As a kid, I was rather more holy than I am now. For example, I served as an altar boy eons ago at my home parish in Bay Ridge, St.…

I was asked to help out a pal with a photo of the ancient Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island. I realize the last really good batch of photos I obtained…

Guest post PAUL SHARROTTStaten Island Historian I just came across an article in the New Yorker by Joseph Mitchell, published in1956 about him exploring along the southern part of Staten…

REVISITING a long-gone Forgotten New York item from the dim past, my thoughts turned to the long-vanished Enchant(ed) Villages of Greenpoint, an art installation on Herbert and North Henry near…

FOR my item on Fr. Joseph Martusciello Way in Woodhaven the other day, I mentioned that it was unusual to find someone I knew on a city street sign. Here’s…

ONE day, I’ll do a thorough look at the streets in northern Tribeca as I haven’t written about that area much. Unlike other parts of Tribeca and neighboring Soho, these…

I squeezed off this photo while awaiting for the crowd to assemble for a Forgotten NY tour across the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges in June 2008. Forgotten NY tours were…

CECILIA, you’re breakin’ my heart. The St. Cecilia Church parish was founded in 1877, while its classic church building, nearly basilica-size at Herbert and North Henry Streets, was built from…

As a preview of an upcoming Bell Boulevard page, here’s one of the few cobblestone-exterior New York City dwellings. At 35-34 Bell Boulevard stands a magnificent two-story building with an…

THE twin-peaked William Van Nostrand House at Pembroke Avenue and 254th Street was built in the mid-1800s; before it was in the Van Nostrand family it had been owned by Capt.…

In the spring of 2016 I was teetering around the edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant on Fulton Street just east of Classon when I spotted this lengthy brown stucco-surfaced building at #1068.…

EVERY so often, I like to note place names that are unique to New York City and it’s likely I won’t find another Watchogue Road with a search on Google…