2018

One one of the very rare sunny days in November 2018, I walked from Grand Army Plaza at Prospect Park into Prospect Heights, Clinton Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Williamsburg, getting over…

By PATRICK O’CONNOR guest columnist What’s that, now?  The Terminal Moraine is the pile of rocks and soil pushed up by the advancing glaciers of the last ice age.  There…

Prospect Avenue is the spine of Windsor Terrace, running from 3rd and Hamilton Avenues southeast and south to Ocean Parkway. It’s named for nearby Prospect Park and its high hills…

I have been poring through the 1940s tax photos that NYC recently added to its online Municipal Archives. Formerly, you had to request these shots from the Archives at $25…

William Holbrook Beard (1825-1900) was a popular painter of comedic animal scenes; it was he who first popularized the Wall Street “bulls” and “bears” by depicting them wrestling on the…

Likely the most poignant monument in Green-Wood is the one erected by Charles Griffith to his beloved wife Jane on Greenbough Avenue in 1858. It depicts a young man going…

Deep within Green-Wood Cemetery, along Linden Avenue, is a section created by the Cemetery to inter Civil War veterans, known as Soldiers’ Lot. Several German immigrants who served their adopted country are…

One of Green-Wood’s more elaborate memorials is also one of its oldest, that of Charlotte Canda (1828-1845), at about the Cemetery’s midpoint.  Charlotte’s life ended in a carriage accident February…

How many of our present-day entertainers, or entertainers from the past fifty years or so, will be remembered a century from now? The giants such as The Beatles or Louis…

Because of its proximity to John F. Kennedy International Airport, I’d always thought Ozone Park’s name had something to do with air travel, since the ozone layer is high in…

There are only three subway stations located on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, and none at all in Brooklyn, which also has a lengthy 5th Avenue. In Manhattan, the Queen of…

I was taken aback just a bit when getting off the A train at Canal Street recently. It happens to be one of those stops that exits into a building…