As many Forgotten NY fans know, I’m attracted to the odd roads that defy the grid, because often they point the way to preexisting roads that existed in the past.…

I have been looking over a topographical map of sections of Brooklyn and Queens published in 1898 by the United States Geological Survey: topography by the US Coast and Geodetic…

As most Forgotten New York readers know, I enjoy maps, especially historic ones that show what the streets of NYC looked like in previous decades. Today, I’ll review an outline…

As a boy, I took the B63 bus on 5th Avenue with my mother, father, or both, to some downtown Brooklyn destination. Or, sometimes we just took rides, as I…

Here’s an interesting (well, to me) map of Queens prepared by Ohman Maps in 1936. It shows the entire route of the recently-shuttered Whitestone Branch of the Long Island Railroad,…

I’ve been fond of showing excepts from a Dripps map of Queens County produced in 1852 (linked from here), showing roads that existed back then and explaining where they are…

The FNY Tour of September 8, 2019 took us once again to the Westchester Square area, the site of two previous tours. There’s a lot of history concentrated in the…

Unlike Queens, which was in the midst of overhauling its street nomenclature in 1922, pushing out names and old numbered streets and instituting a borough-wide numbering system, the map of…

I was looking through a Rand McNally map of Brooklyn and parts of Queens produced in 1911 ( I bet you weren’t aware that Rand McNally was around back then)…

Though a rough grid has been in command of the Queens street layout as dozens of separate housing developments knit together disparate small towns in Queens over the decades of…

The original Greenwich Village was a Canarsee Indian fishing village called Seppanikan (some accounts spell it Sapokanican), centered around a stream they called Manetta, meaning ‘devil water’. Later it became…

This section of a Hyde map of the northeast Bronx shows a small area called The Kernels. Its pedigree goes back to the colonial era when a Cornelius Jones, known as…