One of Brooklyn’s abiding mysteries (probably for me and no one else) is the presence of Highlawn Avenue, which runs in the northern edge of Gravesend, from Stillwell Avenue east…

Forgotten New York has many parents. I have said before that the kernel may have been planted in 1962, when the Department of Traffic tore down all the castiron lampposts…

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…

Back in 2006, I lamented the impending loss of the Tunnel Garage, Manhattan’s first parking garage, at Thompson and Broome Streets, thusly: The Tunnel Garage was constructed in 1922 by architect…

One of the more unusual quirks in the NYC subway network had been alleviated by late 2012. After the IND Sixth Avenue Line was constructed in the 1930s, a free…

Continuing a recent concentration on Hunters Point that I have been indulging, in the spring of 2011 I was idling in the southern end  of the neighborhood near Newtown Creek…

Accompanied by train buffs Mitch Waxman, David Silver, Emily Sharp and Mai Armstrong, In December 2012 I once again rode the MTA ‘holiday special’ in which the older cars from…

I went to high school in Clinton Hill in the Super Seventies, but rarely ventured around the neighborhood — it was tougher than tough then. Today, 40 years later, it’s…

The H train has made a return to the Rockaway peninsula, though hardly a triumphant one. In October 2012, when “Superstorm” Sandy effectively trashed the bridge that connects the A…

I remember 1973 somewhat, but not well. I was fifteen and still in high school. Most of my life revolved around schoolwork and following the Knicks, who had just won…

Despite the protests of congregants, preservationists and neighbors, the Bay Ridge United Methodist Church, popularly known as the Green Church, was razed in 2008. From my Ovington Avenue page: The “Green Church”…

There had indeed been a Lexington Avenue Line in Brooklyn — an el that shrouded the entire length of the Bedford-Stuyvesant avenue that runs from Grand Avenue east to Broadway.  …