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…

A look at a modern-day map shows Cropsey Avenue, the main artery of Bath Beach, make a sharp southward turn at about 24th Avenue, crossing Coney Island Creek over a…

One again, it’s time to go back…way back..back into time with my western Queens map published in 1852. This is the earliest map of the area in my possession. It’s…

One more entry in my Queens 1852 series, then I’ll give it a rest for awhile, though there’s still more territory to cover. I walked Queens Village, which today is…

Unfortunately my copy of the Dripps 1852 Queens map does not run all the way to the East River; however, it does show quite a bit of what eventually became…

Maspeth, in a western corner of Queens east of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn and west of Middle Village, seems stuck between the grit of Brooklyn and the airy, almost suburban feel…