2011

Around 2000, the Department of Transportation installed distinctive black and white signs developed by the Alliance for Downtown Manhattan that featured easy-to-read street names, house numbers found on the block…

The Grand Concourse runs up the western end of the Bronx like a zipper. Unzip it and you will find Bronx past, present and future: the grand visions of a…

The 10-columned (5 on one side, 5 on the other) Music Pagoda in Prospect Park was, once upon a time, the park’s chief concert venue. It can be found on…

Regretfully another season on Governors Island is coming to an end. The island became a public park in 2005 after the last vestiges of its role as a military defender…

Exit, or is is it entrance, at 7th Avenue and 86th Street, Nathan’s, 2005. The sign has since been replaced with something with a little more sense.

Though Green-Wood Cemetery was opened for business in 1838, there are occasional stones and memorials scattered around from earlier times. Sometimes, a family will disinter from one cemetery and relocate…

Baltimore natives Clifton and William Prentiss each died for their country. In 1862, with the USA and Confederate States at war, Clifton joined the Union army and later rose to…

A very large painted ad on a corner factory at Henry and Middagh Streets proclaims Peaks Mason Mints, and is the former home of the Mason, Au and Magenheimer Candy…

Throughout most of Shea Stadium’s existence in Flushing Meadows, Queens (except for the last couple of years, when Citifield was being constructed) a large, four-sided clock tower was visible beyond the…

Willets Point Boulevard between Roosevelt Avenue and Northern Boulevard is the heart of the “iron triangle” consisting of metal works, scrap metal dealers, car repair shops, and wholesalers. The city…

Wood sign announcing total height from road to elevated trestle on Roosevelt Avenue at the Mets-Willlets Point station. It’s a very old design and could have been here since the…

Before the “pooper scooper” regulation was passed in the 1980s, cleaning up after your dog was merely voluntary, and the Department of Sanitation could merely encourage people to do so.…