamsburg
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Cypress Hills Ridgewood Williamsburg Woodhaven
In the summer of 2009 I was on Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, having just completed another 40 or 50 blocks in my drawn-out survey of Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn (two segments of this have already appeared in FNY) when, en route for the subway, I passed the City Reliquary at Number 370. It had been awhile since [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
I was foraging on Metropolitan Avenue recently, a couple of hours before a meeting at Dave Herman’s City Reliquary, when I found myself teetering tenuously up Havemeyer Street, which extends for a few blocks between Broadway and Union Avenue. Formerly 7th Street in Williamsburg, the street was renamed for a member of the 19th Century German immigrant [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Signs Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
After recently stumbling (or was I pushed?) off the J train at Marcy Avenue, the first stop in Brooklyn, I walked up and down the platform, snapping away at what met my gaze. There’s a panoply of Brooklyn architecture from the classic era visible from here, and in perfect weather, who could resist. In the mid-2000s most of [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
After reaching Graham Avenue after duly noting the Gothic Most Holy Trinity/St. Mary’s Church and its satellite buildings after proceeding south on Manhattan Avenue, I turned north up Graham. The avenue runs from Flushing Avenue, where it meets Broadway and Marcus Garvey Boulevard (a.k.a. Sumner Avenue) north to Driggs Avenue and McGuiness Boulevard. Graham Avenue [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
A few weeks after my trip to Far East Williamsburg, I had a hankering for roughly the same territory, but this time, a little further west, where there is somewhat more of a human presence. I settled on walking down Manhattan Avenue and up Graham, in what is mostly east Williamsburg, though not far east, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
With Halloween approaching I thought it appropriate to highlight one of Brooklyn’s more notable ‘haunted houses’ or at least one of its more mysterious. Growing up in Bay Ridge I knew of at least two decrepit old piles, one on Fort Hamilton Parkway and 88th Street, the other on Parrott Place near 92nd — both have [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
Fresh from staggering up and down North 4th in Williamsburg, I next turned my attention a block away on North 5th, where I found some fare that presented a more varied appearance, with new million-dollar condos sharing space with aluminum-sided houses that have not changed appearance since the Truman Administration, and brick churches that haven’t been significantly [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
June 2009: I spent a recent Saturday in rapidly-changing Williamsburg, which has evolved from hard-scrabble industrial- somewhat-residential neighborhood dominated by breweries and powerhouses, with the Navy Yard looming to the south and west — to the East East Village — to the Brooklyn Gold Coast. Even with all the rapid change, some aspects of the neighborhood [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
Continued from Part 2 Metropolitan Forgive the blur on the image above: it was blown up from a smaller picture I obtained in 2005 on a previous walk. This is Metropolitan Avenue looking east. Some structures in the photo have been torn down, and new construction has appeared elswhere on the street. Metropolitan Avenue runs [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn Williamsburg
Continued from Page 1 Con Dead Time has proven the enemy for our magnificent brick power plants in recent years. The Long Island City Penn Station powerhouse, with its four iconic smokestacks, has been converted to residential use, minus the smokestacks, and the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit (BMT) powerhouse on 500 Kent and Division Avenues, shown [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn Williamsburg
Kent Avenue runs from the eastern end of Clinton Hill to the Williamsburg-Greenpoint border. Because of Brooklyn’s topography along the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Wallabout Channel and the East River, the route resembles a giant question mark in reverse without the dot. It’s unusual among Williamsburg’s north-south avenues like Wythe Avenue, Berry Street, and Driggs Avenue [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn Williamsburg
Unlike apparently everyone else in the NYC blogosphere I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Williamsburg the past couple of years — until a couple of weekends ago (writing this August 11, 2008) when a too-long wait for the B61 caused me to ditch my planned visit to Red Hook and walk down Willoughby, through Ft. Greene [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
According to the Bible of Brooklyn street names, Brooklyn By Name by Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss, Williamsburg’s Dunham Place was named for David Dunham (1790-1823), a New York merchant who helped initiate an early steam ferry from Brooklyn to New York, which earned him the nickname “Father of Williamsburg.” Dunham was an indefatigable advocate for steam navigation and [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
It was 20 years ago (as I write in 2008) that the Williamsburg Bridge was shut down briefly as the then-85 year old bridge was discovered to have serious structural damage, corrosion in the cables and steel supports, more or less the result of deferred maintenance over the decades. A 15-year rehabilitation began in 1991 that [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
My first memories of Williamsburg came during ages 14-17, when our high school bowling team (on our way to getting whomped by St. Francis Prep and Xaverian) would pile into a Dodge van and trundle up Kent Avenue on our way to the lanes (in a deserted section of Greenpoint at Humboldt and Moultrie Streets). In [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
REVISITING the scene of the very first ForgottenTour in June 1999 FNY turns again to Brooklyn’s Broadway, formerly the main drag in Williamsburg, where the Vanderbilts looked across the river to Manhattan from their mansions, the Pratts heated their homes, and the Havemeyers put sugar in their coffee. arly maps from the 1820s and 1830s show that in Williamsburg(h) Broadway [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
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
City Reliquary, 307 Grand Street, Williamsburg Kindred spirits in Forgottenhood are always a blessing in NYC. We’re always truly humbled and gratified by the crowds we gather for ForgottenTours; this site itself has been inspired by three others, Frank Jump’sFaded Ads, Steve Anderson’s nycroads, and Jeff Saltzman’s Streetlite Nuts. And we’re always glad to find someone whose interest in NYC’s hard-to-find [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
WE’VE SPENT a lot of time in Williamsburg lately…it’s a great source of Forgotteniana, and as one of NYC’s most-established neighborhoods, a great place to walk around in with its bars and cafes that sprouted up when relatively lower rents in Williamsburg started attracting Lower East Siders from Manhattan. Things have pretty much settled down [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Fort Greene Gumballs Williamsburg
[These paintings were on Williamsburg walls in the summer and fall of 2003. Given theever-changing nature of street art, not many are likely still there.] Those who know Your Webmaster know I’m not down with the hip hoppers and graffitists. Wild style is not my style. But a recent stroll through Williamsburg, the hip, hep, hip-hop, [...]
Categorized in: Street Scenes Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
