Grand Street is a long road with two distinct sections. The western end of the street in Brooklyn runs east-west through the heart of Williamsburg all the way to the…
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Desert Island Comic Books, 540 Metropolitan Avenue near Union Avenue in Brooklyn, has participated in a recent trend (that I welcome): maintaining an older classic awning sign of a previous…
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I’ve made a big deal over the years about how I miss the color-coded street signs, by borough, that marked NYC streets between 1964 and 1985, which were thence supplanted…
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When I began Forgotten NY in 1998, the last bastions of the two-light stoplight were along Liberty Avenue under the A train el in Woodhaven/Ozone Park, and along Shore Front…
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Long before Queens officials thought of doing it, the city of Williamsburgh laid out streets that were all numbered, with the odd rare named street here and there. North-south streets…
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Just as archaeologists search for arrowheads to ascertain ancient Native American settlements, so do I look for arrowheads — arrowhead signs that point the way to NYC bridges. These first…
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Just one of the marvelously rendered and colored signs that you see on some of the Art Deco apartment houses along the Grand Concourse and other locales in the Bronx.…
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Russian People’s Home of Greenpoint, 106 Clay Street off McGuinness Boulevard. This is either an old sign of great age, or may have been part of a movie set that…
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In the early 20th Century, Queens featured hundreds of striped poles featuring directional signs to different neighborhoods and even out-of-borough locations. Â This one, photographed in 1931, pointed to Flushing, Brooklyn,…
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Terrific hand-lettered, drop shadowed sign for a watch repair shop on Roosevelt Avenue near the Woodside RR complex. It was closed when I passed by at about 1 PM on…
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Forest Hills Gardens, a ritzy community on the south side of the LIRR main line tracks roughly between Continental Avenue, Union Turnpike, the LIRR and Greenway South, was one of…
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Boston does a great job marking war heroes and local luminaries on hundreds of street corners with these embossed black and gold signs, like this one in the West End.…