above photo: Gayle Alstrom WHEN I last visited Port Richmond, Staten Island in 2018, I noticed what appeared to be several very old painted ads that I hadn’t noticed before.…

SIFTING through some photos from 2016, which seems like yesterday now, I came across a series I got in Port Richmond and West Brighton in December 2016 that included a…

In December 2025 I took a quick walk in the Rockefeller Center pedestrian passage beneath 6th Avenue for six blocks between 47th and 53rd Streets, accessible in its south end…

STRANGE to say it but I’ve seen the massive Silvercup sign in Long Island City more often from the rear than from the front. This shot is from an eastbound…

UNTIL about ten years ago there was a very old, rusted, arrow-shaped sign pointing toward New Jersey on Richmond Terrace just east of Port Richmond Avenue, and if you look…

AFTER who knows how many decades in service, an ancient Department of Traffic sign (the agency is now the Department of Transportation, and is now mostly interested in bicycle lanes)…

WHILE I haven’t been to East Flatbush, Mill Basin and Bergen Beach for several years, when I lived in Brooklyn I was a fairly frequent visitor as it was directly…

I noticed that the Rita Brady Square sign has disappeared at the crossroads of Woodside, Roosevelt Avenue at 61st Street, where the Flushing El and the elevated LIRR Woodside station…

FOR years I was confounded by this sign, rendered in the Benguiat type font, at Junction Boulevard and 41st Avenue, south of the Flushing elevated over Roosevelt Avenue. It is…

THOUGH “King of the Sausage” Bari has gone, in southern Brooklyn there are still a number of “pork stores,” a combination of Italian-themed grocery and butcher. If I lived near…

CAN it really be almost nine years since I last explored the underground passageway beneath Rockefeller Center that rins beneath 6th Avenue from west 47th to 53rd Streets and then…

I have always been wary about bees and their relatives, the hornets. They have stingers on their butts and aren’t afraid to use them, the hornets especially. Worker bees that…