Graffiti-scrawled subway cars reached their peak in 1982, a year in which the MTA’s subway operations reached their nadir, with older cars from previous decades broke down regularly and track…

Here’s a look at a Queens grocery store or delicatessen in July 1938. The shelves are chockablock with canned, packaged and bottled goods. You can see packs of Coca-Cola, for…

There are a pair of drugstores in Brooklyn called Silver Rod. The two stores are in about as far flung as two neighborhoods in Brooklyn can be, one in Bensonhurst…

A few years ago, while going through hundreds of photos of Queens in the 1930s and 1940s for Forgotten Queens, written by me with the Greater Astoria Historical Society and…

I was fascinated by a couple of photos I saw at the NYC Transit Museum when I visited it in January of the Brighton Line, a steam rail line that…

Today I’m showing an extinct variety of castiron lamp that could very occasionally be found on NYC streets. Oddly this post does not appear in either the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s…

Union Turnpike evolved from a short road in Glendale called Union Avenue. As it was built east and gained length in the early 20th Century, it was renamed Union Turnpike,…

Here’s a placid scene at #605 West 42nd Street in 1940, just west of 11th Avenue in Hells Kitchen. Well into the 1980s, this was a somewhat sketchy part of…

Railroad underpasses are often punctuated with murals that illustrate area histories. Likely the most notable one in town is in southern Queens, where a Long Island Rail Road bridge crossing…

Pad thai is a generic term for a popular food in Thailand consisting of stir-fried rice noodles, egg, bean sprouts, shrimp, peanuts, and seasonings; the name comes from the Thai…

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the directional signs pointing to a nonexistent NY Central Railroad station at the East 149th Street station in the Bronx, where the…

In this photo from the 1940 Municipal Archives we’re looking east on East 23rd Street, at #304-310, which are on the right side of the picture. While a number of…