Many of New York City’s busiest roads have humble beginnings indeed. Queens Boulevard arose in the pre-colonial period and eventually became a two-lane dirt road called Thomson Avenue, Jamiaca Turnpike,…

I haven’t spent enough time in Battery Park City, the 40-year-old neighborhood built on landfill above Battery Park, piecemeal beginning in the 1970s. I’m working with limited time available, but…

While its name might sound feminine, Greenwich Village’s Jane Street is not named for a woman (in most cases the wife of a wealthy landowner) like Ann, Hester, or Catharine,…

In July 2013 I was meandering around southern Manhattan, if only to take some fleeting solace in the madding crowd, and while in St. Paul’s Churchyard, I saw an unusual…

Riding on the #7 train I always stake out a position near the door on the left side of the train. On the #7, that’s an ideal spot if you’re…

Park Avenue South has existed under its present name only since 1959, the year Alaska and Hawaii joined the Union. Before that, of course, the route was called 4th Avenue;…

Here’s a bit of trivia. The Amazing Mets once traded Royce Ring and Heath Bell in the same deal. I have been working in the Madison Square area for a…

I have been featuring Bay Ridge quite a bit this year — a ForgottenTour visited on 8/17/13 — and since my dentist is still there, I find myself going back…

In the past I have chronicled the remaining “Wheelie” stoplights in New York City — those long-armed castiron stoplights outwardly resembling Corvington lampposts, but instead of the usual inner scrollwork,…

Suffused into the NoHo street grid is a narrow, semiprivate lane called Jones Alley. It makes two L-shaped turns as it makes its way through. Beginning at a dead end…

Time for another batch of signs picked out by FNY Correspondent and MTA employee Gary Fonville …   The NE corner of 116th Street & Manhattan Avenue in Harlem is where…

Long before DUMBO became home to yuppies and became Eloi-ized, with its carousels and gourmet chocolate shoppe purveyors, it was one of Brooklyn’s hardest-working neighborhoods, with coffee and grocery importers,…