THERE I was, half crazy from the heat and humidity, stumbling around Carroll Gardens on a July weekday, yet another neighborhood that because of income disparity I had no business…

NEXT time you are in midtown between 5th and 8th Avenues and 23rd and 40th Streets, be sure and look up at all the ancient brick buildings, built in stolid…

The famed Puck Building takes up the entire block between Lafayette, Mulberry, the alley Jersey Street and East Houston. It was built as a printing plant between 1886 and 1893 by the…

The rapidly gentrifying, upscaling Bowery, formerly home to NYC’s entertainment district, the Third Avenue Elevated and flophouses has its own fiefdoms that are little remarked upon. One stretch is home…

HAVE you ever been wandering in northern Tribeca…just south of Canal Street…and encountered 6th Avenue and wondered, what the heck is a numbered NYC avenue doing this far south? After…

YOU have to look carefully to see it but a small sign on a relatively nondescript 4-story building on the east side of Church Street between Franklin and White Streets…

I stalked around in Riverdale and Fieldston, in the northwest Bronx, on two separate hikes last year, both in early November, and I intend to go back the same time…

CONVENT Avenue in Manhattanville is named for the former campus of the Catholic Society of the Sacred Heart, which once stood between Convent Avenue and St. Nicholas Terrace between West…

LYMAN Place is a rather obscure (except for local residents) one-bock street running between East 169th Street and Freeman Street east of Prospect Avenue. It was laid out in the…

BLOODGOOD Haviland Cutter (1817-1906) was a miller, potato farmer, property owner (he once owned the land where my garden apartment complex, Westmoreland Village, stands) and composer of light doggerel. He…

I really should have gotten a better photo of it from the other side, but fascinated by the sight of an honorific sign among the distinctive Downtown Alliance black and…

Teddy’s is a Williamsburg institution that has been here since 1887. A vintage stained glass sign for Peter Doelger’s Extra Beer is on the Berry Street side. The Doelgers operated…