My affinity for stolid brick buildings, whether factories or dwellings, has been stated repeatedly in FNY. Greenpoint is one of those Brooklyn neighborhoods that is changing rapidly, with glassy residential…

TIME for another peek into the past through Al Ponte’s Time Machine on Facebook. This view is of the southeast corner of Queens Boulevard and 55th Avenue, across from today’s…

THIS view of Bethesda Fountain, at the north end of the Mall in Central Park, is always a heavily-traveled park vista in the warm months, and this view that I…

In contrast to Western mores, in which some cemeteries have been left to overgrow with weeds (as happened with Prospect Cemetery in Jamaica, Queens and Sylvan Cemetery in Travis, Staten…

I often find myself in Straus Square, an overlooked little triangle formed by Rutgers Street, Canal Street and East Broadway. Here, two streets are generated: Canal, which roars west to…

By the time I snapped this formidable smokestack once belonging to the Peter Van Iderstine glue factory along Newtown Creek in the spring of 2017, operations had long ago moved…

I was staggering around in western Queens in July 2020, crazed from the humidity, when I found this mailbox trio. The mailbox on the left, painted olive green, is called…

STUYVESANT Town sits on an almost-square defined by East 14th and East 20th Street, 1st Avenue and Avenue C, with 89 buildings containing 8,757 apartments. By auto it’s accessed by…

IT’S no-frills dining at its finest in this restaurant on Laurel Hill Boulevard in 1938. Straight-backed wood seats, tables and checkered tablecloths in what was likely an Italian eatery. Within…

LIKE most Brooklyn parents, mine accompanied me to Coney Island on numerous Sundays when I was a kid; I seem to remember getting a string of tickets that would let…

ODDLY enough, both The Bronx and Queens have Rainey Parks, named for two separate Raineys. The Bronx Rainey Park, pictured here, is by far the newer one as it was…

As a kid, I was a parishioner at St. Anselm Church in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, named for an 11th-Century bishop originally from Burgundy in what is now Italy, but immigrated…