2011

I did a thorough survey of Staten Island’s Tompkinsville and Stapleton, especially Van Duzer Street, in December 2010 (to match my earlier page on the gorgeous homes of St. Paul’s…

Just about every weekend when I was quite small one of my parents–most often my mother — and I would take a bus ride just to see what was out there.…

Unlike other boroughs, trends or leanings cannot be ascribed to Queens’ numbered streets. Unlike, say, Manhattan’s 57th Street, which is a self-contained unit on which you will find icons such as Carnegie…

On April 18th, 2010 the first ForgottenTour of the season (39th in the series that began June 1st, 1999 and second in association with the Newtown Historical Society), embarked under partly cloudy and 60-degree…

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…

Eckford Street, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, runs from Manhattan Avenue between Newton and Engert north to Greenpoint Avenue. According to the indispensable Brooklyn By Name (Benardo/Weiss, 2006) Eckford Webb was a…

The Chelsea and Clinton neighborhoods on the west side of Manhattan are relatively easy to get to from lively Little Neck — the train ride to Manhattan is 22 minutes…

I was heading to a birthday thing the other Saturday and found myself along Kings Highway, Brooklyn’s Mother Road, a colonial-era route built partially atop a Native American trail that once stretched…

It’s about time I finished my Westchester Avenue walk, which I began in the summer of 2009 from Parkchester, the 1942 apartment complex created by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company…

Hallelujah, I’m a bum. In March 2011 my former company had a ‘reorganization’ in which the dead wood is carted out and burned. No matter how much they spin it for…

March 2011: Just suffered my first layoff of the decade, which just missed being my third (1999, 2004, 2011). My last trip while employed by someone else in 2011 was…

Allow me a litle FNY esoterica. (You can argue the whole website is esoterica but I would disagree with you). Over the past few years, the NYC Department of Transportation and…