FOR years, I’ve noticed that many liquor stores in the five boroughs have the same signage they must have had decades ago…whether they’re ceramic, painted signs or my favorite, NEON.…
Kevin Walsh
Kevin Walsh
My name is Kevin Walsh. After a 35-year residency in Bay Ridge, where I witnessed the construction of the Verrazano Bridge as a kid (below) I moved to Queens to be closer to my job as a copywriter/graphic designer at a well-known direct marketer in Long Island and then a compositor at the Queens Times Ledger. I had been noticing ancient advertising and street furniture for years, but it wasn't till I moved to Flushing and saw the ancient remaining Victorian and older buildings that stand among the cookie cutter brick apartments that I put two and two together and noticed there was no one out there who was really calling attention to the artifacts of a long-gone New York. Forgotten NY was named one of Forbes' Best City Blogs sites, and in good company: Gothamist and Newyorkology. FNY has been profiled in all of NYC's daily newspapers, and has been mentioned by name in columns by the New York Times' Christopher Gray and David Dunlap and by the New York Sun's Francis Morrone. It has twice been named to the Village Voice's Best of NYC list, most recently in 2006. It has also been cited by PC Magazine's Top 99 "Undiscovered" websites. Forgotten NY is always in great debt to its contributors, especially Forgotten NY correspondent Christina Wilkinson, retired NYC bus driver Gary Fonville, Mike Olshan, Jean Siegel and many other Forgotten regulars. See my Forgotten Fans page for just a few. FNY averages between 1500-2000 unique vistors daily, and 4000-5000 daily visits overall.
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In the mid-1760s, NYC had sufficiently grown that the Episcopalian parish of Trinity Church began to expand uptown, and built St. Paul’s Chapel in 1766. When a giant fire broke…
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SADLY I have never visited Big Nose Kate’s, a saloon way out in Rossville, at 2484 Arthur Kill Road, tucked near the huge Old Bermuda catering hall next to the…
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THIS week I’m continuing with explorations of north-south streets in Chinatown, Little Italy and the Lower East Side. Having already covered Christie Street and Eldridge Street, I’ll complete the trio…
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I got this photo at the dawn of Forgotten NY in the winter of 1998 at Bedford Avenue and North 4th, when Williamsburg was still an industrial/ethnic Eastern European stronghold,…
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WHEN I lived in Bay Ridge, I would frequently bicycle down Ocean Parkway from Church Avenue to Coney Island. It boasts a world-class bike path and it’s flat as a…
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YOU can find connections in NYC in places that are miles apart. Take #36 West 56th Street, a Queen Anne -style mansion built in 1882 by architect Bruce Price for Dr.…
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A painted ad at #315 West 53rd Street between 8th and 9th Avenues has perplexed me since I first saw it when I worked in the area between June and…
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RECENTLY, there has been an interesting development for NYC lamppost aficionados, all five of us. A classic landmarked Twinlamp at 5th Avenue and 28th Street was discovered missing (by me)…
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At the southernmost point in New York is Conference House Park, which Kevin visited a few times over the past quarter century, always finding something new to document. The park…
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THE turn-of-the-century English Garden City movement of Sir Ebenezer Howard and Sir Raymond Unwin served as the inspiration for Sunnyside Gardens, built from 1924-1928. This housing experiment was aimed at showing civic leaders that…
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AND now, another image from the dawn of Forgotten New York, from 1998-2000, thereabouts. At this remove, I’m not sure where I fired off this photo, but by the tiling…