THERE are two monuments to famed 19th Century preacher Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) in the Boro Hall — Brooklyn Heights area, the one seen here and one at Beecher’s church,…

SYLVAN” is an adjective that means “woodsy” or “like a forest” and there are three uptown alleys named “Sylvan”: Sylvan Court and Sylvan Place, which are on East 121st Street…

No, this isn’t a recent picture. I got it in 1999 or 2000 at Richmond Valley Road at Madsen Avenue in the south end of Staten Island, years before the…

ALTHOUGH officially, New York City is the southernmost town in New York State, Tottenville, on the southern end of Staten Island, was actually the southernmost village when it was a…

BERGEN Beach is a southeast Brooklyn former island community found east of Marine Park. In the mid-1600s after the Canarsee Indians left, the island was owned by Dutchman Hans Hansen…

BEFORE you mention it in Comments, Forbidden Planet, the sci-fi and comic shop on #832 Broadway, is hardly Forgotten as it attracts perhaps a million shoppers and visitors per year.…

WEST Maspeth, also known as Laurel Hill, was world headquarters of Hagstrom Maps, whose plant is shown here on 46-35 54th Road near 48th Street. Though the company moved out long…

472 Broadway, one of Manhattan’s narrowest buildings in Soho north of Grand Street, has been up, down and then up again…literally. It’s known as the Gila Building because of the…

I never tire of Greenpoint, and each time I am there, there is something “new” I haven’t seen before, or one more layer of the onion to peel off. Much…

THE Beddi-Makky Art Foundry, 227 India Street east of McGuinness Boulevard, is a bronze monument foundry established in Greenpoint in the 1940s when two immigrant Hungarian foundryworkers named Bedi and…

ONLY in the ‘dirty 30s’ (as weatherman Tex Antoine used to say) could a laundry be named the most beautiful building in Queens…though in the borough of Archie Bunker, maybe that isn’t…

JUST as Macy’s moved uptown from its original location, so did Lord & Taylor. The store’s third location was in this French Second Empire building, on the southwest corner of…