It’s one of the longest-tenured abandoned buildings in a borough full of them — see parts of Seaview Hospital, the Staten Island Farm Colony, and the St. Augustine Retreat House (into which neither…

Catalpa Avenue, a street running west-east in Ridgewood, slots between 68th Road and 69th Avenue between Seneca and Myrtle Avenues and 65th Place. Catalpas are large-leafed trees that generally grow to a height…

Two dead-end lanes called Cornell Lane and Jessie Court, running north from Northern Boulevard between Marathon Parkway and Little Neck Parkway, have been there for decades — likely as much as…

Bay Street, one of the few main streets in Staten Island not named Richmond (Hylan Boulevard is another) takes its name from the route it runs on the eastern shore of…

If it seems as if I am revisiting a lot of areas I have previously covered this year [2009] that’s true. Many of my neighborhood profiles were done early on just…

With Halloween approaching I thought it appropriate to highlight one of Brooklyn’s more notable ‘haunted houses’ or at least one of its more mysterious. Growing up in Bay Ridge I knew…

While walking around town between one Open House NY venue and the other, I managed to snap a few scenes of objects that interested me. Some of this stuff is arguably…

Unlike 2008, which was mostly overcast with a threat of showers both days, Open House New York weekend 2009 in NYC was spectacular weatherwise, with partly cloudy Saturday morning giving way…

News came this week [2009] that a 600 year old tree in Douglaston was rotting — it wasn’t dead yet, but it was getting there finally, and before more branches cracked off, it…

If you ride the Long Island Rail Road Port Washington line as I have every day for the past 17 years, no doubt you have noticed the four-story brick factory on…

Of course, one of my favorite corners in Manhattan concerns a lamppost, a Type 24M Twin, as a matter of fact. Barely a dozen of these posts exist anymore, with a few…

Despite being depicted every week for over a dozen years (admittedly in a lighthearted fashion) on TV’s M*A*S*H*, theKorean War, in which US forces defended South Korea against invasion from North Korean…