“Liberty” is one of the few words you can type using 4 consecutive letters on a QWERTY keyboard. After getting that out of the way, you’ll pardon me this week…

Elmhurst has more alleys than you might think, and some didn’t start out as alleys, like Claremont Terrace, a dirt road off Dongan Avenue, all that is left of the…

As far as I can tell, there are four “L”-shaped streets in Manhattan, and I just featured one a few days ago (August 2013): Shinbone Alley, a now-privatized lane in…

Suffused into the NoHo street grid is a narrow, semiprivate lane called Jones Alley. It makes two L-shaped turns as it makes its way through. Beginning at a dead end…

I’m highlighting the sign identifying Celtic Avenue (properly pronounced “Keltic” though probably few do) because I took it  a few years ago, and it’s now been replaced with a new…

Continuing my recent alley studies, which so far have encompassed Broadway Alley, Jersey Street, Cortlandt Alley and Weehawken Street, I visited one of my favorites, Staple Street, which runs two blocks…

Long before DUMBO (“Down under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge Overpasses”) had a name, it was an industrial grid with manufacturing and warehousing. Its extreme eastern flank remained residential and…

“Van Nostrand” was formerly a big name in Little Neck — the Little Neck Theater at Northern Boulevard and 254th Street, ankd the still-standing house in back of it on…

For the most part, Manhattan and even most of the other NYC boroughs have eradicated their alleys. On an island, real estate is in short supply and there isn’t room…

I have never been to Weehawken, New Jersey. Not once! And that’s fairly odd, since my visits to other urban New Jersey Hudson River-side locales, such as Jersey City and…

The Village is full of narrow alleys that lead to back houses (buildings that don’t front on the street but instead stand in back of houses that face the street…

Hagstrom Maps used to produce an incredibly detailed map of lower Manhattan, which showed all major buildings and adresses, subway lines and their entrances and exits, and even subtle curvatures…