In downtown Brooklyn, there are a pair of streets called Fleet Street and Fleet Place — and even an additional alley on York Street in DUMBO called Fleet’s Alley. I had…

On the outskirts of Chinatown and Little Italy (the two Manhattan neighborhoods bleed into each other), at Centre and Grand Streets, stands one of the oldest examples of the oldest working…

May 2010: I was stumbling around Fort Greene and Clinton Hill on a recent Saturday, mumbling incoherently, no doubt frightening all the yuppies and richies who had recently moved in, when…

Uncharacteristically stumped for a Slice for the midweek period I turned to a familiar corner I went past all the time when I worked in the Penn Station area between 1988-1991…

I find myself on Jackson Avenue quite a bit as it is the main diagonal artery from Vernon Boulevard in Hunters Point to Queens Plaza, where under the tangle of elevated…

I try to keep Forgotten New York from turning into the Nostalgia Page of the Week, but when I am in Bay Ridge, I always have nostalgic thoughts, since I…

A quick look at a map of southeastern Brooklyn reveals a nearly unbroken grid of unrelenting monotony, as city planners slavishly copied the Manhattan grid here and in most of Brooklyn. We’re…

Time was, you couldn’t walk down a main street of any small to medium town in America, swing a dead cat and not hit a Rexall drugstore, provided there were any…

Those of you who have followed FNY for a long time know about my predilection for lampposts — an affinity I am hard pressed to explain. I do know I have…

I happen to be involved in one capacity or the other with both the Greater Astoria Historical Society and the Newtown Historical Society, both concerned with the preservation of the legacies of areas in…

General Motors’ so-called “new-look” “fishbowl” buses were introduced in 1959 and almost immediately made a, er, splash on NYC streets, with selected routes getting them the very next year. The “fishbowl”…

I’ve been aware of this rare midblock passageway between side streets in Chelsea, between West 26th and West 27th Streets, for a few years now. I was pasing by on my…