For over 18 years (as I write this in 2017) I have written about NYC’s infrastructure, as well as other hidden aspects like ancient ads, signage, and things people rarely…

6th Avenue runs up the center of Manhattan Island; in his compilation Ferrari in the Bedroom, humorist Jean Shepherd called it “the armpit of Manhattan.” It was originally laid out in…

I was wandering on Fingerboard Road near Tompkins Avenue in 1999, looking for traces of the old Staten Island Railway (Staten Island Rapid Transit) right of way, when I saw…

At some point in the Easy Eighties, the Department of Transportation did a little experiment with the pillars for the Jamaica El on Jamaica Avenue, placing square street signs on…

The term “freeway” is commonly used in Southern California in the Los Angeles metropolitan area to designate an expressway without tolls. In New York City, there’s one and only one…

As stated here a few days ago I have been busy scanning and labelling vintage postcards, slides and photos for the Greater Astoria Historical Society archives. When I came across…

220th Place is a short dead-end on 46th Avenue by Oakland Lake west of Cloverdale Boulevard and south of the Wendy’s and Burger King in on Northern Boulevard where I…

Goldwater Hospital, on the south side of Roosevelt Island near the Queensboro Bridge, opened in 1939 and was named for Dr. Sigismund Schulz Goldwater, health commissioner under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (and…

Forgotten NY has appeared in all three of NYC’s daily papers over the years, in articles about the website and the book and also articles written by me. I once…

Two for the price of one on Liberty Avenue at 88-17, with ads for a former local tavern, Tutie’s, and Garcia Grande Cigars. Forgotten Fan James Burke remembers Tutie’s. He writes: Tutie’s was…

For the years between 1960 and 1972 the General Electric M-100 lamp, a greenish-white mercury vapor variety without a glass reflector bowl, jockeyed for supremacy on the side streets of…

In 1999 I investigated and photographed a Canarsie dead end called Savage Lane, which I have found on only one map: the Colorprint NYC atlas produced by the American Map…