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…

Here’s a photo of the east end of Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing, where it meets Northern Boulevard at 155th Street and a shopping mall. For a number of reasons, I…

Woodside is, perhaps, best known by NYC commuters as a major interchange of the Long Island Rail Road — the only other station in addition to Pennsylvania Station where all major…

It’s a shame we can’t jump into an H.G. Wells-style time machine and motor backward or forward to a time of our choosing, but the laws of physics insist that…