Tool manufacturers have been moving away from New York City in recent years as rents rise. Tool and die makers produce jigs, fixtures, dies, molds, machine tools, cutting tools, gauges, and other tools used in manufacturing…

I’ve been checking some things out, as you may expect, on the 1940-era tax photos newly uploaded to the NYC Municipal Archives site. I’ve looked at the well-known buildings in Manhattan…

At Beverly and Bedford Avenues in Flatbush is this huge Art Moderne monolith that looks like something straight out of the 1936 movie Things to Come (the third section, where…

By BOB SINGLETON Executive Director, Greater Astoria Historical Society “Every picture tells a story,” sang Rod Stewart in 1971. With Long Island City it seems every building has a story…

Here’s a 1940 photograph of Grand Street looking east from West Broadway in SoHo. Naturally the first thing I noticed was the unusually curved lamppost on the corner. Why would…

Lord & Taylor, a department store fixture on 5th Avenue between West 38th and 39th Street for decades, has now closed. The building will remain, but will become offices including a WeWork…

The last time I spent an afternoon in Times Square, it was the coldest day of the winter in February 2016. The temperature had dropped to one below in the morning,…

Here’s a photo from the NYC Municipal Archives of the Market Diner on the NW corner of 9th Avenue and West 33rd Street. At the time, the diner occupied the…

I haven’t paid enough attention to East Broadway in my wanderings, so I hope to rectify the situation as we edge into 2019. I was on the thoroughfare a few…

While wandering around in the Seaport area under the spaghetti cluster of elevated roads that connect the Brooklyn Bridge to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, I spotted this unusual road…

Here’s a painted ad I hadn’t noticed before on Merrick Boulevard between the Long Island Rail Road overpass and Douglas Avenue for what was apparently the Jamaica Soda Fountain Fixture…

Erastina Place isn’t easy to find, way out on Staten Island’s north shore in Mariners Harbor. You have to travel all the way down Richmond terrace past the Bayonne Bridge,…