At the northwest corner of York Avenue and East 83rd Street is an unassuming 19th-century walkup with a realistic mural depicting a glockenspiel. Titled Glockenspiel, it honors the German community…

MUCH of the southern Bronx was owned in the colonial era by the Morris family. Richard Morris, originally from Wales, purchased a large estate called Broncksland from a Samuel Edsall…

MUCH of downtown Brooklyn has given up its rich collection of one-block and dead-end alleys, with a few notable exceptions, such as Grace Court, Grace Court Alley and even Harrison…

I have been thinking about the Interborough Express, a proposed mass transit line connecting Bay Ridge and Jackson Heights running mainly along the rights of way of the NY &…

No one is really celebrating it, but on the eve of the nation’s 249th anniversary, I’d like to mention another anniversary: the redrawing of the Brooklyn-Queens borderline separating present-day neighborhoods…

KNOWING the toll modernization was taking on the island, and perhaps presciently imagining the devastation to be wreaked on Staten Island’s old and out-of-the-way places by the opening of the…

BACK in March I walked sections of 4th and 5th Avenues in Sunset Park, an area I had neglected, at least on foot. I have traveled beneath 4th Avenue on…

THERE are many ancient ads for wholesale clothing concerns in the Garment District, Midtown between 5th and 8th Avenues, 29th to 41st Streets. Most of them are nonsdescript, with just…

OWLS Head Park is Bay Ridge’s largest public park, stretching between the Belt Parkway, Colonial Road and 68th Street, and its high hill provides a prime viewing spot during Brooklyn’s occasional…

In January 1777, skirmishes occurred between the patriots and the British at Fort Washington Independence, located then where Giles Place and Sedgwick Avenue in Kingsbridge Heights would be, and then…

I will use a shot from Street View today. I have been past Washington and Park Avenues in Clinton Hill a few times over the last few years, but somehow…

On a warmish day in mid-April I decided to take a walk in the Chelsea area near the High Line, which as you know is the 1934 elevated freight railroad…