A week ago in 2020, I did a Brooklyn A to Z page about southern Brooklyn avenues named for letters of the alphabet, Avenue A to Z. There are a…

Though Tom’s Restaurant on the Upper West Side at Broadway and West 112th Street is hardly “forgotten” and has been a beloved area touchstone since the 1940s when the Zoulis…

I moved to Little Neck from Flushing on July 1, 2007 and had long heard of Patrick’s Pub on Northern Boulevard off Little Neck Parkway even before I got there,…

Sugar refineries, called sugar houses, were built in lower Manhattan during the mid to late 1700s to alleviate the need to import refined sugar from Europe. The sugar houses, with their…

Wheeler Avenue was the scene of one of the most infamous incidents in the history of the New York Police Department, as Guinea, West African immigrant Amadou Diallo was shot and…

Grand Avenue Pizza is not on Grand Avenue but it is on an avenue that used to be Grand. I’ll explain in a minute. Today I got out of the…

This spur track off the “Culver elevated” serving the F train at McDonald Avenue and Cortelyou Road is one of the only tangible reminders of the Culver Shuttle that connected…

It’s all a matter of perspective. Unlike my pal Mitch Waxman of the Newtown Pentacle, I’m not a professional photographer, and don’t use a high-end camera with plenty of settings;…

I found several stanzas of Desiderata outside an ice cream shop while staggering around in Park Slope back in 2011. I describe myself as practical and not especially spiritual, but…

Graffiti-scrawled subway cars reached their peak in 1982, a year in which the MTA’s subway operations reached their nadir, with older cars from previous decades broke down regularly and track…

Here’s a look at a Queens grocery store or delicatessen in July 1938. The shelves are chockablock with canned, packaged and bottled goods. You can see packs of Coca-Cola, for…

There are a pair of drugstores in Brooklyn called Silver Rod. The two stores are in about as far flung as two neighborhoods in Brooklyn can be, one in Bensonhurst…