What you see here is Bay Ridge’s main drag…for most of the 19th Century, that is. Stewart Avenue (it likely takes that name from a landowner along its route) once…

Making up somewhat for previous oversights, I invaded Chinatown in February in search of ancient laneways that contain hidden architectural “Easter eggs” and traces of long-vanished neighborhoods. I’d be remiss…

When “Charlotte Street” is mentioned, anyone in NYC over age 40 can remember the two words with dread, remembering the dead landscape full of burned, crumbling buildings visited by President Jimmy…

Well, there are a number of hidden alleys in Brooklyn (and FNY will ferret them all out eventually) but one that has continually escaped the Department of Transportation as well as…

CONTINUED FROM CREAKY ALLEYS PART 1 Before testing our courage and skulking around some more of lower Manhattan’s rare extant alleys, I thought we should pay tribute to a pair…

Your webmaster recently went prowling about lower Manhattan, re-shooting the little-known laneways and alleys of the island’s underbelly. It wasn’t so much an attempt to revisit old ground–though admittedly, the…

“There are places I remember…” As I have said before in these pages, New York City is virtually alone among East Coast cities in being “alley-poor.” Stalking the older sections of…

 New York is just not an alley town. While Boston has its Crab Alleys, Quaker Lanes and Primus Avenues, Philadelphia its Crooked Billet Streets, Black Horse and Elfreth’s Alleys, and…

In a city that routinely discards its history, you will sometimes find it in overlooked alleys that are no more than modern passageways under bridge ramps, or service lanes providing…

FNY PREVIOUSLY VISITED TULFAN TERRACE IN 1999, when most of it was still there. The little lane off Oxford Avenue near West 236th Street in Riverdale, Bronx, lined on both…

WE’RE FADING TO GRAY this week as we mourn the possible imminent death of one of Brooklyn’s last colonial links. Red Hook Lane, running diagonally in downtown from Fulton and…

It’s a long way out there, at the end of the A Train on the Rockaway Peninsula, though its thousands of residents would differ with you about that. To them…