VAN WYCK Expressway is a north-south expressway that roars from the Whitestone Expressway at the Flushing River all the way south to John F. Kennedy Airport, where it loops around…

OLD Staten Island place names are fascinating. By 2026, most of the old place names have been expunged or renamed, with a few exceptions like Fingerboard Road, named for a…

For some time I have been bemused by one of the street names in southern Bayside, along Cloverdale Boulevard south of Oakland Lake in the Queens Community College area. The…

THERE are over a dozen streets in NYC named “Mill,” and I have always been interested in them because they point to waterside mills, most of which were torn down…

As many NYC railbuffs (but a decreasing number of them) remember, the last NYC subways grade crossing was way out at the far southeast of Brooklyn in Canarsie, at the…

As a rule, NYC streets are given designations, seemingly arbitrarily, by the engineer who is plotting the map years before buildings on the streets are actually constructed. In Manhattan, with…

THERE is a curious-looking “ghost street” in Wakefield, a curved dirt pedestrian path along the stone wall that marks the south end of the 239th Street subway yard serving #2…

LAKEVILLE ROAD is a major north-south thoroughfare in western Nassau County, part of a much longer road running from Kings Point south to Jericho Turnpike in New Hyde Park. North…

MANY of New York City’s longest and most important roads begin in inconspicuousness and humble spots. Metropolitan Avenue is one of the lengthiest routes between Brooklyn and Queens. It was…

DYER Avenue, seen here from West 38th Street, is an unlikely candidate for a Forgotten New York item, as it’s one of the most car-trafficked roads in New York City.…

THOUGH most of Queens’ streets, except lengthy main roads such as Northern Boulevard, Queens Boulevard, etc. were numbered beginning in the 1910s and 1920s, some outmoded names continued to show…

THIS photo of the long-gone West Side Highway in Manhattan has been making the rounds today (it’s in Facebook’s Lost New York page) so I thought I’d wade in. Surprisingly…