Gary Fonville sends along this enamel “South Ferry Street” sign at Jamaica Avenue and 86th Street in Woodhaven. This 1909 Bromley atlas plate confirms the name “Ferry Street” if not…

I was attracted to this nearly intact sign on 36th Avenue and 35th Street. It probably goes back 50 years or more. If you’re not busy getting clean, you’re busy…

On this winter view of Perry Street in Greenwich Village, a Curb Your Dog sign is prominent. New York City instituted the “pooper scooper” law in the early 1980s, mandating…

Former MTA bus driver and current employee, Brooklyn’s Gary Fonville, has been a Forgotten NY correspondent almost from the very beginning, in 2000. Gary still gets around town quite a…

Honestly, I had despaired of seeing this sort of thing ever again. In the Fab Fifties, there was a short-lived craze of drilling kids in school to hide under their…

With pedestrian fatalities and injuries more common that usual in NYC in early 2014, I thought I’d root around for some photos I took of a program cooked up by…

I’ve mentioned NYC’s public fire alarms before because they’re true “living fossils” on NYC streets whose design was pretty much codified and finalized in the 1912-1913 period. In the wireless…

An old-school gold and black Manhattan Beekman Street street sign is mounted in front of a fire engine belonging to the Engine 6 firehouse in lower Manhattan. Such signs were…

Drury Avenue is a one-block street between Father Capodanno Boulevard and Ocean Avenue near the South Beach boardwalk in Staten Island. Nothing at all unusual about it, except that the…

Recent station “improvements” and modernizations recently (12/13) claimed the remaining Mott Avenue mosaic signs at the #2 train station at 149th Street (years ago, its “NY Central” mosaic signs that…

A few years ago I found this pair of signs on Sutphin and Archer, a block south of the LIRR Jamaica station. I haven’t walked south on Sutphin Boulevard (perhaps…

Here’s a shot from long ago in Prince’s Bay, Staten Island, where I was bumbling along with a camera in 1998 when I spotted a pair of Staten Island classic…