photo: Gary Fonville Red bricked streets are now relatively rare in NYC, but that doesn’t mean they always have been; while they haven’t gotten the press time that “cobblestoned” or…

There are a pair of dead-end streets, Ridge and Bennett Courts, on 72nd Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues in Bay Ridge, my old hometown, so I’ve always been aware…

Peter Chahales Park is a small triangle of green with a couple of benches, hedges and trees at 69th Street, 58th Avenue and the Queens-Midtown Expressway in Maspeth. It was…

One Room Schoolhouse Park, Astoria Boulevard and 90th Street, sits on a .14 acre plot that was home to the schoolhouse mentioned in the park’s name, PS 10,  from 1879…

The building on the west side of Parsons Boulevard at 89th Avenue has a complicated history. It opened in 1930 as the Central Library Building of Queens Public Library (the…

I was looking out a bus window at Richmond Avenue and Arthur Kill Road in Greenridge, Staten Island, when I spotted a rarely-employed double bracket Donald Deskey pole. Never widely…

I was doing some midweek loitering on the Marcy Avenue platform in Williamsburg, watching the trains go by. I can do this because over the past five years the copy…

Lost Battalion Hall and Lost Battalion Park, between Queens and Junction Boulevards just south of the Horace Harding (Long Island) Expressway and wedged between the Queens Center and Rego Center…

By GARY FONVILLE Forgotten NY correspondent Downtown Brooklyn is going through many changes.  To a person who hasn’t visited the neighborhood in thirty years or so, it would be totally…

A green slotted post on 39th Road, next to the Little Neck station platform on the Long Island Rail Road, proclaims the parking rules on this stretch of road: “don’t…

In one case in which modern MTA actually clarifies matters instead of duplicating previously existing signage or muddies the transportation waters, a 1980s vintage sign in the 45th Street station…

Bob Mulero, King of NYC Lampposts and author of the new book The History and Design of New York City Streetlights, Past and Present, has just released this gem from his…