MOST police precincts in NYC display two green lamps at the entrance. The tradition of green lights dates back to colonial times. According to the NYPD website, “It is believed…
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MAN, I’m digging the old brick factory buildings in “South Brooklyn” that have since been repurposed. 132 32nd Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues is just such a building, a…
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PLAIN, unadorned brick buildings, as Bernie Taupin/Elton John would put it, say so much. They are gradually disappearing around town, with those that haven’t been adapted for residential use are…
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YEAR-END Billboard charts for 1979 included the top hits “My Sharona,” “Bad Girls,” “Le Freak,” “I Will Survive,” and “YMCA” as disco reached its chart peak that year. None of…
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In March 2018, I marched from the Tremont Ave. IND subway station at the Grand Concourse east on its titular avenue all the way to the Bruckner Expressway, where I…
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QUESTION: When is a park not a park, but a street? Answer: When it’s Washington Park in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the street at the east end of Fort Greene Park.…
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WEIHER Court is a narrow alley just south of East 165th between Washington and Third Avenues in Morrisania. Though a Bromley 1911 atlas shows a number of small brick residences…
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A huge factory that formerly turned out threads for the Howard Clothes Company (a men’s haberdasher), and before that, gyroscopes, stands on the west side of the pedal to the…
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UNTIL recently, this handsome 1940s-era sign for Vincent F. Grace Prime Meats was visible on 162nd Street, a main shopping drag between Northern Boulevard and Sanford Avenue in eastern Flushing…
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FOLLOWING my revisit of upper 5th Avenue in Park Slope in early 2024 I decided to stalk south on 19th Street into the heart of Windsor Terrace, as I had…
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I recently revisited Beaver Street, downtown in the financial district. One of Manhattan’s oldest streets was named very early on, in the 1660s, and commemorates the paddle-tailed, dam-building, aquatic rodent…
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GENOVESE was formerly a big name in the pharmacy world, operating over 100 drugstores in the NY metropolitan area. The company was founded by Joseph Genovese in Astoria in 1924,…