In the summer of 2014 I took multiple walks up and down the streets of Hoboken, NJ, hoping to do an epic series of posts capturing its small-town minutiae. I…

I have often lamented the lack of named back alleys in New York City. Pittsburgh, PA fills the bill with hundreds of them, almost all called “ways.” This is Osterburg…

The neon is falling off this amazing neon sign on Broad and Ellsworth Streets in south Philly. This sign would have been removed decades ago in New York City. Photo:…

Though New York City continually strives to rid itself of old signage and other relics of the past, a new trend has arisen of actually maintaining relics and reusing them…

In a residential section of North Los Angeles, a pair of guy-wired telephone pole masts with incandescent lamps survived until early 2014 at Kittridge Street and Radford Avenue (above)…  …

I’m thankful that I hung onto my map collection of both NYC and countrywide, which I began acquiring in the early 1970s at age 12 and came to number over…

A stretch of Kercheval Avenue in the Morningside section of Detroit, in the northeast part of town, still has some examples of Detroit’s oldest surviving municipal light post, some posts…

Street signs in Long Island change by municipality, so you’ll see different styles depending on what village or town you’re in. I was bumbling around New Hyde Park, crazed from…

The Denton name is prominent on the Nassau County atlas. Richard Denton, a British Presbyterian minister, immigrated to the New World in 1630 and, along with his son, Daniel, was…

Newark, NJ has installed some new faux-retro streetlights in its downtown area recently, but unfortunately, that’s served as the death knell for several grand old cast iron specimens along Market…

I think I’ll have to take New Jersey Transit to Ridgewood, NJ. Why? It’s got plenty of ancient “gumball” incandescent light fixtures, complete with their original telephone pole masts, and…

There was a time when directional signs such as this one, on Plandome and Stonytown Roads in Plandome, Nassau County, were quite prevalent along America’s roadways. The advent of the…