I was loitering in Bayonne the other day and noticed, even as its streetlamp luminaires are being replaced with one new model, imparting a strangling uniformity, its street signs remain…

Dean Street and Nostrand Avenue, Crown Heights

This is the street sign style used in Manhattan and the Bronx beginning in the mid-1910s, and surviving in some cases until the early 1960s. They were navy blue and…

Ancient Queens street sign from the FNY Archives

In the 1950s, these yellow and black signs showing the cross streets appeared in Manhattan. When the DOT replaced them with vinyl and metal signs beginning in 1964, the yellow…

These ‘humpback’ navy and white street signs were standard issue in Manhattan and the Bronx from 1913 until the early 1960s. Politically, Manhattan and the Bronx were the same county…

A pair of black and white Brooklyn street signs in East Flatbush. These were standard issue between 1964 and about 1984.

One of Brooklyn’s oldest street signs is hiding in plain sight in Brooklyn’s premier residential neighborhood (or so the papers and magazines would have you believe). At the corner of…

While meandering down 1st Avenue, between East Houston and East 14th Streets recently, I was struck by the large number of small hole-in-the wall businesses and the handmade or old-fashioned…

The Department of Transportation has come up with an unusual arrangement in downtown College Point in NW Queens. For the former WALK/DONT WALK signs, now represented by a red hand…

The Frost Pharamcy sign on 55th Avenue and Queens Boulevard is without a doubt one of my favorites in Queens. It’s likely a snapshot from the Fab Forties or Nifty…

As the city wastes millions by changing street signs that are ALL CAPS to Upper & Lower Case — including, ridiculously, numbered signs that, at most, have a tiny “AV”…