Quite a bit of Queens real estate bears the name Hollis — the neighborhoods Hollis, Holliswood, Hollis Park Gardens and Hollis Hills, the LIRR Hollis station, Hollis Avenue, Hollis Hills Terrace…

In the deeply Red East Village (I’m kidding), you can find a triumphant statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the chief architect of the Soviet state that ruled much of eastern Europe from 1918-1990,…

Believe it or not, I have been inside Carnegie Hall only once. In the early 1980s — I forget the year now, as this was the Cambrian Era — I went…

Parts of New York City are very steep and hilly. To allow access to the hillier areas, engineers have occasionally inserted step streets into the grid to allow foot traffic acess to private…

Bay Ridge is the land of my youth. It is also the land of my dentist, and I will be spending three Saturdays, at least, in Bay Ridge as my mouth…

I was slowly making my unsteady way up Clintonville Street in Whitestone one searing afternoon in the dead dog heat of the summer of 2010. My brain cells, seared nearly past…

There are two spots in Manhattan where 4th and 10th meet — and 4th and 11th, 12th and 13th, as well. 4th Avenue and East 10th, 11th and 12th Streets,…

Originally a northern section of Avenue A between East 114th and East 120th Streets –cut off from York Avenue, which was also originally Avenue A, by a bend in the Harlem…

About ten years ago — at the Dawn of Forgotten New York (ca. 2000) I was aimlessly wandering around Red Hook Brooklyn — long before Fairway, long before IKEA, before the…

In the evening of September 16, 2010, a large storm front swept through the general NYC area with high winds and heavy rain and the storm was strong enough to produce two…

Desperate from some surcease from the baking, broiling madness that was the summer of 2010 in New York, a summer that saw over a month total lof plus-90 degree weather, a…

I had just crossed the miasmic, fetid Gowanus Canal one recent flaccid, sweat-inducing Sunday, on an August in one of the hottest, most humid New York summers in an uncountable string of them,…