North of Fourteenth Street, Manhattan is pretty uniform, with only Broadway and Central Park interrupting the gridiron of streets between 14th Street and 110th. Still, there are a few obscure…

Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill are regarded to be the most beautiful neighborhoods in Brooklyn, though each neighborhood has its own partisans. They have dozens of landmarked 19th century brownstone…

The Bronx is not to be outdone when it comes to obscure alleys and lanes. Some are in leaf-filled enclaves like Riverdale and others are to be found in teeming…

While poking around the streets of Soho (South of Houston) and Noho (North of Houston) you can find several hidden and not-so-hidden alleyways that contain a few surprises here and…

The Indian trails and cowpaths that made up lower Manhattan from the mid-1600s are still largely there, but instead of the hilly, pastoral scenes that played along their routes in…

Lake Place, a little alley running a few blocks between 86th Street and Van Sicklen Street in Gravesend, Brooklyn, wasn’t named for a nearby lake, and it wasn’t always an…

Greenwich Village has always had a well-developed street layout that made it impossible for city commissioners to impose the street grid plan that was given to the rest of the…

above: Skidmore Lane at East 92nd Street Canarsie, a neighborhood in southeast Brooklyn at the end of the BMT L line, for many decades of its history had been derided…

Nestled in prosperous Murray Hill on East 36th Street between 3rd and Lexington is one of the few alleys of the midtown area. Sniffen Court was constructed between 1850 and…

Southern Brooklyn still has a number of its ancient routes preserved as hardly-surviving dirt roads and alleys. Today’s Brooklynites probably do not know that these roads existed for centuries, ever…