There are quite a few ancient signs displaying former letter telephone exchanges around town used with dial rotary phones, which displayed letters as well as numbers; the first two characters…

I have no idea how I missed this one, since I’ve walked East Gun Hill Road a couple of times in the last five years… RUN & GUN: WALKING GUN…

I find it interesting that the name of the Bliss Grocery at Queens Boulevard and 47th Street in Sunnyside was not named for the owner of the grocery, or from…

Sunnyside, a fairly large wedge of western Queens defined by the Sunnyside Yards on the north, 48th Street on the east, and the Queens Midtown Expressway on the south, isn’t…

This white enamel directional sign can be found on Seagirt Boulevard just east of Beach 9th Street. It was probably placed there and is incomplete; it likely had an arrow…

Once upon a time, telephone customers were assigned alphanumeric telephone numbers. For example, the numbers were such as FOundation 8-3556 (now 368-2556), MOnument 2-2491 (now 662-2491) or NEvins 8-3886 (now 638-3886). The…

I moved to Little Neck from Flushing on July 1, 2007 and had long heard of Patrick’s Pub on Northern Boulevard off Little Neck Parkway even before I got there,…

Grand Avenue Pizza is not on Grand Avenue but it is on an avenue that used to be Grand. I’ll explain in a minute. Today I got out of the…

I found several stanzas of Desiderata outside an ice cream shop while staggering around in Park Slope back in 2011. I describe myself as practical and not especially spiritual, but…

There are a pair of drugstores in Brooklyn called Silver Rod. The two stores are in about as far flung as two neighborhoods in Brooklyn can be, one in Bensonhurst…

A few years ago, while going through hundreds of photos of Queens in the 1930s and 1940s for Forgotten Queens, written by me with the Greater Astoria Historical Society and…

Pad thai is a generic term for a popular food in Thailand consisting of stir-fried rice noodles, egg, bean sprouts, shrimp, peanuts, and seasonings; the name comes from the Thai…