By Sean Colby and Kevin Walsh Though the downtown area has lost an entire entertainment district (Scollay Square) in the past 50 years, and a raft of byways and mazes…

By Sean Colby and Kevin Walsh Wedged between Government Center and the North End, along Congress Street near the old Union Oyster House, you will find a labyrinth of tangled,…

By Sean Colby and Kevin Walsh Back Bay was created by filling in swamp lands that attached to the Charles River, a process which began in 1857 and was completed…

An L-shaped alley appears on maps of Lower Manhattan going back as far as 1776. At that early date we can already see streets with the same names as now,…

I had just lurched across the Manhattan Bridge after a shift in DUMBO, and was slowly making my way west toward the subway on Varick Street. After a winter of…

I first found it in the late 1970s, on one of my many bicycling trips from Bay Ridge way out east, to New Lots, Ozone Park or even further, depending…

For me, it’s one of NYC’s more abiding mysteries. For about twenty years, the online maps I’ve consulted have named a little dead end at Maple Avenue and Frame Place…

Centre Market Place is a one-block street in Manhattan’s Little Italy. It runs between Grand and Broome Street on the eastern end of the 1905  former NYPD Headquarters. When I…

Since New York City has so few alleys, I tend to be fascinated by them when encountering one. Even better is an alley that has some notable history attached to…

I found myself shambling north on York Avenue in the dishrag New York heat and humidity (wasn’t even that hot yet, being May) and was wondering if I would escape…

After my annual spring visit to Coney Island and its boardwalk Nathans, I decided to have a look around Brighton Beach and its latticework of laneways between what is now…

Pictured here is a small piece of dead-end road emanating from East 83rd Street south of Avenue J. The road once ran continuously from East 83rd northeast to Grace Church…